YouSaid · the spoken record

Carroll Shelby

lines on the record: 54
first: 2019-11-24
most recent: 2019-11-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“And finally, I want to end here with what shall we go to be remembered for? And the beautiful part about Shelby's life is he's going to be remembered for his main ambition, which is building the Cobra, building the car that he wanted to, being obsessed with car since he was four or five years old. And finally, 40 years later, being able to build one with his own name on end and have it loved by customers all over the world. So it says, Carol is 89 years, have been as full as any man's could possibly be. But as most people what he is universally known for, and they will reply, the cobra. The cobra, above all else, stood for performance. Something that Carol truly understood when he made the statement My name's Carol Shelby, and performance is my business.”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Studying Life of Carol Shelby is like, you got to enjoy your time here, your limited time here. And one thing about Shelby's, he's extremely successful as a person, a builder of products, constructor, racing teams. But he had fun doing what he was doing. And so we're going to see a good insight into the person. And the note I still have myself was that was Shelby. All right. They'd always get together every year, a group of friends and people in the same industry, and they'd have these chili cook-offs. I told you earlier, outside of the chili cook-off started like the Carol Shelby chili company, which was successful for a few years.”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And says, I have a contract for Ford, but I'd like to get out of it and I want to do this contract to have all the dealerships in Toyota. And he says, oh, forget it, Shell. We're going to push them back into the ocean. So we went to my friend Tommy and I says, Tommy, do you want this dealership? Well, he wiggled and waffled, but he finally took it. And he's become a billionaire out of it and good friend, right? And I'm glad to see a friend of mine make it if I couldn't. I don't have any regrets. I'd have had a lot more money if I had taken it, but I wouldn't have had all the other things happen to me in my life that have happened since then. And I haven't really missed anything. All right, there's one story I want to share with you because the book, I couldn't pull them all out. There's a million stories like the one I'm about to read to you, but it's one kind of humorous and two gives you a really good insight to Carol Shellby the person. And one thing I'm going to take away from.”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Perry. So let me finish this quote and then I also want to read you this other quote I found about Homer Perry. So she'll be saying I have the utmost respect for Leo and Homer because they were both apolitical. They didn't give a shit about politics inside the company. All they wanted to do was get the job done. Exactly what Shobe. That's all Shobi wants to do. That's all any of the people that we respect that build products. They don't want to engage in the politics. They just want to get the job done. They want to build the product. So let me find this quote that he says something about Homer Perry that I just loved. Okay, here it is. He says, we had this wonderful person at four named Homer Perry. He was apolitical. He moved everything out of the way. He was one of those rare individuals and you're going to see why I pulled this out in a minute. We wouldn't have won Laman without Homer Perry. He was one of these people who could stay focused and didn't let anything.”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Without having to go through committees or meetings or getting approval. Because he said over and over again, he's like, I just want to make a couple hundred, maybe a couple thousand cars. I don't need, you know, he had no desire to make 8,000 cars in a day or whatever it was that Ford was making at this time. And so this is now quotes from Shelby about this time period. He says, I have the utmost respect for Leo Beebe and Homer Perry because they were both a political. These are two people working for Ford. It's a Leo Beebe, interesting enough. Leo Beebe was Henry Ford II's commanding officer in World War II. When Henry Ford II came home from the war, he hired Leo Bibi, Leo Bibi was essentially like the guy he would send if there was an issue, like Leo Bibi would work on whatever was most important for Ford at the time. So when it became the most important thing for Ford to beat Ferrari, Le Mans, he put him in charge as like the Ford liaison to Shelby, right? So Shelby worked very well with Leo Bibi. He also worked very well with Homer.”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bean counters is a quote from Shelby seem to be everywhere. One of coworkers more and more, he told me he felt the shackle, but he knew if he broke with them, he'd be finished. Another scripture of Shelby at this time, he was always a free spirit at heart, totally, and he still is. And now they're going to go back to the time of the small shop in Venice. It says, everyone whom I've met who were part of that close-knit group working with Shelby in Venice have similarly spoken of those early years as being something very special, something that was to change forever over the coming months. One of them recalled the words of Jacqueline Kennedy a week after her husband's presidency had been cut short by his assassination. As to quote from Jackie Kennedy, it says, don't let it be forgot that once there was a spa for one brief shining moment that was known as”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That needed a good deal more investment from Ford. This would naturally result in more money for Carroll himself, but there's seldom such a thing as free lunch. Ford wanted more control, and Carol knew he'd have to let them have it in order to further the momentum that had built up around him and his automotive adventures. So one thing that talks about Shelby talks about a lot in his interviews, but also in the book, is he hates company politics. That's why he always wanted to run smaller companies, because you can avoid politics in that case. But he's like, when you dealt with Ford, like all projects would start off well, they'd have success, and eventually he says it's human nature for people to be envious of your success, and they would try since they're working on other parts of the company they might want to be involved in and they want to be involved in your project even though they couldn't, they would sabotage. And so that happens Shelby over and over again. It says, Shelby Gen to be unhappy at this point because of his relationship with Ford. They more and more introduced themselves into the projects.”