[Brad Jacobs]
I'm ready when you are, man.

[David Senra]
Let's go.

[Brad Jacobs]
I'm in the zone. I'm in the zone, man.

[David Senra]
We're going to pick up right... I hope we start with this. I love your energy. This is what I always tell people when, you know, I did the episode on your book, right? And since then, thousands, and this is not an exaggeration, thousands of people have sent me messages. But what I try to explain to people, they're like, "Well, what's so different about Brad?" I was like, "Well, first of all, how long do you have? Second of all, he's got the best energy, and the most energy of any person I've ever been around." So, like, I really appreciate you taking the time and agreeing to do this.

[David Senra]
One of my favorite things is your affinity and relationship that you had. You had a bunch of mentors, but one of your most important ones that you mentioned I think four times in the book is Ludwig Jesselson. You have a list of maxims, in the very beginning of the book, that you learned from other people. The maxim that you listed for him was, "Get the major trend right." So, if you could just talk about your relationship with him, and what he meant to you. I think that's a perfect place to start.

[Brad Jacobs]
He meant a lot. So Mr. Jesselson... I never called him Ludwig. Mr. Jesselson, he was, you know, significantly older than me, and much more accomplished than me, so I showed him respect by calling him Mr. Jesselson.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
Mr. Jesselson was a special guy. This was someone who was deep, very profound, and had lived life fully, and by principles. And he was a religious guy, but I wouldn't say he was, like, ultra-religious. He was more taking the morality of Judaism, the do's and don'ts, and ethical behavior, and honesty and so forth, and that became the core of his life.

[Brad Jacobs]
That became the core of his personal life, and his business life. Relationships, deep relationships, long-term relationships, honest relationships, relationships you can keep coming back to. And sometimes one person has the leverage, sometimes the other person has the leverage, doesn't matter, you don't take advantage of that. It's long-term relationships. And he had about a few dozen deep principles. And one of them is the one you just mentioned, which is because he was a trader.

[David Senra]
Mm-hmm.

[Brad Jacobs]
He ran the largest commodity trading firm in the world, Philipp Brothers. It was, you got to get the long-term trend right. You can get a lot of other stuff right.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
But if you don't get the long-term trend right, you're kind of in trouble. So, you got to figure that one out. You got to say, "What's going on here?" You need context. You need to see what's happening, what did happen, what is happening, and what will likely happen in the future, and what are the different future states that could happen, and what's the probabilities for each one of those? And then you have your risk management. So, yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
The converse of that is, if you get the major trend wrong, you can do a thousand things right, you're still going to lose. You're not going to create alpha. You're not going to create value there. So yeah, that was a big lesson from him.

[David Senra]
The other thing that I love is you were 23 years old. You're having lunch with him on a very frequent basis. Like you just said, he's much older. He's one of the most successful people in the world. He's taking an interest in you. And yet, you were still comfortable to unload your stresses and your problems, and he would sit there patiently listening. And then I love his response where it's just like, "Yeah, business is problems." Like, one of the, I think, most important lessons was just, like, problems are...

[David Senra]
There's a line from Henry Kaiser who was, you know, in his day, was as famous as, say, like, an Elon is today, or you're becoming, and, you know, he started 100 different companies. He built the Hoover Dam. He built Liberty ships for the Allies in World War II. And I read a bunch of biographies on him, because he was one of Charlie Munger's favorite founders. And he said a line in the biography, that's in multiple life stories about him, that problems are just opportunities in work clothes. And so, I read your recounting in your book of some of your lunches with Mr. Jesselson. And it's like, oh, he essentially gave you the same advice.

[Brad Jacobs]
Yeah. So, in the book, I talked about a specific episode when I was having lunch with him, and I was kind of down and glum, and he said, "What's going on?" And I was talking about this problem, and this thing, and I was just kind of down, you know? And he said, "Well, don't stay in the business world if you're going to get down on this stuff. These are the things you should get up from."

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
When you have problems, when you have challenges, when you have obstacles, by addressing those, that's how you make money. You make money. So, the more problems you have, as long as you can solve them, as long as you figure out how to address them, and remove the problem, that's how you're creating value. That's a wonderful way to go through life. Number one, it's a great way to make money.

[David Senra]
Mm-hmm.

[Brad Jacobs]
Because you're not always down. Because you always have incoming missiles when you're in the business world. You have problems with employees, with competitors, with regular... I mean, just all day long, you have incoming missiles. You have great stuff too, but in between that is punches to the face. And if you're going to get beaten up by that, you're not going to be successful.

[Brad Jacobs]
And secondly, you're not going to be happy. So, you're going to go through life, like, glum. Sometimes you see these, like, multi-billionaire guys and they always look like this. Well, what's the point of all the money? If they're...

[Brad Jacobs]
Seriously. So, I would not want to be one of these zillionaire guys who's, like, frowning all the time, and upset, and angry, and depressed. That's much more important to me to be in the right frame of mind, and to go through the short time we have in life happy, reasonably happy.

[David Senra]
Mm-hmm.

[Brad Jacobs]
I don't have a perfectionist standard where I have to be, like, in ecstasy and bliss 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but generally happy.

[David Senra]
Did you ever meet Sam Zell when he was alive?

[Brad Jacobs]
I did. Yeah, I'm sure many times.

[David Senra]
Okay.

[Brad Jacobs]
Great guy.

[David Senra]
He had the same thing. I was lucky enough to have a two-hour very intense lunch with him. He said the very similar thing to you. He's just like, "I know all the rich guys." He's like, "You wouldn't believe how many are miserable." He's like, "Don't do that." He's like, "I wake up every single day." You guys have a lot of similarity where, like, I'll spend time with you. You know, the very first time I met you when I went to your book launch party, right?

[Brad Jacobs]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
I just remember like, "Oh, this guy's got crazy energy." And I'd already read your book by then, but something that you talk about over and over again in your book is just, like, problems are just opportunities. It reminded me of there's this line from Jeff Bezos'... There's several books on him, but one of his main biographies is this book called "The Everything Store." And they said that Jeff, you would tell him problems about his business, and he would get excited.

[Brad Jacobs]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
Because he's like, "Oh." And he talks about it in the shareholder letters. It's like, "Oh, this is like, these are problems. If I solve these problems, this is going to increase the enterprise value of the company that I'm building. These are actually good things to identify and embrace instead of avoid."

[David Senra]
One of the most important things that I learned from Brad Jacobs is the importance of working with the smartest and most talented people you can. Brad says the most important thing that a CEO does is recruit superlative people. Brad recruits the smartest people he can find, and says there's no substitute for smarts.

[David Senra]
Steve Jobs believed that this was important too. Steve said, "I think that I've consistently figured out who the really smart people were to hang around with. You must find extraordinary people. The key observation is that in most things in life, the dynamic range between average quality, and the best quality is at most two to one. But in the field that I was interested in, I noticed that the dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish, and what the best person could accomplish, was 50 or 100 to one. You need to build a team that pursues the A+ players." That is the end of the Steve Jobs quote, and that is exactly what Ramp has done.

[David Senra]
Ramp has the most talented technical team in their industry. Becoming an engineer at Ramp is nearly impossible. In the last 12 months, they hired only .23% of the people that applied. That means when you use Ramp, you now have top tier technical talent, and some of the best AI engineers working on your behalf 24/7 to automate and improve all of your business' financial operations. And they do this on a single platform. That means the longer they use Ramp, the more efficient your company becomes.

[David Senra]
This is important, because as Sam Walton said in his autobiography, "You can make a lot of different mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation, or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you're too inefficient."

[David Senra]
Ramp helps you run an efficient organization. From a customer's perspective, what does a team of A+ players sound like? It sounds like this customer review that I read, which said, "Ramp is like having a teammate who you never need to check in on because they have it handled." Go to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business save time and money today. That is ramp.com.

[David Senra]
I do have a question on your long-term reputation, okay? So, there's this line, do you remember when Buffett got in all that trouble with Salomon Brothers.

[Brad Jacobs]
I remember it.

[David Senra]
And he's like, "Listen. You can lose money. That's fine. But you lose a shred of reputation, I'll be absolutely ruthless."

[Brad Jacobs]
Right.

[Brad Jacobs]
"I'll be ruthless."

[Brad Jacobs]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
It was a very jarring experience for me at your book launch party. Because first of all, I was the only one that didn't show up in a suit. So, I rectified that today, right? And then everybody else was just like, you know, "I've known Brad for three decades." Basically, everybody there was like, "How do you know Brad?" It's like, you know, I was investor of his, you know, he made all this money for this pension fund that we run, and everything else. And, like, the stories that I've heard at the party, and then since I released the episode, it's just like, you have a fantastic long-term reputation. Do you have any advice on how you were able to maintain that, and how important it was for other people to do the same thing?

[Brad Jacobs]
Reputation is really important. Your personal brand is extremely important, because based on that, people are going to want to do business with you, or they're going to want to not do business with you. So, every day you're in the office and doing stuff, you're either raising your brand, or you're lowering your brand. And that's the main thing you got to work on. You got to make sure that your brand reflects integrity, and honesty, and dependability, and stability, and people can count on you.

[Brad Jacobs]
This goes back to Mr. Jesselson. So, Philipp Brothers, this is before email, actually, it was even before faxes. It was more TWXs and Telexes. So, which took a few days to go through, when they went through. Sometimes they didn't go through. So, you could do a deal worth hundreds of millions of dollars on a handshake, or on a phone call.

[Brad Jacobs]
There's no written confirmation of that for, like, days. In the meantime, maybe the price of whatever you were trading, oil or copper, had gone up a lot. You still had to have a deal.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
Otherwise, you know, the whole system doesn't work. So, dependability is so... Trust is so, so important to do.

[David Senra]
How old were you when you... When he gave you that advice, did you immediately start applying it?

[Brad Jacobs]
In my 20s.

[David Senra]
So, you were optimizing for the long term even when you were that young?

[Brad Jacobs]
Yeah. I think as you get older, you optimize for the long term more. I think. I think when you're young, you're just so ambitious, and you want to get stuff done, you're in the now. As you get older, and as you mature, you have more context. I think life, in general, is about getting more context, seeing things in proportion to other things.

[David Senra]
Can you say more about that?

[Brad Jacobs]
Well, you know, because we've talked about it a lot outside of your podcast, I'm into meditation.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
So, a lot of the meditation I do is changing... Looking at space from different perspectives, not the normal perspective that we have right this minute. So, I expand my mind from the earth, to the sun, to the solar system, to the galaxy, to the clusters of galaxies, to the universe, to the multiverse. Just go way, way, way, way, way high. And then bring it all the way back in, and then go into the molecule, and the atom, and the proton, and the nucleus, and right in the middle of all that, and then go to strings.

[Brad Jacobs]
And I find that making my mind like an accordion, getting really big, and then really, really small. And then doing the same thing with time, looking at time, go back towards my life over the last few decades, and then go back centuries, and millennia, and just keep going way, way, way back, all the way back 13.8 billion years, go back all the way to the Big Bang, and then go all the way forward. And, like, picture the world going forward, forward, forward, forward.

[Brad Jacobs]
That time and space juxtaposition, for me, at least, different things work for different people, gives me context. It gives me humility. It gives me humbleness. It shows that I'm just one thing right here in a major, major thing going on. I'm just one little, tiny jet. But at the same time, I'm part of that. So, I'm very uplifted, I'm very inspired, I'm very motivated. Like, "Wow, I'm part of, like, a real big deal here." It's great. We all are.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
We're all part of this huge, huge thing. So, I think context is really important. It gives you meaning, it gives you purpose, it gives you understanding, it gives you wisdom.

[David Senra]
I know you hate when I say this, because we've talked about this privately. It's like, you obviously know I study uncommon people for a living, right?

[Brad Jacobs]
You do a great job at it.

[David Senra]
I appreciate it.

[Brad Jacobs]
Maybe unique.

[David Senra]
Yeah. I appreciate it. But, like, think about how crazy it is. Like, the people that I study on "Founders" is they were so good at their job, somebody wrote a book about their life. Like, you're talking about very small. But most of their inner monologues, you're different. You have a much more positive energy. And, like, there's almost like a... Let me give you some context here. We were together a few months ago at a mutual friend's birthday party, in Miami. Our friend, Rick. There was a bunch of interesting people at the party. One of them was Apolo Ohno, okay?

[David Senra]
Apolo Ohno is the most decorated American winter Olympian of all time.

[Brad Jacobs]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
He's become a friend. I met him through the podcast. And he walks up to me, and this is one of the funniest things. And, you know, because he has... People think you're an Olympian. Like, he was training since he was a kid. His dad would make him get up at 5:00 in the morning and run drills in the school parking lot.

[Brad Jacobs]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
But he still comes from, like, a very positive... He has a great relationship with his dad. Normally, it's like, you know, not good, when they're put under the circumstances. So, he was asking me, he's just like, "I see this pattern in, you know, when you're reading all these hundreds of biographies about these great entrepreneurs that, like, there is something inside of them driving them that is actually negative." It could be insecurity, it could be, you know, they grew up in poverty, it could be a bad relationship with their family. And he's like, "Are they all like that?"

[David Senra]
And you were, like, 20 feet away, "You see that guy over there?" He goes, "Yeah." And I go, "You know who that is?" He goes, "No." I go, "That's Brad f****** Jacobs." I was like, "I guarantee you he's not driven by that." This is what I mean. You're uncommon amongst uncommon people, because, at least from the outside, and the conversation we had, it's like, I think part of this impenetrable nature that you have in like, "Oh, yeah, business is problems. It's going to come. What do you think we're doing here?" Like, you don't seem to be rattled by them. So, like, what is your inner monologue?

[David Senra]
Like, when you're doing huge f****** deals right now. You're doing all kinds of crazy stuff. You've built eight separate billion-dollar companies. You don't do that by accident. So, how do you... I'll stop talking there. What is your inner monologue like?

[Brad Jacobs]
So, it goes back to what Mr. Jesselson used to say is, "Problems are your friend."

[David Senra]
Mm-hmm.

[Brad Jacobs]
You don't want to just tolerate problems. You want to embrace problems. You want to hug problems. Problems are the way you succeed. You want to run to the fire. You don't want to run away from the fire. You want to be brave, you want to be courageous, go into it. I think you can start with anything that's anything. And in this case, in Apolo's case, he starts with, and other people he's studied start with, negativity, trauma, stress, insecurity, fear, anxiety, and then that's their motivator. They zero in on that, and then that makes them run faster.

[David Senra]
Was that ever your case though?

[Brad Jacobs]
No. That's not my thing.

[David Senra]
You're like a unicorn.

[Brad Jacobs]
I don't know that I'm a unicorn. I don't embrace negativity. I'm okay with it, but I don't make a big deal about negativity. I'd much rather enjoy the positivity. I'm a sunny side up guy.

[David Senra]
But your inner monologue, are you nice to yourself? Your ongoing inner monologue?

[Brad Jacobs]
I'm reasonably nice. Like, yeah, I am.

[David Senra]
I am vicious. I sound like... You know who David Goggins is?

[Brad Jacobs]
Oh, yeah. Oz the Mentalist was talking about him.

[David Senra]
My inner monologue sounds like David Goggins. Where it's just like, "You're not doing enough. This wasn't good enough." Like, I see the problems, so, like, I attack them. It's like, oh, I'll listen to a past podcast or something, anything I've done where it's like... And all I see are the flaws. I don't see any of the good part.

[Brad Jacobs]
So, let me comment on that. I think there's two different ways you can approach that. So, yes, as cognitive behavior therapy has taught everyone, we're born with a schema, a prism through which we see life, and that can be clouded by core beliefs of, "I'm inadequate, I'm weak, I'm defective, I'm unattractive, I'm unlovable." All kinds of negative stuff. Now, there's two ways you can approach on that.

