YouSaid · the spoken record

Brad Jacobs

lines on the record: 174
first: 2025-10-28
most recent: 2025-10-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“We just did this before we started recording. Let's go through a That I feel like I'm obsessed with what I do. I love my work Want it to be the best in the world at it. And that's where it's like, oh, you just see these deficiencies.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Creeps, and of course, it creeps in. I'm dancing with the ghosts of my ancestors just the way you and everybody else are dancing with the ghosts of the ancestors. Evolution worked very slowly over generations over long periods of time. So we always have the set of genes that were good for survival and procreation of our ancestors, but not necessarily now. We still have in the gene pool all these like irrational thoughts. So another way to look at it is just observe it. Kind of more of a Buddhist way. Just observe it. One of the most simplest Buddhist meditations just observe your breath. Observe your breath. I mean, how easy can that be? All you got to do is did this.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Playing with some friends, and then you have to find the center, come back to center, back to the center, back to the center. So there'd be a center point in the music. You could go anywhere you wanted in the music. You can improvise all over the place, but come back to center. And then everybody come back to their common center. So I've incorporated this concept of centering, of finding a center into my meditation practices, into my business practices, into my philosophy of life. So I like to find centers. But going back to what we were saying before, so you have this negative self-taught coming. You can either take one of two paths. You can take the path of validating and disputing it and seeing it in a proper rational way. Or you can take the approach of just witnessing it, just enjoying it and just, it is what it is. It's mindful acceptance of it, so acceptance of that. And I vacillate between those two. Sometimes I do the, you ask how I do it. My internal monologue, if negative,”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I much prefer to be him myself. I like to come to center. I like to find the center. The first time that concept of centering came about was when I was, I went to enrichment camp at school in summertime. And there was a book they gave out called On Centering. I don't remember who wrote it and had a picture of someone making a pottery. And they were explaining in the book that it's all about finding the center of the pottery making. So centering, finding that inner calmness, finding that zone where you're in the groove. And everybody has it. Everybody has that. You just got to find it. And that's one of life's missions is to find that center, find that intercommunist zone. And then when I went to college and I studied music under Bill Dixon, same concept came out. I'm familiar with this, said come back to the center. So we're playing improvisation, what he called black music. Some people might call it jazz. He didn't like the word jazz.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Talk and then you catastrophize on those negative things and make them into huge, huge issues when they really should be minimized if you put them in proper context. So you first validate it, but then dispute it and say, well, what does the evidence say here? Is this really a rational thought or is this my schema kicking in?”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dispute those things, first validate, then dispute. So say, well, of course I'm hearing this. I have executives who report to me over the years that have exact same schema as you just described, where they're always saying, oh, I'm no good at this. Oh, when people realize how bad I am, I'm just faking it. I'm wearing this mask and I'm doing a bad job. I'm going to get fired. People are hiding stuff against me because they don't respect me. All this like negative self-talk. It's a complete waste of time. But nevertheless, that's the reality. The reality is they have this steady drone of automatic negative thoughts. There's two ways to deal with that. Either you can dispute them, but first validate it. Don't start with the disputing. First validate and say, okay, yeah. Of course I'm having all these negative thoughts because I got a tough job, for example. I have a big job, there's a lot of pressure, and I'm not perfect, so I'm not getting everything right. And so I do mess stuff up. And I do get things wrong and all that negative.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So let me comment on that. I think there's two different ways you can approach that. As cognitive behavior therapy has taught everyone, we're born with a schema, a prism through which we see life. And that can be clouded by core beliefs of I'm inadequate, I'm weak, I'm defective, I'm unattractive, I'm unlovable, all kinds of negative stuff. Now there's two ways you can approach on that. You can either”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where it's just like, you're not doing enough. This wasn't good enough. Like, I see the problems. So, like, I attack them. Like, it's like, oh, I'll listen to like a past podcast or something, anything I've done. It's like, and all I see are the flaws. I don't see any of the good part.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know that I'm a unicorn. I don't embrace negativity. I'm okay with it, but I don't make a big deal about negativity. I'd much rather enjoy the positivity. I'm a sunny side-up guy.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What Ms. Justin used to say is problems are your friend. You don't want to just tolerate problems. You want to embrace problems. You want to hook problems. Problems are the way you succeed. You want to run to the fire. You don't want to run away from the fire. Be brave. We'll be courageous. Go into it. I think you can start with anything that's, anything, and in this case in Apollo's case, he starts with, and other people he's a study start with, negativity, trauma, stress, insecurity, fear, anxiety. And then that's their motivator. They zero in on that. And then that makes them run faster.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That time and space juxtaposition for me at least different things work for different people gives me context. It gives me humility, gives me humbleness, it shows that I'm just one thing right here in a major, major thing going on. I'm just one little tiny debt. At the same time, I'm part of that. So I'm very uplifted. I'm very inspired. I'm very motivated. Like, wow, I'm part of like a real big deal here. It's great. We all are. We're all part of this huge, huge, huge, huge, huge thing. So I think context is really important. It gives you meaning. It gives you purpose. It gives you understanding. It gives you wisdom.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, because we've talked about a lot outside of your podcast into meditation. So a lot of the meditation I do is changing, looking at space from different perspectives, not the normal perspective that we have right this minute. So I expand my mind from the earth to the sun to the solar system to the galaxy to clusters of galaxies to the universe, to the multiverse. Let's go way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way high. And then bring it all the way back in and then go into the molecule and the atom and the proton and the nucleus right in the middle of all that and go to strings. And I find that according, making my mind like an accordion game be really big and then really, really small. And they're doing the same thing with time. Looking at time, go back towards my life over the last few decades, and then go back centuries and millennia and just keep going way, way, way back all the way back 13.8 billion years, go back all the way to the Big Bang, and then go all the way forward and like picture the world going forward.