YouSaid · the spoken record

Wolfgang Hammer

lines on the record: 45
first: 2025-11-11
most recent: 2025-11-11
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

“Thought about this There's so many people that I owe a lot to, but I know that it's my wife who married me. I think that probably is the kindest thing.”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Usually every five minutes when you have to communicate and make a decision of some kind and it gives you confidence and there is a guy that I really like, this guy John O'Donoghue talks a lot about Meister Eckhart who had this concept of Gilassenheid which is the letting go of all intent simply experience a divine nature that's already in you by the pure fact that you're alive and once you realize that all else is an afterthought and I think that's probably what Don Roosevelt communicated to me in a visceral way.”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It to say that in the end every story is a metaphor. So you want to couch all these absolute truths revealed in a subjective way and metaphors that don't spell it out directly but convey their meaning through something that's close but not the thing itself. He had this wonderful way of repeating back to you the absurdity of your beliefs and laughing at them. So you would be laughing at these absurd constructs that these stories that you've come up with and believed to be fundamentally true, mainly because you hadn't done the work of just saying, well”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's a technology that is able to through consilience, through pulling from all strands of knowledge to communicate an ultimate concern, so an absolute truth in the story universe, in such a way that the individual can understand it on an emotional, personal level, which is kind of also what philosophy has been trying to do, and it's also what religion has been trying to do. So in that sense, it's a technology layer of arranging situations and character in such a way that enables this transmission. So in that sense, storytelling is soteriological and has, as its concern, a form of salvation, not the form of salvation, a form of salvation. Maybe the answer to the question, am I worthy of love? The answer is yes. Very often comes back to that on the emotional love. And then very often is it safe to die? And the answer is in most cases yes.”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Character in action through action? This is the great discovery of the pragmatists, which I think is a huge reason for why the American experiment has been so successful is that people do a lot of doing happening. You cannot have a good narrative without an active character. There's no one that sits around and thinks their way through problems. I think it's a combination of having a dominant worldview to fight against, of having a personal worldview to a spouse and a willingness to through action. And I think also through quiet reflection that those voices that perhaps are in the subconscious safely come to the surface and see where it goes without having a specific outcome in mind over time, narratives fear made conscious and conquer through action.”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some way. I think emphasis in some way. I think we have a very narrow definition of leaders, business or political leader. And that's sort of the end of it. I think actually if you invert that and you just simply say you have a predicate understanding of yourself at that point in time based on reflection and you act according to this predicate understanding as best as you can at that point in time, you're already a leader simply because you're guided by a philosophical worldview that feels absolutely true to you at that moment.”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the definition of story. This is a Faulkner quote, but great conflict is the heart and conflict with itself. That's a great story. So you want two conflicting things at the same time. You're very invested in your fear, but you create situations in the original state where this investment in your fear pays off and at the same time there's a part of you mostly subconscious can be conscious that has a dream of greatness. And those are absolutely in conflict because the fear wants to dominate and the greatness wants to come out and do its thing. And it's through the story itself that this gets worked out. And I always think this when someone takes on the position of the leader and how relieved everyone else is not to have to do that. People love to just disappear in a mass and be relieved of the burden of individuality. But this is possible because someone has a will to power and steps up and says, I will do it.”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think fear and greatness, as long as we define greatness as a manifold of flourishing of life, so in all its forms, not just a great engineer or a great company builder. If we believe, as I do, that storytelling, especially for the course of Gilgamesh all the way to now, is thousands of years of storytelling and myth-making that we have thoroughly enjoyed people realizing potential in the world, that there is an inner drive to each one's potential. I do think There's probably a fear of reaching one's own potential because it might be too big.”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The mind obviously is very good at projecting into the future, and can you imagine really anything? And in many ways, what is possible, even emanating from our own subconscious, is so much bigger than what the left hemisphere brain, the rational analytical brain can handle. So I think there is a fear of the bigness of the world, that fear of the biggness of the world is also reflected in the inner world. So much of story is actually an inner transformation. when you have infinite potential in the outer world, this potential is probably also inside of you and it's overwhelming. So fear is present, but it's a fear of potential of all that could be.”