Founders - #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business)

Episode Date: November 24, 2019

What I learned from reading Carroll Shelby: The Authorized Biography by Rinsey Mills. ----Come see a live show with me and Patrick O'Shaughnessy from Invest Like The Best on October 19th in New York City. Get your tickets here! ----Subscribe to listen to Founders Premium — Subscribers can listen to Ask Me Anything (AMA) episodes and every bonus episode. ---[3:27] I love everything about this person. I like the way he thought. I like the way he lived his life.[3:38] It is almost unbelievable all the different events that could happen in one human lifetime.[3:52] He lived to 89 years old and he used every single year that he was alive.[5:22] He could talk his way out of anything.[6:40] He knew what he wanted. He didn't want anybody else telling him what to do.[7:41] He had a love for anything that would go fast.[10:48] He didn’t know what to do with his life.[15:54] Follow your natural drift. —Charlie Munger[17:00] I can't work for anybody.[18:42]  He has fun his entire life. As soon as they stop being fun he runs away.[22:20] A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market by Ed Thorp. (Founders #93 and #222) [24:17]  Money only solves money problems.[26:32] Scratching around doing insignificant races with inferior machinery wasn't an option in which he could see any future.[27:26] Whatever setbacks he encountered he was invariably able to bounce back through a combination of self-belief and an aptitude for making other people believe in him.[27:45] Enthusiasm and passion are universal attractive traits.[28:05] Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans by A.J. Baime. (Founders #97) and Enzo Ferrari: Power, Politics, and the Making of an Automobile Empire by Luca Dal Monte. (Founders #98) [30:29] The Purple Cow by Seth Godin[32:22] Distant Force: A Memoir of the Teledyne Corporation and the Man Who Created It by Dr. George Roberts. (Founders #110)[32:38] Having extreme focus in the information age is a superpower.[36:13] Racing was a means to an end. He wanted to build his own car. That was his main goal.[42:34] He still didn't know quite how he was going to do it but if he was finally going to produce his own sports car.[53:48] All big things start small.[58:31] 12 months after Shelby was deeply depressed his life is completely different and the Shelby Cobra starts to take shape.[1:00:06] A summary of the early days of Shelby Automotive: Everything had to be done tomorrow and by the cheapest method possible.[1:01:12] It wasn't uncommon for them to work until two or three in the morning and be back down there at 7:30 the next morning.[1:02:22] There's just something special about a group of highly talented, smart people working together for a common goal.[1:03:48] Shelby hates company politics. That is why he wanted to run a smaller company.[1:17:30] My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business. —“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 ----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

Shelby. The name itself conjures up immediate visions of Cobras, GT350s, and GT500s, pounding around an historic road course with throaty horsepower coming from under the hood and tires on the edge of adhesion. But for me personally, the Shelby name will always mean much more. I have been blessed to have known Carroll since I was a teenager, walking the pit road with my father at Le Mans during Ford's first major assault on Ferrari in 1966. By then he was already a legend in my eyes, having had great success as a race driver for companies like Aston Martin and Maserati during the 1950s and being named Sports Illustrated Driver of the Year in 1956 and 1957.

So when I first met Carroll LeMans, as his Shelby American race team was preparing the GT40s for the Ford Motor Company, I was thrilled to meet the man who has since become a lifelong friend. Subsequently, I worked for him during a summer break while I was in college. He gave me the opportunity to spend some time with him, taking in the wisdom that is truly Carroll. The name Shelby means so many things to so many people. But to me, Carroll is an innovator.

He is a man who is always ahead of his time, who has created, designed, and developed performance products that have been second to none. The fact that most of them have been with and for Ford Motor Company is a personal point of pride for me. Carol is passionate about performance vehicles, but he's also passionate about life, his family, his many, many friends that he has made in the 60-plus years he's been involved in our industry I am proud to be counted among them so those words were written by Edsel Ford II which is the great grandson of Henry Ford and they appear in the forward of the book that I read this week and the one that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Carol Shelby, The Authorized Biography. And it was written by Rinsy Mills. A little while back, I was listening

to an author who had just completed a biography, writing a biography on Winston Churchill. And he was talking about the process of writing biography. That's why I was listening to it. That's what I was interested in. And I found it fascinating because he talks about, you know, Winston Churchill, like why does the world need another biography of him? He has, I think the author said over 1,100, definitely over 1,000 biographies have been published about the life of Winston Churchill. And he brought up, like, how do you bring something new to it? And he sent a word that I wasn't familiar with, and it's hagiography. So I had to look that word up.

He basically was talking about what he was trying to avoid when he was talking about Winston Churchill. And all that word means is essentially it's just a biography that idolizes its subject. Another term is it's auditory writing about another person. That's what this podcast is going to be about. I wasn't expecting to read the biography of Carroll Shelby anytime. I don't even know if I was going to read it in general. But the last few weeks as I started doing research for Enzo Ferrari, for the Ford

versus Ferrari, I was introduced to this wonderful character that is Carroll Shelby. And I became absolutely enthralled with him. And so there's going to be a lot of times where I'm reading you sections of his biography, and I'm just going to have a big fat smile on my face. So I just wanted to tell you that up front. I'm completely biased. I love everything about this person. I like the way he thought. I like the way he lived his life. The book I'm holding in my hand, it tells a life story that's almost unbelievable. It's almost unbelievable all the different events and things that could happen in one human lifetime. So I don't want to waste any more amount of time. This book is extremely long.

Carol worked with the author a few years before he died, and he lived to 89 years old, and he used every single year that he was alive on the planet, as we'll see. So let me just jump in. I want to start with a story from early childhood and talk a little bit about her personality, because I think the reason I picked this section to start is because you're going to immediately understand who Carroll Shelby was just based on a couple of different stories from his early life. All right. So let me go to the book. It says Shelby was a little runt and gave you some context here. This is a friend of Shelby that went to grade school with him.

And he's going to tell a story about Shelby's, like, his persistence. So he says, but let me tell you, I saw a guy whip his butt three times at lunch one time. I said, Shelby, leave him alone. You can't whip him. So there's going to be a lot of, like, a very, my poor, like, Texas accent that I don't have. My imitation of a Texas accent that might come out of this podcast because that's where Shelby's from.

He has a lot of people that are from there. So that, I found myself when I was reading, like slipping into like this fake Texas drawl. I have no idea why. So he says, I saw a guy whip his butt three times at lunch one time. And I said, Shelby, leave him alone. You can't whip him.

Hell I can, he says. This was in high school. Shelby took him on three times in that 30 minute lunch break. And that guy knocked the hell out whip him. Hell, I can, he says. This was in high school. Shelby took him on three times in that 30-minute lunch break, and that guy knocked the hell out of him. The guy was pretty well built and a hell of a lot older than Shelby. Three times he whipped him. The next story says he was full of energy. He was always into some kind of mischief. He couldn't contain himself. His personality was such that he could talk his way out of anything. So that's something I guess you'd have to know about Shelby right up front. I say, I would guess one of his best attributes as far as what led him to have

success in whatever he chose to do in life. And large part, of course, he had failures like anybody else, but he was extremely charismatic. But I think he's a master salesman. He had the ability to talk. I mean, he talked to Lea Koch at Ford. He talked to all kinds of people into like selling him on the dream he had and what he needed from that particular person to achieve that dream. He was very good at. There's another little anecdote from his early childhood. And you'll get an idea of the person we're dealing with here. And now this is

Carol in his own words, looking back at his childhood. He says, you used to get your driver's license in Texas when you were 14. And the day I was 14, my dad took me down and I got my license. He had a little 34 Dodge and I bullshitted him to let me take it to work that day. And I got caught doing 80 miles an hour. That was it. Six months and I didn't drive anything. And so Shelby, like a lot of people that we've talked about on this podcast so far, he's a bit of a troublemaker. And I don't think he was doing it, you know, to be disrespectful or anything like that. He just he was very determined. He had it.

He had in his mind. He knew what he wanted to do and he didn't want anybody else telling him what to do. And as a result, something we also see a lot is these kind of personality types. Usually they don't do well at school. Carol was no exception to that. He was not a good student. And so this is a little bit about that. So Carol was not a model student.

