#126: Larry Ellison (The Billionaire and the Mechanic)

Podcast: Founders
Source: whisper-base
Language: en
Duration: 4136s
URL: https://afp-922710-injected.calisto.simplecastaudio.com/57933a1d-c5a9-4040-9aca-e766ae2ec0eb/episodes/6b424423-8064-4013-8ed9-09a48e76e73a/audio/128/default.mp3?aid=rss_feed&awCollectionId=57933a1d-c5a9-4040-9aca-e766ae2ec0eb&awEpisodeId=6b424423-8064-4013-8ed9-09a48e76e73a&feed=3hnxp7yk
Fetched: 2026-03-03 09:12:12

I'm talking about greatness, about taking a lever to the world and moving it, Larry said, walking the grounds of his new woodside property with his best friend Steve Jobs. I'm not talking about moral perfection. I'm talking about people who change the world the most during their lifetime. Jobs who had returned to Apple three years earlier enjoyed the conversational voiling and placed Leonardo da Vinci and Gandhi as his top choices, with Gandhi in the lead. Leonardo, a great artist and inventor, lived in violent times and was a designer of tanks, battlements, ramparts, and an assortment of other military tools and castle fortifications. Jobs cited Gandhi's doctrine of non-violent revolution as an example of how it was possible to remain morally pure while aggressively pursuing change. Larry's choice for history's greatest person could not have been more different than Gandhi, the military leader Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon overthrew kings and tyrants throughout Europe, created a system of free public schools and wrote one set of laws that applied to everybody. Napoleon invented modern public education, public art museums, and the modern legal system, and ended state-sponsored religious discrimination. And as if that weren't enough, he emptied the ghettos and gave the Jews a quality in the eyes of the law, Larry said. Steve had heard it all before and would never be convinced. The Napoleonic wars are named after Napoleon. It's not a good thing to have lots of wars named after you, Steve countered, taking long pauses between his sentences as was his way. In contrast, Gandhi's methods were moral and his achievements were material. He led India to independence. Napoleon engaged in a war to overthrow kings and tyrants. He had no choice. They couldn't be talked off their thrones, Larry said. Yes, India got its independence, and along with it a genocidal civil war between Hindus and Muslims. Countless people were slaughtered on both sides. Jobs noted that Gandhi had gone on a hunger strike to stop it. Yes, and for his selfless efforts, Gandhi was shot and martyred just like Lincoln, Larry said. America's greatest president engaged in a war where over 600,000 people lost their lives. He ignored the Constitution and suspended habeas corpus, and he instilled a draft to fill the ranks of the Union Army. After the Battle of Gettysburg, Lincoln had to send troops to New York City to put down draft riots. Even the sainted Lincoln was willing to resort to violence to purge the nation of slavery and preserve the Union. He couldn't talk the South out of succession or slavery. The saying violence never solved anything is nonsense. They had had this who was the greatest talk before, with Steve offering up Alexander Gustaf Eiffel who built the tower, Arthur Rimbaud, the 19th century French poet, and Bob Dillon, whom Steve said he would trade all of his technology to have an afternoon with. They had also debated the role of founders of great religions, including Christ and Muhammad. Steve liked to say the Beatles were his management model, four guys who kept each other in check and produced something great. Larry liked Galileo and Winston Churchill. Winston Churchill saved Western civilization, Larry said, knowing that his friend didn't approve of Churchill's methods. Churchill prevented Hitler from invading England. But English people were not enslaved like so many others. Sure, he did it by shooting down lots of German airplanes and sinking the German fleet. Not every problem can be solved by talking. Larry's favorite history book was Will and Ariel de Rance, the age of Napoleon, which he had read several times. Like his buddy Steve, and like Larry himself, Napoleon was an outsider who was told he would never amount to anything. When he was ten, he was sent from Corsica to military school in France. His teacher's report said he spoke French with a horrible thick Italian accent, and noted that although the other kids didn't like him, he had an exceptionally high opinion of himself. He was a small town Italian kid and nothing like the sophisticated Parisians he went to school with, Larry said. In other words, he was a man with something to prove, an obsessive compulsive who while his marshals feasted and drank the night before battles would work through the night. Very marveled to Steve. He'd spread the maps of all the area all over the floor of his tent, and then he spent all night planning and dictating detailed orders to each one of his commanders. He'd have roast chicken for dinner because he didn't want to stop working to eat. When I'm interested in, Larry continued, his how can history's greatest general also be history's ableist administrator, the creator of the laws, the courts, the schools, the museums, all the institutions that shaped France then and now? How can one human being do all that? As he looked at his friend, he thought he was a man who also had that rare combination of talent and will. Only Steve's battles were with Microsoft, not England. Alright, that was an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is the billionaire and the mechanic, how Larry Ellison and a car mechanic teamed up to win sailing's greatest race, the America's Cup, twice, and was written by Julian Guthrie. So this book will serve as a second in a three-part series that I'm doing, Larry Ellison. It was actually recommended to me by a misfit named Richard. He actually sent me a screenshot of one page in the book where Steve, Jobs and Larry Ellison are having that discussion on who they admire most in history. Just from that one page I knew immediately I had to read the book and it was a fantastic read. I had a hard time putting it down. Now, the book technically is about the American Cup race, but that's not really what it's about. It's about insights. It's going to give you and I insights into the mindset of extreme winners. So that's what we're going to talk about mostly today. Steve Jobs has featured a lot in this book. So I want to talk about how their friendship started. They were best friends for 25 years. This is Larry and Steve were friends from the first one on one meeting they had in the mid-1980s. Steve had bought a house in Woodside just up the hill from Larry. His front yard ended where Larry's backyard began. One morning, shortly after Steve moved in, Larry was awakened at dawn by the sound of screaming peacocks. Larry trudged up the hill, knocked on the door, and Steve answered. Are those your peacocks, Larry asked? Yeah, they woke me up too. They're really loud, aren't they, Steve replied. They were a birthday gift and I don't know what I'm going to do. I hate them. Larry, an animal lover who funds animal rescue centers around the world, plotted with Steve to relocate his birthday birds. The plan was simple. Steve was to place all the blame on Larry, his nocturnal next door neighbor, who was complaining about being awakened at sunrise by screaming peacocks. The sleep deprived neighbor even threatened to lock up or to look up peacock recipes. The situation was serious and left Steve with no other choice. He lived in a neighborhood hostile to peacocks and had to get rid of their birds for their own safety. Steve thought that was a great idea and executed the plan to perfection, so they see an insight into both their mischievous nature. There's a lot of similarities between the two. I would argue that their approach to business is radically different, but on a personal level, their personalities have a lot of overlap. So it says, Stephen Larry found they had much in common. They both had adoptive parents. They both considered their adoptive parents as their real parents. Both were OCD and both were anti-authoritarian. They shared a disdain for conventional wisdom and felt people too often equated obedience with intelligence. They never graduated from college. And Steve loved to boast that he left Reed College after just two weeks. While it took others, including Larry and their rival Bill Gates, months are even years to drop out. Larry and Steve's companies had taken shape around the same time, and they had risen and fallen, and were both rising again. Both men had started companies with an idea that wasn't their own. And both Steve and Larry listened to Naysayers insisting that the technologies were unsuitable for the commercial market, and then they went ahead and figured out ways