The Autobiography of Quentin Tarantino

1. 0:00 – 9:16

   Floyd Ray Wilson: The Flaky Mentor Who Lived in Tarantino's House

   1. DSDavid Senra0:00

      So who exactly was this Floyd character I was referring to earlier? His name was Floyd Ray Wilson, and he was about 37. And for a year and a half in the late 1970s, he lived in my house. He used to date my mom's best friend, Jackie. And years earlier, he would visit the apartment that my mom and I shared with her two roommates, Jackie and Lillian. And every time he came by, it was exciting because I thought Floyd was really cool and I could talk movies with him. And since he was a hip guy who saw a lot of shit, he could keep up. I remember when Jackie introduced us. I was 10 years old. And she said, "Quentin, Floyd's who you should talk to about movies. He knows as much as you do." So I, a 10-year-old, started testing this grown-ass man on his knowledge of movies. Finally, I was able to talk to somebody about movies who knew what the fuck I was talking about. Also during this time, I realized the hard way that Floyd was a flaky guy who couldn't be counted on. On at least two occasions, he told me he'd come over next Saturday and take me to the movies. "Oh boy," I thought, "not just talking about movies with Floyd, but actually going to the movies with Floyd." But when Saturday came, no Floyd. No call, no excuse, no apology, just no show. He either forgot or he didn't give a shit. And I was so excited too. As the hours passed and I waited and I waited and I waited and it got later and later, I finally realized he wasn't coming. I wasn't mad. I was heartbroken. I didn't even think of myself as a kid, but even I knew you didn't do that to a kid. But I forgave Floyd and played it cool the next time he came by. And a few visits later, he promised to take me out again. I made sure when he left that he remembered that we had plans and I'd be waiting for him. And he said, "Of course, no problem. See you next Saturday." And the fucking guy did it to me again. But this time, I wasn't heartbroken. I felt lousy, but not crushed. It was just now I knew who Floyd really was. He was an adult I couldn't count on. This is a theme that's gonna reappear over and over again, Quentin's fierce self-belief and fierce independence because he was surrounded by a bunch of adults he couldn't count on. He was an adult I couldn't count on. I also promised myself when I grew up that I'd never do that to a kid. Now cut to 1978. I'm 15 going on 16. My mom's work is requiring her to spend more and more time away from the house, or she wanted to, and that was a good excuse, so she ran with it, which happened to coincide with the age that I started getting in trouble a lot. A lot of fights in school, skipping school, and staying out late. I was a young wise guy who thought he was tough. So mom rented Floyd a spare room in our house with the provision that she keep an eye on her 16-year-old son. I still thought Floyd was the coolest. Yeah, yeah, years ago he stood me up, but since that time, I had gone through the whole trauma of being sent to Tennessee and put in the care of hillbilly alcoholics. I think that was his grandparents. So by that time, Floyd being a flake was easy to forgive, but it equipped me with two pieces of information that would prove valuable as our relationship moved forward. One, I could not count on Floyd. And two, I cared more for Floyd than he cared for me. I'm sure my mom thought she came up with the perfect solution for the whole what to do with Quentin problem. At the time, I don't think she was aware of what a shady cat Floyd really was, nor did she consider the ramifications of having her very impressionable young son spend so much time around such a sketchy dude. It was sort of like moving Samuel Jackson's character in Jackie Brown, Ordell Robbie, into your home and having him look after your 16-year-old boy for over a year. And if you've seen Jackie Brown, then you know that Ordell Robbie was a character that was a gun runner, killed people, and attempted to manipulate every single person around him. During the year of 1978 and some of 1979, Floyd and I saw a lot of movies together. During this time, the only family I had around me was my mom. But to us, her close circle of friends were our family. Her best friend Jackie was like my second mom. Her friend Lillian was like my aunt. Jackie's brother Don was like my uncle, and they all looked out for me. Floyd, in his own way, looked out for me too. The difference between Floyd and them was while they loved me, Floyd didn't give a shit about me. Don't get me wrong, Floyd liked me. We had a good time together. You see, a guy like Floyd could like you and simultaneously not give a fuck whether you lived or died. One doesn't contradict the other if you're a guy like Floyd. Not to say Floyd didn't have affection for me, but he was always looking out for number one, and that wasn't me. Very much like Ordell Robbie and Jackie Brown. And it wasn't the worst thing in the world to hang around an adult who didn't treat you with kid gloves, who told it to you like it is without too much concern for your feelings. Floyd never lied to me about me. He didn't care enough about me to lie to me. Obviously, sometimes this hurt my feelings. But through Floyd, I received an authentic glimpse on the impression I was making on others. Floyd moved out in 1979. When Floyd moved out, he was gone, never to be seen or heard from again. And that was the story of Floyd. I didn't hold it against Floyd for not keeping in touch. I'm sure he had enough of me. And by that time, he had done things to dischant everybody in our circle. He was persona non grata with my mom due to some jewelry in a pawn shop, and I'm sure other things that I wasn't aware of. Nevertheless, Floyd Ray Wilson left a lasting impression on the 15 and 16-year-old boy he mentored in the year of 1978, as well as a bit of legacy that he could have never imagined. What exactly Floyd did for a living all these years was open to wild speculation. Like everyone I've ever met like him, he always had stories of the days when he was living the high life. But if he's 37 years old and moving into his old girlfriend's best friend's spare room and made to keep a lookout on her teenage son, he couldn't have been doing so well. Floyd was a very personable guy, yet he never had friends from the old days visit him, which I can't say rang any bells back then. But now, I think it's due to the fact that he didn't have any old friends. People were in Floyd's life for a while, and then they weren't. But Floyd did have an ambition. Floyd wanted to be a screenwriter. By the time he moved into my house, he had written two screenplays. Floyd's two screenplays were the first two screenplays I ever read. The script that I loved, the first script I ever read, was Floyd's epic Western saga called Billy Spencer. The story featured an incredibly cool Black cowboy named Billy Spencer. The essence of what Floyd was trying to accomplish in that script, an epic Western with a Black heroic cowboy at its center, was the very heart of what I was trying to accomplish with Django Unchained. But even more influential than any script was having a man trying to be a screenwriter living in my house. Him writing, him talking about his script, me reading it, made me consider for the first time writing movies. It would be a long road from that year of 1978 to me completing my first feature length screenplay, True Romance, in September 1987. So another theme, that's 11 years between the idea and then the completion of the idea. That's gonna be another main theme in, in Quentin's life, the effect that he uses ideas, you know, sometimes decades later after he discovers them. But due to Floyd's inspiration, I tried writing screenplays. I usually never got that far, but I tried, and eventually I succeeded. So what happened to the script for Billy Spencer? Nothing. I'm sure at the time of his death, Floyd was the only one who still had a copy of it. And whenever he died, wherever he was, it was disposed of with the rest of his meager possessions. And whatever trash can it was tossed into was the final resting place of Floyd Ray Wilson's dream of a Black cowboy hero named Billy Spencer. My dream of a Black cowboy hero, Django Unchained, was not only read, it was made by me into a worldwide smash. A smash that resulted in me winning the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. By the time I walked up to that podium and accepted the Oscar, Floyd was long since dead. I don't know how he died, where he died, or where he's buried, but I do know that I should have thanked him.