When graduation time came, just two out of the class of 400 failed to make the grade. This is high school now. So and one of those two was, of course, Carroll. He said they both did extra work that summer and ended up with enough credits to graduate. Neither teenager's lack of academic prowess appears to have compromised their adult life. So that other guy, Jake,

went to be one of the most well-respected judges in Texas. And of course, Carroll went on to have a fabulous career as well. With high school over, he could pursue his ambition to fly since he planned to join the Army Air Force. This is right around the early 1940s, right around World War II. He decides, hey, he was fascinated from a very young age. So his first love was cars, but he also had a love, he had a love of anything that would go fast. So I would say the two passions that he possessed his entire life was automobiles and planes. So he raced cars and he learned how to fly planes. He actually winds up serving in the Air Force and training a bunch of pilots during World

War II. And I'm going to tell you a story about that in a minute. But this is something that those passions started at a very young age and they never left him. I was just watching him. One of his last interviews he gave before he died, he was, I think, 85, maybe 84 years old at the time of this interview. And he was talking about the fact that he still loves, even though he wasn't flying anymore at that age, but he still loved it. Like he still loved everything about flying. Before I get to his time in the Air Force, he has he has to go through he went through a rather tragic experience. This is Shelby's dad dying extremely young and then Shelby almost dying extremely young as well. So his dad had a congenital heart defect. And so he dies. He says he had a third and fatal heart attack. He was only 46 years old. So Shelby was about, I think, 18 years

old when he lost his dad. So shortly after his 18th birthday, he joins the Air Force and they teach him how to fly and then eventually decide he's going to be an instructor. Now, not only is some of his duties are training other pilots, but then he also has to do like short flights from different like naval, or not naval, Air Force bases throughout the country. They might have to bring like switch planes around,

maybe bring some equipment from here or there. And so on one of these trips, he almost dies. And so this is the story of that. It says exactly a month after his father's death, Carol could have well

lost his own life. On this flight, and he's the pilot, a fire broke out beneath the floor of the cockpit. The fire was spreading, so Shelby gave the order to abandon ship. So what he does is he's going to be the last one. He's the only pilot on board. He's going to be the last one off the plane.

He's letting everybody else make their escape, jump out, and parachute down. As he's doing this, he's also bringing the plane lower and lower. So when it inevitably does crash, the damage is sensibly less, right? So he says their altitude was now about 5,500 feet. The fire had by now reached such proportions that he realized it was likely to reach the fuel lines. It's going to get worse than that, though. The problem was they had real bombs on board, not dummies. Things were turning nasty extremely quickly. So he does something here too, which also shows the courage he has. He could have said, you know what,

there's bombs on board. I don't want to die. I'm going to jump off. He takes the extra step of flying out to like an area where there's no populations and releasing the bombs. I think it was somewhere over like Kansas or something like that, just dropping a bunch of bombs because he realized if the plane crashes after he jumps and has bombs on board, you know, people could be obviously killed or whatever the case was. So he lets the bombs go, and it says, with his crew gone, Carroll put the controls on autopilot

and cut the main switch before he made his own way out of the rear and bailed out. So he gets out of the Air Force after World War II. In that time, he gets married and has a couple of kids. And so he comes back to Texas and he realizes, I don't know what to do with my life. So he had the passion of flying, but he didn't want to be an airline pilot. He thought that was going to be too boring. And he didn't know how to get into racing yet. And so he feels he has this obligation. He's like, I got to go into business. I got to be able to support my wife and my kids. So this is where he starts becoming an entrepreneur for the first time.

And he gets into a bunch of different businesses. So I'm going to spend some time. I find this, I found this part of the book fascinating. So I want to spend some time here. And this is the first business he gets into is the trucking business. It said Carol's old friend, Bailey Gordon, had also left the service and they were both looking for something to do. Bailey's girlfriend's father had built up a large fleet of trucks during the war to supply ready-mix concrete to the government, who were building a number of airfields in Texas. So they start getting into the trucking business here.

He says, we went out and we bought two war surplus trucks and then we bought two more trucks and so he this is his own words so he says so so now we were big shots we were trucking contractors we were hauling using our four trucks and we had six or eight guys hauling also we would make about 50 cents a load and we and so we thought we were doing pretty good so you're going to realize that we're making revenue but we're not marching our costs so they think think they're big shots. I think they're doing well. And they're actually not even turning a profit. It says the tires were costing us like crazy. And this guy was paying us 62 and a half cents a mile to haul that concrete. And we couldn't make any money. We couldn't haul enough of it, but we did for about six months. So now this is his partner who realizes that Shelby's

not keeping an eye on the money. In fact, Shelby talked about in one of the interviews I saw with him, he's like, the entire time I had my car business back in the, he had car businesses his whole life, but the ones that was most famous, like in the 60s, he's like, I wrote like four checks. I always had somebody else take care of the books because I wasn't good at it. So he says, this is his partner at the time. So he says, so after about the sixth month, I said to him, we're collecting this month's money to pay last month's bills. We're getting behind.

So what I started doing was keeping a bank account. At the end of every week, if it was over by $40 here or $60 there, I took it out and I didn't show him the full balance. That was the only way to get money in the bank. Otherwise, he'd go out and spend it. He wanted every cent we had to pay all his expenses. Hell yes, he was poor as shit. Well, anyways, I carried on doing that. So when we went out of business, I had enough money to pay off all the bills.

And I think we had about $400 left to split. At that time, we only owed two trucks apiece. So he took his two trucks and put trailers on them. And he started hauling potatoes out of East Texas. Before I go back to the book, let me just stop there. I think why I focus so much, and I'm personally fascinated. Like, if you notice how I try to present the information that I read in these books, I really try to focus on their early life. Like, I spend way more time on when they don't have things figured out than after they're already super successful and have things figured out.

Because I find, personally, I find that inspiring. And I know other people do as well. Because if you think about where we're in the story, Carroll Shelby is one of the most, like, he has, like, a cult-like following. You know, people feel like he's really a, you know, an American icon. But that's Carroll Shelby when he's, you know, 40, 50, 60 years old, 70 years old. Carroll Shelby at 20, 25 is just like so many of us. I've had the same experience too, especially as a young person. Anybody that's young and curious and ambitious knows this feeling. When you're young, you don't know what the future holds for you. And there's just a lot of

uncertainty. And so you try to grab at whatever opportunity you feel is in front of you. And Carroll's no different. You know, I'm going to try to haul, I'm going to try to get a truck business. I'm going to try to haul concrete. Okay. That didn't work out. Let me just, let me just haul potatoes. Let me do anything I can to try to become useful and hopefully make a little money to support my family. So I think that's, it's extremely important because this part of his life where he's struggling, he doesn't really figure things out. He becomes a race car driver when he's almost 30 years old, And if you know anything about racing, that's very, very uncommon. A lot of the people, even today, a lot of the really popular Formula One

race car drivers, they start racing when they're like 10, 8, 5, 15. It's extremely uncommon to do what Carroll Shelby did. But I think that the experiences that he's having, let's see, we're in the 19, let's say we're around 19, maybe we're right around 1950, you know, 70 years ago. There's people going through this exact same experience today, and there'll be people going through the exact same experience in the future. So I think there's a lot to learn from it. Here's another opportunity he tries to grab. His wife's father is this extremely hard-nosed, really successful Texas oil man. And so he gives his son-in-law a job. And so I want to read this section to you because I think it's interesting. So, well, let me read the note,

actually, that I left myself first. It says, while trying to work in the oil business, he realizes who he is. I think that's extremely important for the formulation of any person's life is really having to go be exposed to a variety of experiences and sitting alone with yourself and realizing like, who am I? Charlie Munger gives that piece of advice all the time. He's like, you need to follow your natural drift. Well, you can't follow your natural drift unless you know who you are naturally. And so this is where Shelby starts to realize who he is. Says he sold the trucks and went into the oil business, not as a favorite son-in-law working with the Fields empire. That's the last name of his, uh, his father-in-law, but in the oil fields,

often doing the dirtiest and most menial of work. Remember he's extremely poor at this time. Old man Fields had come up the hard way. So he saw no reason why Carol should be given a curse, cushy job. Better for him to start at the bottom and, so he saw no reason why Carol should be given a cushy job. Better for him to start at the bottom and see how he made out. That's a direct quote from Shelby. My father-in-law thought that if I worked for about 15 years in the oil fields, then that might be enough time for him to decide that I could go into the family business.