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“might not be what you actually want. I guess, and I'm only basing that off other people's experiences where they're just like, I don't want this. I don't want to have, he even says in a lot of these interviews, I didn't want to have a bunch of thousands of employees. That's why he takes off to Africa, at least one of the reasons. All right. So anyways, he said, this is early days of Shelby. We had hot routers from England, Switzerland, France, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, people from all over the world wanted to work for this little company. He's talking about Shelby American. And he says, I've never seen a company that had as high of a morale as we had. It wasn't uncommon for them to work until two or three in the morning and be back down there at 7 30 a.m. the next morning. That wasn't uncommon at all. Everyone was just hyper to beat Ferrari. And it's very interesting reading the book and hearing Shelby speak is like that level of talent, that morale, that passion, once they reach that goal of beating Ferrari, it is...”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And now just 12 months on, it seemed like he was heading to what could be the motherload. His own sports car at last, totally underwritten by the Ford Motor Company. Okay, so I need to skip ahead in the time. I'm obsessed with early days of small companies. I want to read two things. A description of Shelby Automotive in the early days, which I find completely fascinating, one sentence from the book. It says everything had to be done tomorrow and by the cheapest method possible. And the second thing I want to read to you is an 80-year-old shelf be looking back at this time. And this is also very common when you're studying the history of not only people's lives, but their businesses. Everybody seems like you have like a really small group of talented people out of that small group of talented people. You have this usually larger company that grows. And then they all look back on the early days.”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he even got very drunk on occasion, but up until then, he'd always been able to take it or leave it. And it had never been habitual. So he'd picked up this habitual drinking habit when he got depressed. Just then, however, he had been in danger of getting out of hand and he'd begun to spend more time in bars than was good for him. The money had stopped coming in. This is, again, a description of his life 12 months prior. His second marriage was on its way to failure, and at times it seemed like the best thing he'd got to look forward to was a drink. But this is such an important part for all of us to realize that we can, even if our lives are in a time where they're going in a direction we don't want, like we have the power to change. This is the difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset, which Shelby obviously held a growth mindset. But he said, but the inner strength and sense of self-conviction that it brought him this far in life was his salvation. He picked himself up, dusted himself off, and got back on track to where he wanted to go.”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Operation. He was renting a tiny bit of extra space from his friend. He had one employee at the time, and he was doing everything else. But the part I want to focus on here is I think what he's doing here with there's three people, three organizations involved, right? Shelby, the company that he hopes to become one day, Ford, and then the AC car. What Shelby does here is genius. It's a masterful alignment of incentives, which speaks directly at how you can get other humans motivated to do something you want to do. You don't appeal. They say, hey, I need a favor just because you might like me. It's like you need to appeal to interest. And so Shelby understood that and he does so beautifully here. All right, so let me read this part to you. This is after everything, like everything's lined up with AC, everything's lined up before. So talking about like, why is AC doing this and why is Ford doing this? It says, as far as AC were concerned, these were to result in them invoicing Ford.”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If the people at AC cars were happy to go along with the development of a car with a Ford engine, then they might be worth approaching. So that's where he gets the idea. It's like, okay, well, let me just fly over to London and talk these people into that. So as a small company owned by a family called the Herlocks, and it says the Herlocks were interested in taking things further once Carol could come up with what he considered a suitable engine. And it looked as though for its new engine might be that very thing. And so this is also a reminder, something we see over and over again, goes back to one of my favorite Jeff Bezos quotes, which I always talk about over and over again. All big things start small. It said, the data Carol came to the AC car company was the first time that I'd met him. Although of course I knew very little about him from his I knew a little about him from his racing exploits. He came across his very personable, very self-assured, and I suppose because he told us that Ford was supplying him with engines,”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sport magazine that really made him sit up. John Bolster had tested something called an ace that was fitted with a Ford engine and it was apparently being put into production so somebody else was already taking a chassis, putting in a Ford engine the exact same idea he's Says Carol stopped, reread it, and then read it again. It was like Bolster had gotten inside his brain, pulled out his sports car idea, and described exactly what he wanted to make.”