[Brad Jacobs]
You can either dispute those things. First validate, then dispute. So say, "Well, of course I'm hearing this." I have executives who report to me over the years that have the exact same schema as you just described, where they're always saying, "Oh, I'm no good at this. Oh, when people realize how bad I am, I'm just faking it. I'm wearing this mask, and I'm doing a bad job. I'm going to get fired. People are hiding stuff against me, because they don't respect me." All this, like, negative self-talk. It's a complete waste of time. But nevertheless, that's their reality.

[David Senra]
Mm-hmm.

[Brad Jacobs]
Their reality is they have this steady drone of automatic negative thoughts. There's two ways to deal with that. Either you can dispute them, but first validate it. Don't start with the disputing. First, validate it and say, "Okay, yeah, of course I'm having all these negative thoughts, because I got a tough job," for example. "I have a big job. There's a lot of pressure, and I'm not perfect, so I'm not getting everything right. And so, I do mess stuff up, and I do get things wrong," and all that negative talk.

[Brad Jacobs]
And then you catastrophize on those negative things, and make them into huge, huge issues when they really should be minimized, if you put them in proper context. So, you first validate it, but then dispute it, and then say, "Well, what does the evidence say here? Is this really a rational thought, or is this my schema kicking in?"

[David Senra]
To me, when you say that, it's like I think you have this gift to step outside of yourself, which now you're saying... But when I say, "You step outside of yourself," you're like, "No, I'm in myself."

[Brad Jacobs]
I much prefer to be in myself, than out of myself.

[David Senra]
Okay.

[Brad Jacobs]
I like to come to center.

[David Senra]
Okay.

[Brad Jacobs]
I like to find the center. The first time that concept of centering came about was when I went to enrichment camp at a school in the summertime, and there was a book they gave out called "On Centering." I don't remember who wrote it. And it had a picture of someone making pottery. And they were explaining in the book that it's all about finding the center of the pot you're making. So, centering, finding that inner calmness, finding that zone where you're in the groove, and everybody has it. Everybody has that. You just got to find it.

[Brad Jacobs]
And that's one of life's missions is to find that center, find that inner calmness zone. And then, when I went to college and I studied music under Bill Dixon, same concept came out. I said, "Oh, I'm familiar with this." He said, "Come back to the center." So, we're playing improvisation, what he called black music.

[David Senra]
Mm-hmm.

[Brad Jacobs]
Some people might call it jazz. He didn't like the word jazz. Playing with some friends, and then you have to find the center, come back to center, back to the center, back to the center. So, there'd be a center point in the music. You could go anywhere you wanted in the music. You can improvise all over the place, but come back to center, and then everybody would come back to their common center. So, I've incorporated this concept of centering, of finding a center into my meditation practices, into my business practices, into my philosophy of life. So, I like to find centers.

[Brad Jacobs]
But going back to what we were saying before, so you have this negative self-talk coming. You can either take one of two paths. You can take the path of validating, and then disputing it, and seeing it in a proper, rational way. Or, you can take the approach of just witnessing it, just enjoying it, and just it is what it is. It's mindful acceptance of it. So, acceptance of that. And I vacillate between those two. Sometimes I do the... You asked how I do it.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
My internal monologue, if negativity creeps in, and of course it creeps in. I'm dancing with the ghosts of my ancestors, just the way you and everybody else are dancing with the ghosts of the ancestors. Evolution worked very slowly over generations, over long periods of time. So, we always have this set of genes that were good for survival, and procreation of our ancestors, but not necessarily now.

[David Senra]
Mm-hmm.

[Brad Jacobs]
We still have in the gene pool all these like, irrational thoughts. So, another way to look at it is, just observe it. Kind of more of a Buddhist way. Just observe it. Like one of the ways... The most simplest Buddhist meditation is just observe your breath.

[David Senra]
Mm-hmm.

[Brad Jacobs]
Just observe your breath. I mean, how easy can that be? All you got to do is close your...

[David Senra]
We just did this before we started recording. Where you're like, "Let's go through a miniature meditation before we begin." And like, I don't ever do that. And I should probably should start doing it. I just kind of wake up and go, and just try to attack things that I feel like... And don't get me wrong, like I absolutely am obsessed with what I do.

[Brad Jacobs]
You are.

[David Senra]
I love my work. I work on it seven days a week. But I wanted to be the best in the world at it, and that's where it's like, "Oh, you just see these deficiencies."

[Brad Jacobs]
So, that sounds to me like perfectionism. So, I suffered a lot from perfectionism when I was younger. I wanted to be perfect.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
Not only did I want to be perfect, I wanted everybody else to be perfect. Not only did I want myself and others to be perfect, I wanted the universe to be perfect. I wanted everything just to go swimmingly well at my beck and call, and command. Well, turns out, that's not reality.

[David Senra]
It's not nature's way.

[Brad Jacobs]
None of those three constituents are perfect.

[David Senra]
There's something that you said in your book. It's actually in this section that I was writing down. You're like, "I'm not surprised when things don't go perfectly. That's the nature of the universe. The big problems can be where the best opportunities lie." And so, obviously, you know, like any time I read something, it's not that I'm reading it. I think about how it relates to every single thing else I've experienced, and all the other books I read. And I remember I got to have dinner with Charlie Munger. I spent three hours with him, you know, six months, eight months before he died. There's like a trend here unfortunately, where it's like kind of dangerous.

[Brad Jacobs]
Uh-oh.

[David Senra]
Remember? You're like, "I don't know if I'm going to have dinner with you." But one of the things I loved, it was the top note I left myself. Because as soon as I left there, I just wrote down, like, what I learned. And it said that, "Charlie has an almost complete indifference to problems. Troubles from time to time should be expected. This is inescapable, so why let it bother you?" And it's like one of the things I most admired about him. He's just like, "Yeah, it's part of life. What's wrong with you?" Like, you know, he had 10 decades of life experience. He was way further down the line, and obviously way wiser than I was.

[Brad Jacobs]
I have two comments on that. One is, when you go back to the Big Bang.

[David Senra]
Mm-hmm.

[Brad Jacobs]
The current construct model of how the universe was created, it was actually created out of imperfection. There was like a slight imbalance between matter and anti-matter. Just a slight imbalance. A lot of debate of what caused that. As a result of that, everything came out of that.

[David Senra]
Mm-hmm.

[Brad Jacobs]
Had there been perfection at the beginning of the universe, the Big Bang would not have happened. So, we are imperfection. We are the children of imperfection. Imperfection is good. Imperfection is not bad. Expecting perfection will cause you stress, and strain, and won't really work.

[David Senra]
When you were in your 20s, though, you said, "Hey, I wanted to be perfect. Not only do I want to be perfect, I want everybody around me to be perfect."

[Brad Jacobs]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
"I wanted the universe to be perfect." Like, how long did it take for you to learn what you just explained?

[Brad Jacobs]
So, when I stepped down from United Rentals as CEO, I still stayed as chairman. When I stepped down as CEO of United Rentals, had done it for about 10 years, and I wanted to do my next big thing. I wanted to do another startup from beginning. I was running a big company. I wanted to start it from scratch. And there was a period of a couple years where I was trying to figure out what I was going to do, and I didn't find it. And then the great financial crisis came, and I was kind of lost. I was kind of... It was probably the only time in my life that I was depressed. I'm just not depressed. But that period of time, I was actually clinically depressed. I took the Beck Depression Inventory, and I came out, yep, depressed.

[David Senra]
Wow.

[Brad Jacobs]
So, I found a amazing cognitive therapist, and I went to the guy twice a week, hour and a half a shot, for two years. It was fantastic. One of the best things I've ever done in my life, because what we did was, in an environment that was very safe, and confidential, and trusting, with someone who was a professional at psychology, I was able to, first of all, identify, and then notice more fully my automatic thoughts, the negative thoughts.

[David Senra]
Mm-hmm.

[Brad Jacobs]
And irrational thoughts, unconstructive thoughts. And then first validate them, then dispute them. First join, and then lead to a more constructive way of looking at things. So, that cognitive therapy approach of identifying the thoughts, and then dealing with them, really was the turning point in my life on this perfection thing. Because after a few sessions, he said, "You know, I kind of know what's going on here now. I've gotten your measure. You want to hear it?" I said, "Yeah, I want to hear it." And he said, "You're suffering from perfectionism."

[Brad Jacobs]
Like, "You want everything to be perfect, and it ain't." So, we need to get over that. We need to reduce these demands, these musts, these shoulds, these commands that either I, or you, or the rest of the world is perfect to, you know, preferences.

[David Senra]
Mm-hmm.

[Brad Jacobs]
Where I would like me to be better, I would like you to be better, I'd like things to go better, but they don't have to. I can still be happy, and frankly, they're not going to all the time. So, I need to accept that. Need to radically accept that. I need to be in reality, not put these... You know, you mentioned Bezos. Bezos says a lot of cool stuff. But one of the things he says often is, "Don't fight with reality, because reality always wins."

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
So, the reality of this is nothing's perfect. Like, literally nothing is perfect, that I've found yet.

[David Senra]
He has another line that I think is related. It's similar to the idea in your book, where he's just like, "If you don't want to be criticized, and you don't want stress, then you don't do anything."

[Brad Jacobs]
Exactly.

[David Senra]
It's just like, then just sit in a room and watch Netflix, and order a DoorDash or something, but like you're not going to do anything that you can be proud of.

[Brad Jacobs]
So, that's another irrational thought you see people have. And I used to have this a lot, but I don't have it now, because I went through that therapy thing, and it turned a switch on in my brain, is a demand that everybody likes me, and everybody respects me, and everybody says great stuff about me, and I get good press, and I get good reviews, and the stock just goes up every single day. Well, that's not going to happen. That's called perfectionism. That's not reality.

[Brad Jacobs]
So, you just kind of modify that to, "Well, sure, like everybody else, I'd like people to say good stuff about me, rather than bad stuff about me, but I don't really care. If people say bad stuff about me, then, okay, maybe there's some truth in it. Maybe there's some good thing I can learn from that. Or maybe they're just off, and they don't know me, and they're just kind of imposing their distortions on me." But does that really change who I am? It really doesn't. If somebody is saying something bad about me, does that really matter? It doesn't matter really at court.

[Brad Jacobs]
And it, again, goes back to context. In the larger context of things, most problems really don't matter. They just don't matter. Maybe at the time they seem like one, and maybe we're kicking in, magnifying those problems, and making them into big catastrophes, and dramas. But most problems really aren't a bad thing.

[David Senra]
I always say opportunity is a strange beast. It frequently appears after a loss.

[Brad Jacobs]
There's always a play. No matter what happens... This goes back to the Jesselson conversation. No matter what gets thrown in your face, at the moment, it may seem ugly and bad. There's a play. There's a way to utilize that. There's a way to use that. There's a way to embrace that, and turn that into success. Anything can be turned into positivity and success, even if it starts in a bad place.

[David Senra]
Something came to mind when you were talking, that's also unusual, because most of the people that, like, I read biographies about, they go through several different companies until they find, like, their life's work. But normally, they're working on something for, like, a very long time. Why do you keep starting so many companies? Like, what is going on?

[Brad Jacobs]
That's my thing. Everybody's got their thing. So, you're a great podcaster.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
You have a talent. Your superpower is you can consume large amount of information, and then distill it down to like, boom, here are the most important takeaways from that. It's really brilliant. That's your thing.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
That's why you're doing it, right?

[David Senra]
Yeah, yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
Because that's what you're good at.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
You're not playing professional baseball or, you know, acting or singing or whatever.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
You're doing what you're good at.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
This is what I'm good at. I'm good at figuring out what's the right industry to consolidate.

[David Senra]
Mm-hmm.

[Brad Jacobs]
And secondly, I have a toolkit, and it's the same old toolkit.

[David Senra]
You told me this last time. Can you explain this? I love the way you described this toolkit of how you approach building your businesses.

[Brad Jacobs]
So, first, I find the right industry. I find something that's large. I find something that's growing. I find something where it's fragmented. I find something where we can buy things at reasonable prices. I find things where technology could be used. It's not very tech-forward industry. I find stuff that AI and automation are not going to disrupt anytime in the near future.

[Brad Jacobs]
So, I find industries that have certain characteristics to it, whether it was garbage, whether it was construction, whether it was transportation, or logistics, and now distribution. They all have the same characteristics, same traits. So, that's point number one.

[Brad Jacobs]
Point number two is I then put together an amazing team. I put together a team of people who are generally smarter than me, and who are more talented than me in what they do. So, I have a great CHRO who knows everything there is to know about HR, and compensation, and talent, recruitment, and so forth. I have great M&A team, who really know how to do deals, and get deals done, rather than turn them into dramas. I have great finance accounting people who understand everything there is to know A to Z about running a fast-growing company, and keeping the books clean. So, et cetera. And I get the team together, then I get the compensation sorted out.

[Brad Jacobs]
So, I make everybody my partner on the senior team. And I give people tons of equity, but there's a catch. You can invest, but you can't sell it for five years.

[David Senra]
Mm-hmm.

[Brad Jacobs]
And most of it invests in the last two years. So, everyone is committed, going back to long-term relationships. Sure, people come and go for whatever personal reasons, or people burnout, or whatever. But generally speaking, most of the team stays for a while. And you work together as a team. And then I have certain rules of how we're going to interact with each other in a very respectful way, but in a way that encourages looking at things from different angles.

[Brad Jacobs]
So, we disagree, and we argue. Argue is too strong of a word. We present different ways of looking at a situation that partly overlap, and partly conflict. And then we, in a very scientific way, figure out, well, let's risk-adjust these things, and figure out what's right. It's a scientific experiment, an ongoing science experiment, like all day long of trial and error, and experimentation, and A/B experimenting. And so, that culture that we create gives us a power. It gives us a power to attack the industry in a way, without all the noise that a management team has. We're a very coherent team, like a superorganism, like a brain, like a very organized group.

[Brad Jacobs]
And then I have, between all those people, we have experience at our main job, which is to buy companies at reasonable prices, where there's a difference between what we can raise capital at, and what we can deploy it at. And then, we have a skillset to be able to improve the companies that we buy.

[Brad Jacobs]
These are the two main things we're good at, is buying companies in a disciplined way. Price is too high, we don't do it. Price is reasonable, doesn't have to be cheap. We're not trying to steal companies. If the price is reasonable, we go for it with gusto. And secondly, the other talent that the team collectively has is we know how to improve the businesses. We know how to improve the pricing, improve the procurement, the HR element, the compensation systems, the technology, the whole tech stack, just everything from A to Z. We're just good at transformation. We're good at taking a company that is making a billion dollars of EBITDA, of profit, and within three to five years, doubling the profit, doubling the EBITDA.

[David Senra]
Mm-hmm.

[Brad Jacobs]
That's the main criteria I look at when I look at a company, is purchase price, and secondly, can we double the profit in three to five years? And most of my main acquisitions have done that. So, Con-way, Norbert Dentressangle, all these different ones. They were great companies, and everyone says, "Oh, they're working really well." Okay. Well, three years later, we doubled the profit.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
Because we apply the toolkit. We apply the playbook. And it's the same playbook industry after industry. The playbook gets refined a little bit here and there, but it's the same playbook.

[David Senra]
So, when you say, "This is just what I do," to me, you now have figured out who you are as a person, right? I have this weird theory that I can't prove, but I believe. And, you know, there's like this myth of the genius young entrepreneur. And I was like, "Well, I don't know." If you study the history of entrepreneurship pretty intensely, you realize that, like, people do, most of the time, their best work many decades into their career. And so, there's all kinds of reasons. They're like, "Oh, they've had more experience. They're wiser. They have more resources. They have more practice." And I don't dispute that. That is all true. But I have this weird theory that they also know themselves way better. And I think the key to being a great entrepreneur is building a business that's... I used to say building a business that's authentic to you, and then I read Michael Dell's excellent autobiography.

