Ego

is such an interesting one. That lesson is fascinating. Confusing people liking the work for liking you. I've never heard it phrased that way. And that is so damn interesting. Where else do you see ego rear its head, good or bad? It strikes me that ego is like a negative connotation. You don't want to have an ego, but you do want to be confident. You do want to be charismatic. You do want to be a good salesperson. Some of the things that high ego people might be good at. What other things have you learned about ego? That phrasing is so helpful. I

actually don't think that you build a great company with a giant ego. I don't think that exists. Sam Walton has a good idea about that. He's like, listen, your ego should use to drive you, but you should not be on public display. And he's like, I hire people at Walmart with big egos that know how to hide it. Because there is some weird thing where it drives you. What's the problem is when you make it apparent that you think that you're better than everybody else. In almost every story, you have a young entrepreneur that needs some help. They're usually helped by people that are older, have a lot more access to resources. So think about how people are funding private companies now. You have super smart and determined founders, a lot of potential. Who knows what a person like that is going to be in 10 or 20 years, but they need assistance, whether it's they need resources, they need personnel, they need money. What I realized this morning is there's this guy named Thomas Mellon. And Thomas Mellon is one of the most important people in American business history because he's the patriarch of the Mellon family dynasty. What he did is he made a lot of money before and after the American Civil War. He's like maybe 50 years old, super rich, owns a bunch of banks and stuff like that. He comes across a 21-year Henry Clay Frick. Henry Clay Frick shows a lot of potential at this time. What Mellon can't possibly know yet, 40 years in the future, Frick is going to be considered one of the best entrepreneurs to ever do it. So much so that Andrew Carnegie sees him and is like, I need this guy on my team. And then they have a falling out. There's a fantastic book called Meet You in Hell. I recommend everybody reads if you want to learn about Andrew Carnegie and Frick. It's about what Frick told him. They had a falling out. Later, when Andrew's about to die, he sends a letter to Frick. He's like, hey, let's reconcile. We're living in the same city. We live a few blocks away. Let's get together. And he writes back. He's like, I'll meet you in hell. What was fascinating is Mellon sees Frick. Frick is at the very beginning of building this Coke empire that's eventually going to be acquired by Carnegie's company. And Mellon sees him. He's like, oh, this is another me. This is me when I was younger. He approves the loan. Then Frick takes that money, immediately deploys it, starts scaling up because it's like, hey, I got an opportunity. I need to do this as fast as possible. Goes back to Mellon. I think he borrowed like $1,000. This is $1,800. So it's a lot more money than $1,000. So he borrowed $1,000. Goes back almost immediately says, give me $10,000. Melon's like, yo, what the hell are you doing, kid? So he sends one of his partners, he says, go check out this Frick guy. He seems he has potential to me, but I need to make sure this guy's not full of crap. So Melon's partner goes and shadows Frick, and he writes back to Melon. And he's like, the guy works in the coke plants all day long, studies his books at night, knows his business down to the ground, makes a loan. And that is the first hand up that he gets that causes him to build a monopoly in his industry. There was no one B to Frick's Coke empire. It was clearly him. What was fascinating is like, I didn't put this together the first time I read that book, because I probably read 150 books, 150 biographies since I read it the first time. But I had just recently been rereading books on John D. Rockefeller. And this guy named Jay Gold pops up in Rockefeller's biography, every single one, which is really weird. Everybody's read Titan, the most famous biography of John D. Rockefeller. What I did is I went in the bibliography of Titan, found a book that the author, Ron Chernow, used his research and ordered it. It's a very old book. It's like 40 something years old. It's very hard to find. I read that book and I'm like, wait, this is a biography of Rockefeller and there's an entire chapter based on Jay Gold. What the hell is happening here? And then you see when people would ask, Rockefeller is probably the most famous entrepreneur in history. And they asked him like, who's the best businessman you know? And he said, without hesitation, Jay Gold. Without hesitation. Then you have Cornelius Vanderbilt. This is another thing we should talk about is how these people wind up knowing each other. There is something to be like talking to other A players. And then you have Cornelius Vanderbilt, who's the richest person in America at the time, 40 or 50 years older than Jay Gold. And he's like, Jay Gold's the smartest person in America. So I was like, okay, what the hell happened? So the author actually sent me the book, a biography of Jay Gold, came out like 15 years ago. I think it's called like Dark Genius of Wall Street or something like that. These are formidable people saying this is the one. You got to pay attention to that. Why is that happening? So I'm reading Jay Gold's biography, same situation. He's like 20 years old, 21, needs a leg up, meets this older, more successful businessman. But where Mellon did is like, I'm successful, but he didn't even let his ego get in the way. He's like, I want to be this guy's partner. His success does not threaten me at all. The difference in Jay Gold's life is Jay Gold winds up taking on an older partner. This guy named Zadig Pratt, I think is his name. I'm going off memory here, so I might get his name wrong. But that guy was super rich, owned a ton of land in the Northeast at the time, owned 30 different factories that would produce leather goods. And all the different factories would have different partners. So he winds up doing a partnership. Jay winds up doing some surveying work for him on some of his land. And Zadok's like, oh, this guy's smart. I'll partner with him. I'll put up the money. I'll give you the expertise. And then you run with it. Well, Jay Gold is a straight up genius, way smarter than I'll ever be. And he runs with it. He'll hit you up for advice and money. But eventually he's like, oh, I got this. I can figure it out. He's coming up with ideas. The crazy thing about Jay is this guy's been in the leather business for 40 years. I'm coming up with ideas that he doesn't see. That threatens Zadok's ego. How do I know it's Zadok's ego? Because the guy was so rich, he started his own bank, printed his own currency. Guess whose face he put on his currency? His face. You know Mount Rushmore? In this town, there's like a big granite wall or a big rock formation. So Mount Rushmore, you got all the presidents on there. He hired somebody to carve his own face. Think about how egotistical you have to be. I want people to come to my town and see my giant head hovering above everybody. They started partnering. He didn't like that Jay stopped asking him for advice. He thought his success in Jay was managing his leather factory, they call them tanneries, better than his other partners. He didn't like that. He felt threatened. So he tried to maneuver and he said, hey, we're going to end the partnership. You have to either buy me out for $60,000, which is the money I put in, or I buy you out for 10, which is with the money you put in. He did that because he's like, this guy doesn't have 60 grand. Didn't know that Jay has a brain. He knew this was coming and he had secretly set up financing and he was waiting for that to happen. Rockefeller has the exact same story for his first partners in the oil industry. He had older partners to try to screw him. And he says a great line. He's like, well, they were talking so loud. My mind was running. What happens? Like, okay, I'm hitting this provision in our contract. You have to come up with 60 grand. Jay's like, here it is. And he takes off and running. You had the opportunity to partner with one of the greatest entrepreneurs to ever do it, and you fumbled it because of ego. How