2. 9:16 – 11:41

   Introducing Cinema Speculation and Tarantino's Singular Voice

   1. DSDavid Senra9:16

      That was an excerpt from the book that I'm gonna talk to you about today, which is Cinema Speculation, and it was written by Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino's probably my favorite filmmaker. This book is unlike any other book that I've read so far for the podcast. I'm gonna read from, uh, the front flap, like the front cover, about what, like, what, what's going on here. Um, and one of my favorite lines, and that jumps out, uh, it says, "Tarantino is possibly the most joyously infectious movie lover alive." He's been obsessed with movies for 53, 54 years. And so it describes what this book, this unusual book is. "At once film criticism, film theory, a feat of reporting, and a wonderful personal history, it is all written in the singular voice recognizable immediately as Quentin Tarantino's. With the rare perspective about cinema possible only from one of the greatest practitioners of the art form ever." That idea is that it's written in the singular voice recognizable immediately as Quentin Tarantino. I think the lesson for you and I is the importance of having a very distinct, distinctive brand. I've seen all of Tarantino's movies multiple times. I've watched all his interviews. I hear his voice. When I read this book, I don't hear the words in my voice. I hear it in his. And that idea that he has a singular voice that's recognizable immediately as his own reminded me of something Warren Buffett said on the power of brand. Uh, Warren said, "Everyone has something in their mind about Disney. When I say Universal Pictures or 20th Century Fox, you don't have anything special in your mind. If I say Disney, you have something special in your mind. So is a mother going to walk in and pick out a Universal Pictures video in preference to Disney? That's not going to happen." And that is what you want to have in a business. That is the moat, and you want to moa- you want to widen that moat. And that is exactly what Tarantino has, and I- what I would argue is one of his most valuable assets. And so I think this book gives you, uh, gives, gonna help give you and I an idea of, like, how did that come to be. It's very unusual. Like [chuckles] it's not really an autobiography. You're gonna h- like, learn about his life. But what he's doing is he's, like, writing these in-depth reviews of these movies that he watched in the '70s and then early '80s. There's maybe, like, eight to 10 that he goes in detail. And it's through this analysis that we get an idea of what was going on in his life at the time. And so here's

3. 11:41 – 18:26

   A Mother Who Let a Seven-Year-Old Watch Adult Movies

   1. DSDavid Senra11:41

      something that's gonna jump out, because it starts out, he starts being o- becoming obsessed with movies at seven years old. This idea that true interest is revealed early is certainly true for Tarantino. And his mom, this is gonna be a main theme, his mom let him watch adult movies at a very, very young age. And so something I thought about a lot was other parents would say this is a bad idea. In fact, some, [chuckles] some other parents wouldn't let their kids play with Quentin because that he was watching all these crazy movies. So other parents would say, "Okay, this is a bad idea." Yet this supposed bad idea leads Quentin to his life's work, and if you think about it, like, he's watching them at, say, a decade before. You know, when you're like 17, 18, you're, you're probably watching a bunch of R-rated movies. He's watching them at seven and eight, and so it's almost like he had a decade of extra practice and study because of his mom's, quote-unquote, "irresponsible decision." So let's jump right into that. He says, "My young parents went to a lot of movies around this time, and they usually brought me along. I'm sure they could have found someone else to pawn me off on, but instead they allowed me to tag along. But part of the reason I was allowed to tag along was because I knew how to keep my mouth shut. I was encouraged to act mature and well-behaved, because if I acted like a childish pain in the ass, I'd be left at home with the babysitter. I didn't want to stay at home. I wanted to go out with them. I wanted to be part of adult time. When they took me to the movies, it was my job to sit and watch the movie whether I liked it or not." And so this is the first example of this lifelong hobby that he's gonna have, where it says, you know, uh, the, the, the front cover, "He is possibly the most joyously infectious movie lover alive." This idea of being in love with movies and then analyzing them is gonna be the foundation of his life's work when he starts making his own. So he starts asking questions about the meaning of films from a very young age. There's a ton of examples like this in the book. So he's talking to his mom after they just watched Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and so that movie ends with the implication, but they do not show it, that all the people died. And so he said, " 'What happened?' I remember asking. 'They died,' my mom informed me. 'They died?' I yelped. 'Yes, Quentin, they died,' my mother assured me. 'How do you know?' I asked. 'Because when it froze, that was what it was meant to imply.' 'Why didn't they show it?' I asked, almost indignantly. 'They should have shown it.'" And as you know from his movies, he definitely chose to show it. When a child read... This is the, the main point of why I'm reading this to you. When a child reads an adult book, there's going to be words they don't understand. But depending on the context and the paragraph surrounding the sentence, sometimes they can figure it out. Same thing when a kid watches an adult movie. "On the ride home from the movies, even if I didn't have questions, my parents would talk about the movies we had just seen. These are some of my fondest memories. These are some of my fondest memories. It was interesting to review the movie that I had just seen from their, from the perspective of their analysis." So this in-depth study of movies forms the basis of his entire career. By the time he starts writing his own scripts and making his own movies, he has a comprehensive database of movies in his head. If you were to have some kind of contest for movie history trivia of all the filmmakers alive, I highly suspect that Tarantino would win. Back to this. "In that year of 1970, I saw a lot of intense shit." He is seven. He is seven in the year of 1970. "Because I was allowed to see things that other kids weren't, I appeared sophisticated to my classmates. And because I was watching the most challenging movies of the greatest movie-making era in the history of Hollywood, they were right. I was. At some point, when I realized I was seeing movies other parents weren't letting their children see, I asked my mom about it. She said, 'Quentin, I worry more about you watching the news. A movie is not going to hurt you.'" This was Quentin's response when his mom said that to him. His mom's name is Connie. It is interesting that he refers to her by her first name, but he says, "Right fucking on, Connie." And so before I go on, it's, it's really fascinating to think about this. Most parents would say that Quentin's mom was making the wrong decision, letting her young son watch these violent R-rated movies, especially the movies in the 1970s. He feels like that was the best age of movies. If you go back and actually analyze, he took a bunch... This is, this is gonna be incredible. This is, again, why you and I know that we're on the right path. Over and over and over again, we see the people that get to the top of their profession, they have this comprehensive database in their head of the history of all the great work that came before them. There's a ton of, uh, you know, I've been watching Tarantino movies forever. I didn't know until I read this book, there's e- exact lines, there's themes, there's ideas, that all he was doing was taking ideas from the '70s and then adapting them to his own work. But going back to this, it is impossible to read this book and not think that her decision was helpful to his future career. And this is something I was thinking about myself, because my, I was watching these movies when I was, you know, I was watching Scarface and Godfather and all these, you know, these violent movies when I was, like, a small kid. Yet with my own kids, I don't [chuckles] let them do that. I was watching, you know, pro- I think I watched... I, I, this is crazy. So if people were to ask me, they're like, you know, I, I look at, uh, at Founders as, like, one giant conversation on the history of entrepreneurship that I'm just constantly updating every week and I hope to have, you know, for the rest of my life. So I really don't look at it as... Yeah, they're updated in separate episodes, but it's just one conversation. But if you were to ask me, like, what I think the best episode I ever was capable of making, I think the best episode I've ever made so far was episode 311 on James Cameron. And what happened with that is I kept trying to sit down and record, and I couldn't stop finding more interesting things about James Cameron. And so I kept pushing it back, and push, pushing it back, and pushing it back. I did the exact same thing. I've been in this, like, Quentin Tarantino deep hole for, you know, two, over two weeks, because I can't stop finding interesting, fascinating things about this guy. And so you read this book and he mentions a movie he made, or then I'm, I'm watching a bunch of interviews with him at, at, at the same time. So then I go back and watch the movie, I'm like, "Oh, I missed that. I didn't even understand that the first time." And so during this time, I remember my daughter, who's only 11, she comes in, she... And I was like, "You can't," like, "listen, I love you. I would love to spend a ton of time with you. There's no way" [chuckles] "that you can watch Inglourious Basterds or Django Unchained or Pulp Fiction," which are the movies I've been watching. And I'm making that decision with my daughter, and it probably is the right decision, in the face of the fact that, you know, everybody said this is irresponsible. They're literally not letting- The friends at school, their parents are not letting them hang out with Quentin because what his mom lets him see. And there's just impossible. It is absolutely impossible to read this book and not realize that that was actually the right decision. The, the obsession of movies grabs him, right, at a very young age, and it never lets him go.