[David Senra]
And he has a better line. He said he built a business that's natural to him. And there's a great story. I want your opinion on this in one second. But there's a great story where, you know, Michael starts his company when he's 19. He's in his 20s and it's doing fabulously well, but he realized, "Hey, I need some grown up, I need some help here." And so, he gets this guy, I think his name is Lee Walker if I remember correctly, and he's about 20 years older than Michael, already started a bunch of companies, rich, you know, didn't have to work anymore. But he saw an unusual, once in a generation talent in Michael, decides to help him. He lasts like four years. And so, I read the book and then I was about to make the podcast on it, I go and see. I was like, "I wonder whatever happened to this guy." And I found an interview that he did, and he's in his 80s, and he's talking about that time. And he gave me some of the best context to really understand this story.

[David Senra]
And Michael's story is really a story of you and everybody, and all the people really, you know, very similar people that were studying. And he's just like, "You know, Michael starts this company with $1,000." He says, "I'm going to take on IBM from my dorm room." IBM is the most valuable company in the world at the time, which I didn't know. It was the first company to hit $100 billion market cap, which is nuts. And, you know, just the audacity to have that. And he's like, "And the first few years, we're going against this behemoth. And I lasted four years. I started losing my hair. My back hurts. I can't sleep. I'm unhealthy." And he goes, "But Michael was energized by it. He built a business that was natural to him."

[Brad Jacobs]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
"Because this is what I want to do. I'm not losing my hair. I'm not, you know, depressed. My back's not hurting. I can't sleep. I'm like waking up every day just getting after it." So, is that the way you feel about just, like, what you're doing? And it may seem weird, because it is... in not a pejorative way. It's not weird in a negative way. I don't know another person that started eight separate billion-dollar companies. So, it's almost like you can't help yourself.

[Brad Jacobs]
But that's what I do.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
I mean, I know how to do that.

[David Senra]
So, it's just natural to you. This is just like...

[Brad Jacobs]
Yeah. I mean, I've done it many times before. And I've made every mistake in the book over the decades. And I've learned from those mistakes. And I've refined it and refined it, but I have a winning formula. I know how to execute on this. And the team I have knows how to execute on it. I don't want to underestimate the team. So, one of the things about being the CEO, and the founder, is you get all the credit. But like, there's a lot of people on the team who are doing these things and accomplishing these things.

[David Senra]
Yeah. You have a great line in your book, which I see over and over again. You said, "The CEO's most important job is recruiting superlative people."

[Brad Jacobs]
Totally. Totally.

[David Senra]
So, my question to you though, is what would it take to get you to stop?

[Brad Jacobs]
Gee, I don't know. Because I don't see that in my near future.

[David Senra]
This is what...

[Brad Jacobs]
I just started the company in the last few months.

[David Senra]
This is what I... No, but in general, like, so this is what I loved about, you know, most of the people I admire. It's like, I can still remember this. You know, I put it into the maxim. It's like, "If you love what you do, your exit strategy is death," right? It's like you should be working on something... So like, you know, Sam Zell told me, he's like, "I'm going to be doing deals until I die." Well, he was just doing deals until he died. Munger, same thing. Like, I met him right after the Silicon Valley Bank collapse.

[Brad Jacobs]
Oh, yeah.  

[David Senra]
It was like [unintelligible]. He was like a kid in a candy shop. He just thought this was like the... He didn't want people to be hurt, obviously. But he's just like, "You know how many financial panics that I've seen in my lifetime? Like, of course, this is like nothing new." So I remember I was actually having dinner. I remember where it was. I was at Harry's Pizzeria in Miami, in the Design District. And, you know, I was supposed to be paying attention to my wife on our date. And I was thinking about the podcast and all the s*** I'm reading. And I go and, like, take a bite into a piece of pizza. And I was like, "People used to say, 'If you love what you do, you'd do it for free.'" And I go, "No. There's a different level. If you loved what you do, they couldn't pay you to stop."

[Brad Jacobs]
There you go.

[David Senra]
And I was like, "How much money could you have gone to Steve Jobs and be like, 'Hey, how much would it take for you to not work in Apple?'" That's not why he's doing it. That's not why they're doing it. And Enzo Ferrari, Estée Lauder, Edwin Land, Coco Chanel, all these other people, like, they just can't... Michele Ferrero, the Michelin brothers. Like, there's this story over and over again. And I get the same sense to you. It's just like, if I said, "Hey, what price I'm going to pay you, and you can't do any work. You have to stay home. You can't work." It's just like, there's no price.

[Brad Jacobs]
Everyone you just named, all those successful people, they were all-in.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
They were 100% in. They weren't like partly in, and partly aren't. They're in. They're 100% in, and completely focused, and single-mindedly concentrated on executing the plan. And that's important, too. And you want to have people on your team who share that passion, that commitment.

[David Senra]
The best leaders in business are able to spot patterns, but you can't spot patterns if you can't see your data. And most businesses are only using 20% of their data, because 80% of your customer intelligence is invisible, hidden in emails, transcripts, and conversations, unless you have HubSpot. HubSpot is where all of your data comes together, so you can see the patterns that matter. Because when you know more, you grow more. And that is a pattern that never fails. Visit hubspot.com today. That is hubspot.com.

[David Senra]
That leads me to another great one of your... I don't even think you think it's a maxim, but it's how you differentiate between A, B, and C players, where you're like... I'm just going to summarize this, and jump in whenever you want. But, you envision, you do another thought experiment.

[Brad Jacobs]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
Of, okay, do you want to see if you have the absolute best people on your team? Just visualize that they're coming into your office and they're saying, "Brad, I quit."

[Brad Jacobs]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
So, then what happens next in this scenario?

[Brad Jacobs]
So I'm always interacting with my CHRO, and going over talent and making sure everybody's happy and motivated and...

[David Senra]
Mm-hmm.

[David Senra]
How much percentage of your...

[Brad Jacobs]
A lot. I spend most of my time on people, and talent issues.

[David Senra]
So most of your time?

[Brad Jacobs]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
There's a funny...

[Brad Jacobs]
Well, no, not the most, but the most... If I did a pie chart of, like, how I divide up my time, the largest percent is on people issues.

[David Senra]
There's a funny story about this, and then I don't want to interrupt, but I do. This is inside of me and it just has to come out, all these stories, because I find them fascinating. So, there's two MBA students in Stanford in the late '90s, and in '97, they interview 16 technology company founders, since they're in Silicon Valley at the time, you know, and they publish this book called "In the Company of Giants." And everybody's in there, you know, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs, and everybody else. And they're telling Steve, they're like, "Well, you know, you're the founder. Of course you don't have time to, you know, recruit people." And Steve's like, "What?" Like, "No, it's the most..." It sounds exactly like what you said in your book. "It's the most important." And a great way to demonstrate the point. He goes, "Let's say you're starting a company, right? You're in Silicon Valley. Like, this is what you're doing over here. You pick your co-founder. You should think long and hard about that. Your co-founder is 50% of the company at that point."

[Brad Jacobs]
Right.

[David Senra]
And then he goes, "But it still goes out. Now you have to pick the 10th person. That person's 10% of your company, and you're saying you don't have time?" Like, "What else are you doing?"

[Brad Jacobs]
It's all about the people. It's all about the people. You know, systems, and tech, and budgets, and customers, and sales, all these things are really, really important, but you can't achieve excellence in those things without fantastic people, without fantastic leaders. And I spend a lot of time especially on the top few dozen people. I want to make sure everybody's in it to win it. Everybody is fully, fully engaged. And I do a mental exercise where I picture the person coming into my office and saying, "Brad, I quit." Like, "This is not a conversation about you making me a counteroffer. I'm done. I've already moved, and it's over with. This is about a conversation about how do we make an orderly transition, because I respect you, and I don't want to leave you high and dry." And then I try to feel, and visualize, what would be my reaction if that person came in to me and quit? If my reaction to that is, "Yes!" I don't want to smile.

[Brad Jacobs]
I don't want to act like I'm happy about this, but, you know, I didn't have... You know, nobody likes firing people. And I just didn't, you know... I just kept postponing firing that person when I shouldn't have, but I did, and this is great. I don't have to pay severance. And, you know, that solves that problem. No problem at all. We'll replace them. That's a C player. That's someone, really, you should get the courage up to get off the team right away. And then, on the second category, if my reaction to it is, "You know, it kind of sucks. You know, I would have preferred that person stayed, but it's not the end of the world. We'll hire a headhunter. We'll get someone as good, maybe someone even better, and, you know, things will work out." That's a B player. But if when I visualize that person quitting, my reaction to that is pure terror, and absolute panic, and like somebody took a baseball bat and just whacked me in the stomach, and then punched me in the face, I'm going, "Oh my God!" Like, "I'm never going to find someone as good as her. No way."

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
Or, "I'm never going to have someone as talented as that person. I'm never going to have someone who brings to the table their particular superpower."

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
And I can't even hear what they're saying anymore, because I'm just like having this internal panic dialogue going on. That's what you call an A player. So, I want all A players around me. I want people whose relationship with me I value so much that if it was terminated, I would be lost. And I want them to feel the same way. I want to have mutual relationships. I want people who love being in a relationship with the team, with the company, and that we all are in it together to go conquer the world. I think I named it... It's been two years since I wrote the book. But I think I had a chapter that said, "How to Kill the Competition Instead of Killing Each Other."

[David Senra]
Mm-hmm.

[Brad Jacobs]
And, you know, it's kind of funny, but it's a serious title, is you don't want to have a dysfunctional management team. One of the most important things that has allowed us to create tens and tens of billions of dollars of value is the management team's coherent. We have the right people on the management team, and we have the rules of the road of how we're going to deal with each other in a respectful way, that still encourages differences of opinion.

[David Senra]
First of all, I love the way you described. Because everybody says, "Oh yeah, hire A players." And I'm like, it's really hard to differentiate, like, what does that actually mean? And I think this thought experiment is perfect. It's like, "We are f***** if this person leaves." That's an A player. That's a way to think about this. But this also goes down to your gift, and why I think I've learned so much from you. One, partially, it's like your ability to have very clear thinking, and then put it in a memorable way. So, you were just talking about, like, the relationships that you have with the people you work for. You have a line in the book where you're like, "An organization is like a party. You only want to invite people who bring the vibe up. My team and I spend a lot of time together, so it's a big deal that we like one another."

[Brad Jacobs]
Yeah. I agree with that.

[David Senra]
Yeah. Well, there's another...

[Brad Jacobs]
Who said that? That was a good one.

[David Senra]
Bezos has a line in, I think, his shareholder letters, just like, "Life is too short to work with people you don't admire." Like, it's the same situation. It's like, you're in charge. You get to choose. Again, this goes back to the gift of being a CEO, of being an entrepreneur, is like, it's very rare that you get to literally choose who has access to you, who's around you. And I love this idea. It's like, hey, the organization is just like a party. You only want people who bring up the vibe.

[Brad Jacobs]
David, it's all about the people. It's all about the people, because the people then create all the different processes, and work streams, and transformations, and everything.

[David Senra]
This is very fascinating, because like, it's obviously... You know, business is people, right? Not only just like the people that are building a product, but, like, all of business is. The best definition of business I ever heard actually came from Richard Branson. He says, "All business is, is an idea that makes somebody else's life better." Right? And, like, that's why there's always more opportunity, because there's infinite ways. We think technology's going to, like... It changes things, but then it just usually opens up other ways to make other people's lives better. So, just focus on, like, if you're looking for an opportunity, how can I just serve other people? Another line that's very related to this is Henry Ford, where he says, "Money comes naturally as a result of service." Like, I think those two ideas go together. The reason I was thinking about this, though, the best way I've heard described what you were just saying, it's all about people, work with the best people you possibly can, the A players. We're going to talk about... You have this great line about, "There's no substitute for brains."

[David Senra]
But before that, it's like, the way that I've heard this described best, in my opinion, is from Ed Catmull, the founder of Pixar, right? He would go around and give all these talks, and he was actually, like, shocked that he would ask the audience, "What's more important, people or ideas?" He says every single time, people got it wrong. They said it was the ideas. And he's like, "No, it's the people." And so, he has this great line where he says like, "Listen, if you give a mediocre idea, right, to a brilliant team, they're either going to fix it, or they'll throw it out and come up with something better, something new. But if you give a great idea to a mediocre team, they're going to screw it up." So, obviously, because ideas come from people, so it's the people.

[Brad Jacobs]
That's exactly what I'm trying to say. What he said.

[David Senra]
He says it in just a great way. But you have a very, like, explicit piece of advice in your book that I think is interesting, where you're like, "There's no substitute for brains. Screening for superior intelligence eliminates 90% of all candidates. So, it's the first thing I look at. There's no substitute for smarts. The CEO trait most closely correlated with organizational success is a high IQ. Double down on hiring the brightest."

[Brad Jacobs]
Yeah. Well, you want smart people. And I particularly want people who are smarter than me. I want people who uplift me, who teach me. I don't want to be...

[David Senra]
Do you want them specialized? Because you mentioned earlier, you said you want them smarter than you, but also better at their particular...

[Brad Jacobs]
The vast majority of them are specialized.

[David Senra]
Okay.

[Brad Jacobs]
They're a finance person, they're an investor person, they're a strategic person. They have something that they... Tech person, they bring to the table that they're an inch wide and a mile deep in. But you also want them to have certain human qualities that transcend what their specialty is. And those are as, or more important, than the technical skills.

[David Senra]
Explain.

[Brad Jacobs]
Well, you want... So, you mentioned smart. You want people who are honest. You want people who are hardworking. You want people who are collegial. You want people who are really in it, like on the work-life balance thing, boom, it's work.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
And their life is a lot of their work. And, you know, that they enjoy that. I don't have to hold them like a school teacher with a stick over their head, getting them to work late, or come in early, or work on weekends. Like, they want to do that. Like, they enjoy doing that. Their job, their career, their success, the collective success of the company is an important part of their gestalt. It's a really important part of their being and their purpose.

[David Senra]
Was there ever a time... I don't mean to keep interrupting you, but this is fascinating, and it's almost selfish to have this conversation, because like, I get to ask you questions, and learn from you. Was there ever a time where work wasn't... Where you were more balanced?

[Brad Jacobs]
No. No.

[David Senra]
When was the last time you were balanced?

[Brad Jacobs]
No.

[David Senra]
So, you started your first company at 23.

[Brad Jacobs]
I did. And I've been completely imbalanced since then. I've been working seven days a week.

[David Senra]
Yeah, because you...

[Brad Jacobs]
Very few vacations.

[David Senra]
You guys scaled in, like, four years to, I don't know, like, a couple billion dollars. It was just, like, an insane story in the book.

[Brad Jacobs]
But for me, it's not work. For me, it's like, I'm really enjoying it. To me, it's a craft, it's a skill that I have that I enjoy doing it.

[David Senra]
Were you always honest with yourself that it was the top priority?

[Brad Jacobs]
I think so. Yeah. I I've been honest with myself.

[David Senra]
I had a conversation with a friend of mine, on the drive over here, and I think I'm lying to myself. So, let me give you an example. So, you know, in many cases, like, you read these biographies of these people and it winds up being a cautionary tale, you know, because they kind of, like, will sacrifice everything for professional success. Their health, their relationships, everything else.

[Brad Jacobs]
Well, that I'm not in favor of.

[David Senra]
No, no, no. You're still married, you're a good father, like everything else. Yeah, for sure. But your main... It's not like you have an abundance of hobbies outside of work, from what I understand.

[Brad Jacobs]
No.

[Brad Jacobs]
Meditation and music, that's pretty much it.

