Speaker 1 ([00:01]):
Hi, I am Doberman Dan, and if you want to know what I’m doing, this would be what we call ready, fire, aim, right? Sometimes you just need to do something. So I’ve needed to do something new for a long time. Instead of being in my head so much and trying to figure it out, I’m just doing something. It’s like what we used to say. Throw a bunch of mud up on the wall and see what sticks. And so for having lack of any planning, almost any planning whatsoever, I’m just going to read something from my March, 2024 newsletter, the Doberman Dan letter, which is issue 1 59 and never done this before. It’s going to be me reading my newsletter, but probably me reading my newsletter with commentary. I always start every issue with a quote. And the quote this month is, the question isn’t who is going to let me, it’s who is going to stop me?
([01:07]):
Ayn Rand. And so we begin, dear night of the round table, we started this month with one of the more popular quotes attributed to Ayn Rand, but here’s the Fang. And by the way, Fang is spelled T-H-A-N-G because that is the proper way of pronouncing it. And I know that that’s true because that’s how my mother from Mississippi always pronounced it and my sister and I always made fun of her for that. So hence it just comes out of my writing for some reason. So anyway, let’s get back to it. Here’s the thing. Rand never wrote or said those exact words, however, the gist of it lies in a passage from her first bestseller, the Fountain Fountainhead. The hero of that novel is a dude named Howard Rourke. He’s an architect, a real man’s man, an ombre of uncompromising integrity and independence. Early in the book, chapter one, Rourke has expelled from architectural school.
([02:09]):
The dean calls him in for a meeting expecting that Rourke will beg for a second chance when no such begging occurs. The dean begins lecturing Rourke, criticizing his radically unconventional approach to architectural design. And here’s a quote from the book. Every problem you were given, the dean said every project you had to design, what did you do with it? Every one of them done in that, well, I cannot call it a style in that incredible manner of yours. It is contrary to every principle. We have tried to teach you contrary to all established precedents and traditions of art. You may think you are what is called a modernist, but it isn’t even that. It is. It is sheer insanity. If you don’t mind Rourke, I don’t mind.
([03:05]):
This is now, this is me talking, not the quote from the book, exasperated the dean points to an architectural drawing on his desk submitted by Rourke for a classroom assignment. It’s a totally modern design in Rourke’s strikingly unique style, except that the assignment was to design a renaissance villa, which rourke regarded as a useless exercise in drawing Italian postcards submitted. Submit it for your approval. I didn’t say that right? It says submit it for your approval, and then in parentheses it says, say that in your best rod sterling voice. So let try that. Let me stick my upper, lift My upper T, like he submitted for your approval is the key passage from the novel. Here we go. An hour ago, the dean had wished that this interview would proceed as calmly as possible. Now, he wished that Rourke would display some emotion. It seemed unnatural for him to be so quietly natural in the circumstances.
([04:12]):
Do you mean to tell me that you’re thinking seriously of building that way when and if you are an architect? Yes, my dear fellow, who will let you, that’s not the point. The point is who will stop me? You see, even though the quote at the top of page one of this humble little rag is attributed to I Rand, they’re actually just a well-intentioned condensation of this titillating tit for tat in the fountain head. I really like the words titillating and tit for tat. Is that a Freudian thing? I can totally see why this resonates so much with entrepreneurs. After all, as soon as you decide to step out of this sheeple slash slave slash employee prison, you’re immediately considered an enemy of the state. In fact, they’ve officially declared war on Usan. It’s called the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, and it’s still in effect today.
([05:18]):
Who pray Tell is the enemy. That’s an easy one, all US citizens, and they use it as a weapon against us. For example, Franklin d Roosevelt used it to shut down all financial institutions and declare a bank holiday to prevent runs on the banks. During the Great Depression in 1933, it was also used to outlaw ownership of gold in an attempt to prop up what was then still a gold-backed dollar. So there’s that, and most Americans are clueless about it. But entrepreneurs, we are the most heinous of all the enemies, and they’ve taken and continue to take extreme measures to punish us in every way imaginable, especially financially. That is the small and medium business owners. The big business owners are exempt because they’re the puppet masters of the politicians who’ve declared war on us. So yeah, of course those guys get a pass. Listen with all this opposition against you from the powers that be the government, by the way, I spell that G-U-M-M-I-T because that’s how I hear people pronounce it, government, and that includes local, county, state, and federal.
([06:43]):
They all punish you for your ambition and the one that hurts the most from your closest friends and family. If you truly want to make it in a business of your own, you got to have brass balls the size of Texas or brass ovaries for the ladies. Although the ladies seem to have less of a problem with this lack of waves issue than most guys these days, it seems to have started with the millennial guys. It’s even worse for all the males can’t really call ’em men anymore in the generation slash demographics that were born after the millennials. Plus, it doesn’t help that this modern woman slash feminism movement has turned women into men. That’s why the Passport bros movement traveling to another country to find a wife still raised with traditional values has exploded. I guess I was a passport, bro, two decades before it was cool.
