Learning From People We Hate

Paul Ford: I’m Paul Ford, the co-founder of Aboard.

Rich Ziade: And I’m Rich Ziade, the other co-founder of Aboard.

Paul: And Rich today—well, wait a minute. Before we get into the meat of this podcast, why don’t you and, or, Beyond Meat, if you’re vegan, why don’t we talk about Aboard for just a sec? What is it? What is this thing?

Rich: A delicious appetizer sponsorship before we get to the meat of the podcast. Aboard—

Paul: Exactly.

Rich: At aboard.com is a really powerful tool that lets you save links from the web and save really anything, data that you kind of have scattered everywhere. It lets you put it in one place. Very snazzy mobile app. Check it out at aboard.com. We’ve got exciting changes coming. We’re not going to talk about changes until you can see the changes.

Paul: Couldn’t have said it better myself.

[intro music]

Paul: Let’s go to this podcast. I came to you this morning, I said, “I have a really good idea. We often complain. We’re New Yorkers, we complain too much. Let’s talk about business leaders we really, really admire.” And you looked m at me and you said, “No, I know, that’s a good idea, but why, instead, don’t we talk about the people we hate?” And so here we are. I had to admit that’s more compelling content. So…

Rich: And that’s what we’re here for.

Paul: Well, let’s put some guidelines on this. Let’s not just sit here and hate. What are we trying to do here? Gimme, gimme… Set the buzzer up.

Rich: Look, the Internet, taken to its algorithmic end, powered by AI stuff, has resulted in us losing our minds.

Paul: Yeah, that’s true.

Rich: And so here we are. We love, love, love, [shocked voice] “Did see this??? Did you see what he said??? Did you see what he said???” And then you run over with your phone.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: And you show them what that person, like, [appalled voice] “I can’t believe they said that. I’m going to now tell someone else about what they just said.”

Paul: Correct.

Rich: And then we all lose our minds. And there’s a lot of that because the internet, sadly, is very optimized—and when I say internet, I pretty much mean social media—is optimized for incendiary content, right? It just gets us riled up.

Paul: I would actually qualify that. I would say humans are optimized for incendiary content. There happens to—

Rich: [laughing Exactly. And we now have tools.

Paul: It turns out that a large-graph database is the number-one tool for transmitting human terror and rage from one cohort to another.

Rich: Yes. That’s right. And so I was thinking about this, and here’s another reality—by any measure, most of the people we hate are either celebrities or immensely financially successful. [laughing]

Paul: Yeah, it’s funny how—

Rich: Pretty much everyone. I mean, you could hate your barber down the street, but on a scale, like, a large scale? We love to hate extremely successful people. Let’s get that out of the way.

Paul: No, it’s true. Well, I think there are archetypes that we hate, like your boss. Everybody hates their boss.

Rich: [laughing] Yeah.

Paul: I’ve been on both sides of that one. But no, aside from the archetypes, there are individuals, and they really inspire our hatred, and often can feed on it, I think. I think they start to enjoy it.

Rich: Okay, so we’re going to play a game, and we’re going to turn it on its head. Instead of being destructive and just eating away at our emotional core, we’re going to be constructive. Everyone we hate got to a place where the whole world gets to hear about what they do.

Paul: Mmm.

Rich: They found success, and they found an incredible profile. Right?

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: And some revel in it, some don’t. It’s not the point. Point is, how did they get there? So what I want to do is I’m going to put a, set a timer, Paul. We’re going to name someone very, very famous, that has enormous reach, and that many, many people hate. And then we’re going to talk about some things we can learn from those people—positive things that we can take away from the people we hate.

Paul: Okay, okay.

Rich: You ready?

Paul: This is going to be a struggle, this is going to be—but this is different than our normal set a buzzer and just hate things day-to-day engagement.

Rich: No— [laughing] Exactly.

Paul: So I’m pretty excited that we’re going to try to find the uplift here. All right. I’m bracing myself to come up with good things about the former president, because I know that’s coming, but, all right, all right. Go, go, go. Who’s the first one?