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, not in the personal, emotional level, not on a professional level, even just being around people who have a more benevolent attitude towards failure can be extremely helpful because one's own worth is not caught up in whether something works or not. This is also a huge advantage that the Americans have over the Europeans. Failure in Europe is so shameful. And then America is more forgiving. Obviously, on the margins than sometimes you think, oh, wow, this is a level of heedlessness that perhaps is a little irresponsible. But yeah, I think risk is inherent, sort of the end stage of this kind of transformation that you talk about when you have figured out your ultimate concern, you figured out that there are going to be barriers. You can kind of name the barriers even. You gain self-knowledge. You realize that through action, there's power even just in the action itself, even though it doesn't actually yield anything immediately. And then action begets action, which begets courage.”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You just increasingly become tolerant, like I said, of calculated risk, which in the creative endeavor is a requirement because you're going to fail.”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And absolutely endless. It's an amazing thing to be able to talk to people like this. And they're very different. Both founders, they're both amazingly successful investors that have done the whole thing. They've done it numerous times. And they're very patient and generous, at least at this stage of the game. They both have a real understanding and passion for the craft and artistic nature of storytelling. Courage, complete comfort with calculated failure. As in if you know what you're doing, you're trying something and you know it's a trial balloon, it's totally all right if it goes wrong as long as you really thought about it and there's a calculated risk as opposed to a random, let's see what sticks kind of risk. Really incredible ability.”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Technologically mediated and always has been. The third endeavor is going to be around distribution, but marginally. And we're all three very interested in whether something can be done on the edges that espouses this 80-20 philosophy of, well, it's going to be very much a movie company. It is very much a movie company, but maybe has a couple of points in the dominant worldview that it perhaps doesn't quite believe and wants to substitute something else for it.”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And building a film studio from scratch, Mitch Lasky is my chairman and A16Z as my investor, including Mitch. Mitch Lasky is a former partner at Benchmark and comes from the video game world and Margand Driesen is obviously a great lover of cinema and has seen absolutely everything. And the quest is twofold, trying to make movies in a very traditional sense that at least for me personally have an aspiration towards some kind of epiphany or some kind of transcendental insight, even if it's very brief, or maybe show some kind of transformation possible around these philosophical principles. And then there are two sort of technical components to it. One being isn't how we make things. And again, I very much believe that the nature of autistic expression is in the human and the human intent, but technology can help filmmaking is inherently a technological endeavor because you're representing the world via cameras. You're staging events to make them look as if they were real, but they're obviously not. So in that sense,”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think everything is about status. Every scene is about status. Every scene is about a power differential. It's what we find relentlessly fascinating. Every interaction is about status. There's a sort of story about, I think it was a British actor who knew absolutely everyone in English society and for some reason was unsuccessful at getting what they wanted. And he said, when he overplayed his status, he would be hated. When he underplayed his status, he wouldn't get what he wanted. Everyone liked him, but he wouldn't get what he wanted. when he matched status, he would get whatever he asked for.”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Transformation is interesting because in the Greek poetic sense, it would be a transformation. It would be the emergence of a new insight, a new power, which then creates a new kind of version of yourself, or of the hero self. And then lately, I've also added maybe in my mind this idea of the transcendental insight as enough. James Joyce was all about this, the Joyce and Epiphany, the moment where the character accesses the universal truth, the transcendental truth about the world just for a brief moment. And that's the end of it. So even just the recognition, oh, this is how the way things really are. Maybe that's enough too.”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Brilliant designer, and he talked about originality and how it's so important. And it felt like a status game that people play that when they do something great, that somehow it was entirely original so as to aggrandize their achievement. And it's entirely possible that they felt that this was the case. I think very often it's much more derivative. And I think we should be much kinder to the notion of derivative. And I think we should understand perhaps that originality is just another form of derivation, except it's one that perhaps hasn't been done quite in this way before. Everything's been said, right? Everything we've just said on this conversation, and this conversation has been said before in some way by someone at some point. It just wasn't maybe heard or it wasn't set in the right way that one specific person could hear it. I think originality is in the same way.”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think hardship as the barrier to be overcome is the foundational element of any narrative. I find it very interesting in general that when you look at the history of storytelling, how the archetype, if you will, the paradigm of what a story is, is someone actively overcoming obstacles to achieve something. I guess somehow this must correspond to how collectively you see this in Chinese mythology, you see it in Indian mythology, you overcome through activity, through intentional action. Big or small doesn't mean it can just be very, very small. So I think that's probably as a foundational piece the overcoming of obstacles, which then becomes in and of itself the reason for doing it. There is no journey to go on without an obstacle. So in that sense, I think it's essential. Originality, I have this specific view. I think very often successful people, I just heard an interview with a...”