4. 18:26 – 21:18

   Thinking in Movies and the Teacher Who Believed in Him

   1. DSDavid Senra18:26

      I love this idea that people don't have ideas, ideas have people, and I think that's a great explanation of what happened with Tarantino. There's a podcast I listened to. There's a bunch of podcasts and interviews I listened to, uh, to prep for this conversation as well, and one of them was on, uh, he was, he was interviewed by his friend Brian Koppelman on, on the podcast, The Moment. And what was fascinating is Tarantino says that, like, this comes naturally, like he thinks in movies. So he's gonna talk over and over again about all the books that he reads. He's obsessed with... He's, uh, this is not gonna surprise you. Uh, he's obsessed with reading biographies and autobiographies of filmmakers, actors, all kinds of people. But he says when he reads books that he thinks in terms of movies. So he literally will make the book that he's reading into a movie in his head. And so he says as he reads, he puts a notepad next to him where then he starts writing casting lists. He's like, you know, there might be 15 characters in the novel that he's reading or a biography or autobiography he's reading, and he starts like, "Okay, well, who... If this was, if this book was a movie, who would play that?" He starts adapting the plot. He's like, "Okay, well, I can, I would add, uh, I would add to this, like a plot line, or I'd remove that, or I would do it this way." And he was like that from a very young age. It was very fascinating. The reason I brought this up is because he talks about, you know, "I felt I was more sophisticated than my classmates because I was watching the most challenging movies of the greatest movie-making era in the history of Hollywood." What was interesting is he was so uninterested in schoolwork 'cause he was so obsessed with movies that people thought he was dumb. And so if he didn't care about schoolwork, it was like zero or 100, right? He's like, "I'm gonna be completely obsessed with movies. Any of my schoolwork that's not movies, I don't care about." But he was reading at an adult level way... He's obviously not stupid. He, he was reading at adult level way before a lot of the other kids. And so people would make fun of him 'cause he got bad grades, and he said that there was one supportive teacher, this guy named Mr. Simpson. And Quentin's in, like, a public school, and he's like, "Listen, Mr. Simpson saw something in me, thought I was special. He didn't, he thought I was vastly underperforming 'cause I would, you know, read, uh, I, I could read and have intelligent conversations about what I'm reading, but I wasn't doing any schoolwork." And so this guy, this teacher devised an entire separate curriculum just for him. And when other people in the class would make fun of Quentin and say, "Oh, Quentin's kind of dumb," Mr. Simpson would get up, and he would stop, like, the bullying. He said, "Listen, Quentin is reading on a level so far superior to you. He's reading on an adult level. He's reading on my level," is what Mr. Simpson would say. And then another interesting clue about, about the depth of his obsession is that he starts writing screenplays instead of doing his schoolwork, and he's like, "You know, why isn't the school..." He says, "I was a little surprised that the school wasn't looking at this as an academic thing. They looked at my writing and creating stories as a defiant act of rebellion." And they did that because essentially Tarantino's creating his own curriculum instead of just t- regurgitating or accepting what they're giving him to learn. So then in the book, he starts to talk about his childhood. There is a million, uh, notes that I have left to mys- uh, that I left to myself as I'm reading this book.

5. 21:18 – 26:49

   Blaxploitation, a Missing Father, and Searching for Father Figures

   1. DSDavid Senra21:18

      Where is Quentin's dad? Where is his dad? Where is his dad? I'm asking this over and over again because his stepfather, he, he referred to his parents, uh, earlier. That's his stepfather, Kurt. Turns out, I didn't know it. It's never mentioned in this book, but it's obvious that he's, like, yearning for some kind of male, like, positive male, uh, role model or figure in his life, and I don't think he ever found one. As you heard, he's hanging out with O- Ordel Robbie, [chuckles] Floyd Ray Wilson, when he's, like, you know, 16, 17. That's not the person I'd want my son with, uh, when he's 16 or 17. And what I, I found out later that he never knew his dad. I think his mom got pregnant super early. I, I would guess. I couldn't find the exact date, but, uh, my guess is based on my, what I, like, the context around it. It's, like, probably 18, maybe 20, something like that, maybe 21. And so he never met his biological dad. His dad was never there. But his mom winds up getting divorced from his stepdad, and then when Quentin is 10 years old, this is what I meant about one of the main themes, that this kid had to grow up, this guy, I should say, or I guess he was a kid. This kid grew up fast. And so now he's living with his mother in an apartment. He grew up in LA, okay? They're all cocktail waitresses, and it's his mom, his, or her, and her two best friends, Jackie and Lillian. And so he describes this time in his life. He says, "All three were young, hip, good-looking women in the funky '70s with a penchant for dating professional athletes." Remember, he is 10. "During this time, my mother was dating a professional football player named Reggie. Reggie asked to hang out with me. Being a football player, he asked, 'Does Quentin like football?' She told him, 'No, he likes movies.' Well, as luck would have it, so did Reggie." And this winds up being a very important. Reggie's not gonna stick around, and this is where the weird thing that's in the book. Like, these guys are, you know, there's, like, a, let's just say a steady stream of, uh, people coming in and out. A series of men, uh, that his mom were dating, and w- and some of those men Quentin would watch movies with. And one of those guys introduced him to this genre that's gonna be, that, that came around in the '70s that is hugely influential to Quentin's movie career, and I think it's pronounced blaxploitation. And so Reggie introduces him to this genre 'cause he says, "My little face was the only white face in the audience. That was my first movie in an all-Black movie theater in a Black neighborhood." And he absolutely loved it. He says, "As far as I was concerned, Mom could marry this cat. To one degree..." Now, this is crazy. This is all gonna tie together, and then you see the influence on his work later. But he says, "To one degree or another, I've spent my entire life since both attending movies and making them, trying to recreate that experience of watching a brand-new Jim Brown film on a Saturday night in a Black cinema in 1972." The mass-- This is the interesting part, which I didn't put together. Again, this is why I think it was so helpful for me to constantly, like, put off. Like, I sat down. I was like, "Oh, I'm not ready. I'm not ready. I can't-" I keep finding more interesting things because I didn't understand the full context around this till, you know, two weeks, maybe a week and a half after I read this. "The massive theater full of Black males cheered in a way that nine-year-old little me had never experienced in a movie before. At the time," remember, I kept asking, "Where's Quentin's dad? Where is Quentin's dad?" "At the time, living with a single mother, it was the most masculine experience I had ever been part of." Remember this theme that reappears over and over again in these books. You can always understand the son by the story of his father. The story of the father is embedded in the son. Quentin didn't know his father, and so I'm watching this... I might do a completely separate episode on it because it's so, it, it's so excellent. I might, I'm gonna have to do another Quentin episode, uh, down the line. But he's, he's being interviewed by Robert Rodriguez in this series called Dir- Director's Chair, and what they also do is, you know, it's directors interviewing directors, and then they also take questions from other directors, and one of them was very surprising. They're like, "Hey, are you ever gonna do..." I think maybe Francis Ford Coppola was ask- asking the question, too, which is fascinating because you can always understand the son by the story of his father. The story of the father is embedded in the son comes from Francis Ford Coppola's biography that I covered back on 242. Wow, I didn't put that together till just now. So that's incredible. He a- so I'm almost positive Francis Ford Coppola's the one that asked him the question. It's like, "Are you gonna ever gonna do anything more autobiographical? Is it always gonna be, like, somebody..." You know, Quentin writes all of his movies. I think he wrote every single one except for Jackie Brown. And so he says, like, he did do auto... This is gonna be surprising, and this was shocking to me, that the most autobiographical film that he did was Kill Bill. What the hell? What do you mean? Well, how is that even possible? If you've seen Kill Bill 1 and 2, which also, interesting enough, Quentin thinks it's just one movie. He thinks of Kill Bill 1 and 2 as one movie. But he said it was more, the most autobi- autobiographical movie that he ever did. He just hid it under a bunch of metaphor and stories and everything else. And so I'm rewatching Kill Bill, and there's a line about Bill in Kill Bill 2 that I think applies to Tarantino if you combine this book with his movies, with these interviews, with that random question. And he says, "Like most men who never knew their father, Bill collected father figures." I think that was what Quentin was doing, and the way he did it was by movies. He was looking for these male father figures in movies. And what's fascinating is how much I relate to that. My friend, uh, Jeremy Gafan, has this [chuckles] ability to g-