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think as you get older you optimize long term more. I think. I think when you're young, you're just so ambitious and you want to get stuff done, you're in the now. As you get older and as you mature, you have more context. I think life in general is about getting more context, seeing things in proportion to other things.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Still had to have a deal, otherwise, you know, the whole system doesn't work. So dependability is so, so trust is so, so important to do.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reputation is really important. Your personal brand is extremely important because based on that, people are going to want to do business with you or they're going to want to not do business with you. So every day you're in the office and doing stuff, you're either raising your brand or you're lowering your brand. And that's the main thing you got to work on. You got to make sure that your brand reflects integrity and honesty and dependability and stability and people can count on you. It goes back to Mr. Jesuson. So Phillip Brothers, this is before email. This is before actually it was even before faxes. It was more Twixes and Telexes, which took a few days to go through when they went through. So you could do a deal worth hundreds of millions of dollars on a handshake or on a phone call. There's no written confirmation of that for like days. In the meantime, maybe the price of whatever you were trading, oil or copper, had gone up a lot.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Be absolutely ruth It was a very jarring experience for me at your book launch party because, first of all, I was the only one that didn't show up in a suit. Rectified that today, right? And then everybody else was just like, you know, I've known Brad for three decades. Basically, everybody there was like, how do you know Brad? It's like, you know, I was investors of his, you know, he made all this money for the pension fund that we run and everything else. And like the stories that I've heard at the party, and then since I released the episode, it's like, you have a fantastic long-term reputation. Do you have any advice on how you're able to maintain that and how important it was for other people to do the same thing?”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the most important things that I learned from Brad Jacobs is the importance of working with the smartest and most talented people you can. Brad says, the most important thing that a CEO does is recruit superlative people. Brad recruits the smartest people he can find and says there's no substitute for smarts. Steve Jobs believed that this was important too. Steve said, I think that I've consistently figured out who the really smart people were to hang around with. You must find extraordinary people. The key observation is that in most things in life, the dynamic range between average quality and the best quality is at most two to one. But in the field that I was interested in, I noticed that the dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 or 100 to 1. You need to build a team that pursues the A plus players. That is the end of the Steve Jobs quote, and that is exactly what Ramp has done. Ramp has the most talented technical team in their industry.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's much more important to me to be in the right frame of mind and to go through the short time we have in life. Reasonably happy. I don't have a perfectionist standard. I have to be like in ecstasy and bliss 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but generally happy.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With employees, with competitors, with regular, I mean, just all day long, you have incoming missiles. You have great stuff, too, but in between that is punches to the face. And if you're going to get beaten up by that, you're not going to be successful. And secondly, you're not going to be happy. So you're going to go through life like glump. You see, sometimes you see these multi-billionaire guys and they always look like this. Well, what's the point of all the money? Seriously. So I would not want to be one of these.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Make money so the more problems you have, as long as you can solve them, as long as you figure out how to address them and remove the problem, that's how you're creating value. That's a wonderful way to go through life. Number one, it's a great way to make money because you're not always down because you always have incoming missiles when you're in the business world. You have problems with.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So in the book, I talked about a specific episode when I was having lunch with him and I was kind of down and glum and what's going on. And I was talking about this problem and this thing. I was just kind of down. And he said, well. Stay in the business world if you're going to get down on this stuff. This is the things you should get up from. We have problems, we have challenges, you have obstacles by addressing those. That's how you make money.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But if you don't get the long term trend right, you're kind of in trouble. So you gotta figure that one out. You gotta see what's going on here. You need context. You need to see what's happening, what did happen, what is happening, and what will likely happen in the future. And one of the different future states that could happen, and what's the probabilities for each one of those? And then you have your risk management. So yeah, the converse of that is if you get the major trend wrong, you can do a thousand things right, you're still going to lose. You're not going to create alpha. You're not going to create value there. So yeah, that was a big lesson from him.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Deep principles. And one of them is one you just mentioned, which is because he was a traitor. In the largest commodity trading firm in the world, Phillip Brothers was you got to get the long term trend right. You can get a lot of other stuff.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mental a lot. So Mr. Jesse, I never called them Ludwig. Mr. Jesselson, he was significantly older than me, much more accomplished than me. Showed him respect by calling Mr. Jesse. Miss Jesse was a special guy. This was someone who was deep, very profound, and had lived life fully and by principles. And he was a religious guy, but I wouldn't say he was like ultra-religious. He was more taking the morality of Judaism, the do's and don'ts and ethical behavior and honesty and so forth. And that became the core of his life and became the core of his personal life and his business life, relationships, deep relationships, long-term relationships, honest relationships, relationships you can keep coming back to. And sometimes one person has the leverage, sometimes the other person has the leverage. Doesn't matter. You don't take advantage of that. It's long-term relationships. And he had about a few dozen...”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT