How to make a few Billion Dollars | Brad Jacobs

[00:00:06] I bet you always want to know how to make a few billion. Well, I wanted to know too. So I read the book How to Make a Few Billion Dollars by Brad Jacobs and I had questions. So he came on the podcast,

[00:00:21] I asked my questions and I had stuff related to making billions of dollars but also completely nothing to do with making billions of dollars. Although maybe it does have something to do with making billions of dollars. You'll be able to tell. Here's Brad Jacobs to talk about

[00:00:38] how to make a few billion dollars. This isn't your average business podcast and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher Show. I'm not a big fed macro expert at all. I'm a business

[00:01:05] expert. I'm a micro expert. I'm an expert on building businesses and making money doing that. Do you think though, your experience in business and your history in business, I mean, you've been building these billion dollar businesses since the late 70s. Your

[00:01:18] perspective is valuable, maybe even more valuable than let's say an economist who considers themselves an expert. I don't know if it's more valuable but it's a different perspective because you're in the real world and you're dealing with customers all day long and you're dealing

[00:01:32] with employees all day long. So you're seeing inflation and you're seeing unemployment and you're seeing what the job market is. You do have your finger right on the pulse. And also I think you're more aware that things can go wrong.

[00:01:46] Yeah, because if you're doing your job right as a CEO, you're always thinking about what could go wrong. I mean, I'm skipping ahead a few companies but in the 90s you had an equipment rental company, United Rentals and there was all this infrastructure funding set by Congress.

[00:02:03] So you started buying construction equipment companies. That didn't work out so well. Right, it didn't work out. You sold them for a half a billion dollar loss. I did. So you've been wrong. I think a lot of people don't admit to all that stuff.

[00:02:16] I've been wrong a lot of times but I've made thousands and thousands of decisions so over the decade. So if I'm wrong on a few dozen things, that's a good thing. It's fine. You can't aim for perfection on decision making. It's not feasible.

[00:02:29] But given that, you have to kind of diversify your decision making it so much that when you do make wrong decisions, you know it's not going to bring you under. Okay, two things on that. You need to be honest with yourself when you've made a wrong decision

[00:02:43] and have good feedback loops with lots of smart folks and the numbers and the data. Admit that you've made a mistake and then cut your loss and take action to bail yourself out from that.

[00:02:54] Yeah, so what's a time when not only you made a mistake but you made a second level mistake which is that you didn't realize you made a mistake? The biggest mistakes I've made are with people because that's the most important decision you're

[00:03:06] going to make in business is who do you surround yourself with? Who do you place in positions of authority? Who do you give power to? Who do you give responsibility to? Who are you going

[00:03:14] to make your leaders? Because your leaders then hire other people and they usually hire people in their image and they create the culture. And so that's where I've made my greatest decisions, where I've succeeded the most in hiring fantastic people,

[00:03:27] the vast majority of the time. But the few times I made mistakes, they were whoppers. You know, they were big mistakes. Like what's an example? Can you give a specific? Yeah, I've hired people sometimes who I thought they were real good managers and they were just

[00:03:41] half good managers. By that I mean a good manager, a good executive knows how to grow the top line, grow market share, get good volume, please the customers, keep the customers happy and coming back for more. And at the same time is very thoughtfully frugal,

[00:03:58] meaning they're very cost-conscious and don't waste money. And sometimes I've hired executives more than once who are good at just one or the other, not both. And that doesn't work out. That doesn't cut the mustard. You absolutely need executives who can both grow, grow,

[00:04:13] grow the business but do it in a way that is cost-conscious. And I've made some mistakes on that. What about hiring someone you didn't realize was dishonest in some way?

[00:04:23] I've had that. I've had that and I deeply regret. I beat myself up about that because at the end of the day, the CEO, the buck stops with me. So even if you have people lower in the organization do

[00:04:33] something unethical, it really, the buck stops with the CEO. I've had really good luck with people I've hired in terms of honesty. Maybe 99% of the people I've hired have been completely

[00:04:44] honest and 1% have not been so honest. But when you're hiring as many people as I've hired over the years and look at the three companies that I cheer right now, I have roughly about 150,000, 175,000 people between the three of them. So even if 1% are dishonest, that's 1,700 people.

[00:05:03] That's way too many people. You used the word luck. Like you said, you've been really lucky in hiring people. Do you like to use the word luck? Do you really think that plays a role or are you just using it to be nice?

[00:05:13] I'm glad you pointed that out because a lot of things that people call luck aren't luck. It's a byproduct of process of decisions that you made and then you say, oh yeah,

[00:05:21] I've been lucky. It's kind of like a false modesty. So that's a fair point out that you made. Yeah, I get called out a lot when I use the word luck because there's actually very rare when

[00:05:34] luck plays a role in sometimes in major things in your life. Like if there's an earthquake and then you have to move and blah, blah, blah. But even that might not be

[00:05:41] lucky if you move into an earthquake zone. Well, I was lucky that I was born in 1956 so that when I was in my business years, for instance, I was doing lots of business in the last decade

[00:05:52] when interest rates were nothing and when there was global synchronized growth everywhere. So I mean, I was lucky. I didn't contribute to low interest rates or to global synchronized

[00:06:02] growth. It just lucked out. What I did want to do is I wanted to get into some of the weeds of businesses a little bit. And this, hopefully the listeners will go along with me. But

[00:06:11] you discussed the low interest rate environment that a lot of your career was in. Several of your business, at least two of your businesses were called rollups. And a rollup is where you're able to buy many companies in the same industry and by doing that you're able

[00:06:26] to cut costs through back end costs. You could kind of combine so it's an easy way to reduce costs. And also the larger a company is, often the higher the multiple is when it's valued by

[00:06:40] the public. So you did this with your waste company and your rental companies. And transportation too. We only did 18 acquisitions at XPO and we did more than a couple of hundred in the other two you mentioned but definitely we built the company by acquisition.

[00:06:54] And in organic growth, you can't just buy companies. You've got to build them and grow them after you buy them. Well, part of organic growth is again the synergy. So when you buy a company in California and a

[00:07:05] company in New York, you could often have organic growth because they could trade customers as, you know, some compsers are opening up offices from New York into California. Then the fact that you have offices or companies on both sides of the country gives you

[00:07:19] sort of organic growth but you really are benefiting from the synergies between the companies you bought. I think you summed it up well. You can cross-fertilize best practices as you buy more companies too. That's a big part of the playbook.

[00:07:32] I feel like this is one of the best business models you could possibly do. I completely agree which is why I've done it three times and I'm about to do it again. So if you want an argument, you got to talk to somebody else.

