← Old School with Shilo Brooks
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- [00:01]
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- [00:30]
Shiloh Brooks
I'm Shiloh Brooks. I'm a professor and CEO, and I believe reading good books makes us better men. Today I'm sitting down with Daniel Lubecky. Daniel is the founder of the multi billion dollar health snacks company kind and a shark on ABC's Shark Tank. Pierke Avot, compiled in the third century CE changed Daniel's life. Today. I'm asking him why. This is old school. DANIEL lubecky, welcome to Old School.
- [01:11]
Daniel Lubetzky
Thank you, Charlotte. It's such an honor to be with you.
- [01:13]
Shiloh Brooks
It's good to have you here. You know, Old School is really about the way books collide with people. And so before we get to the book that you chose, which is Pirke Avot, this extraordinary book of Jewish maxims, I want listeners to get a sense of who you are. So can you tell us the story of founding your company, Kind?
- [01:35]
Daniel Lubetzky
So I'm a confused Mexican American Jew, And I started KIND in 2003, the same year that my father passed away. And he was named after him because in the 1940s, when he was a child, he was sent to a concentration camp. And after many years of horrors, he was liberated by American soldiers. And all his life, he lived his life with kindness in spite of all of the darkness that he went through. He saw his role in the world as trying to bring some kindness to others. And so the year that we founded Kind, my dad had passed away. And it was, interestingly, Shiloh. It was one of the hardest years of my life, but it was also one of the greatest years of spiritual and professional growth. It was a very weird year. My dad was my hero. And I when we lost, when I when we lost him, I was just devastated and really depressed. If I had any advice for any listeners, and you don't need to be Jewish to take advantage of this is the Jewish rites of mourning require that you meditate three times a day, pray three times a day, and you're saying prayers where you're exalting God. And for me, prayer didn't come easy. Like, I don't get it. And I talked to my rabbi and I said, look, you know, we just lost my dad. Why Am I gonna be
- [03:15]
Shiloh Brooks
praying?
- [03:15]
Daniel Lubetzky
Why would God care that we are saying, you're amazing, we love you? Why would Korah care about us lowly people? Like, I don't get it. And the rabbi said to me, listen, Daniel, do me one favor. Just try to do the Kaddish, try to do the prayers, see how it feels to you. And also, if anytime, because I was traveling a lot, I was starting Cain that year, and I also was starting the One Voice Movement and meeting a lot of fascinating people. And the rabbi said, if you're traveling, then read this book called Per Kay Avot and see how it flows, where you will talk in a month. And it was one of the most transformative experiences of my life.
- [03:50]
Shiloh Brooks
Why do you think Kind was so successful and has been so successful after it emerged? I mean, it emerged, as you said, from grief and uncertainty. Why has that business been so successful?
- [04:01]
Daniel Lubetzky
Many different things. First of all, I had 10 years of failures and lessons that I drew lessons from. So thanks to my 10 years of building a company called P Sworx, right before I did kind, I had 10 years of building P Sworps, which is a company bringing Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians, Egyptians and Turks to work together. And the concept was very cool to use business as a force for bringing people together. The execution was not our iconic. Our main brand was called Moshe Pupik and Ali Mishmunkin's World Famous All Natural Gourmet Foods. I still don't know why it didn't work, but. But I learned so much from that. So a lot is learning from your mistakes. A lot of I think is just luck. I do think just being there at the right time, at the right place, a lot of it is from those lessons identifying something that I needed in my life, which was a healthy snack that people could travel with. You seem a little younger than me. I'm 57. But in the early 90s, there was no healthy snack sector. There was no healthy snacks if you were traveling, selling your products, or staying late to work and reading your books. And there was no good snacking options. It was all either tasted like cardboard or was very indulgent or indulgent and tasted like cardboard. And so I was trying to design a product that fit me. And I think we just really hit the sweet spot. We designed a product that people really needed. I think in consumer products, goods, the product is king. Just like in finance, they say cash is king in products. In consumer products, goods, the products, if you have a good product, you're going to figure it out and then the last thing, and probably the most important thing is we just built the best culture. We built a team that was very driven and everybody was in that together. And we created a culture where all of us were working towards a shared goal and create a culture where people could engage in hearty debate and be very creative and had all of the traits for a high performing culture where we attracted incredible talent. One of the most important things is attracting incredible talent and then propelling them to do great things. And it's not the easiest thing to do. Like you need to really find the strength to recognize that other people are better than you at certain things.
- [06:17]
Shiloh Brooks
So I want to get into the book you chose today, Pierke Evote. But I want to do that by learning a little bit more about your father because I've heard you in other interviews talk about him. I understand he was a Holocaust survivor, that he had a third grade education, but that despite that, he was quite a voracious reader.
