The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Soul of an Entrepreneur: Work and Life Beyond the Startup Myth by David Sax

Episode Date: March 30, 2022

The Soul of an Entrepreneur: Work and Life Beyond the Startup Myth by David Sax An award-winning business writer dismantles the myths of entrepreneurship, replacing them with an essential story about the experience of real business owners in the modern economy. We're often told that we're living amidst a startup boom. Typically, we think of apps built by college kids and funded by venture capital firms, which remake fortunes and economies overnight. But in reality, most new businesses are things like restaurants or hair salons. Entrepreneurs aren't all millennials -- more often, it's their parents. And those small companies are the fabric of our economy. The Soul of an Entrepreneur is a business book of a different kind, exploring our work but also our passions and hopes. David Sax reports on the deeply personal questions of entrepreneurship: why an immigrant family risks everything to build a bakery; how a small farmer fights to manage his debt; and what it feels like to rise and fall with a business you built for yourself. This book is the real story of entrepreneurship. It confronts both success and failure, and shows how they can change a human life. It captures the inherent freedom that entrepreneurship brings, and why it matters.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times.

Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Evidently, I'm the host, so I guess it's my job to do this at the beginning. So I'll just go ahead and do it. Welcome to the show, guys. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Refer to the show to your family, friends, relatives, and everyone else. Tell them to subscribe at youtube.com, 4S Chris Voss.

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Also go to our big 138,000 group over there on LinkedIn. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a

great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. Or order the book where refined books are sold. Today, we have an amazing author on the show. He's a multi-book author, if you will. He's written many books. That's what that means, multi-author, for those of you from the new generation who can't read. Public school, it's so awesome. I went there too. Anyway, guys, David Sachs is on the show with us.

He's written a book called The Soul of an Entrepreneur, Work and Life Beyond the Startup Myth. Came out April 21st, 2020. I've been a, he was recommended by someone on the show. So thanks to whoever did that. So we're going to be talking about his awesome book today. And he's got a lot in the, in the package here. I'm seeing here on Amazon. He is a journalist, writer and keynote speaker, especially specializing in business and culture. Welcome to the show, David.

How are you? I'm great, Chris. I have to say, I've been in a lot of podcasts. I have never heard a podcast intro theme music like that. Thank you. That was, I was, all you needed to complete it was someone saying Sunday, Sunday, Sunday at the, you know, Toledo Metrodome. The Christmas podcast. We had Dave Navarro on last week from, man, I'm still suffering from leg day, but the

musician. And he heard the intro and he goes, I thought I was entering a WWE truck show or something. Yeah, 100%. It was a 1980s monster truck rally. Yeah. And now it's something you got, which is great. That's awesome. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. We feed it's something you got, which is great. That's awesome. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. We feed it with energy. So welcome to the show. We certainly appreciate you coming on. Congratulations on the book. Give us your plugs, your dot coms, so people can find you on those interwebs. Good question. Yes, I have a very untouched website that I just paid the bill for today, but haven't touched in a few years called saxdavid.com. And then a Twitter at

saxdavid, which I try to avoid for my mental sanity and LinkedIn. Saxdavid, I guess. David Sax. I don't know. It's somewhere on there. People seem to find me. Bangladeshi, Forex traders and various Bitcoin evangelists seem to invite me every day. So I'm on there as well. I love LinkedIn. It's the most boring of the social networks. And I say that with great praise we'll probably have you on the newsletter tomorrow probably we'll have it out tomorrow so that'll go out to a bunch of people

and then you know we love LinkedIn I've been on it since the beginning of time so before Microsoft ruined it and it's starting to really come into its own now again the ruining of Microsoft has kind of made a comeback so you've written a lot of books how many books have you written total i'm seeing like a whole bunch of them here a whole bunch of books this one the soul of an entrepreneur which came

out uh two years ago pretty much and that was my fourth i have another one coming out this fall so yeah i guess this is what i do i'll just Sling paper. Sling paper. Sling ideas. With letters on them. On paper. Yeah. So it's, you know. Paper and word. I write books for a living.

There you go. So I've been an entrepreneur for 18 years and I'm still searching for my soul. Tell us what motivated you to want to write this book, The Soul of an Entrepreneur. Or if you want to give us a little origin story, maybe that led you up to it too. Feel free. Well, you know, similar story to yours, Chris, in that I had been working for myself as a writer and journalist and speaker and whatever else I do to make money and live and define myself as a human being in this modern world for a similar period of time, you know, two decades. And I had never worked for anyone else. And the last job I had as a paid employee was teaching skiing, you know, for

two months in a winter on the weekends. And even in my career, I've never, I've never been employed by a newspaper, an organization. So, you know, I always worked for myself. Not only that, but my wife had just started her own business. My brother had just started his own business. My father has been an entrepreneur his entire career. You know, he graduated law school. He worked at one firm for, you know, a year. And after he's got his certification, they're like, Saks, you're, you know, you're not meant to be an employee here. My grandfather started a tool business, which just finally closed after 80 years. So everyone in my family was an entrepreneur in the sense that they all worked for themselves. And my mother-in-law, my father-in-law, everyone.

And yet, at the time when I started thinking about this book, which was four or five years ago, everybody was talking about entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship. There were podcasts and festivals and magazines and so much sexiness and glamour around entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship. But it was only about one type of entrepreneurship. And I didn't recognize myself or anyone that I knew in that or, you know, very few people. And that was kind of this exclusive focus on the glorification of the kind of Silicon Valley style startup entrepreneur, right? And you know the story. You've heard the story before, I imagine, Chris.

It's a small story. Young, brilliant man or woman graduated or dropped out even better from Harvard or Stanford. No other university. Dartmouth. Nobody cares. You know, the State University of Nevada or whatever. You know, and had a brilliant idea and manifested it with you know hundreds of millions of dollars of venture capital venture capital and now they're sitting on a stage

in like very expensive casual looking sneakers telling you how you can be an entrepreneur and and sort of this myth of the startup as the as the kind of defining story and mythology of entrepreneurship really captured the world of business and of culture. I mean, transcending it, right? Think of someone like Elon Musk, you know, he's not written about in the business press. He's worshipped in celebrity magazines and cultural magazines. I mean, he is as much a cultural figure as a movie star. And it has very little to do with his financial acumen or whatever. And yet that is the example that everybody sort of looks at when they're talking about entrepreneurship, which as I started thinking about, and again, looking for myself and my family and my wife and everybody I knew in these figures and

this kind of mythology of the entrepreneur, which was really like the story that everybody wanted to tell, I was missing out on the 99% of entrepreneurs that actually are the ones that are out there, the people that own the coffee shop around the corner and the car repair place and the small accounting business and the lawyer that helped prepare my tax return and all the other entrepreneurs, the individuals who work for themselves, who own a business, who work for themselves and have no one boss and sort of decided to forge their own path.

The podcasters, the podcast production studios. Wait, you get paid for this? No. Do I get a check? That's a whole other story. You don't get a check because you're not an employee. You're an entrepreneur. Fight for those checks.

My card says B-I-T-C-H on it is my title. I'm not sure what that means. In chief, yes. Well, at least I got the chief part there. It took me years to get that. So it really came out of this fascination around it. Because initially I was like, I'm going to write about this boom of entrepreneurship. Look at all these entrepreneurs. Look at all these this boom of entrepreneurship. Look at all these entrepreneurs.