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because everyone views themselves as one. You get access to people when they recognize themselves in what it is you're saying. It's the human desire to overcome our wretched state, which is this Kickgat phrase I always love. And humans are gods who shit. And I think it has to do with this capable being on this planet that has to die. And that sends all these things are questions of death.”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's a character starting at an extreme point that. That is then resolved at the very end to some degree. Most characters that you meet are either underdogs trying to rise or kings who are falling or queens are falling. The biggest people in the world believe they're the underdog because we are again locked into this subjective experience of the world and we are wanting beings.”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's an unbelievably powerful symbol because it stores potentiality. So the mind can imagine anything. So it's the ultimate story in some sense where both all your desires and fantasies can be fulfilled and all your anxieties can be patched to such a degree maybe that the money project is a denial of death project. The more you accrue of that, it allows itself to be imprinted with any vision that you want. The more you accrue of it, the more it gives the illusion that you're not going to have to leave your consciousness.”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have an unusual view of this because I don't know if we think it needs to be enjoyable. I think that's a recent meaning in the last 30, 40 years phenomenon where storytelling became entertainment almost exclusively. I don't think that's really the genealogy of that space at all. But I also think story is as a religious aspect, not in the organized way necessarily, but perhaps in a way of ultimate concern. Stories are very good vehicles for delivering experience of ultimate concern.”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think you do have to know which part of it you're in, we experience both desire and fear. It's not just one or the other. The hero's journey is very often a desire to rise in the world. That's a desire to fulfill one's potential in the world. Anxiety or fear purged is an idea of an inherent fear of something that might happen to you that you really don't wish to happen and it feels good to see a version of the world play out where that which you're afraid of actually doesn't happen because you have had agency in defeating it. This is always really important. So story is character and action. Things don't happen to you. You act against obstacles. And as you do require knowledge because knowledge comes power to then effect the outcome. It's also interesting to see that this is never done alone. They're always surrogates. People who give you knowledge and people who age you in the quest, whatever the quest may be.”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it has to do with a perceived power differential that we're completely powerless in the face of death, at least for now. And that is a fantasy to acquire more power. And then because we have this capacity to imagine the future and we can imagine really much anything, we have an ability to create our own cherished outcome that overcoming this weakness with the power fantasy. Robert Town, who was a great screenwriter and wrote Chinatown and he recently died, wonderful life and a wonderful career. He said this to me at lunch years ago when I was a young executive. He said, stories are either desirous fulfilled or anxiety is purged. And I think he's right. These are great minds who've made great films and it's never left me. I think it has to do with overcoming basic human condition.”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, everything is in some ways a death project. Absolutely. Who feels that creativity, the art of creating negates death and therefore is the purest expression of a battle against the inevitable. And Tolkien has this famous clip on YouTube. All stories are about death. And I think he's absolutely right because it's the ultimate stakes. And it's the stakes everyone lives with every day. And we get up and do things anyways.”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“None of this is a moral evaluation. And no one cares what I think was good or bad on a personal moral level. But on a narrative level, I think it's absolutely fascinating that you have someone willing to step out on such limbs all the time.”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My view today, and it might change, but has probably to do with an ability to be a Greek hero, which means to live and espouse a worldview that is universally disliked. That's iconic. I'm really interested on this pure narrative level in what Elon Musk is doing because it's so unconcerned with the traditional hero trajectory is almost Greek. And this idea of breaking societal rules, if you will, that you get to some platonic ideal that is worth more than acceptance. And I think all stories have in common the idea of resilience, that a character will overcome these obstacles and things are not working. And there'sn't enough knowledge and enough power to go where one must go or one has impelled or has been impelled to go and keep going anyways. So this idea of resilience and to keep going anyways, even though the obstacles are getting enormous, I think inspires that begrudging admiration.”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The point needed to be conveyed so they could be at peace knowing that they're done their bit for this thing to work out and to be able to communicate that in such a way that the people you're speaking to can hear it because you're adjusting this emotional subjective emotional component to them. I think that to me is the secret of great communication.”