I went in as a roughneck to learn the oil business. After six months, I said, stick it and left. I tried and I didn't and it didn't work. And this sentence is probably the most it's the most important sentence, the entire paragraph, and it's integral in understanding who Carroll Shelby was. He says, I can't work for anybody. And I think that's a good place to start to understand Carroll Shelby, the person. Like if you think about the etymology of the word entrepreneur, right? It's a French word originally means like one who undertakes. The best description I've ever heard of that word though, is one who has ideas and does them. And so that's why you see

me get inspiration, not only from people that are running businesses, but investors, athletes, really anybody that has an idea and does it. And it applies that to whatever work they do during their day. So what we're going to see over the course, I think the reason I started the podcast with I have a huge admiration, I fell in love with Shelby as a person, is because that's that theme throughout his entire life. He's like, I have this idea. And he just focuses on that idea and tries to do everything he can to complete what the idea that he has in his mind. And sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn't. And sometimes it leads to weird businesses. Like, you know, I'm about to tell you, he starts rearing chickens. We're going to talk about that in a minute. But he also does, you

know, he's well known for building some of the most beautiful, well-performing cars ever at a time when you can actually do that, when you could be a tiny, tiny company and build cars. But he also has businesses, like he starts a hunting business in Africa. He starts a chili business that he winds up selling. He was, he had like these Texas chili cook-offs. Like he was not, I'm trying to, I don't, I think, I don't think I'm being clear here. Like he, there was no boundaries. Like he lived, he just said, you know what, this is something I'm passionate about right now. This is, I have an idea and I'm going to go chase this. And maybe he's going to end up in a dead end and more often than not, it doesn't, but then

it also could lead to an unexpected place. And I could have more success than I can ever, ever imagine. And not only that, more importantly, he has fun his entire life doing these things. And as soon as they stop being fun, he runs away. Like, let me give you an example I don't talk about. They don't even talk about too much in the book, which is fascinating because after he had a huge success with Ford Motor Company, I think he was working with Chrysler. No, he's working for Ford Motor Company. He doesn't like the politics of Ford. It's like the end of the 60s, I think. And he takes off to Africa for 12 years. Like it reminds me like Dave Chappelle did this where he has a hugely successful Chappelle show. This is the early

2000s. He doesn't like the fact that there's politics at the Comedy Central. He doesn't like that they're changing him. And so he takes off to Africa. Carroll Shelby did the exact same thing, except he stayed there for 12 years and he built a bunch of different businesses and he traveled all over the continent. He just this guy is just really, really amazing. So there's really no other word for that. So anyways, I'm rambling now. Let me get back into his next business that he does after he realizes, hey, I can't work for my father-in-law. He has a lifelong fascination with animals. Even when he was in his 80s, he had this huge ranch and he would raise, I think he would breed animals as well. So it says, Carol's next career move could have turned out to be a large and profitable business,

but which, after a promising start, ended up in disaster. Instead of staying where he had been or backtracking to where a secure living could be made with every prospect of considerable financial advancement without any personal risk, meaning working for his family, he struck out on his own once more. But he was already aware then, as he is now, that mere wealth is not enough. So this is Shelby about not doing things just for money, even though he winds up being wealthy. He says, I should have carried on running the ready mix concrete operation for Carruth. So Carruth was this hugely successful. He was the one paying them to haul the concrete. He created hugely successful businesses in Texas. And he says,

Carruth was probably the richest man in Dallas back then. If I was more money-oriented, I'd have stayed with him and become a millionaire before I was 30. Anyway, I'm still here and he's gone. He shot himself in the heart with a.45 caliber about 15 years ago. That's a crazy story.

So he says he decides to go into the chicken rearing business. He had no land of his own and precious little money to capitalize any venture. That didn't stand in his way, however. So that context for what he's starting this business is also how he starts the most, his most successful business. Well, I don't know if it's his most financially successful business because he owned a, he was a tire distributor for Goodyear for like 40 or 50 years. And that business printed money as well. But this whole idea of having an idea, really no assets of his own, and really no money never stops him because that's the situation he was in before he started manufacturing his own car. All right.

So he's got precious little money to capitalize, and it didn't stand in his way. He says, the small business administration loaned me some money. This is now Carol talking. And I built some chicken houses on land that I leased from Karuth. There's that guy again. And then he's going to find a way. He's just essentially

relentlessly resourceful, right? He says the feed companies, meaning what he needs to feed the chickens, the feed companies and others were happy to provide their products on credit. So off I went.

Carol threw himself into his new venture with his typical enthusiasm. And to begin with, it went all well. The first few thousand day olds, meaning day old chickens, grew into table birds and were sold for a good profit to be replaced by another batch. Rearing poultry on that scale and in those conditions carries with it the ever present risk of disease. And he came in one day to find thousands of dead birds. It was the dreaded Newcastle disease. But he's like, how did that happen? He had done everything

by the book. He thought he had administered the correct vaccines to avoid the disease, or at least he thought. And he's now being taught a lesson about human nature. This echoes back to the podcast I did on Ed Thorpe. At the time, Ed Thorpe's just a really smart kid. He's an academic. And he gets involved in the casino industry. He's trying to beat Roulette and Blackjack. And he's like, oh, my God, I'm running into unbelievable amounts of corruption. There's people. I'm getting cheated by the casinos. They're breaking people's hands, their legs. They're trying to kill me. And so he's like, oh, OK, well, let me get out of this. He switches from the casino industry into the stock market.

And he thought, you know, he even said it was a little naive at that. He's like, OK, well, you know, the stock market is going to be way less, you know, corruption and crooks and everything like that. And he realized, no, it's the opposite. The stakes in the stock market are so much higher than they are in just casino games. So there's more corruption. This is also appearing in the chicken rearing business. So this is Shelby. There are a lot of crooks in the feed business.

And there was a guy that I bought a bunch of it from, meaning feed. I couldn't understand why it happened. So I had the stuff analyzed and I found that he didn't put the right chemicals in. I was vaccinating chickens for Newcastle disease and it was absolutely worthless. That's the reason the chickens died.

There it was, 1950, and I was bankrupt. I sold the business on the courthouse steps, but I paid off every dime, including interest, to all those thieves in the feed business. So the very next year, he has another personal tragedy. He says Carol's mother had been unwell for some years, and she was confined to a hospital where she died. Although she wasn't yet 50 years old, it was a merciful release. As apart from her physical ill health, she also suffered from severe depression and irrationality

for as long as her family could remember. Although she was sincerely mourned by her children, it has been said that their lives were easier without her. So that's really rough. The reason I brought that up is because this is the part where we find Joby when he decides to start, he's like, you know what?

I'm not having any success doing things just for money. And he also realized that money only solves money problems, which he talks about a lot too. And he's like, you need enough of it to do what you want in life, but nothing above that because it's just going to bring, like, you can't take it all with you.

But the reason I bring that up is because think about where he's at in his life. He's almost 30 years old. Both parents are dead. He's got no money, no business. I think he's got his third kid by now and he's got a wife and three kids to take care of. And so he finally is like, you know what, let me just I'm going to try to actually pursue like do something I'm actually interested in. I'm not having any success doing things that I think are just going to make money. So Shelby decides to give racing a try. He's 29 years old and he has immediate success uh him and his friend they build a car uh they entered the car into this

race carol recorded his first official win uh so then he's like you know what part of the you're going to race you also need to be able to build your own car so they start they try to it's called hot riding at the time which is just the the people that buy cars from like the factory and they'll switch out other parts. They just try to, they're performance enthusiasts that want to do the work themselves, which is essentially the foundation of the company that he's going to build a few years from now. So he starts doing that out of his garage and his wife at the time, her name is Jean, says after a while, Jean got so tired of the noise from the garage, which was as well attracting comments from the neighbors about keeping their children awake at night, that she gave me an ultimatum. The car had to leave or she would. And that was the first of

his seven marriages. So he's an enthusiast for a lot of things, apparently. Getting married and divorced is one of them, unfortunately. He starts having a little success. I'm skipping over, obviously, major parts. This is another gigantic book. It's almost like 600 pages. So I want to get into, he has some insights, though. He's very good at analyzing the situation and people in general. So he wants to get into racing, and he figures it out.

He's like, okay, well, there's three ways to break into racing at this time. And, you know, you could argue that it's still the case today, probably even harder. The first way to break into racing is to be rich and buy your own cars. The second way was to come up the hard way through club racing. So that's like where you start out at a very young age. You're racing tiny, like they almost look like go-karts. You start racing other cars and you just keep going up, right? You can't do that because, you know, Shelby's already almost 30 years old. He's a good 10 years older than most of other people he's competing against. And number three is to know the right people. Shelby chose option three. So let me talk to you about that. He says, scratching around doing insignificant races with inferior machinery wasn't an option in which he

could see any future. He was just about to turn 30, so time wasn't on his side. And if he was going to put all his energy into making a success of being a race driver, he knew he wouldn't have the patience to do it that way either. One of Carroll Shelby's natural abilities is to get on with people, or perhaps, I should say get in with people. He doesn't even have to make a noticeable effort. They're just attracted to him as though by an invisible magnet. And many of his long-term friends agree that this is almost certainly his biggest single asset. And so one of his friends gave this fantastic analogy. And it says, if Shelby had walked into the Mission Operations Control Room at Houston on July 20th, 1969, at just after two o'clock in the afternoon,

the whole of the black team would have dropped what they were doing and started to talk with him. Whatever setbacks he encountered, he was invariably able to bounce back through a combination of self-belief and an aptitude for making other people believe in him. And this is just one of the things that you can never learn in school.