Look at all these co-working spaces. Look at all these startups. There's never been a better time to be an entrepreneur. My friend, Greg Kaplan, who happens to be a professor at University of Chicago in economics, at the time Princeton, brilliant young man. Greg said, well, are you sure about that?

And I was like, yeah, look at all the startups. Look at all the WeWorks. Look at all these, you know, We were in New York at the time. At the time,. Look at all the WeWorks. Look at all these, you know, we were in New York at the time. At the time, at the time, the WeWorks was the golden goose. And I was like, look at all these co-working spaces. Of course, this is a golden age of entrepreneurship. He's like, let me send you a paper.

Let me send you some economic statistics. And what it said was that if you judge it by the number of businesses that people in America, I'm in Canada, but in America were starting, it was half the number of people were going in to work for themselves, going to business for themselves, self-employed from 1980, pretty much the year after I was born until now. It had been declining. That American entrepreneurship had actually been in the decline. Fewer people now are going out to work for themselves and starting their own business. And so on the one hand, you have this mythology. It's never been a better time to be an entrepreneur.

It's never been easier to be an entrepreneur. It's never been easier to raise money. It's never been easier to start a company. All you have to do is click, click, click. And, you know, Squarespace, WeWork, and all these things are just going to take care of it for you. You don't need this. You don't need that. And you're off to the races raising millions.

And the reality, which is that, wow, fewer people are actually starting businesses. Fewer people are going out to work for themselves. Fewer people are actually starting businesses. Fewer people are going out to work for themselves. Fewer people are taking that risk. Fewer people are becoming entrepreneurs. And fewer people are actually succeeding at it. So what was happening? There was this disconnect between the mythology and the reality of entrepreneurship. And that's what the book is about.

All right. All right. Short answer, no. But I've been sitting in this chair for two years. So the, uh, you and me, man,

that's been a fun, it's been a interesting ride. I don't think funds, right. Word. But I mean, we've, we've met a lot of great people that,

you know, we probably wouldn't have met otherwise. So, you know, what is the soul of the entrepreneur? Cause I'm still trying to find a mine. Mine's I don't know. Mine's in, I think, I think I sold mine to the devil or something, but what is the soul of the entrepreneur? Cause I'm still trying to find a mine. Mine's I don't know. Mine's in, in, I think, I think I sold mine to the devil or something, but what is the soul of

the entrepreneur? And give us a tease if you would on what you found in your, in your research. Sure. Well, the reason the book's called the soul of an entrepreneur is because that's what I wanted to write about. You know, every book that you read about entrepreneurship and there are stores filled with them. Every podcast you listen to about entrepreneurship, it's about the mind of the entrepreneur, the brain of the entrepreneur, the success of the entrepreneur. I'm supposed to have a brain? No, no, God, no. Instinct, the path of the entrepreneur, right? Five ways you can, six ways you can, 10 ways, the top five, the top 20, you know, the best mythologies and ideas that you have to make your money, right?

What are the five things Elon Musk did? What are the 10, you know, ways that Steve Jobs wore his shoes? You know, Andrew Carnegie did, he recommends these five breakfast cereals. And it's all based on this idea of, you know, a process, you know, a path. But when you know entrepreneurs and you talk to entrepreneurs, as I had done as a business journalist for many years, wrote for Businessweek and the New York Times and various other publications that you won't know about and don't sound as impressive. And you interview entrepreneurs, I did for books and whatever, restaurant owners, people who own manufacturing businesses, street food sellers in Rio de Janeiro. And you talk to them about their businesses. They're not like, oh yeah, here's how I got from 2% growth to 3% growth annually. And these are the five

methods I do. They talk about their businesses in the terms of talking about things with the soul. They talk about their business and their life as an entrepreneur in the same way they talk about their life with their family, their life living in their place. They talk about their business and entrepreneurship in the same way they talk about spirituality and soul or a passion or a hobby that they have. And I know personally, and from those around me, that entrepreneurship is very much a journey of the soul, regardless of whether you are successful, you know, financially or not, or as the majority of entrepreneurs are some kind of mix in between, right? Successful. I literally just finished doing my tax return. So you're hitting a particularly disgustingly raw moment.

The fun part of the entrepreneur is the tax filings. The write-off of an entrepreneur. That is one of the nice things about being an employee. Somebody else deals with all the paperwork for that. So that's always nice. You know, it is a soul work. I've told people there is nothing that, I mean, I don't know, maybe parent. I've never done parenting, so I can't say I fully know what's, because that seems like a life. To me, nothing gives you self-actualization or forces self-actualization on you than being an entrepreneur, especially one without a VC

backing you and lots of money. I started my first companies with sweat equity and I think $2,000 when we first, the first successful company that went to multimillion dollar status, we started with $2,000. We had maybe four months to make a profit and not run out of funds. A lot of it was sweat equity that we're putting into it, our own vehicles and stuff for what we're doing. But we funded it with literally $2,000. I write about it in my book. Within a year and a half, I started a second company on top of the first company that was just blowing up. For $4,000, we started a mortgage company. Both companies lasted 15 and 20 years.

The mortgage company would be around today if it hadn't been for the giant recession. The courier company, you know, we were making so much money in the mortgage company, it finally became just liability with cars and people driving around. And I'd moved to another state and was running it for some time. But, you know, I mean, literally taking two companies and turning them into multimillion dollar companies, hundreds of employees, really huge things from just that little seed money. And then we had a whole little empire of companies. We started out of that. I was just smacking balls there for a while, home runs every time. And going through that experience then of course watching the

what you talked about earlier the vcs the we works where i've seen you know millions and millions dollars put by billions sometimes put behind you know some 20 year old dude and you know you you hear about who was it that wrote the unicorn book a friend of mine dan dan lyons a friend of mine yeah he wrote the corn book and I forget the name of it. Sorry, Dan. Oh God. Dan, Dan like wrote the blurb on the back of my book. So I really shouldn't. Oh, did he? Disrupted. Disrupted. Disrupted. I was just going to Google him, but you know, seeing the, seeing the amount of money that's blown out their butts and, and seeing some of the challenges, you know, I just recently watched clubhouse for the last two

years, ruined one of the greatest rollouts ever. Wasn't that, that was like a hot second in time, right? It was. That was perhaps the frothiest, most delicious blip in the frothy, delicious blips of like Silicon Valley, social media, BSPR marketing. Oh, yeah. There was like a three-week phase where it's like, are you on Clubhouse?

Are you on Clubhouse? Are you doing Clubhouse? I'm on Clubhouse. Someone's on Clubhouse. Someone's on Clubhouse. And by the end of it, like, people were just doing parodies. I'm like, well, I'm glad I never even touched that. I'm glad.