Rich: When I say the name, a clock will start. We have three minutes to discuss. We can’t say anything bad about them. Everybody knows they’re “bad,” quote-unquote, for millions of people. So we only can talk about positive things we can learn from them.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: Ready?

Paul: I’m ready. I’m ready.

Rich: [laugh] You’re so nervous, Paul.

Paul: Ugh, it’s a high-stakes game.

Rich: Elon Musk. Clock starts.

Paul: Ugggggggghhhhh………..

Rich: I’ll do the first one, Paul. Get you going.

Paul: Go.

Rich: Okay? Elon Musk. Musk is extremely successful. We tend to hear a lot about him through the Twitter/X debacle—and it is truly a debacle, let’s get that out of the way. But he has found enormous success, and I have one thing I will take away from him. I don’t think he’s an engineering genius. I don’t think he’s a business genius. I think he does one thing that he rode for a while, and I think he’s fizzling out on now because it doesn’t work always. But there’s one thing he does. He will gather a small number of very smart people into a room, and he will tell them, “You can do anything.” They will say, “No, batteries don’t go that long.” And he’d say, “Yeah, that’s what everyone else said. But you? You are special. And I’m going to get behind you, and I’ll give you whatever money you need to crack this puzzle.”

Paul: That is legitimate, that he puts resources behind enormous ideas in a way that almost no entrepreneur can, and almost no large business will.

Rich: And it works sometimes, right? The ability to get people to hear that they can do something no one else could, and that you believe in them, leads to people working insane amounts. Like, they put everything into it. And he’s been able to inspire people to do that. People seek love when they work for people that inspire them. It’s a very, very tricky game. Jobs was known—I once saw an interview with the Mac team, the original Mac team?

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: And they were very proud of what they did. And then they talked about how much Jobs pushed them, and some of them started crying.

Paul: Sure.

Rich: It was actually something. These were grown adults.

Paul: Sure, literally awakening a trauma in which…

Rich: [laughing] Right…

Paul: Look, there is, you work in these environments, this is the flip side. There are two sides to this. So, I mean, let’s not make it a love fest, right? But this person sets an extraordinary goal. Says, “I believe in you.” But now that is the standard. And so the standard is that you must accomplish greatness—

Rich: Yes.

Paul: —or they will not think that you are great anymore.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: I think what’s interesting with Musk, I’ve been in environments like that where there’s no money and no upside. I think there is money and upside. I think if you went—I think if you hit a scientific wall and it can’t be gotten over, he’s probably pretty grumpy. But it’s not the end of the world, right?

Rich: Yeah. Yeah.

Paul: But, yeah, the guy is able to bake up multiple Manhattan Projects in his backyard. That is a hell of a thing.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But you know what you learn—

Rich: You have eight seconds left. You have eight seconds left.

Paul: Well, we can talk about, this is a general point, and then we’ll get to the next one. Individuals, I believe, have sort of, like, distances at which they are optimal.

Rich: Hmm.

Paul: So, when they are up close, a person might be an absolute nightmare. But if you put them about 75 feet away with 70 people around them, they’re an inspiring leader.

Rich: Exactly.

Paul: Some people need to be in a stadium. Some people need to be on TV before they are barely palatable. But no one is good at, it’s like close-up magic versus special effects. Right? No one is good at little, tiny card tricks, but also can get hold of 80,000 people wrapt in a stadium.

Rich: Exactly. All right.

Paul: He is a guy you should perceive at a distance.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And Twitter wrecked it because he’s not far enough away. He needed to be kept far away.

Rich: That’s a great observation. This is the genius. This is the genius we’re all looking for here. Great observation.

Paul: All right. All right. Okay, who’s two?

Rich: This is a tough one. Donald Trump.

Paul: Oh, God, dude, why’d you have to do it? All right, well, I mean, talk about—I’m gonna, first, let me just get it out there. I hate this person so much. I really do. I wake up and I think about him, and I hate him. [laughter] And I don’t think people know this about me. I wake up every day and I think, “I hate that guy.”

Rich: I don’t think this is a big reveal.

Paul: No. No, but it’s unusual for me. I think about a couple, I think about, I’m trying to get customer service for a synthesizer module, and they’re not writing back fast enough, and I think about hating Donald Trump. Those are the—and then I think about our very intense software startup. That’s the priority. After that, my children, [laughter] and my loving wife. All right, we have three minutes to say good things about Donald Trump.