often do these people, men and women, break the law or

enter the gray area of the law, building what they built? In Jay Gold's case, all the time, because the SEC was founded 40 years later to combat things that Jay did. This is 1800. There's no securities law. They did insane things. There's no antitrust act yet. You could say, okay, is there a person like Steve Jobs in history? I just said there is. Is there a person like Elon Musk? There probably is, especially people that try to sell and like overpromise in some domain. That's like Henry Kaiser, who was as famous in his day as Elon is today. There is not in the history of entrepreneurship an equivalent to Cornelius Vanderbilt. I read two books on him. If you said, okay, David, who alive today reminds you most of Cornelius Vanderbilt? I would say Vladimir Putin. Vanderbilt had nation-level wealth. If you could have turned his entire fortune liquid at the day he died, he would have controlled one out of every $20 in circulation. The reason I say he's not like anybody else, and yeah, he breaks the law, is there's a fantastic book I did a podcast on, it's called Tycoon's War. There was this other guy, I think his name's William Wallace. This is like three years ago, so I'm going off memory. William Wallace was interesting because by the time he was 18, he had graduated law school, medical school, taught himself a bunch of different languages, really smart dude, winds up taking over different parts of Mexico, which was very common at the time. He was a military adventurer. He winds up taking over, I think, Nicaragua. And this is a time where Cornelius is doing the transition from just having steamboats and he's getting into railroads, but this is Gold Rush. So people are paying to be transported from the East Coast to the United States to get to California for the gold rush. Vanderbilt makes a ton of money because he's one of the rare people that has steamships, railroads, and then boats to cut through South America. And then he'll pitch on like a mule and then he'll pick you up on the other side. He had basically from A to Z. He cut down travel time by like six months. So substantial value. So some of his ships were stationed in Nicaragua. And Williams said, hey, I overthrew the government. I am now the president of Nicaragua. So these are my ships. Vanderbilt tried to have him killed. That's not hyperbolic. That is legitimate. He hired mercenaries to go get him. He petitioned the Secretary of State of both the United States and Britain. He's like, I'm not going to sue you. I'm going to kill you. The way they thought, you could argue that some in history's greatest entrepreneurs, they might have been more ambitious. I'm not saying go out and overthrow governments, but they did. Sam Zemuri, fish in the eighth of well, he did that. That's legitimate. He funded a coup because you tried to take away his banana property. I'm not saying these are good people. I'm just saying that they just looked at it like a problem, how we would be like, oh, I can't do anything. I guess my stuff is gone. Oh, he has my ships. What can I do? I'll try to go through diplomatic channels. Cornelius is like, I'll just send guys with guns. Go try to steal something from Putin. What do you think is going to happen to you?