And I think it applies to, it doesn't matter what culture you're from, what country you're from, where you're from. Enthusiasm and passion are like universal attractive traits to other humans. And even if like they were talking about, even if you can't understand the language, so he goes over and spends a lot of time

at the factories in Italy before he builds his own car, he spends time in the factories learning how to do it, right? And he would talk about like the passion that the Italians had. And I talked a little bit about this in the the two ferrari uh the two packets of denver ferrari especially in i was saying i think it was pronouncing in modena i think it's modena i was

mispronouncing it but in modena ferrari talked about like the people that grew up where he had uh where he did had a special psychosis for car racing and so in the book they talk about like you don't even have to understand Italian to realize how passionate the Italians were about building cars and going really fast. Shelby had that passion, that charisma, that enthusiasm for everything he did. And as a result, he was able to attract talent and money

to build the businesses that he did throughout his life. So that can't be understated. I think what his friends were saying, like that's a single business, that biggest asset. That's also what I took away from reading this book. Something also Shelby knew is he knew that you can't stand out if you blend in. So he found a way to like brand himself. Remember, he's not the best driver in the world, older than his competition, but he became one of the most famous race car drivers. Like many other men in country districts, Carroll often wore bib overalls. Okay. So it's like these country like farmer

overalls, right? So he says he wore them when he was doing chores around the place and he wore them when he was in the chicken business and he still wore them now. He also found them cool and comfortable in hot weather. So the inside of a race car gets extremely hot. Nowadays they have like special suits and everything. At this time, they really, it was rudimentary. They didn't really have the technology. And so he realized like, well, I'm not going to wear what other stuff, what other drivers are wearing because it doesn't keep me as cool as my overalls. So once he starts winning, people associated, like, look at this, this like redneck, this like country bumpkin that's getting

on his overall he's winning all these races and becomes like his branding so he wins this is once they arrived with some good natured joshing went on other drivers would ask if he would he'd forgotten where he was going when he was dressed like that meaning the overalls carol didn't mind about all that and besides he felt a lot cooler than most of them looked and he was still cool after he'd gone out and beaten them all. From that day, the press honed in on Carroll and his farm overalls. The relaxed and casual

looking farm boy, half asleep as he sauntered towards his race car. He didn't care what they said. It was all publicity and free at that. There's a great little short book

if you're interested in the power of just not even having to be better, just being different. It's written by Seth Godin. It's called The Purple Cow. I'd recommend reading it. It's fascinating. This is interesting too. I just heard one of the founders of Instagram say something. You're too worried to fail. He basically said, no one's going to remember your failures. They're only going to remember successes. So he talks about like, you know, people remember when Instagram pivoted. He used the word pivot. I would use they stole the stories feature from Snapchat.

And he's like, everybody remembers that in the growth it led to Instagram. But no one remembers the 15 other products that launched before that that failed miserably. And so one thing I love about I love about Shelby is I think he believed that as well, because in the book goes into details, he has a lot of failures, but he had one, maybe two, maybe three wild successes in his commercial career as an entrepreneur. And those three big wins, that's what Shelby's remembered by, right? Not all the other projects he did that didn't go anywhere. It was also the case in his racing career though, where he won Le Mans, he was the Sports Illustrated Driver of the Year two years in a row, and he won like two or three championships.

But he also had a lot of races he didn't even finish. He came in, you know, last place or maybe in the middle of the pack. And so that's kind of an illustration of that, like why it's so important to keep taking at-bats, to keep having attempts at trying to do something great. Even achieving that once or twice in your life is more, it's enough. That's really all you need. It's kind of like a variation of what we learned from Buffett and Munger, where they're like, listen, if you have three great businesses in your life, that's all you need. And that goes for not just like investments, but even if businesses you start or anything you do, like you can have one, two, three things go your way in life, and it will

more than make up for all the other stuff that didn't. Where we're in the book, he's just started racing. He has some mild success. But this part really stuck out to me because especially it's been kind of been put into my mind a lot through various different entrepreneurs and biographies I've read, but I don't think any more than Henry Singleton. And his superpower was his ability to focus and kind of like shut everybody else's opinion out, right? And really just think about the problem at hand and figure out the way, the best way to solve that problem. And the reason I keep bringing that up is because that's something I want to do. Like, I feel like having extreme focus in the information age is like a superpower. Carroll also understood. He knew what

happens when you fail to maintain your focus. So many times in life, you're able to see a lack of focus at other people first, then in your own self. He's seeing that in another driver. And this guy winds up dying, unfortunately, but like most of them do. So he talks about, his name's Peter. He says, he was the first friend I had over there. His mother used to wash my dirty clothes, meaning in Europe. His father was the main Ford dealer. It was a wonderful family, but he screwed up later when he went to drive for Ferrari and married Louise King. Louise King was like a famous actress at the time. He became a kind of playboy and let being a racing driver go to his head. Rather than keep priorities right, he started living a fast life. He bought a yacht to live on in Monte Carlo. There was a lot of nightlife and he started

drinking pretty heavily. And so about a year after this, he winds up dying in a racing accident. And he was just 26 years old, unfortunately. All right. So moving on, he's had a lot of success as a race car driver at this point in the story. He gets the attention of Enzo Ferrari. Enzo Ferrari tries to recruit him to drive for him. He does it for several years. Shelby decided not to because too many of Ferrari's drivers were dying and he knew that he made his drivers compete with one another. It was first impression of Enzo Ferrari. And remember, Enzo is very much in the same cuff and same cloth as Shelby was. He's a very determined, very forceful personality. So it says, Carroll recalled that his first impression of Ferrari himself was of a quietly imperious man who would be hard to get the better of. Something also told him, and he was right about this, that this man wouldn't fall for Carroll's usually infallible method of approach. So he couldn't, he would be able to charm people, get them to do what he want, get them to cooperate with him, I should say. It wasn't

happening with Ferrari. Ferrari's another strong individual and one that wanted, they had very different personalities, but they were both obsessed with freedom and control. And so here's a little story about Shelby's, an insight into that aspect of Shelby's personality. He starts driving for another constructor, as they're called, the people that run the racing teams, this guy named John Edgar. So he says, when he agreed to drive John Edgar's cars,

he made it quite clear that he should not be bound solely to him and should be free to drive for whoever, wherever, and whenever he chose, something John had little problem with, he fully realized what it was that drove Shelby. And he'd sooner have some of a happy focus Shelby than all of those whose thoughts and ambitions were often elsewhere. So that's another throwback to this idea of Shelby focusing on when it was like, you know, he says he had OCD

and he had a, not OCD, attention deficit disorder, he says he had ocd and he had uh not ocd attention deficit disorder and that he he had a hard time focusing but when he was extremely like when he was especially when he's racing or when he's building his cars that's all he focused on um and i think that again that going back to what i just said i think that's a superpower that that uh we could all adapt our own life very important to understand though we've been talking a lot about all the deaths the last few weeks that that was occurring in racing at this time period. Right. And Shelby wasn't about that. He said, listen, a lot of these people died because they had inferior machinery and they were trying to make up with with talent and risk. Like they either they were going to win the race or

they're going to die trying. He's like, I had a strong survival instinct. He's like, I knew I was never going to, like racing wasn't going to be my whole career. For Shelby to understand, I guess what I'm saying here, to understand what Shelby's whole goal in all this was, racing was a means to an end. He wanted to build his own car.

That was his main goal. I want to build cars in my own name and sell those products, right? And he realized that, you know, he had to do this in a, there was several steps he, there was a several steps he had to complete before he had the opportunity to be able to do that. And by gaining fame and notoriety and contacts within the racing industry, that would eventually in the future open doors for him. Right. So he was really smart to pick up on that at such a young age, because, you know, he was in his twenties when he was

formulating all these plans. So this was just about racing as a means to an end and so he what he was i never finished my my thought there what he was saying is like listen if if i have inferior machinery i'm i'll push it to what it can be pushed but i'm not putting my life on the line that just means i won't win the race he's like when i had the better cars then i won the race but if i i wasn't going to't going to risk my life doing that. I mean, he obviously is risking his life to some degree racing, but he didn't take gambles. Even though he had a couple accidents. He broke his elbow, the funny bone, he said.

That was a bad accident. He burned his hands. He had a bunch of them, but he never obviously, he never obviously had any like career ending accidents. All right. So anyways, this is about racing being a means to an end for Shelby says Carol took the opportunity for, of a lull in his busy schedule to go over to Europe so that he could keep abreast of what some of the manufacturers were up to and renew the contacts he'd made on previous visits.