- [06:36]
Daniel Lubetzky
Yeah, it's exactly as you said. When the war started, my dad was nine years old, so he only went through a third grade education. He was sent to a ghetto dental concentration camp liberated by American soldiers, who I'm eternally grateful to. Then he was in a hospital for six months in a refugee camp for six months and then landed in Mexico. He didn't speak Spanish or English. And the way he educated himself was by getting gifts of used encyclopedias and reading them cover to cover, volume A, volume B, volume C. And he read no less than 5,000 books in his lifetime. And what's interesting, Shiloh, if you. When I was a kid, I observed how people would ring the doorbell to come to seek my dad's advice. And this is a man that had a third grade education and he spoke nine languages. He was one of the most erudite people. He could talk about any topic. It was such a pleasure to talk to and listen to. And he just an extraordinary human being.
- [07:34]
Shiloh Brooks
Did you find this book through him? Is this a book that he had
- [07:37]
Daniel Lubetzky
read when he passed away? And I was in so much despair. My rabbi, Rabbi Sheinberg said read this book called Pirkei Abot changed my life. It really changed my life.
- [07:52]
Shiloh Brooks
For people who haven't read it before and people Jewish and non Jewish alike, can you explain exactly what this is and how it fits into the larger body of Jewish literature?
- [08:05]
Daniel Lubetzky
Piercevot is a section of what is called the Mishnah in 200 BC so like 2200 plus years ago. Rabbi Yehuda Benassi. Yehuda Benasi who was like Yehuda the Prince, was like the nickname for this rabbi, took upon himself to compile all of the oral traditions from all of the rabbinical commentary which have been passed orally for generations, and put it into these books. And what's interesting about Pirkevot is Precepts of Our Fathers. It's like ethical maxims. It's a moral tractate. It's about morality. It's not legal commandments, but it follows a section on legal commandments. And it's very interesting. Why did this rabbi, who was sorry, that put moral maxims right next to civil damages. There was like a section on what happens if you aggrieve a person. And the way rabbis explained it is that the civil damage to section was how you deal with other fellow human beings, if you grieve them. Perkevot is how you deal with yourself. It's how you lead a better life. It's how you learn to deal with God and within yourself. And it's about how you elevate yourself through moral behavior. And so it's a bunch of pieces of wisdom. Many of them read like haikus. Like, you know, the Japanese haiku was like three or four really concise statements that are so deep, and sometimes you need to really go in deeply and really ponder them. You get so much out of them. And sometimes it's like, wow, this is really from the 2200 years ago. Because sometimes they say things that might not relate to you, but sometimes it's fascinating how the wisdom of 2200 years ago applies today, like if it had been written yesterday.
- [09:57]
Shiloh Brooks
So it consists of five initial chapters, and there's been a sixth one appended. And each of these chapters contains maxims, and they come in all different forms. The second chapter is about a rabbi and his five disciples, for instance. And, you know, then there are chapters on how low human beings are, but how high they are when they study Torah and are, you know, in the presence or at least in. In. In the kind of communication with God. So it's an extraordinary religious text, and I understand that it's oftentimes read at certain periods of the Jewish calendar. Do you. Do you know when it's often read, what time of year it's read?
- [10:35]
Daniel Lubetzky
I think it's in the spring. But I actually don't. Don't have a very good answer. But I have a very interesting thing to tell you, Shiloh, based on what you said, unless you want to go
- [10:43]
Shiloh Brooks
somewhere else, tell me what you're going to tell me, and then we can go somewhere else.
- [10:47]
Daniel Lubetzky
You were going to talk about how it really praises the story of the Torah, which is true, the story of the Torah. It's important study. But what I found fascinating is how these rabbis 2,200 years ago warned about too much over intellectualization and they wanted you to balance the story of becoming a good human being with the good deeds of actually becoming a human being, the study with actually working. And if I may, I want to read you a couple of little ones because I think it's fascinating how when we talk about what's going on in our colleges, what's going on today in our country, sometimes we worry that people are living in la la land and they're not connected to reality. And we talk about experts and the expert class and we talk about how sometimes people in the ivory towers might not connect with the common man. And these rabbis, 2,200 years ago, we're already warning about that. And so I'll read you a couple of them. One of them says from Rabbi Shammael says, speak little but do much. Which is like a concept of like, yes, try to learn, but also try to do. Another one from Rabbi Shimon Ben Gamaliel says, all my days I grew up among the sages and I found nothing better for a person than. Than silence. Study is not the most important thing, but actions. Whoever indulges in too many words brings about sin. For me, that was fascinating that they were saying, we are studying and we're telling you, don't only study, don't only talk and wax poetic. Because if you don't have practical experience, you might over intellectualize. And a lot of times we as human beings are too easy to judge because we haven't had the experience to understand how difficult it is to put yourself in other people's shoes.
- [12:46]
Shiloh Brooks
I want to talk more about the maxims. I mean, there's so many good ones in this book, it's amazing. And you know, I'm not Jewish and I read it with delight and I was edified by it. And I want to ask you, though, when you found it, how did it strike you? In other words, you were in a period of grief and you said a minute ago that the book changed your life. And I want to hear what. What is it about the book? What were you going through? What were you feeling? Your rabbi assigned it to you, you read it and something clicked in there. What was it that clicked and why did that happen?
