Stig Brodersen  4:56  

Great response, Roland. So let’s talk basketball here. One of the things that impressed not just me, I guess, but most basketball fans worldwide was that Jordan always looked like his team was, one point down with one minute to go, he was so intense. And that was basically regardless of the score, regardless of his only practice, and he also played a lot of games when he was injured. 

Perhaps you could tell us your favorite story about how hard Michael Jordan actually played the game, and also, how his competitive mindset made him one of the greatest athletes of all time.

Roland Lazenby  5:34  

Well, Phil Jackson brought George Mumford, a mindfulness expert, who had actually roomed with Dr. J [Julius Erving] at the University of Massachusetts for a while. He brought George Mumford to the team in the mid ’90s. At first, Michael and all the players were rolling their eyes and all the mindfulness issues. I mean, the NBA doesn’t have a lot of practice time anyway with the schedule. Who wastes practice time on meditating? Part of this thing was that Phil wanted his players to be able to deal with pressure. 

Now Michael had his own capabilities early on, obviously. He had hit the shot to give the University of North Carolina the championship as a freshman, and he had these elevated abilities. And Mumford went into practice and just watched for a month. And he thought maybe Jordan had some kind of mental condition he had never seen. And George had played a year of basketball. 

He got injured, but he was sort of like I was playing a freshman year back when freshmen weren’t eligible. But he had played at UMass [University of Massachusetts Amherst]. He played a fair amount of pickup ball with Dr. J. He was a kid off the streets of South Boston, and he was stunned at Jordan. He thought maybe he was bipolar or he wasn’t sure but in a mere practice, he had such an elevated state of consciousness. He really just drove things at a level that George Mumford had never witnessed, and he just kept watching him. 

Over about a month, he came to realize that this was Jordan’s normal state, that most people, if you’ve been involved in competition, you’ll get to the zone what’s referred to as the zone. But it’s such a rare thing. I remember playing a freshman game against the University of Virginia, and I had a couple of tackles and a sack, and it was magical. I was aware of this zone thing, obviously, a couple other times. 

But Mumford looked at Jordan and thought to himself, this guy lives in the zone. He can put himself there, really as he needs to be. But Jordan began to embrace the mindfulness of what Michael would refer to in his media interviews as, “being in the moment”. And he told Mumford, I wish I’d met you earlier in my career. I might not have lived my life in hotel rooms. And it was a powerful thing. 

Kobe Bryant, the same thing. I introduced George Mumford to Kobe Bryant in Houston one night before George even began working with the Lakers. Before Phil Jackson was coaching them. Kobe was suspicious, but he came to consider this mindfulness practice and the work that they did. 

He came to consider it one of the utmost important things that allowed him to function in his life. Jordan really took these mindfulness skills, and particularly in a sport like basketball, but it’s all sports. It’s end to end. The pressure can be immense because these guys are playing. They have these guaranteed contracts and they’re very wealthy and they have this elevated freak athlete status globally, but it’s all on the line. 

We’ve seen players perform terribly in big moments. And that kind of pressure, that kind of difficulty, you make a mistake at one end of the floor, and the next thing you know, you’ve taken it to the other end, and it can build on itself in the course of a game, and it robs a player of energy, of focus all those things.

Preston Pysh  9:25  

Watching Jordan play as a kid. My impression of him is that he never thought he was ever going to miss a shot, no matter what the conditions or the situation was. He was so positive in his thinking that whenever he’d go out to the three point line, it didn’t matter if there was a guy in his face. They were following him. In his mind, he’s still saying, I’m going to make this shot. There’s no doubt I’m gonna make this shot. Would you agree with that being his typical way of thinking?

Roland Lazenby  9:49  

Right. And back to timing is everything. There’s so much that was burnished into Michael about his mindset at a young age because Michael had a brother, Larry who was 11 months older, who was his father’s favorite. And Michael’s father was mechanically inclined, a very smart man. Michael was not mechanically inclined. 

