What I learned from having lunch with Sam Zell and reading Zeckendorf: The Autobiography of The man Who Played a Real-Life Game of Monopoly and Won the Largest Real Estate Empire in History by William Zeckendorf.
Okay, so this episode is going to be a little different.
What I'm going to do first is go into detail about what I learned from having a two hour lunch with Sam Zell.
He sat directly across from me for 2 hours.
I got to stare in his eyes and hear crazy, crazy stories that this from his amazing, you know, more than six decade career of being an entrepreneur.
And then after that, you're going to hear a normal founder's episode where I go into detail about what I learned from reading William Zeckendorf's autobiography.
So.
And that came about because as I was talking to Sam Zell, I was like, hey, when I was reading your autobiography, Sam, you mentioned reading Zeckendorf's autobiography when you were a young man and you thought it was very valuable.
You got a good idea out of there.
And I was like, I bought the book after reading it, about it in your autobiography.
And then he said to me, he's like, have you read it?
I go, no, not yet.
And then he said in his, like, deep voice, he's like, read it.
And so that was good enough for me.
If Sam Zell tells me to read a book, then I will do.
I will read the book.
And so that is what the episode is going to be about.
So I want to start at the end first, and then I'll talk to you about how this came to be and all the stuff, a lot of the stuff that we talked about.
So I get home after spending over 2 hours with them, and the first thing I say to my wife, this is what I mean by starting at the end.
I was like, I want that.
I want that to be 81 years old, still fired up about your work, still unbelievably curious around about the world, traveling all over the world, still reading books, still listening to podcasts, still doing deals.