Yeah. I'm glad I watched that wave wash back out to sea. Well, the decisions they made were just abysmal. I mean, I'd never seen in recent memory, other than probably WeWork, so many bad, poor decisions. And a lot of it was just youth and inexperience and whatever, but you know, millions and millions of dollars. So do you try and profile who in the book, who the normal entrepreneurs are and maybe try and peel away some of that mythology so people can because people get lost in that whole minutia of the mythology of like

ooh you know i see all these people running around going i'm a boss i'm a boss babe and you're just like you make five dollars an hour and you're i don't know you're just doing some coaching or something i'm not really sure what you're doing i don't know what you're just doing some coaching or something. I'm not really sure what you're doing. I don't know. What do you, do you try and do that in your book where you're pulling away the mythology or? Yeah, that's exactly what the book is. I mean, it really is saying, listen, let's look beyond this to actually see what, what does it, what does it mean in a much deeper way to be an entrepreneur? And so it goes back to the beginning of actually how, you know, how we got to this point, right? How the definition of an entrepreneur even began going back to, you know,

the, you know, four or 500 years ago in France, when the term was first being used and what that means. And then how that definition really over the 20th century, the latter part of the 20th century became far more narrowly defined for various different reasons as this, you know, high growth venture capital backed entrepreneur. And then, and, and then I, so I start, I profile entrepreneurs in each different part of the book, looking at the different types, right? The, the, the, the silica, you know, two students at Stanford who were starting some startup because that's the thing to do. And they feel like they have to do it and just

examines that kind of world through their eyes as they see it. And they start getting jaded about the reality of what it is. But also, you know, the immigrant entrepreneur, a family of two Syrian brothers whose bakery was destroyed in Aleppo and came as refugees here to Toronto and completely rebuilt and rebuilt the bakery and brought their families over. And that story of everything that that meant to them and other Syrian refugees who came around the same time, we'd all open these restaurant businesses. Entrepreneurs who do it for lifestyle, this wonderful woman, Tracy Abalski, who was working as kind of a high-end pastry chef at top restaurants in Manhattan,

really well-known and absolutely hated it, totally burned out, wanted to surf, just wanted to do her own thing. And so she opened a bakery and cafe in rockway beach and you know wakes up every day goes surfing bikes to her bakery bakes sells coffee goes bikes back goes surfing you know has dinner goes to bed wakes up at 5 a.m does it every day and is living the dream so to speak there you go not getting rich but you know lives the life of someone who we would all aspire to live like. Even talking about those entrepreneurs for whom it's all about, the soul is defined by the realization of their own values. And when I say that, I don't mean like, oh, we sell one shoe and we give another shoe

to a poor child in Africa. But actually, you know, the entrepreneur has been at some sort of business for a long time and actually realizes the purpose of their entrepreneurship is greater than just the money they're making and what that's like. So it really does try to, through the eyes of many of these different types of entrepreneurs, which represent, you know, a very small selection, obviously what that's like for them, what it's like to, to define themselves and their own identity through entrepreneurship. Yeah. I went through that cathartic time too. I went through that, that whole tunnel, you know, as we mentioned earlier, the self-actualization process,

it literally is your soul. You live, breathe your business. It's everything, 24-7. There's no punch-out time. I remember when I first came down to Las Vegas and ran, built a mortgage company, just started to build a mortgage company for some Chinese investors. They were from China, I should say. It was so nice to have someone else's money be in the bank, and I didn't have to worry about whether... I mean, I should say. It was so nice to have someone else's money be in the bank and I didn't have to worry about whether, I mean, I had to worry about whether we're going to make a profit or not, but I knew what we were building because I built it before. But it was so nice to be able to go home at five and not have to think about it so much like I would all of my other companies.

And being able to punch out at five is a whole different thing. I used to dream all the time of what I would be doing the next day. Like that would be my dreams, who I was going to fire, what meetings I was going to have. If I dreamed about a beautiful girl, I mean, that was like a miracle once in a million days. It was always about business. So you would dream business. You would live, breathe, eat it 24-7. Even if you were at home trying to watch a movie or out trying to watch a movie or have a nice dinner with someone.

It gets absorbed into such a central part of your identity. You can't separate yourself from it. And you get a call. You get a call. Hey, the place is on fire. You know, somebody. You're like, did we set it this time? No.

Okay. Okay. Yeah. And yeah, it just never ends. But I went through that cathartic experience where, and it helped that I had a business partner who finally betrayed me and stepped out of the picture. But I went through that cathartic thing where we became hugely successful, had all the employees. I mean, I wish I would have written down all the stories of all my employees' adventures.

I would have like four books if I could remember them all. But the fun of being an entrepreneur, the employees. And my business partner did fry out. That's why he quit. books if I could remember them all. But the fun of being an entrepreneur, the employees. And my business partner did fry out. That's why he quit. He fried out. He's just like, I'm tired of this. After 13 years, I'm done. And I don't like being an entrepreneur anymore. And so he went off and did his thing. Me, I went through a great thing where once I got rid of him and replaced him with a really chief secretary, which was pretty amazing for the amounts we were being paid. I went through a phase where I'm like, I don't need all these employees. I can make a lot of money.

And the phase, of course, I built my companies. People hear the 2,000 and 4,000 numbers. They don't realize this was back in the day where you had to buy an office. And these were brick and mortar companies. These weren't like buying a Kodaddy website and you're selling your business. These were brick and mortar companies. In fact, our first company had to buy regulation and licenses and insurance and stuff. So that was a heady time to start a business because you didn't just start a GoDaddy website. You bought the business, you know, paid a bunch of money for the phone company to show up and install the

lines and stuff. You know, I went through that cathartic period, and now I'm in a much better place, kind of like where I don't really want to run a 100-person business anymore. I really like what I do and try and maximize my money, and I can earn almost as much as I used to earn back then without all the headache. And I like it a lot better. The quality of my life is better. And so I went through that sort of gauntlet you're talking about, where maybe I found someone in my soul or whatever was left. I don't know.

I think that's it. I mean, entrepreneurship is... So the way the myth is, is you're going to have a brilliant idea. You're going to put it out there in the world. People are going to give you money for it. And then you're going to be rich and successful and change the world. And let's say that happens. The 99% of people that it's not going to happen. Their idea isn't brilliant. They're not going to find the money. The execution is going to be right. That's just, that's reality. And I include myself in that, you know, mediocre pool, but you know, even if that happens to you, you still don't have to confront what you do next. I mean, because it is, it is not just a straight monetary thing. It's not like, well, I'm going to work myself up to this level.

And then when I get to this level, you know, I'm going to be paid a million dollars. Then at this level, we paid 2 million and then a 10 million. And then I get, you know, at this age, I'm going to retire. When you're an entrepreneur, it's, it's, it's almost, you know, all the entrepreneurs I talked to, it's never about the money. I mean, money is a marker of success and there's an ambition around it, but it's not about making a certain amount. And so, you know, the entrepreneur's journey is constantly being redefined and they're constantly being challenged by their own goals and determinations of why they're doing this, right?

