The Pomp Podcast - #561: Polina Pompliano on The World’s Most Successful People

Episode Date: May 21, 2021

Polina Marinova Pompliano is the founder and author at The Profile, which is a community that studies the world's most successful people and companies. She previously was the author of Term Sheet at Fortune Magazine.  In this conversation, we take a look at 6 recent profiles and discuss lessons learned from Dolly Parton, Keanu Reeves, Kris Jenner, and more.  ======================= Revolut is a finance app in the US and UK, that say they're the simplest way to access crypto. Sign up today at Revolut.com/pomp and make 3 card transactions to get $15, which you can exchange for any tokens Revolut supports. As usual, when you move your money from fiat to crypto your capital is at risk. See T&C's for details. Revolut is a financial technology company. Banking services provided by Metropolitan Commercial Bank, Member FDIC. Cryptocurrency services provided directly by Paxos Trust Company, LLC. ======================= Cosmos is building the Internet of Blockchains, marking a new era of interoperability, scalability, and usability. The free flow of assets and data between blockchains with bridges to Ethereum and Bitcoin will unleash the potential of DeFi, NFTs, and much more. Dive into Cosmos at cosmos.network/pomp  ======================= Remote makes it easy for companies of all sizes to employ global full-time employees and contractors. We take care of international payroll, benefits, taxes and local compliance, so you can focus on growing your business.  You can get 50% off Remote's full suite of global employment solutions for your first employee for three months. Just visit remote.com/pomp and use promo code "POMP"

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Polina Marinova-Pompliano is the founder and author at The Profile, which is a community that studies the world's most successful people and companies. She previously was the author of Term Sheet at Fortune Magazine and is also making me a very lucky guy as my wife. In this conversation, we discuss a number of the profile dossiers that Polina has put together over the last few months. I really enjoy these conversations because I learn a ton from some of the world's most successful and smart people. Before we get into this episode, I want to quickly talk about our

sponsors. First up is Revolut. Back to the basics for a second. That's why I've partnered with Revolut. They're a finance app in the United States and the UK that say they're the simplest way to access crypto. They're putting their money where their mouth is, allowing you to sign up and make three card transactions and get 15 free dollars that's right 15 bucks for free what can you do with the 15 you can exchange it for bitcoin or any of the other tokens revolute supports yep they are crypto enabled these guys have made it easier to get some skin in the game and as usual when you move your money from fiat to crypto your capital is at risk so sign up now through revolute.com slash pomp to get a 15 reward and put them to the test again revolute.com

slash pomp to get a $15 reward and put them to the test. They've also asked me to read some ridiculous terms and conditions. So listen up closely and I'll try to make it as fun as possible. You can see the terms and conditions for details. Revolut. Yes, Revolut is a financial technology company. Banking service are provided by Metropolitan Commercial Bank, a member of the FDIC. Their cryptocurrency services are provided directly by Paxos Trust Company, LLC. Those are the disclaimers i read them for revolute because i read them you should go and check out revolute.com slash pomp to say thanks pomp i appreciate you reading all the disclaimers revolute.com slash pomp all right next up is cosmos cosmos is building the internet of blockchains marking a new era of

interoperability scalability and usability the free flow of assets and data between blockchains with bridges to ethereum and bitcoin will unleash the potential of defi nfts and much more you can dive into Cosmos at Cosmos.network.com. Again, Cosmos.network.com. Next up is my friends at Remote. Remote's been supporting the podcast for a while, so make sure you pay attention right here. When you use Remote, you can employ people in other countries legally and easily. They take care of international payroll, employee benefits, tax headaches, and all the paperwork for local compliance. Forget about location and hire the best person for every open role using Remote. remote's platform is easy to use for full-time employees contractors and your hr team whether

you're a major corporation or a small startup remote has the tools and resources to help you at a price you can afford even better listeners get a special deal sign up for remote today and receive 50 off your first employee for the first three months check out remote.com slash pomp and enter promo code POMP to get started. Remote.com slash POMP. Enter promo code POMP today. Go check them out. Remote's awesome. You'll love it. I'll love it. Remote.com slash POMP. All right, let's get into this episode with Plena. I hope you enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano runs POMP Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of POMP Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by POMP or his guests as a

specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. Polina's here. She also happens to be my wife, but she is the founder of The Profile. Every single Wednesday, she writes a profile dossier, which is basically a deep dive on a successful person. She goes and scours the internet. She finds all sorts of articles, interviews, videos, podcasts, whatever she can, learns as much as she can about that person,

and then writes it all down to save you, me, and all of the other readers time. I really enjoy reading them, so she's here on the podcast, and we're going to talk about some of the people that she's written recent ones on. What's up? What's up? How are you? Great. Great. I haven't seen you in five minutes.