[00:07:43] I'm in complete 100% agreement with that statement. Like people say 9 out of 10 startups fail but I think if you're in the business of buying successful companies and combining them, it's a little harder for you to fail.

[00:07:55] I could still fail my next one and I don't take it for granted that I'm going to succeed fabulously and that keeps me on my toes but the chances are high that I'm going to succeed

[00:08:03] because I've got a playbook and I keep applying the same playbook over and over again. What's the next one you're going to do? I haven't announced the industry yet and I haven't irreversibly decided what it's

[00:08:14] going to be but I'm zeroing in on one and it's a large industry that says a lot of opportunity for M&A and then I can bring a tech angle to it. All my companies I've deployed tech in a big way early on in the company that's

[00:08:26] benefited us quite a bit and that's going to be the case here too. It's interesting you say it's a large industry. You would think many of these companies are in industries where there's a solid business model. These are already successful companies.

[00:08:41] You would think that every industry like that, given the high percentage success of doing these roll-ups, you would think that every industry would already have roll-ups all over the place. Well, most roll-ups have not been fabulously successful. In fact,

[00:08:54] most of them have not even been successful. They haven't created alpha. They haven't created more value than just beta of the market just going up during the period of time when they were doing it. That's because a lot of people have done roll-ups or M&A strategies.

[00:09:07] They really had no business doing it. They weren't professional operators. They were money guys, they were promotion guys, they could do M&A. Doing M&A is the easiest part of the whole thing. M&A, all you have to do is write a check. Why are money?

[00:09:21] There's a 30-40 page document that the lawyer is writing. You sign it and boom, you own the company. The real challenge starts after you bought the companies and now you have to integrate them. You've got to get all the IT systems the same.

[00:09:33] You've got to get all the HR systems the same. You have to get the financial accounting systems the same. You have to come up with standardized key performance indicators and metrics. You have to really take a paintbrush and repaint the whole organization.

[00:09:46] You have to continually be doing that. You're doing an acquisition, integrating. Doing another acquisition and integrating again. Doing another acquisition, integrating again. You're always doing these two processes almost simultaneously. Not a lot of people have that expertise.

[00:10:00] It almost sounds like there's an opportunity to create a company that facilitates roll-ups. Let's say someone has a service company that basically does all the integration of any roll-up. Like, oh, we'll kind of make all the databases integrate. We'll make all the HR integrate and so on.

[00:10:17] Well, you know, some of the big private equity funds are starting to do just that. They have started over the last few years. Like Apollo has an operations group. Platinum is famous for that. They call it M&A and O, mergers and acquisitions and operations.

[00:10:31] And they have a whole operations team that goes in. Blackstone, KKR, all the big guys are doing that now. I want to reel back to your very first business because there was something that was interesting there. So your very first business was like an oil trading arbitrage business.

[00:10:44] You would arbitrage the difference between oil futures and the oil spot price. So futures is a way to bet on the future price of oil. The spot price is the current price of oil. And what you're saying is basically,

[00:10:57] the futures might have been suggesting oil might be $80 in a month, but right now it's $60 so you could buy the oil and short the futures. No, actually, what we did was even crazier than that. It was so ridiculously easy.

[00:11:10] This was right at the beginning of the futures market starting. So there was no futures market when I first started, like in the late 70s. But then it started coming in. There was in Chicago, the Mercantile Exchange, there was New York Mercantile Exchange.

[00:11:23] And you started having two oil, New York Harbor, two oil traded. Then you had other derivatives traded as well. And it was two completely different groups of people, James. There were oil companies and people who used to work at oil companies trading

[00:11:38] real physical oil with wet barrels of oil and a ship and a moving an FOB and a SCIF. It was real physical business. And that was one universe. And then there was another universe of futures traders, futures traders trading on the Mercantile exchanges.

[00:11:57] And they weren't talking to each other. And we said, gee, they're trading the same stuff. Why don't we just buy on one and sell on the other? And the spreads were to answer your question. Enormous. Sometimes it was 2, 3 cents a gallon. It was huge, huge amounts.

[00:12:12] I mean, now you might sometimes get a spread of like a tenth of a penny for like 10 seconds and then the computers go and try to capture that. So this was an era before the internet, before futures, when information was scarce. Information wasn't flowing freely.

[00:12:29] So companies like ours who were in the game and had a foot in both, we had two of the very first seats on the New York Mercantile exchange. I wish I'd never sold them. I could have retired just holding onto those seats forever.

[00:12:41] But we saw these anomalies between the two markets and we jumped in and did that right away. So you were able to buy like on one exchange or one market oil for like $40.50 and another place right away sell it for $40.55? More than that, like maybe 50 cents more, maybe $41.

[00:13:02] So it was quite a big, there were different worlds. Now you had to be in both of those worlds all day long continuously because it wasn't always the same. And sometimes it was for half an hour, there was a window of, wow, this has gone up.

[00:13:16] This one hasn't caught up yet. So you had to really, you had to be in it to win it on that one. It's almost like a brain dead way of making money. Not suggesting you're brain dead, but like do you think opportunities like that,

[00:13:26] you know, still exists or when new technologies or new financial assets are created, do you think opportunities like that exist again? Absolutely, but not in the same things that it was in the past. Right. Because Adam Smith's hidden hand of capitalism finds these these inefficiencies and smart

[00:13:45] capital comes and capitalizes on them and over time the margins go down. And then something else comes up. So anytime there's aberrations, there's government intervention. So look even over the last few years, we've had capitalism turn into a form of socialism.

[00:14:00] United States, I say that in the sense that capitalism means companies, profit making companies are allocating capital and the free market determines who's doing the best, who's pleasing customers more, who's getting customers to buy their products and services more and then their shares go up and so forth.

[00:14:18] And socialism meaning you have government. The government is allocating capital based on what they think is fair and just and right and what their interests are and how they can get reelected if it's elected government or if they're not an elected government, how they can stay in power.

[00:14:32] And we've gone now because of COVID to some extent necessarily to more of a socialist model where the government allocated trillions and trillions of dollars, not a small amount, not small amounts of money. Now that may have been necessary, maybe not in the same quantities that were stimulated

[00:14:48] in economy, but some amount would have been necessary. Otherwise you could have had people suffered in a big way and government had to step up. But what happened as a result of that big intervention of government allocating capital is you had imbalances.

[00:15:02] You had anomalies created in the market and things got stimulated and got overstimulated and there you had your inflation and we had to then raise rates to lower the inflation. So all these things caused anomalies and people found ways to make money on it.