The various schemes that were formulating in his head more often than not involved products and people from both England and Italy. So it was important to keep up to date and not allow people to forget him. So I took notes on one of his, let me grab them real quick. And so there's a bunch of interviews that he gave later on in his life where he talks about this time. So, okay, well, here's one I wasn't expecting to read. I had the ambition to build my own car. What I did was spend a lot of time around the factories that I drove for. So that's how he's learning. I spent one whole summer with Dino Ferrari. He spent the summer right before Dino dies. Dino died at 24 years old. He's the son of Enzo Ferrari of muscular dystrophy. I was lucky

enough to get to spend three months with him. He's a fine young man. I used to hang, this is exactly what the book was talking about. I used to hang, this is exactly what the book was talking about. I used to hang around the factory where they were building the cars, hanging around the factory, seeing how everything was put together and how little companies operated. That was the thing that gave me insights on how to put the Cobra together. The Cobra was his first product that Shelby Automotive is actually going to make. And the car, the one product I would say he's by far best well known for. So that's what he's doing at this time in the story. He's racing, but he's not

wasting any of his free time. And he's realizing, hey, there's a lot of these, a lot I can learn from these people, especially how to build cars, if that's my goal. So let me not, you know, some people went back home, spent time with their family, whatever the case was. Shelby's like, I'm going to learn from them so I can, in a few years when I'm done racing I can do this for myself okay so now I want to talk about a little bit about his mindset what he's what he's thinking about why he wants to quit quit racing and again there's still a lot of uncertainty in his future he it's not like he's going to leave you know if you're super successful winning Le Mans and getting driver of the year now you're making millions upon millions of dollars a year back in in the 1950s, you weren't. I mean, not that you would be poor by any means,

but you were not like super wealthy. And so let's go over his mindset, because I think this is fascinating because you still, you know, he doesn't know how his life is going to turn out, but all he knows is he's got to make a change. And again, that's just, I think, something that's universal to our species. So he says he had time to reflect upon his recent races, as well as the highs, the lows, and the dangers of his chosen profession. So now we're going to hear direct quotes from Shelby at this time. He said, I'm really tired of living out of a suitcase. I could quit all this nonsense very easily right now.

Well, my luck is running so bad that it's really comical. But it always changes. And all I can do is the best I can. No use trying, but so hard in this racket. I know inside myself that I'm not hard on equipment. People that get upset and try too hard usually end up in the slab orchid. They die. You can't get out every time. So he's talking about discussions with other drivers. A bunch of his friends and people he knows are obviously being killed. He said a good year this time would be four to five drivers die every year. They thought, OK, this year wasn't that bad.

Like, that's how dangerous what he's doing is. So he's having these thoughts and he's about to race Le Mans. And by winning Le Mans, this is actually going to owe a lot of opportunities, future commercial opportunities going to open up for him. And at this point in the story, we're at another turning point in Shelby's life, which is very similar to the one that I wanted to bring to your attention right before he started racing. At that time, he has no money. Both his parents are dead. Doesn't know what to do. He's got a family support.

Well, this is now Shelby having to plan to transition from racer to manufacturer, right? And this is a summary of his life. He's quitting racing. His dealership is flopping. I forgot to mention that to you. Like most race car drivers, when they have, when they start to get famous, they open a dealership. He opened a dealership back in Texas.

In his case, it was profitable for a little bit, but now it's not doing well. And then his family is breaking up. This is going to be the first of his many divorces. So let's go to his mindset here. It says, during the final few weeks of the year, Carroll once again reflected upon his recent past and where his future lay. The last 12 months had witnessed his greatest racing triumphs, but that victory at Le Mans had been one of his only wins. The rest of the season consisted of far too many DNFs, meaning do not finishes, and are, if he had finished,

low placings. The dealership hadn't been running smoothly either. Car sales had slowed to a trickle. And with their separate agendas, the Hall boys and he were about to go, ready to go their separate ways. These are people financing some of his racing activities. It was the same for him and Gene. No point in putting it off any longer. The children were now old enough to understand. So it was time to make the break. There was a home waiting for him in California. This is where he was sure his future lay career-wise

after he retired from racing. The countless visits to English and Italian sports and racing car makers and testing their products had all been part of his long-term plan to become a manufacturer in his own right. Few people had taken him seriously if he told them that one day there would be a Shelby car. He still didn't know quite how he was going to do it, but if he was finally going to get going and produce his own sports car, then as far as he was concerned, California was the place to be.

As the epicenter of sports racing and performance cars on the West Coast, it had dozens, if not hundreds of shops and manufacturers to service this industry. So when the time came, that was where he'd make his base. So before I move on to the, that's the first important part of this section. I'll tell you what the second important part is in a minute. One, he decided to make his base where the talent was. Because at this point in time, there was this whole huge subculture of hot rodders. That's what they were called. It's the people that were complete enthusiasts about making race cars and doing it themselves and learning how to hobble together pieces from even different manufacturers, putting

into one car and making it outperform the major companies. So let me give you an example of like the disparity between talent at this point. He's going to convince Ford to finance the Shelby car. And he's, and I'll talk more about that. And he tells Lee Iacocca that, Hey, give me $25,000 and I'll build you two prototypes, uh, $25,000 and a few Ford, uh, Ford engines. They just made this new V8 that he wanted. And I'll build you two prototypes, $25,000 and a few Ford engines. He just made this new V8 that he wanted. And I'll build you two prototypes that'll beat Corvettes because Chevy was beating Ford at this point in performance and everybody wanted to buy Corvettes and Ford didn't have an answer to that. Now, why is that important? And why would they do that? Well, first, Shelby's an amazing salesperson,

which we already talked about. He understood human nature. He's like, well, Ford has, you know, it's one of the most successful, one of the largest, most financially successful companies in the world at this time. Their downside's capped. Yeah, I'll give you, I think you got like five or six engines from them and $25,000. Why would Ford do that? Because one, they could only lose five or six engines and $25,000 and the upside was huge. But not only that, they were incapable of matching the cost structure that a smaller company would have.

Their prototypes coming out of Detroit were $200,000 or $300,000 each. And so Shelby took this. It's basically a small group of misfits, like these maniacal geniuses at making cars go really fast. And that was the foundation of his company. You're talking about a handful of people, six or 12 different people at the time. And he's so successful that he goes from like a handful of employees, let's say he has 10 to a thousand in two years, because Ford then starts dumping a bunch of money in, which we'll get to in a minute. All right. The second point, the second important part about what's going on here is, and the piece of advice that I think is applicable to us, like obviously figure out what you want to do. And if there is some geographic place

where all that talent is, then it might be a good idea to set up shop there. But the second piece of advice he's going to have for people trying to build a product is don't do it from scratch. He realizes, hey, there's no way I'm going to be able to build my car from scratch. Now the lesson, which is interesting,

the lesson he's about to tell us here that he's learning, he forgets like 30 or 40 years in the future and he does it from scratch and it winds up being like a complete failure. Anyways, he says he had never envisioned doing the whole thing from scratch and starting with a blank sheet of paper. Too many dreams had ended in oblivion by taking that route. Either the massive cost of getting the whole thing off the ground took you out, or if you saw through, there was the risk of ending up with a lemon. Much better to find someone who was already building a good, but maybe underpowered chassis and drop a V8 in it. So that's what he does. He takes a chassis from the small English company called AC Cars and takes the Ford V8, combines the two,

and within a few years, he creates one of, first of all, if you've ever seen a picture of a Shelby Cobra, one of the most beautiful cars I've ever seen in my life. And second, it was the fastest. And it won all the races for like, you know, let's say four or five years in a row until he's finally done in by, I think it was like close to the end of the 60s.

Yeah, end of the 60s, early 70s is when other cars finally caught up. Something else I have to tell you, in the midst of all this, so another reason he wanted to quit driving in addition to wanting to build his own car, which is his main ambition in life, is he had a severe heart problem.

So he was, during races, he would have to take nitroglycerin pills. And he didn't realize the pains in his heart that he was having. He was getting a heart transplant later in life. And the doctor's like, you had hundreds of heart attacks. And he just thought they were pains. So every time he'd feel the pain, he'd take a nitroglycerin pill. And he'd do this while he was driving.