to make it work. So there's a couple of other conversations that happened throughout the book, and in this case, they're in Larry's garden. Larry had a love for nature. He says he felt comfortable in gardens and on sea, and on the sea, but never in cities. And so they had this quick conversation, which I thought was interesting. And Larry's talking about gardens and how he favors natural art over anything man made. But then they hit on this idea that we can also make our own art, we can make our own contributions. And I thought this quick exchange was interesting. Gardens were Larry's favorite art form, a collaboration between God and man, a sculpture that never stayed the same. Steve not want to readily give compliments just to the beauty around them and said, why do people buy art when they can make their own? Larry thought for a moment and replied, well, Steve, not everyone can make his own art. You can. It's a gift. And that last comment by Larry gives you an insight into how he felt about Steve. He says over and over again, I've seen this in multiple books now. He compares. He says jobs is the Edison of our time. He is irreplaceable. Later on, I'll tell you about the critique that Larry had. Larry's a voracious reader, and he reads a lot of biographies. And he read Isaacson's book on Steve Jobs, so did I actually did a podcast on it. And he says the biggest critique is that Isaacson didn't let jobs be irreplaceable. And Larry said there's nobody alive that's like jobs. Okay, so let's get back into this. We see more about their personalities, the difference in their personalities. And this is part of his job, meaning Larry, as he saw it, was to tempt and corrupt his friend with boats and planes so he'd have more fun and more time. Steve was always concerned about his conspicuous consumption. He liked cars and motorcycles, but never spent a lot of money. What he loved was designing and redesigning things to make them more useful and more beautiful. So we see the difference there with that last sentence. I would say that their approaches, whatever, if it's earlier approaches to business completely different. Larry, like I said, on the previous podcast, if Michael Jordan sold enterprise software, he'd be Larry Ellison. Larry is addicted to winning. Steve's motivations are very, very different. What he loved was designing and redesigning things to make them more useful and more beautiful. You also see how they push their lives. Larry admires somebody like Howard Hughes, who you know had, he had all kinds of different things. He dated beautiful women. He was a pilot. He started a bunch of different companies. He had a bunch of interests. That is very similar to how Ellison conducts his life. When you look at Steve Jobs, you know, he lived in a fairly simple house. He wore the same thing every day. It seems to me that he simplified his life so he could focus on designing and redesigning beautiful products where Larry would get bored a lot. So he needs to create, and I'll talk to you more about this in a minute. What Larry does is very similar to Michael Jordan. I just finished the Michael Jordan documentary. Larry creates games within games. And I think there's actually good insights to that. But with Steve's is much more simple. I'm going to make the best products in the world. They're going to be insanely great. And so I'm going to try to eliminate everything in my life that's not that. And we are, so when the book is talking about Larry's trying to corrupt Steve, one thing Steve did think that you should spend money on, and he winds up doing that, I think Apple spent like $40 million on his plane, something like that. Larry was actually on the board at that time. I think it might have been Larry's idea. But anyways, there's a section in the book that talks about Steve is studying the design of Larry's plane and seeing what changes he would make for his own, right? And the reason I bring this up is because this is an idea that I learned from Steve over and over again. And he has this idea that the further you get away from one, the more complexity you're inviting it. Right? And I really love that idea. It's one of the most important ideas I've discovered in all these books. And this is just a quick illustration of that. Steve started designing the interior of his new plane, studying Larry's Gulf Stream and making improvements on Larry's design. When he noticed Larry had one button to open a door and another button to close it, Steve decided on a single toggle switch that would do both on his plane. And before I get into a little bit about some insights from Larry's early life, this is not going to surprise you. This is just another person on a long list of the people that we've studied who actually make it a priority in their life to study and learn from history. And it says Larry was a voracious reader who spent a great deal of time studying science and technology. But his favorite subject was history. He learned more about human nature, management, and leadership by reading history than by reading books about business. Okay, so from here on in, we're going to really talk about like, how did, like, why does Larry do the things that he does? Like, how is, he's one of the most extreme, extremely competitive people that you'll ever come across? His early life was not a reflection of what he wanted his life to be. And I think that was a hugely motivating factor in how aggressive he was later in life. So there is some interesting stories from his early life about inspirations that Larry drew. And this is one of them. Larry's own interest in sailing had been sparked when he was a teenager living in the South Side of Chicago. He was enthralled by a national geographic story about a boy named Robin Lee Graham. Graham was the youngest person to solo circumnavigate the globe. The first installment of the story ran with a picture of a lean, tan, shirtless Graham on his 24-foot boat under the title, a teenager sails the world alone. Larry read every word of the teen's adventures in his small boat. His navigating to exotic places and his keeping two kittens and a shortwave radio for company. He envied how Graham's parents supported him on his adventure. As this was the opposite of his own life, so what they're talking about there is his adopted dad said, over and over again, Larry, you're a loser, you're going to mountain nothing in life. And that was his main message to his adopted son. So wonderful, great guy, right? The story of Graham transported Larry from the regimentation of high school to the adventure and freedom of the sea. And I would say, now this is the second book I've read on Larry. I'm halfway through the third. I would say that Larry treats life like an adventure. That's probably a good idea if you believe we only get one life. He was a boy alone at sea, here was a boy alone at sea for weeks at a stretch dealing with storms, circling sharks, and broken masks, visiting exotic locales. Through it all, this may be the most important takeaway in this section. I think that influenced Larry. Through it all, he was his own navigator. That's definitely the way Larry approached his life. So I covered, I'm not going to, I'm going to try to avoid repeating myself. So there is some stories in here that were not in the previous book. But this is the difference between Larry and his adopted father. This is me repeating myself a little bit though. So Lou Ellison revered authority figures. But Larry found those in charge mostly uninspiring or wrong. When the two debated the virtues of President Eisenhower and his policies, Lou advised Larry. He's the President. He knows things that we don't. That information enables the President to make the right decisions, even if we can't understand them. Larry responded, he looks human to me, I'm sure he makes mistakes like everybody else. Larry never believed in the infallibility of authority figures. Okay, so now we're going to get into this idea. The more I thought about the information in this book, I really think Larry uses competition as a tool. And so he uses it as a tool that in varying different ways. And so one of the ways he uses this, he uses competition as a way to test himself. And he talks about like, you know, you have a pretty demanding day job. You're running this gigantic Oracle corporation. Like how do you have time to dedicate to all these extreme sports? And in the America's Cup. So the way to think about America's Cup, I didn't know anything about it going in. The metaphor they use in the book that might help explain it to you is that you think about like Formula One racing, right? You have these super advanced cars done on the edge of technology. They have entire thing almost like small businesses, you know, could be able 100 in America's Cup case. You have 100 to 150 people working