6. 26:49 – 34:41

   Reps, Index Cards, and Chasing Rolling Thunder

   1. DSDavid Senra26:49

      get right to the heart of the matter one time, and one time just randomly said to me, "So it's pretty obvious what you're doing with the podcast." I said, "What do you mean?" And he said, "In your entire family, there's never been a successful role model, so that's what you're doing with these biographies. It's this obsessive search for a successful blueprint that you can emulate." And I had never consciously had that thought before, but as soon as it came out of his mouth, I was like, "Oh, he's right." And so let's go back to Tarantino's childhood. Later on in life, he was, i- i- he was well known, uh, for his film knowledge and his video recommendations, so, like, when he was working at... He, his, his job, he was working minimum wage trying to write scripts. Uh, he was working at Video Archives, which is a video rental place in Manhattan Beach. But everybody in the local community knew about the, the, the weird movie nerd at the Video Archives because he had this extensive film knowledge and video rec- uh, like, video recommendations that would come directly from his brain. Later on in life, like, when people... He said, "When people ask me if I went to film school, I tell them, 'No, I went to films.'" And so this entire book is teaching you the importance of reps, reps, reps. Tarantino was getting in a lot of reps at a very young age. He talks about the fact that he would go to double and triple features. I don't think they even do this in movie theaters anymore. It's like you watch one movie, then they immediately after start playing the second movie, and then in some cases, they immediately after playing a third movie. You're sitting in the movie theater for seven, eight, nine hours. The depth of his obsession cannot be understated. A young Tarantino, he, for some reason, he doesn't mention why, but he has a child psychologist, and he says when he does sessions with her, all they would talk about is the movies that they saw. And so this is what a typical weekend would look like, uh, between the ages of 8 to 11 years old. "My mom would drive me to the cinema on a Saturday, on Sat- Saturday and Sunday afternoon, then drop me off and come back and pick me up four or five hours later." And so this goes back to his mom's unusual, unusually relaxed attitude about movies, leading directly to his phenomenal career because by the time he starts making movies and writing his own scripts, you know, 11, 15 years later, he's got this encyclopedic knowledge of his industry, just like Charlie Munger, just like Sam Zell, just like Kobe Bryant, just like Magnus Carlsen, the dominant chess player. I was listening to my friend Patrick's, uh, podcast, Invest Like the Best. It's episode 348. I'll link it down below. But it's, uh, Patrick and John Collison, which are the founders of Stripe, and the title of the episode is A, A Business State of Mind. But they mentioned something in that episode that was very fascinating, that Magnus Carlsen, who's, you know, dominating chess, when he was younger, he entered some chess trivia contest. It was just chess trivia, and he won it. He knew the most chess trivia out of anyone who was in this contest, and that's, this is, I'm, I'm quoting from the episode. He knew the most chess trivia out of anyone who was in this contest, and that's not a coincidence that the world's number one player has also studied the most about all chess history. He's extremely knowledgeable on that. You could say the exact same thing about Tarantino. And so if you study Tarantino's love and dedication to his craft, you can't help but co- co- compare it to your love and dedication to your own. And so there's an incredible story about this, and it's very simple, like how bad do you actually want it? You can tell that Tarantino deeply, deeply wanted it. This story I'm about to tell you takes place a decade, a decade before he writes his first suc- he successfully sells his first screenplay. Says, "When I saw the movie Rolling Thunder with my mother and her boyfriend Marco in 1977, it blew my fucking mind. I loved Rolling Thunder. For a period of 10 years, I followed it all over Los Angeles whenever and wherever it played." This is way before Home Dep- or Home Depot. This is before home video. This is before streaming. You literally had to wait until it was, they would replay movies over and over again. I don't even think they do this now. And then he would go all over the city of Los Angeles looking for this. "I did this before I knew how to drive a car or before I had a car. I would travel by bus, hours away from my home, to some really sketchy neighborhoods to see Rolling Thunder. After I watched the film a few times, I began to have a deeper understanding of it." Again, this is another thing he will tell o- over and over again. You hear this in conversations, you hear this in writing. He's like, "Oh yeah, I watched that movie 15 times. I watched that movie six times." It's not one or two movies he did this for. He, repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition. You know what's insane? Tarantino made his own Readwise. He made his own Founders Notes. He had [chuckles] he has scrapbooks. So this is what he does. He's comparing, uh, his love and dedication to, to films compared to this other director, and he says, "This guy didn't, nor did he keep scrapbooks, make notes, and keep files on index cards of all the movies he saw growing up like I did." That is Readwise and Founders Notes before software. He's got the analog version of that. He's got a database of index cards of every single thing, and files on all the movies he had growing up. It would be almost impossible to approach whatever you're working on like Tarantino approached what he was working on and not come out successful on the other side. But this story is not over. So he's like, "Okay, I'll get on a bus. I will travel by bus for hours just to see this movie. I will watch it over and over and over again so I can have a deeper understanding of the film." This is exactly like Napoleon, the advice Napoleon gave you and I a couple weeks ago on episode 337. What did he say? You know, "Do you watch one movie one time? Do you read a book one time? Do you listen to podcast one time?" Well, good. You're gonna get dusted by the people that repeat, repeat, repeat, and put in more reps. Napoleon said, "Read over and over again the campaigns of Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, uh, Frederick the Great. Make them your models. This is the only way to become a great general and to master the secrets of the art of war with your own genius enlightened by this study." Quentin Tarantino was enlightening his own genius by this study, by building this database, by taking these notes, by going to such great lengths. And what does he do next? "That film, Rolling Thunder, made me a champion of its director, John Flynn. So much so that I sought out h- I sought him out at 19 to interview him." How does he do that? "How did I manage that? Simple, but not easy. I looked up every John Flynn in the phone book, called them up and asked them, 'Is this John Flynn?' If they said yes, then I asked them, 'The John Flynn who directed Rolling Thunder?' Till eventually one said, 'Yes, it is. Who is this?' Wow, it's fucking him. I had never spoken to a movie director before, no less the director of one of my favorite movies. So I introduced myself and told him I was writing a book on film directors, and could we get together and interview, and could I interview him about his career? And he agreed, and we set a time, and he invited me over, uh, to come over to his house and conduct the interview. As we sat down in his living room to conduct the interview, I began asking my questions and testing my theories about Rolling Thunder. I was so inexperienced at what I was doing that I brought my tape recorder with me, but I only brought one cassette. I could not imagine him giving me more than an hour." So one- obviously he did. "So once both sides of the tape were done, I didn't wanna look like an idiot, so I just kept flipping it over and re-recording over what I had just recorded. So all the stuff on his early career was lost forever." That is the end of that story. That is why I titled that story How Bad Do You Want It? This is, there's another story that you and I have talked about in the past. Steve Jobs was 14 years old. Looks up Bill Hewlett, who's a f- the founder, the co-founder of HP, right? He's got a question. He wants to make frequency counters. He calls him up. Bill answers the phone. He's like, "Hey, I'm Steve Jobs. I'm 14 years old. Uh, I wanna make frequency counters. Can I have some extra parts?" Bill laughs and laughs and laughs, thought it was hilarious. Gives him the parts and gives him a summer job on the assembly line at HP when he's like 14 years old, assembling frequency counters.