- [13:17]
Daniel Lubetzky
So think about this, Shiloh. Not only was I in a lot of pain from Losing my mentor, my father, my best friend. Like, he really was everything to me. I mean, my siblings and my mom and my children and my wife also. But my father was this incredible force for me, and he was just everything. And all of a sudden, we lose them without anticipation. It just. It was a sudden death. And so while I'm mourning, it just so happens to be that I'm building a movement that's a historic movement. And somehow this book is grounding me. Both the mourning of my father and the rite of Kaddish and the reading of these precepts, it's reminding me of what's important and about. The book warns about not getting too close to power. It warns about ego. It warns about a lot of the forces. And you asked earlier, how did kind succeed? I'm 100% certain that the grounding of these moral lessons and of reading this book helped me learn to be a better leader. Because I think prior to Kind, still today, by the way, I struggle with wanting. I love myself too much, and I really don't have false humility. I'm very proud of everything done, unlike my father, who was very comfortable giving other people the spotlight. I like the spotlight. And so reading the book occasionally helps remind me that searching for the spotlight can be your own doing. So. One of my favorite rabbis is Rabbi Hillel, and he has one great hit after another. And he says, one who makes his name great causes his name to be destroyed. One who does not add to his knowledge causes it to cease. For me, this is fascinating. And if you really think about the way I interpret it, one who makes his name great causes his name to be destroyed. When you're just searching for ego, for celebrity, for fame, and you're focusing on the wrong things, you're probably going to develop the wrong habits and you're probably going to get in trouble. And also when you try to elevate yourself, somebody's going to try to bring you down. I think about this a lot because I'm on Shark Tank and I like talking about all these precepts. So I really struggle. And sometimes people ask me this really vital question. Why are you seeking more? Like in the age of social media, where if you don't have a platform, if you don't do your podcast, how are you going to transmit your ideas? So you need to find a way to transmit your ideas without becoming part of the problem, without searching for those clicks, without searching for that shallow popularity. And how do you. And going back to this rabbinical tactic gives you some of the Answers, don't just try to make your name bigger. Try to do the right things and then connect it to your, to your podcast. One who does not add to his knowledge causes it to cease. Because very often you find smart people and the smarter they are, the more in danger they are of thinking that they're too smart. I've noticed this a lot with myself and others that we think we have the answers because we actually thought through an issue. But then sometimes circumstances change and if we're not willing to have the humility to be self reflective, we're gonna get in trouble and then move in a path without incorporating more knowledge.
- [16:44]
Shiloh Brooks
So it sounds like from what you've just said about learning from the book, about, you know, you were meeting all these celebrities and you were founding this company and it was like the graph was going up and to the right, like the line was just like going straight to the top on the financ finances and all this and that. This book, pure k avot, you found it and it helped you keep your feet on the ground at a time when you could have lost yourself, become a vain man and a puffed up man. And I like what you said a minute ago, which you said, now, I'm not over that stuff. I still do love myself. I still love myself. But this book reminds me of what it means to be grounded and what the most important things in life are. Would you say that's kind of what the book does? I mean, it's, you know, as you said, you know, Torah is important, the study, God, humility, peace, justice. I mean, it has all these kind of universal values, virtues that are present in it. And so you kind of came into contact with those, it sounds like, and that helped you stay grounded. And then you say, and I find this fascinating, that kind, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, wouldn't have been as successful had you not encountered this book at the moment that you did, because it made you a better man and a better leader in a way.
- [17:58]
Daniel Lubetzky
100%. 100%. And I would just say I've noticed a lot of amazing people that get celebrity very quickly and they don't find a way to ground themselves either with a spouse or children or friends or colleagues that will tell them when they're wrong and they lose themselves. And it's actually more common than not, particularly when you have success early. I had 10 years of failures, so that grounds me also a lot. But it is really, really important that as you're searching for greatness, you're always finding Ways to talk to yourself, to be introspective, to read, to surround yourself with people that love you enough to be kind to you by giving you feedback when you're wrong. And I don't know if you've encountered the Shiloh, but I know a lot of incredible CEOs that surround themselves. Not that they want to, but it just so happens with people that are just going to tell them what they want to hear. Like the emperor who has no cloth. And you can see that five, ten years later the company gets into enormous trouble because somebody says something wrong but they were scared to tell the visionary CEO. Particularly when the visionary CEO has achieved a lot, then people are intimidated. Like who am I to challenge that person? But guess what? If you don't give everybody an equal voice, which is what this book talks to you about, about making sure I love another precept of this book is so much it encourages you to give people the benefit of the doubt, to assume positive intent and to doubt yourself a little bit. Be confident enough, but doubt yourself from Rabbi Hillel again, do not separate yourself from the community. Do not trust in yourself until the day of your death. Do not judge your fellow man until you've reached his place. I mean, think about it like always allow for self doubt until you die, no matter how much you've achieved. Allow for self doubt and never trust the other person till you've put yourself in those shoes. Because it's so easy for us to start judging others when we're not actually facing those circumstances.