usually 12 to 14 hour days for two years before the race takes place. They have to travel in America's Cup travels us in Formula One, but sometimes the races are in Spain, sometimes in New Zealand. And wherever the race is going to be, the entire company, this 100 to 150 people, set up shop there and they're living there for until the race is over. And so not only do they have to have like all the logistics and that, they have to build schools for the kids of the people that work there. So it's a heavily intensive operation. So people are like Larry, how do you have time to do all this? Or why are you doing this? And this is the best explanation that you'll find. He says he wanted to see just how much better a sailor he had become. It would be an interesting test he told himself. So this is a race from Sydney, Australia to Hobart. So this is not the America's Cup, but it's another sailing race. And this is where he races through and almost dies in a hurricane. But that's also I'll get there, but this is the most important part. There was a clarity to be found in sports that couldn't be had in business. And Oracle, he still wanted to beat his rivals IBM and Microsoft, but business was a marathon without end. It's a fantastic sentence, right? There was always another quarter in sports, the buzzer sounds and time runs out. So last week we talked Charles Ketering, Ket, as I called him on the podcast, I think he picks up on something that that was really, really smart. He talked about why he didn't worry about duplication of effort when you're researching. In this case, I think they were trying to find like a cure for a specific kind of cancer, right? And he said something in that book that I think always, or I hope I always remember. And he says, I'm not worried about the duplication of effort in research. Such duplication is sometimes a good thing. It is not what two groups do alike that matters. It's what they do differently that's liable to count. And I would argue Larry's fanatical obsession with seeking out competition and he also calls it alternative stress is something that we can learn from and that he's actually to Ket's point. It's what he's doing differently that is very unique. Most humans run away from stress. Again, Larry's going to use this as a tool to to first self improvement. So he says, stress focused the billionaire daredevil who did aerobatics for fun, served in storms in Hawaii. And once broke his neck, once broke his neck surfing, then nearly left him a paraplegic. He'd also take an oracle back from the brink of bankruptcy more than once. He was the world's fifth wealthiest person just two decades after facing foreclosure on his own home and having his water and electricity turned off because he couldn't pay the bills. His hobbies by his own admission were a constant search for alternative stress. Okay, so let me take you to this second race, they're leaving Australia and they had this experience where you had really rapid, like an increase in wind speed and then immediately dies down. So anybody has lived through a hurricane, I've lived through several of them. If you've been in the high, I have a hurricane or close to them. It is kind of spooky, almost beautiful where you're getting pounded by the storm for hours and hours and then it stops and it looks like almost like a new day. And then a few hours later, depending on how fast the hurricane's moving, it goes right back. So there, this is what's happening while they're doing this race. And this is one of the worst experiences in Larry's life, but this is also the risk he's taking to get that alternative stress, right? So he says, Larry's question is to the people on the boat, he's like, have you ever seen this before? Looking at the swirly, frothly, psychonic cloud and with a plus center in the sign, that's where the boat is, Larry answered his own question, well, I have, it was on the weather channel and it's called a hurricane. We are in the eye of a fucking hurricane. So they wind up surviving this experience, right? I'm going to fast forward through a lot of it. They won the race, but it was called the worst at the time, the worst maritime disaster in Australian history. It wasn't a joyous victory. Larry looked at Butterworth and said, it was like Disney trying to rewrite the ending of a horror film. The crew had learned upon sailing into the harbor that six sailors had died in the race. Five boats had sunk and an estimated 55 people had to be lifted out by helicopter. Larry's team went nearly three days without food or water because of the constant vomiting. So the reason I'm telling all this part is not, is one, I think it's unusual, this constant search for alternative stress. But I think this answer that he's asked at the end, like why after he's, you know, he wants to sleep in for like 15 hours straight, takes a shower, eats something. So now you can kind of reflect on what just happened. And this is the most important part of this whole section. Okay. So it's like, why are you risking your life for a race? What are you doing? After the laughter died down, Larry turned serious. Why do we do these things? George Mallory said the reason he wanted to climb Everest was because it's there. I don't think so. I think Mallory was wrong. It's not because it's there. It's because we're there. And we wonder if we can do it. So he's referencing this person that used to race. And this is called by his guy named Bertrand. And it's like, why are you doing these competitive, dangerous races where people lose their life? And Bertrand described his quest as a higher calling, a stirring within. Something is old. It's human life. So there's just something inside of us that's constantly pushing us forward to try to improve, to try to test ourselves. It's just some people like Larry take that to an extreme, just like Jordan. These are extreme winners. This is what this book is about. Their mindset is not normal. And I find it one fascinating and two full of lessons that we can plot our lives. So he gets us ideas like, you know what? I'm not going to do sending to Hovert, but America's Cup, which is one of the oldest and most prestigious competitive sports and of any kind in the world and the oldest sailing race. He's like, well, there's a reason he was thinking about buying maybe San Francisco 49 years of this time or the Golden State Warriors. But Larry is not content with being on the sidelines. He wants to play. So this is him coming up with ideas like, well, I can buy an American Cup team and then I can race in the team. So this is Larry reason that he could buy the San Francisco 49ers football team and still not play quarterback. Here he could buy the team and hold the wheel. He had every intention of driving. So in the middle of this story, there's this section that gives you an idea of his personality. He is an absolute control freak and he admits this. He says in the end though, he didn't like letting them have control. It was the same reason he didn't have a driver and it was why he liked to pilot his own planes and why he'd been married in divorce three times. He didn't like being told what he could and couldn't do. So what's happening is this is something to do the Americans Cup. It's not like you could just enter as an individual. You have to do an agreement with these these yacht clubs and these yacht clubs are all over the world. And then the rules regarding the American Cup, they have very specific specification of what is what qualifies as a yacht club and what doesn't. So he goes to the oldest most prestigious yacht club in San Francisco, tries to do a deal with them. They won't give him what he wants, which is controlling. He's like, I'm going to pay for everything, but I want to call the shots. They're like, they have a series of committees and they just wouldn't do that. So the reason the book is called the Billionaire Mechanic is because he teams up with the opposite of that yacht club. It's called the Golden Gate yacht club and it's like a blue collar version. It was a yacht club that in decades past, you know, had won some races, had some prestige and has kind of fallen on hard times. The membership is dwindling. The people aren't even being able to afford to pay them. They're deeply in debt. And so the mechanic is this guy named Norbert, who is the person that runs the yacht club is called a Commodore, right? And so he just happens to be serving as Commodore and he's the one reading about Larry's troubles with the other yacht club in the newspaper. And so he sends an email and saying, Hey, you know, we're deeply in debt. If you need a yacht club, we'll let you do whatever you want. And that's actually, it's actually really smart that he appealed to incentives. So I just want to tell you, I'm not going to go into too much detail about this because I want