Larry was the older, stronger brother shorter than Michael. The father was so disapproving in so many different ways. It wasn’t abusive, it was subtle, but it rang like a bell in Michael’s young life. I was astounded. And of course, Michael had these titanic one-on-one battles in the backyard with his older brother. He cannot beat him, and it was very severe. And those things can be that way in childhood. It made me so much more aware of the tremendous power and effect of sibling rivalry.

Stig Brodersen  10:54  

Do you think that that is really where he got his competitive mindset? I mean, even as an adult, whenever he was done playing a game, it seems like he was just out there competing playing golf, table tennis, whatever he could get his hands on, almost not sleeping because he just wanted to compete, compete compete. Didn’t have to zone out, he was, as you said, I guess always in the zone. Does that stem from the sibling rivalry, in your opinion?

Roland Lazenby  11:20  

Almost completely, Larry, his older brother was short and muscular and really athletic. I remember Doug Collins looked at Larry and remarked to a reporter, “You can look at Larry, and you can see why Michael is Michael, because he spent his whole young life battling this brother. 11 months older, who was much stronger.” 

I mean, these were everyday. This is what they did. They got home from school. They went, and they battled. It was a war. And it was a constant war, and Michael could not win. Then, he finally won, and he never lost again. And it was that thing that drove the agenda.

Preston Pysh  12:05  

So Roland, talk to us about Tex Winter. When I read your book, you said something that I found very important to the success of Michael Jordan’s development as a player. You said Tex Winter focused on fundamentals and building success habits around those fundamentals. Could you talk about who he is and maybe a story about these habits he was building into the players.

Roland Lazenby  12:26  

He’s one of a kind. He was an intense perfectionist and as Tex pointed out to me, all the great players are unbelievable perfectionists about what they do. And Tex had played for Sam Barry at Southern Cal [Southern California], who had this sideline triangle off dance. And it became as Johnny Bach and other Bulls’s assistant coach said, “It became Tex Winter’s possible pages.” And Tex wrote a book about it. He built an entire system. Actually, totally different fundamentals. You’ll see so many of his fundamentals in the game today. 

The toss back machine where everybody learns to throw perfect passes. The toss back machine is Tex Winter’s creation. He was maniacal about fundamentals. He had this entire system based on sharing the ball. 

It had all of these different fundamentals you had to learn, and it was just this unbelievable convergence because Scottie Pippen and Michael Jordan had this work ethic and this determination, and they took all of this stuff. 

They would spend 15 minutes and start to practice throwing chest passes. You can’t get grade schoolers to do that. And I mean, they would do this every day. They had all of these drills and they did them all willfully.

Preston Pysh  13:51  

You know, it’s interesting. Whenever I was reading your book, and I was doing some research online, I started looking at some YouTube videos. Just Michael Jordan YouTube, and here comes up some of these videos that I guess Michael had made for some training camp or something. And there he is talking about the triple threat position. It was like a 15-minute video just talking about the triple threat position, and listening to Michael talk about what’s going through his brain as he’s assessing the defense. 

If the guy’s knee is going this way, well, then that gives me these 10 options to play against that. And he’s going into detail and you could tell that he had spent just an enormous amount of time developing habits around how to react to certain situations, and they were ingrained down at a very, very low level, like, if this person’s foot moves forward, then that means I’m going to do A, B, C, D, E, F and G as an option. I just couldn’t get over how much thought he had gone into all these little details. 

I played basketball for a few years as a kid, and there’s no way any coach had ever even talked about even an infinitesimal amount of detail as he did just in that one video I watched. I was blown away. I can’t help but think that a lot of that came from Tex Winter and the way that he was training these guys to focus on these little fundamental things that most people just completely blow off or don’t even notice.

Roland Lazenby  15:22  

The Bulls had all these automatics. They call these “reactions.” And often in really big games, they would suddenly spread the floor. Today, we see the NBA with a spread floor all the time, but the Bulls would pop into a spread floor. There would be back cuts, and they would just blow teams away because teams weren’t ready for how the triangle would look in a spread. And one thing I must add, Tex’s relationship with Michael was quite adversarial. Tex was the bad cop. Phil was this guy who was spouting wisdom from the mountain. And Tex was the guy who would needle Michael over his chest passes. 