[David Senra]
There you go. So, for a long time, every single person I read about was like, okay, well, I even titled the episode "My Personal Blueprint," which was Ed Thorp, right? Ed Thorp, I'll give a short run-down real quick. First person to invent a quantitative hedge fund. He invented, you know, the ability to count cards for blackjack, writes this book in the 1960s called "Beat A Dealer," you know, made more money than he'll ever spend. But if you read his book, you get to the end, it's like he was much more balanced, right? He also came from academia, and maybe this had played a role into that. But he essentially, like, lived a life of adventure, because he truly loved what he did. Once he made more money than he could spend, he stopped trading more time for money. He had a good marriage until his wife passed away from cancer, took care of his health.

[David Senra]
But, like, much more of a... Let's say there's five important things, and he kind of, like, divvied up. Maybe work was 50%, but the other four are other 50%. And I was like, "Oh, that's kind of my personal blueprint." And I said on the drive over, I go, "No, I'm lying."

[Brad Jacobs]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
It's like 90% of what I think about, and how I spend my time, is just work.

[Brad Jacobs]
That's a beautiful thing. So, all the people you've mentioned so far, all these very, very successful people, I guarantee you probably every single one of them, with few exceptions, if any, were all-in.

[David Senra]
Yes.

[Brad Jacobs]
And what they were doing was their passion, and they were just so excited about it. They were in the flow. They were in the flow of being so absorbed on something that you, like, lose track of time and the whole rest of the universe is gone. You're just in it. You're just really into something that you do well and you're with people that you really like, and you're likely to be successful because you're doing what you do.

[David Senra]
When I was thinking about the amount of research that you do that you explain, before you get into an industry, before you start a company, it's like... The way I describe your book is buy it, read it all the way through, and then what I really think it is, you put it close to your desk, because it's a reference manual. Because you can just pick this up now, and read one chapter that takes 10 minutes, and get good ideas out of it.

[Brad Jacobs]
Do you know I'm writing a sequel?

[David Senra]
Last time you told me this. Like, "I only had one book in me, I have nothing else."

[Brad Jacobs]
So, I wrote the book, and I got so much feedback of what people thought about it. And people asked, "Well, you should really talk more about this, this, and this." At first I said, "I'm never writing another book."

[David Senra]
Yes, I remember.

[Brad Jacobs]
It takes a lot of time to write a book, and I don't have a lot of time.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
But I had so many people ask me similar questions. Okay, I'm going to write a sequel that addresses those particular questions. You know what the title's going to be? That was "How to Make a Few Billion Dollars."

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
This one's going to be called "How to Make a Few More Billion Dollars." Is that great or what?

[David Senra]
Yes. Let me get an early copy, please. You were very nice to send me an early copy of this one. But I think what ties all this together, when I think about your research process, the way you go after life, all the people we've been talking about, from Steve Jobs, to Jeff Bezos, it's like mediocrity is always invisible until passion shows up and exposes it.

[Brad Jacobs]
Love it.

[David Senra]
I think that is what animates me. It's just like you see this. You're talking about like even when you buy great companies, good companies, they're like, "What else could you do?" It's like there's always more.

[Brad Jacobs]
Always.

[David Senra]
Because you can always infuse passion into what you're doing, obsession, work with the best people. Of course you can keep getting better and better results.

[Brad Jacobs]
Yeah. Well, I agree with that. I think... So, what you just said, you buy a company, it's doing very well. And then three, four years later, you've doubled the profit of it. What did you do? You went in with a toolkit, and you tapped the pricing using algorithms and elasticity analysis. You've tapped the compensation, so you've got the salespeople made partners, rather than pupils to the parent authoritarian figure at corporate. You've put in technology that frees up time, that allows people to spend time doing selling, and doing their job, rather than trying to find information. You're sharing information in very good ways. So, you apply a certain toolkit. Boom, you double profit.

[David Senra]
So, wait a minute, this brings up something interesting that I've been talking about lately, the different archetypes there are in founders and CEOs, right? Everybody thinks like, oh, there's kind of one archetype, and especially the ones that are popularized now, it's like essentially like the Steve Jobs dictator, make, you know, almost all the decisions.

[Brad Jacobs]
I don't like that.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
No.

[David Senra]
Exactly. I just heard the pupil part.

[Brad Jacobs]
Now, who am I to criticize Steve Jobs?

[David Senra]
No, no, no, no, no.

[Brad Jacobs]
That's not my style.

[David Senra]
It's not a criticism. It's just like, that's the beauty of entrepreneurship is like you get to do it...

[Brad Jacobs]
I wouldn't be able to do that.

[David Senra]
So, what is your archetype? What is... Like, let me back up before I ask you a question, because I've been having long conversations with Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify, who's become a good friend. And that's his whole thing, where he... Like, we actually might be writing something together about... Like, he's concerned that there's going to be young entrepreneurs out there that are like, "I'm not like Elon, or I'm not like Steve, or I'm not like all these people, so therefore I can't be an entrepreneur." He's like, "There's multiple archetypes." He's like, "I'm not like that." He says he thinks he's a better coach than he is a player. And essentially, he has discovered... It's almost like this. He recruits some of the best talent in the world to the point where he's like, "I used to be the best at product. That guy's better at product, he should do it. That guy's a better designer. That person's a better HR. That person's everything." So, he's like, "The way I look at it is like I'm much more of a coach than a player." What is your, like, archetype?

[Brad Jacobs]
So, you want to get the right people in place, you want to get the compensation aligned, and then you want to be communicating with each other in a very constructive way, in a very prolific way. So, Friday, we had our second MOR, monthly operating review, for this company we had bought, Beacon. And how did we come up with the agenda? It was a 10-hour meeting, two breaks. One was ten minutes, one was five minutes. Nobody was distracted, nobody was on phones, their devices were all shut off. We're very concentrating on the one person that had the proverbial microphone at a time, and listening very carefully and intently what that person was saying, and then debating each point, and each action point. How did we come up with the agenda? Here's how. Did I, the CEO, come from above and say, "Here's the agenda that I think is the important thing. I'm smarter than all of you, and here's what we should be doing"?

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
No.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
How pompous, and arrogant, and kind of ineffective really to do that.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
What I do is just the opposite. I send around a QuestionPro, an app, and we say, "Here's all the materials, pre-read for the meeting." We don't do PowerPoints, and go through all that nonsense where everyone tells each other how great they're doing.

[Brad Jacobs]
It's just a silliness that you see a lot in corporate America.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
We send all those decks out ahead of time. We have everybody read them, and then we have everybody fill out the app, say, "Based on everything I read, here are my main takeaways, and here are the main questions that I think are so important, in terms of creating value, that we should, the whole team, all 25 of us who were in that meeting, spend time debating and discussing around the table, in the limited time we've got." Because 10 hours goes by like that. And then I send back out the takeaways, and I send back out the questions. People rank them on a scale of 1 to 10. Again, we have an app for this. And then I send people the takeaways. Here's how they were rated. Here's what people thought were the most important takeaways. Very valuable. Now you've got the benefit of everybody's perspectives on the same data. So, people have seen the same charts, the same data, the same metrics, same KPIs, but they've seen it from a little different angle.

[Brad Jacobs]
It's very enlightening. And then I've got the questions. I tell everybody, "Rate the question 1 to 10," and then all the questions that are rated 8, 9, and 10, and between 8 and 10, that's the agenda, David. That's what we talked about.

[David Senra]
Mm-hmm.

[Brad Jacobs]
So, we just went... Then we put them in categories. Everything about tech that was rated eight or above, here they are. Everything that was on comp or people, everything that was on strategic, everything that was on M&A, all the different categories. Only the ones that the group voted on at least an eight. Now, what is the consequence of that? Number one, we have an amazing meeting. Like, it's a good agenda. Much better than I could come up with. Because now it's got everybody's angle on it. It's group sourced. Secondly, everybody's involved in it, because the boss didn't come down and like, "Here's the agenda." It's like we collectively made the agenda. So, people realize the truth of the matter is we really respect each other's opinions. There's no one person who's the authoritarian figure who's like teaching everybody else. It's a group. I've created a group. I've created a superorganism. I've created like a beehive, or an ant colony, or a brain, or a human body. Superorganisms.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
Mm-hmm.

[Brad Jacobs]
Things that are a collection of people that the sum is greater than the collection of the parts. And the whole is greater than each individual. We have a holistic, powerful approach to that. That's how I run the business.

[David Senra]
How many people would be in a meeting like that?

[Brad Jacobs]
So, I've experimented with this over the years. I used to have larger meetings with 40 or 50 people, and it just didn't work. And so, those meetings, those monthly operating reviews, which are the most important meeting of the month.

[David Senra]
Okay.

[Brad Jacobs]
It's when the most senior people in the company come together, and do the exercise I just mentioned for 10 hours, with almost no breaks, almost no breaks at all. That, I have 25 people, and I limit it to 25. I don't want more than 25. I don't know what's so magic about 25, but 20 to 25 is the ideal group. You have enough people that you get diversity of opinion, and you have dialectical discussions, meaning looking at issues from multiple perspectives, and then analyzing those, and synthesizing and finding the truth. But you don't have so many people that, you know, people are peacocking, and trying to impress each other, and don't want to be vulnerable. You want people to be vulnerable. You want people to trust the other people in the room so much that you've created a safe zone to say, "You know what? I've been thinking this, and thinking this, but the more I'm listening to you, the more I'm hearing about this, I may be wrong."

[Brad Jacobs]
"Maybe I got this thing completely upside down, and I'm starting to come around to looking at it like this with one little twist. Now, I think what we should do is X, Y, Z. And then what do y'all think of that?" That's a fantastic conversation. When you have leaders of the company feeling it's safe to show that, "Hey, I was wrong."

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
"I was thinking things wrong up to..." And I model that, I role model that myself all the time. Be flexible in thinking, don't be rigid in thinking. Don't be black and white, dichotomous thinking, but be open-minded, be receptive, to be willing to learn and to be challenged. And that's okay to be proven wrong. It's actually a good thing. We're learning together.

[David Senra]
Two questions on that. What percent of the meeting are you speaking, in a situation like that?

[Brad Jacobs]
So, I open up usually, and I ramble on for like an hour, or maybe more than an hour, of the state of the union from my perspective. And I try not to just mention things that I form conclusions on, but I try to frame things of, "These are the most important successes of the company, but these are the things where we need to improve. And here are the issues that, in my view, after reading everybody's votes and everything, I think are the things we should attention direct, we should spend the most amount of time solving. Because I think those will create the most amount of value." And I try to keep it balanced, the good stuff and the bad stuff. Yes, I do atta boys and atta girls and rah rahs. That's a good thing to do for leadership. But I, in equal measure do, "Look, we got to keep it real. We got to keep it honest. Here's things that we said by this deadline we're going to do it. We're a couple weeks behind on this."

[Brad Jacobs]
"Let's get going here. What's going on? Here's where we thought this outcome was going to happen, and we're only 92% there. How can we get to 100%?" So, I try to start off with a balance, but then I try to shut up, and then I try to let the mechanical going through the questions, where I just go down the questions by categories, and then go around the room and hear everyone's opinion. You don't want the leader talking a huge amount of time.

[David Senra]
Yeah, so you basically start with an hour, then the next, in this case, the nine hours for the rest of the meeting, you're...

[Brad Jacobs]
Everyone else.

[David Senra]
Everyone else.

[Brad Jacobs]
And I'll talk, too, but not inordinately. I've already used up my hour, for God's sake, you know?

[David Senra]
Yeah, this is one of the things that I've felt... And I've seen this with a lot, with like really remarkable people, is how many people, like when we had this intense breakfast at your house a few months ago, you had a notepad, and I'm talking, and you're taking notes. I'm like, "What the hell is going on?" It's the reverse.

[Brad Jacobs]
Well, you were saying cool stuff.

[David Senra]
No, it should be the reverse. In fact, I have a story about this, and then I have another question for you, was Mitch Rales, obviously one of the founders of Danaher.

[Brad Jacobs]
Great company.

[David Senra]
Oh, incredible.

[Brad Jacobs]
The Danaher way. Yeah.

[David Senra]
He's actually a mentor of two close friends of mine. So, I get like insights from them, about him, and just what... One of the most remarkable things that he did. But, he was at this vertical market software conference. It was only like 40 people there, recently. And a friend of mine, I was going for a walk in New York City about this, and he's just like, "I don't understand. The guy sat in the front row. He's the most successful person there by far, and he was just taking notes the whole time." I was like, "That is why he's successful. It's not the reverse. It's not that you go and you build a $200 billion company or whatever it is, and then take notes. He was like that his whole time." Just the relentless, like, you have valuable information. Great. I just did this episode on Jimmy Iovine, who's a very fascinating person, and he has this great line. He said, "Great can come from anywhere."

[Brad Jacobs]
Yes.

[David Senra]
And then you have this other thing. I'll get back to that in a question.

[Brad Jacobs]
I love that.

[David Senra]
Great can come from anywhere.

[Brad Jacobs]
Great can come from anywhere.

[David Senra]
And he's in the music business. His point was that he was trying to help... He was partners and a mentor of Dr. Dre, who's one of the greatest hip hop producers of all time. Dre didn't have an artist to work with. They wind up getting this demo tape from Eminem. And at the time, he's this poor kid in Michigan, living in a trailer park, right? Like, no resources at all, and yet they're like, "We weren't looking for, you know, somebody to be controversial. We were looking for great." And guess what? It can come from anywhere. It came from this kid that was obsessed, sitting in a fricking trailer park saying, "I want to do this thing, and I'm going to do this to the best of my ability." I want to talk about... I'm going to go back to this question I have, but you have... I love this idea of grabbing information, which is really fascinating. There's multiple examples in your book, and then I find these in other books where it's just like, it's so nuts that especially when companies get big and older, they stop asking information from people from the front line.

[Brad Jacobs]
It's bad.

[David Senra]
So, you're like, "Often when we buy a company, we discover that the frontline employees, middle managers, and even some senior executives have never been asked, 'What would do to improve the company?'"

[Brad Jacobs]
It's bad.

[David Senra]
"You would think owners would want to know that." And then you have this great thing that I think is actually good for business, but also personal issues. You ask, "What is the stupidest thing we're doing? And what is the smartest thing that we're doing?"

[Brad Jacobs]
Yes.

[David Senra]
This ability to like... You just almost described it in these meetings. It's like, "Hey, we're going to disperse and ask these questions, and see what comes back, and then we'll rank the information."

[Brad Jacobs]
So, the end of those operating reviews, once we've gone through all the lists, now we do human interactions. That's where the fun starts. So, we work really hard solving all these problems, and debating all these issues. Now we put that aside, and I ask a series of questions. I modify them a little bit every month, but I have a list of a few dozen questions, and I pick which ones I want to ask each time.

[Brad Jacobs]
Usually one of the first ones is, "What is something somebody said today that you have a different opinion on? What is something that somebody said, you disagree with, and you didn't get a chance to talk about it?" And I just go around one by one to each person. That's a wonderful thing. Many management teams can't do that, because everyone would get upset.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
Here, it's like, "Great!" And then we have a nice, honest debate. I ask everyone, "What's your single biggest takeaway from today? What is something that, 10 hours ago, you didn't understand about how we're going to make money, and how we're going to serve customers better, and how we're going to improve employee engagement, and how we're going to kill the competition? What is something you didn't know? What is something you learned?" And you just go around, one by one by one by one.

[Brad Jacobs]
And then I ask them, "When I think about people not in this room, but people in the organization out there in the field, who's an MVP? Who's the most valuable player? Who's somebody who's going above and beyond that you really respect, you really admire, you really think is amazing? I wish we had a thousand more like that person, and why?" And I send an email to them afterwards saying, "Hey, I was in a meeting with the leaders of the company, and you were nominated as an MVP because X, Y, Z." People love it. Sometimes they start crying. There's a lot of times it's a really, really emotional thing.

[David Senra]
Oh, wow.