[00:15:16] And to answer your question very specifically, I went to an industrials conference about a month ago in the city. I saw about, I don't know, maybe 16, 17, 18 presentations over the course of a few days

[00:15:27] and I was shocked that about half of them had a slide or two of you should buy our stock because we're going to get X hundreds of millions of dollars or even more than that in some cases from the CARES Act, from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act,

[00:15:45] from the Inflation Reduction Act. And people had business plans revolving around these government stimulus, these government handouts. That's not necessarily a good thing long term for the economy as a whole because you don't have the free market allocating capital.

[00:15:59] You have people who are getting elected and not necessarily good business minds allocating the capital. So the question is if it's good for the economy or not, you're saying it's being misallocated. A dollar that's invested in federal express might be a more effective allocation

[00:16:31] than a dollar that's invested in the post office, for instance. Like more letters per dollar invested might happen in private enterprise versus public in that case. So what's the negative ramifications when you see the government allocating so much dollars as opposed to the private sector?

[00:16:47] Well, the biggest one is inflation. Inflation over the last few years has been horrible and unfortunately, inflation hurts the middle class and really the working class, the people making $15, $20 an hour. They got creamed by inflation.

[00:17:01] I mean, the main things that they use their paychecks for like fuel and transportation and housing, these are the three big things that a factory worker or a warehouse worker or a truck driver, that's what they spend their money on from paycheck to paycheck for the most part.

[00:17:14] These things soared. I mean, these things didn't just go up 5, 6, 7%. They went up dozens of percent. It was really terrible, terrible. And people were in more, in the hole every two weeks after their paycheck because inflation was going up so much.

[00:17:28] And that was a result of the government overdoing the amount of stimulus, not necessarily bad intentions. And by the way, that's a bipartisan thing. Trump put, I think, $2 trillion into the economy. Of course, the Biden administration put many times that into the economy, emptied up even more.

[00:17:45] But the amount of trillions and trillions of dollars that went into the economy was just way too much. And that caused inflation. And that inflation is a horrible thing. Now, we're working ourselves out of that by raising interest rates and doing quantitative tidying. Yeah.

[00:17:58] Do you think there'll be a recession? I don't know. James, I was at a business conference with a couple hundred Fortune 500 CEOs about two years ago. And we took a poll on a little app. And well over 90% thought there'd be a severe recession or moderate recession in 2022.

[00:18:20] Obviously, there was no recession in 2022. Technically, there hasn't really been a recession yet since then. So CEOs predicting recessions don't have a real good track record. Neither do economists, by the way. But to answer your question, it's a fair question. I should answer it.

[00:18:36] I think we'll have a recession next year. I think the amount of quantitative tightening and the amount of interest rates, rising and raising of interest rates by the Fed has a delayed effect of six quarters or something.

[00:18:48] And I think next year it'll catch up and there'll be a recession. But I don't have a high level of conviction because a lot of people, including me, have been wrong about predicting the recession that never came the last couple years. Yeah.

[00:18:59] And it seems like there's just a lot of enthusiasm right now that you don't usually see before a recession. But there's a lot of enthusiasm for technologies like AI and the effect that's going to have on the economy and so on.

[00:19:10] And you also don't usually see unemployment this low during times where before a recession. So it's like an unusual period. But I guess that is true for a lot of things these past few years. No, that's all true.

[00:19:23] So going back to your first business, you were 23 years old when you started this first business. When I was 23 years old, I wouldn't have thought to myself, oh my god, I could buy $40 oil on this tanker and sell for $40.50 on this tanker.

[00:19:36] Like I wouldn't have thought that way. What were you doing? What was going on? And you said, oh, I'm going to make a billion-dollar oil trading business. So I'd never set out to make a billion-dollar oil trading business.

[00:19:47] I set out to make $100,000 in interest rates were very high back then. You could get a CD from Bank of America. They had a 16% CD certificate deposit that was based in Bank of America, New York. And they had a 17% one that was in the Caribbean somewhere.

[00:20:04] I forget which country in the Caribbean at a little more risk, but you get an extra 100 basis points on it. So my goal was to make $100,000. And I figured I could take the $100,000. And with the interest I'd make on that, I'd make over $1,000 a month.

[00:20:19] And I figured I could live comfortably on that. My too big, yeah, that's what I was doing. The two big things I was doing were music and meditation. And I didn't feel either of those required a lot of money. I was not into money.

[00:20:29] My goal was never to make money. It turned out that I was good at making money. And instead of making $100,000 over some period of time, I happened to be in the right place at the right time and had some great people around me and with me.

[00:20:41] And we were making $100,000 a month and more than that actually. So I just, I didn't plan it. It just kind of started happening and it's happening. And then I got more and more and more and one thing led to another.

[00:20:52] Did you talk to your music friends about this? Like how did you even get into like oil trading? I didn't even know oil trading existed until I was much older. So what did you even know that got you started?

[00:21:04] I will tell you the moment that I decided to get into the oil business because I remember very vividly. I was watching the evening news, I think it was CBS with Dan Rather, right? Could be wrong.

[00:21:14] I think it was CBS, Dan Rather and Exxon before they bought mobile, they were just called Exxon back then, was the first company to ever make a billion dollars profit in a quarter. And on the television, it said obscene profits. I said, huh, I'd like to make $100,000.

[00:21:34] That's obscene profits. I think I'll get in the oil business. So I went to the library, no internet back then. So I went to the library and I just read every book I could get on the oil business.

[00:21:45] I read a book called The Seven Sisters and I read just every the history of the oil business and everything I could get my hands on that was there. And from that, I started talking to people.

[00:21:54] I found some other guys who were doing different things in the oil business. And what does that mean you found like in the bars where your band was playing? Well, I just asked around just people I knew, people I ran into,

[00:22:04] people I knew socially and some people were doing it already. And I learned from that and I started making some calls together with some friends. It wasn't just me alone. I don't deserve all the credit.

[00:22:13] And as a team, we started calling major oil companies like Exxon, Shell, BP, Texaco, etc. I mean, some of those have been sold but you know, those are the big ones back then. And we talked to independent refiners like Marathon and Ashland and City Service and so

[00:22:28] forth. And by dumb luck, the Iran regime changed and the Iotolo community came back from Paris, to Shaw left, and they took the 400 American hostages, this is 1979. And oil prices went through the moon.

[00:22:44] And there was those who were old enough to remember there was you had to get your license plate, you had an odd or even license plate number and that determined whether you could get gasoline that day. And people were fighting for gasoline.