Why am I getting up each day and doing this thing that I do? Whether I have a hundred employees or a thousand employees or no employees, why do I keep doing this instead of going out and finding a job and unloading that mental burden, right? The French economist who basically coined the term entrepreneur had been in use in france in different ways but he was the one who really sort of defined it in 1734 i think you're richard contien he said you know there are two types of people there's the person who is the employee and they get paid for the work they do they get paid a daily or weekly or monthly wage whether they're the farmer the sort of king's you know advisor and then everyone else is the entrepreneur and the entrepreneur all entrepreneurs whether they're poor or rich whatever field they're the farmer, the sort of King's, you know, advisor, and then everyone else is the entrepreneur and the entrepreneur, all entrepreneurs, whether they're poor or rich, whatever field they're in are linked by two things. One is freedom. They have the freedom to decide

how to work, where to work, what they want to work on, you know, the way they approach it and risk. And risk is, you know, the fact that they don't know if they're going to get paid or how much they'll get paid or whether their venture will be successful or not. And that tension between freedom and risk is really the core of the soul of the entrepreneur. And that's the thing that every entrepreneur constantly, constantly is reevaluating and dancing with that tension because it's never, it's never perfect. It's never in perfect harmony or balance. As soon as you take on more risk, you know, you're, you're losing a little bit of the freedom. As soon as you're going for a bit more freedom, you're taking on greater risk and, and you can't have one without the other. And I think that, you know, what you're talking about

with your own experiences is, is that dance that all entrepreneurs do between freedom and risk. And that's really the essential part of what it is to be an entrepreneur, regardless of the fields you're in, regardless of the years you've been doing it, regardless of how many companies you started or how many companies succeeded, how many companies fail,

how much money you make or how much money you lost. It's all about that freedom and risk. That's the defining characteristic. And that's the trap, the dance, the conversation that's constantly happening within the entrepreneur's own head. Yeah. And it's never a final thing. I had this thing, and I imagine you talk about it in your book, but I had this image that once I built an empire of companies, I pretty much would be set for life and it would be an easy role. But it's a constant fluid state of changing market dynamics, business models, mistakes that you can make.

Those are always fun. But, you know, I mean, you can build a company or a business model and run it for a decade. You can run it for years. And then all of a sudden the market changes, the regulation changes, or sometimes the ways of processing the business change, or something comes up that you start bleeding. Some sort of pandemic, some sort of global pandemic. Or a 2008 housing crisis recession that wipes out every business that you own. Or your entire supply lines in the eastern cities of Ukraine. Like, right?

Those risks are huge. Those are big external risks. And then there's the everyday risks. Your manager steals from you. Someone in your business that's a key person gets sick with cancer. Tastes change, right? You have your own health issues. You have a family and your priorities change.

I mean, all these risks are constant. Nothing is static. And even for the entrepreneur, the lucky ones who create some business that has this consistent autopilot level of success, which they exist, they work, right? They're a few lucky people. Even those entrepreneurs are not like, well, I'm good. I'm set. Off to Florida with me. They get to Florida and they're like, this town really needs bagels. I was just in Mexico with my family on vacation. We were renting a condo from these people who described as an entrepreneur from Toronto also. And we were in the unit that we rented next to.

And he owns a trucking business. But while he's down there, he's helped do interior interior building for restaurants. Cause he used to do that in Toronto. It's like, he didn't need to do it. There was no financial reason, you know, it was just like, well, you know what? Yeah. You need help with the restaurant. All right. Well, I have some experience in it. Like, you know, it's even then the risk is that restlessness gets to them. They, I, entrepreneurs need that. They want to exercise that freedom. They're not like, no, I'm good. I've started enough businesses.

I'm going to go back to the beach and have my Corona. It's like two hours into that, you know, beach, what the hell else am I going to do? All right, let's start a business. You know, one of the, one of the problems is, is our mindset because we see things from how things can be better and it becomes a muscle that you develop. And so, you know, you, you see, you know, I, I get mental, like I go into places, I think I was recently in my gym and, you know, you see how things are managed. You see how things operate. You, you know, I, I used, I, I think I probably still do mentally, but I used to be really present in

thinking about it, but I would walk be really present in thinking about it. But I would walk into most businesses and try and figure out their business model and their money. And my psychiatrist said I was doing that. He's like, you would normally be insane, but because you use it for a business purpose, it's probably okay what you do, Chris, because I would count things and measure things and keep different databases in my head. And he, but, but, you know, I'd look at them and be like, okay, how did these guys make a profit? And then sometimes, you know, their business is so awful, whether it's like customer service or product delivery or execution, or, you know, you name it, you just sit and you look at them and go, how the F are these people making money? Right. How, How the hell are they making?

I can't figure it out because these guys are really bad at what they're doing. But, you know, and so you walk into businesses, you look at everything in life. You know, anything you can hand me, I'll probably look at it, study it, and be like, hmm, I wonder how they made this. It's a muscle that once you make it and you maintain it too, it just kind of, you're like, should I go into this business? This kind of looks interesting. What is this?

Right. An instant way for you to lose money. Like it's, that's, you know, how many, how many restaurants have been started by brilliant entrepreneurs and business people who like love this kind of food and think they could do better. And it's like, oh, here's your shirt. Take it to the cleaners. Cause that's where you're going, my friend.

Oh, you love steakhouses? Good. Great. Yeah. Yeah. We did that with a lot of little companies that we start up or companies we do. We do a business alone thing. And so we get insights into businesses.

And then sometimes we'd be like, well, we should maybe take them over or whatever, bring them in our companies. And sometimes they just wouldn't work out. And, you know, a lot of ideas that we would try that just wouldn't work out. And you just be like, okay, well just let's stick with the, what makes us money. But you know, you just have that muscle, but it's, it's, it's maddening. You know, like I said, my psychiatrist used to say, cause they used to suffer really bad anxiety in the early years and i had to get medicated for that you know basically depression i grew up i started i started with it when i was 16 where i was checking doors and you know i had the ceo disease the add disease which i don't know that's a whole book in and of itself but it was maddening because you you live business all your life you live live, eat, breathe. You do it.

You're, you know, you're constantly looking at business models, thinking about business models. You know, it's just, it's a tough place to be. And I don't think people realize, like you say, it's, you know, people see the glam and glory. And they're like, oh, you know, oh, it's, it's, you know, it's easy, but it's not. Yeah, I think what a lot of people sort of project, and this is that grass is greener, is you're your own boss. You have this unlimited freedom, but they don't really think of the risk. They think of it in the sense of like, well, I could never do that. But what they don't actually think about is the sort of day-to-day burden of that risk. So even for someone who is a small entrepreneur like myself, completely self-employed, I have no employees.

I write books. I write articles. I give talks, right? That's the extent of my entrepreneurial empire, so to speak. And again, did the taxes today. So the empire is like Russia's shrinking. Today's podcast brought to you by rosna but but you know i was i was talking with someone a fellow parent of my kid's school the other day

she was you know she works for the city as a as a job in the bureaucracy of toronto lovely person she's like you know she's like it's amazing what you do like you come up with ideas you write books like i wish i could do that and i was like honestly i tamera like i wish i could work with you and get a pension and just like do my job and have a very clearly defined thing because i just finished a book and i'm literally staring at a blank calendar of nothingness and like i have a bunch of ideas but like now i know i have to like work on them for months and try to get to something where I can sell it before I like I have months before anyone will pay me for anything. And that mental burden is just going to build up inside me as this tremendous ball of horrible tension. And then I'm going to do it again in two years.

And like, it's like, Oh, but the grass on the other side of just like every two weeks you get a check and here's your vacation days and here's your thing and here's your benefits. And you know, I got to talk to Jeff and accounting and Susan in, you know, marketing, but Prita in management's got this other thing. And it's like, that world is so foreign to me and it's just seems horrendous and horrible. But like part of me envies that certainty of it and the, and the lack of risk, right? The only risk is you lose your job and then you find another job. They're out there, you know, we're at the lowest unemployment in history or something like that. So, so it's,

it's, it's so interesting, right? That, that mind, the way we project around the sort of reality of what that is. And I think for entrepreneurs, that reality just becomes different and the longer they're in it, it's, it's, you know, but it's still always hard to like wrap your head around what your reality is as an entrepreneur. There's still this disbelief where you're like, is this really the way I live? It's, it's so funny. You know, I look back on it now and I'm just like, did I really do all that crap? And now I'm tired. The, you, you, you live it so, so much. You know, I just got done writing my first book just barely last year. It took me 54 years to write, evidently.