Rich: But Paul, yeah! Give me something good. Do you have anything good?

Paul: Well, there is… [resigned, horrified noises] I’ll tell you, the one thing I did, the policies…that guy didn’t like war. He was not a hawk.

Rich: Oh, interesting. That’s true. He didn’t.

Paul: And there is a, it’s almost like a side effect of his pathologies. But I definitely hate…I’m not an American isolationist, but, boy, we like to get weapons out way too fast. I really do believe, it’s how we assert our power, it’s been our policy for a hundred years. You can go back to, like, Mark Twain saying, why are we doing these things in the Philippines? Like, we just have this weird imperialist strain.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And I always associate, it was very strong with the Republicans during the second Bush administration, that sort of Project for the New American Century.

Rich: Disaster. Yup, yup, yup.

Paul: Trump—and, yeah, thanks, we got Iraq, the least-needed war that has ever happened.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: So, like, okay, I got all this going on in my head. He didn’t, he didn’t—the guy doesn’t want to get into a war because he’s an isolationist, and that is a trade-off.

Rich: Yeah. Okay.

Paul: What about you? What do you like about Donald Trump, Rich? This is great. Let’s get this on Twitter.

Rich: Let’s get it out of the way, I’m not a fan either. But I think he has a skill that we can all learn from. Unfortunately, he uses it for really sinister means, in my view.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: Like, he’s deeply manipulative. But his understanding of…he’s a real-time marketing machine.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: It is staggering to watch. Right? He does not think about making coherent sense. What he thinks about is, I have—you ever see those old videos of, like, the newspaper spinning, and then it lands on the headline in your face?

Paul: Yes. Yes. It’s…news is breaking.

Rich: News is breaking. His 45-minute speech is just spinning newspapers.

Paul: Yes. Nothing else.

Rich: Nothing else. And what he understands is that that crowd, and frankly, the broader audience, is going to grab a headline they like out of the 80 or 200 headlines he’s going to spin at you, and they’re going to hold onto it for dear life. And he understands that as well as anyone.

Paul: And they’ll sort of ignore the rest. You know, there is an immense, there is an immense power, everyone we’re going to talk about in this thread is going to have this power. The power of true shamelessness is unmatched. If you have no shame and just want to get your thing and can apply that with your rhetorical skills and kind of go for it, you can get away with almost anything.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: We really have built society on people going, “That’s horrible.” And the other person goes, “Oh, well, maybe I shouldn’t.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And if they won’t do that, then we kind of don’t have a system.

Rich: Everyone, we’re going to do a little judo move. Everybody thinks we’re going to share public figures that we hate or that it’s going to be one-sided. But let’s go to the next one. Joe Biden. There’s a lot of people who don’t like Joe Biden.

Paul: Yes.

Rich: We just talked about Trump.

Paul: I grew up around Joe Biden, because he’s from Delaware, I’m from the southeast part of Pennsylvania, and I couldn’t believe that he was running for president for the 8,000,000th time.

Rich: [laughing] He ran for president a lot.

Paul: I do think when you think about, what really appeals to him about, what I really like and learn from this guy, I actually, I look at a lot of his policy decisions, I don’t agree with a lot of them, but I also kind of understand where they’re coming from. His principles are simple.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And so I feel that he’s very legible to me, as a middle-aged man in America, I feel like I get this guy. You remember when he was campaigning and he was like, “Man, my dad could really drive.” And I’m like, okay, he could win, right? Because, like, that’s something that people understand. Barack Obama never would say that. He’d never be like, “My mom, man. Whoo, boy, she could just, we would get on that motorcycle and go,” right? That was never the case. It was intellectual.

Rich: Yeah. Yeahyeahyeah.

Paul: And so I think, like, Biden, I don’t agree with it, but I understand it. And it’s ethical. So I see, I do I learn that from him.