[00:22:55] It was a shortage and the price were going way up like they had never gone up before. It was a very volatile spot market. So in that atmosphere, guys at Exxon or Mobile or Texaco would take a 20-something-year-old

[00:23:08] kid's call and say, hey, are you interested in selling any oil or do you need any oil? And they would say, well, we've got some Arab heavy and we'd like to get rid of it. We've got too much.

[00:23:19] If you've got someone who's got some Arab heavy, give me a call and I'd say, you got anything you want to buy? So actually, yeah, we'd like some Dubai. We'd like to do buy some crude oil. I'm just using these examples. So now we've got two orders.

[00:23:31] We've got a buy order. We get a sell order. We'd call the next guy. We'd call Gulf oil and say, we repeat what we have the buy and sell order for. And maybe Gulf would want to do one of those.

[00:23:42] And so then we'd call back Exxon and we'd say, okay, we have a counterparty for you. Let's put them together. They say, is it reputable or is it someone we can't trust? It was another one of the seven sisters back then. It's another one of your six sisters.

[00:23:56] And it's okay. That's fine. Put the deal together and we charge them a nickel or dime of barrel. And that was our commission. And we were so all over the marketplace, we were talking to everybody at once that we had market knowledge. We had price discovery.

[00:24:10] We knew who was selling and who was buying. And therefore we could match them together and earn an honest brokerage commission. I mean, that's great. But there's a few things there that are really incredible.

[00:24:21] And again, I'm trying to like make the bridge between my own mindset at the age of 23 and yours. First off, when I think of the oil business even right now, and I think of going into

[00:24:31] the oil business as you put it, I think how am I like Exxon is already in the oil business? What am I going to do? Drill for oil? That's the first thing I would think. And then the answer is of course no because that requires billions of dollars.

[00:24:46] And then the idea of calling Exxon up and saying, hey, do you want to buy this kind of oil? Like why wouldn't Exxon just call their six other sisters and do it themselves? I would think to myself, I don't really add any value here.

[00:25:00] I would give up before I discovered the ways to add value. Okay. So back then the seven sisters didn't talk to each other. There were antitrust reasons. There were ego reasons. There were all kinds of reasons. They didn't need to really.

[00:25:15] Everyone had integrated oil companies where they were drilling for oil in the Middle East and Africa and Asia. They had their own ships. They had their own refineries that they were shipping it to in Rotterdam or Amsterdam or in Houston.

[00:25:29] And they had their own gasoline stations that they would then go and distribute it to. So they were really integrated and everything was going hunky-dory and everyone had their own little world and they didn't really need to talk to anybody else.

[00:25:40] When this Iranian situation broke out in 1979, that all changed. Because people's systems got all messed up. And going back to what we were saying before, when there's anomalies, when there's disruptions, when there's volatility, you can make money on that if you're nimble, if you're agile,

[00:25:56] if you're flexible, if you're willing to take a little risk. Yeah. So you just felt confident or you would call them up and then we ever worried like let's say, okay, I got Exxon to buy this from mobile and I took my piece in the middle.

[00:26:09] We ever worried that now instead of being in the middle, Exxon could just call mobile every time they needed the same thing you sold Exxon. That happened. Yeah, that happens sometimes and we got cut out of it and that happens.

[00:26:21] But more often than not, these guys didn't like talking to each other. They were very competitive and they had a lot of legal reasons why they weren't supposed to talk to each other for antitrust reasons. The Justice Department was all over the oil companies back then.

[00:26:33] So they really, and they weren't our only customers. We had the independent refiners and then we had the traders. We had a big trading community, the Philip Brothers and Tampa Max and they had the Japanese Sogoshoshes, the big Japanese trading houses.

[00:26:48] So we had a lot of people to talk to and it was maybe like a couple hundred customers and we were talking to all of them and none of those companies were talking to the other 199 of them.

[00:27:01] Everyone had a few they were talking to but not all of them. So the fact that we were all over the market was our secret. Now where did I get that idea? I remember exactly where I got that idea.

[00:27:10] I got that idea from reading a Business Week article about a man who ended up doing business with his company, meeting him and he became my business mentor called Ludwig Jesselsson in the name of his company was Philip Brothers and I read an article in Business Week

[00:27:24] about him and it had a photograph of then they were traders. I was a broker so a trader takes title buys and sells. A broker matches together a buyer and a seller and takes commission. Now the trader has risk, sometimes they lose money.

[00:27:39] A broker the most they can lose is they don't get paid their commission but they don't have a lose principle. And there was a photograph in that Business Week article of the trading floor and it had

[00:27:51] clocks with the times of different cities around the world and the article explained that the way Philip Brothers made money was to have a worldwide global organization that was plugged in to all the people who needed commodities and all the people who wanted to sell

[00:28:09] commodities and therefore they had an edge and they had a legitimate value they could add in the oil business. And I said, I totally get that business. The problem is I had $5,000 left over from my bar mitzvah money and that was it.

[00:28:22] So I could not spend billions of dollars buying and selling crude oil or refined products because I didn't have billions of dollars and no bank was going to lend me that. But brokerage doesn't require any money. Brokerage just required a phone and that was pretty much it.

[00:28:36] And the phone you didn't have to pay for two, three months after you got the phone bill. So helpful working capital. So it was an easy business. So it's a business we could afford and it was a business that was relatively low risk, almost no risk.

[00:28:49] And I guess in order for a business like this to work, you have to be able to talk to actual decision makers on both sides. So you can talk to the people four levels underneath. So if the decision maker was the CEO, you're probably in trouble.

[00:29:01] But the decision maker probably for an oil company on whether to buy a particular type of oil probably was more middle management is my guess. I don't know. Absolutely. No, you're completely right. It was not the CEO. It was...

[00:29:13] We would see the CEOs at the annual events in London or in Houston or New York. They were parties. They were trade shows. But they really weren't in the trading game. They were running the whole business.

[00:29:24] There was usually a head of trading at each one of the oil companies. And there was managers of crude oil, managers of two oil, managers of fuel oil, of residual oil, different types of oil. And there were managers of shipping, of the chartering ships and moving it around.

[00:29:38] And that's who we spoke with. My guess is through your reading and your conversations, you realize probably, A, you realize that there's going to be these anomalies and this volatility in the oil business. But you also probably got a sense that the decision makers weren't impossible for

[00:29:53] you to reach. And I think that's what would have stopped me is that I probably wouldn't have understood that I could have reached the decision makers. I've never been shy about calling anybody.

[00:30:03] And I find that 90% of people I call will take my call even if I've never talked to them before. And I think people like to talk to other people. People like to connect. People like to help other people. I think most people are generous by nature.