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Timing on he does his Goodyear tire distributor at this time, which keeps for like 40 something years. And he gets a little bit of money from anybody building car parts that want to be associated with the name Carol Shelby. These recent developments were observing the majority of his time and energy when he had a moment to think about anything else, it would be about building a sports car, as this remained his main ambition. So he's doing this for, I think like a year or two. And finally he gets to the point where he's going to start building the product he actually wants to build. So it says the summer of 1961 also saw the mist surrounding the ethereal sports car of Carol's dreams suddenly dissolve. And there he was standing in bright sunshine after years of pondering. Finds his car, this is the chassis that I mentioned earlier. He says the car was called the Ace and it was manufactured by a small English firm called AC Cars in a village on the outskirts of London. This is the first person he needs to line up before he goes to Ford. He says he read a piece in the latest issue of August.”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You could have a goal, but sometimes there's going to be a few steps, preliminary steps that you have to fulfill before you're going to be able to reach that goal. And it's going to take you off on a tangent. But as long as you don't lose sight of that goal, you can work yourself back onto that path. So it's like, okay, there's racetracks around me. They're busy during the weekends, but they're not being used during the week. What if I approach the owner or racetrack, say, hey, can I rent a racetrack on off days and do a driving school? And so he starts the Carol Shelby school of race car driving, I think is what it's called because people still know who he is. He's famous. So they're like, okay, I'll come learn from you. And this is how he's able to generate a little bit of income to tie him over until he starts building his car. A response to his advertisement in the sports car graphic, which is a magazine at the time, was almost overwhelming, with something over like 1,400 replies. He also signed a deal with Champion Spark plugs. And although neither those nor Goodyear tires were pulling in much money as of yet, they surely change.”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Carol was entering a personal slow of despond, and any Scotch he drank at home was becoming simply a chaser to what he was consuming around the bars of LA. So he winds up breaking up with his actress wife, her name, I think, Jan. And she described his life at this time. This is probably the most depressive, this is interesting to me, where like he has this huge success. He's widely known. He has an idea of what he wants to do in his life. He starts trying to make that happen. It's not being successful yet. And as a result, he dispends his days doing nothing and getting drunk all the time. And it was because of this depressive alcoholic episode in his life that his wife actually decides that she doesn't want to be married to him anymore. And I bring that up because, you know, from the outside, it's like, well, this guy has it all. And it's just other people's lives are so hard to interpret because we only get to see usually what they want us to see.”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In California, got married to a beautiful actress who he'd been courting for several years. They end up being married for less than a year and was embarking on the production of his very own brand of sports car, as well as having many other exciting projects in the pipeline. However, appearances can be deceiving. Underlying this picture of happy home life, there was, however, a sense of hopelessness, of futility beginning to grow within Carol. All the time he'd been racing, he'd plan what he might do when it was over, build that sports car and a whole bunch of other stuff. But now the time had come and there was just a void. He's depressed. That's essentially what's happening here. A lot was up in the air and he was talking to people, but nothing had gotten off the ground. People were telling stuff like, they were perfectly good sports cars made in England and Italy. As for an American sports car, there was already the Corvette, essentially telling, why do you want to do this? They'd also point out stuff like he didn't have the money or any money for that matter. So a backer was a sentence.”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he thought they told me he had a heart murmur or something like that when he was like eight. So he just assumed that he was going to die like, you know, maybe in his 40s or 50s, went up living to his 89. So anyways, this is a description of his heart problem. His chest pains had returned with a vengeance. Their prognosis was angina. I don't know if that's the right way to pronounce it. But after running additional electrocardiogram tests, there was insufficient medical evidence to insist that he gave up racing. All they could do was strongly suggest that he called a day and tell him to carry on with the nitroglycerin. as well as warning him that if his condition continued to deteriorate a health a heart attack might not be too far long up the road okay so this is the state of his mind when he starts his business now he's full he's not racing anymore he's fully committed to to realizing his live stream about having his own car name shelvy from the outside it appeared that carol shelby at the age of 37 had it made he'd come through his racing career with fewer injuries than many of his contemporaries and retired as a champion”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Close to the end of the 60s. Yeah, end of the 60s, early 70s is when other cars were finally caught up. Something else I'll tell you, in the midst of all this, so another reason he wanted to quit driving in addition to wanting to become and build his own car, which is his main ambition in life, is he had a severe heart problem. So he was during races, he would have to take nitroglycerin pills. And he didn't realize the pains in his heart that he was having. He wound up getting a heart transplant later in life. And the doctor's like, you had hundreds of heart attacks. And he just thought they were pains. So every time he'd feel the pain, you take a nitroglycerin pill and he had to like, he'd do this while he was driving. So he'd have to slow down for a few laps until the feeling that you get after you take a nitroglycerin pill would eventually like wear off and he'd be able to drive again without the heart pain. I think one of the reasons that he also was such an, like he had such an enthusiasm for life is he didn't, he never expected to live long. Remember, his dad died at 46. His mom died before she.”