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All society is communication, and that because of its complexity, communication breaks down into buckets of specialty, but it's in essence being a master communicator of an almost infinite amount of buckets. And knowing to context switch between them and understanding the language games that each one of these buckets plays, but never forgetting the core principles underneath all this, some of it is unspoken. So I think the people I have observed, especially as one person that I admire enormously is doing a massive turnaround, and he has been communicating the same marching orders for two years to this huge company everyone around him was in doubt, and the results of finally coming in, and he's right. So in posts, he was well against all these obstacles, but he was able to do it because he could communicate exactly what he was doing, almost in these three layers to anyone, but always adjusting, never the philosophy, but always sort of adjusting the emotional component, to whomever he was speaking to, so that each person could hear.”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Willing to do it again, and some of the CEOs I've gotten to know are artists in some ways. This is difficult stuff, especially when you have 100,000 employees. I mean, and you're owning it too. But to answer the question more precisely, I think it's the willingness and the courage to espouse a specific kind of worldview that perhaps is a little bit counter, but stands in some tension to the dominant worldview and own that anyways.”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Come back to this ability and willingness to take ultimate responsibility, which is really not what most people want to do at all. And for some reason, especially filmmakers, I have a true vision of what it is they want to be doing, which means the birthing this project and they take ultimate responsibility from beginning to end and then do it again and then do it again, each time risking total failure, staking their entire being on this one next thing. They're running these pretty big temporary startups that get funding from the outside world, like they get distribution from someone else, not themselves. So I think it's courage. And it's also courage to espouse their particular worldview and all the great filmmakers have a very particular worldview. I think it's extraordinary. It exists at all in the world. Someone like that exists who will do that even if it fails.”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Always around these sort of midsized places. I never ran a Warner Brothers type place simply because they don't make the kinds of movies I'm particularly good at or interesting. At the same time, it's a very specific skill set to run the big ones. So I ran the midsized ones. I think it has to do with being able to communicate in different worlds, which is actually quite difficult because you have to speak the language of filmmakers or live in their own world and then you have to speak the language of corporate because they're reporting requirements, business requirements. You have to speak the language of marketing and sales here in these different worlds and your job is to understand the language of filmmaking and the language of business and the language of marketing, a run interference so the thing can happen.”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Understand you're dealing with human beings first and foremost. And I think the greatest founders and the greatest builders understand this instinctively”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's exactly right. Someone called me a note from them in a while and they said, we realized we've been selling to the wrong level. We have to sell to sea level as opposed to frontline manager level and the sales pitch didn't work to the sea level. It was because they had not changed the framework, this objective personal philosophy. The sea level has a very different worldview of what's happening in company than the line manager. And we worked on it and it was like magic. It was like magic. All of a sudden closing huge national deals with huge companies because they understood the psychology of the sea level management. I think it's easy to forget that you're dealing with human beings who have a human experience at the same time as having a professional experience. And story is really good at seeing these two layers at the same time. There's a subjective experience that a human being has and then there's the professional experience on top of it. And I think you want to combine these two.”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The reason storytelling to me is so effective is because you have a subjective point of view that an individual can relate to because it's imitating and processing the character's point of view. So it's subjective in that way. The subjective access to storytelling would be a universal truth. But there can be only accessed subjectively.”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was a project where simply there's a camera installed in the room and the camera would move back and forth across the room. And each time uncover a little bit more of the room. And nothing else happens. There's no payoff to it. But the suspense of seeing a little bit more information about the room is absolutely riveting. Even just this tiny amount of new information being given creates enormous suspense because somehow we're good at anticipating, we're really always anticipating. And each new piece of information gets put into some kind of puzzle. So by the end, the suspense is unbearable.”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Striving to stay within the obvious and trying to find a variation on the obvious, I think you have a higher chance, at least in storytelling of discovering something novel that will still feel intelligible enough to categorize in the world some people have an ability to see something truly new and immediately categorize it. Those people tend to be very successful investors, for instance. But generally speaking, I think the idea of original is overrated and the great filmmakers know this, the great novelists know this, that you can begin with something very familiar and make it feel totally new incrementally.”