[Brad Jacobs]
It's a really, really nice thing, validating the field. And then I bring it inwards, and I say, "Who around this table today, in your mind, did their star go up?" And the star already might have been high, because everyone loves each other, but even higher, it went up, and why? What is something that somebody said today in the meeting that impressed you, that made you go, 'Aha!' or made you say, 'D***, that's a good insight. That's a good perception. I really like that.' Who was it, and what did they say?" We go around, everything like that. And I have a few other questions like that.

[Brad Jacobs]
And then I bring it down to the person themselves, and I say, "Finish the sentence. I resolve to improve the company by..." Just go one by one, and each person stands up and says, "I resolve to improve the company by..." and then they say what they want to say. It's a great thing. What I didn't get a chance to do Friday, because we ran out of time, what I often do is then we go into another room. We get out of the boardroom, get out of the conference room, and then we stand in a circle, and just silently look at each other for the first couple minutes. And a couple minutes is a long time to be, like, looking around everybody else.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
You know, for a lot of people, that's uncomfortable. It's not uncomfortable if you all like each other.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
And look at each person and say, "I admire this person because..." Like, what are the strengths, what are the qualities, what are the traits, what are the skills, what are the things that they do that you really are impressed with, you really like that person a lot? And just go one by one, look at each person, and just identify that.

[Brad Jacobs]
And then after a minute or two has gone by, I say, "Okay, now let's do the same thing. Look at each person and say, 'I really...'" So, we've already said why I'm grateful they're on the team. So, now I want to say... So, it was gratitude. Gratitude is a wonderful leadership technique.

[David Senra]
Mm-hmm.

[Brad Jacobs]
And then the second thing is, "I really wish that person great success in the company, and I can picture this company five years from now accomplishing X, Y, Z." And I send nice vibes, I send love vibes to that person. Just go around one by one, all silently. Nothing out loud. Just one by one by one by one. You start seeing people smile. Like, always, I've done it so many times. You start seeing people smile.

[Brad Jacobs]
So, you're looking at people, you see them looking at people in a very positive, uplifting way, an appreciative way. And then I say, "Okay, now we've concluded the day, and I declare the day a success, and congratulations." Then we just clap. And we clap... Sometimes this clapping goes on for, like, five minutes. And it, like, really, really goes on, but it's a very... Then people levitate home. Then they go to the airport and go home.

[David Senra]
How much of the way you run your company is, like, guided by intuition? Like, you seem like a very intuitive person to me.

[Brad Jacobs]
Maybe not as much as you think.

[David Senra]
No?

[Brad Jacobs]
Yes, there's always instinct. There's always intuition. You're always going by your gut.

[David Senra]
But, like, how would you even know? Like, this is an unusual... Like, what you just described, how did you learn that?

[Brad Jacobs]
So, I've experimented over time.

[David Senra]
Okay.

[Brad Jacobs]
I've experimented with different things. I've read a lot. I've studied positive psychology, I've studied cognitive therapy. I've studied a lot of stuff. I read a lot of stuff. I meditate a lot. And I do things that worked for me. So, I think of things that have worked for me on my path, on my evolution of feeling gratitude, and all the happiness that comes with feeling gratitude, by feeling appreciation, by problem solving, all the different things, and I try to imbibe that to other people. And then if it works... So, feedback loops.

[Brad Jacobs]
One of the key tenets of all my companies is we have intense, voluminous feedback loops. Feedback loops between the senior team, feedback loops between the senior team and mid-level management, feedback loops between senior, medium, and front-line management, feedback loops with customers, feedback loops with vendors, feedback loops with investors. All the constituents of the constellation that make a corporation, that make a company. We have to be communicating.

[Brad Jacobs]
We have to be communicating very intensely with each other, in an honest way, and then sharing that information. I share information much more widely in my organisms, in my organizations, than most companies. Most companies, they're afraid to share it. They're afraid to share the good information. They think a competitor's going to hear about it.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
Okay, well, they will, but let them try to copy us. They don't have all the ingredients to do that. Or they say, "We don't want to share the bad stuff, because then the market's going to hear our weaknesses." Okay, well, that's kind of true too, but that's so much overshadowed by the benefit of we're learning where we have to improve. We're learning how to become better.

[David Senra]
I read something Jeff Bezos said that changed my perspective on the importance of high quality sleep. He said that he makes sure he gets eight hours of sleep a night, and as a result, his mood, his energy, and his decision-making is improved. His point was that you get paid to make high quality decisions, and you can't do that if you're sleeping terribly. And the product that has made the biggest impact on my quality of sleep for years is Eight Sleep. I'm lucky enough to be friends with the founder of Eight Sleep, Matteo, and we live in the same city.

[David Senra]
A few months after I started using Eight Sleep, I randomly ran into Matteo at a restaurant, and I was with some friends. So, I go over and say hi. When I got back to my table, my friend asked me, who was I talking to? And I said, "That's Matteo, the founder of Eight Sleep." And my friend replied, "He looks like he gets good sleep." Matteo is living and breathing his product. I had never had the ability to change the temperature of my bed before I had an Eight Sleep. I had no idea how much that would improve the quality of my sleep. I keep my Eight Sleep ice-cold.

[David Senra]
It's cold before I get into bed, so I fall asleep faster, and wake up less during the night. That feature alone is worth 10 times the price. There are very few no-brainer investments in life, and I believe Eight Sleep is one of them. That is why elite founders like, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have all said publicly that they use Eight Sleep. I would recommend getting the Pod 5, which is the newest generation of their signature product. It is a smart mattress cover that you place on top of your existing mattress, and it is next-level sleep tech.

[David Senra]
It automatically regulates your body temperature throughout the night, independently for each side of the bed. The result is you get up to a full hour of additional quality sleep per night. Make the no-brainer investment in your sleep by going to EightSleep.com/SENRA, and use the code SENRA to get $350 off. You can try it for 30 days at home, and return it if you don't like it, but I'm confident you will love it. I will never let anyone take my Eight Sleep from me. Make sure you get yours at EightSleep.com/SENRA.

[David Senra]
So, this is what you were describing earlier, this almost like constant iterative trial and error process.

[Brad Jacobs]
Absolutely.

[David Senra]
And just keeping the information flowing through the company. There's a idea that I think, when I thought of your ideas, like, "Hey, we're going to buy the company. We're going to ask, like, 'What would you do if you were running the company? What's the stupidest thing we're doing? What's the smartest thing we're doing?'" I, as you know, I'm interested in timeless principles, not timely, right?

[Brad Jacobs]
Mm-hmm.

[David Senra]
And when I read that in your book, what I thought of was not you building your company. I thought of Jim Casey building UPS 100 years ago. And what he learned... Because a lot of these things, these ideas that survive for a long period of time, they're not dependent on the company, they're really dependent on human nature. Because history doesn't repeat. Human nature does, right? Human nature's kind of constant, doesn't really change. And so, what Jim realized is the more successful he became, the more successful his company became, his executives, their incentives were to hide the bad news, and just tell him good things, because then it's like, "Everything's great in the company, Jim. And so, I was the one that made that great, and so pay me more, and make sure I keep this great job I have."

[David Senra]
And Jim realized, he's like, "Oh, I need to have constant, unfiltered access from the people that are delivering the service to my customers." So, what he would do is, like, he would instruct his driver, "Every time we see a brown UPS truck, you are to pull over." And he would get out, no matter how successful he was, and he would talk to the driver.

[Brad Jacobs]
I love it.

[David Senra]
Unfiltered information.

[Brad Jacobs]
Love it.  

[David Senra]
Same thing. People would go and they'd try to meet Sam Walton in Bentonville, Arkansas, right? They'd show up. They even have an appointment on the books. And they'd walk into the office, and they're like, "Hey, I'm here to meet Sam for our, you know, 7:00 AM meeting." And his secretary's just like, because he used to fly his own plane, "He left at 5:00 a.m. this morning, and he went to, you know, this Walmart over here, and he's hanging out and greeting customers, and talking to the people stocking the shelves, and everything else." But this constant... I think there's a lot of wisdom in what you said in your book, basically, is what I'm saying is, like, you see this over and over again. They want unfiltered access from the front lines. They don't want the information to be, you know, massaged or presented in a manner that seems good.

[Brad Jacobs]
So, Todd Combs is one of Warren Buffett's managers.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
And we were talking on a Saturday about, I don't know, 10 years ago, 8, 9, 10 years ago, when he was getting on the JP Morgan board, and he was kind of moving up in the world, stuff like that. I lost touch with him, but really great guy, really smart guy. And he said, "What are you doing?" I said, "I'm reading employee surveys. I'm reading all the employee surveys from the whole company of... We ask them two questions, 'What's your single best idea to improve the company?' And rate your job satisfaction, scale of 1 to 10."

[Brad Jacobs]
And sometimes we add a third one of what it will take to make it a 10. I just go through all these, one by one, because I feel like I'm talking to every employee and learning on that." He said, "That's amazing." I said, "What's so amazing about that?" He said, "I was just talking to Bezos, and Bezos was reading customer surveys.

[Brad Jacobs]
Reading customer survey. So, he's talking about customers, I'm talking about employees. But it's the same concept. You need feedback loops. You don't know how you're doing unless you have radar, like, sending beep beeps out there, and seeing how it comes back. You have to have this very intense feedback loop.

[David Senra]
And, and this is why I'm so obsessed with what I'm doing, because nothing we're doing is new. Like, you had all these people that ran all these kind of experiments for centuries, and they built great companies. And just because, you know, they passed on, and maybe the company's not around anymore, it's like there's a treasure trove of data in there. So, like Bezos' idea, I love where he would publicize it. He used to publicize the very early days of Amazon, "jeff@amazon.com, email me." And he read...

[David Senra]
One of the reasons that he figured it out, he's like, "Oh, we can't just sell books. I could sell anything." He would send emails to the, I think, like, top thousand customers like, "What else would you buy?" And one guy, he had this epiphany, because, you know, they were like, "Hey, I want toilet paper, I want, you know, groceries," whatever. One guy's like, "I want windshield wipers." And he's like, "Windshield wipers? If this guy wants windshield wipers, I'm gonna be able to sell everything." Like, it is a true everything store.

[David Senra]
But I was thinking about this recently, because I just read this book translated from French about the Michelin family dynasty, which starts out in 1891, selling tires in France. They're selling tires. There's, like, 350 cars on the road for God's sake. But there's a line in the book that is related to all this, where the two brothers have to take over this failing factory, and they don't know what to make, because most of the products that they're manufacturing are unprofitable. They're on the brink of bankruptcy. Their one profitable product... So, they eliminate everything else, and they focus on the one profitable product, which is a rubber brake pad for horse-drawn carriages.

[Brad Jacobs]
Say that again?

[David Senra]
A rubber brake pad for horse-drawn carriages.

[Brad Jacobs]
Okay.

[David Senra]
Remember, this is 1888. And so, it takes them like a year or two to figure out, "Hey, we should manufacture rubber." And there's two twin phenomenons. You're talking about, remember what Jesselson said, "Get the major trend right?"

[Brad Jacobs]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
They're like, "Well, horse-drawn carriages have been around for a while. You know what's growing way faster? Bicycles, and then cars, even from a small number. Like, we need to go to where the technology's going." But the point being is like, so we need to make more products. We need to make rubber tires. And the guy took over a factory, he's like, "I don't know how to do that." So, his answer was, he would go...

[David Senra]
And it sounds just like what you do. He only had like 50 employees that were making the rubber brake pads, and he would just ask questions. He's like, "I came to them, and I admitted my ignorance. I know nothing about rubber manufacturing. Why'd you do that? Can you explain to me? What if we did..." And not in like, what you just said, you said something about not like coming down from on high. It's like a peer almost like, "Teach me."

[Brad Jacobs]
Yes.

[David Senra]
And he's like, it was wildly effective, and he's got a great line in that book. He's like, "It turns out, the guy that handles the material for eight hours a day, while the CEO's in the office, has something to teach you." Like, he's going to understand something about that process, because you have like a bird-level view. He has a very particular job. And he found it very instructive.

[Brad Jacobs]
Mm-hmm.

[David Senra]
And he's like, "It was a wonderful way to learn the business." And then that led him to like, "Oh, now I know how to make things." And then, from there, to grow and grow and grow. And I just absolutely love this idea. It's like, you should have this unfiltered access, unfiltered information over and over and over again.

[Brad Jacobs]
Completely. All the different constituents in an organization need to be talking to each other, need to have feedback loops to know how they're doing. If you're not asking your customers how you're doing, you may think you're doing a lot better than you really are.

[David Senra]
How do you figure out how you're doing in your position?

[Brad Jacobs]
I ask all day long. And we have different modalities of anonymous surveys, and 360 reviews. And I'm interacting with the teams non-stop all day long. I'm walking in people's offices, "What's going on? What do you think of this? What do you think of that?"

[David Senra]
Do you like the... You have this great line in your book, where it says, "I love working with outrageously talented people to deliver outside returns for shareholders in public stock markets."

[Brad Jacobs]
I love that.

[David Senra]
This constant feedback from the public market.

[Brad Jacobs]
It's fantastic.

[David Senra]
You love it?

[Brad Jacobs]
Yeah. I don't always agree with it. But some of it, there's always some truth in it. That you get free advice from like the smartest people in the world. The global allocators. People who have raised billions of dollars from pensions, and endowments, and sovereign wealth funds. And now they're analyzing what you're doing, and they're giving you advice. They're telling you, "This is what I like. This is what I don't like." Okay. You don't have to... Actually, you mathematically can't agree with it all, because a lot of times you get conflicting advice.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
People saying, "You're going right. You should be going left." The other guy's saying, "You should go left even more." So, it's good to hear all this stuff. It's good to hear what people are saying. But then you have to go within yourself, and you have to make the decision. You have to be an adult. You're taking tons and tons of information, and opinions, and beliefs, and data, as much as possible. Then you've got to kind of just ignore all that. Just go inside and say, "This is what I want to do." You've got to make the call. That's what a CEO does. It's what a leader does, is you make the call. But you have to get all that input. Otherwise, you're just in a bubble chamber, echo chamber, where you're just hearing your own thoughts instead of others.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
You want people challenging your thoughts all the time.

[David Senra]
I think for a long time, one big goal was like starting a company, and then taking it public. And now I talk to a lot of founders, and even the ones that raised a lot of money, and they don't want to ever go public. Do you have any...

[Brad Jacobs]
I love being public.

[David Senra]
Like, what advice would you give to somebody, let's say, 30 years younger than you? They're trying to build a great company. They've raised a bunch of money, but they don't want to go public.

[Brad Jacobs]
Well, they have to be at a level of maturity for the company to go public.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
They have to be preferably profitable.

[David Senra]
But there's a bunch of them now.

[Brad Jacobs]
Just never want to go public.

[David Senra]
Yeah, yeah. That reach that criteria, and are choosing not to.

[Brad Jacobs]
You know, it'd be interesting to ask them why. What's the reason why you don't want...

[David Senra]
I think people think... Yeah, I can't speak for them, but I think maybe they're scared of the public scrutiny, the hassle.

[Brad Jacobs]
But that goes back to what we were talking about an hour ago is, so they might have a core belief saying, "I need everybody to always be like saying great stuff about me," which is never going to happen. And they may think that, "Gee, if I go public..."

[Brad Jacobs]
When you're public, at any moment in time, you have people in favor of you, and people who are naysayers. You have people who are selling, and buying. The people who are selling think you're overvalued. The people who are buying get the joke, and they understand you have a real business plan here that's going to create much more value. So, you always have those two different things going. Maybe those people don't want to hear the naysayers.

[Brad Jacobs]
Maybe those people don't understand that naysayers sometimes can help you correct your own path, can tell you, "Gee, you know, maybe I'm cutting costs too much." People come in and say, "You're cutting costs too much. I visited one of your locations. I didn't think the service was so great." "Oh, wow. I didn't know that. Thank you for telling me that."