to focus on what I felt was the more interesting part of the book is Larry's insights into winning and competition, but just give you some background what's going to take place. So it says later that day, Norbert, she, please, he ran the idea of a deal with Ellison by a few of club members. I want to point this out because like every, any new thing you do in your life, you're just going to have to overcome people telling you that you're an idiot. Oh, sure, Norbert. A guy like Larry Ellison is really going to partner with us. I love you, but this idea is crazy. So Norbert's just being really logical. It's like, well, we have a yacht club and he needs a yacht club. He has money. We need money. Why wouldn't this work? And so he's like vice Commodore, they're having this conversation as his, his name is Madeline. Madeline added to that from what he read, Ellison was a self-made man, which says a lot. He should appreciate the underdog. So they're positioning themselves as we don't have a lot of rules where people like, we are people like the ones you grew up around, right? And he says, they also noted that Ellison was also a very rich man who loved racing and happens to need a yacht club. The same rocket science, he needs a yacht club and we have one. And so I really like the fact that Norbert just said, you know, he had this idea is like, this makes sense to me. What's the harm in setting out an email? They want him getting a deal done. So what's interesting is that they want him doing a deal. I just want to pause here. I would take a tangent here because he's, Norbert's eventually going to have to work, he's going to have to work hand in hand because the Commodore of the yacht club plays a role and has to, has some role to play in the American cup, even though he's not financing the team and not competing, right? What I found was interesting was that Norbert's wife wanted to know who the person that her husband had to deal with. So she winds up reading the book that I'm currently reading right now, which will be on next week's podcast. And so her name is Madeline, says Madeline had her own approach. She wanted to understand what her husband was up against. So she picked up the biography, the difference between God and Larry Ellison. And she peppered Norbert with pillow talk tidbits that are laying in bed and she's essentially reading some sections aloud to him. So he has an idea of who he's going to be dealing with. The oracle way was simply to win Madeline read aloud. How that goal was achieved was secondary. She went on. When while Ellison demanded absolute loyalty, he did not always return it. The people he liked best were the ones who were doing something for him. The people he hired were all geniuses until the day they resigned. When in Ellison's view, they became it it's a worse. So he says he never graduated from college, Madeline Marvel, and he'd become a billionaire two decades later after investing $1,200 in upstart named software development laboratories. That was the initial name of oracle. Early in his life, and even though much of his 20s, everyone around him seemed concerned, everything around him seemed concerned. He'd have no idea how to make money. He's extremely, I don't know if you call him lazy, I mean, he only wanted to work weekends and nights. I don't know if lazy is the right word, but he just was not concerned about money at all, which is surprising given who he is today, right? Larry's first wife, a customer Larry bouncing from one program job to another, got fed up and divorced him. Norbert turned out this pillotalk. He told his wife he would reserve judgment until he met the man a person. In Norbert's eyes, Mr. Ellison, as he called him, was a guy who came from nothing and made his life a success. Norbert believed in looking someone in the eye and forming his own opinion. So the book also goes back in between, it tells the narrative of this race that's happening over several years, right? But it also goes back and gives you insight into his early life and other struggles that Larry had to overcome. And one of those was the internet bubble burst in 2001. And I found it interesting what Larry is reading while this is happening, because he draws inspiration from the life stories and books just like we do. So it says, he continued to read voraciously. The books on his nice stand included, Fate is the Hunter, a pilot's memoir by Ernest Gann, who's reading The Jordan Rules by Sam Smith, that's hilarious. And William and Manchester's multi-volume biography of Winston Churchill, and this next part is going to give you insight into this game within a game. And this comes up several times throughout the book. So right now, Oracle is going through rough financial periods. So there's a time where, if there's a problem, Oracle will have its full attention. He'll be dedicated night and day. And then when he feels things are going well, he'll go off and do races, do other things, right? But this is very fascinating. This is going to tell you what drove Larry during times difficulty and it's probably one of the things that he does differently than other people. Whenever Larry felt remotely close to being a risk of failure, he couldn't stop working. And now everything, his country, his business seemed at risk. Like most of our achievers, he was driven not so much by the pursuit of success as the fear of failure. So he's fully engaged around the clock. But he also picks up on some interesting things like this mass psychosis that was taking place during the dot com bubble. And this is, I'm going to, I'm going to read you one of the funniest and I mean, funny spear guess I've ever read because it's the guy that Larry is talking to is insane. In the dot com heyday, he got a call from his friend, Farzad Nassim, who used to work at Oracle and was now a top executive at Yahoo. Nassim told Larry, Disney wants to merge with us. Why would we ever want to do something like that? What have they got? I love Larry's answer here because he's he's popping through this psychosis. Larry answered his old friend, gee, let me think they have the most valuable film library in the world, the most valuable TV channels in the world and sick and the most successful theme parks everywhere. Disney makes tons of money and they're probably the most beloved brand on the planet. Now what have you got a web page with news on it and free email. There's everyone gone crazy. Okay, so this next paragraph I think is important because you can be distracted by all the other pursuits that Larry does, but Oracle is by far the most important thing in his life and I think he puts that above, he definitely puts it above, maybe not as kids, but definitely as wives. I think at this point, he's been married in force four times now and we'll see examples of that. So this is a great paragraph that that kind of illustrates that point. With all of Larry's joking glibness, with all his high adrenaline, hobbies and pursuits, cats, that's an executive at oral, knew that, knew that Oracle was his baby. He could marry a divorce, befriend presidents and prime ministers, devour history books and biographies, and debate about the greatest minds, athletes, cars, planes, poets, writers and musicians, but Oracle was in his marrow. And so something to think about that is like how he's, you know, Oracle's been around for 40 years. I think his point with, I never finished my point about the guy comparing Yahoo and Disney. Yeah, Yahoo was like the flavor of the month at that time, but you have to respect Disney because Disney survived and thrived for multiple decades. Same thing with Oracle. How many companies can survive 40 plus years, especially in the technology industry? And I think one of the most key insights I took away from Larry is this idea that I've mentioned a few times around, a game within a game. I'm glad I'm reading these books about Larry Ells at the very same time. I watch this 10-part documentary on Michael Jordan because I think both Jordan and Ellison figured out something that is fundamental to our nature. And I don't think they didn't, they were not setting out to try to figure out something fundamental about human nature. They did so in their own process of self-discovery. And what I mean about that is they hack themselves by creating games within games. They understand over a long period of time that your motivations, your dedication, your disciplines can ebb and flow, and they had to find a way to hack themselves. So let me read this section to you and I'll give you some examples from the Jordan documentary. Here we are competing at the various high level, Oracle versus IBM, Oracle versus Microsoft Larry said. The stakes are high, much higher than in the Americans cup. IBM is a lot more important to me than beating Team New Zealand. Katz, he's still talking to her, knew