Mazel tov. Mazel tov. And, you know, you get the book done and then everyone looks at you like, okay, what's next, book boy? What do you got next coming up? You know, you have to start thinking about the next book. And you're like, wait, I didn't, did I start something? Like I have to do more, you know? And then, and then you're like, Hey, I just, I just wrote this book. And I was like, you got to go out and promote it. Yeah. Go, go chase, go chase that around. You're like,

wait, people just don't buy this damn thing. Cause I wrote it like, you know, and there's like, I don't know, it was like 300,000 new books are published every month oh yeah there's nothing more dispiriting than walking into a bookstore for another i mean it's just maybe jk rowling's like she's got it covered but everyone else it's crushing yeah yeah and and and i you know it's it's been a great experience but it was it was hard to write the book especially the first time I'm hoping it will be easier a little bit the second time. At least, you know, I develop some muscle in writing every day. But, yeah, you're just always like, what is that song that all the ladies like? What have you done for me lately?

It's kind of that's the definition of entrepreneur. Okay, well, yeah, you did that yesterday, and that was really cool. But what are you doing now, buddy? What's next? Yeah. What's the next thing? What's the next big thing, right? And I think that's it. There's this idea that like, I'm going to do this and it's going to get to this point and then I'm going to sell it or I'm going to exit and then I'm good. And then it's like, well, okay, let's say that happens and you hit the nail on the head, then what, right? Or, you know, and so I think, again, it's that idea of, you know, the entrepreneurs that were most in tune with the soul were the ones who realized that they truly found joy and meaning in the actual work day to day of what it is and, and what they were able to bring to that in terms of their

community or in terms of their values or in terms of their ideas, that part of it is kind of what, what really the healthy entrepreneurs are able to sort of get up because there's going to be businesses that do well, there's going to be businesses that do poorly. There's going to be a lot of stuff in between. There's going to be good years. There's going to be bad years. There's going to be years that are a mix of both. And that's in every industry in the life of every entrepreneur. And I think that's, yeah, that's coming to terms with that is a really difficult thing. And it's something that very few entrepreneurs do certainly early on.

It takes a long time to kind of come to that mature realization that like, it's not, it's not a, it's not a race. It's not a sprint and it's not really even a marathon. It's like a long hike along a never ending population trail with peaks and valleys and beautiful views along the way. And you better enjoy the smell of pine and, you know, pooping woods. Because that's it. That's it, man. There you go. The, you know, and the journey is you have to build something. You'll build it and it will come or hopefully they'll come.

There's no guarantee. Like there was in the movie. And I don't think even there was in the movie. I'm pretty sure that was. Like the ghost of Ty Cobb gave him a guarantee. It's like, I guarantee it. Here's the contract. of Ty Cobb gave him a guarantee. It's like, I guarantee it. Here's the contract.

Guarantee from a ghost? Wow. I've had those dreams, but usually it was involving vodka where, you know, someone appears and says, oh, sure, it'll all work out. But, you know, part of the problem is, you know, as an employee, you step into a business and, you know, everything's formed for you. You step into a pre-mold, pre-molded prefab. Okay, here's what you do. You do this,

and you do this little box thing, and you're good. As an entrepreneur, you have to go out and create it. I remember writing the book last year, just sitting around going, no one's going to read this piece of trash. This is stupid. At one point, the editing was the hardest part. Just being like, I'm putting in all these hours and I'm putting all this blood, sweat, and tears. Is anyone going to care or read about the stupid thing? Like, you're like, I'm going to sell like one copy. You know, you, you start having all these self-doubts that you have to deal with all this nightmarish, all this nightmarish stuff that goes to your head, you know? And like you say, it's a, it's a winding journey that seems to almost have no destination where you're going through it. And you're just like, is this even going to work out? One of my friends, Dennis, you, and I think a few people

use this as a, as a joke. Now it's kind of become meme-ish on LinkedIn, but they talk about, they're like, Oh, here's another guy who's a overnight entrepreneur, but they've been building it for eight years. Like no one ever talks about how, you know, you always see the profiles. Hey, here's this guy who, who, or this woman who, who overnight success, she took her business. And in the last two years, it went from like $50,000 to 10 million, but they never like say, well, she was working on that, making 50,000 for the first 10 years. There's a woman I wrote about in the book, Jessica DuPart, who's a, you know, a black woman from new Orleans grew up braiding hair in her parents' bathroom of her friends. She would sneak them in the back door or through the window in

high school. And then eventually, you know, worked at salons, worked at barbershops, had a salon. She opened up with a partner that her and the partner split up, started again, built another salon from scratch. No, no loans, no banks, a black woman, no banks giving money to a black woman in new Orleans, totally self-financed bootstrap. Her Katrina wipes that all away. Of course, insurance is paying her, rebuilds it up from scratch. Hair salon opens up a month later, a stylist leaves a hair blow dryer on, place burns to the ground, rebuilds again, goes back working for other people while she's rebuilding her business, starts selling hair products out of a thing and starts making videos with someone who does nails in the salon. and the videos are really good they were super funny and they start taking off on social media and wow she builds this hair product

business this beauty business kaleidoscope beauty and it takes off and it grows really fast and then all of a sudden it goes incredibly fast now she moved to atlanta she lives in like a massive mansion with like a zoo in it i i knew her you know on in between buying the luxury like buying the first luxury car and the zoo that's i was seeing her at the cusp of it and we were talking about this she's like everyone thinks that this is you know me just coming up with the stuff and instagram made it take off but it's like it's like you know 20 years of my life of blood sweat and tears just to get to this point where I can then go to the next point and enjoy that level of success. And again, where she goes, it's going to continue going in all

these different directions. But again, that's that mythology, right? It's that success should be incident, should be gratification. You should be a brilliant student in your dorm at Stanford one day and then be showered with millions of dollars the next. That's the way it's supposed to work. It really is this Disney fairy tale notion of what this is supposed to be about. And it's not. It's a lifelong journey that never ends until that life ends pretty much. Yeah. And people don't count the practice and fails like, you know, I started my first business at 18. Then I tried doing some other things and those failed with some, you know, different partners and different iterations where I was trying to get out of the construction business. That was my first company.

And then, you know, cause I didn't want to be in blue collar on my life. I'm like, I can't, I can't be doing this work when I'm, when I get old. I just can't, you know, my, I can see my body's not going to hold up for this. And, you know, it's, it's hard work being in construction and subcontracting. So, you know, so there was the first business that was successful. There was the, I don't know, three or four iterations. I've got business cards in my box of them all. And then finally, you know, hitting on the big multimillion dollar one that I hit on, I think it was 22. And so there was like, what, three or four years where I was kind of trying

to find the next big thing. And so no one cancels failures. And all those little practices are part of that multimillion dollar company. You know, I wrote about this in my book. I'm like, these, here's my failures. And here's also some of the stuff that I learned from some great CEOs that actually kind of finished what I call my CEO final training, what I needed to really complete the package to start smacking stuff out of the park or at least having the ability to. and no one counts those. So like, like, I don't know if that counted for that young lady you mentioned who had 20 years over her thing, you know, all the failures, but no one counts that. Like, you know, you technically need to add on like, I don't know, four or five years prior to my first multimillionaire company of, of the practices and failures. And that really was part of the whole journey that completed it. Because I couldn't have ever done that without those four or five failures.