So he had to slow down for a few laps until the feeling that you get after you take a nitroglycerin pill would eventually wear off. And he'd be able to drive again without the heart pain. I think one of the reasons that he also was such an, like he had such an enthusiasm for life is he didn't, he never expected to live long. Remember his dad died at 46. His mom died before she was 50. And he thought, they told me he had a heart murmur or something like that when he was like eight. So he just assumed that he was going to die like, you know, maybe in his forties or fifties when he was living to his like you know maybe in his 40s or 50s when i'm living to his 89 so anyways this is a description of his heart problem his chest pains had returned with a vengeance their prognosis was angina i don't i don't know if that's the right way to pronounce it but after running additional electrocardiogram tests there was insufficient medical evidence to

insist that he gave up racing all they could do was strongly suggest that he called a day and tell him to carry on with the nitroglycerin, as well as warning him that if his condition continued to deteriorate, a heart attack might not be too far along up the road. Okay, so this is the state of his mind when he starts his business. Now he's not racing anymore. He's fully committed to realizing his life stream about having his own car named Shelby. From the outside, it appeared that Carroll Shelby at the age of 37 had it made. He'd come through his racing career with fewer injuries than many of his contemporaries and retired as a champion. He'd settled in California, got married to a beautiful actress who he'd been courting for several years, didn't wind up being married for

less than a year, and was embarking on the production of his very own brand of sports car, as well as having many other exciting projects in the pipeline. However, appearances can be deceiving. Underlying this picture of happy home life, there was, however, a sense of hopelessness, of futility, beginning to grow within Carroll. All the time he'd been racing, he'd planned what he might do when it was over, build that sports car and a whole bunch of other stuff. But now the time had come and there was just a void. He's depressed. That's essentially what's happening here. A lot was up in the air and he was talking to people, but nothing had gotten off the ground. People would tell him stuff like, there were perfectly good sports cars made in England and Italy. As for an American sports car, there was already

the Corvette. Essentially telling him, why do you want to do this? They'd also point out stuff like he didn't have the money or any money for that matter so a backer was essential carol was entering a personal slow of despond and any scotch he drank at home was becoming simply an uh a chaser to what he was consuming around the bars of la so he winds up breaking up with his uh his actress wife her name's i think jan and she described his his his life at this time. This is probably the most depressive, this is interesting to me, where, like, he has this huge success,

he's widely known, he has an idea of what he wants to do in his life. He starts trying to make that happen. It's not being successful yet. And as a result, he just spends his days doing nothing and getting drunk all the time. And it was because of this depressive alcoholic episode in his life that uh his wife actually decides that she doesn't want to be married to him anymore and i bring that up because you know from the outside it's like

this guy has it all and it's just other people's lives are so hard to interpret because we they only we only get to see usually what they want us to see and behind behind everybody, I think is like this, like a sense of, it could be anxiety, depression, whatever the case is, like, and it's not permanent by any means, but there's, there's everybody goes, my point is everybody goes through those periods in their life. And that it should, what's motivating to me and inspiring to me about reading these stories is like, not that he was able to succeed because nothing bad happened, but that he was able to succeed in spite of this. He eventually pulls himself out of this depressive period and gets on to do what he wants to do in his life. Around this time, he's like, here's what's happening in the story. He doesn't have the

resources to build his own car. And so he has to come up with another idea. And so he's like, listen, I can't get this ball rolling. I'm not going to give up on that idea, but I got to make money. So what am I going to do? So he decides that he's going to start a school to teach people how to race. And again, this is another example of something I've learned from Shelby is that like you could have a goal, but sometimes there's going to be a few steps that you, a preliminary steps that you have to fulfill before you're going to be able to reach that goal. And it's going to take you off on a tangent.

But as long as you don't lose sight of that goal, you can work yourself back onto that path. So it's like, okay, there's racetracks around me. They're busy during the weekends, but they're not being used during the week. What if I approach the owner of a racetrack, say, hey, can I rent your racetrack on off days and do a driving school? And so he starts the Carroll Shelby School of Race Car Driving, I think is what it's called, because people still know who he is. He's famous. So they're like, OK, I'll come learn from you.

And this is how he's able to generate a little bit of income to tide him over until he starts building his car. A response to his advertisement in the Sports Car Graphic, which is a magazine at the time, was almost overwhelming with something over like 1,400 replies. He also signed a deal with Champion Spark Plugs, and although neither those nor Goodyear tires were pulling in much money as of yet, that would surely change as time went on. He does his Goodyear tire distributor at this time, which he keeps for like 40-something years,

and he gets a little bit of money from, you know, anybody building car parts that want to be associated with the name Carroll Shelby. These recent developments were absorbing the majority of his time and energy. When he had a moment to think about anything else, it would be about building a sports car, as this remained his main ambition. So he's doing this for I think like a year or two. And finally, he gets to the point where he's going to start building the product he actually wants to build. So it says the summer of 1961 also saw the mist surrounding the ethereal sports car of Carol's dreams suddenly dissolve.

And there he was standing in bright sunshine after years of pondering. He finds this car. This is the chassis that I mentioned earlier. He says the car was called the Ace and it was manufactured by a small English firm called AC Cars in a village on the outskirts of London. This is the first person he needs to line up before he goes to Ford. He says he read a piece in the latest issue of Autosport magazine that really made him sit up. John Bolster had tested something called an Ace that was fitted with a Ford engine, and it was apparently being put into production. So somebody else was already taking a chassis, putting in a Ford engine,

the exact same idea he's had for a few years. But this person got it done and was having success. It was further motivated Shelby. It says Carroll stopped, reread it, and then read it again. It was like Bolster had got inside his brain, pulled out his sports car idea, and described exactly what he wanted to make. If the people at AC Cars were happy to go along with the development of a car with a Ford engine, then they might be worth approaching. So that's where he gets the idea. He's like, okay, well, let me just fly over to London and talk these people into that. So it's a small company owned by a family called the Herlocks. And it says the Herlocks were interested in taking things

further once Carroll could come up with what he considered a suitable engine. And it looked as though Ford's new engine might be that very thing. And so this is also a reminder, something we see over and over again, goes back to one of my favorite Jeff Bezos quotes, which I always talk about over and over again. All big things start small. It said, the day that Carroll came to the AC car company was the first time that I'd met him. Although, of course, I knew very little about him from his, I knew a little about him from his racing exploits. He came across as very personable, very self-assured. And I suppose because he told us that Ford was supplying him with engines, we assumed that he had more behind him than he did at this point. So that's actually something really smart that he

does. You know, that people might know him because a race car driver, but because he, and this is what I wasn't, I'm a little confused on. When Carroll tells the story, he tells the story that he found the chassis and talked to them first and then went to Ford. In the book, this guy's saying that it happened in reverse. What I think happened is I think Carroll told them he had Ford's backing before he had Ford's backing as a sales technique. Okay, so he's not just Carroll Shelby, famous race car driver. It's, hey, I'm Carroll Shelby, famous race car driver. And guess what? Ford's backing as a sales technique. Okay, so he's not just Carroll Shelby, famous race car driver. It's, hey, I'm Carroll Shelby, famous race car driving. Guess what?

Ford's backing me. Now, that comes true. Ford's the one that finances most of his company. But I don't think that was true at this time and point. So he says, he told us that Ford was supplying with the engines. We assumed he had more behind him

than he did at this point. We certainly had little idea of what a shoe-seeing operation he was running, but it all worked out well. So what's a shoe-seeing operation he was running, but it all worked out well. So what's a shoe-seeing operation? He was renting a tiny bit of extra space from his friend. He had one employee at the time and he was doing everything else. But the part I want to focus on here is I think what he's doing here with, there's three people, three organizations involved, right? Shelby, the company that he hopes to become one day, Ford, and then the AC car. What Shelby does here is genius. It's a masterful alignment of

incentives, which speaks directly at how you can get other humans motivated to do something you want to do. You don't appeal. They say, hey, I need a favor just because you might like me. It's like you need to appeal to her interest. And so Shelby understood that and he does so beautifully here. All right. So let me read this part to you. This is after everything's lined up with AC, everything's lined up with Ford. So talking about like, why is AC doing this and why is Ford doing this? It says, as far as AC were concerned, these were to result in them invoicing Ford Motor credit company, Shelby accounts. Okay, so what they're talking about is they don't have to take Shelby's name for it.

When they complete a chassis and ship it to him in California before they ship it from London to California, they invoice, they're not invoicing Shelby, not being sure if he was going to get paid. They're invoicing Ford Motor Credit Company. So they know they're going to get paid. And the result is a finished, fully trimmed

and painted car minus engine and gearbox, which is what Shelby has to put together using other manufacturers' part, including Ford being the engine part. Now, so that's why Shelby's doing it, okay? Hey, we'll send more chassis, we'll sell more chassis, and we know we're going to get paid because Ford's this giant company that pays their bills. Makes sense. Now, why is Ford doing it? I said, Ford's profit, they hope, would come from the exposure that they'd receive as a result of such high-performance sports car being available from any Ford dealer, which in turn should bring customers into the dealership to look at, if not buy a Cobra, they'd buy something else from Ford. In the longer term, Carroll had talked of racing. And if this did happen and went well, then that could considerably enhance the total performance image that Ford surely was going to begin promoting.

So at this point in Ford's company history is they're ditching their old taglines and their new tagline is total performance. So if you're going to be reorienting your brand around performance, you should have some cars that go fast. So that's what Shelby's and Shelby's going to build them for him. Given the right marketing, the car could end up as much of Ford as they wanted. So let me explain that. When you see Cobra marketing from this time period, it says Cobra powered by Ford. So you'd have the Cobra brand name, the Cobra logo, but Ford would be associated to it. So it says to design, develop and put into production a car all of their own on their own would cost millions, if not tens of millions of dollars, not to mention several years with no guaranteed success at the end.