I was sitting with Tex in the locker room before a game. Tex had all of his investments. He was a child of oppression. You left a piece of steak on your plate, he’d snatch it up and eat it. 

And here comes Michael. Tex always needs Michael’s shoe boxes. He likes to keep his investment papers in the shoe boxes. We were sitting, and Michael’s been there in the locker room. And Michael’s really pissed about that. He looks at us there. And he’s got this shoe box for Tex. And he says, you want this? And Tex looks up at me of course and goes, yes. I mean Tex was just such a character. Michael looks at it and throws it on the floor. I thought it was the most disrespectful thing I’d ever seen. I was astounded. And yet those two would go at each other. 

Preston Pysh  16:56  

Wow. That’s incredible.

Stig Brodersen  16:58  

So I would like to talk more about this special relationship Michael Jordan had with his coach through the years. And I think the two most interesting dynamics, at least, I took away from your book was his relationship to Dean Smith in North Carolina and then Phil Jackson in Chicago Bulls. What do you think has he learned from them? And is there something from that relationship you think that we as business people can use?

Roland Lazenby  17:26  

Well, that is fascinating. It’s such a complex thing. Dean Smith had such a tightly controlled system. I was talking to a couple of players, and I said, What people don’t realize is a tremendous amount of character that it took for Michael who had all of this athleticism. He could do anything he wanted anytime, and all that was not allowed at Carolina. You couldn’t put those things on display. You didn’t even go one-on-one against somebody in that system. It was so tightly controlled. Pro coaches trying to look at UNC [University of North Carolina] players and evaluate their talent, were going nuts because it was hard to really see the athleticism. 

Michael did that great dunk against Maryland that the Atlantic Coast Conference made into a promo. Dean Smith wouldn’t even allow it to be shown on his coach’s show. So there was this tremendously talented figure who came in and then Tex Winter always said, if Michael hadn’t been that disciplined person who was willing to set aside all the flashy elements of his talent to play in that system, and literally, Dean Smith had to force Michael to move on almost. It was almost like Dean Smith made that decision for Michael to leave North Carolina, but that inherence to discipline was such a value in Michael’s life.

Preston Pysh  19:04  

And when you say throw them out, you mean he threw them out because he was so talented and he knew he was going to bigger things, right? 

Roland Lazenby  19:10  

Well, Michael had a decision as a junior to turn pro. He really didn’t show any indication. I mean, he was just studying for his exams. He’d gone to school, but Dean had seen this timing. We’ll go back to that. He had friends, he was close with the group that would become Michael’s agent. And he had seen that this was where things were going to be. And so he really sort of nudged him out.

Stig Brodersen  19:38  

You know, it’s really interesting to hear about Jordan this time and this stage in his career, because now we’re talking about timing, and I can’t help to think how much is timing and how lucky I guess he has been to meet the right coaches at the right time. Is it even justified to talk about something like that? I’m not in any way trying to downplay Michael Jordan’s skills as a basketball player, of course.

Roland Lazenby  20:03  

All around Michael are almost surreal. The people who were close, who influenced one another, who came into conflict with one another, and Michael was this great force that blew through all of their lives with this timing and provided the connectivity for everything.

Preston Pysh  20:22  

So Roland, one of the things that we’ve noticed with all the billionaires that we study and these people that are literally number one in the world at what they do. It really always comes down to the mindset. And if I had to breakdown the mindset into two areas, the first would be, they set the destination. So they’ve made it up in their mind that I’m going to be number one in the world at whatever. And they make up that mindset that the destination that they’re going to very early in their life, or it’s something that they’ve been plugging away at for decades.

And then the second part is just the mindset of being in the moment and really working towards that destination and having the willpower to get there. So when I look at your book, and I read through this, a lot of what you see is really kind of the second half, which is the just total brutal work ethic and competitiveness that Jordan had to get there. 

I guess whenever I’m thinking through the first part of this mindset, which is setting the destination, do you really think that whenever he was in high school when he got cut his sophomore year, that at that point in time, he made up his mind that he was going to be the number one player on the entire planet? And the reason I asked this is because I was watching this interview. Jordan had retired. He was running some summer camp or something like that with high schoolers. 