I know a lot of VC people do the same thing, or not VCs, but people work for VCs. You know, they bet that these guys are going to have three or four failures and turnovers, but they bet that when they finally hit the home run, it's, you know, a unicorn. And they're wrong a lot of the time. That's the thing. Everyone thinks these guys in Patagonia vests are these brilliant geniuses that pick the winner every time, but you know, their firm might've picked one winner once and they're still riding off the

coattails of that investment in Facebook or whatever. It doesn't mean that they're so good at picking out what's the next great thing. And, and yet, you, you know, and again, they're investing in like a fractional percentage of the companies that start up and actually make money, right? They're not investing in the construction firms. They're not investing in the coffee shop. They're not investing in these other businesses that, you know, could do well, but it doesn't fit in their wheelhouse. And there's a lot of marketing that goes into it, right? A lot of that money buys stories in the press and ads and things.

You're like, wow, this is amazing. Look at this tremendous boom of, you know, mattress companies that you can order online. Like that, wow, these guys are geniuses. And then two years later, like, wow, look at all these bankrupt mattress companies. Or WeWork, you know, or Theranos. Theranos? Theranos. Yeah. Both those mini series have just come out at the same time.

So take your pick of which, you know, entrepreneur rise and fall story that you want to watch on your streaming service of choice. Yeah. You know, and you, you actually make me think of something, you know, people, people always kind of point to the glam, the successes, the top things. And I remember when I started my first company and everyone's like,

no, that wasn't my first company. It was my one that became a multimillion-dollar company. I didn't really know what I was doing on my first company where I knew that I was an entrepreneur. Like, that wasn't a thing back then. Like, everyone was like today, where it's like, you need to run around and be an entrepreneur. I didn't even know I was an entrepreneur.

I'm just like, I got fired from McDonald's, needed a job and, and, uh, started up what I learned from my dad as a kid and subcontracting. And, uh, Amazing you got fired from McDonald's. Let's just, The story's pretty amazing. If you're reading the book, it was for having long rocker hair and wearing satanic Van Halen concert t-shirts.

Cause it was a real, Satanic and Van Halen together. Satanic and Van Halen together. Yeahic and Van Halen together, yeah. It's a fun story in the book and how it turns out. I go back and I shake the hand of the guy who fired me about three months later and tell him how much I'm making. But yeah, he was real religious. It was here in Utah. You can figure that one out.

But yeah, evidently my Satanic Van Halen t-shirts of 1984 concert because, I i don't know maybe it was the baby who's smoking on the cover of that album maybe that was but yeah we all know that van halen is clearly of the devil worshiping type you know this is the 80s so you know back then who's running around in the 80s wasn't it al gore's wife doing that album thing yeah there was this was obviously you hit it right before the rap phase yeah yeah. Van Halen was, I guess, the hardest core thing that in Provo, Utah or wherever. It was pretty insane. I mean, I was wearing an Aussie. I mean, maybe you can throw on.

Okay. Okay. Yeah. Fair enough. That's like straight up. Yeah. But no one ever does like a book on the fails. And I remember, I mean, when I started to lead in with my segue was, you know,

I remember when I started my multimillion dollar company, I was, we were trying to get credit. We're trying to, you know, get some traction, maybe get some money. And I was, and I remember hearing that the term, you know, 99% of businesses fail in the first two years. And I'm like, holy fucking Christ, I gotta, I gotta climb that mountain. And that was the first time it had hit me. And I realized what sort of odds I was up against. And I doubled down and like a dog I just sunk my teeth in. And a pit bull. And I'm just like,

I'm not gonna be that fucking guy. I'm making this thing. And I realized how stacked the odds were. And it made me work harder. But no one writes about that 99% that failed. There is this thing, failure porn, right? And it talks about, it's a genre of entrepreneur porn. And it is that like, here's the story of my successful business. But first, I'm going to tell you a quick little funny anecdote about the business I had that failed

and the lesson I learned from that. But so much of that failure is out of people's hands. In the book, I write about a man named Seth Nitschke, who is actually a big fan of punk and the clash. So what a proof of those choices, not Van Halen though. Seth's a rancher in the Central Valley, California. He started a grass-fed beef company with his wife and really just, he's like a one-man rancher and he doesn't own his own ranch. So he's, you wife, and really just is like a one-man rancher. And he doesn't own his own ranch. So he's trucking cattle all around this area. It's costly and expensive, takes a lot of time, but land is so expensive in this area. And I went out and spent a couple of days with him when he was really at the peak of struggles. The bank had just turned him down for a mortgage on

a home and ranch where he would have his own land to be able to run his cattle out of the land. And it was just crushing. He said it was like getting kicked in the balls by a horse, which was like a metaphor I could really understand as a non-farmer. And he still kept at it and he's still doing it today. And he's, he's, he's gotten back up and things are going well. But, you know, I think that the problem with the failure thing is that people sort of

ascribe it to certain thing. It's like, Oh, I want to hear a story about someone who failed. And then they learn from that and they never failed again. And the reality for entrepreneurs is like failure is a constant, constant force. That's going to be there, but it is not the be all and end all. You will have lots of failures every day, multiple times throughout the day or every

year. And it's what you do with those failures, those mistakes, those misfortunes, those things that are completely out of your control that defines you as an entrepreneur. How you deal with failure is more important than sort of like moving on from it in this, in this great way. And so, yeah, the stuff about failure is, is it's just kind of this, it's like this checklist failure. And then that the mythology of the entrepreneur is like, first, you're going to do something and you're going to fail and you're going to fail spectacularly, fail big.

And then you'll have your success and you'll be able to talk about that failure. But like, you know, a lot of people failed because of things that were out of their control, right? And they constantly do, or because of bad decisions that they made that at the time seemed like good decisions or, you know, the good people they hired. And we can all look back and with that 2020 crystal clear hindsight and be like, well, I failed because of this. And so, you know, lesson number two is blah, blah, blah. But the circumstances are so completely different for everyone else that if I did the exact same thing you did, I would probably, and you know, vice versa. If you tried something that I failed at, you might succeed, right? It's, it's, it's, I think that the thing for me is that entrepreneurship is so, is so individual.

It's so down to in person's individual personality and circumstances, their background, the privilege that they have of where they actually come from and what that is, right? Those set of personal circumstances and the time they're in where they are, that it's such a personal journey that it's very hard to kind of universalize it. Entrepreneurs have to do this. Entrepreneurs act like this. People are like, what's, I've done so many podcasts and movies. Like, well, what's the personality of an entrepreneur? Like, well, I'm like, well, I've met super over the top extroverted entrepreneurs who are super confident, love to talk and whatever. And I met like quiet church mess entrepreneurs and both of

them, you know, can be either successful or or failures and it has nothing to do with that thing it suits you know every race creed class economic level personality type has entrepreneurs in it everyone has an entrepreneur in the family there's no one type that kind of unites them all except for that desire for sort of freedom the ability to tolerate the risk that goes with it yeah yeah and no one and like you mentioned with the failure porn no one writes about the people who fail fail fail and never come back you know they right or fail not in some crazy spectacular way but like in a everyday mid-league way right like that the line of credit ran out and they had to close down the business and take a job somewhere and then they started something on the side and you, it doesn't really take off enough for them to become this thing.