- [20:01]
Shiloh Brooks
It's self deception that allows you to think so highly of yourself, not give people the benefit of the doubt like these sorts of things like you were talking about a moment ago. And this book really does call on you to know yourself in a deeper way. And it's that self knowledge that produces the humility. It seems to me in combination with a humility before God 100%. This is old school. And here we have an appreciation for old school, quality, craftsmanship, how things used to be made. Today's sponsor is doing exactly that. Vare that's V A E R was founded in Los Angeles with a mission to revive American watchmaking. And they've actually pulled it off. Vaer is now the largest independent watch assembler in the US building watches across California, Arizona, Rhode island and Alabama with leather straps made in Illinois and Florida. I absolutely love the watch these guys sent me. It's beautifully made and it feels substantial on my hand. It genuinely lives up to the reputation they've built. Veer has over 10,000 five star reviews. And once you wear one, you're gonna understand why I get compliments on it all the time. If you're tired of disposable products and want something rugged, timeless, and thoughtfully made, check them out. Go to VAR watches.com that's V A E R watches.com and support American craftsmanship. So let me, let me. You've shared a lot with me. I want to share one with you. And then I want to move on to some broader discussion about the book. But there was, you know, I'm not Jewish. And so I think for people who are thinking, well, can a person who's. Who's not Jewish get benefit from this book? We can have that discussion in a moment. I. I found a lot of it, you know, very inspiring. But let me read one and share one with you to get your reflection on. This is from the fourth chapter of Pirkei Avod. And it's Ben Zoma said, who is wise? He who learns from all men, as it is said, from all my teachers have I gotten understanding. Who is mighty? He who controls his passions. As it is said, he that is slow to anger is better than the mighty. And he that ruleth over his spirit, then he taketh a city. Who is rich, he who rejoices in his portion. As it is said, when thou eatest the labor of thine hands, happy art thou, and it shall be well with thee. Happy art thou in this world, and it shall be well with thee in the world to come. Who is honored, he who honors others, as it is said, for them that honor me, I will honor. And they that despise me shall be held in contempt. So I thought that was just a very, kind of beautiful, in a way, that's all of life. That's the whole, you know, that's extraordinary. Emotional.
- [22:50]
Daniel Lubetzky
Yeah.
- [22:51]
Shiloh Brooks
So powerful.
- [22:51]
Daniel Lubetzky
It's so powerful. And it's not for the Jews, it's
- [22:55]
Shiloh Brooks
for every human being.
- [22:56]
Daniel Lubetzky
What I love about this book is it's a universal set of lessons. And honestly, obviously Christianity and Islam also have respect for the. What they call the Old Testament, which we call the Torah. What we call the Torah, Christianity calls the Old Testament. They're the same books. The Mishnah is precepts drawn from what the rabbis. You made me emotional. The Mishnah is reflections and maxims from that. But I think it's got, like you said, and what's fascinating is I'm listening to the passage you chose, and it's really practical. It really. Well, it's so deep and it really makes your brain work. It literally helps you know how to run kind. It helps you run how to run your company, your family. Like, it really provides you really, really actionable of advice for how to make the most out of this life and of your community.
- [24:03]
Shiloh Brooks
Yeah, I agree with that. And I think even if you're not Jewish, one of the things that you get from reading this book, in addition to certain, there are certain universal things discussed, like justice and truth and peace with respect to the many, many exhortations to study Torah. Obviously those are specifically Jewish rather than universally human in a lot of ways. But one of the things I most admired was just the exhortation to take yourself seriously, take a holy book seriously. Again, I'm not Jewish, but I was moved by the devotion articulated in the exhortation to be a careful and close reader of a holy book given to us by God. That's a really powerful thing. And it makes you kind of step back, even if you're not Jewish and think, am I, Am I doing that? Am I taking myself seriously? Is there, is there some text from which I can take guidance that I'm taking seriously in the way that is described here? It's very powerful.
- [25:01]
Daniel Lubetzky
And by the way, if any of your listeners or viewers decide to give it a shot and they can go online and search for Pirkevot, and with the commentary, there are sections that are a little bit obtuse and there are things that are like, oh, my God, this really was written 2200 years ago. So just stay with it, because before you know it, it gets extraordinarily useful. So you read it. If it connects with you, you do, and if not, you keep going.