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“30 or 40 years in the future, and he does it from scratch, and it winds up being like a complete failure. Anyways, he says he had never envisioned doing the whole thing from scratch and starting with a blank sheet of paper. Too many dreams had ended in oblivion by taking that route. Either the massive cost of getting the whole thing off the ground took you out, or if you saw through, there was the risk of ending up with a lemon. Much better to find someone who was already building a good but maybe underpowered chassis and drop in and drop a V8 in it. So that's what he does. He takes a chassis from the small English company called AC Cars and takes the Ford V8, combines the two. And within a few years, he creates one of, first of all, if you've ever seen a picture of a Shelby Cobra, one of the most beautiful cars I've ever seen in my life. And second, it was the fastest. And it won all the races for like, you know, let's say four or five years in a row until he finally done in by, I think it was like a...”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was huge, but not only that, they were incapable of matching the cost structure that a smaller company would have. Their prototypes coming out of Detroit were $200 or $300,000 each. So Shelby took this, it's basically a small group of misfits, like these maniacal geniuses at making cars go really fast. And that was the foundation of his company. You're talking about a handful of people, six, six or twelve different people at the time. And he's so successful that he goes from like a handful of employees, let's say he has 10 to 1,000 in two years because Ford then starts dumping a bunch of money, which we'll get to in a minute. All right, the second point, the second important part about what's going on here is and the piece of advice that I think is applicable to us like obviously figure out what you want to do and if there is some geographic place where all that talent is, then go it might be a good idea to set up shop there. But the second piece of advice is going to have for people trying to build a product is don't do it from scratch. You realize, hey, there's no way I'm going to be able to build my car from scratch. Now the lesson, which is interesting, the lesson he's about to tell us here that he's learning, he forgets like...”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let me give you an example of the disparity between talent at this point. He's going to convince Ford to finance the Shelby car. And I'll talk more about that. And he tells Leah Icoca that, hey, give me $25,000 and I'll build you two prototypes, $25,000 in a Feud entrance. They just made this new V8 that he wanted. And I'll build you two prototypes that'll beat Corvettes because Corvette Chevy was beating forward at this point performance and everybody wanted to buy Corvettes and Ford didn't have like an answer to that. Now, why is that important? And why would they do that? Well, first, she always is an amazing salesperson, which we already talked about. He understood human nature. It's like, well, Ford has, you know, it's one of the most successful, one of the largest, most financially successful companies in the world at its time. Their downsides capped. Yeah, I'll give you, I think you got like five or six engines from them and $25,000. Why would Ford do that? Because one, they could only lose five or six engines and $25,000 in the upside.”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One day there would be a Shelby car. He and this is such an important sentence here. He still didn't know quite how he was going to do it, but if he was finally going to get going and produce his own sports car, then as far as he was concerned, California was the place to be. As the epicenter of sports, racing, and performance cars on the West Coast, it had dozens, if not hundreds of shops and manufacturers to service this industry. So when the time came, that was where he'd make his base. So before I move on to the, that's the first important part of the section. I'll tell you what the second important part is in a minute. One, he decided to make his base where the talent was. Because at this point in time, there was this whole huge subculture hot rotters. That's what they were called. It's the people that were complete enthusiasts about making race cars and doing themselves and learning how to hobble together pieces from even different manufacturers, putting into one car and making it outperform like the major company.”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And by winning Lamon, this is actually going to owe a lot of opportunities, future commercial opportunities, going to open up for him. And at this point in the story, we're at another turning point in Shelby's life, which is very similar to the one that I wanted to bring to your attention right before he started racing. At that time, he has no money. Both his parents are dead. Doesn't know what to do. He's got a family support. Well, this is now Shelby having to plan to transition from racer to manufacturer, right? And this is a summary of his life. He's quitting racing. His dealership is flopping. I forgot to mention that to you, like most race car drivers, when he started getting famous, they opened a dealership. You opened a dealership back in Texas. In his case, it was profitable for a little bit, but now it's not doing well. And then his family is breaking up. This is going to be the first of his many divorces. So let's go to his mindset here. Says during the final few weeks of the year, Carol once again reflected upon his recent past and where his future lay. The last 12 months had witnessed his”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He had time to reflect upon his recent races, as well as the highs, the lows, and the dangers of his chosen profession. So now we're going to hear direct quotes from Shelby at this time. He said, I'm really tired of living out of a suitcase. I could quit all this nonsense very easily right now. While my luck is running so bad that it's really comical, but it always changes. And all I can do is the best I can. No use trying but so hard in this racket. I know inside myself that I'm not hard on equipment. People that get upset and try too hard usually end up in the slab orchid. They die. You can't get out every time. So he's talking about discussions having with other drivers, a bunch of his friends and people he knows are obviously being killed. He said a good year this time would be four to five drivers die every year. They thought, okay, this year wasn't that bad. Like that's how dangerous what he's doing is. So he's having these thoughts and he's about to race Lamond.”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And his superpower was his ability to focus and kind of like shut everybody else's opinion out, right? And really just think about the problem at hand and figure out the way the best way to solve that problem. And the reason I keep bringing that up is because that's something I want to do. Like I feel like having extreme focus in the information age is like a superpower. Carol also understood. He knew what happens when you fail to maintain your focus so many times in life you're able to see a lack of focus in other people first than in your own self. He's seeing that in another driver. And this guy winds up dying, unfortunately, but like most of them do. So he talks about his name's Peter. He says he was the first friend I had over there. His mother used to wash my dirty clothes, meaning in Europe. His father was the main Ford dealer. It was a wonderful family. But he screwed up later when he went to drive for Ferrari and married Louise King. Louise King was like a famous actress at the time. He became a kind of playboy.”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Special suits and everything. This time, it was rudimentary. They didn't really have the technology. And so he realized like, well, I'm not going to wear what other drivers are wearing because it doesn't keep me as cool as my overalls. So once he starts winning, people associated, like, look at this redneck, this like country bumpkin that's getting on his overall. He's winning all these races and becomes like his branding. So he wins this is once they arrive with some good nature Joshing went on, other drivers would ask if he'd forgotten where he was going when he was dressed like that, meaning the overalls. Carol didn't mind about all that. And besides, he felt a lot cooler than most of them looked. And he was still cool after he'd gone out and beaten them all. From that day, the press honed in on Carol and his farm overalls, the relaxed and casual-looking farm boy, half asleep as he sauntered towards his race car. He didn't care what they said. It was all publicity and free at that. There's a great little shot.”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That enthusiasm for everything he did. And as a result, he was able to attract talent and money to build the businesses that he did throughout his life. So that can't be understated. I think what his friends were saying, that's a single business, biggest asset. That's also what I took away from reading this book. Something also Shelby News, he knew that you can't stand out if you blend in. So he found a way to brand himself. Remember, you're not the best driver in the world. older than his competition, but he became one of the most famous race car drivers. Like many other men in country districts, Carol often wore bib overalls. Okay, so it's like these country like farmer overalls, right? So he says he wore him when he was doing chores around the place and he wore them when he was in the chicken business. And he still wore them now. He also found them cool and comfortable in hot weather. So the inside of a race car gets extremely hot nowadays they have like”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just one of the things that you can never learn in school, and I think it applies to it doesn't matter what culture you're from, what country you're from, where you're from enthusiasm and passion are like universal attractive traits to other humans. And even if they were talking about even if you can't understand language. So he goes over and spends a lot of time at the factories in Italy before he builds his own car, he spends time in the factories learning how to do it, right? And he would talk about like the passion that the Italians had. And I talked a little bit about this in the two Ferrar, the two-pack I don't ends in Ferrari, especially I was saying, I think it was pronouncing him Modina. I think it's Modena. I was mispronouncing it. But in Modena, Ferrari talked about like the people that grew up where he had, where he did, had a special psychosis for car racing. And so in the book, they talk about like, you don't even have to understand Italian to realize how passionate the Italians were about building and going really cars and going really fast. Shelby had that passion, that charisma.”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was going to put all this energy into making a success of being a race driver, he knew he wouldn't have the patience to do it that way either. One of Carol Shelby's natural abilities is to get on with people, or perhaps, I should say, get in with people. He doesn't even have to make a noticeable effort. They're just attracted to him as though by an invisible magnet, and many of his long-term friends agree that this is almost certainly his biggest single asset. And so one of his friends gave us this fantastic analogy. And it says, if Shelby had walked into the Mission Operations Control Room at Houston on July 20, 1969, at just after 2 o'clock in the afternoon, the whole of the black team would have dropped what they were doing and started to talk with him, whatever setbacks he encountered, he was invariably able to bounce back through a combination of self-belief and an aptitude for making other people believe in him.”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“600 pages. So I want to get into he has some insights though. He's very good analyzing the situation in people in general. So he wants to get into racing and he figures it out. He's like, okay, well, there's three ways to break into racing at this time. And, you know, you could argue that it's still the case today, probably even harder. The first way to break into racing racing is to be rich and buy your own cars. The second way was to come up the hard way through club racing. So that's like where you start out at a very young age. You racing tiny like little, they almost look like go-karts and you start racing other cars and you just keep going up, right? You can't do that because, you know, Shelby's already almost 30 years old. He's a good 10 years older than most of other people he's competing against. And number three is to know the right people. Shelby chose option three. So let me talk to you about that. He says scratching around doing insignificant races with inferior machinery wasn't an option in which you could see any future. He was just about to turn 30, so time wasn't on his side.”