They were still smarting from the all too recent Edsel experience that had ended with the loss of a reported $350 million. So doing the sports car, the Carroll Shelby way, looked like a real bargain. Besides, it was going to start almost immediately. Even looking on the downside, the way that Ford were going into it meant that if the whole thing belly flopped, they could quietly walk away. So what did Shelby do? Shelby's capping their downside for them. It was only the engine that was going to be theirs. And that had already proven a success. This is him showing us a masterful alignment of incentives, right? But I also want to talk about, because the next paragraph talks about this all occurred,

what I just read to you, 12 months of time from him being a complete depressed person. 12 months later, his life is completely different. I think it's motivating for all of us. I want to spend a little bit of time reading this section to you. Not too long before that, others had thought he might be heading for Skid Row. He'd always enjoyed drinking in moderation, and he even got very drunk on occasion, but up until then, he'd always been able to take it or leave it, and it had never been habitual, so he picked up this habitual drinking habit when he got depressed. Just then, however, he'd been in danger of getting out of hand, and he'd begun to spend more time in bars than was good for him. The money had stopped coming in. This is again, description of

his life 12 months prior. His second marriage was on its way to failure. And at times it seemed like the best thing he'd got to look forward to was a drink. But this is such an important part for all of us to realize that we can, even if our lives are in a time where they're going in a direction we don't want, like we have the power to change. Like this is the difference between like a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. Shelby obviously held a growth mindset, but he said, but the inner strength and sense of self-conviction that it brought him this far in life was his salvation. He picked himself up, dusted himself off and got back on track to where he wanted to go. And now just 12 months on, it seemed like he was heading to what

could be the motherlode, his own sports car at last, totally underwritten by the Ford Motor Company. Okay, so I need to skip ahead in the time. I'm obsessed with early days of small companies. I want to read two things, a description of Shelby Automotive in the early days, which I find completely fascinating. One sentence from the book says everything had to be done tomorrow and by the cheapest method possible. And the second thing I want to read to you is an 80 year old Shelby looking back at this time. And this is also very common when you're studying the history of not only people's lives, but their businesses. Everybody seems like you have like a really small group of talented people.

Out of that small group of talented people, you have this usually larger company that grows and then they all look back on the early days with like like positive nostalgia they yearn to go back to the way things were which i i'm just telling you in case like you're ever in this situation like you might realize like what you think that you want to do might not be what you actually want i guess this and i'm only basing that off other people's experiences where they're just like, I don't want this. I don't want to have, he even says in a lot of these interviews,

I didn't want to have a bunch of thousands of employees. And that's why he takes off to Africa, or at least one of the reasons. All right, so anyways, he said, this is early days of Shelby. We had hot routers from England, Switzerland, France, Japan, Australia, New Zealand. People from all over the world

wanted to work for this little company. He's talking about Shelby American. And he says, I've never seen a company that had as high of a morale as we had. It wasn't uncommon for them to work until two or three in the morning and be back down there at 7.30 a.m. the next morning. That wasn't uncommon at all. Everyone was just hyper to beat Ferrari. It's very interesting reading the book and hearing Shelby speak is like that level of talent, that morale, that passion. Once they reach that goal of beating Ferrari, it essentially disappears. And so many of the people, once Ford, now Ford keeps pumping more money because Shelby's having success. So the company goes from like a

small band of misfits and troublemakers. And it grows to the point where a lot of those misfits and troublemakers, by definition, those kind of people cannot work in larger companies. They're like, we can't work in an environment. So he actually starts losing a bunch of talent. And it had nothing to do really with Shelby himself. They all loved working for him, but they just couldn't work. The people that Ford was bringing in and moving a lot of the people from Detroit to California, it's a completely different environment. And so once that happened, they just spread to the wind. They all went and did different things.

Some of them built their own cars. Some of them went back to racing. Some of them retired completely. But I don't know, man. That kind of makes me a little sad. I mean, I guess it had to happen. So maybe it's sad. Maybe melancholic is a better word there.

But there's just something special about a group of highly talented, smart people working together for a common goal. And whatever makes that special with size and growth and added other people that are maybe not as enthusiastic, it dilutes that, unfortunately. okay oh so i'm skipping ahead by like a good amount of probably like 100 pages just now and the note i see i left on this page on the very next on the very next section i want to talk to you about was the long and what i was just talking about the longing to go back to the early smaller days of a company occurs frequently in history is the note i left myself and it says shelby wants more money ford wants more control for its money shelby wants control how is this going to end? Shelby Automotive is very successful. I think this is after they've already beat.

Yeah, this is after they beat Old Man Ferrari. So let's talk about what happens after that. In ensuring that he got maximum exposure for his ideas at Ford and that the maximum amount of finance he could justify to carry them out was forthcoming, was his expansion in both production and racing activities. Expansion that needed a good deal more investment from Ford. This would naturally result in more money for Carroll himself, but there's seldom such a thing as free lunch. Ford wanted more control, and Carroll knew he'd have to let them have it in order to further the momentum that had built up around him and his automotive adventures. So one thing that Shelby talks about a lot in his interviews, but also in the book,

is he hates company politics. That's why he always wanted to run smaller companies, because you can avoid politics in that case. But he's like, when you dealt with Ford, all projects would start off well, they'd have success. And eventually, he says, it's human nature for people to be envious of your success. And they would try, since they're working on other parts of the company they might want to be involved in, they want to be involved in your project, even though they couldn't, they would sabotage. And so that happened to Shelby. And over again, it says Shelby began to be unhappy at this point because of his relationship with Ford. They more and more introduced themselves into the projects. Their bean counters, this is a quote from Shelby, seemed to be everywhere.

One of his co-workers, more and more, he told me he felt the shackle, but he knew if he broke with them, he'd be finished. Another description of Shelby at this time, he was always a free spirit at heart, totally, and he still is. And now they're going to go back to the time at the small shop in Venice. It says, everyone whom I've met who were part of that close-knit group working with Shelby in Venice have similarly spoken of those early years

as being something very special, something that was to change forever over the coming months. One of them recalled the words of Jacqueline Kennedy a week after her husband's presidency had been cut short by his assassination. And it's a quote from Jackie Kennedy. It says, Don't let it be forgot Jacqueline Kennedy, a week after her husband's presidency, had been cut short by his assassination. And it's a quote from Jackie Kennedy.

It says, don't let it be forgot that once there was a spot for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot, it will never be that way again. And nor would Shelby American. And because Shelby talked about this so frequently, I feel the need to continue to expound on that because it's something he dealt with all the time. And I think the whole point of us spending time together every week is to learn from their experiences. So this is a big part of his experience. So I'm going to continue pulling a couple of quotes out when Shelby talks about company politics. He says, he was concerned, however, that various factions might have difficulty working together

towards the common good. After all, he'd seen the pitfalls of the politics that were an integral part of Ford creep into Shelby American ever since their involvement had increased. As he saw it,

politics, while being necessary within a huge organization that dealt with mass markets, being Ford, were problematic for a small-scale manufacturer and close to unworkable within a racing team. And that's really all he wanted to be. He just wanted to be a small-scale manufacturer with the ability to make decisions quickly,

without having to go through committees or meetings or getting approval. Because he said over and over again, he's like, I just want to make a couple hundred, maybe a couple thousand cars. I don't need, you know, he had no desire to make 8,000 cars in a day or whatever it was that Ford was making at this time. And so this is now quotes from Shelby about this time period. He says, I have the utmost respect for Leo Beebe and Homer Perry because they were both apolitical. These are two people working for Ford. So Leo Beebe, interesting enough, Leo Beebe was Henry Ford II's commanding officer in World War II. When Henry Ford II came home from the war,

he hired Leo Beebe. Leo Beebe was essentially like the guy he would send if there was an issue. Leo Beebe would work on whatever was most important for Ford at the time. So when it became the most important thing for Ford to beat Ferrari at Le Mans, he put him in charge as like the Ford liaison to Shelby, right?

So Shelby worked very well with Leo Beebe. He also worked very well with Homer Perry. So let me finish this quote, and then I also want to read you this other quote I found about Homer Perry. So Shelby's saying, I have the utmost respect for Leo and Homer because they were both apolitical. They didn't give a shit about politics inside the company. All they wanted to do was get the job done. That's exactly what Shelby, that's all Shelby wants to do.

That's all any of the people that we respect that build products. They don't want to engage in the politics. They just want to get the job done. They want to build the product. So let me find this quote that he says something about Homer Perry that I just loved.

Okay, here it is. He says, we had this wonderful person at Ford named Homer Perry. I just loved. Okay. Here it is. He says, we had this wonderful person at Ford named Homer Perry. He was apolitical. He moved everything out of the way. He was one of those rare individuals. And you're going to see why I pull this out in a minute. We wouldn't have won Le Mans without Homer Perry. He was one of these people who could stay focused and didn't let anything get in his way. So seldom do you see people like that. Now, I bring that up as one because I keep talking about this idea like I'm trying to smack myself in the face over and over again.