I know. all right let's start with frank abagnale is that how you say it abagnale frank abagnale yes that is how you say this is the guy who uh catch me if you can yes right it was the movie was created because of him yes it was leonardo dicaprio was based his character was based on the real frank abagnale okay i've seen a google talk by frank abagnale it's very good highly highly suggest it um but he's got kind of a crazy story he was basically a criminal and then ended up helping the government he was a con man of all con men he was an impersonator so before he was the king of the con men con men yes okay but it was funny because you want to say like oh yeah he was like

a con man whatever he was a 16 year old kid he was just really really smart and he um all before he was 21 years old he impersonated an airline pilot a doctor a bureau of prisons agent a sociology professor and an attorney and he did it so believably that people were like oh yeah that's a doctor and so what was the purpose for doing this was he like stealing money from people or was he just literally doing it to see if he could so basically uh this all happened after his parents had a devastating divorce and he ran away from home when you run away from home at age 16 thank you when you um when you run away from home at age 16 you need to figure out how to make money he figured out quickly that he stop it i'm fixing your microphone go ahead

um he he didn't kind of aim to become one of the most famous imposters ever uh but he ended up like he was forging checks he was doing little things and i think his frame of mind was more so i'm clever they're not gonna catch me i'm beating them at their own game than it was you know uh i want to be a criminal but he basically said like the deeper he got into it the harder it was to get out um but he says like in our society people judge people uh by you know you judge a book by cover. You're judged based on what you wear and how you appear. So he just learned the game. Oh, if I put on a suit and tie, I can enter this fancy party. I can meet some people. I can just observe them. He would literally go to the lobby and observe attorneys and see how they acted and

then impersonate them. So when you think about studying a criminal, that's not exactly the person I would think that you would go and learn something from. What do you think you learned from them i learned a lot okay and um if you've seen the movie catch me if you can you know that eventually um he gets caught by the fbi he gets caught in france spends some time in a french prison comes back to the united states and starts working with the fbi on uh check forging and trying to like uh catch cyber criminals so basically he becomes a rat no he does not become a rat he didn't rat on anybody he's helping the fbi find criminals who are really good at what they do so he switched teams he switched teams okay but in his mind he was like i'm basically

trying to repent for what i did and this is my way of paying it off he was with the fbi for decades and i'm assuming he caught a lot of people he did i'm sure i don't know the extent of it yeah um did he go to jail he went to jail in france but i think he was in the u.s they're like you don't have to go to jail but you have to switch teams yes wow i don't know how i feel about that why like if you were a criminal even if you're helping the government now do you just not go to jail at all again like he didn't kill people it's not like he was like a murderer who suddenly is like oh i'm gonna help the u.s government the u.s government no he i mean he forged checks and like got people you know took their money and stole it's not good what he did steal yeah okay i think i don't know

um but basically the whole idea is like okay well you're really smart obviously he um like the ways that he would um run away from the cops and the fbi for years is actually incredible like what hold on uh oh no what is an example of how frank abagnale would run away from the police so um he i forget there was oh okay okay okay he managed to escape from police custody twice once from a taxiing airliner and once from a u.s federal penitentiary but how did he do it oh long story you gotta go read it oh okay all right let's move on to the next person dolly parton we didn't get to the lesson i learned from okay what was lesson well a lot so okay so basically frank um explains that anybody can be really really good at um becoming like he

basically says observation is a superpower when he looks at someone on the street who's wearing a suit and tie he can tell like that guy's a businessman who works at goldman sachs and the guy who's dressed exactly like him i know that he's a drug dealer and the way he knows is by the little tiny cues that the people give off most of us don't pay enough attention to the shoes to the way they um carry themselves to to know so actually you're much why are you laughing at me the only drug dealers that wear suits and ties are pharmaceutical representatives anyway but um he he's able to say like you're very likely to get scammed and conned because you don't pay enough attention so if you start paying attention you might not be the victim of

a con okay anything else you learned from them i mean a lot that's probably the best one yeah all right dolly parton time dolly parton time so dolly parton is just a country singer i thought not and then and then you basically broke down her whole life she's been married forever yeah nobody knows anything about our husband really and she's actually like a savage business woman who plays kind of dumb when she's in public she's playing chess when everybody else is playing checkers how do you so good she's so she couldn't beat me in chess but go ahead she's so good so first of all what you need to know about dolly partner she was born in extreme poverty she was one of 12 kids born in a one-bedroom log cabin in the mountains of tennessee and um and she grew up

without electricity think about 12 kids in a one-bedroom log cabin in tennessee sounds like they had a lot of fun and when she moved to nashville she by the way she met her husband the first day she moved to nashville at a laundromat and um basically she was trying to be this country singer country star and they were like you're very rough around the edges because she came from like a really really poor uh place and i watched this documentary and they were saying like she would use language that was very crude that like ladies didn't use um but they liked her because it gave her character she kind of played dumb but she was honest yeah and um and they told her dolly she was like oh by the way i'm gonna get married and they're like no you're not you

have this like sex appeal you're gonna play into this image basically your career is gonna be over if you get married and like men can't like you know fantasize like you're single you have sex appeal whatever and she was like okay and then she didn't tell anybody they got secretly married at the courthouse and a year later she went back and they were like oh no you can't get married like whatever and she's like by the way i've been married for a year and you didn't know and i have a great career so what's your point she she does things like that she um uh you know a lot of people are like they want to use stereotypes and make fun of her um so they're like oh well like if they want to make fun of the fact that she has a lot of plastic surgery or she has like really

big fake boobs or whatever and she and when they make a joke about it they'll be like uh oh well you're fake or whatever and she'll say i may be fake but i'm real in all the like places that matter and she'll kind of she's already expecting it and she she um like it tosses it back to them and the whole point is like you can only feel shame if you allow them to shame you she doesn't care is it fair to say that most famous successful people do not get lucky and they're actually very very intelligent know exactly what they're doing yes like she's kanye west is probably much more intelligent than people give them credit for i think some people get lucky but then it catches up to them and they fall into obscurity because they're not willing to be strategic how much money

do we think dolly parton makes do we know oh i'm i'm not i'm not sure but like do we think that she's worth 100 mil 10 million a billion probably like closer to 100 million yeah i had to guess she um she's actually really philanthropic uh she because her dad didn't know how to read um she started an organization called the imagination library in 1995 today her program spans five countries five countries and gifts over 1 million free books each month to kids around the world and to date she's donated more than 140 million books wow 140 million books yeah that's wild to kids all around the world all right what'd you learn from her um i learned a lot by the way if you want to read the dossiers you can go to readtheprofile.com readtheprofile.com

so okay so here's a fun one you probably didn't know i learned try me okay so she you know at the time was kind of building her career she was still relatively young and imagine you're Dolly Parton and you have this song that you wrote that you sang called I Will Always Love You and in the 70s Elvis Presley wanted to record her song but his manager wanted half the publishing rights and she said no that's not fair I wrote it I sang it it's my song and she wouldn't budge on the position so they couldn't come to terms and she said no and people were like wow like my god she's a woman she should be honored that Elvis Presley wants to record her song and here's what she said she said I never thought of it as being about being a man or a woman I thought of about

it as being an artist and a writer and a person of strong will so she just like wasn't willing to budge on this one thing and she said it broke my heart to say no but I was willing to suffer that temporary disappointment and heartache than to live with something that i knew was wrong um so yeah so then whitney houston as we know i will always love you uh became famous that that became her song she became famous with that song uh and dolly says um i'm happy that you know she became that with that people associate that song with her as long as um as long as i'm still making the money so as long as dolly pardon's getting paid she don't care who gets the credit yeah i I mean, she's focused on the right thing for the most part.

Because when you hear that song, you think of Whitney Houston, not Dolly Parton. But Dolly Parton, the savage, is the one who actually made it. I love it. All right, next. Speaking of opportunistic person, Kris Jenner, who I actually think is probably one of the most intelligent business people on the planet, is the mother and manager to a gazillion Kardashians. I literally don't know how many there are.