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They entered the car into this race. Carol recorded his first official win. So then he's like, you know what? If you're going to race, you also need to be able to build your own car. So they try to, it's called hot riding at the time, which is just the people that buy cars from the factory and they'll switch out other parts. They just try to, their performance enthusiasts that want to do the work themselves, which is essentially the foundation of the company he's going to build a few years from now. So he starts doing that out of his garage and his wife at the time, her name is Gene. says after a while gene got so tired of the noise from the garage which was as well attracting comments from the neighbors about keeping their children awake at night that she gave me an ultimatum the the car had to leave or she would and that was the first of his uh seven marriages so uh he's an enthusiast for a lot of things apparently getting married and divorce is one of them unfortunately he starts having a little success i'm skipping over obviously major parts this is this is another gigantic book it's almost like”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is also appearing in the chicken rearing business. So this is Shelby. There are a lot of crooks in the feed business and there was a guy that I bought a bunch of it from, meaning feed. I couldn't understand why it happened. So I had the stuff analyzed and I found that he didn't put the right chemicals in. I was vaccinating chickens for Newcastle disease and it was absolutely worthless. That's the reason the chickens died. There it was nineteen fifty and I was bankrupt. I sold the business on the courthouse steps, but I paid off every dime, including interest, to all those thieves in the feed business. So the very next year, he has another personal tragedy. He says, Carol's mother had been unwell for some years, and she was confined to a hospital where she died. Although she wasn't yet 50 years old, it was a merciful release. As apart from her physical ill health, she also suffered from severe depression and irrationality.”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hands, their legs, they're trying to kill me. And so he's like, oh, okay, well, let me get out of this. And he switches from the casino industry into the stock market. And he thought, you know, he even said I was a little naive at the thought. He's like, okay, well, you know, the stock market is going to be way less corruption and crooks and everything like that. And he realized, no, it's the opposite. The stakes and the stock market are so much higher.”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Carol threw himself into his new venture with his typical enthusiasm. And to begin with, it went all well. The first few thousand daolds, meaning Dale chickens, grew into table birds and were sold for a good profit to be replaced by another batch. Rearing poultry on that scale and in those conditions carries with it the ever-present risk of disease, and he came in one day to find thousands of dead birds. It was the dreaded Newcastle disease. But he's like, how did that happen? He had done everything by the book. He thought he had administered the correct vaccines to avoid the disease, or at least he thought. And he's now being taught a lesson about human nature. This echoes back to the podcast I did on Ed Thorpe at the time, Ed Thorpe's just a really smart kid. He's an academic, and he gets involved in the casino industry trying to beat roulette and blackjack. And he's like, oh my God, I'm running into unbelievable amounts of corruption. There's people I'm getting cheated by the casinos. They're breaking people's.”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Money, this is now Carol talking, and I built some chicken houses on land that I leased from Carruth. There's that guy again. And then he's going to find a way. He's just essentially relentlessly resourceful, right? He says the feed companies, meaning what he needs to feed chickens, the feed companies and others were happy to provide their products on credit. So off I went.”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oriented, I'd have stayed with him and become a millionaire before I was 30. Anyway, I'm still here and he's gone. He shot himself in the heart with a 45 caliber about 15 years ago. That's a crazy story. So he says he decides to go into the chicken rearing business. He had no land of his own and precious little money to capitalize any venture. That didn't stand in his way, however, so that context for what he started this business is also how he starts his most successful business. Well, I don't know if it's his most financially successful business because he owned it. He was a tire distributor for Goodyear for like 40 or 50 years. And that business printed money as well. But this whole idea of having an idea, really no assets of his own, and really no money never stops him because that's the situation he was in before he started manufacturing his own car. All right, so he's got precious little money to capitalize and it didn't stand in his way. He says the small business administration loan me.”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lifelong fascination with animals. Even when he was in his 80s, he had this huge ranch and he would raise, I think he would breed animals as well. So it says Carol's next career move could have turned out to be a large and profitable business, but which, after a promising start, ended up in disaster. Instead of staying where he had been or backtracking to where his secure living could be made with every prospect of considerable financial advancement without any personal risk, meaning working for his family, he struck out on his own once more. But he was already aware then as he is now that mere wealth is not enough. So this is Shelby about not doing things just for money, even though he winds up being, you know, wealthy. He says, I should have carried on running the ready-mixed concrete operation for Caruth. So Karuth was this hugely successful. He was the one paying them to haul the concrete. He created hugely successful businesses in Texas. And he says, Caruth was probably the richest man in Dallas back then. If I was more money...”