And I guess there was some high school student that was the number one player. I can’t remember the guy’s name, but he was the number one player in the whole US, and for high school play. And he kept jagging, poking at Jordan like, “Hey, I’m going to beat you one-on-one,” and Jordan’s retired. He got so frustrated with this kid [that] he’s like, “Hey! 10 o’clock tonight when everyone’s sleeping, come out here. We’re going to play, and we’re going to settle this.” 

And in the interview, he was kind of angry when he was telling the story. He said, I absolutely crushed this guy. If there was a video that you could take and watch how badly I just destroyed him, it was a total embarrassment. And he said, I looked at this kid, and I told him, you might be the number one player for high school, but guess what, I’m the number one player on the entire planet. And he was angry when he said this. And whenever I watched this video, I’m thinking to myself, this dude set the destination, and that destination was, “I’m going to be the number one player in the world.” Do you think that this was something that was consciously burning in his mind from the day he was in high school?

Roland Lazenby  22:45  

I don’t. I do think that his response to any given situation. My name’s not on that list for the varsity. I’ve got to play on the JV [junior varsity] when I’m the best player on the floor. It was an extremely visceral thing early on. The other amazing thing about Michael was he became known for his great work ethic is how lazy and worthless he was as a teenager. He begs his parents *inaudible*. He had a job one week his entire life. There was this guy who had a motel with a swimming pool in a restaurant. And Michael didn’t go get this job. His mother who worked at the bank knew this businessman, and got him set up, and Michael had to clean the pool. 

He was afraid his friends would walk by and see him cleaning this pool. It was demeaning. He worked exactly one week and quit. The thing that absolutely amazed me is that the pay stub from Michael’s one week of work in his entire life, survived all these many years and became an item. When I went through the museum, there was his pay stub from working at that swimming pool, for that one week. And there was no explanation for it. But when you realize that that pay stub survived to come to rest in that museum. To me, that was astounding. 

But Roy Williams, who coaches at UNC now was an assistant then, was very close with the Jordan family, and he said some powerful things to Michael. Michael did have these ambitions to be great, don’t get me wrong. But he said, you can’t work like the average guy and have large ambitions. You have to have a large work ethic. You’ve got to do all these things. Put yourself in position. Michael has said and Roy recalls that because Michael was acting a little lazy as a freshman at UNC, these things are present, but they don’t come to full flower sometime until later in life. And I think that’s a big part of it.

Stig Brodersen  24:55  

Let’s move on from the one pay stub, and talk about a lot more money because basketball in itself made Michael Jordan a multimillionaire, but the reason why he is today a billionaire is really because of his activities off the court. Nike and especially this signature basketball shoe market has been a major factor in building his wealth. Could you tell us your favorite story about this relationship that was profitable, but also very volatile between Michael Jordan and Nike?

Roland Lazenby  25:28  

Well, I’ve been blessed with both my Jordan book and my Kobe Bryant book to spend lots and lots of time with Sonny Vaccaro, who was the primary figure in Nike basketball. And there were other people around, but Sonny Vaccaro was the one who said we’ve got to put it all into Jordan. And Michael had his head turned by, obviously in Converse. He really liked Adidas, and it was Michael’s mother as Sonny Vaccaro explained, who really drove that deal. Michael was a College Junior. He’s 21 years old, but he was your typical spoiled, uninitiated kid in the ways of the world. I mean, this was an incredible gift. No one had ever gotten a royalty on shoes. And Nike gave him this deal where he got a percentage. No one had gotten that. 

And suddenly, all the different things happen. You know, the Michael image really was a first time thing. Nike ended up doing all this stuff that even Nike didn’t know what to do. And she was there and ready. She had her demands. 

Sonny Vaccaro said, “I’ve dealt with so many people in my life. And these are subtle things that fans can’t pick up on. They don’t have that level of understanding, neither do media people.” And Sonny Vaccaro, who was there in all of the moments said, “She [his mother] was driving for that deal. She’s one of the truly impressive people I’ve met in my life.” And so, Michael carried the force of his family with him. He had this great attention to detail. He had this tremendous discipline. All of these things were so vital.