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interesting thing about this whole world is that there are no rules to it. Everyone gleans and tries to come up with rules for themselves. Sometimes that seem to work more often than they don't work, but there's no book on this, really. Raymond Lowey, the designer, had a similar rule in around 1820. The most tolerable element of new before it's rejected by the human mind is incomprehensible. With the idea of originality and creativity, there's a sort of tension, even in of itself is a story. There's this tension, especially now originality is highly prized and there's sort of this belief that only the very new is truly novel. And with storytelling especially, but I even think maybe this is confirmation bias, but I even think in business or innovation, the new is really just the obvious uncovered through systematic trial and ever over a certain period of time so that by”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“organization that makes a product of some kind, I think fulfills personal life picture for the people you're communicating it to. So it's just, it feels more important. It feels truer and it feels more meaningful and worthwhile.”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“acted accordingly with unbelievable discipline and courage and created something Every one of these instances is completely unique, obviously. But I think that is what's possible. It also makes it just more interesting in general. It's very easy to be conformist in some sense because you know what's expected, but there's a lot left on the table too. At the same time, espousing a new narrative or finding a predicated understanding just unlocks a ton. It doesn't need to be this life-changing. Sometimes it can be incremental and just unlock a whole new world of potential that is very easily implemented. And in many ways, stories are very good at creating symbols which represent some sort of transcendental belief that people participate in. So in the sense that everyone has an ultimate concern, something that they're in absolute ways concerned about. We'll talk about it, but it can be many different kinds of things. It can be money. It can be a deity. It can be truth. And to be able to present an ultimate concern around a business level.”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think sometimes it's because doing the thing is so difficult and complex that the idea of having to frame this now on top of everything else in some sort of philosophical way is overwhelming and doesn't even seem necessary at times. Of course, it's always present and people just are not conscious of it. So when pretty kind of understanding of what is actually happening is made conscious and is communicated in a way that doesn't quite name the thing, but it was able to metaphorically describe it. It can be extremely inspiring because it simply seems that these three elements of the external, the internal, and the philosophical combined unlock something that moves people very deeply. I was at Stanford when the turnaround for Apple in the second inning, I should not be using baseball metaphors because I have no idea what they are, but this was a man who had a philosophy, a personal world view, and knew exactly what he was fighting against at all times.”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the external would be what are we doing? What are we making? What are we selling? What are we buying? Whatever it may be, that's a core function of the company, the philosophical is the why. So you believe in certain ideals, a certain way, you believe that the world should be on an abstract level. It's an abstract why. And emotional is a personal why. In the founder's case, it's very often why they are doing it.”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Philosophical beliefs of how the world works and why that's a good thing. And then you juxtapose that with your own personal philosophy of how the dominant worldview is actually wrong and just plant that with your own personal philosophy. And ideally, you do this four or five points and you do it on a direct refutational basis. So each one, you say, everyone believes this, I believe that. When this is steel manned is really helpful. And then you do the same. So this is on a sort of global level about how the world. And when we talk about world, it's probably specific to whatever it is you're building or running. And then they do that for the personal as well. So you can do it for a customer. You can do it for a person you're selling to. How do they believe things should be done and you juxtapose that with what you think should be done? So there's three layers and you want to hear each one of them.”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way I think of it is story works in three layers. One, there's the external mechanics of how the character interacts in the world and you can substitute character for product. That's a requirement. And in the case of technology, it's technical. You got to have something that works. And then there are two more layers, which is a subjective layer of why is this series of events important to me and what does it mean to me personally? And then there is a philosophical layer. And on a philosophical level, it's probably where you try to find out and you have to steal man this. And it's very easy to straw man anybody got to steel man it. How you believe the world works today and what people believe makes a good world. Because everyone most of the time believes they're doing what is the right thing. It needs to be done the way it's done for a reason. They're mostly not wrong. So there's a sort of almost intractable philosophy.”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A thing in character development where the character at the beginning of a story will have a concept of the world that they believe is fixed. And it's very often a flawed concept. This is always attributable to a lack of self-knowledge. And I think with the case of a great founder who feels that they're building something that's working, and then they feel that perhaps the way they're thinking about the context we're in this product lives is limited. With big companies, sometimes they have a product that perhaps is not as good anymore as it used to be, and that the conception of the world is antiquacist and they don't quite know how to pivot it. And then there are all these superficial answers that come and you grab from the world what the answers might be that you need to structure your company around. And my suggestion is always to pull that from the inside, so to access it through self-knowledge. So with a founder, they're simply trying to find access to some very truth that”
2025-11-11 · Invest Like the Best · Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story - [Invest Like the Best, EP.447] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source