that when the company was doing great, Larry became interested in other things. Oracle had his full attention now. So this is another part of when Oracle was struggling. And so the idea that he says, okay, I don't want to be the second best or the second most valuable software company to hold. Again, this is where you really have to contrast his motivations with jobs. Jobs wanted to make the best technology products in the world, which I think he did. Larry wants to be the number one. He wants to win. Now, hopefully you can get there by having the best products, but he also relied heavily on sales and marketing, right? And so he has this game within a game, because how do you sustain that level of intensity over multiple decades? He counts days to put enemies. Jordan did the same thing. There's an example where he's in it, they're playing the Seattle Super Sonic's and Finals. Which Carl, the head coach at the time, is the Super Sonic's ignored Jordan at dinner. So Jordan uses that as motivation. He would make up things even if they weren't true. There's an example in the documentary where he's, Jordan's having an off night. And so this guy wasn't nearly as good at him as good as him that Jordan was guarding scored 37 points, right? So they're going to play them the next day. And Jordan tells his friends, oh, this guy's just respectful. He scored 37 points in the me. And then he said, oh, nice job, nice game, Mike. And he's like, that's it. I'm going to go and get what he got. I'm going to score as many points as in the first half as he did in the entire game. It turns out that conversation never happened. Jordan made it up. He made a game within a game. He understood that, especially for the levels of intensity, he operate on. He can't sustain that all by, by himself. He's got to have different things. When they played Utah on the finals, when he, when Jordan retired to play baseball, he went and went to say hi to some Utah players. And there was a rookie named Byron Russell. And Byron Russell's like, oh, why'd you quit? You're lucky you quit because I can guard you, you know, talk to all this trash. And then a year and a half, two years later, Byron Russell is guarding Jordan in the finals. And Jordan uses that conversation that happened, you know, a year and a half, two years earlier as motivation. It's a way to hack yourself. And I think that's extremely interesting when you're studying the lives of people like Ellison, Jordan. Okay. So the setback, there's a bunch of setbacks in the book, right? They lose a bunch of races and they lost a bunch of races because Larry was too busy. He was focused on Oracle. So he had the team managers like, hey, I want to fire the best sailor. He's the best sailor, but everybody hates him. So Larry, he's like, listen, I'm not there. You have to make that choice, right? And Larry comes, winds up dedicating more time to the racing team after. He's like, this is a bad choice. I am, we're bringing this guy back. So they lost a bunch of races, Larry's like, listen, we're going to bring the best sailor that everyone hates. He wants, this one's of being a mistake, but Larry doesn't know it's a mistake then, right? So he says, I think you always learn more from losing than you do from winning. So I've had the opportunity to turn around a lot these past few days. I've learned that we need to make a leadership change to our team's after guard. So in sailing, the after guard is like the brain trust, the people that are picking the strategy, right? I'm done learning through losing. After a pause, Larry said, some of you guys are going to be unhappy about this, but I'm bringing Chris Dixon back as tactician and skipper in the book. I read last, the last Larry Allison book I read was, was published like I think 10 years before this book. At the time, he compares Dixon to Jordan. Dixon is not Jordan, okay? Just remember that loud cries of oh man and no way followed. So the conversation about Dixon continued and this is where Larry makes the Jordan comparison to Dixon. You don't have to like him, Larry said. I'm not asking you to date him. I'm asking you to sail for him. As some people feel they cannot remain on the team, I understand. We will continue with the people who choose to stay on this team. After listening to more grumbling and protests, Larry talked about another to temptuous athlete. Remember he had read Jordan rules that book by Sam Smith on Michael Jordan. Michael Jordan screamed at his teammates. He was a loof. He didn't hang around or talk much with his teammates, but he had a burning desire to win. A will to win and he won. So they're going back and forth and they're like, hey, they're supposed to have fun. There's all this back and forth. There's one sentence that really sums up Larry's personality and one sentence that occurs during this exchange and it says follows. Winning, that's my idea of fun. So they make the change. I'm going to fast forward here because I want to get to, I think, which is more important. Dixon is not Jordan. Extreme winners and there's a lot of extreme winners on Larry's team, right? And they're interesting people. One of the things I like most about the book is they give you insights into the mindset how they prepare for their sport, which again, I think is applicable to prepare for whatever it is you do for a living, whatever your craft is, right? But one thing that Dixon is not is like extreme winners respect other extreme winners, right? They don't respect quitters. So I saw this interview one time where Phil Jackson introduces, he's like, hey, this is after Michael Jordan's retired and he and Phil Jackson's coaching a young Kobe Bryant. He's like, hey, come over and meet with Kobe. Kobe's like 21 at the time. So you want to have a conversation and, you know, they're both hugely competitive people. And so Mike's like, oh, you're like, I'm not anymore. And Kobe shoots right back. He's like, you can't guard me like I would win if you were still in the league. And so they want to have an argument. He's like, okay, we'll see one day. We'll see one day. Maybe we'll play like, you know, one on one or whatever. And so Kobe leaves. Jordan's walking out with his friend and he turns. He goes, I love that guy took about Kobe. He didn't respect people. If he's super aggressive with you and pushing you, the ones that backed down, he didn't respect because he thought those people were quitters. Larry is going to do the same thing because he's realizing, Dixon has a Jordan, Dixon's a quitter. And so he says, what he did see all too clearly now that was his skipper wasn't a Michael Jordan who at the end of the game when the pressure was on said, give me the ball. Dixon said, Larry, my advice is that we go out there tomorrow to try to win the race. You will probably get beaten and you should be prepared to lose gracefully. It's probably not something you want to say to something like Larry Ellison. Larry was stunned by the suggestion. After a long pause, he said that he could be gracious after losing but wasn't being capable of being gracious while he was losing. He had come here to win. The next morning as Dixon got ready to go for the race of the day, a call came in. It was from the team manager. Dixon was told he didn't need to show up for work. He was off the boat. He felt Larry's decision was the wrong one for the team and he was disappointed that Larry hadn't made the call himself, but Dixon knew Larry. He knew that when the chips were down, Larry would always come out swinging. He would never do nothing. He would take a risk and make a change. So there's a lot of, one of the things I love most about Larry is that he's got this, he's a gracious reader, says a lot of history. And so he's peppering his conversations with, you know, this is very similar to what Michelangelo dealt with here or whatever the case is. And so Larry is giving a speech on winning, desire and talent. And it's about somebody he might as most, which is a football coach of insulin party. There's a story that I shared on a podcast about the book Creative Selection, which goes inside of the design, how Apple designed products when Steve Jobs running a company, right? And what I, it's one of my favorite stories because it's talked about laboratory, laboratory one with one play and one play over and over again. He would talk about one physical, one play for like eight hours uninterrupted, but he also has a lot of great speeches and insight into like competition, you know? And so this is Larry quoting Vince the party says, Vince the party's most famous line is winning isn't the most important thing. It's the only thing. That's not the Lombardi line I love. When Lombardi left the Green Bay Packers where he'd won all the championships, he went to an also ran team, Larry said. So he came in and made the following