Preston Pysh  27:25  

But I think a lot of the people who haven’t read the book [and] might be listening to the interview, Sonny Vaccaro was a guy who had done tons of deals. He had worked with tons of various professional athletes with his training camps and things. And so for him to make such a strong statement about Jordan’s mother in orchestrating this deal, I think says so much.

Roland Lazenby  27:46  

Right. Sonny was the guy who made Nike basketball blow up because they were paying coaches all of his cash under the table. Sonny himself was making like a $20,000 annual salary with Nike in the ’70s. When he came up with the idea, Sonny was a guy who came out of Pittsburgh. He was a gambler. He had sort of this shady Vegas background. He has a brother who’s a well known bookmaker in Vegas, and Sonny suddenly appears in basketball. He came up with the idea, “Well, we’re going to get all the players to wear our shoes because we’re going to pay the coaches,” and Nike began funneling all this cash to Sonny, and he was spreading it out. 

And all of a sudden, Nike college basketball exploded. Pro basketball wasn’t thought of and Sonny watched Michael help win the championship. He said, this kid’s got the impact when Carolina won. And he pushed Nike to do the whole deal with Michael and to go really large with, and the instincts for that, and the way it blew up. Once it happened, the various figures at Nike who helped channel that in terms of advertising, and just the way that there’d never been a player, not only about the royalty, but [also] who was packaged and promoted the way Michael was. 

And there was all this synergy with Gatorade. Michael became the Godhead of global sports marketing. And really, Michael didn’t know he could achieve this stuff. The people at Nike didn’t know what they could achieve. They wanted to get rid of Michael because they realize that they’ve given him this royalty and these shoes with the ads. These shoes blew up on him. They had so many. It suddenly created this business that was out of control, frankly. It couldn’t make sense. It’s up. Retreats. It’s up. And so, they were going to get rid of it and just go back to their nice little college hoops business.

Stig Brodersen  29:14  

I mean, this was a big deal. I think you mentioned that they actually paid him more than the Bulls did at that time. And that was at a point in time where he hadn’t played a minute of NBA basketball. And Nike was not a big company at this point in time. We actually read Phil Knight’s book, I think was episode 96 on the podcast, and he talks about how he was sweating on this Michael Jordan deal because it was a big deal to him. He was a very small company. Adidas was the big competitor that everyone, I guess including Jordan wanted to be associated with. It was definitely not Nike at that time, if you were in that league. And they just took the chance, and Phil Knight was scolded for accepting his staff to make this deal with Jordan.

Roland Lazenby  30:40  

Vaccaro and Phil Knight are in a battle over who gets credit for this. I’m good friends with Billy Packer and during the 1984 Olympics, when Vaccaro was trying to sell Jordan to Nike to do this, Billy said, for some reason, Sonny is a funny guy, but he asked me to go to dinner with Phil Knight and Sonny, of course. They’re in Los Angeles and Sonny Vaccaro’s a very animated guy. He’s a street guy. And he’s trying to tell Phil Knight, and Billy’s just sitting there watching. He’s always been fascinated by Vaccaro. And he says there was no sense at all that Phil Knight was going to go in this huge as Sonny was urging him to do. 

But Billy was right there. He was not involved in the deal. He was a friend of Sonny’s. He was a powerful well known broadcaster at the time. I mean, Sonny Vaccaro is a funny, great guy. I enjoy talking to him all the time, but it’s not your view of the classic business deal that launches the empire. Phil Knight’s a very different guy himself. He came out the track side of things. He’s not really into team sports. He doesn’t get the whole thing in some ways. But he’s brilliant. 

Phil Knight’s brilliant in so many ways. And it’s just fascinating when you look at not just the money made by Nike and Jordan, but the impact upon business and marketing, and product development, all of those things. It really was a seminal moment. And it almost happened despite the key figures.

Preston Pysh  32:20  

So Roland, when I was reading your book, there was one story in there that really made me laugh. And just think to myself, this is why this guy became who he was. And it was a story that you were telling. He had just gone pro. He hadn’t even played a pro game yet. It was that summer before his first pro season. And he’s now training with the Bulls. 