[00:30:17] And by the way, I don't think... I think opportunities like this, they probably don't exist in the same industries, but they probably always exist. Like it reminds me of reading Bernard Baruch's autobiography called My Story,

[00:30:28] where he basically gets telegraphed at the gold price in London, finds out what the gold price is in New York and he has the simple arbitrage. You know, it's so funny you mentioned that book. My father had that book. He kept it in his bedroom.

[00:30:43] He used to see it all the time. He used to always tell me to read it. I never read it. Oh, it's really good. I should read it now you're mentioning it again. I'm going to read it. It's a different era of investing where insider trading was had...

[00:30:57] There was a different viewpoint on it legally. And I'm not saying he was an insider trader, but some of this stuff seemed to border on that. But he also used very simple arbitrage principles and found where those very simple arbitrages were.

[00:31:10] Like in that time, it was gold internationally. Like I imagine now, like let's say someone creates, hypothetically, the SEC approves the BlackRock Bitcoin ETF. I imagine it's possible to call a sovereign wealth fund in the Middle East and say, listen, you need to leg in.

[00:31:27] You know, a lot of people are putting money into Bitcoin ETFs. You're going to need to leg into it slowly but faster than your competitors. And I can help you do that by dealing with directly with BlackRock.

[00:31:37] I'm just making this up right now based on what you just said. So I imagine there's some opportunities like that that could exist in the future. There's always opportunities. The world is so big and commerce is so large. And there's so much going on.

[00:31:51] And there's so much flowing goods. It's just so much going on that if you're sharp and if you have an open mind and you have the right attitude, you have great people, there's places you can make money. Always. There's never no places to make money.

[00:32:04] There's always places to make money. And this relates to your focus in the book on mindset and how important mindset is. And I've been seeing this constantly lately that how many times mindset is mentioned just in the course of my life.

[00:32:22] And you know, you mentioned how it's very easy. It's almost like an evolutionary thing to have negative thoughts because the people who survived were more worried about lions than the people who are optimistic that lions would never show up.

[00:32:33] And so the question is though, but to succeed in business, you have to have enough optimism or enough positive thinking to know that a 23 year old can call the decision makers and do billion dollar oil deals. So like how do you, how do you straddle that bridge?

[00:32:48] And you mentioned your earlier interest in meditation. You said you were interested in music and meditation. Had you traveled to India or like, what was your interest in meditation at that time? Because in the 70s it was like everybody went to India to meditate.

[00:33:00] They, they, they came toward here. And I went to India too. Into the 70s and the 80s and the early 90s. I haven't been in India in a long time. And while I have many, many Indian friends, but India has changed a lot.

[00:33:11] I mean, when I went to India and even in Delhi, the phones didn't work. You had to call someone 20 times to get through. When I went to India to get from the airport to the hotel, you were, you were mobbed with people with leprosy and poor people.

[00:33:25] And some of that still exists, but not as much as it did back then. When I was in India, the taxi cabs in the floor had holes. And you can see the road out here and rocks were coming in. So it's really changed.

[00:33:36] And there was no, there was no billionaire class. There was really no big middle class. It was a poor, poor country. Now they've, they've changed a lot. They've really matured as a country and the economy has gone a lot. And there's a lot of wealth.

[00:33:50] There's still great poverty, which is terrible. But wow, it's come a long, long, long way. Now, but you mentioned a minute ago, I want to comment on that. That you have to have a lot of positivity in order to succeed in business.

[00:34:00] I would say yes, but I would say I agree with you. You absolutely need a positive mindset and a thinking big and you have to have good upbeat energy and you want a team of winners and people thinking they're going to conquer the world and

[00:34:13] all full of piss and vinegar, as I said. However, I think you can't only be like that because you have to always, you have to, there is a value to being also pessimistic, also doubting, also being rational, testing your beliefs, really challenging your hypotheses. Are they right?

[00:34:33] And in all the businesses I've had, I've created a culture where there's dialectical thinking, meaning looking at situations from multiple perspectives, not only two perspectives, but multiple perspectives. And I think the reason, one of the main reasons why we've been successful is

[00:34:51] we debate things all day long in a nice way, in a nice way. And I have a niece who when she was young, when she was in high school, now she's in her 30s, when she was in high school, she scored very, very high nationally

[00:35:06] in these debating clubs. I think they call it forensics. And I really respected the way they did it. She would have to argue one side of the proposition and then they'd switch and she'd have to argue the against and the person who was arguing against had to argue

[00:35:24] the four. And she were graded on how well you argued both sides of the argument, not just one side. I think this is really important in business. I think it's important in life. But I think in business, you have to always be thinking big thoughts, dreaming big objectives,

[00:35:42] but then also challenging those, challenging those assumptions to make sure they're real. And then you have to be modifying the business plan all along based on further evidence that's coming up, more information that's coming, better perceptions and analysis of the situation, being opportunistic, pivoting when it's necessary

[00:36:01] to pivot. So I think you need both. I don't think you should just be everything is roses and ice cream and wonderful. I think that helps a part of the culture should be like that.

[00:36:11] But I think it's really healthy and useful and important to have also a doubting part of the culture as well. Yeah. So but still, I guess there's this optimism that you yourself personally can survive the problems that you encounter in this

[00:36:30] steel manning of both sides. Like you have confidence that even though, okay, you made a $500 billion mistake, depending on the US government. 500 million, not 500 billion. Oh, 500 million. It's still a lot of money. It's still a lot of money.

[00:36:44] My mistake. I won't scribble over it. It was a big mistake. Yeah. You still have confidence in yourself that you wouldn't start spiraling into, oh, I'm a loser. I shouldn't be CEO. Here's my resignation. Like you have confidence that

[00:36:57] you personally can move forward through these things? Absolutely. I mean, you're going to make mistakes. So in the acknowledgment section of the book, instead of thanking the normal people you thank, I called out who my mentors were, my friends were people I learned from, people I

[00:37:12] really got something from as a result of interacting with in my life. And one of them was a psychologist called Albert Ellis, who died about 15 years ago. But I had the fortune of seeing him

[00:37:23] in New York when he was alive in his later years. And I read all his books and I just really fascinated with his mind. He was one of the two inventors of cognitive therapy along with Aaron

[00:37:32] Beck. He called it rational emotive therapy, but basically it was the same thing as cognitive therapy, which is where you're analyzing your thoughts and being aware of your thoughts and then disputing them and reframing them in more constructive ways.