7. 34:41 – 38:11

   Encyclopedic Knowledge: Napoleon, Magnus Carlsen, Munger and Zell

   1. DSDavid Senra34:41

      So I wanna go back to where this started, this unexpected benefit of his mom's unusually relaxed attitude about these violent movies, these R-rated movies, these adult movies, right? That directly leads to the, the, you know, a decade extra of time and reps and study, and which that in turn leads to this encyclopedic, encyclopedic knowledge of his industry. The, the, the people I mentioned earlier, uh, in addition to Napoleon, was Charlie Munger, Sam Zell, and Kobe. I didn't get a chance to meet Kobe before he passed away, unfortunately. But I got a chance to meet both Charlie Munger and Sam Zell before they died, and I'm telling you right now, I spoke directly to Charlie Munger for three hours, could ask him any question I wanted. I spoke to Sam Zell for two hours, could ask him any single question I want. They know this stuff down pat. And I met Sam Zell before I met Charlie Munger, and I remember coming back to my house and telling my wife, I was like, "I want that. I want that." At 81 years old, right, I didn't know he was gonna die six months later, or maybe even less than that, four months later. But, you know, to be, he was still so fired up about what he was doing. He wanted it, like, he, he didn't, he's like, "When am I gonna retire? There's nothing to retire from." You know, the guy's got billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars. Not doing it for money, doing it for the love, saying he's gonna do deals till he dies. But what I, when I came back from that, that conversation was, you know, he started, he was, he had 61 years experience as an entrepreneur, and I'm supposed to be the business history guy. And for two hours, there's not one thing that I could bring up that Sam Zell didn't already know, and I came back and I remember telling my wife, I was like, "I know I'm on the right path." You don't sell a company for $38 billion like Sam Zell did, then you learn all this shit. You don't make incredible movies like Django Unchained and Inglourious Basterds and Pulp Fiction and then learn all this shit. You learn it way before, in some cases decades before you use it. There's no way you can tell me that you and I are not on the right path, that th- that this, this complete dedication to trying to condense, clarify this comprehensive knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs, we're clearly on the right path. You see it over and over and over again in these people that get to the top of their professions, the people that literally get, become great at what they do, whether it's war, chess, politics, business, filmmaking. It's all the same. Athletics. You see it over and over and over again. And the great thing is Tarantino's much older than I am, much more accomplished than I am, and I'm like, "Oh, there's... I thought I was dedicated to this." I was like, "Oh, there's levels to this." There's a great example. He's constantly comparing and contrasting. You know, some filmmakers he likes, but he's like, "Oh, it's, it's a job to them. It's an obsession with me." And so he talks about, uh, directors, uh, like Sam Peckinpah and Don Sigel- Seigel, who made great films. Don Siegel made, uh, Dirty Harry. They were genre film masters. That's what Tarantino calls them. But he says, "But they didn't make genre film, films the way that I do." As students of genre f- cinema, we make films because we love genre films. They made genre films because they were good at it, and that's what the studios would hire them to do. And so when Tarantino studies other people, just like when I study him, it's like, "Oh, that fires me up. I want that." Just like what I said to my wife when I met Sam Zell, "I want that." Tarantino, before he makes movies, he starts seeing other people that aren't treating this like a job. They're treating it like something they have to do. The people that he's about to go into, and you know Tarantino, even if he couldn't figure out a way to do it professionally, he was gonna make films no matter what. For money or not for money, he was going to do it no matter what.

8. 38:11 – 43:47

   Movie Brats, Obsession, and Leaving on Top

   1. DSDavid Senra38:11

      And so he starts seeing the movie brats. This is in the 1970s, and he's like, "Oh my God, they're film nerds like me." And so I've done a bunch of episodes on the movie brats. These are the first... So Tarantino's gonna give us some background here, right? They're the first fir- film school educated generation of young directors that were raised on television. So you're thinking Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg. This part is important, right? So he's saying, "What set the movie brats apart from the earlier generation of directors that had come before them, even more th- than their youth and the film school education, was the fact that they were film geeks." True interest is revealed early, right? You can find somebody that's gonna want to make film, wants to play basketball, wants to start businesses, wants to invest. You, you look at their childhood, there's going to be signs early. People don't have ideas. Ideas have people. The ideas grab them early. When I'm reading this... Uh, listen, I... It should be obvious to you, this is not a job to me. I am completely and utterly obsessed. I work on Founders Podcast seven days a week. Well, what was I doing before that? I, the first time I discovered a podcast was in 2010. You know, I'd been obsessed with, uh, you know, radio, spoken word. Like, it was so hard to find. Like, I grew up, there was no, you know, obviously no internet. Uh, well, later on in my childhood there's internet, but you'd have to listen to, like, AM radio. And then I remember the day where, like, it was magic, where I didn't have to be in the car trying to listen to AM radio. Uh, you know, I listened to AM radio on everything, politics, sports, uh, religion, advice columns, everything. And, um, I remember the day when you could, the first time you could actually, uh, listen not in your car. You could, uh, you could stream it on, in your browser. Like, it would... The internet speeds were slow back then. It would, like, buffer sometimes even though it was just audio. It's like, this is incredible. But the first time I discovered an actual podcast, which ch- ch- changed everything because it's like, oh, it's independent, essentially you have a radio station in your pocket, and you can listen anytime you want, was in 2010. From 2010 to 2016, right, I started this podcast in 2016, I listened to thousands of episodes. And so you're seeing a very similar thing with Tarantino, and then the movie brats, 'cause he's like, "Oh, y- they're nerds." And he says they loved movies, they dreamed of movies. They even received degrees in movies back when that was a dubious major. And so this is what Tarantino is realizing. Why that's so important, because that's how you truly get great at what you're doing, get to the top of your profession, 'cause he sees Jaws. And so this is Tarantino on Steven Spielberg and greatness. "When Jaws came out in 1975, it was easily the best movie ever made. Nothing ever made before it came close, because for the first time, the man at the helm wasn't executing a studio assignment, but a natural-born filmmaker genius who grooved on exactly th- this kind of movie and would kill himself to deliver the exact version of it that was in his head." And there's another time in the book that he brings up Jaws and Steven Spielberg. He says, "Steven Spielberg's Jaws is one of the greatest movies ever made because one of the most talented filmmakers who ever lived, when he was young..." Remember this part because Quentin has made it public that his next movie is, he intends his next movie to be his last, and I'll get there right after this so I don't forget. Just remember this, the, the when he was young part. "Steven Spielberg's Jaws is one of the greatest movies ever made because one of the most talented filmmakers who ever lived, when he was young, got his hands on the right material, knew what he had, and killed himself to deliver the best version of that movie that he could." So let me put the book down. I need to go to my notes. Oh, in fact, this is hilarious. So one of the things I was doing was I bought all of the, all of his movies, and, uh, s- a few of them came with, like, extra, like, you know, there's like, uh, like back in the day when you'd buy DVDs, they'd have like, not even extra scenes, but like interviews and stuff. And so one of the extra scenes from his movie Once Upon a Time In Hollywood ends with Tarantino leading a chant wh- uh, while they're on set. I think they closed down Hollywood Boulevard to do that scene, and he, he's leading a chant with his entire crew, "Because we love making movies. Because we love making movies. Because we love making movies." That was his last, the last film he's made so far. He's gotta be close to, you know, 60 years old at the time. And yet you can picture if you read this book and you spend time studying him, you knew that he w- he would do the exact same thing when he was 10, 15, 25. And so one of the interviews I watched with Tarantino was when Tarantino came on Joe Rogan's podcast to promote his book, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. And, you know, he was, Joe kept pushing him. He was like, "Why?" Like, "I'm a huge fan. Why are you trying to, like, I don't want you to stop making movies." And Tarantino says, he goes, "I wanna leave on top, so I'm planning my next movie to be my last. I want to leave the audience wanting more, but also the fact that I know about film history influences that decision." "So what do you mean?" He goes, "I know about film history. Film directors do not get better as they get older." That's what Tarantino said. "Film directors do not get better as they get older. I don't wanna leave when my powers of moviemaking a- and moviemaking abilities are diminished." And he used the example of Muhammad Ali fighting too long. You know, he wants to leave. He wants to be the Muhammad Ali that leaves before he fights Leon Spinks. But again, I love this idea, this, this historic database that he has in his mind of film history. He knows. I, like, I'm not... Learning is not memorizing information, right? Learning is changing your behavior. Quentin clearly is learning from history 'cause he's using those ideas in his work, and you can see 'em. And so this one, he's like, "I have to do this. Film directors do not get better as they get older."