And like, that's a lot of entrepreneurs out there. And, and rather than saying, well, they don't matter. What matters is only the ones who are successful. Actually, if we studied the ones that are in the middle, we might discover more interesting things or more things that we can learn from than studying the career of elon musk this is what it's you know every every young entrepreneur on linkedin right how many fucking times have i like seen someone post an elon musk video of him talking about starting a business or like simon sinek the same simon sinek video over and over and over um on linkedin this is what i love about linkedin and it's like you know this is my hero elon musk steve jobs like look at

what he does look at that he says this is who i emulate it's like what are you possibly going to learn from steve jobs starting like it's like this is this is such a singular one-of-a-kind individual like what are you possibly learning from this person it's like if is such a singular, one-of-a-kind individual. What are you possibly learning from this person? It's like if you just read that biography one more time, you're going to nail it. Right? Or if you do the Theranos thing, whatever. Yeah, you wear the turtleneck. Or you act like Elon Musk.

You're like, you need to divorce your first wife and act like an asshole to everyone else. That's the lesson that people take from it. Right? Oh, he only got two hours of sleep, so I'm only getting two hours of sleep too. There was this young biz bro here in Toronto, entrepreneur that owns this, I don't know, chain of restaurants or something. I was at some conference and there was this other guy who has this huge thing of ad agencies. He's huge worldwide. And he's like, oh, I'm only I'm only down to four hours of sleep now.

Isn't that great? Like he was bragging to the older guy, like this is his thing. Like he's trying to achieve that level of what it is. It's, it's, it's putting it all in this box and thinking that you have to act in this, in this certain way. And it, you can be an entrepreneur in any way to suit your own personality, suit your life, to suit your, your lifestyle, to suit your, you know, your values. Like the,

the entrepreneurship is what allows you to take your work and shape it to that, not the other way around. You don't have to be an entrepreneur in a certain way. And, and the failure porn, you know, it's, it's just part of that myth making. I think that it has to be eradicated. You see it all the time on, in the Silicon Valley crowd, in the startup VC crowd. I'm not trying to shame the VC crowd, but the, the startup companies, I know a lot of guys who are, you know, they're working really hard to do what they do, but sometimes that startup porn, I, you know, I've been critical of Elon Musk

and a lot of things he does. I mean, he comes from a different sort of avenue. I mean, he came from rich parents, number one. So he's born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He easily slid those investments into what he did. Did he have some good ideas? Yeah, he came from the, was it Stanford group with all the other guys, the PayPal mafia kids that came out of, who's the Facebook board member who was pretty toxic? Peter Thiel. I'm probably getting sued now. Literally sitting in Putin's ear right now, telling him what to do. I'm sure, yeah. The Putin in Florida or the Putin in Russia? I'm sorry. Which reminds me of the four-hour sleeping thing, which turns out that's just a Adderall addiction. You know the story

behind that. But no, that whole crowd that just kind of came up together and helped each other out. And they hit bigly with the PayPal. There's a certain thing. I didn't have that when I went through my thing. And I think a lot of the VCs, even though they give these kids a lot of money, I mean, these kids are still living in maybe a dorm somewhere they set up and they're, they're still living on top ramen. That's, that's the reason VCs really like these guys is they, they work really cheap and for free. I mean, yeah, if they, if they hit the unicorn, yeah, big times, but you know, they, they know these guys are going to work their butt off. Whereas VCs probably aren't going to be money. Cause I'm like, I got to go take a, and I don't run on alcohol anymore. I mean, that phase is gone. And yeah, I mean, it's just lots of high caffeinated

coffee at this point. But yeah, there's a point where the old man goes, my back hurts. I got to go take a nap. But yeah, it's an interesting journey. And I think it's good what you're doing in peeling back the gloss of it or the porn of it, you know, success porn, failure porn that I see everywhere because people buy into it. And then they think it's easy. And you're like, you have no idea. Like, I kind of thought it was kind of easy, too. I thought it was easy once you attained a level of success. You know, you had the hundreds of employees, you know, multimillion dollar companies.

You know, you're making so much money. You're throwing like 10 grand a month in your investment accounts. You know, you got more money you can freaking stupid spend sometimes. And I thought that would be a level of success. But what people don't realize is you're basically raising this balance beam. Or what is it, the circus thing? You know, they do the balance thing. The high wire.

You're building a high wire. And the more successful you get, the more money you make, the more employees you have that you're beholden to, to make, you know, it's really weird when you look at, you know, okay, I got to worry about paying my bills for this month. And then suddenly you're like a hundred people that depend on me every month. And if I fuck up, I fuck like 100 people's lives up. That's a whole different level of pressure. And the harder you go, the farther you can fall. My business partner, when he left my company,

he thought he could go out and get five figures a month just because he left the company. And he's just like, hey, I just go tell them I make five figures a month and they'll pay me in quadruplicate. And he found out they were hiring me. It's not that easy. It just doesn't happen that he was living a dream that I built. And so you have this high wire that if you know that the higher you go, the more you look down and go,

if I fuck up, it's a long way to the bottom. Like, it's just not like, like if I fuck up now and you know, I'm finally bankruptcy for whatever reason, it's a, whatever my bills are, you know, but you know, when you're running a multimillion dollar company or a series of multimillion dollar companies, like I was, it was a long way down, man. It was a long way down. And people don't realize, they just think, I used to have people that come into me and they go, you're rich. And I'm like, yeah, and you took all the money. But they would be like, you know, it must be so nice to do something you love. You don't have to worry. You don't have to work hard anymore. And I'm like, holy, I work harder now than ever running three companies. Like,

what are you talking about? Like, it just gets harder. Living the dream, Chris. Living the dream. Living the success. And that's it, right? That's the, you know, that's it in a nutshell. It's like, it takes every entrepreneur realizes that in some way, whether it's when they hit that rock bottom or when they're at the top or somewhere in the middle, going up and going down in those cycles.

They're like, why am I doing this? What does this actually mean to me? And I think we all have to confront that and actually deal with it. And only by confronting it and dealing with it and having those conversations with yourself and maybe a therapist or a spiritual leader or a loved one, do you actually wrap your head around what it means and why you do it? Because if you can't answer that question, if it's just like, well, I'm doing it to make money, then you're going to hit that wall at some point. No, that was the hardest part for me too. All of my companies, I started from an investor, CEO mindset of just smacking them out of the park. And I never done the entrepreneur journey of finding something you love. My podcast is the only thing I've ever built that I sincerely love. I'm passionate about it. I don't care if you

pay me or not for this thing. I love it. I love the brilliant authors like you guys that come on the show and you guys spend hundreds of thousand hours researching something and I get to ask all the cool questions. You know, we've had people on here like Peter Strzok and other people that, you know, I've watched them do interviews on TV and, and I, you know, they just do the soundbite, ask him stupid idiot questions in the media. The media always doesn't do that, but they did it particularly with him. And I'm like, I want to find out more about my constitution, my government, what's going on. And no one's asking these questions. And so I get to ask those questions when we have people like that on, uh, that no one asks in the media and we get to cover stuff. And we also get to find out there's

a human being there as opposed to, you know, some of the hits that some of these people take from the media and, you know, it's, well, you know, you did this or whatever. And, you know, they've got three minutes to save their reputation on, on national TV. So I love what I do now. It's the first time in 50 years that I have something that I love. And I didn't even love it the first 10 years. So when COVID started, we changed the format of the show and we opened it up to authors and everybody else. And before that was Silicon Valley tech stuff. And I just burned out on it. And when COVID started, I'm like, I want to talk about something about everything, but also also shit that matters, you know,