- [25:26]
Shiloh Brooks
So, you know, we've talked a lot about tradition here because these maxims are, as you have pointed out, from the third century. And I'm curious and you know, in the title, even the Ethics of the Fathers, there are these fathers, these rabbis of old, who were reputed to be wise and who left behind these wise maxims to be studied. But in culture today, it occurs to me there's just a lot of veneration of youth disruption. This book really calls the reader's attention back to tradition, the fathers, the ancient maxims on ethics and morals. So I'm curious to get your view about the value of tradition in a society. I mean, you're on Shark Tank and you founded this company, and I know your life is fast paced in a society that values disruption more than tradition. Why is it valuable?
- [26:18]
Daniel Lubetzky
John Mackey, who founded Whole Foods in one of Our conversations told me that in his perspective, there are progressives, there are conservatives. And he had a couple of things, but he called me. I don't remember the exact term, but it was kind of like integrationist, where, like, they like to honor certain pieces from the progressive, certain things from the conservative. My entire journey has been finding the good and learning from different traditions. So in my opinion, recognizing the foundations of our society is essential for us to prevent mistakes in the future. I really do think that over the last 20, 30 years, we in America made a very big mistake in not teaching young people a lot of things that you and I were taught. Like, I don't know if a lot of the people that are listening to us right now are aware that over the last 20, 30 years, a lot of Greek thought and a lot of thorough and Locke and a lot of things that a lot of us studied, philosophy and all this. Western foundations of democracy rule all. They stopped teaching them. And I think it's a gigantic mistake. I think, of course, you should teach other alternative views and cultures. I think that that's a very rich contribution. But if you then remove all of these foundations, all of a sudden you have young people not recognizing why democracy, to paraphrase Churchill, is the worst of all systems, except for all others. Right. That same with capitalism. Same with using market forces. There's a lot of imperfections with all of those. But we've seen through history what other systems can bring to us. And the American experiment really, really is extraordinary and unique. I wanted to find a way to reinvest in it. And when I immigrated from Mexico to Texas in 1984, I found a country that was exporting all of these values of kindness, of respect, of civility, of democracy, of freedom, of rule, of law. And we now are in danger of losing a lot of these fundamental things. Not just that we stop exporting them, but we don't cherish them and invest in them here. And a lot of young generations need to be taught the importance of these foundational values. So for me, tradition, heritage, all of the goodness from our culture, we need to reaffirm it. And like we spoke earlier, be comfortable also criticizing and learning and continuously improving, but not throwing away all of the extraordinary foundations of our country.
- [29:00]
Shiloh Brooks
Yeah, you know, I couldn't agree more. I mean, you're talking to the guy who's made his whole career teaching great books. And I think one of the things that strikes me as most beautiful about the tradition of the West's literature and philosophy and religion is that it's that tradition which contains within itself a critique of itself. So it's not as though by teaching it you are indoctrinating or something of that kind, because there are thinkers who come along who rightfully belong in that tradition, who also tear it down. And so it's a really wonderful thing for students to study because there are so many accounts of the true in the Western tradition, so many literary, philosophic perspectives, that it's less univocal, let's say, than I think people who haven't studied it would think. I want to do justice to Pierkei Avot in this way, though this is a book and we. It's not false to say it contains universal applicability when it talks about peace and justice and humility and self restraint. But I do think that this is a book that requires to get what you really want out of it, it requires the reader to have a relationship with God. And one of the things that frustrates me about a lot of the ways that folks read religious texts in particular is that they try to extract from them secular lessons, which is fine, I think you should do that. But the goodness of the truths that the book contains are grounded in a relationship with a God who says justice is good. Being humble is good. You know, being a person of moderation is good. And so that those, those values, those universal values, find their authority through a God who says they are good. And so I don't think you can fully divorce God from your reading of this. As universally, as universally applicable as the
- [30:49]
Daniel Lubetzky
book is, all my life I've believed in God. What does God mean? Has evolved throughout my life. As a kid, it was a little bit more simplistic. And I have had a number of formative influences. I'm the guy that when I was 12 years old, after, you know, when I was 9 years old, Shiloh, I started hearing about when my father went through the Holocaust, developed insomnia. I couldn't fall asleep and so appeared when I was 12 years old, lying in bed dreaming that I was God's emissary. So I'm starting there. I'm not going to end there. Don't be too scared. But I really felt when I was 12 years old and confessing, I had dreams when. And I'm a magician since I'm a kid, I would dream that I would fly up into the skies and God sent me to tell the people, stop fighting. Because I thought. I think I was very traumatized about what my father went through and the stories of what he went through. And like he was £70 when he was liberated by American soldiers. And he was six foot tall. Like he was almost not alive. He went through. If any of your viewers or listeners want to go on YouTube and look for Roman Lubezky Holocaust interview. And he talks about his experience and really something people need to understand. I believe that I have a soul. I believe that when my dad passed away, some of his soul elevated to the Shekhinah, to this thing that unites us all. But some of it stayed inside me because of the studies and the Kaddish and these things. And I feel if I carry his lessons, his memory and part of his soul, which we can't really explain inside me. And I believe there is a God, but I believe God is a force that is almost karmic. It's a force that. Where every human being counts, where every living being counts. And it's inside every one of us. And it's what makes me connect to everybody's humanity. It's what makes me have empathy for each other, what makes me understand the duty that I have to leave this world better than I found it. And so for me, God definitely is a force that I actually do believe a lot of what I learned from the Bible. But in today's world, the way I reflect on what God is, it's a force that connect all of us and commands all of us to treat each other the way God would want us to, because we are all reflections of his image.