She manages them all. You showed me the trailer one time for like the original Kardashian show and there was literally like a hundred of them. How many are there? Oh, okay. So there's like, I think five kids if I'm correct. So. Oh, it's like a hundred boys.

There's like a hundred Kardashian girls. Kim, Kourtney. We don't have to do public math. I don't know. There's like Kylie. Well, so nevermind. Okay. I'm not going to get into the family dynamics.

Oh no, no, sorry. Six children. Six children. I wrote it out. what did she do before she became the person that people know now sorry what did she do before she okay so she has kind of a complicated life um she was 17 years old when she started dating robert kardashian okay who was a successful attorney 11 years older at the time right okay so we got 28 year old hooking up with a 17 year old exactly so not exactly legal in today's world

Oh, right. At the time, I'm not sure, but probably not. Not legal and not, you know, her parents looked down upon it. But they were just friends. She was 17. So she was like, thank you for your advances. I cannot pursue this. Sure she did.

She turned him down and pursued her career as a flight attendant because she wanted to see the world. They ultimately reunited and she married him at age 22, a very, a much more appropriate age. and then eight years later she realized she was a housewife with four kids so she had a little affair with a soccer player so then her and robert after he found out so chris jenner cheated on her husband right okay so then her husband robert kardashian found out and they went through a really ugly public divorce in which he canceled her credit cards and left her broken alone so suddenly she went from a rich housewife he was famous and she wasn't right okay right okay so then shortly thereafter she met then bruce jenner on a blind date and bruce jenner at the time

was kind of a like a failed star i mean he like he was he was an olympian he was an olympian but his olympic career cousin was kind of like stalling like he he was out of the olympics whatever so she was like it was kind of like a poor man's uh um robert kardashian like robert was a star he wasn't so so she ended up becoming she was bored right so she ended up becoming bruce's agent literally putting together like these like press packets and sending them to press and being like he's an olympian like if you have a speaking gig at your conference he'll come speak so she ended up making him a lot of money that way were they hooking up then yeah they they met on a blind date got married shortly thereafter and then she like started helping him oh wow she

married him actually a month after her divorce was finalized yeah um they started helping him so they had two daughters kendall and kylie okay kylie is yep uh uh before their family landed the tv show was the uh young one yeah so she she had two kids with bruce oh and the other ones were yes got it okay got it um so so then okay so basically long story short chris jenner and her daughters um courtney and kim had these like clothing stores in la and they really wanted to be like into fashion and they wanted to open up stores in la whatever and um let's not fool ourselves nothing pops off till kim has a sex tape well so they get a tv deal and then oh they got the tv deal before the sex tape yes interesting yes and then the sex tape came out and here's what

how one new york times columnist put it as a parent chris jenner was concerned for her daughter but as her manager she thought well hot diggity so do we think that sex tape was real like they they uh did not expect that to come out or was that a pre-planned leak to be famous not i don't buy into the conspiracy theories but be my guest i i didn't even know there's a conspiracy theory so anyway i mean again luck or whatever but now two or three of her children are billionaires like you cannot go from sex tape to billionaire as hard as you try a lot of people try to do that is chris jenner a billionaire i don't think so no she takes 20 is it 10 i think i heard i think it was 10 is it 10 pretty sure yes 10 she takes a 10 cut from each of her children's

earnings 10 is not that bad yeah she says the industry average is 20 which is why i remembered it but got it yeah so she takes 10 because they're her kids so it's like a family friend's discount yeah and in it if you know anything about chris jenner she works like she does not one of her famous quotes is um if i call you and somebody and you say no or if you call somebody and they say no then you're talking to the wrong person like she will find a way to get you there um what i what i learned about her is something that i myself have experienced um you don't need business school to get a business school education. So basically, even though Kris Jenner was a housewife of this, you know, Robert Kardashian, she found herself at parties, at concerts, at

ballets, operas around these really successful business people. And so she learned from them. She overheard things. She asked questions. And she said, I got married to Robert Kardashian when I was 22 years old. Everybody that I was surrounded by for two decades was at the top of their game in the entertainment business so she literally had a front row seat to someone like the brightest minds in entertainment whether you like it or not you're gonna pick up on things and if you're smart you're gonna use it all right i agree with all that what's next in uh our lessons of chris jenner what'd you learn from her oh what else so every year she um has an annual check-in with her kids but i find it really interesting because she she admits that she herself is a control