9. 43:47 – 48:09

   Fearlessness Against the Play-It-Safe '80s

   1. DSDavid Senra43:47

      So then I wanna bring up the fact that he starts making movies in the '90s, right? He was in, his, his influences were in the '70s, and the, the way he made movies in his 90s were not only influenced by the '70s, but they were also influenced by the '80s. In the '70s, he was emulating what he liked. In the '80s, he was trying to do the opposite of what he hated. And so he says, "After growing up in the anything-goes '70s, the '80s marked it as a play-it-safe decade. The '80s was a horrible decade. The restrictions Hollywood imposed on their product were self-imposed. The harshest s- form of censorship is self-censorship." And so he talks about the '80s were when every movie had to have a happy ending. Everything had to be predictable. And so the only way to fight against that is to build. Remember, there's no point in criticizing. Just build what you wanna see in the world, and that's exactly what he did. And so k- keep in mind, he's writing, so, uh, I don't know if I've... I think I've said this already, but if, just in case I, uh, I got a little excited, so just in case I forgot. Tarantino's, like, making $150 a week working at a video rental store. That's what he was doing when he's writing his first script. The plan was to try to sell a script. The first script he sells is True Romance, then use that money to fund his first movie, which winds up being Reservoir Dogs. And so this is Tarantino looking back on this point of his life where he's just refusing to self-censor, and he's refusing to play it safe. And so he writes, "I remember when I worked at Man- the Manhattan Beach video store, Video Archives, and I would talk to the other employees about the types of movies that I wanted to make and the things I wanted to do inside of those movies, and their response would be, 'Quentin, they won't let you do that,' to which I replied back, 'Who the fuck are they, and who is going to stop me? They can go fuck themselves.' I wasn't a professional filmmaker back then. I was a brash, know-it-all film geek." Okay. His self-confidence, uh, obviously when you hear him speak, when you hear him write, excessively high. It was like that way before. Belief comes before ability. He, before he ever made a movie, he had self-confidence that he could make the movie. And one of his great friends is the other filmmaker, Robert Rodriguez, and he even brought it up in the interview. Like, "Oh, you know, you know, you're obviously very self-confident." And they were self-confident back when they were, like, kids. They were talking about hanging out when they were, uh, they were first trying to make it. They'd go to, like, Quentin's, like, crappy apartment and watch movies all day. I think they were in, like, their early 20s when they were doing this, and Quentin was like that back then. And so you see that. He's like, "You know, I'm not gonna let them stop me. Forget them. I wasn't a professional filmmaker back then. I was a brash, know-it-all geek. Yet, once I graduated to a professional filmmaker, I never did let they stop me. Viewers can accept my work or reject it. They can deem it good, bad, or with indifference. But I've al-" This is such an interesting... This is a great line. Such an interesting idea. "But I've always approached my cinema with a fearlessness of the eventual outcome, a fearlessness that comes to me naturally. I've always approached my cinema with a fearlessness of the eventual outcome, a fearlessness that comes to me naturally." And you know that is true because he is, he, he is going against the trend. He is swim- Remember last week, David Ogilvy said, "Only dead fish go with the flow"? Tarantino's not a dead fish. He's not going with the flow. He's making Reservoir Dogs coming off the '80s. And so he says, "The people making movies at this time didn't think audience cared whether or not the happy endings they gave them made sense or not." 'Cause to Tarantino, they don't make sense. So, like, you had this whole story, and then you have to f- you have to do this weird twist that doesn't make any sense just to give it a happy ending so audiences are, are happy, right? Now, this is fascinating. Tarantino makes the movies he wanted to see. Even at the time, he knew that the mass audiences liked movies that he hated, right? So he's like, "Listen, I hate what the people making movies are doing." And he says, "While I'd like to say those Hollywood professionals were wrong, I'm not sure they were." How would Tarantino know that? How would they know that, you know, he's like, "Hey, I would love for them to be wrong. I'm not sure that they were." And think about it. He's not sure that they were, but he still goes back. He still be s- he's still, he's still, he is still fearless in making, in approaching the cinema and making the movie that he wants to see, right? Because at Video Archives, remember, while this is going on, he's working in the video store. He's talking to customers, viewers of movies. And so he says, "At Video Archives, I dealt closely with the movie-watching public, uh, usually on a one-on-one basis, much closer than any Hollywood executives, and for the most part, they didn't care how unrealistic or implausible the jerry-rigged climaxes they were spoon-fed were. They just didn't want the movie to end like a bummer."

10. 48:09 – 51:04

    Saying No: Jamie Foxx, Reservoir Dogs and Travolta

    1. DSDavid Senra48:09

       It's very obvious that Tarantino has a perspective. He has a set of ideals. He has a way he wants things done. In fact, w- uh, I watched this clip of Jamie Foxx being interviewed by Howard Stern, and he talks about what it was like working with Quentin Tarantino. And Jamie Foxx says that on set, Tarantino is a tyrant, and he, quote, "Won't let you fuck his film up." And so Howard Stern was surprised by that, and he's like, "Oh, you must, you know, you must not like that." And his whole point was like, no, with him, cl- Jamie Foxx was very, it's very obvious, like Tarantino knows his stuff. He cares deeply. He's not going to let this fail. He's gonna get the best performance possible out of you. And so the follow-up question was, like, expecting a negative answer. You know, "Oh, like of course you wouldn't. Like, would you work with Quentin Tarantino again?" The, the expected answer would, no, of course not. He's a tyrant. You know, he would be yelling and screaming, and very adamant about how things he wanted to be. And yet Jamie Foxx said, "A thousand times. A thousand times I would work with Quentin Tarantino again." And what's incredible is this approach, this, like, dedication to the fact that, hey, I'm gonna make my movies with a fearlessness of the eventual outcome. Everybody, even early in his career, okay, everybody tries to get him to do things the way that they want him to do things, and he just refuses. He just says no over and over again. No. No, not doing that. Early in his career, a lot of his movies were financed by the Weinstein Company, and Harvey Weinstein walks up to him, and they're, they are s- uh, showcasing Reservoir Dogs. This is before it's released to, on, like the, like, the film festival circuit. And what they're noticing is there's a scene in Reservoir Dogs where they're cutting a guy's ear off, and some percentage of the audience is just not reacting well to that. They get up, and they walk out. They're very upset. And so, you know, the, they're trying to make the point to Tarantino. It's like, "Hey, if you just remove that scene, then, you know, more people will watch the movie." And Tarantino just said no over and over again. He's like, "Nope, it's staying in. It's my movie. That scene's important. That's exactly... The movie's exactly what I want it to be. That is staying in." And it's this constant no, no, no. And refusing to budge. Everybody else budges because it is more important to Quentin than it is to them. Another example that Tarantino gives is he has some unusual cast decisions, and you'll see that over and over again. At the time he cast John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, John Travolta was thought of as, like, a has-been, right? Now he winds up, his career was revived after Pulp Fiction, goes on to do a bunch of other movies. But before then, everybody's like, "Oh, it's like that, that was that guy dancing in the, you know, the 1970s. He's doing, like, the baby movies now." Like, no. And so they told him. He sends this cast list, and they're like, "We like all the names, but you have to take Travolta off there." And he's like, "I'm not taking John Travolta off there." And again, he just says, "No, no, no." It goes back to this idea that I'm approaching my cinema with a fearlessness of the eventual outcome. And in the case of Pulp Fiction, this is fascinating. Uh, um, you think about movies to me, right? The filmmaker's career is fascinating. You could think

