Transcript
Introduction
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 2-hour lunch with Sam Zell. He sat directly across for me. For 2 hours, I got to stare in his eyes and hear, crazy, crazy stories that this -- from his amazing more than 6-decade career of being an entrepreneur.
And then after that, you're going to hear a normal Founders 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 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 him.