she admits that she's a control freak and she loves controlling the narrative but if you know one thing about the kardashian family is that they've been through some shit but they have never made themselves the victim ever like they always kind of in the most like crises of crises i mean kim kardashian got robbed at gunpoint in france sex tape robberies of all the things conversions of they're never on the side of victim they're always somehow and that's like a knock against you know uh chris jenner is like oh it's always a business opportunity but i don't think so i think like she talks about like i'm a mom first but then i'm not gonna let my kid just wallow in this and like you know lose sight of what's important can we ask the important

questions what what is going on with the uh kim kardashian kanye west why are they messing with my guy kanye we're not gonna get into that no but this is not that what happened i don't know oh i think kanye was right i don't even are they disagreeing or is this amicable i don't know all right kanye was right and that's the other thing i've been watching the last season of the kardashians which after like 20 years it's finally coming to an end and they keep they've always like whenever a spouse does not want to participate in the show they don't make them for a while kanye wanted to be in it then he was like no i don't want to be in it anymore fine they don't even talk about him and when kim was going through the divorce in this season they kept it out like

they showed her on the phone they showed her upset but they never kind of like aired their dirty laundry and even in a family that public to have some privacy i think is really interesting kanye west is still right i'm sure that they're screwing them somehow they're it's a they're colluding they're colluding all right daniel eck daniel eck is the uh spotify founder and ceo uh incredibly intelligent uh has built a amazing business in the audio space now going really heavy into podcasting went on an absolute acquisition tear some may say what's up with him okay so he's fascinating why he's probably one of my favorite ceos you could you know that you could meet a worm on the street and be like oh this worm was really fascinating and you literally could come

back with like three things like damn that worm is pretty fascinating yeah go ahead i was gonna say a savage comeback but i didn't go ahead it's why i found you fascinating oh because i was like the worm on the street okay just like i can find anybody fascinating all right you're genuinely fascinating okay you're not bothering me whatsoever whether you think i'm right now you have very like closed off body language. So I'm just saying. All right. So Daniel Ek. Listen, there's other people in the room right now. Don't make me shut this podcast off and we can open up your body language like we're here to chat. No, we're not here. We are on a timer. Let's go. You're pontificating on things that don't matter. In 2006, Daniel Ek asked himself

the question, which is nearly impossible to answer. Do you have an answer for this question? what is better than free what is better than free if you do things and get paid for it damn daniel damn daniel look at that okay you're gonna ask me easy questions bring the hard ones where's the sat questions so here's here's a fun fact at the time in 2006 online music piracy was at like thriving in sweden in sweden right but because it was thriving it was thriving in sweden because of government mandated broadband and the country had one of the fastest um internet speeds in the world which allowed people to easily download songs and stuff on the internet in seconds but daniel like is smart and he realized wait a second but that's not that's not true for

the rest of the world if you're in the u.s and you want to download some sketchy music or not sketchy you want to download music off of a sketchy website that you didn't pay for for free it would take hours right do you remember because um anyway so he he decided that the thing that would be better than free is something that could be legal and free and fast and he legal free and fast i'm sorry yes okay um so he said i had this idea of the kind of product i wanted to see in the world what if we can build something that makes it feel like you had all the world's music on your hard drive and if we can create that feeling we'll have built something much better than privacy so um anyway so basically he said that if he could offer something really fast

um and people would be able to press play and it would play immediately then people would be willing to pay for it okay what do you think is the biggest lesson you learned from him Oh, OK. So I think the biggest lesson and one that I've actually thought about in my daily life is that he he's very busy, right? Like he has a massive company now, but he typically starts working around 10 a.m. because and not only does he start at 10 a.m., he also limits his calendar or three to four meetings a day. And this is based on what he read of Paul Graham's idea of a maker's schedule

versus a manager's schedule. So when you're operating on a manager's schedule, your calendar has all the meetings in the world, you're on other people's time. But if you're a maker, you devote long chunks of time to work on creative problem. And they generally prefer to use time in units

of half a day that allow them to work on longer term media initiatives than have them sliced up in little chunks. So that's how he schedules his day and every meeting he walks into, he knows the exact role he is playing and he knows what do you need from me in this meeting? He likes to know that in advance.