11. 51:04 – 53:16

    Films as Miniature Businesses: Budgets and Box Office

    1. DSDavid Senra51:04

       about each individual movie as, like, a little miniature business, right? That it's put together for a cer- certain set of time. Uh, I think there's a lot of similarities between a director and an entrepreneur. There's a line from a biography of Robert Friedland, which I covered, I don't know, five years ago. He was, uh, the guy that was a huge influence on Steve Jobs early in his life. But he says, "Promoting a stock or building a business is like making a movie. You've got to have stars, prop, and a good script." And so you can think of every single film that Tarantino or any other filmmaker for that matter has made as, like, a miniature b- business. And so look at some of the capital efficiency here. Pulp Fiction cost eight million dollars to make. It got 213 million just at the box office. So all these numbers, I went and pulled eight out of the 10 movies. So Reservoir Dogs, you know, k- made a little bit of money, uh, at box office, you know. But it cost very little. I think, I think it was, like, 1.2 million and made, like, three million, something like that. And then the only one that kind of flopped or broke even, none of his movies lost money, but he considers, uh, Death, Death Proof a flop because I think it just made back what they invested. But if you take the top eight out of the 10 movies that Tarantino's made so far, they've cost about $400 million to make, and they've yielded almost two billion at the box office, and that's just the box office. You know, I just said this week I bought a bunch of them, you know, $15 a pop on, on Apple. They're streaming. They're still selling. But Pulp Fiction, eight million to make, 213 million at the box office. Jackie Brown, 12 million to make, 74 million at the box office. Kill Bill: Volume 1, 30 million to make, 180 million at the box office. Inglourious Basterds, s- that's probably my favorite Tarantino movie, uh, 70 million to make, 321 million at the box office. Django cost 100 million to make, brought in 426 million, almost a half a billion dollars at the box office. And it goes on and on and on. But this idea, like these are, like, miniature businesses, right? And so everybody's like, you can't have... John Travolta was, you know, probably the most important, arguably the most important character in that movie. Maybe Samuel L. Jackson, you know, uh, in Pulp Fiction played the bigger, bigger role. But that eight million dollars, and it yielded 213 million at the box office. The movie's been out, what? For, you know, 25, 30 years. How much money has it made since then?

12. 53:16 – 59:22

    Kevin Thomas, Passion, and the Value of a Historical Database

    1. DSDavid Senra53:16

       Okay, so there's one more story that I wanna tell you. It's about Quentin Tarantino's favorite film critic, and I think it ties a lot of the ideas, um, that I took away from studying Tarantino. One is that if you love your work, that will increase your enjoyment of your life. Uh, number two is the importance of knowing more about your industry than anyone else. Number three is that passion and enthusiasm is infectious. You are... I've never seen, you know, these are movies that [chuckles] came out 50 years ago in some cases. I've never seen them. And yet just reading about Tarantino's interpretation of them and love of them makes you love them or love his enthusiasm for them. And then four, the importance of building this historical database that you can then use and that can influence and benefit your work many, many years into the future. We have no idea, as we're about to see here. There's gonna be examples of books you read, hopefully podcasts you listen to like this one, where you're gonna hear something, and you're gonna use that 10, 15, 20 years into the future. And so he starts out comparing and contrasting the way that Kevin Thomas approaches his work is the direct opposite of how most people approach theirs in the same, uh, industry. Most critics writing for newspapers and magazines set themselves up as superior to the films that they were paid to review, which I could never understand because judging from their writing, this was clearly not the case. They looked down on films that gave pleasure, and on filmmakers who had an understanding of the audience that they did not. As a kid who loved movies and paid to see pretty much everything, I just thought they were snide assholes. Today, as a much older and wiser man, I realize the extent of how unhappy they must have been. They wrote with the demeanor of somebody who hates their life and hates their job. Kevin Thomas reviewed movies for the Los Angeles Times. The L- the LA Times was the morning newspaper that most agents and studio executives read, so it was influential not only to a young Quentin Tarantino, but also people working in the industry, you know, a decade before, maybe a decade, maybe half a decade before Tarantino breaks in. Years later, at the Torrance Public Library, I looked up one of his reviews. Okay, if you find yourself at a public library looking for a review of a movie that came out 20 years earlier, that is a sign that you are obsessed. That is a sign that you have maneuvered yourself into the exact industry you should be working in. And so he talks about the fact that Kevin loved, he was very passionate, again, passion and enthusiasm is infectious, that Kevin loved the movie for the review that he's reading. Quentin re- Quentin goes to watch it. He says, "After 20 minutes, I walked out on this one too, but I never begrudged Kevin Thomas his enthusiasm. Did I waste money? Yeah, but I'm not gonna pretend I even gave a shit about that. I liked Kevin Thomas so much, I was glad that he at least had a good time." Think about the contrast, right, where he started this, where he's like, "You know, I'm reading these critics for newspapers. Oh," and then you realize, oh, they, they hate their lives, they hate their jobs. And then he's reading Kevin Thomas. Kevin's, like, hyped up about this movie. Quentin, who loves movies, goes to see it. He's like, "Oh, I didn't like this movie, but I'm still happy 'cause at least Kevin loved it." Passion and enthusiasm is infectious. And so what's never stated, but it's also implied if you read this story, is like, oh, Kevin was just like Quentin in the sense that he maneuvered himself into a job he loved, which then increases your enjoyment of overall your life, right? Then he goes into the f- the, this importance of having this historical database in your head because you never know when you're gonna use these ideas. And so here's an example of that. One review Kevin Thomas wrote in 1980 that I read when I was 18 years old was to have a significant impact on my film 17 years later. So it was a review. This is gonna... So he's, he's 18. Uh, he's gonna use this 17 years later, right? Uh, it was a review for a Jaws ripoff called Alligator. In his review of this giant alligator movie, okay, [chuckles] which he, which Kevin called well-made and lots of fun, Kevin focused on two lead performances. One of those lead performances was this g- was a young Robert Forster. Remember, Quentin is 18 years old when he's reading this review about this performance of this actor named Robert Forster. 15 years later, when I was writing my adaptation to what would turn into the movie Jackie Brown, I had to consider who was gonna play the likable lead male character, bail bondsman Max Cherry. There was something about Forster in Alligator that really stuck with me. I watched the movie again, and I felt that the character from Alligator could be Max Cherry, just 15 years earlier. So I started writing the script as if he was. Would I have done that without Kevin Thomas' highlighting Forster so positively in his review? No. In the end, what made Kevin Thomas so unique in the world of the '70s and '80s film criticism, he seemed like one of the only few practitioners who truly enjoyed their job and consequently their life. I loved reading him growing up and practically considered him a friend. In 1994, I won an award for Pulp Fiction from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. When I stepped up to the podium and looked out before the audience of LA critics, my first remarks to the room were, "Gee, thanks. Now I finally know what Kevin Thomas looks like." And that is where I'll leave it for the full story. Highly recommend reading the book. If you buy the book using the link that's in the show notes on your podcast player, are available at founderspodcast.com, you'll be supporting this podcast at the same time. That is 344 books down, 1,000 to go, and I'll talk to you again soon.