[00:37:45] And one of the things that he was famous for and what I put in the book that I learned from is, lose perfectionism. Don't try to think that you're perfect because you're not. Don't think other people are going to be perfect because they're not.

[00:38:01] Don't think that life is going to be perfect because it is not. And if you can really master that non-perfectionism where you don't expect perfection in yourself, in others, in life in general, number one, you're a lot happier. You get disappointed. You don't disappoint

[00:38:18] yourself. Other people don't disappoint you. The world doesn't disappoint you because you're expecting things to go wrong because that's life. That's the way it works. And secondly, you can be more effective in your thinking because you're not wasting time. You mentioned

[00:38:30] a minute ago in your question about I didn't think oh, I'm a loser. Oh, by the way, that's a thought that does come up sometimes. I'm a loser. But then I realized, okay, that's a silly thought. That's not a rational thought. I'm exaggerating something. Let's

[00:38:43] throw that thought away. But that's normal. People do have that thought, particularly successful people. I'm shocked at when I get—and I know a lot of successful people—when I know them well and we confide in each other, most successful people were a mask. They were a

[00:38:59] mask of confidence, of strength. I got this whole thing together. And in their private moments, when they're talking to their husband or their wife or to another person that they confide,

[00:39:09] that's a good friend, they say, wow, I don't know if I can do this. Gee, this may be a first year in a long time. I'm going to really mess up. Or, wow, look what I did. People have—it's okay.

[00:39:19] That's normal to have negative thoughts. But you have to reframe those. You can't let them grip you. You can't let them dominate you and just hold you down. But you shouldn't feel bad about feeling bad. That's something I learned from Albert Ellis. You shouldn't feel

[00:39:35] you're a loser just because you're thinking in a bad way. You're a human being who's programmed to think not exactly rationally all the time. That's what we are. You describe a meditation that you do—you mentioned you meditate 15 minutes in the

[00:40:03] morning, 15 minutes in the evening usually. And early on, you described two kinds of meditation. I was curious. You don't say you do this, but you said that if you stare at your hands for a few minutes, you'll start to get into a trans-like feeling.

[00:40:17] I never heard that before. I know quite a bit about meditation or it's enough about it. I never heard this before. So, I didn't invent that. Ernie Rossi died about two years ago out in Los Osos, California.

[00:40:32] One of the smartest people I've ever met in my life. He was a hypnotherapist. And he studied under the best hypnotherapist of all time called Milton H. Erickson, who died in the 80s. And what he came up with, Ernie Rossi, was you ever heard of the

[00:40:50] homunculus man? Homunculus man is a visualization of what a person would look like if the size of their organs was proportionate to the amount of communication, electrical and chemical between the brain and that organ. So they have very big hands. They have very

[00:41:08] big lips. They have very small other parts of the body that there's not no reason, like the elbow is very small because the brain doesn't really need to be talking to the elbow much. But due to our

[00:41:19] ancestral past, the hands are really important because we were pulling onto trees and we had that wrong and we're communicating one mistake you're dead. And he came up with this thing of you

[00:41:29] look at your hands and you stare at your hands as if it's the very first time you've ever seen your hands. And by the way, sometimes it is the very first time you've really stared at your

[00:41:41] hands. Some people never looked at their hands before and you look at your hands and it's amazing. You do this and I've done this with Ernie with 200 people in an audience and it's very

[00:41:51] quiet. People do go into a transe to use your word and you look at your hands and you start seeing things you never noticed before and you start getting very, very introspective. And he takes that to another level and another level and another level that maybe

[00:42:05] should be the subject of an entire another podcast, but not now. What I did is I took, I'm never ashamed of taking other people's ideas and then improvising on them and making them

[00:42:15] more relatable to me and stuff I can use. I do it all the time. I'm always looking for information that's really cool that I can then maybe apply in just a little bit different way

[00:42:26] and I can use it for my own personal benefit or the business benefit. So what I took was rather than standing there looking at my hands, which after a while I hurt,

[00:42:34] I put my hands down, I said, okay, let me close my eyes because most of my meditation to do with my eyes closed. And I said, why don't I feel the brain? Why don't I just close my eyes

[00:42:44] and like allow my awareness to float in the brain sometimes on the right hemisphere, some on the left hemisphere, some on the top, some on the bottom, some on the prefrontal cortex or the back, whatever, just be in the brain and see what happens. And that's been

[00:42:58] the main meditation. I do lots of different meditation techniques, but that's the main meditation technique that I invented, my humble contribution to the field of meditation that I do myself. And I do it several times a day. I don't just do it in the morning and

[00:43:11] the evening for 15 minutes, but if it's two, three o'clock in the afternoon and I'm feeling that afternoon kind of dullness and I got big meetings going on to be sharp, I'll just close my eyes for a few minutes and I'll just feel my brain. I'll just direct

[00:43:24] my awareness into my brain and I find it's extremely relaxing and energizing at the same time. I find it unleashes this huge amount of creativity and it's a sensory activity and just it's a really cool thing. So that's what I do. That's my main meditation technique is

[00:43:41] feeling the brain. I do other stuff too. That's the one I really enjoy the most. I think in the appendix maybe you mentioned some of the other things like these thought experiments in the appendix are very interesting. Like the first, I think four or five of them

[00:43:53] were space related. Imagine for instance you're a star that's about to explode. Why did you pick these specific, maybe you could describe one of them, but why did you pick those specific thought experiments? I've never seen thought experiments like those before.

[00:44:09] You really read the book, James. Thank you for doing it. Of course. I wouldn't have you on the podcast if I didn't read the book. Oh, good. No, you did homework. So thought experiments to me are an integral part of

[00:44:20] how my businesses have succeeded so much because one of my basic beliefs is if you're going to do extraordinary stuff, you need people who are extraordinary and they need to think in different ways. You need to rearrange their brain because if I hire just ordinary folks

[00:44:40] and we think in ordinary ways, it's foolish to think we're going to achieve extraordinary profits for shareholders like we have. So that's a basic, basic tenant of all my businesses is hire extraordinary people, pay them real well and let's think in

[00:44:55] ways that are very different than most management teams think. And I got this idea about thinking differently in part from studying Albert Einstein where he had these Gdank experiments. My German is terrible so I'm sure I'm mispronouncing that word where he imagined different things

[00:45:11] like riding a beam of light and it came up with E equals MC squared. And so he literally closes eyes to picture stuff. That's how he came up with his theorems. And so I find that if we want to

[00:45:22] think differently, if we want to rearrange our brain, there's a lot of different ways we could go about doing that. But the examples I gave in the book are ones that are visualizing time, visualizing space in very different ways, either very, very big elements of space. Thinking

[00:45:38] about the whole cosmos or thinking about an infinite number of picturing, actually picturing an infinite number of universes all at the same time. That's a very, very expanding, expansive way of thinking. Or shrinking down to tiny, tiny elements of space, thinking of what would it

[00:45:58] be like to be in the nucleus of an atom or be in elementary particle inside an atom. And then just getting in touch with that and then maybe alternating between tiny, tiny,

[00:46:08] tiny, tiny and huge, huge, huge. And that's one way to get out of your normal way of thinking, which is the goal in my opinion of meditation is to get into a new state of consciousness,

[00:46:16] not the ordinary way of perceiving the world. But then that's only one as you as you rightfully pointed out. There's also ways to use meditation to change the way you have perceptions of use your senses, ways to smell differently, to taste differently, to hear different sounds.