When he goes in, he can make decisions quickly. I like that a lot. I also bet that his meetings are much shorter than most people. Yeah, and he literally like half the day he'll reserve for strategic thinking because that is the role of him as CEO, right? yeah do you are you long spotify podcasting

so fascinating now i want to be they made a bunch of acquisitions but do you think it's gonna work on this podcast we put our opinions on the line well but apple just launched that sleek new so do you think spotify podcast no music yes okay i actually have a nuanced answer spotify will continue to grab more and more of the podcast market share but they will never be able to unseat apple agree agree yep all right next one of my favorite people in the world of business mr tyler perry also known as madia so when he was little a teacher asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up and he answered with a one word answer even though he didn't know any at the time he said billionaire what a boss what a boss and so she told him that he would never make

it because he was poor and he was black and he said even as a child there was something in me that said that's not true don't believe that and what is he now a billionaire yeah yeah yeah yeah the part that i like about tyler perry though is that uh he owns it was called tyler perry enterprise i think he owns it all he owns a hundred percent no investors all him billion dollars alone just through that he has amassed one of the most valuable individually owned libraries in hollywood really that happened because a bunch of people when he was creating these plays and these movies people would turn him down and he was like okay fine well i'll own a hundred percent then like he had no choice but to own 100 and now his motto has become own your stuff own your business own

your way he's really big on ownership and he learned that from oprah yeah oprah is a absolute animal too i love it yeah so all right tyler perry owns 100 of everything he does including doesn't he own a bunch of real estate in atlanta yes at some point they like helped him buy in 2019 he opened the largest privately owned motion picture studio in the U S it is a 330 acre former Confederate army base that now houses 12 sound stages. Each of which is named after an iconic African-American figure. And he shot, that's awesome. The first movie he shot there was black Panther. It's cool. He just gets it right. And you can just tell he's doing things his own way. Yeah. And it feels like that's why he's so successful. Yeah. Um, so, so I like him

because you know when people are like who was your mentor growing up and like who did you aspire to be he was like i didn't know my mentor he was like i would come home from school i would turn on the television and i would watch the oprah show and to him she was more influential in his life even though he didn't know her because she talked she owned the oprah show she owned like the her own partially at the time oh really yeah okay well there's a great if anyone wants to learn more about oprah they should go to the acquired fm podcast they have an entire episode on oprah winfrey probably one of the best podcast episodes i've ever listened to they do a really really good job with it and and the reason i like that is because that's the whole premise of the profile

you don't actually have to know the people you learn from you can still learn from their mistakes their failures and their successes just by studying them do you feel like tyler perry would be more successful or less successful if he was starting today, given the internet and digital media? Oh, 100% more successful. Why? Oh my God.

Like he would hold these plays and the way he would get the word out is through like flyers and like imagine having Facebook or Twitter or like you could mobilize people. Who's still on Facebook? Okay. You could mobilize,

I was thinking of Facebook groups. Kidding, kidding, kidding. You could mobilize people on a level that like he never, it was all local then, you know? All right. next person last person probably the kindest human on planet earth kiana reeves and and by the way the only thing i know about him before you went and did this was if you've ever seen

the movie hardball you ever seen it no hardball he basically is a coach he goes and he coaches like an inner city uh baseball team and at one point he literally is in the dugout and he starts singing big papa and he starts waving his hands you didn't know him from the matrix nah i don't watch that stuff i knew from the matrix so i watched the matrix you sat down and watched the whole matrix so yes because it was constantly on tbs when we moved to the united states and i had to watch it yeah well you were red pilled when i met you so exactly catch my eye okay yeah i did catch your eye that's why we're married go ahead tell me about keanu reeves help okay so i didn't know i mean how lucky is she so i didn't know anything about keanu except for the fact that

people had always said he is known for doing these random acts of kindness so uh there's a video on the internet a viral video of him uh seeing a woman with a large bag and he got up from his seat on the subway which he rides even though he's worth like 300 million dollars he gets up offers her the seat she sits down he just like acts like nothing ever happened another time uh he was caught uh for hours hanging out with a homeless man um and just like chilling telling stories they were eating together um and then uh and then another time uh he jumped out of a car to autograph a sign he saw on a fan's lawn it's just like he he does these little PR moments no no no no they're not like the yeah they're not so anyway so he's just always doing random