([07:46]):
One more interesting little side fact. Gen Z 1997 through 2012 and Gen Alpha 2013 through 25, males have the lowest testosterone levels in history so low. In fact, statisticians have estimated the extinction of the human race will happen in just a handful of decades. It also doesn’t help that many, many millennial men and the subsequent generations too have now lost interest in dating and even just being in a relationship with the opposite sex. Many aren’t even interested in sex anymore because of the low testosterone problem. Yeah, of course, but also because of the masculinization happening to women, because of the woke feminazi movement. So this is a big contributing factor to, man, I sure go off on tangents in this thing. I maybe I should read these aloud more often. I might delete most of this shit. Any who, what I’m saying is this, the primary requisite for launching and building a
Speaker 2 ([08:54]):
Business that can support any lifestyle you can imagine is a Howard Rourke mindset, which means you better be prepared to be the lone unicorn amongst the billions of beasts of burden because nobody is going to understand you. And that leads me to this. It’s from one of my favorite jazz fusion guitarists, Scott Henderson, despite once being named number one jazz guitarist by Guitar World readers, it explains why he thinks he’s not a jazz guitarist. You see, Henderson has abandoned playing jazz standards. He explains what he’s trying to achieve now drawing from Beyonce country, Albert King and Eddie Van Halen, and there’s a massively important lesson in this for all entrepreneurs. Henderson just gets it, even though he refuses to own the label of jazz musician. He says, and this is a quote, I don’t know. As one goes through many years of playing influences and experimenting with gear, maybe you just hit on something that’s you that defines who you are.
([10:12]):
But am I a jazz guitarist? No, not really. I’m a combination of all of my influences over the years. My experimentation with tone amps and pedals has led me to hit on something that sounds like me. I don’t know how that happens other than through experience and trial and error. There are so many jazz guitarists out there playing standards. I’m not a jazz guitarist and I don’t feel like I need to be another one playing those songs. Not that I don’t respect jazz guitar players who play standards. I think it’s great to keep those traditions alive, but there’s a lot of guys who do that better than I do. So I let them do it. I’ll be doing me, I’m not happy when I’m not writing, so I’d rather write my own music. That didn’t happen overnight, but at this point, it’s all I’m interested in doing. That’s interesting. This isn’t in the newsletter. I’m just riffing at this point. That’s interesting and quite prescient that I wrote that or included that in the March issue because in an email I just sent out, just like yesterday, I basically said the same thing, except almost for all intents and purposes, I said the exact same thing. All we’d have to do is substitute copywriter for when he says jazz guitarist.
([11:39]):
Wow, I didn’t connect those dots until right now. I should go back and read my stuff more often. Alright, back to the newsletter, but still, guitar World named him number one jazz guitarist in 1991. So what’s the deal? He says, that is interesting, but it’s not due to anything I did. I just kept being me and trying to do whatever I did better. Everything I do presents new challenges. The big thing is wanting to get better no matter the genre. And I underline that sometimes I want to get better at soloing through chord progressions, and other times it’s a technical aspect like going from one voice to another without space. That’s not always easy. Sometimes it’s hard to go from one thing to another without the melody sounding robotic. But I always try to keep my sound smooth from chord to chord, and that is something jazz players do.
([12:37]):
Well, I’m not suggesting you become a jack of all trades, master of none, even though I look at myself that way. But again, I’ve never thought of myself as a jazz guy because my mindset has never mirrored that there are many things I’ve always needed to work on. So it’s a technical thing regardless of what, that’s the end of Scott’s quote. This is me regardless of what genre you call it, Henderson’s wandering ear only fixes on one thing for a short time, and yet his ideas remain cohesive and uniquely his. Here’s the thing, how do you make yourself unique so you stand head and shoulders above all your competitors, the people offering the same products and services as you? Well, I guess you could invent some kind of USP unique selling proposition, and that uniqueness could be unique, but not likely because if you can invent a unique fang slash angle slash hook, someone else can invent all the exact same things or just knock off yours happens all the time. So how does one become unique in the marketplace? Let me answer that by rephrasing the question. How does a truly unique individual show his or her uniqueness?
([14:07]):
If no other human being walking this earth and all the billions who have walked the earth before you are even remotely like you, aren’t you already inherently unique? Don’t answer that. I’ll answer it for you. Yes. So that means to be unique in the marketplace, all you got to do is be you the real. You just got to let your freak flag fly. I mean, really own that shit and flaunt it unabashedly at every opportunity. In other words, do the exact opposite of what the government
Speaker 3 ([14:50]):
Funded youth indoctrination camp, that’s the public school system brainwash you to do and worse be in all other higher forms of indoctrination you’ve allowed yourself to be subjected to also like college, grad school, et cetera. I think the best way I’ve heard it described was by a standup comedian, although his name escapes my memory right now. He said, first you find your voice, then your audience finds you a lot more in this issue. But that’s all I’m going to talk about for now. Thanks for listening.