short speech. As Lombardi is speaking now, every team in the National Football League has the talent necessary to win the championship. It's simply a matter of what you're willing to give up. Then Lombardi looked at them and said, I expect you to give up everything. And he left the room. Winning is a habit. Unfortunately, so is losing. Sure, there is talent, but there also has to be will. This is now Larry, Larry talking, that was a quote from Larry, give me human will and the intense desire to win and it will trump talent every day of the week. Again, that sentence is very, if you want to understand the mindset of Larry Ellison, right there, give me the human will and the intense desire to win and it will trump talent every day of the week. Okay, so this is Larry on marriage, love and a bunch of other things. I don't think I'm good at it and I don't think I should do things I'm not good at, Larry said. Ford believed that there are two important things in life, love and work and not necessarily in that order. As Larry saw it, work defines a person, work his ego, work his selfish, love is about others. His lack of interest in marriage was not about fidelity, but it had more to do with the problems he had with authority. In marriage, he had to live a good part of his life the way the other person wanted him to live it. Larry wanted to live his life his way. This part reminds me of what we learned back on the podcast I did about Frank Lloyd Wright. He's definitely have a lot of similarities to China too. He knew that relationship changed after the tying of the knot. His girlfriend supported his daredevil antics and his around the clock work schedule. His wives told him he was spending too much time at work, that he shouldn't drive so fast, that he shouldn't fly his jet or race sailboats on the Southern Ocean. The idea of being with one person who is made for you, the soulmate argument, struck Larry as ridiculous. A self-described slave to reason, he scoffed at the odds of meeting that one special person. There are seven billion people on the planet. The idea that you would meet the one person in the world who's made for you is so statistically unlikely that it would almost never occur. This was very interesting because he talks about, he was, as you can imagine, really affected by the death of C-jobs and I'll go into more of that later. And it has to do with this saying. His favorite Japanese saying was, your garden is not complete until there's nothing else you can take out of it. To Larry, it was a reminder to spend time with the people who mattered and the things that were important. I think that's a really good lesson for all of us. Oh, this is really interesting. He becomes friends with a lot of professional athletes and he has a lot of lessons that he learns from them and he applies his own life. This is about determination. While he was playing tennis with his friend Rafael Nadal, the Spanish tennis champion. Nadal asked Larry, asked how Larry had made his life such a success. Larry launched into a long philosophical musing about how innovation and technology is quite often based on finding errors in conventional wisdom. And when you find an error, you have to have the courage to take a different approach even when everyone else says they're wrong. Then Larry abruptly stopped himself. Forget everything I just said, the answer is simple, I never give up. Here Nadal said something that made a deep impression on Larry. When asked if he loved winning, Nadal shook his head and replied, no, I love the fight. If you fight hard, the winning will come. Larry loved the fight too. Larry's reading was fascinating to me. We get a lot of like his stuff he's reading and then the notes he and insights he gets from reading, which is fantastic. Imagine if Larry else did a podcast like founders, right? That'd be fascinating. So he's reading this book at the time called Loan Survivor. It's about a team of Navy SEALs and only one person, they're on a mission, only one person survives, right? So it says, but what I think is most interesting is Larry's own notes on the page. Larry had noted a page, the real battle is one in the mind. It's one by the guys who understand their areas of weakness who sit around and think about it, plotting and planning to improve, attending to the detail, work on their weakness and overcome them, never waive the white flag. He was incapable of waiving the white flag. So when I read that section, I thought about the screenshot I saved from something I heard Kobe Bryant say, let me just read this note from Kobe. He says, a young player should not be worried about his legacy. Wake up, identify your weakness and work on that. Go to sleep, wake up and do that all over again. 20 years from now, you'll look back and see your legacy for yourself. That's life. And I think that's very similar to the note that Larry is leaving himself when he's reading this book. So something I also admired about Larry is that he's constantly willing to put himself in uncomfortable positions so he can improve. At this point, he wants to race pro sailors, right? He's like, I don't want to keep racing amateurs and this is why. Larry felt that in sports as in life, you work your way through your weight class and then you move up. I've raced against hassles, another racer, a dozen times and won them all. What is that prove? He said, I'd rather lose to now, he's going to list off a bunch of pro racers, right? I'd rather lose to Dean or to Ben or to Jimmy than beat hassles 100 more times. That's the only way I'm going to get any better. That was the weight class Larry wanted to fight in. And so this is a person that's running Larry's boat for him. This is getting Russell. This is okay, okay, Russell chuckled. You can drive in the professional match races too. But he warned, it meant that Larry would have to practice and practice a lot. I'm there. I'll put in the time Larry said, just tell me when and where and send me the dates. That's another thing I respect. This guy during races when Larry messes up, gets in Larry's face, he's cursing at him, he's like, what are you stupid idiot? What are you doing? And just completely berating him. And Larry takes it and he does it because he realized he's getting berated. Not because the person wants to attack him. He wants to win. And that's again, Larry in some, they say he's complex, but if you view him through that, like lens, he's extremely simple. He's addicted to winning. And if you're going to help him win, then he will take verbal abuse from you. Which again, I think most people would be surprised. This guy doesn't have to do that. He gets lounged by the pool. They ain't fed grapes. He just doesn't, he's doing, he doesn't have to do anything that he's doing. I think that's what's probably so fascinating and why people, there's so many books written about him. But I did think that was very, very interesting. He was willing to be treated like just another member of the team, even though he's paying for everything and he owns a team. I like this idea too and it gives you an insight of why he's so addicted to competitive sports. One of Larry's favorite maxims was the brain's primary purpose is deception. And the primary person to be deceived is the owner. So what does that have to do? What is that maxim? Like how does that, how does his favorite maxim relate to why he likes sports? Because in sports, you can't deceive yourself. He just said the brain's primary purpose is to deceive yourself. So he needs to hack himself. He needs to have his game within a game. So he engaged well doing that. Larry liked having opponents, even enemies. I learn a lot about myself when I compete against somebody. I measure myself by winning and losing. Every shot in basketball is clearly judged by the hoop. Make it or miss it. The hoop makes it difficult to deceive yourself. So one advantage that Oracle had was the fact that they're the first company ever to commercialize a relational database, right? Which people said you couldn't do. It was largely theoretical. I think they based on like a bunch of papers at IBM. So anyways, he approaches, there's an insight there. And the insight is if we do something really hard, we won't have any competition. He applies that same exact insight that he did in Oracle in the 1970s to this, to sailboat race that's happening in the early 2000s, right? And so they build this like gigantic wing. I guess you would call it on this boat. And no one has ever attempted it because like it's impossible. What are you going to do? So this is what Larry says about that. I'm going to skip over all that and just give you the main insight. I know that most people think trying to build a hard wing of this size is crazy. But that's the beauty of the idea. The other side isn't trying to build one. And savoring his words, he