little things um but what a lot of people don't know about Keanu is that he actually he's really really big into giving back um and he does much bigger acts of kindness and I believe it's because of all the tragedy that he's been through what tragedy so when he was not so first of all he had dyslexia he always struggled in school when he was nine his dad left the family he was raised by his mom um and and he grew up with a sister then his sister got leukemia then when he grew up uh things were just starting to go his way like the matrix was doing really well and then um and then he had a longtime girlfriend and their baby was born stillborn at eight months that was a really big tragedy for him and then 18 months later his girlfriend died and tragically in a car accident

so it's like time and time and time again and then you find out literally you have to find out that there are no reports on this he does it anonymously like he tries to keep everything really quiet but he's like a massive donor to um children's cancer hospitals and research and all that kind of stuff um and uh and then he's also known for for example um the matrix series he gave up a percentage of the profits that he was getting to give them to the costume design team and the special effects team because he's like they're the ones who made the movie i didn't make the movie they deserve to be paid uh profits off the off the series too he did that he shaved his salary by a few million dollars for the devil's advocate just because he wanted to get al pacino

so they're like we can always al pacino being so damn greedy come on al let's split it a little bit here i give up a little bit you give up a little bit and he did the same thing on the replacements to be able to work with gene hackman gene hackman why are you being greedy come on i gave up a little bit you give up a little bit jesus so it's just like those things that kind of tell you what type of person he was and i'll never forget i read a profile on him and the reporter was like so why are you like not public about you know um or what she she said something like are you not public about uh the fact that you make donations to children's cancer hospitals uh because uh you know you're i forget what the question was like because you you you want people

to find out in a PR room. He goes, no, I do it because it's private and that's why I don't want to attach my name to it. It has nothing to do with PR or publicity or anything like that. It was just such a, I don't know. I just really like him. What's the most surprising fact about him

that people won't know? Well, I just said a bunch of ones that people don't know. But we know those now because we've been listening. Okay. Okay. Okay.

oh okay that was a really weird noise um all right so okay so his father leaving his father also got arrested for like heroin and cocaine spent a bunch of time in prison uh that really affected him and every time in every interview people ask him about it so uh every time he responds so for example this in this profile they asked about how his father's absence affected him and he said gosh in so many ways i'm not filling that in i'm not and he never talks about his childhood he never talks about his parents um and he makes no apologies for like preserving his privacy and the reporter kept pushing and he said i just really don't want to tell you and that was it i feel like that's fair yeah but you you know like i feel like if you're a celebrity and you're

out there promoting a movie they tell you like talk about everything it's good people like the vulnerable they like and he's like this is not for you to know right i'm here promoting the matrix but i'm not going to talk about my father's absence he should have just pulled out two hands be like red pill blue pill and see what the the journalist said all right what's your favorite part about doing these uh profile dossiers my favorite thing is trying to understand people without ever meeting them and i do that by um well first of all a lot of observation you'd be surprised at how much you can learn about someone by watching them so there's a ton of videos of these people giving interviews whatever um watching somebody like keanu for example he's always kind

of like he's kind of like um again body language is very closed off he he doesn't appear to be like the life of the party when you look at somebody like martha stewart she is she's posting thirst traps she's posting thirst traps on instagram it's about how they present themselves and then also it's about what they say when you hear something over and over and over again but then they say it but then their actions don't match their words you're like so you're kind of like putting on a show for him it's consistently i will not speak about my private life um and i just really like people okay read the profile.com yes now that we've been in miami i've wait what what's your favorite thing about the profile oh i just like learning i you do all the

work and then i get to take away all the lessons it's like the best thing ever literally and for those that are confused i'm a paying member of the profile thank you i appreciate you i was the second support paying member ever yeah somebody beat somebody beat me which is nonsense but i was the second paying member ever and i've continued to pay high loyalty very high retention user right here uh but i know i like it that you go and you do all the work you find all the podcasts you distill it all down i just have to read one email bam i feel like i got all the value you did all the work that is how life works it's amazing uh read the profile.com yes leave everyone with one pro and one con of miami before we go you have to pick one positive and one negative so

far of living in miami one pro is that i've been pleasantly surprised at the caliber of conversation and people that are in miami i've already made so many friends and like real friends not just you know fake friends okay um and then and then con yeah um i i sweated today was hot you sweated that's a con yeah okay well it was hot out there well that's it for today read the profile.com go follow polina at what's your twitter account now at polina underscore marinova All right. We'll do it again sometime.