[Brad Jacobs]
So, now I have to invest more, rather than cut costs. You have other people who say, "You know, I'm looking at your numbers here. Your margins are growing, which is great, but that's only half the situation here." The other situation is, what are you doing with your top line? What are you doing with your price and volume? What are you doing with your organic growth? In my business, in all my businesses, the only two things I had to do in the end, in order to get great valuations and create shareholder value, were grow the top line faster than the competition, faster than the market, be taking share, and growing the margins, increasing the profit margins.

[David Senra]
Mm-hmm.

[Brad Jacobs]
If I did those two things, everything else flowed, everything else flowed from that. But those are the two main things. In order to accomplish those two things, you want as much input as possible. You want as many chefs in the kitchen as you possibly can. The public gets you hundreds and thousands of voices. So, it's amazing data. It also, being public, allows you to build a brand much faster and much more voluminously.

[David Senra]
Explain that part.

[Brad Jacobs]
So, you want to be a magnet for talent, for drivers, for people in the branches, for people in mid-level management. Going back to what you said before, you always want great talent coming in. Well, if nobody knows who you are, they're a little skeptical about joining your company. If you have research written about you by bunches of firms, and you have press releases, and a public website, and so you're very well known what you're doing. It's very clear what you're doing. People say, "Okay, I get it. You're a known quantity, and I like this. I buy into it. I like what you're doing. I want to join the company."

[Brad Jacobs]
And then you can pay them. You can compensate them with stuff they can look on their iPhone every day, and see the value of the compensation. If you're private, you give people these phantom shares, or whatever the compensation plan is, they don't really know the value of it, until they sell it some day, and it may be very different than what they thought it was all along. So, from a compensation point of view, which is a big element of success in these high-growth business plans, being public is fantastic.

[David Senra]
Was there ever a time in your career where you were like, "Maybe I should do a private company instead?" Or you were pretty much all in on it?

[Brad Jacobs]
I've been doing public since 1992, and I'm nonstop. And I like it. I enjoy it. I find it very helpful, very constructive. I like the pressure. I like the ability to hear what the street says, and then agree with what I agree with, but to disagree with what I think is wrong, when I feel passionately and have evidence to support they're wrong. So, sometimes the street, particularly like the hedge funds, they're very focused on, like, this quarter, the next 90 days.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
That's a terrible thing long term. You don't want to be focusing on just what's good for the quarter. You see these public companies that go out, and they cut costs in the field that hurts customer service, or hurts employee morale, and they're understaffed, which is even worse than being overstaffed, which is bad. And here, it's a completely different story. So, yeah, I like being public.

[David Senra]
You said something interesting. "I like the pressure."

[Brad Jacobs]
I do. I thrive on it.

[David Senra]
What do you mean by that?

[Brad Jacobs]
So, many people give you the money, whether it's a retail individual, whether it's a high-net-worth family, whether it's a sovereign wealth fund, whether it's a pension plan, whether it's an endowment, long-only funds, mutual funds. All these people are wiring money to buy your shares. This is a intense pressure. This is probably the biggest pressure I have in life, is to make sure that I do everything I possibly can to make sure I give them back more money than they gave me. Make sure that they invest in the company and... Like, if you look at my neighbors and my friends, I don't know the exact number, but I would guess over 90% of them are invested in the company. And that's what it's been over time.

[Brad Jacobs]
Well, that's pressure, man. That's like, "Wow, I don't want to disappoint them. These are my relatives, these are my friends, these are the people I really love." People come to you and say, "Look, I believe in you so much, I put two-thirds of my retirement plan in your stock." Forget there's diversification. Boom! I'm going all in on Brad and his team. Well, that's a lot of pressure. I like that pressure. I enjoy that pressure. That motivates me, that inspires me, that makes me feel I have something to do here that's important.

[David Senra]
I think that's so important to put that out, because we were talking about the negative self-talk and, you know, just living a pretty crazy life, where it's like you want to work seven days a week, or you're just completely all in. And again, this goes back to you can hear a sentence, and just be like, "Oh, I feel that way, too." And it kind of changes the way you approach things. And I remember reading about Herb Kelleher, which is the founder of Southwest Airlines.

[David Senra]
You know, it's such a crazy story that, like, in an industry where bankruptcy is the most common, you know, outcome, his company was profitable for 40 straight years, which is nuts.

[Brad Jacobs]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
And he's like a nut job. He's drinking a fifth of bourbon every day. He's chain-smoking cigarettes.

[Brad Jacobs]
That's not me, but yes.

[David Senra]
No, no, no.

[Brad Jacobs]
I don't advocate that.

[David Senra]
No, he wouldn't sleep. Just hilarious stories in his life. And I thought he just lived on the edge, and completely, like, all in. There's a great story about this, where they tried to get him... You know, he would chain-smoke, and then drink a fifth of bourbon every day. But then he had, like, prostate cancer, or something like that. And they're like, "You should stop smoking." He's like, "I don't smoke with my prostate."

[David Senra]
But that's not the thing that I remember. The thing that I loved, in an interview one time, they were like, "You deal with a ton of stress. How do you handle it?" He goes, "I don't handle it. I like it."

[Brad Jacobs]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
He wanted the stress.

[Brad Jacobs]
Yes.

[David Senra]
He's like, "I want to be in the game."

[Brad Jacobs]
Yes.

[David Senra]
He was an attorney. He didn't start his company... It was his first company. He was an attorney until he was 35 years old, and then he decides, "Hey, I'm going to try to do a intrastate airline." And then he had, it was, like, four years of legal fights before he could even take his first flight. He's just like, "I love this shit. This is what I want. I want the pressure."

[Brad Jacobs]
Passion.

[David Senra]
What I love about this is... It's in your book. You constantly talk about the other people, the other entrepreneurs, other investors, other CEOs that you learned from. The acknowledgments to all these maxims from all these other brilliant people. You talk about, obviously Ludwig Jesselson. I read something on LinkedIn about other... I want to talk about the other people that you've learned from, the other founders, CEOs, executives that you admire. I want to start with Fred Smith, since he passed away.

[Brad Jacobs]
Oh.

[Brad Jacobs]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
I read his biography probably, like, four or five years ago. And tell me if I'm wrong, you know more about this industry than I do, it just seems like FedEx had to be one of the most difficult operational companies to ever invent.

[Brad Jacobs]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
You're talking about somebody who wanted pressure.

[Brad Jacobs]
And complex. Yeah.

[David Senra]
Yeah, the complexity. You wrote on LinkedIn that you never miss an opportunity to spend time with him, and that you admired him. Could you just tell why?

[Brad Jacobs]
So, Fred endorsed my book.

[David Senra]
Yeah, I saw.

[Brad Jacobs]
And I was very touched that he did that.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
Because he was a competitor.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
Literally the Wall Street competitor, and he still endorsed my book.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
So, Fred was an amazing guy. I mean, this is a very special... You meet people in life that are just special, that have certain integrity. So, I met Fred for the first time in 2013. And I came out of nowhere from this industry. I'd gotten in in 2011, but I really started doing a bunch of acquisitions out of nowhere. And suddenly, like, I was on the front pages of the trade journals.

[David Senra]
Mm-hmm.

[Brad Jacobs]
And I was in Atlanta at the National Association of Manufacturers, the NAM Conference, and Fred was the keynote. So, I was in the audience watching him. And somebody said, "What do you think of Brad Jacobs?" I go, "Oh my God." My heart starts beating. It's like, "Oh my God, Fred Smith's about to, like, destroy me. My brand is going to be completely crushed. You know, the icon of the industry is going to say, 'Oh yeah, I don't believe he's really...'" And he said, "I really like watching that guy work." He said, "He is coming into this industry with courage, and buying things left and right, and has big goals and big ambitions, and I'm going to keep an eye on that guy."

[Brad Jacobs]
And I cried. I said, "Wow, Fred Smith's, like, saying great stuff." So, I went up to him afterwards, when the speech was over, and I said, "Mr. Smith, I'm Brad Jacobs. I really appreciate what you said." He said, "Well, first of all, I'm Fred, not Mr. Smith." And that was the beginning of a great, great friendship. And we got together many, many times. Of course, he was on the business council. He was the longest serving member of the business council, over a quarter of a century.

[David Senra]
Oh, wow.

[Brad Jacobs]
And I go to every business council meeting I possibly can, to meet other CEOs, and to hear what other people are thinking. He was just a generous guy. This was a guy who had vision, he had passion. Talk about grit. I mean, he was flying around all the time everywhere. Vietnam, he was flying helicopters with people shooting bullets at him, to get Marines who had been... He was a Marine.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
Marines who had been killed, but you don't leave any Marine behind. He'd go in there. He's risking his life with bullets, like, shooting at him, to go get the remains of a dead Marine.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
Putting his own life on the line. He got a Purple Heart, he got a Silver, he got a Bronze. I mean, he's a serious, courageous, high-integrity guy. And everybody loved Fred. Everybody loved Fred.

[David Senra]
In the opening paragraph of his biography is the craziest opening paragraph I ever heard. I'm just going to, like, paraphrase it. Essentially, like, you know, he's in debt, he ran through, like his dad's Greyhound bus millions. I think he'd burned through, like, $15 or $20 million. His planes were about to be confiscated. He just got fired by his board. The FBI is investigating him.

[Brad Jacobs]
He goes to Vegas.

[David Senra]
Yes. And then they're like, "He thought..." And he was, like, 30 years old at the time, so still young, but he refused to let his Federal Express dream die. And that line was just like, "He thought of suicide." And then the next paragraph is like, "But the idea of Fred jumping out of window is ludicrous. He's more likely to throw somebody out of a window." He was just like a guy that you could... He was like The Terminator. Like, he just wouldn't stop coming. There's a few lines...

[Brad Jacobs]
No, I don't recognize that in him.

[David Senra]
Okay.

[Brad Jacobs]
So, throwing someone out the window.

[David Senra]
At 30, I think he might have been a little different.

[Brad Jacobs]
Well, maybe.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
But I was a direct competitor of him in transportation, and logistics.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
Not in package, because we didn't do package, but pretty much all the other lines of business, we competed against him.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
He was generous. He was charitable. He would always take a meeting with me. He used to come to my house, we'd spend hours and hours and hours talking about everything.

[David Senra]
This is what is so special. I know it's part of humanity in general, but entrepreneurship in particular, is just like, you see this over and over again, just how generous these people are with their...

[Brad Jacobs]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
Because they know how f****** hard it is.

[Brad Jacobs]
It is, yeah.

[David Senra]
They just went through all this, and now we might be 15, 20, 30 years different in age, but it's just like, Ludwig Jesselson did when you were 23, and in many cases, like what you did for the book.

[Brad Jacobs]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
Like, think about Sam Walton, right? He wrote his autobiography. Cancer was all over his body. He was in pain. He knows his time is towards the end. And what does he do? He spends a big chunk of the last time he had left saying, "This is what I learned in my six decade long career." That is a gift to future generations.

[Brad Jacobs]
Yes.

[Brad Jacobs]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
And then, in the book, they're like, somebody... I love this part, because in the book, they're like, "People ask me all the time, could another Walmart story happen?" He's like, "Yeah, it's probably happening right now." And it was Jeff Bezos going around with his copy of the book, writing it, annotating it, giving it to the executives, the early executives at Amazon. It's such a beautiful thing that Fred would do that. It's a beautiful thing what you did for your book.

[Brad Jacobs]
So, Fred and Amazon didn't get along.

[David Senra]
No, no, no. I'm saying, but, like, in general. Yeah, obviously.

[Brad Jacobs]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
Well, yeah.  

[David Senra]
I can see why. But my point being is the transfer of... Even for competitors. Fred was your competitor, but he's transferring knowledge to you.

[Brad Jacobs]
Absolutely.

[David Senra]
I don't think people understand how much that go... I'm glad you just said that, because, yeah, you can see it in the books. You hear stories like that all...

[Brad Jacobs]
He endorsed my book.

[David Senra]
Exactly. You hear stories like that all the time in private.

[Brad Jacobs]
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[David Senra]
And for you to say that, I think, is really important. There's a few things I pulled out from his biography that just remind me of you. And I'm curious if you agree with some of these things. One, the amount of...

[Brad Jacobs]
If it's about Fred Smith, if I don't have that trait, I should work on getting it.

[David Senra]
Okay, well, then perfect. The amount of information. So, like, think about this. He started FedEx in the '60s, I think, something like that. No, after Vietnam, so maybe early '70s. But in the '80s, he says that he estimated, during the 1980s, he spent four hours a day reading. He says he found he relied quite heavily on his own vision, backed by assimilating information, which you've mentioned multiple times so far, from many different disciplines at once. You talked about that in meetings, you talked about in trade journals, you talked about all the research you do, right? This is his quote, though, that I want to read to you. "The common trait of people who supposedly have vision is they spend a lot of time reading and gathering information, and then synthesize it until they come up with an idea." That sounds like you to me.

[Brad Jacobs]
I like that, yeah. Going back to what I was saying before, you don't want to be rigid in your thinking. You want to be open-minded, you want to be flexible, you want to be scientific about it, that if new evidence comes along that disproves your theory, then modify your theory. Go by the evidence, go by the facts. You want to interact with people who you respect, and you want to be picking their brain all the time.

[David Senra]
The way I describe it, it's like you're also alive and paying attention. Like, the story in your book where you're, like, reading a magazine in bed on a Sunday morning, and you read about these waste management companies making, like, $500 million in profit.

[Brad Jacobs]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
You're like, "Whoa, what?" Like, they're picking up trash from one spot, and bringing it to another.

[Brad Jacobs]
Right.

[Brad Jacobs]
Right.

[David Senra]
I need to learn about this industry. But that's my point is people like Fred, people like you, I think, you know, there's a ton of people that have the same thing where it's like the whole world is like a classroom, if you're actually paying attention. Like, you can pick up ideas all over the place.

[Brad Jacobs]
So, the waste management business, I contrast it to the oil business. The oil business was a lot more complex.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
We were negotiating complicated long-term contracts, and chartering vessels, and negotiating processing agreements with big major oil companies, and hedging. I mean, it was a very complicated, complex business. When I read that about the garbage business, I said, "That is so much easier, picking up..." That's a simple business. They move some garbage, and send out an invoice. So, I definitely think I can do that, and it seems like they make a lot of money. And the trend seemed in the right direction. So, yeah.

[David Senra]
Oh, and the application of technology.

[Brad Jacobs]
Right. Always.

[David Senra]
I love how in the end of your book, you have essentially ordered some key technology developed by humans, starting, you know, back 300,000 years ago, and you move forward. I thought that was a beautiful way to just put that in the appendix.

[Brad Jacobs]
So, I got that from Kurzweil, by the way. Ray Kurzweil.

[David Senra]
Oh.

[Brad Jacobs]
So, Ray Kurzweil, huge mentor of mine. Only met him once, but met him for about six hours.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
But I've read every book he's written. I've read every article about him. I see every YouTube he's... I mean, I'm a Ray Kurzweil fan. And what I read in "The Singularity is Near," in 2005, 2006, when that book came out, was amazing, where it was a chronology of the universe going...

[David Senra]
Mm-hmm.

[Brad Jacobs]
You know my meditation, I go back to space and time.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
So, a kindred spirit here.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
Someone who thinks in large scale of time. And one of the key things that has happened over the last 13 billion years, and reducing that down to a couple hundred points, I thought that was real helpful. So, I modified it a bit, and made it more specific to business, things that would be applicable to business. But the main trend, going back to Mr. Jesselson about you've got to get the main trend right, the main trend for the last two million years had been humans creating tools, AKA technology, to do things, to outsource to those things that do better than us, and free up our time. So, whether it was fire, whether it was a wheel, or whether it was the printing press, and more recently, all the digital electronic stuff we've done, and all of the internet, and now artificial intelligence, and robotics, and nanotechnology, this is the trend.