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have more success than I can ever imagine. And not only that, more importantly, he has fun his entire life doing these things. And as soon as they stop being fun, he runs away. Like, let me give you an example. I don't talk about, they don't even talk about too much in the book, which is fascinating because after you had a huge success with Ford Motor Company, I think he was working with Chrysler. No, he's working for Ford Motor Company. He doesn't like the politics of Ford. This is like the end of the 60s, I think. And he takes off to Africa for 12 years. Like, it reminds me. Dave Chappelle did this where he has a hugely successful Chappelle show. This is the early 2000s. He doesn't like the fact that there's politics at the Commi Central. He doesn't like that they're changing him. And so he takes off to Africa. Carol Shelby did the exact same thing, except he stayed there for 12 years and he built a book a bunch of different businesses and he traveled all over the continent. This guy is just really, really amazing. So there's really no other word for that. So anyways, I'm rambling now. Let me get back into his next business that he does after he realizes, hey, I can't work for my father-in-law. He has a”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Throughout his entire life, he's like, I have this idea, and he just focuses on that idea and tries to do everything he can to complete what the idea that he has in his mind. And sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn't. And sometimes it leads to weird businesses like, you know, I'm about to tell you he starts rearing chickens. We're going to talk about that in a minute. But he also does, you know, he's well known for building some of the most beautiful, well-performing cars ever. At a time when you can actually do that, when you could be a tiny, tiny company and build cars. But he also has businesses like he starts a hunting business in Africa. He starts a chili business that he winds up selling. He was like these Texas chili cookos. Like he was not, I'm trying to, I don't, I think, I don't think I'm being clear here. There was no boundaries. Like he lived, he just said, you know what? This is something I'm passionate about right now. This is to have an idea and I'm going to go chase this. And maybe he's going to end up in a dead end and more often than not, it doesn't. But then it also could lead to an unexpected place and I could.”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I tried and I didn't and it didn't work. And this sentence is probably the most, it's the most important sentence in the entire paragraph and it's integral in understanding who Carol Shelby was. He says, I can't work for anybody. And I think that's a good place to start to understand Carol Shelby the person. Like if you think about the etymology of the word entrepreneur, right? It's a French word originally means like one who undertakes the best description I've ever heard of that word though is one who has ideas and does them. And so that's why you see me get inspiration only from people that are running businesses but investors, athletes. It really anybody that has an idea and does it and applies that to whatever work there is doing whatever work they do during their day. So what we're going to see over the course, I think the reason I started the podcast with like I have a like a huge admiration I fell in love with Shelby as a person is because that's that theme.”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Charlie Munger gives that piece of advice all the time. It's like you need to follow your natural drift. Well, you can't follow your natural drift unless you know who you are naturally. And so this is where Shelby starts to realize who he is. Since he sold the trucks and went into the oil business, not as a favorite son-in-law working with the field's empire. That's the last name of his father-in-law, but in the oil fields, often doing the dirtiest and most menial of work. Remember, he's extremely poor at this time. Old man Fields had come up the hard way. So he saw no reason why Carol should be given a cushy job. Better for him to start at the bottom and see how he made out. And that's a direct quote from Shelby. My father-in-law thought that if I worked for about 15 years in the oil fields, then that might be enough time for him to decide that I could go into the family business. I went in as a roughneck to learn the oil business. After six months, I said, stick it and left.”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, it's extremely uncommon to do what Carol Shelby did. But I think that the experiences that he's having, let's see, we're in the 19, let's say we're around 19, maybe right around 1950, you know, 70 years ago. There's people going through this exact same experience today and there would be people going through the exact same experience in the future. So I think there's a lot to learn from it. Here's another opportunity he tries to grab. His wife's father is this extremely hard-nosed tech, really successful Texas oil man. And so he gives his son-in-law a job. And so I want to read this section to you because I think it's interesting. So, well, let me read the note, actually, that I left myself first. It says, while trying to work in the oil business, he realizes who he is. I think that's extremely important for the formulation of any person's life is really having to be exposed to a variety of experiences and sitting alone with yourself and realizing like who am?”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“60 years old, 70 years old. Carol Shelby at 20, 25 is just like so many of us. I've had the same experience too where you switch as a young person. Anybody that's young and curious in ambition and ambitious knows his feeling when you're young, you don't know what the future holds for you. And there's just a lot of uncertainty. And so you try to grab at whatever opportunity you feel in front of you. And Carol's no different. You know, I'm going to try to hold, I'm going to try to get a truck business. I'm going to try to haul concrete. Okay, that didn't work out. Let me just haul potatoes. Let me do anything I can to try to become useful and hopefully make a little money to support my family. So I think that's extremely important because this part of his life where he's struggling, he doesn't really figure things out. He becomes a race car driver when he's almost 30 years old. And if you know anything about racing, like that's very, very uncommon. A lot of the people, like even today, like a lot of the really popular formula one race car drivers, they start racing when they're like 10, 8, 5, 15.”