added. So we'll have a wing and they won't, and that gives him a massive advantage. And before I get to Steve Jobs dying, because I think there's some insights there, there's a great story about the mindset of extreme winners. And this is Larry talking now to another professional tennis player. Larry had dinner one night with Roger Federer. And he mentioned a conversation he had had earlier with another tennis great Jimmy Connors. Larry told Connors that sometimes he went out and just hit without really focusing on anything in particular. Connors looked at Larry and said, oh no, you do not want to do that. Larry accounted how Connors had given him a look like I just told my rabbi that I was converted into Catholicism. Larry was intrigued by Connors' reaction. To Connors, the idea of going out and hitting without being focused on improving your game was sacrilege. Larry had come to understand the charmed, tormented life of athletes. I think this is a really interesting description. Charmed and tormented. Larry came to understand this by reading an autobiography. Jerry West, actually the subtitle of the book that Larry read, which is the autobiography of Jerry West, says charmed, tormented life. So Larry loves this book and he counts Jerry West among his heroes. But he says, whereas Larry found a brutal but welcome clarity in sports, he had seen how professional athletes, including his dinner mate, Federer, were defined by minutes and even seconds of competition. West wrote about it in his book. This is now West writing. When you imagine what it's like to feel like you have a game one and then you don't, one shot, one play, one call, what I do know is that it hurts. It really hurts. The athletes, Larry knew, this is so important, were obsessed with the game they played. They were like his friend Steve Jobs, who worried about the color of the screws inside a computer, who wanted one switch and not two to control the doors in his plane. They reminded Larry, so now he's saying they, meaning Jerry West, Conner's, Federer, Steve Jobs. They reminded Larry a line from Tombstone into some degree, Larry himself, right? So it says they reminded Larry a line from the movie Tombstone. Why at Urb asked Doc Holliday, if you've ever seen the movie, I would argue Doc Holliday, the role played by Valkymer, one of the greatest characters in movie history, one of my favorite characters ever. Why at Urb asked Doc Holliday, what makes a man like Ringo, Doc? What makes him do the things he does? Doc replies, a man like Ringo has got a great big hole right in the middle of him. He can never kill enough, or steal enough, or inflict enough pain to ever fill it. For better and worse, Larry had the same hole, and he tried to fill it by winning. But as soon as he closed in on one of his goals, he immediately set another difficult and distant goal. In that way, he kept moving the finish line just out of reach. I'm just going to let that sit there for a second, because I think that is one of the most important paragraphs out of the hundreds of pages now I've read on the life of Larry Ellison to understand him, that gigantic, never-ending, never-filling hole. Okay, so this book is different from the other two books that I've read and currently reading on Larry Ellison, because those books were published, let's say, late 90s, early 2000s. This was published after Steve Jobs died, and I think it's got to be devastating to have a best friend of quarter of a century die early, like Steve did. So this is right after the funeral. Back home, standing by the lake where he and Steve had made it things great and small, Larry was certain that decades now there would be two guys walking somewhere, talking about their icons, and Steve would be mentioned. Steve would be one of those misfits, rebels, troublemakers, the round pegs, and the square holes, the ones who see things differently. So he's quoting from apples, think different ad campaign. It's also where I got the idea, instead of saying you're a subscriber, no, you're a misfit that came directly from that apple ad, one of the best ads I've ever seen. Steve would be remembered as one of those with no respect for the status quo, another quote from that ad campaign. And he said, the people who think, this is another quote from the ad campaign, the people who think they're crazy enough to change the world of the ones who do. Larry looked across the lake where he and Melanie had been married. They had divorced a year earlier. The fights had begun, and he wasn't a fighter, not at home. He reserved his combat for work or sports. Now Steve was gone, so he's going through a divorce, Steve dies, and then his father figure dies. Steve was gone, and Tom Lantos, his father figure, was also gone. Larry lived by the Japanese saying, your garden is not complete until there's nothing more you can take out of it. But now things were being taken that he wished were still there. And I just, anybody, you know, I've lost loved ones to death, and anybody has gone to that experience. And it was exactly what Larry's feeling right there. And now things were being taken that he wished were still there. He gives two stories when he's eulogizing Steve, and I'm going to quote heavily from both of them. My 25 year friendship with Steve was made up of a thousand walks. If there's something he wanted to talk about, and there always was, we'd go for a walk. Over the years, one particular walk stands out. We had a lot to talk about that day, so we jumped in the car, put the top down, and headed out to Castle Rock State Park in the Santa Cruz Mountains. It was 1995. Steve was finishing up Toy Story at Pixar, and running next. Apple was in severe distress. It had gone steadily down here, hill, during the ten years of Steve's absence. The problems were now so serious people were wondering if Apple would survive. It was too painful to watch and stand by and do nothing. So the purpose of that particular hike through the Santa Cruz Mountains was to discuss taking control of Apple. This is really fascinating, almost alternate history, if you think about it. If Steve would have said yes to Larry, it's about to propose. My idea was simple. Buy Apple and immediately make Steve CEO. I knew we could borrow the money. Apple wasn't worth much back then. I think they said they could have bought it for like five billion dollars at a time. All Steve had to do was say yes. Steve favored a different approach. Persuade Apple to buy next computer. He joined the Apple Board and over time the board would recognize that Steve was the right guy to lead the company. I said, but Steve, if we don't buy Apple, how are we going to make any money? Steve suddenly stopped walking and turned toward me until we were facing each other. He put his hand on my shoulder and stared unblinkingly into his eyes, into my eyes, excuse me. Larry, he said, this is why it's so important that I'm your friend. You don't need any more money. Steve shook his head and said, I'm not doing this for money. This is the second story from Steve's eulogy. One last story. Steve had this peculiar, delightful sense of humor and a trademark muffled laugh to go along with it. After work, we'd often go out to our favorite local Japanese or Indian restaurant. And sometimes we'd go away together on a holiday to cone a village on the big island of Hawaii. All four of us would be there. Steve, his wife, Lorraine, me and whomever I was married or dating at the time. We'd be in the middle of a dinner conversation, suddenly there'd be a quiet, quiet laughter coming from Steve. The three of us would stop talking, turn and look at him. Eventually one of us would ask him, what is so funny, Steve? He would try to tell us, but each time he tried to speak, he could only get out a couple of words before he'd look slowly down at the table and start laughing again. This would happen over and over again until we all started to laugh and laugh. Never having the slightest idea what Steve found so funny in the first place. Believe it or not, this happened a lot. Those moments are my most cherished and enduring memories of my time with Steve. The four of us sitting together at Kona, eating papayas and laughing for no reason at all. I'll miss those times. Goodbye, Steve. Okay, so it was around this time that Larry reads Isaac's book. I just want to tell you his reaction. Larry wondered why Isaacson wouldn't let Steve be a hero. Why he wouldn't let him be the Edison of our time as Larry saw him. So he's going to say something here. He's talking about Steve, but really I think this gives you an insight into after reading now two books, two and a half books on Ellsson, I think this might be his Ellsson's nightmare. So he's talking about Steve, but he's really talking about his nightmare as I interpreted. Okay. So this is Larry wonder where Isaacson