[00:46:34] There's ways to feel, feel friendliness and love and kindness and compassion and kind-heartedness and gratitude and all these emotions that if you cultivate them, you actually put attention on deliberately, intentionally getting in touch with these fantastic uplifting feelings,

[00:46:52] you feel great. You feel wonderful and you'll be more effective in business. That's not going to happen by itself. You got to put attention on that. I have many, many different little techniques I've fooled around with over the years and I've

[00:47:06] mixed and matched from other meditation teachers that I've respected a lot and I've turned it into my own little toolkit of tools of meditation techniques. It's almost like there's like a bunch of different muscles in the brain that you're trying to exercise. So for instance,

[00:47:21] if you're not used to feeling compassionate towards people, how about let's do 20 minutes a day of exercising that muscle? But another muscle might be that what we talked about earlier, like

[00:47:34] oh I'm always thinking I'm a loser and that spiral is out of control. So another muscle might be noticing when you're thinking going down an irrational path of thoughts, noticing it as quickly as possible, practicing that and being able to pull yourself back before spirals.

[00:47:49] 100% and you're on something big there. There is an intersection between meditation and cognitive therapy where you can try to take a new perspective on your thoughts and challenge those thoughts and reframe those thoughts. And there's a fantastic book that

[00:48:07] Aaron Beck wrote about 20 years ago called The Prisoners of Hate and it's about the mind of a terrorist. It's why does a terrorist do all these horrible, horrible things? And the thesis is it's because there's like all of us, terrorists have core beliefs that are

[00:48:26] reflections of their schema of the lens, the prism by which they interpret the world and those core beliefs are as follows. I believe in XYZ religious thought to you and everybody else must also agree that these are true for all time and

[00:48:49] this is absolutely 100% true and everyone must agree with me on that. And number three, a core belief that says and if you and other people don't agree with me on these core religious beliefs, that's a horrible, terrible, unacceptable thing

[00:49:05] that I cannot let stand and in fact, I have to kill you. I have to eliminate you because that is a unacceptable situation. And then there's a final thought that says, and if I do kill you for

[00:49:16] disagreeing with me, I'm going to go to heaven and I'm going to have great rewards in the afterlife and so forth. And those core beliefs when you have them all end up in terrorism. So in a way it's false logic. Some of those beliefs are wrong but nevertheless,

[00:49:34] there's a reason why people have performed terrorist acts is because of their belief structure. And his hypothesis was, and the prisoners of hate book is cognitive therapy could be an antidote for terrorism in the world. Yeah, I wonder how he made the connection

[00:49:52] with I guess the connection is that if you're aware that some of these core concepts are irrational, then you're able to kind of pull yourself out of them whenever you drift into that. And you could do that through cognitive behavioral therapy, then you won't be a terrorist.

[00:50:09] Yeah, that's the theory. I don't know that how many terrorists have gone to therapy. I think that's the problem is that they also have to have this initial belief that I believe all these things, but there might be another way to think.

[00:50:21] Yeah, I mean, think about this James, opposing back without Kite, instead of when they brought him to when the US government brought him to Guantanamo Bay, instead of quasi torturing them or in some places actually torturing them.

[00:50:34] What if they had given him cognitive therapy? That would have been a real interesting experiment to have done. Yeah, because then presumably if they stopped having the terrorist mindset, they might be more open with giving answers to questions and so on.

[00:50:47] Absolutely. And you think about those core beliefs that go into a terrorist mind. If you were able to succeed at challenging and disputing and reversing any of those, you wouldn't have terrorism. So in other words, if you just get rid of... Maybe they keep the first one.

[00:51:02] I believe in XYZ and there's nothing to debate about it. You're never going to change my mind. I'm sure that it's God telling me that and there's nothing to change about it.

[00:51:11] Okay, maybe they keep that one. But maybe that you can get rid of the second one that says, and you and you and you and you must also believe that. Or maybe they keep those two,

[00:51:21] but you get rid of the one that says, and if they don't agree with me, that's an unacceptable situation. Or you get rid of the one of, I've got to kill you if you disagree with me. So if you get rid of...

[00:51:30] And or the last one is a motivator to do the killing part, that I'll end up in heaven with great rewards. You can get rid of any of those. If you make progress at disputing any of those core beliefs, the person would be not prone to terrorism.

[00:51:44] So it's interesting because you've been in the oil business. You presumably know higher people in these countries. I don't know any terrorist countries. Let's get that out there. No, but that's the point is that even if you talk to people in the royal families of the Middle East,

[00:51:59] they're not... They're on the whole, I would say, or maybe none of them are terrorists. Like they are concerned about their country surviving, their family surviving, their family surviving in power. They're concerned a lot about money.

[00:52:14] In many cases, I think they don't like the terrorists because the terrorists get in the way of all those stability factors that they need to keep their regimes going. So and at the same time, they're religious people.

[00:52:26] So you wonder what takes someone turns them into a terrorist as opposed to just a simply religious Muslim? Yeah, it's not just Islam, but that extreme religious belief with the things that were in that book, Prisoners of Hate, I think that causes terrorism. It makes sense to me.

[00:52:46] So along the lines of mindsets that might be incorrect, I was looking at you. You also have a section with interview questions that you would use when you're interviewing somebody. And one of them, an example is Brad, tell me your professional strengths.

[00:53:04] Why should I believe someone who tells me their professional strengths? Well, even if they're telling you what you don't consider their professional strengths, you think they're fibbing a little bit and interviews people fib a little bit. That's normal. They're selling themselves. Sure.

[00:53:22] What they pick, what they choose, what they select to say tells you a lot about a person. For instance, one of the questions is name a bunch of adjectives and phrases that sum you up that

[00:53:34] get your essence. Is the word honest in there somewhere? Is integrity in there somewhere? And if they've listed seven or eight different adjectives and they forgot to say anything about honesty or ethics, you need to follow up with questions on that.