Silicon Valley matters, but I just want to, I'm just like, there's so much more to talk about life that matters that we're, we're not covering. And, um, so yeah,

falling in love with something and being passionate about it is really, can get you through the darkness. And I never had that. And so that's probably why I drank pretty hard for 20 years. Uh, you're now you're having your coffee. You're back in Utah. dot made of like sugar and go we stay away from the sugar well i it's you know i'm glad to hear that and and you know again like if you're comparing your success with this now which

perhaps is not as financially lucrative on a balance sheet or in pure numbers as some of the other businesses that you talked about, you know, what would you take, right? What would I say? All right, Chris, you got to pick, you know, which one do you take? Like, Oh, this one. And, and I can make the kind of money that I used to make. And we're on the way doing it with the speaker thing and, and the book and all that sort of stuff. You know, we just got to get to the COVID times, you know, we, we were making incredible money before COVID, you know, with events and everything I used to do back then.

And so, yeah, it took a little bit of a turn for the last two years. But, you know, I can make that kind of money again. And the beautiful part is the world's changed enough where, you know, with speaking and touring and being in a different place. And, of course, now, like, it's so much easier. Like I said, our first successful businesses were all brick and mortar. I mean, you had to sign an office lease for three years, build an office, fill it with people, get the secretary up front, get the phone lines installed,

which was – Chairs. Don't forget the chairs. Chairs, you know. We would go in. I remember the first company, you know, we were building some sort of IKEA desk that we got from a office depot, these particle board desks. And, you know, I mean, the amount of work that you would have to put in and investment you would have to put in before you could even start making a dime. You'd have to wait for the Department of Corporations to approve you and the Department of this to approve you.

And then, you know, it was insane. And so, you know, now the world's so much different. I mean, you know, Oh, you want to start a business? 20 bucks on GoDaddy. You got a.com. Well, you're a, you're a CEO of the business. So it's so much nicer, but yeah, the peace of mind that I have now where I don't have partners that I'm carrying all over the world and giving them half the money they deserve. But, you know, like I said, my last partner, I replaced, you know, he went from five figures. I replaced him with some chick for 20, for $2,000. It was basically a secretary. I mean, that's how much work the guy was doing. So, you know, it's, I love the place I'm in. And I think like, you know, you've talked about some of these other folks, they, they reach a point where they try and do more of what's, uh, good for their soul and good for who they are rather

than try and, you know, kill themselves. Cause I mean, there's, there's no soul in that. It's, it's, I don't know. It's insane, but it was fun at the time. That's a memoir. Put that on the cover. Oh yeah oh yeah well i'm the whole book of it i'm glad i'm glad to have been able to share a bit of it with you and uh i'm here i hope i can come back when i slim the next book please do please coming november um stay tuned or reach back there you go do you have a title do you want to give it away yes I have the, I have the like printed manuscript here. The future is analog. The future is analog. There you go.

I love that. So I wrote a book prior to a solvent entrepreneur at a book come out called the revenge of analog, which is actually the best selling book ad. That's my financial success. Not quite a home run, but a decent RBI, I guess maybe like a walk,

like a walk. And, and the new one looks at you know the this this notion that the future we were promised by silicon valley and and others was that it was going to be all digital and everything's going to move toward digital and that's going to be you know where we're going and then two years ago we were kind of all thrust into that it's like here you go work from home from home. All your events are virtual. Your speaking is virtual. Everything's virtual. Your friends, your social life. You can even go to church and synagogue online. This is it. This is the world.

This is the future. And at first we're like, cool. Wow. What's the Zoom? Great. And then after three weeks, you're like, this sucks. Get me out of this house. Give me something. Tell me there's more future than this. And so the book's really about what we learned in the past few years and what kind of future we actually want to build. Yeah, hopefully we learn from this. Well, that was nice.

Hopefully we learn from this, should be the motto for the past five to 20 years. But we'll see. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. It's been a great discussion. Give me your plugs, your dot coms, so people can find you on the internet. I'm like, my plugs?

This is real. This is real. It might be thin, but it's real. David Sachs, wherever you can find me on Google, I guess. Sachs David on Twitter, though I've really, again, tried to stay off it. And David Sachs, or Sachs David, maybe, S-A-X on LinkedIn. If you write me a message, if you write me an email, if you write me a tweet, if you write me on LinkedIn, if you invite me to join your network on LinkedIn, I will always say yes, unless you look like a full scammer. So if you have Bitcoin in your title, you know, it might be like...

How about lead generation? Lead generation. Lead generation. I could use some leads. if you have Bitcoin in your title, you know, it might be like, how about, how about lead generation? That's always lead generation. Lead generation. I could use some leads. Oh, I have, I got those.

It's like, Hey, like we'd love to collaborate. You know, we help authors become bestsellers. I was like, great. Good for you.

Who are these authors? Cool. Okay. I like the, I like the ones that, yeah, within five, you don't really see, you're like, well, they're not a lead gen that, yeah, within five, you don't really see it. You're like, well, they're not a lead gen person.

And then within five seconds of you hitting the approval button, you know, they're pinging you. They're pinging you. Hey, do you want to do a 15-minute call? How can we collaborate? Yeah. You know what I always tell them? I go, well, I'm a consultant, and I get paid by, you know, the minute, like an attorney. So if you go to my, you know, paid by, I think, camp, I think it is, or something like that. There's some site

that I use for that. I'm like, uh, you can use this link. So if you want 15 minutes with me, you know, you can buy it. So there you go. I just say, you'll LinkedIn. We'll have this on LinkedIn tomorrow. Thanks for coming by the show, Dave. My pleasure, Chris. I hope the outro music is as bitching as the intro music. Oh, wow. You caught me on coming by the show, Dave. My pleasure, Chris. I hope the outro music is as bitchin' as the intro music. Oh, wow. You caught me on the off. We don't have outro music. We just roll out. How's that? What? I'm sorry.

That's it? You don't have like... Note to self. Friday, Friday, Friday. Make sure to come back for... We need to have outro music. You know, I really should have outro music, but we just go out with this. I'll do it. Anyway,

guys, thanks for doing it. Go make sure you see all of our groups on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all those different places. We are the Chris Voss shows everywhere.

Just search for it. Also go to goodreads.com. Fortunately, that's Chris Voss. Go to youtube.com. Of course, it's Chris Voss. You can see all the wonderful videos we have over there.

One plug I should make. There's a playlist on the YouTube channel where it has all of our book authors on the show. And you can literally play that for like 50 trillion hours. I mean, it's probably 1,000 authors on there. You can literally play that from beginning to end. And then you'll learn so much and be as smart as i am but you will actually be smarter actually i'm been smarter the last two years anyway guys

thanks for tuning in be good to each other stay safe and we'll see you guys next time