13. 59:22 – 1:06:18

    Sage and Founders Notes: A Historical Database on Demand

    1. DSDavid Senra59:22

       Spending two weeks studying Tarantino has got me completely fired up. I don't know if I'm done making [chuckles] podcasts on him. I might make a... The next episode might be on him again. Uh, I have a lot of material that I still wanna talk about. But the main thing I wanna talk about to you real quick, and I, I can keep this real short, is I can't get over the fact that you know how Tarantino had this historical database in his head of the movie industry, like the entire history of the movie industry? It was in his head. It's something that he could call on and that he not only could call on, but he called on multiple times, and he would use in his work later on. I really believe that Sage, which is the new feature of Founders Notes, is that for you, but for the entire history of entrepreneurship, for the entire entrepreneurship industry. It's kinda blowing my mind how, you know, 'cause I've told you since 2018, I've been f- I've, I did what Tarantino did. I didn't even know that he did this [chuckles] until I read this book. But just like he was cataloging and making index cards and all those things of all the movies that he had been watching since, or since he was a kid- Since 2018, all the books, for every single book that I've r- uh, read for this podcast, I've been adding in all my highlights, all my notes into this database called Readwise, into this app called Readwise, which allows me to search it, to review it, uh, go... There's a bunch of different ways you can like, you can search by book, you can search by highlight feed, you can search by keyword. And so for the last six months, I think you already know this, but for the last six months, I partnered with them. I was like, "Hey," I was getting a bunch of messages over the years of people saying, "Hey, I want access to all your notes and highlights." And so I partnered with the team at Readwise to build foundersnotes.com. Foundersnotes.com is where you sign up to get this if you haven't done so already. And you could see, uh, exactly what I see. You see every single note, every single highlight. You can search through everything that I have, uh, th- that... All, all the notes and highlights that I have. It's this like giant searchable database about like the collected knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs that I've gathered over the... Since 2018, so six years or whatever that's been. Then I started adding other features, like putting in every single transcript into Founders Notes for every single episode, and you could search every single word I've ever, ever, ever uttered on the podcast. And then I had this idea for a feature to build an AI assistant on top of that. And so in addition to you being able to read all my notes, highlights, searching everything, reading all the transcripts, you can do that. Sage can do this for you. And it's insane because, uh, you know, I have... If you're, you've heard me speak on other podcasts or you've heard me speak publicly, uh, you know, I don't know what people are gonna ask me in advance, and I'll just use that historical database that's in my mind to answer, uh, just take another question and run it through everything I've learned from studying this podca- or building this podcast, and then answer their question. Except Sage does this except it has a perfect memory. So what Sage is, uh, I was, I was calling this, you know, this feature. I couldn't figure out what to name it. I was gonna call it Founders ChatGPT or Founders GPT. Uh, I was gonna call it Founders Chat, and I was like, "Well, that's not really what it, what it is." And so somebody that was actually in the private beta... So Sage is available to every single person that has access to Founders Notes. If you already have it, you can use this immediately. If you haven't signed up, you should sign up. Like exactly, I mean, uh, I, I don't know how you're gonna listen to the podcast you just listened to and not realize how valuable it is to have this historical database in your head, and Sage allows you to have this on demand anytime you want. And so somebody that was in the private beta was testing Sage. It was a bunch of people, the existing subscribers of Founders Notes that were testing it. And he sent me an email. He's like, "Listen, w- this Founders Chat, all these other names that you have, AI assistant and all this stuff, it's not actually... That's not a good description of what you've built." And he's like, "Why don't you call it Sage?" And then he sent me the, the definition. And when I think of Sage, I think of Charlie Munger, and this is exactly what Charlie had in his mind. And so the Sage has two main definitions. It's a profoundly wise person. This refers to someone with a deep understanding of life, accumulated knowledge, and sound judgment. That is every single person that you and I have ever studied on the podcast, except Sage allows you to do this with hu- across hundreds of these kind of people. They are often looked to for guidance and advice. That's exactly why I'm reading these books. That's exactly why I'm making the podcast, right? And then it says, uh, "Sage is wise, discerning, discerning, or prudent. This describes someone who shows good judgment and makes well-considered decisions." And so what Sage does, right, s- when you ask Sage a question, and I'll leave a list of the questions. A bunch of people have been sending me questions, uh, that they've asked that they, they've gotten great responses, uh, from about the questions they have in their work, like how do I find new customers, questions on distribution, marketing, all kinds of different things that, that you, uh, decisions that you have to make in your career. And so what I'm eventually gonna do is, uh, first of all, Sage right now is available at foundersnotes.com. Go to foundersnotes.com and get it, okay? Now, eventually, I already realized this is like, uh, I called the... one of the founders at Readwise this week. I was like, "Sage needs to be its own app. We've gotta figure out a way. Let's, let's start building this immediately." This one feature will be y- it'll always be available in Founders Notes, right? But I want this for myself. I want it on my phone as an app, as a standalone feature. And so what Sage does, it automatically... When you ask it a question, right, it automatically searches every single highlight for every single book that I've ever read for the podcast, every single note for every single book that I've ever read for, read for the podcast. It searches every single transcript for every single episode of this podcast s- to give you the best answer possible, which means Sage searches every word I've ever uttered on the podcast to help answer your question. Every week, I'm adding more notes, more highlights, more transcripts. I have so much more data I'm putting into this with the goals over time, just like Tarantino took decades, right, to get to this historical database that's in his head. Charlie Munger took decades to do that. Kobe Bryant took decades to do it. Napoleon, Sam Zell, all these people I mentioned on the podcast. Sage will allow every single person that uses it to have that exact same except for all of history's greatest entrepreneurs, all the ones that I've studied on the podcast so far, and all the ones that I will ever study on the podcast. Over time, I really do believe that everything, all the features I'm building in Founders Notes, Sage being a huge, uh, part of that, is over time, like my goal is I want this ever-increasing, giant, valuable curriculum and tool that you can use your entire career with the goal of condensing and clarifying the collective knowledge of history's greatest founders. If you have access to this information on demand, it will make your decision-making better as it is a way for you to, uh, what did Charlie Munger said? "Learning from history is a form of leverage." So to get access, go to foundersnotes.com. That is founders with an S. You can subscribe on an annual basis if you choose to, or you can do a one-time option, which means you get every single note, highlight, transcript I've ever done and every single note, highlight, transcript I ever do, plus any new feature I ever add. As I continue to add more data to it, as I continue to add more features, of course, the price will go up, so make sure you sign up now. You can lock in the lowest price it'll ever will be. You can do this by going to foundersnotes.com. That is founders with an S, just like the podcast. Foundersnotes.com. Thank you very much for your support. Thank you very much for listening, and I'll talk to you again soon.

Episode duration: 1:06:18