[00:53:48] Like, Jeff's interesting. How come you didn't mention that? So you learn by what they say, how they answer each one of those questions. And you also learn from what they don't say in those questions. And those 45 questions, I put them in an appendix in the book.

[00:54:03] I've now, so I was at a conference with other CEOs three weeks ago. Several different CEOs came up to me because they endorsed the book and they wanted to read the book first. They read the book and they said, I'm using those 45 questions now. I'm using those questionnaires.

[00:54:19] I got those questions. I developed those questions over decades, mainly from hearing other interviewers ask questions. I said, damn, that's a really good question. And I wrote that one down. I find that if I asked those 45 questions somebody

[00:54:35] and I hear their answers and I listen really carefully to their answers, I know that person. I know the essence of that person. I know what makes them tick. I know what motivates them. I know their strengths. I know their weaknesses.

[00:54:48] I know what they say or they think other people think about them. I know a lot about those, that person who's applying for a job. Go ahead. I'm sorry. Again, it's like a second level way of thinking. So it's not so much their answers.

[00:55:01] That's important. It's kind of like the everything else that's surrounding the answer. Yeah. You also want to hear and see how logically they are in thinking and what their thought process is and how they frame, how articulate and how eloquent they are answering those questions.

[00:55:17] It's funny because I remember it brought me back to my very first job interview ever and someone asked me something similar and I said, well, I suppose the correct answer is and I listed off some attributes that I assumed he wanted to hear.

[00:55:30] He got very offended that he said there's no correct answer. I just didn't want to BS. I felt like he was looking for certain answers and I felt it was like sort of unnatural almost answering that question, but I didn't get that job.

[00:55:45] But it seems like another important thing about making a few billion dollars is having a lot of energy. I presume from your chronology you're about 12 years older than me, so that puts you in your mid to upper 60s and you have a lot of energy. You're going around

[00:56:02] at conferences of CEOs, conferences, industry conferences, writing a book, doing podcasts. What keeps you so energetic? You really do seem to have a lot of energy. Yes, I'm lucky. I am born with a lot of energy. I'm happy I am. I've got a lot of

[00:56:17] stuff going on, so I need all that energy. I surround myself with people who have a lot of energy. That's one thing I look for when I hire someone. How hungry are they? How dynamic are they?

[00:56:27] How much energy they have? Is this someone who's kind of sleepy and like, no. I need people who are all in. People who really want to accomplish big stuff and are hungry.

[00:56:40] When you give those psychological tests and they I want people to score high on need to win. I want people who really need to win. I want people who are competitive by nature,

[00:56:50] who really want to come in first, who want to be best in class, but also want to do that fairly, want to do that honestly, don't want to cheat, don't want to cut corners, want to do that ethically,

[00:57:02] want to obey all the rules. But win within the four corners of the rules, win, win, win, win, win. For that you need energy. You need very dynamic people. I give examples of people

[00:57:11] in the book who I've been fortunate enough to work with, who have even more energy than I do. And I have a lot of energy. I mean, like you're even planning your next business or your next

[00:57:20] industry that you're going to roll up. What do you think you would morph to in the next phase of your life? Well, the next phase of my life, the next decade or so, I'm going to start

[00:57:29] another company and I'm going to build it up to something tens of billions of dollars in size. And I'm going to do everything I possibly can to make huge amounts of money for my shareholders. That's my goal. That's my vision. That's my motivation. That's my inspiration. And

[00:57:41] that's what I've done. And I'm lucky I do that well and I'm going to try to do it even better this time. So that's definitely what I'm doing in the next phase of my life. What I do after that,

[00:57:50] I'm not sure. I'm so consumed with what I'm doing now. I don't plan 10 years from now, what I'm going to do starting 11 years from now. But I'm sure I'll do something fun, I'll do something exciting like I always have. Everything I've done in business has been

[00:58:02] fun. It's been a long, long time since I needed the money I'm making for business. It's for the fun, it's for the joy of creating stuff. It's a creative process. It's like,

[00:58:13] you know, if my roots are in music where you're just dreaming and getting the flow and then suddenly you got music and you've got people around you getting harmony with and wow, suddenly you've got this cool thing you've invented, this music, this collaborative

[00:58:25] effort. It's the same thing. I like doing that. I like being with people that I'm harmonious with. People that I'm, we're beating the same drummer to you, Cliché. Do you still do music? Do you play any instruments?

[00:58:36] You know, yes and no, I do. But I don't consider myself a practicing musician because I don't practice every day. So to be, call yourself a musician. You really should practice eight

[00:58:49] hours a day, at least five or six days a week. And then you can jam and you can play in a band and do whatever you want around that. But you need to be practicing. You need to

[00:58:58] practice, practicing, practicing your chops. And I don't do anything remotely close to that. But if I get around a piano or electronic keyboard or get in a room with one of my daughters is a musician and you know, if I see her in an electronic studio, yeah,

[00:59:13] I'll get down and kick out on it. But you don't feel that urge like, okay, now I'm, now finally I'm going to get back to like eight hours a day of practicing the piano and.

[00:59:22] I do actually but I'm resisting that urge because you only do so much at a time. And instead I replaced that urge to be physically creating music that you hear to just enjoying life as music and listening to sounds and being mindful about my

[00:59:38] heart beating and my sound of my breath and just sounds I hear and sounds of the day. And it's a mindfulness technique. You just really tune into the sounds that I'm hearing. Be very close attention to that. And for me, that's very enjoyable. So I

[00:59:53] I walk and when I'm walking in nice places because I'm living here in Connecticut and I hear so many sounds and some of them most people say are really ordinary. And I find them awe inspiring. I'm listening to them. I'm thinking this is music,

[01:00:07] this symphony is great stuff. I do look at life as music. I look at life very intentionally on the hearing of my senses. My hearing is probably my most dominant sense. Well, Brad Jacobs, author of How to Make a Few Billion Dollars, great book. It would definitely

[01:00:23] went in directions I did not expect but it was a great book. So many different like interesting directions and perspectives and I really admire the way you built your career and all the things that surround it. Such a fun conversation.

[01:00:36] I hope you come back on the podcast at some point and clearly you felt the need to do something other than business because you did leave, you know, you did create a good part of your knowledge that you're leaving for next generations.

[01:00:49] And when you wrote this book and I appreciate it. And thank you so much again for coming on the podcast. Thank you, James. I've really enjoyed the conversation. I appreciate it. Me too. Thanks.