wouldn't let Steve be a hero. Why he wouldn't let him be the Edison of our time as Larry saw him. The author made Steve replaceable and in Larry's mind fed into a culture based on a homogenized egalitarian ethos where everyone was the same. Where there are no winners and no losers and where there are no more heroes. I think that sentence right there might be one of the most important sentences in this entire book about when you want on the channel Larry. I said something that's really interesting. Again, I think Larry is responding to his crazy life the same way that most people would respond and it reminds you that old quote the life is but a dream. Sometimes Larry would look around his woodside home as beautiful and serene and spectacularly landscape this any place on the planet or he'd go down to his garage and look at his cars and think how did this happen? There were times he'd walk into Oracle's headquarters and look up at the huge glass buildings and say to himself, how do we pay all these people? Of course he knew but the size of his life sometimes stunned him. He was a kid, he liked to say, born with all the disadvantages needed to succeed. That's interesting that thought there because Ket said the same thing last week that you get stronger by overcoming struggles and then he talks about the people that overcame the struggles and got stronger yet they also seem people to deprive their children of that necessary experience. That's the idea that you need to experience disadvantaged to actually succeed, to get stronger, to create whatever it is that you're looking for in life. That's very fascinating. You notice I've barely talked about the sale about race, right? They have this fantastic, they have a comeback, they should lose this race. There's a series of races, they're down eight to one. The first person to nine wins. They're down eight to one. They come back and run this but I'm going to get there in a minute. One thing they do, because it takes place over several days, you have time to make adjustments. He says something to the guy running his team Russell and again it echoes what Ket said last week that it's not with two people do the same, it's what they do different. So it says Larry said, you already have a job Russell. You've got to figure out why we're so damn slow or set another way. Why is New Zealand so fast? What are they doing that we're not? They figure it out, they actually have helicopters above photographing or filming the race and they're watching the game tape and they realize that they have their sales are set at different angles. So they make a bunch of adjustments. That's just wonderful. They're going to come back, they call it the greatest comeback in sports, right? Of course I would say that, but that's really beside the point. I want to talk to you about what I found so much so interesting is Larry's response to being down eight to one is a really important lesson from the book. Larry was not happy when he heard that speeches were being written and plans being made for the handover of the cup. Remember, it's not over. They're down eight to one they should lose, but his team's like, yeah, who's going to write the concession speech? You can imagine by now what Larry's response to speech to this, but he ignored it all until he's asked to sell an argument over who was going to give the concession speech during the handover. Let me get this straight. People are fighting over who gets to give the concession speech. I don't give a fuck who gives a concession speech. If we lose, everyone who wants to give a concession speech can give a concession speech, but we haven't lost yet. Why don't we focus on winning the next fucking race rather than concession speeches? Larry, a licensed commercial pilot with thousands of hours flying jets, likened the situation to a plane in distress. When pilots have a serious emergency, they immediately go into problem solving mode, and they stay in that mode until the problem is solved or just before impact. In that final moment, the aircraft's cockpit voice recorder captures the pilot's brief concession speech. There are two versions of this speech. One secular, one not. Oh God, and oh shit. Larry, who survived so many storms and crisis over the years, had not reached his oh God or oh shit moment. One eight points to one, he remained in problem solving mode. I love that idea. So there's a bunch of people in the book that have to omit. They're fasting in their own right. One of them is the captain of Larry's racing team, his guy named Jimmy. And Jimmy's really interesting because he winds up dead against his life early. He had to choose between dead against his life to be a professional boxer because he was a boxer or to be a sailor. He was being one of the best sailors in the world. He's got interesting insights, including how hard he pushes himself, he gets up first thing in the morning before his crew. He does an intense workout, then he does an intense boxing workout, then he shows up to work. So by the time everybody else is getting in, he's already had like had a bunch of accomplishments for the day, right? So he's an extreme person. So this is a captain of team of Larry's team reacting to being down eight to one. Jimmy for his part kept thinking about something his friends and the Navy seals told him that the guys who failed to make it through the brutal seal training course were the only, were the ones who looked ahead and realized there's no way they could take three more days of tortures. They're playing mind games with themselves, right? But they're playing the, they're psyching themselves out. So this is the alternative. The ones who made it through thought only about their present task and told themselves, I just got to finish this run or I've just got to get to this rubber boat through the waves one more time. Jimmy told himself, I've just got to go out and win one more race. That's all I've got to do what I found interesting about that part too is the Jordan documentary said the same thing about Jordan. He was perpetually focused on the present on what he controlled now. I can't control what we lost the game last night. I can't think about that. I can't do anything. But I can win. I can focus my efforts on what I can do. And it's winning this game. I'm not worried about the next series. I'm worried about right now. This is contests are the best teachers. So they want it coming back and winning. Larry knew that in the end, the America's Cup was just a boat race. Wimbleton was just a tennis match and the Super Bowl was just another football game. As Muhammad Ali once said, it's just a job. This grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up. No one is going to live or die on the basis of these things. But contests were his best teachers. At some point, one person gets measured against another. They find out who wins and who doesn't. And along the way, they learn something about themselves. Larry had learned that he loved the striving, the facing of setbacks, and the trying again. He was what his friend, Rafael Nadal, said about saving the fight and the winning would come. Everest, it turned out, was never more beautiful than looking up from below. And finally, I don't think there's a better way to close this podcast out on Larry. And he's answering the question, why is he doing this? Each Cup campaign had cost Larry between $100 million and $200 million. When asked about the exact cost, Larry said, sponsors paid a lot of the overall cost. How much did I spend? The truth is, I don't know and I don't want to know. There are days when all the work and expenses feel worth it. And there are days when he wishes he had picked another goal. I have asked myself, why am I doing this? Larry said with a laugh. What started as a hobby gradually became an obsession. It took a while for me to understand how and why I made such a large emotional and financial commitment to winning a boat race. My life has been all about testing my limits and learning from failure. It's been a journey of discovery, of seeing how far I can go. I'm trapped in a never-ending cycle of competing and learning. Once I was successful with Sianara, that's another one of his boats that he raised, it was time to raise the bar so I tried the America's Cup. I was unsuccessful at first, but then I learned from it and I eventually won. Now we're defending the America's Cup. So how do I get off this merry-go-round? How do I stop when I'm winning? Larry paused. Finally, he said, it's hard for me to quit when I'm losing and it's hard for me to quit when I'm winning. It's just hard for me to quit. I'm addicted to competing. That's 126 books down, 1,000 to go. If you buy the book using the link that's in your show notes, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time and I'll talk to you again soon.