- [33:15]
Shiloh Brooks
Let me ask you about the way you understand certain of these divine moral pieces of advice. You know, I read one earlier where it, you know, it said, who is rich, he who rejoices in his portion. You've talked about you're a successful man. There's nothing wrong with pursuing success. Both of us agree about that. But at the same time, success can inflate you. Certainly our culture today is sort of obsessed with acquisition. You know, there are, you know, gambling, and now there are these markets that you can, you know, bet on everything under the sun. And of course, everybody, I mean, Shark Tank is popular because everybody wants to found a startup and let's make some money and the whole thing. So there's this kind of obsession with acquisition, which PK Avote really does call you back from, or at least ask you to reflect on more deeply. So I'm curious how you think people should reconcile the advice to rejoice in their portion. You should rejoice in your portion, that that is rich, that is happiness, with the ambitious drive to found a company like yours. That that's on Shark Tank and has been a big part of your life in your own company. How do you reconcile those two pieces
- [34:27]
Daniel Lubetzky
of advice and come up with these amazing questions? It's a really deep question. I mean, it also brings a question about capitalism. Right? Because I really do believe that capitalism and free markets are amazing as a way to organize society. As the communists and the socialists that truly are actually communists that take the control over centralized decision making. It's a mess. And it's kind of like George. George was, we're all equal, except some are more equal than others. Capitalism is a better system. Free markets are a better system. But there is a problem with greed going crazy and with people just questing for the material goods and not finding a balance to understand what are the deeper things that we're here for. And if we're just trying to grow, is it at the expense of society? Is it the expense of nature? Is it at the expense of our souls? So it's a fundamental question that we all need to struggle with, and it needs to be tempered by some of those values and some of those lessons. I think I read about you, that you also teach a lot about Aristotle and sometimes cite Aristotle. One of the things that I find really important in life is the concept of balance. It's a topic that we do not talk enough about in life. And Aristotle was really good about talking about temperance. Common sense solutions tend to come in understanding all of the opposing forces and finding balance. And I think that's the same thing here. I think it's okay to enjoy life. I don't do enough of it. Like my grandmother, Bob Pola used to talk to me about how she wishes I was, like, a little bit more able to stop and enjoy smell the flowers. She used to say, I wish you could just slow down and smell the flowers. And I struggle with it because I'm always trying to build a better world and build and build. And then sometimes I reflect, like, why am I doing this? Am I doing it to make this a better world for my children to say? Or am I doing it for my ego? And it's not an easy answer, by the way. It's really not an easy answer. You really think about it. What's driving every one of my decisions? Am I always doing it for the right reason? And you need to learn to have those conversations with yourself. All that I can ask of myself is to reflect about it. I'm not going to get the answers right always. But if you're having that conversation, you have A chance at moving in the right direction.
- [36:53]
Shiloh Brooks
The word of the day is Mishnah. You've probably heard the word Torah, but that's not just the five books of Moses. It also includes a very long oral tradition. And Pirkei Avot is part of that tradition. And that oral tradition was put to paper around the third century.
- [37:15]
UnitedHealth Group Announcer
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- [37:45]
Shiloh Brooks
Knowing what you know now about success and about the ethical teachings of this book, this is a kind of hard hypothetical to answer. But if you lost it all tomorrow, would you be happy? Would you be able to rejoice in your portion?
- [38:00]
Daniel Lubetzky
I would like to think so, but I've never been in that situation. So I think it will be a mixed bag, right? I think that if I wasn't, and I think about those questions a lot. I also think that who I am is a lot a reflection of what my father went through. The more that I analyze myself, I can say, hello, how are you? What's your name? In more than 50 languages, I can say thank you in more than 50 languages. Now, the positive reason to say that I can do that is because I love people and I love languages. But the darker recognition is that I also want to build bridges to prevent what happened to my father from happening to me. Why didn't I learn to be a magician? Because I, as a kid, used to fear that in a horrible situation, I needed to develop skills, languages, magic stuff to survive, to navigate and survive. And so a lot of who I am is a reflection of wanting to prevent what happened to my father. And a lot of what I do is building bridges to prevent what happened to my dad from happening again to other human beings. So I would like to believe, because I have this conversation, if there was another war, if I went through what my father went through and then I lost everything, could I find happiness? And I'd like to think so, but the reality is, the more you spoil yourself in Mexico, there's an expression. I'm not going to say it right, but like, if, if you start eating steak, then you no longer want those beans like you need to, you need to, you need to. And. And you know what? I try to eat enough beans as much as possible. I really try to do things in my life to remind me, because I live very well. We have a beautiful situation. We don't, but I try to not always live with it. I try to avoid excess. I try to create for my family and for myself a situation where we know what not to do when we know I don't raise. My family teases me about it. But I hate throwing away food. I just. I cannot do it. And even if they won't eat the leftovers, I'll eat the leftovers. And I don't even want to tell you all the stories that they make fun of me related to that. But it's my way of trying to remind myself that we don't need all of the stake that sometimes beans will do.