Rich: Yeah, I think, I think his best quality is the antidote to Trump’s best quality. Trump, I think Trump, in a lot of ways, has to create a very two-dimensional, or one-dimensional villain for you to get riled up. And Biden is like, “I may not agree with you, but we really need to talk this one out. Otherwise it’s bad for everybody.” Right?

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: And that’s less exciting. That’s less of a headline spinning into your face. That’s more of a memo. [laughing] And memos just aren’t as fun. You can disagree with a lot of what he does, but he is not trying to manipulate you and fool you into buying into what he does.

Paul: I mean, what’s surreal is he has an immense set of policy achievements in this term. It’s almost more than you can list.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: It’s certainly more than Trump was able to pull off, because it was all chaos. And you actually have to really work hard to remember them because they don’t remind you.

Rich: Yeah. I do think he’s too old. I think they’re both too old.

Paul: [weary noise of agreement]

Rich: Hard stop. Next name. Ready?

Paul: Nine months of fun. Nine months of fun. Okay, yes.

Rich: Two more, Paul. We’re almost there.

Paul: Two more.

Paul: Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of Salesforce.

Paul: Do people hate Marc Benioff?

Rich: I…geez…um…

Paul: I like Marc Benioff. I think he is a large man like myself, who continued to find himself in ridiculous capitalist situations and went, “Okay, what’s a Hawaiian word for this one?” [laughter] Like, he’s actually the Joe Biden of enterprise sales.

Rich: Okay, well, let me answer your hate question. If you make billions, millions will hate you. That’s just fact of life.

Paul: Boy, that is real.

Rich: That’s just how it goes. It’s like, what? He’s on what boat? What do you mean his boat won’t fit in the dock and he has to stay out there and a little boat comes out of the side of the big boat to get to the dock. Really? That’s terrible for the earth! [laughing]

Paul: This was very confusing because, you know, Bill Gates, I hated him because of Windows trying to destroy the open-source ecosystem. But now people hate him for completely bananas reasons.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: It’s very…yeah. Hatred is very confusing.

Rich: So what do you like—what can we learn from him?

Paul: Oh, Benioff? You can learn a million things. What you see there is someone who picks three or four exceptionally simple strategies for communication and never veers. Never. I’ve never seen anyone—and they’ll do interviews with him, and he’s like, “Man, you could probably get someone more attractive. I just really believe in American business. Business!”

Rich: Interesting. So you’re saying that Salesforce’s success isn’t just wave after wave of innovative software updates? Is that what you’re saying? That it’s more about communication?

Paul: Dear God, no. It’s all comms. [laughter] Until they got so much money that they could go buy innovation if they needed it.

Rich: Right, right.

Paul: It is, I mean it’s, that is—

Rich: When you say comms, I’m not a comms expert. Do you mean marketing?

Paul: It’s all marketing. It’s Dreamforce, their giant, their giant…it’s their mascots. It’s their enormous conference, Dreamforce, in San Francisco, where the mascots dance and the Foo Fighters play. It’s Benioff doing a talk on the roof of a hotel and Sarah Bareiles plays piano and then they bring out the “trailblazers” who are single moms who are helping you get your Salesforce stuff set up. It is this, like, they basically packaged the sales and marketing of Salesforce as a cultural progressive phenomenon and continue to land that in the culture in the same way that you might land the Thursday-night lineup on NBC.

Rich: Let me ask you this to close out Benioff. I tend to agree with you. I think he’s a storyteller. I think he connects humans with humans. Do you think they would have found success no matter what the software was?

Paul: Close, I mean, no, I think you need a product, like a product that is solid. There are things that Salesforce has done very, very, very well, even though it can be clunky.

Rich: But the soaring success isn’t because the software is just miles ahead of everyone else.

Paul: I think what you see here is when a very, very smart person decides to stop trying to look or be smart, and just focuses all of their effort on communicating, listening, and turning that into product and turning that into business? It’s an unfricking stoppable force. What you see with Benioff is just very, very little…the guy is a zillionaire. He doesn’t seem to need that narcissistic supply to be met.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: He doesn’t want to be told he’s the best boy ever.

Rich: Yeah, that’s true. That’s true.