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I wasn't good at it. She says, This is part of the time. So it says, So after about the sixth month, I said to him, We're collecting this month's money to pay last month's bills. We're getting behind. So what I started doing was keeping a bank account. At the end of every week, if it was over by $40 here or $60 there, I took it out and I didn't show him the full balance. That was the only way to get money in the bank. Otherwise, he'd go out and spend it. He wanted every cent we had to pay all his expenses. Hell, yes, he was poor as shit”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then we bought two more trucks. And so this is his own word. So he says, so now we were big shots. We were trucking contractors. We were hauling using our fore trucks and we had six or eight guys hauling also. We would make about 50 cents a load. And so we thought we were doing pretty good. So you're going to realize that we're making revenue, but we're not marching our costs. So they think they're big shots. I think they're doing well and they're actually not even turning a profit. It says the tires were costing us like crazy. And this guy was paying us 62.5 cents a mile to haul that concrete and we couldn't make any money. We couldn't haul enough of it, but we did for about six months. So now this is his partner who realizes that Shelby's not keeping an eye on the money. In fact, Shelby talked about in one of the interviews I saw with him. He's like the entire time I had my car business back in the, he had car businesses his whole life, but the ones that was most famous like in the 60s, he's like, I wrote like four checks. I always had somebody else take care of the book.”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And has a couple kids, and so he comes back to Texas and he realizes I don't know what to do with my life. So he had the passion of flying, but he didn't want to be an airline pilot. He thought that was going to be too boring. And he didn't know how to get into racing yet. And so he feels he has this obligation. He's like, I gotta, I got to go into business. I got to be able to support my wife and my kids. So this is where he starts becoming an entrepreneur for the first time and he gets into a bunch of different businesses. So I'm going to spend some time. I find this, I found this part of the book fascinating, so I want to spend some time here. And this is the first business he gets into is the trucking business. It said Carol's old friend Bailey Gordon had also left the service and they were both looking for something to do. Bailey's girlfriend's father had built up a large fleet of trucks during the war to supply ready-mixed concrete to the government who were building a number of airfields in Texas. So they started getting into the trucking business here. He says, we went out and we brought two war surplus trucks.”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Passions start at a very young age and they never left them. I was just watching him one of his last interviews he gave before he died. He was, I think, 85, maybe 84 years old at the time of this interview. And he was talking about the fact that he still loves, even though he wasn't flying anymore at that age, but he still loved, like he still loved everything about flying. Before I get to his time in the Air Force, he has to go through, he went through a rather tragic experience. This is Shelby's dad dying extremely young, and then Shelby almost dying extremely young as well. So his dad had a congenital heart defect, and so he dies. He says he had a third and fatal heart attack. He was only 46 years old. So Shelby was about, I think, 18 years old when he lost his dad. So shortly after his 18th birthday, he joined the Air Force. And they teach him how to fly. And then eventually decide he's going to be.”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Course, Carol. He says they both did extra work that summer and ended up with enough credits to graduate. Neither teenagers' lack of academic prowess appears to have compromised their adult life. So that other guy, Jake, went to be one of the most well-respected judges in Texas, and of course, Carol went on to have a fabulous career as well. With high school over, he could pursue his ambition to fly since he planned to join the Army Air Force. This is right around the early 1940s, right around World War II. He decides, hey, he was fascinated from a very young age. So his first love was cars, but he also had a love of anything that would go fast. So I would say the two passions that he possessed his entire life was automobiles and planes. So he raced cars and he learned how to fly planes. He actually winds up serving in the Air Force and training a bunch of pilots during World War II. And I'm going to tell you a story about that in a minute. But this is something that those...”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was 14, my dad took me down and I got my license. He had a little 34 dodge, and I bullshitted him to let me take it to work that day. And I got caught doing 80 miles an hour. That was it. Six months and I didn't drive anything. And so Shelby, like a lot of people that we've talked about on this podcast so far, he's a bit of a troublemaker. And I don't think he was doing it to be disrespectful or anything like that. He just was very determined. He had in his mind, he knew what he wanted to do, and he didn't want anybody else telling him what to do. And as a result, something we also see a lot is these kind of personality types. Usually they don't do well at school. Carol was no exception to that. He was not a good student. And so this is a little bit about that. So Carol was not a model student. When graduation time came, just two out of the class of 400 failed to make the grade. This is high school now. So one of those two was.”
2019-11-24 · Founders · #99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source