[Brad Jacobs]
The main trend in life, and therefore in business, is technology. Outsourcing our senses, outsourcing our memory, outsourcing now our intellect, our speech, to computers, to the cloud. This is big. This is really, really big. So, when I looked at 55 different industries, before I picked Building Products, I ruled out a bunch of them, and said, "This looks like an interesting industry, but I think AI and automation are going to kibosh it."

[David Senra]
Uh-huh.

[Brad Jacobs]
And I didn't do it. And I mentioned in the book, there was one particular online education company, it was called Chegg. And I said, "I don't know, it seems like you got a good business, but I think the AI is going to come in and basically do that for free." Well, you know, and I said, "I think the stock might come down." Well, stock came down a lot, you know, from 50 to single digits.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
So, fortunately, I made a good prediction there. As Yogi Berra said, "Predictions are difficult, particularly when they're about the future." But that turned out to be a good prediction. Why was that a good prediction? Because, to me, I'm looking at it saying, "The main trend, the long-term trend, is to use technology to do things that we've been doing ourselves." And so, I'm always trying to look at these different workstreams and say, "Is that something that can be automated? Is that something that's going to be AI or robotics going forward?" And then capitalizing on that.

[David Senra]
And the opportunity to always do something slightly better, which is invent tools to do so, the technology.

[Brad Jacobs]
Sure.

[David Senra]
It even starts out when you were talking about collecting...

[Brad Jacobs]
Sometimes a lot better, not slightly better.

[David Senra]
But the good thing is, like, this is not exclusive to the time we live in. It's a constant throughout our experience.

[Brad Jacobs]
Some years.

[David Senra]
You can go and look at... Like, when you guys were collecting all... This is, you said, before fax, before email, you were collecting all the information for Amerex, you know, 40 years ago.

[Brad Jacobs]
Yes, yes.

[Brad Jacobs]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
And then the waste management, when you're like, "Hey, like, I should get into this." And then you realize, "Wait, they're not even using technology to figure out the most efficient route."

[Brad Jacobs]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
This constant application of technology is one of the things I'm glad you... It was on my notes, but I'm glad you directed the conversation there, because the way I thought about this was really crystallized in my mind when I read Andrew Carnegie's autobiography, right? Which was probably written 130 years ago. And for whatever reason, if you talk to somebody today, they don't think of, like, the production of steel as technology, which is a crazy thing. At the time, it was like they literally invented a new and a better way, and then everything in the world was going to be made out of this.

[Brad Jacobs]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
And so, what I do is, like, when I'm finished reading a book, again, we go back to this idea that you and I share, we have to, like, distill it. You're not going to remember 250 pages, but you'll remember a paragraph, or a sentence, if you can. And Andrew's a young person getting into an existing industry. It's a new industry, but it's still an existing industry. Most of his competitors were much older, and they were very, to your point, resistant to change. You cannot be resistant to change.

[Brad Jacobs]
No, no.  

[David Senra]
You have to embrace the major trend, which is what your mentor told you. And so, I was hearing the criticism that his competitors... Almost like when you were in that business and the guy took you out to lunch, and he's like, "Slow down. I used to be the first, now I'm the second." You know, that's a terrible way to do business. It's like, take your competitor out to lunch and be like, "Stop being better than me."

[Brad Jacobs]
It just motivates you.

[David Senra]
Yeah, it's not going to work. But the way I would summarize the main theme from Andrew Carnegie's book, that then reappears over and over again in all these stories, is invest in technology, the savings compound. It can give you an advantage over slower-moving competitors, and can be the difference between a profit and a loss. And you see that over and over and over again. It doesn't matter if it's steel, waste management, software, over and over again. It's like the best entrepreneurs, the best CEOs, the best executives, they're not scared of technology. If you're scared of it, you're going to get destroyed by it. They embrace it, and they invest heavily in it.

[David Senra]
And again, the benefit I have is, like, I'm reading about a chocolate company that was started 80 years ago, and they have some of the most advanced robots making chocolate. I'm reading about a tire company from 150 years ago. They watch their costs, and they're very efficient in how they spend their time and their money, but they invest heavily in technology. No one thinks of Walmart as a technology company, but if you go back in 1979, right, Sam's in his 60s, and they're like, "Hey, we're doing everything by hand."

[Brad Jacobs]
Mm-hmm.

[David Senra]
"Our business is getting way too complex. We have all these distribution centers." Think about the logistics. You would know all this. Moving all this material where it needs to be at the right time. "We need to invest in computers." And Sam, at first, he heard, "computer," he heard, "overhead," he heard, "expense." "I can't do that." And then he was slowly allowing himself to be convinced by the accounts people on his team, and when he decided to invest, he wouldn't dabble. He invested $500 million, in 1979 dollars. Who knows what that would be today, in the most advanced computer system to handle his logistics and distribution. And that was an edge that not another retailer on the planet had, or at least in America had, that he had the technological edge over the rest of his competitors.

[Brad Jacobs]
In business, you always want to be finding waste, because there always is some, and eliminate it. You always want to find inefficiencies, and there always are. You want to reduce them. Technology helps you with that. Walmart's a big tech company. So, my chief supply chain officer came out of Walmart, a very, very sophisticated guy. It's all about technology, all about using tech in order to get the data, and then being very data-driven.

[David Senra]
I would argue that if anybody... I don't think you could be the leader in any industry and not also... We don't think of them as tech companies, because we think tech has to be like Google or Facebook. It's like, no, they're all tech companies.

[Brad Jacobs]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
I wanted to do more than just, like, American entrepreneurs, just because, you know...

[Brad Jacobs]
But we have an outsized share of entrepreneurs here.

[David Senra]
Oh. Everybody's like, "You should do more X, Y, Z." It's just like, "Why are they all American?" And I understand that. And my point being is like, if you think about entrepreneurship in the market economy, it's only a couple hundred years old. It's like, well, America's kind of dominated there. So, it makes sense if 75% or 80% of my episodes are about that. But I did one on one of the most successful entrepreneurs in Europe named Amancio Ortega.

[Brad Jacobs]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
And I didn't know anything about him. All I know is that...

[Brad Jacobs]
Is it H&M?

[David Senra]
Zara.

[Brad Jacobs]
Oh, Zara. So, Inditex.

[David Senra]
Inditex.

[Brad Jacobs]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
Yeah, yeah. And then you're reading about this, and you're like, it's not a fashion company. It is a technology company. What does that mean? He built the logistics and the system to say... Me and you can walk out on the street right now, and we can see, "Oh, there's a trend here where all these ladies are wearing dresses with whatever, you know, red flowers on them." And he can take that idea and put it through his system, and he can manufacture dresses with red flowers in, you know, 25 different countries in seven days. That is technology. And he says, "We're a technology company with a chain of stores attached to it."

[Brad Jacobs]
So, Zara Inditex is a big customer of GXO Logistics, one of the companies we spun off from XPO. And GXO runs a lot of their warehouses in Europe, and it's exactly what you're saying. It's e-commerce. It's trying to do things very efficiently, and very quickly, and very accurately, and you need technology to do that. You need robots, and you need AI. Every business, every single business, is going to see more automation and more AI. People have to get on the program on that, or they're going to be dinosaurs.

[David Senra]
100%. I'm going to go back to Fred Smith. He says something that sounds...

[Brad Jacobs]
Fred was into tech.

[David Senra]
Oh, of course.

[Brad Jacobs]
I mean, in a big way.

[David Senra]
Yeah, of course.

[Brad Jacobs]
He's always talking about this new invention he just did, removing packages, and robots. And we were trying to figure out some way we could use automation at LTL, because he was a big LTL. FedEx is the biggest, actually, in LTL, and XPO's a big LTL. The automation's not there yet, because all the closed spaces, and all the people still involved in that, but it's going to be. Package, you have automation though. Package automation is much further ahead.

[David Senra]
Yes. So, there's something we haven't touched on, and I have a question for you. And this is a quote from Fred in his biography. It says, "You have to be absolutely brutal in the management of your time."

[Brad Jacobs]
Oh, yes.

[David Senra]
Do you have any insights into...

[Brad Jacobs]
Look, if you want someone to disagree with that, you're going to have to talk to somebody else, because I'm 100% in agreement with it.

[David Senra]
No, no.

[David Senra]
I'm curious how you do this, though.

[Brad Jacobs]
So, time. So, when you're a CEO, when you're an executive, you only got two things. You got time, and you got capital. And how you deploy that time, and how you deploy that capital equals results.

[David Senra]
Mm-hmm.

[Brad Jacobs]
So, it's your time, and it's the time of the people of the organization. So, when I was running XPO, we had about 150,000, a little more, employees worldwide. See, each one of those worked... The senior management worked long hours, but the average worker worked eight hours a day. So, you had eight times... You had about 1.2 million hours a day of work getting done. If you've got people very focused, and very motivated, and very well-trained, and feel good about the company, and feel good about their job, that productivity of that 1.2 million hours a day is going to be a lot more than if the conditions I just mentioned are not present. So, managing people's time, putting them in the right priorities, and ranking what people should be spending their time on, is very, very, very, very important to success.

[Brad Jacobs]
Now, how do I spend my time? I spend my time deliberately, and consciously, and intentionally on the things that I think make the most amount of value for the company.

[David Senra]
How many things, at any given time, are you having to focus on?

[Brad Jacobs]
A fair amount. So, if you're CEO, you're managing, you know, 15, 20 different things always. You're managing people, you manage technology, you're managing budgets, you're managing investors, you're managing infrastructure, you're managing transportation, you're managing logistics, you're managing pricing, you're managing procurement with the vendors, you're managing customer relations, you're managing sales. You manage Salesforce excellence. I mean, there's about 20 things that are your life. Like, that's what a good CEO does. The problem with a lot of CEOs is they've come up through just sales or operations, and they're good at that, but they kind of just delegate the other 15 things. That's really part of the CEO job. You look at the great CEOs, the CEOs who've created a lot of alpha, a lot of shareholder value. They've been in each one of those 20 or so things.

[Brad Jacobs]
You talk to a Dave Cote, or you talk to an Ed Breen, you talk to Larry Culp, you can talk about any of those 20 things, and they have things to say, and you can learn from them. You talk to CEOs who haven't created a lot of value, and are not really good at this game, they'll know four, or five, or six or even half of those 20 things, but they don't do the other. They don't do the other part. You got to be in all of them. But you're not in all those things in equal measure. Some things you don't have to spend as much time on. The people things and compensation things, I actually spend a lot of time on. So, that's core. That's critical to get right. That's something that if you get wrong, you're wasted. Budgeting, I spend a lot of time going on the budget. Customer satisfaction, I spend a lot of time on that. The employee engagements, going out to the field, doing the town halls, doing the Zooms, I'm all-in on that.

[David Senra]
But when you say that the CEOs that you think might not be doing the best they could, are they delegating too much?

[Brad Jacobs]
Yeah. They're afraid to do the... I'm making generalizations, because there's always exceptions.

[David Senra]
Yeah, please.

[Brad Jacobs]
But generally speaking, what I find is they gravitate to the stuff they like, and that they're good at, and they kind of just don't do the stuff that they don't like, or they aren't very good at. And you can't. You've got to be... If you want to be a good CEO and have a high-performing company, and be in the top decile of stock performance... Like, United Rentals and XPO were both top 10 stock performers in the last decade. That's not random that both those companies were. Because it was the same principles, the same structures. You've got to have CEOs, and they did, that are in the whole thing, and understand from A to Z what running a business is, and how you create shareholder value, and see the whole picture of the levers.

[Brad Jacobs]
So, I always tell friends who are... And I have a lot of friends who are portfolio managers or analysts on the buy side. I say, "When you bring a management team in, you need to ask them, 'What's your stock price going to be five years from now? And what are the levers that I have to believe that's going to get you there?'" And if that CEO tells you, "That's a great question. I'll get back to you." Short that stock. Please don't buy that stock, because that's the first thing the CEO has to know. First thing a CEO and the senior management team has to know with great specificity, "Here's where we are right now, the stock price. We want to get massive outperformance and get to here. That's great. That's just the beginning. Here are the levers of how I get there. Here are the levers of the things that we must do, as an organization, that will improve our profitability, improve our multiple, generate free cash flow, just how are we going to get to there?"

[Brad Jacobs]
And in my case, it's not that hard, because when you do the graph, the first two bars, when you do the levers, comprise the vast majority of what you have to do to create the value, and those are buying companies right, meaning being very disciplined in what you pay, and looking at lots of acquisition candidates at the same time, so you don't fall in love with any one of them, and so you have alternatives, and you don't...

[David Senra]
Mm-hmm.

[David Senra]
What's the distribution there? So, you've done over 500 acquisitions throughout your...

[Brad Jacobs]
My teams and I have. I like to give credit to my team.

[David Senra]
Yeah, you and your team.

[Brad Jacobs]
They deserve it.

[David Senra]
For sure. So, you and your team have done over 500 acquisitions. You've looked at how many?

[Brad Jacobs]
Thousands and thousands. I mean, many thousands.

[David Senra]
Like, 100,000? Do you think it'd be that huge?

[Brad Jacobs]
I've lost count.

[David Senra]
Okay, so you didn't count.

[Brad Jacobs]
I don't know if it's 100,000. And when I say look, looked at in depth.

[David Senra]
Yeah, yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
But in the thousands, many thousands.

[David Senra]
Okay. Going back to the time management though, I think, especially in, like, the age that people are growing up in, where there's a shortened attention span, a lack of focus, in my opinion, and like, really easy to give in to distraction.

[Brad Jacobs]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
You sound like you're almost, not impervious to distraction, that's not the right way to put it, because I know how you're going to be humble when you describe yourself, but how do you avoid being pulled into things that are not prioritized?

[Brad Jacobs]
So many, many people know Warren Buffett. I barely know Warren Buffett.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
I met him a few times, but he's not a close personal friend. I wish he was, but he's not. But I know a lot of people who are close to me who are close to him, and most of them have the same story, so he must tell this to everybody. He tells people, "I'm the richest person. I'm the wealthiest person in the world." And they say, "Well, Mr. Buffett, you were for one period of time, but I think you're number four," or whatever.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
He says, "No, no. I can prove that I'm the wealthiest person in the world." They say, "Why is that?" And he reaches in, he brings out his day timer, you know, his calendar.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
And he says, "Monday, I have one appointment. Tuesday, I have no appointments."

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
"Wednesday, I have no appointments." Because he controls his time.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
He controls his time, and he has no problem saying no and refusing people time. It's very difficult to...

[David Senra]
No, I think I have a problem saying no, though. Like, this is why I'm asking you these questions.

[Brad Jacobs]
Well, you need to solve that problem. That's a problem you've identified. That's great. That's half of the solution to the problem. Now you need to work on it.

[David Senra]
He has a great line, where he's like, "The difference between successful people and really successful people is really successful people say no to almost everything." So, like, you have 20, you know, whatever the number is...

[Brad Jacobs]
Some truth to that.

[David Senra]
Yeah, so whatever the number is, like, you have 20 things that, you know, you're focused on at the CEO level at this moment. You know where you want to spend your time, what you're best at. We talked about incentives, and then recruiting talent. But, like, you also are one of the most, and you're not going to like this, but one of the most famous and wealthiest people in the world. You have an unbelievable amount of people that want your time. Like, you seem to be disciplined from the outside of saying no to a lot of things. Is that something you learned in the last, like, five years, 10 years? Were you like that when you were younger?

[Brad Jacobs]
So, first of all, I'm not that famous. I'm well-known in the...

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
In the business community, yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
The business community, I'm well-known.

[David Senra]
That's the only community I care about, though.

[Brad Jacobs]
I'd agree.