Paul: And so he just kind of keeps going with the same messages, same as Biden, just—Biden could learn from Benioff. Just, just start telling, more messaging, more standing up. I don’t know. I can’t tell Joe Biden what to do. That’s the job of The New York Times op-ed page, not me.

Rich: [laughing] Okay, let’s close it with one more controversial, iconic figure that most people probably, at this point, there’s some distance since he passed away. So people don’t know this about Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs, I mean, really, our Thomas Edison, in a lot of ways, was an absolutely brutal, mean, mean man. He was a mean man.

Paul: Well, he’s a wild one because they made him into a saint. You know, like, he, with his turtleneck. Like, he became Saint iPhone.

Rich: Well, once you leave, Paul, you can’t be mean anymore.

Paul: Yeah, but—

Rich: And he made a lot—do you know how many homes hanging off of cliffs in California are the result of the success of Apple? And so what are you going to say about the guy?

Paul: They’re literally starting to crumble due to climate change. Like, nobody knows what to do.

Rich: [laughing[ That’s a separate—yeah.

Paul: Like seriously, there’s footage of homes, they’re just hanging there now. This is real. I don’t know if people, you know, if you come along and if you read the Isaacson biography, again, this is sort of like Bill Gates, where Jobs was always a little more beloved because he was way cooler, like, he dated Joan Baez—

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: He had an actual sort of finger on the pulse. He was very handsome. He was very sort of like, of culture—

Rich: Incredibly charismatic. I mean, just stopped a room, right?

Paul: But, man, I don’t know if you had this. I had this where if you came up in this industry, there was a definite sense of internalized anxiety about what you would say or do if you ever had to meet him. And, like, I was never within a thousand miles of Steve Jobs, but—

Rich: [laughing] You still got nervous.

Paul: But there still was this sense of, like, God, what would I do, if I was on the elevator with him, what would happen? He was—

Rich: Yeah, an overwhelming personality, yeah.

Paul: And this is actually a true secret, you see it with all of them. You see it with Trump. You see it—I don’t think Biden has this. I don’t think Benioff has this. So there are other ways to do this, but there is a certain kind of personality where they’re in your head.

Rich: Mmm.

Paul: They are really good at lodging in your brain and into thousands or millions of brains, and some part of you wants their approval. You know who I feel this way about? And this is kind of bananas. I listened, there was, like, one Taylor Swift album, I was like,”Oh, I’ll check this out.” And I listened to it, like, three or four times, and I started to feel like I’d somehow let Taylor Swift down. Like, she’s really good at getting in your head and making you think, “Boy, poor Taylor. What are we going to do to help her?” [laughter] There is a power that certain humans have to sort of manipulate at scale.

Rich: That’s so funny. Yeah, you know what, Paul? Maybe if you stopped standing outside her bedroom on the lawn.

Paul: You know, it’s a 30-year-old woman—

Rich: In a trench coat.

Paul: She did an album with, like, i’s like, the producer from The National. It’s utterly comprehensible that a goof like me would be, like, “Oh, let’s go check this out.” But you’re listening to it, and I just start to feel like I’m, like, in the kitchen making eggs, going, like, “Taylor wouldn’t like these eggs.” [laughter] That’s, that is her gift! Her gift is that she can, like the worm in Wrath of Khan in Star Trek, she gets into your brain. And I think Jobs, his amazing skill was, he will get in your brain, and it’s really hard to get him out of there.

Rich: That is not something, I don’t think that’s something we can teach someone.

Paul: I think, unfortunately, it’s real. I think that you and I, for better or for worse, are people that get into people’s brains and they think about us too much. And I try to stop it, but it doesn’t always work.

Rich: Yeah. Yeah. I will add one more thing that I think we can learn from him, is that that personality type absolutely neutralizes political friction in such an insane way.

Paul: Oh, because it’s all about their needs. It’s not about the politics. It’s about what they want.

Rich: They just see red. They just like, “What? What do you mean? It went to the 11th floor for sign off. What does that even mean?” And they obliterate friction.

Paul: Well, the great narrative of Tim Cook, when he took over Apple, because  everybody was like, “He’s a softie. He’s a softie. He’s just a logistics guy.” And there was a meeting where there was some problem in China, and ten minutes later, he turned to the person who had reported the problem and said, “Why are you still here? Go to the airport.”