And I forget the name of the coach at the time, but the coach was putting the players out there in teams of three. And they were playing against each other and there were just random teams of three, and they were playing against each other. They were playing first team to 10, then that team would come off the next three on three would go out there and play, and what the coach found was that every time Michael was on a team, that team would win no matter what. So I want you to tell the rest of the story whenever the score got up to 7, tell the rest of this story to folks because this just encapsulates everything from his drive, to his mindset, to all that stuff. I really loved this story.

Roland Lazenby  33:19  

It was the coaches, you know, when you coach a team, and you’re assessing talent, you do things like this. They’re playing to 10, they get to 7, and suddenly he flips him [Jordan] to the other side. Michael is a competitor. He’s getting infuriated by this. They were witnessing this for the first time, and they were just doing an evaluation of this. I mean, they’ve never seen anything like this competitiveness, and the more they’re getting there, the angrier Michael got, because he would take the game to one lead and then they would flip him to the other. 

Preston Pysh  33:47  

Then he’d come back and win. Like, you’d be up 7 points on one team. They’d swap them to the other team, and they might not even have a point, and Michael would come back and win with the other team. Right?

Roland Lazenby  33:58  

Exactly. Here’s a rookie doing this, and the veterans, the Chicago Bulls back then was a terrible franchise. It was nearly broke. There were questions that they might move out of Chicago. They wouldn’t even bother to take down the plexiglass when the hockey team played. You’d go to a Bulls game and a lot of nights you have to watch the Bulls through the plexiglass in old Chicago stadium. I think the thing that’s so amazing, the way Michael conducted himself, and yet he was perfectly willing in other ways to be a function of convention. Obey. And then on the other hand, he attacked the system. 

And I think one of the things that is amazing and perhaps an important role model about Michael, is that he came in, in that mode to effect change, and yet, he was quite willing to be a soldier. And that willingness, the combination of the two, this guy who was absolutely ruthless when it came to certain elements. He was quite willing to be a part of this. And I think that is exceptional.

Preston Pysh  35:12  

Alright, so Roland, you’ve written a book about Kobe Bryant. You’ve obviously written this book about Jordan. And so I’ve got to ask you the famous question. If you took either one of these guys in their prime who’s going to win?

Roland Lazenby  35:25  

I think Jordan, but I’m not putting any money on that. Pretty sure Jordan would win, but [James] Worthy claims to beat him. When he finally conceded to Michael’s desire to play one-on-one, Worthy got a victory and got the hell out of there. He did not want to engage in that battle. So I mean, there are people who have beaten Michael. Kobe was a maniac about one-on-one. His father who was an NBA player, just like Jordan had it with his brother, Kobe and his father battled, and when Kobe finally beat him, Joe Bryan, Kobe’s father refused to ever play with him again. 

The rest of us look at these one-on-one matches as intense things, and it is sort of a measure of many things, but they’re really just sort of fun engagements. But this stuff is the ultimate macho statement for the ultimate macho men.

Preston Pysh  36:28  

All right, I like that. This interview is so much fun. Your book was amazing. I absolutely love your book. People that are listening to this, if you want to read something that’s very motivational, [and] if you’re looking for some energy in your own life, I can tell you this book has motivated me beyond reproach. And Roland, if people want to find out more about you, where can they find your book, all that kind of stuff. Give them a hand off so that they can learn more about you.

Roland Lazenby  36:52  

Well, I’m always at Twitter at @lazenby. “Michael Jordan: The Life” is in 14 languages. No one knows who I am. That’s not the important thing. The important thing is that Michael Jordan came out of nowhere. Pro basketball was purely backwater for the most part. He came, and his energy and drive all the things we’ve discussed here, resonating globally in a way that nothing else ever has.

Preston Pysh  37:23  

Well, thank you so much for your time, Roland. We really enjoyed this interview with you.

Roland Lazenby  37:28  

I too enjoyed it. Thank you for the wonderful questions, and I’ve done a lot of these but this is an all-timer. Thank you.

Preston Pysh  37:35  

Thank you, sir. Thank you. 