Fine. You can't do everything in life, David. Figure out what you want to do and focus on it and stop letting other people and other things pull you away from that, right? I think that's good advice for everybody, but I'm really speaking to myself there. And what I found fascinating is, remember, at the foreword of the book, Hetzel Ford II said, you know, Shelby had a 60 plus year career in this industry. 60 years. Think about the knowledge you drew accumulating 60 years of working in industry. This is the time that that quote I'm pulling from right now, that's the Shelby that had 60 plus years. He's 85 years old at this interview, whatever the case is. Listen to what he says. He says that he's a rare individual and he's one of these people that could stay focused and didn't let

anything get in his way. And then he ends with so seldom. Do you see people like that? I think that is, it's him. That's like my spidey sense goes off. Like that is really important. Focus is really, really important because this guy worked with thousands of people in his 60 year career. And he's like, it's really seldom that you could just think about how silly, that seems silly, right? It seems like it's not true. That the fact that somebody that could stay focused

and didn't let anything get his way was rare. So just having that trait and applying it to your craft, applying it to whatever it is you're doing all day is rare. I think that's super, super important. Okay, so now at this point in the book, they're going to break up the first time. He eventually goes back to Ford after like 15, 20 years.

I forgot what it was. He was a much older man then because he worked for Lea Iacocca, leaves Ford, and winds up going to Chrysler and doing one of the best turnarounds in corporate history and then hires Shelby to do the Dodge Viper and some other vehicles. But before that happens,

we have to have the falling out with Ford and Shelby. And this is why I love people like Shelby and I hate, hate large bureaucratic organizations like what Ford is at the end of 1960s. And here's why. It says, my own know, Shelby and Ford were destined to break up because they thought and acted completely different. They start from a completely different point of view. So this is Shelby's son talking about what happened. He says, they got everything they wanted out of dad. The Le Mans win, the world championship with the Daytona Coupes. Then they yank production from him in 1967 for all those indiscretions that he did.

He was spending a bunch of money and they ended up writing it off. I knew a guy who was a comptroller there, meaning a Ford. And he said it was $12 million. Now think about this. They are at this time, Ford's investing $800 million to increase automobile manufacturing in Europe. The entire Shelby program, which I don't know if this is the only number I've ever seen pulled out, right? The entire Shelby program that Ford had to finance at the time, $12 million. That's $12 million in end of 1960 dollars. So yeah, it's a good amount of money, but tiny compared to 800, like Ford's printing money. Granted, they're going to have some really hard times in a few years from now,

but that's a tiny amount of money in general, right? So he says, I knew a guy who was a comptroller there and he said it was $12 million. The Ford bean counter said, we can't continue this. Look at the losses, but they missed the big picture. Look what they got in the previous five years in publicity. 50 times 12 million. But they couldn't handle a guy down here throwing away $10,000 here and there. And so that's the whole point. I think it was a quote. I don't know if it was last week or the week before where they talk about at this point, there's a quote from a Ford executive. It's like, we're a nickel and dime business. Like I'll cut your head off to save a hundred thousand dollars or what our core, I think like

a quarter on every car would have been whatever the number was. But like, again, Shelby's trying to build, he's trying to innovate. He's trying to create something new. He, to do so, you're going to have to spend money that you think is going to work out. And it's not in, again, it's a tiny percent compared to Ford's overall financial picture, but that's not how the bean counters and middle management at Ford think. They're like, oh, well, if I can save the company $12 million or $10 million or whatever it is, if I just shut this department down, not realizing, yeah, you're saving money, but you're also foreclosing all the opportunity to that publicity could benefit your company in the future. This is a really weird decision. So at this point he takes off, he spends 12 years in Africa. The book is full of, it's, it's amazing. The book

only developed, uh, are dedicated one chapter to it because it's first of all, it's a long time. And two, he had all sorts of adventures, like dealing with like the presidents of all these different countries in Africa, uh, starting these companies over there, almost dying. Like again, this guy just had his life stories. One of the craziest ones I've ever had. He comes back and forth between African-America, Africa and America, excuse me, because he's got to get at this time. He has like two bypass heart surgeries. Eventually he has a complete heart transplant and his kidneys fail. He has to get a kidney from one of his sons that donates a kidney to him. And so that saves his life because he said if he had to do dialysis, he would have killed himself. So anyways, at this point, he's got a ton of opportunities to pursue.

So not only now he's a free agent, there's all kinds of other car companies all over the world that want to be associated with Shelby. One of them is Toyota. I'm going to skip over all of that. Obviously, I can't share everything in the book. The book is like, I mean, it took me an unbelievable amount of time to read, probably like 15 hours. But there was something interesting because Shelby had all these opportunities, but he missed out a lot. Remember, he said he could have been a millionaire before he was 30 if he just worked for Carruth. Well, here's a story about how Shelby missed out on an opportunity that would have made him a billionaire. And this is amazing to me.

So it says he's got a relationship with Toyota at the time. Obviously, at this point in history, Toyota is going to come. All these Japanese manufacturers come and eat Detroit's lunch. As we know now, because we have the benefit of hindsight. So it says, Carroll's Toyota associations could have led to the biggest and most lucrative deal of his life, however,

but it was one that he let slip to his fingers. This is a direct quote from Shelby. One time, when he was at my house, Mr. Toyota, that's not the guy's name, by the way. He calls him Mr. Toyota. And when I read that in the book, in my mind, I have Shelby's Texas accent. I don't know why. But he said, one time when he was at my house, Mr. Toyota offered me the distributorship for Texas. So what did I do? I went to Iacocca and says, I have a contract for Ford, but I'd like to get out of it.

I want to do this contract to have all the dealerships in Toyota. And he says, oh, forget it, Shell. We're going to push them back into the ocean. So I went to my friend Tommy and I says, Tommy, do you want this dealership? Well, he wiggled and waffled, but he finally took it. And he's become a billionaire out of it. And good friend, right? And I'm glad to see a friend of mine make it if I couldn't.

I don't have any regrets. I'd have had a lot more money if I had taken it, but I wouldn't have had all the other things happen to me in my life that have happened since then. And I haven't really missed anything. All right. There's one story I want to share with you because the book, I couldn't pull them all out.

There's a million stories like the one I'm about to read to you, but it's one, kind of humorous, and two, gives you really good insight to Carroll Shelby the person. And one thing I'm going to take away from studying the life of Carroll Shelby is like, you got to enjoy your time here, your limited time here. And one thing about Shelby is he's extremely successful as a person, a builder of products, a constructor of racing teams. But he had fun doing what he was doing.

And so we're going to see a good insight into the person. And the note I just left myself was that was Shelby. All right. They'd always get together every year, a group of friends and people in the same industry. And they'd have these chili cook-offs. I told you earlier, outside of the chili cook-off started like the Carroll Shelby Chili Company, which was successful for a few years, sold in a bunch of grocery stores. And then some other company went and bought it. So it says, we had a party preceding the chili cook-off,

a big party. All the guys that flew in from California were there. And it was some pretty rowdy occasion. There was a fella, no names, they weren't going to tell you who it is. There was a fella, we're not going to tell you the name, upstairs in bed with somebody else's girlfriend. And Shelby knew about it. So he talked another guy into banging on the door and going in with a pistol with blanks in it, which at the time was something people would bring to the cook-offs. These pistols that would just make a lot of noise with no bullet come out of them. Anyway, he started shooting it at the fellow who was in bed with someone he shouldn't have been. And before you knew it, he, meaning the guy, would jump right out of bed, backed up to the window, and jumped out.

Well, he landed down in the courtyard where a lot of the folks were partying. And he lands right beside the phone. And do you know, he says laughingly, telling me, the only thing he had on was the socks. Trouble was, although as I remember it, he was not in a lot of pain, he was trying to stand up, he had broken his leg. So it turned out to be a bit of a comic tragedy in this next sentence, the whole point of the story.

And that was Shelby. He didn't go in with a gun, but he put the guy who did up to it. And finally, I want to end here with what's Shelby going to be remembered for? And the beautiful part about Shelby's life is he's going to be remembered for his main ambition, which is building the Cobra, building the car that he wanted to, being obsessed with cars since he was four or five years old. And finally, you know, 40 years later, being able to build since he was four or five years old. And finally, you know, 40 years later, being able to build one with his own name on it and have it, you know, loved by customers all over the world. So it says, Carol's 89 years have been as full as any man's

could possibly be. But ask most people what he is universally known for, and they will reply, the Cobra. The Cobra, above all else, stood for performance, something that Carroll truly understood when he made the statement. My name's Carroll Shelby, and performance is my business. And I'll leave the story there. If you want the full story, I highly recommend reading the book. And if you buy the book by pressing the link that's in the show notes of your podcast player or going to founderspodcast.com, if you buy the book using that link, Amazon will send me a small percentage of the sale at no additional cost to you. So it's

a great way for you to get a book, support the author, support yourself because you'll learn something new, and then support the podcast at the same time. Thank you very much for listening, and I'll talk to you next week.