- [40:17]
Shiloh Brooks
I was going to ask you the question because you're a builder, right? And you've said throughout this conversation that you love to build bridges and you've built a company. Is it more difficult to build a company of the kind that you have, or is it more difficult to build yourself and your soul?
- [40:34]
Daniel Lubetzky
I think they're the same for me. They're the same for me, kind was a reflection of my values and my aspirations. And really, very often you look at the founder, CEO and look at the company, and the cultures are really informed by one another. So I think that. And that's why Pierkevod was so instrumental in shaping me and shaping kind, because a lot of those precepts are, at least in the, you know, I sold kind a year and a half ago now, or a year and three months ago, not that I'm counting, but. But for me, Kind, at least when I ran, it was inextricable for my personality. Trying to seek transparency, trying to encourage hearty debate, trying to treat everybody as equals, drawing from the lessons from my father, who treated everybody the same. So for us, the janitor had stock options in kind, the president had stock options in kind, and everybody in between was an owner and was given the microphone to speak up. And if we encourage anybody that joined first, we gave them a whole talk about, like, really important. You are essential. You just started here, but you're going to observe things that we haven't observed, that we take for granted and we assume to have to be the case. We encourage you to challenge conventional wisdom. So we created a culture where my personality of being warm and hugging people and being talkative and treating people like partners and as equals and being very passionate and bringing a lot of passion and being very funny and very silly but also very intense. And that was a culture that existed at kind. And I really do think we created the highest performing culture. We attracted the most extraordinary talent. Everybody worked harder. I still meet team members years later that left many years. And they say that decade, those five years were the best of my life. It was the best culture because we really created something where everybody was elevating, where I learned how to, as Mishnah teaches you, to reduce yourself, to contract yourself, to allow others to lead and to learn from each other and to try to keep your ego in check. Not that I get it right all the time. I really don't. Very, very oftentimes I mess up and I interrupt people and I talk too much, and I have many, many failings. But I really did have the intention to try to help my team.
- [42:56]
Shiloh Brooks
You know, you ran a very different business from the one, the nonprofit that I run. But when you, when you say things, and it sounds to me like you're saying decency matters, compassion matters, human dignity matters, and that those things are not just words, those things are precepts to live by as a leader, as a business person. I mean, I feel like I very much resonate with what you've said. And that's something that many of the leaders I admire also believe. And so I. I think what you say is true. And it just, you know, when I think about that, you know, in a way, what you've given us is here's the kind of person that you need to be, the kind of things that you need to stand for, to have the kind of success that you've had, or at least even if it's not to that scale, to do it right and do right by people. Even if you're. If your business is worth $100,000, then you're still doing right by people.
- [43:45]
Daniel Lubetzky
It's really important to understand that it's not just because the how matters and you're going to enjoy life more by living the way you described. In my experience, it also made us perform better. It didn't detract from our performance. It added towards creating that culture where we trusted each other, we cared for each other, we had a higher perform, higher expectations of ourselves. And so everybody gave it everything because we were all in it together. And I mean, Kind was probably one of the best performing companies in history. I mean, we grew triple digits, more than doubled ourselves every year for 10 years in a row. And we did so profitably and cash flow positively. We basically didn't need money. We grew like this. Like, you Were talking earlier and we just reached a billion dollars with less than $5 million in advertising, with less than $5 million in investment. It's very rare. We reached a value of many, many, many billions with a total lifetime investment of $5 million. And almost no company has done that. It was thanks to my team who just were the protagonists in that. Right.
- [45:01]
Shiloh Brooks
No, no, it's true. And what you stood for and what you, you know, the way you treated people and that's where I was going was, it seems like there's a lot, I mean, you're a guy who, you know, people probably come to you for advice about business. You know, Shark Tank and the whole thing with the founders and this whole kind of thing. Are there red flags that you see when somebody comes to you and says, you know, will my company be successful? Would you be willing to invest in it? Whatever the case may be, where you think, nope, that's not, that's not it. That's a red flag. Like what are those kind of things?