Alright, so at this point in the show, we’re going to go ahead and play a question from our audience. And this question comes from Brandon.

Brandon  37:43  

Hey, guys, my name is Brandon. I’m a 21-year old college student. I just have a quick question about any recommendations or kind of suggestions you would have for a younger guy trying to get involved in investing. I’m a finance major, so I’ve been trading currency stocks since I was 17. But I kind of just wanted to hear your thoughts on anything that would kind of enhance my experience and kind of make myself just an all-around better investor before I get into the real world that I graduate. So, any tips you would have, books that would help, stuff like that would be greatly appreciated. Thank you guys. I love the show.

Preston Pysh  38:21  

All right, Brandon. So, a really interesting question. This is a question that we love to ask all of our guests because whenever you ask somebody a question, they might give you a two or three minute response. And there’s not a lot of value to be captured in two to three minutes. But if you can ask a person what their favorite book or a book that influenced them the most, that might be like a three or four hour response or maybe even longer, depending on the size of the book. So I find that that’s probably one of the best questions a person can ask is the one that you just did. 

So, what I would tell you is this, if you’ve had a bunch of classes, and you’re a finance major, I personally really like Joel Greenblatt’s book, “You Can be a Stock Market Genius”. I think that that is a very easy to read book for somebody who has a little bit of background in finance. And he’s given you some real nuggets on how to make good money through the implementation of special situations. So I don’t think that you’re going to get that kind of training in your schooling. And I think that it’s something that you can capture a whole lot of value out of a pretty short read. So that’d be my book recommendation for you.

Stig Brodersen  39:26  

So Brandon, I have two book recommendations. The first one would be “From Good to Great” by Jim Collins, and not so much because all the so called great companies that he talks about in his book, they’re still the best companies out there. Some of them are, some of them are not, but it’s more on his thought process in evaluating business, in general, I think is really helpful regardless if you’re an investor or not, or just a business person in general. 

And the other book I would like to recommend is, “Influence” by [Robert] Cialdini. That’s because if you want to master business, you really need to master the human mind, and how humans interact with each other. And I think, at least on my part, “Influence” taught me so much about how we have all these biases, and how we behave, and why we behave the way we do. I think that’s very important whenever you start your career. 

You said that you want to be a good all-round investor. I think that could be a potential dangerous road to take. I would recommend that you concentrate on a niche. I know that this might sound counterintuitive, for instance, to the interview we did with someone like with Jim Rogers, one of the best investors in the world. He talked about the way he got started investing was really to read up on all the asset classes and saw how they were all linked together and that way he could value what’s the cheapest asset class and have this macro perspective already when he started out. That might sound like an appealing approach when you’re talking about looking at currencies, you’re looking at stocks. 

But I think for most people that are not Jim Rogers, it might be biting more that you can chew, especially when you’re starting out. I think I’ll concentrate on finding a niche that really appeals to you, and then whenever you feel that you’ve mastered that, you might go on to another asset class.

Preston Pysh  40:24  

All right, Brandon. So fantastic question. Hopefully the book recommendations help out. I noticed the ones that Stig gave you are really amazing books. I fully endorse those as well. They’re incredible reads. For calling in and leaving your question, we’re going to give you a free subscription to our intrinsic value course that we just finished building coming out of your undergrad with a finance degree. 

I think looking at our intrinsic value course might help you out a lot because what’s going to happen is you’re going to look at things from a more practical standpoint instead of an academic standpoint. And that’s something that we are really proud of with our new course. So we hope you enjoy it. And then for anybody else that wants to check out the course. Go to our TIP Academy on our The Investor’s Podcast website. You can see the course there. 

Alright, so if you want to get your question played like our guests here, just go to asktheinvestors.com. And if you go to asktheinvestors.com, you will see there’s a little recorder there. You just hit record and you can ask your question and then it goes right into our queue. And if we select it and play it on the show, you get access to one of our courses.

Stig Brodersen  42:18  

Alright guys, that was all the Preston and I had for this week’s episode of The Investor’s Podcast. We’ll see each other again next week.

Outro  42:26  

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