Rich: Yeah, yeah. Exactly.

Paul: That kind of like, hey, there is no other reality here that we’re negotiating.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: I don’t, I’m not worried about your family. Get to China and make the factory work again.

Rich: We’ve been in very big organizations. Apple was a very big organization when he came back into it, Jobs. And we’ve seen good ideas just get chiseled away, and it’s just the the rolling core of the apple on the sidewalk. Like, there’s nothing left of it, because everyone chips away at it, right? And when you have someone with as strong a force and a personality as a Jobs, they defend the idea all the way through. They’re like, “No, we talked about this.” “Yeah, but it’s physically impossible, Steve.” “No, we talked about this. It’s going to have to be smoother in my hand. And then another three months go by. That is insane, that, you don’t see that anymore.

Paul: No, you see it. But again, we’re back to shamelessness, right? It’s like… [laughter] Because he’s—no, because he’s not ashamed to ask for the thing and have the person just look at him with a sense, like, puppy dog eyes don’t work.

Rich: No.

Paul: Your daughter’s bat mitzvah doesn’t work. He wanted soft, beveled edges.

Rich: It’s not about him, at all. He can’t believe the terrible injustice you’re introducing into the world with the decision you just made. He can’t believe it.

Paul: I often feel like, people like this cannot, and this gets bundled under narcissism a lot, but people like this can often just kind of can’t tell where the boundaries between them and you are.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: You are another, you’re like a limb to them.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Why is my arm sore? My arm is not supposed to be sore. My arm is supposed to be downstairs, soldering.

Rich: Yeah. Yeah.

Paul: All right, so we’ve learned a lot from people that we or others hate.

Rich: Paul, we did something else here. We injected a dollop of positivity. We took the hate. We took these hateful people, people we love to hate, and we found good qualities in them. Maybe. [laughing]

Paul: I mean, I don’t know. I don’t—

Rich: Don’t give speeches with spinning 1930s headlines, is… [laughing]

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: But when you’re trying to convince a room, look, I don’t have a problem with that kind of charisma if it’s used for good things.

Paul: Yeah, but Elon Musk has no charisma. That’s what’s tricky.

Rich: No, Elon Musk. No, Elon Musk is like, “You six? I picked you guys. You six? You are the star team.”

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: “And you can do anything. We’re going into outer space. We’re going to Mars.” “But, Elon, we need to first go to the moon.” “No, no, no. The moon? That was the sixties.”

Paul: I mean, everything you’re saying, Richard, as we talk about it, makes me think we should argue for a much, much more aggressive taxation strategy in our country.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: We should probably be getting to, like, 80, 90% taxation for some of these people [laughing] because they just can’t be helped. And they need to kind of go away. So that’s where I’m ending.

Rich: I’ll tell you what, this podcast can get us in trouble. You said you like the little Salesforce bear, which is pretty much the end of our brand, but whatever.

Paul: [cackling] It’s a good bear. It’s a little—

Rich: Check out Aboard [laughing] at aboard.com.

Paul: He’s like a little guy! He’s like a little kid and a bear. And I think it’s actually, like lore where you can’t really tell he’s the boy-bear. I don’t know. I don’t know.

Rich: It’s the creepiest freakin’ thing. Anyway.

Paul: We gotta go to Dreamforce, you and me. Let’s go to Dreamforce.

Rich: We sure do. I was in town one year overlapping with Dreamforce.

Paul: Mmm.

Rich: I had never seen so many drunk blue dress shirts in a bar in my life.

Paul: Oh yeah. Yeah.

Rich: It was wild. It was wild.

Paul: If you yell the name “Mike” over, you risk the stampede. [laughter]

[outro music]

Rich: All right. We love Salesforce. We love everybody. There is love in our hearts, Paul.

Paul: No. No no no. We don’t—

Rich: Paul. Check out Aboard at aboard.com. Reach out to us—

Paul: We don’t love Donald Trump, Richard. Okay, yeah, reach out to us. hello@aboard.com?

Rich: Hello@aboard.com. Have a lovely week.

Paul: Bye!