[David Senra]
No, the average, yeah, for sure.

[Brad Jacobs]
And I'm not one of the richest people in the world.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
There's many people who are vastly richer than I am. But in my own modest way, I've created some level of recognition, and some wealth, and more importantly, wealth to others.

[David Senra]
You should see my inbox when it comes to you. But that's fine. That's fine.

[Brad Jacobs]
Well, I appreciate that.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
But in context, it's not...

[David Senra]
It's funny because people...

[Brad Jacobs]
And the way you said it is a little grandiose. I don't think I am that.

[David Senra]
I know.

[David Senra]
This is why every time I say these things to you, you say things like this.

[Brad Jacobs]
Well, because I want to correct the record.

[David Senra]
That's fine.

[Brad Jacobs]
I don't want to get grandiose in the wrong...

[David Senra]
No, it's a smart move. But the funny thing is when I did the "I Had Breakfast with Brad Jacobs" episode. Now, people are like, flooded me, like, "Can you introduce us?" I'm like, "No. You have to figure out how to get to him yourself. You can't do that."

[Brad Jacobs]
So, when I was researching, after XPO, I was looking for my next thing.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
No, no, excuse me, after United Rentals, I was looking for my next thing.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
And I was looking at asset management. And I went to Chicago, and I wanted to get an appointment with Ken Griffin, who now I've met, now I know, and he's a neighbor down in Florida.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
I know him well enough.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
And, you know, I think he'd return my call if I called him. But he turned down the meeting. He wouldn't take the meeting. I said, "Wow, that's kind of humbling."  And, "But you can't even, like, spend an hour?" He says, "No." Ken is a very... And I think you interviewed him, right?

[David Senra]
No, not yet.

[Brad Jacobs]
Oh, you probably should. You definitely should.

[David Senra]
I want to meet him.

[Brad Jacobs]
Very interesting guy.

[David Senra]
I want to meet him.

[Brad Jacobs]
Very.

[David Senra]
So, if you can introduce me, please.

[Brad Jacobs]
He could be president of the United States some day.

[David Senra]
So, this is the good thing about when I do... Remember, most of the people I study are dead. When I do episodes on people that are living, this is why I was asking you some of the questions, because like, I'll do this episode, it reaches a very valuable community, and they're really helpful, and then I get all these crazy stories about, "This guy's even more remarkable than your episodes." And I got it about you, and I got it about Ken. And then I was like, "Oh, I definitely want to meet Ken."

[Brad Jacobs]
Ken's in a different league than I am.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
Ken is like way, way up there.

[David Senra]
He's a very fascinating person, yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
Oh, you should definitely do something on him. You asked how I manage my time. So, I have a chief of staff. He used to work in the Oval Office, and manage the most important person in the world's calendars.

[David Senra]
Oh, yeah.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
I mean, he's always very, very good.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
And more importantly, he understands what I'm doing. He understands my priorities, and he understands what I was talking to you before. Like, the two most important things that I got to do are have organic revenue growth, better than the competition, and a margin expansion, and then everything follows. So, he understands that. He understands that in order to do that, I have to focus on people, I have to focus on technology. He understands the different levers to do that.

[David Senra]
So, you run every decision between those two...

[Brad Jacobs]
Yeah, that's my framework. In business, my framework is... Because I've learned, if I do those two things... And it takes 100 different things to do those two things well. But if I do those two things well, I will create dramatic shareholder value. If I buy companies at significant lower multiples of profit than I trade at, Monday morning at 7:00, after we announce the acquisition, I've already created alpha for my shareholders. That's a nice way to start the week.

[Brad Jacobs]
Number two, if I then double the profit over the next three to five years, then I'll get a nice multiple, and if I generate... Those are the two main things I need to focus on. He understands that. Now, what he also understands is all the components. Because, you know, in the monthly operating reviews, and all the correspondence, we're very good at communicating with each other what's important and what's not important. So, he knows my priorities, and therefore he's a great gatekeeper.

[David Senra]
Is there anybody that could tell you when you're getting off track from what you profess to say is important to you?

[Brad Jacobs]
Everybody around me. So, if I'm spending too much time on... Like, I'm going to catch heck for being on this podcast with my team.

[David Senra]
Dude, you're the man for doing this, by the way. I really appreciate it.

[Brad Jacobs]
No, I love doing it, and I love you.

[David Senra]
Yeah, yeah. Well, and we'll also get to, like... I do think, you know, one of the things that you obviously accomplished with the book, and like, I try to help amplify with my work, is like, just how millions of people are going to benefit from your lived experience.

[Brad Jacobs]
Oh.

[David Senra]
You have 40, almost 50 years, let's say 40 years, of experience as an entrepreneur. It's like, how many people that have ever lived life that have done that? Most people, you know, unfortunately, they quit, or they fail, or whatever the case is. Like, you have so much to teach the world.

[Brad Jacobs]
Can I comment on something about the time?

[David Senra]
Yeah, go ahead.

[Brad Jacobs]
There's a phrase I used to use, and you brought it out of me, so I'm going to start using it again. I haven't used it recently. It's WOT-WOM.

[David Senra]
What?

[Brad Jacobs]
W-O-T-W-O-M.

[David Senra]
Okay.

[Brad Jacobs]
Waste of time, waste of money. So, when people are brainstorming, we're kind of, "Let's do this, let's do that," someone can say, “WOT-WOM." Everybody knows that's a waste of time, waste of money. Like, how does what you're suggesting we do influence, directly or even indirectly, growing organic revenue growth, or increasing the margin? And if it doesn't, WOT-WOM.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
It's a waste of time, waste of money. You have limited time, and you have limited capital. You've got to be directing that time, and deploying that capital, so that things have the greatest returns. Otherwise, it's WOT-WOM.

[David Senra]
And I'm so glad... First of all, that's hilarious. I'm glad that you said that you actually have other people around you doing this, too. Because I am kind of skeptical that no human can hit their goals and what they want to do, you know, 100% of the time. I can't imagine, you know, the complexity of running FedEx. And this guy is just like, "No, you have to be brutal." "Absolutely brutal" is the word. Absolutely brutal in time management, yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
Good time management, yeah.

[David Senra]
I think there's a lot of things. There's another thing that Fred Smith said that, again, like, when I'm reading about Fred... When I was going through and rereading all my highlights from his biography, I wasn't really thinking about Fred, I was thinking about you. You know? Like, this, to me, feels like a lot of what I've learned from you. And this is a direct quote from Fred. He says, "I believe that a man who expects to win out in business, without self-denial and self-improvement, stands as about as much a chance as a prize fighter would stand if he started a ring battle without having gone through intensive training. Natural ability, even when accompanied by the spirit to win, is never sufficient." If I look at the way you were building businesses when you were 23, compared to, you know, you can pick the first billion-dollar company, and then you look at the second, or the third, or the fourth, or the fifth, or the seventh, it's like you're not even... Like, you'd go back and kick that dude's a** because of all the stuff you have learned since then.

[Brad Jacobs]
Well, you do get better as you keep... With experience, like, in anybody and anything. But the principles are pretty the same. If you look at all my companies, the essential concepts are the same, that you want to have fantastic people, that you want to have rules of engagement with those people where you get along and go kill the competition instead of killing each other, that you want to have fair compensation so that everybody's in on the action here.

[David Senra]
You kept repeating that. When did you understand the power of incentives? Because you talk about compensation incentives a lot.

[Brad Jacobs]
Very early. Very early in the oil brokerage days, because I used to have... We had tables. There were like 10 brokers at a table. And every month, we paid people monthly, I'd meet with everyone and say, "Look, we made so much this month in the bonus pool. What percent do you think you contributed to it?" And then I would add it up, and it would always come to like 300%. It never added up to 100%. So, I had to have these difficult conversations with people, and say, "Look, you know, I think you're inflated with how much of the... " But what I realized very early on is people are coming to work not because they love me. They might love me. I might love them. But that's not their main motivation. The main motivation why they're coming to work is to make money. Make money for themselves, and more often to make money for others, to make money for their families, for their spouses, their kids, or whoever. And that's important. To understand the motivation of the other person is really, really important.

[Brad Jacobs]
It's called theory of mind, where you understand... And a child gets that after a few years. They don't have it at first. And there've been a lot of psychological studies done on that. It's important to look at things from what's motivating the other person, what's driving the other person, what's important to that other person. That's good in deal-making. That's good in compensation. That's good in building teams. That's good in customer relations. That good with vendor relations. You need to understand their point of view. You can't just be in your mind. You can't just say, "Here's what I want. Here's what's important to me, and I'm a bully, and I'm going to go get it." Because then people are just going to stick their tongue out at you. They'll turn away and do something else. You have to have a partnership. You have to be trading with people all the time. You've got to be figuring out what will help them, what's good for them, and how can we make money together, not me at your expense, or you at my expense, but how can we go conquer the world together?

[David Senra]
I think you're a faster learner than me, because, like, I don't think I ever thought about incentives. I think Episode 97... So, this is probably, like, six years ago, that means I'd read 96 biographies before this. I get to "Poor Charlie's Almanack," and he's really the one that got... Charlie was the one that really put into my mind about how important this was, because I thought he was one of... I still think he's the wisest person I ever met, and probably one of the most brilliant people. And he said something fascinating in that book where he's like, "I've been in the top 5% of my age cohort my entire life, of understanding the power of incentives, and how it drives human behavior, and there's not a year that goes by..." And he's probably in his 60s when he said this. "There's not a year that goes by where I don't underestimate the power of incentives." And he would repeat it over and over again. "You show me the incentive, I will show you the outcome."

[Brad Jacobs]
Remember I told you a few minutes ago that I give everyone on the top level of the company a bunch of equity, but it's locked up for five years.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
So, I meet with my CHRO, who's fabulous, regularly, usually twice a month, and she shows me a spreadsheet of how much the equity is going to be worth at $50 a share, $75 a share, at $100 a share. And I look at that. I look at the numbers, and I say, "Okay, this person has something to work for. This person's on the team. That's something that I'm going to... I see them working really hard to get those numbers." Or I say, "Gee, you know, somehow or another we messed up the comp, and maybe we got to top the person up," or, "Wow, I can't take anything back, but maybe I gave too much equity after. Whatever, but at least I know where everyone's head is at, because I know what's in it for them."

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
You know, there's always that joke, I listen to a radio station WIFM, "What's In It For Me?" And people are generally... They don't care about you and me, David.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Brad Jacobs]
They care about them, which is normal. That's capitalism. That's free markets. That's a good thing.

[David Senra]
Yeah, I don't feel it's a negative thing at all. It's like we're all self-obsessed.

[Brad Jacobs]
It is what it is.

[David Senra]
But I do think you have a great line in the book, where you're like, "I built businesses all over the world." When you have 150,000 employees, they're spread throughout, you know, people are like, "Oh, it's all different cultures." Like, well, guess what? Money animates people everywhere.

[Brad Jacobs]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
For the whole point, you have a great line in the book. Like, they're not coming to work to make Brad Jacobs more money.

[Brad Jacobs]
Not at all.

[David Senra]
They're doing it for their families. I love this idea. I think it's really important to have a... And I think it's tied to your obsession with, like, the public markets, too, and what you said in your book about being very proud of building wealth, not just for yourself, but for school teachers, pension plans, nurses, firemen, and everything else.

[Brad Jacobs]
Firemen.

[David Senra]
So, like, the importance of having a mission bigger than yourself.

[Brad Jacobs]
Yes.

[David Senra]
I think, like, if you just live a completely selfish life, first of all, you would have stopped a long time ago. Like, you didn't need to... And in general, you wouldn't have to do this. And I've seen this in a couple different places, where Jeff Bezos... We talked about him a few times today, where his idea was when he started Amazon, he's like, "I want to build the world's most customer-centric company. So, I want to be an example not just to our employees and our customers, but to other companies to see, look how you can, over the long term, align the interest of the customer and the shareholder, perfectly aligned. They just have to be done so over the extremely long term." But this idea of, like, going... It drives me. It's like, I want to build wealth, you know, so my kids are proud of me, and I show them what it's like to chase after something and be deeply committed to it, and be passionate about it, and love it, and also make something that's better for other people.

[Brad Jacobs]
Sure.

[David Senra]
And if you do that automatically, you know, the family will prosper and everything else. So, I think that was one of my favorite parts of your book.

[Brad Jacobs]
Do you know? I think Amazon modified that mission statement now,  something with employee engagement, too.

[David Senra]
Do you remember what it was?

[Brad Jacobs]
Something about workplace, great workplace environment or something like that. The best workplace environment in the world.

[David Senra]
It is funny when you think about it, because it's one of... I had this conversation, actually, last night. I went to dinner with our mutual friend, Patrick O'Shaughnessy. He texted me this morning. He's like, "Make sure you tell Brad hi."

[Brad Jacobs]
Invest Like the Best.

[David Senra]
Yeah, 100%. And he was with us when we had breakfast here a few months ago. And we were having this discussion at dinner, with his family. I was like, "What is the most impressive company built in our lifetime?" And so, me and him were born in the '80s, because he said, "What about Microsoft?" I said, "Microsoft was in '70s." Like, it was before us. And I would say it's like, for me, the answer's Amazon. Like, it started in '97.  I can't think of another company started in the '90s, in terms of like, as impressive as what Jeff has built.

[Brad Jacobs]
A big success story.

[David Senra]
By reading your book, listening to your interviews, talking to you now, you kind of, for me personally, remove any self-imposed limit that I have, where I'm like, "Oh, like, there's no... I don't think Brad has a limit to what he thinks he can achieve. He thinks on a big scale automatically." Like, you just operate in a very big and ambitious way, where I think a lot of people have like self... There's like self-imposed ceilings, that are most likely invisible in many cases, right? If you want to build more wealth, you want to grow great companies, just find more customers to serve. It's a pretty straightforward process. But I do think one of the things that I absolutely love is, and it's the way I ended the episode, it's the way you ended the book, and I would summarize what I'm about to say here as, "Go all in. You only get one shot at life." And I think this is a perfect spot to wrap our discussion.

[David Senra]
And so, I'm just going to read from your book, to you, and you said, "The summer after eighth grade, I attended the Rhode Island Governor's School for the Gifted in Art and Music, a summer enrichment program for kids who've been nominated by their schools. I wasn't sure what to expect. On the first night, I was captivated by a speech given by one of the leaders. I remember goosebumps rising on my arms as he spoke. 'This program is a special opportunity, but it's up to you to take advantage of it. You have a choice. You can waste the next couple of months and not accomplish that much, or you can go all in. This is an opportunity to go deep on a project and do the best work you've ever done, but you have to decide if you want it.' I learned what it meant to go all in, the magical connection between intensity of focus, and the end result."

[David Senra]
This is, to me, the punchline. And I love this. "If I put my whole heart and soul into a project, I had it in me to create really cool stuff." Can you talk about the passion and going all in, and the advice that you'd have for other people listening to this?

[Brad Jacobs]
I'm reliving the goosebumps, literally. Physically, I'm feeling the tingling in my sensation, because that was in a critical moment in my life where I understood that it's up to you. You can diddle-daddle through life, and just kind of sleepwalk, and then die, or you can live life, you can embrace life, you can have big dreams, and go all in and find your passion, which for most people is not going to be business or making money, but whatever it is, that's what it is, and really achieve something fantastic. And for me, that's a big motivator.

[David Senra]
That was a perfect place to end. Thank you very much for writing the book. Thanks for taking the time. Brad, I really admire you. I've learned a lot from you, and now, I'm very humbled and privileged to call you a friend. I really appreciate it.

[Brad Jacobs]
Thank you, sir.

[David Senra]
Thank you very much.

[Brad Jacobs]
All the best.

[David Senra]
I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening, and leave a review. And make sure you listen to my other podcast, "Founders." For almost a decade, I have obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through "Founders."