- [45:32]
Daniel Lubetzky
Well, earlier you were talking about why we do what we do. And I, by, you know, why do I build a kind of gigantic enterprise. And I think doing it for the right reasons and thinking about the underlying things that you're doing and the why and the how helps figure out your performance. So I didn't really look at financials that much. I had Zaheer Ibrahim who was the best CFO and John Leahy was the best partner, and Ellie Lanning and many others who were mining the store. But I focused on the underlying things we need to create a great product, a great brand, trust a great culture, do the right thing, build with each other, be more creative, be more like all those things, and those things led to that. So if I look at somebody that's just focused on an exit, that just wants to grow for the sake of growth, that's willing to do shortcuts to get there. That for me would be the red flags and I would encourage them to be more long term oriented and more relationship oriented as opposed to being short term and transaction oriented. A lot of people are very transactional today. Rather than thinking about how do you build long term relationships that are going to create value over decades rather than over days.
- [46:52]
Shiloh Brooks
Let me ask you a few lightning round questions to conclude some quick ones. What is the best flavor of kind bar?
- [47:03]
Daniel Lubetzky
It really depends on the day. It's like asking me to kiss kids to some of my kids. Depends which one's behaving better. But the dark chocolate nuts and sea salt was like Took us two years to develop and we almost took the wrong turn by trying to make it zero sugar and chose that would have required for us to sacrifice some of our core tenets. Dark chocolate directionally is the one that I tend to go to more but I like variety. I like to write different ones.
- [47:34]
Shiloh Brooks
What business book would you recommend that every entrepreneur read?
- [47:39]
Daniel Lubetzky
One of the books that helped me enormously was Daniel Kahneman's. I think it's called Think fast and Slow which helps you understand how people think and how they make decisions. It's one of my favorite all time books. But I also really like your show because I think reading books that are not about business is probably going to be better for you than reading books about business. So I was, I was reading some of the recent interviews you had. You had somebody talk about the brothers Karamazov and I remember when I read that book like what I like about reading books and I wish I would. My wife is. She devours books I unfortunately don't get to read. I have a list of one read. It's great. But when I get to give myself the gift of reading the books, it exercises your mind, it makes you grow, it makes you dream, it makes you think. It's just so much better than the tactical and practical hey, how do you do this, that or that? So I think what I would recommend to people that want to really get to the most is don't just be transactional in what your pursuits are of how to books do incorporate that. It was important for me to learn some basics but also read books that make you think about what's important in life and that challenge you and that stretch you and that help you imagine because that's how you're really going to exercise that muscle and how you're going to create more and build more and know where you're heading.
- [49:02]
Shiloh Brooks
So you've said that you're a magician a few times and I looked up that you like mentalist tricks. In particular the mentalism trick. So I'm curious, what is your favorite magic trick to perform?
- [49:15]
Daniel Lubetzky
The most practical when I'm, you know, somewhere is just to do something like this because it's very easy to do. But mentalism is what I enjoy the most. But I have to really get into it. When we were running kite once a year we had a dinner at the Natural products Expo with 50100 team members and I would prepare mentalism routine for it. And also when we closed the transaction where we sold a majority stake of kind of our bankers held a dinner for us. And I did a mentalism routine for them. And my friend Byron Trott, who was our banker, freaked out and he thought that I actually had got in his head and he's like, oh my God, like you were negotiating bad faith because you knew what I was thinking. Ever since then, Byron, every time he has his, he has this incredible annual meeting and he now brings a mentalist to perform because I think he was really taken by that.
- [50:14]
Shiloh Brooks
That's a great superpower. What's the biggest mistake that you made when you built Kind?
- [50:19]
Daniel Lubetzky
Probably the biggest mistake was selling it. I wish my partners future owners just enormous success. But sometimes I reflect about whether I should have just kept doing it myself for my entire life. I think that was probably, if I have one reflection that I wish I could do all over again, probably would be now. There were many reasons why I sold it, but one of them was that I wanted to do other things. And I felt that selling Kind would free me to do many other things, which is true. But sometimes in some ways it's actually harder because now I'm investing across many different companies. It's actually very hard to do all of that and have a social impact with it.
- [51:06]
Shiloh Brooks
Last question. Is there a Jewish value, a maxim, something that you think about a lot when you make decisions that guides you, that you would share with our listeners?
- [51:19]
Daniel Lubetzky
Judaism for me, what I was taught when I was in Mexico and when I grew up was about Kun Olam, about your duty to live this world better than you found it, about the Golden Rule, which exists in Judaism but also exists in pretty much every other religion. Treat others the way you would want to be treated. So I think that's for me, the most important precept.
- [51:39]
Shiloh Brooks
Daniel Lubecky, thank you for sharing this extraordinary book with us today on Old School.
- [51:45]
Daniel Lubetzky
Thank you, Shiloh.
- [51:47]
UnitedHealth Group Announcer
Now finding a doctor is a little less challenging. UnitedHealth Group is investing in tools that make it easier for patients to navigate healthcare and pay less. These transparency tools help patients find providers. And this is the big thing. Compare costs up front. The big picture, more transparent pricing benefits everyone. These tools from UnitedHealth Group can help patients save hundreds of dollars annually. Learn more@unitedhealthgroup.com commit.