What I learned from reading Money Talks, Bullsh*t Walks: Inside the Contrarian Mind of Billionaire Mogul Sam Zell by Ben Johnson.
One of the craziest things that has happened as a result of the podcast is a few years ago, I read Sam Zell's autobiography, and then I made an episode on what I learned from reading Sam Zell's autobiography.
And Sam Zell listened to the episode that is about his autobiography and asked to meet me as a result.
And in that autobiography, he talks about the impact that his partner Bob had on him.
And here's one of the stories from his autobiography.
He says, bob was extremely frugal and watched every single nickel in our business.
Bob was constantly on the lookout for anything that could be reused.
He used to walk into somebody's office and while talking, would casually rummage through the person's trash can.
He would take out stacks of papers that still had paper clips on them, all while continuing his conversation as though nothing out of the ordinary was occurring.
Bob would then just pull those paper clips off, hand them back to the employee, conclude the conversation, and walk out.
This is a trait that Bob and Sam shared in this book.
There's a quote that says, in a trademark zelle move, he focused on aggressive internal cost controls.
I spend a ton of time reviewing all the lessons that you and I are learning from this podcast.
So I read old highlights notes.
I search through transcripts.
I even built an AI assistant called Sage that helps me do this.
And so this week I was asking Sage, why do you think history's greatest contributors are obsessed with this?
Why are they all obsessed with controlling their costs, with watching their expenses?
I mean, look at this.
Look at the story that Sam just told us.
His partner's walking in and rummaging through the trash can.