#122 Inside the Minds of the Most Successful Founders | David Senra

20:24And then talking to him. So 43, he's 43, 44 years of, uh, experiences in entrepreneur. Brad Jacobs will tell you he's obsessed still. Oh, he just loves deals. He like dances. He's just giddy,

20:34David Senra:like a little school girl. I think he's 68 or 69 years old. He still wakes up every day fired up work. He's like, dude, there was eight days in a week. I'd work eight. He's just like, he can't help himself. The fourth one was Todd Graves. Okay. Yeah. Obsessed. The guy is worth$20 billion and all he does is sell chicken fingers. That's insane. But he just sells chicken fingers better than anybody else in the world. And also, didn't he do a boating? He was like fishing and that was the - I can tell you stories from him. So - You found, I mean, not that you found him. He was obviously very, very successful, but nobody was really bound down at the altar of Todd Graves before you found this guy.

21:09David Senra:Because you astutely picked up what I'm actually interested in. It's like, I like people that are obsessed and do things for a long time. I'm very simple. and I don't care what that is. It could be a tech company. It could be, you know, you're creating hardware, software. You could sell chicken fingers. It could be real estate. I just, they nerd out and they think about things in such a deep way where then you talk to them or you read about them. It makes you like, oh, I can take what I'm doing seriously. Go back to Charlie Munger, which mean you will talk about over and over again. I think one of the most important things I ever heard Charlie Munger say, which is like a, he's like, oftentimes we find that the winning system in business goes ridiculously, this is the word he used, ridiculously far, minimizing and are maximizing one or a few variables.

21:51There's an extension to that idea, which I think is almost like a way to describe that idea in simpler terms is find, find a simple idea and take it seriously.

22:00David Senra:Todd Graves has not changed his menu. He started the business when he's 23. He's 53 now. He has not changed the menu in 30 years. And what did he do? He came out to the West Coast, saw the success of In-N-Out. It's like, look, we're in LA right now. I'll probably go to In-N-Out after this because I haven't eaten anything today. I've just had coffee all day long. And he's like, well, a simple menu, stripped down, very simple menu worked in cheeseburgers. Why wouldn't it work for Chicken Fingers? And his original idea was like, I'm going to sell Chicken Fingers to drunk college students outside of LSU.

22:31Turns out a lot of people

22:33David Senra:like fried chicken. I like fried chicken too. And I'm not a drunk college student. And then he just didn't interrupt the compounding, but I didn't find him. I saw a clip. He went on Theo Vaughn And this is the thing that once you, again, have this, I think everybody listening should just find people you admire and then just read their life story. And then in those books, they will talk about the people they admire and then go read their life story and just keep following that chain back and back and back. I think it's a very fascinating and a good use of your time. So I wouldn't have understood this clip I saw if I, you know, maybe the first year I started Founders Podcast.

23:06But I was in like the seventh year. I'd run like 300 of these things. I have an idea of how these entrepreneurs think. And it's a one minute clip on TikTok or something. And he was talking about the fact that the simpler the menu is, it relates to even how fast he can turn over in the drive-through. And I was like, oh, so this guy understands how one decision impacts everything else and that you should limit the amount of details and then make every detail perfect. That's how I would describe what Todd Graves has done. And then you don't interrupt the compounding and you're worth$20 billion selling,

23:36David Senra:go to Raising Cane's. Why is a simple menu matter, right? Because when he has one restaurant, and he's saving 15 or 20 seconds in order because the menu's simple, you pull up to Raisin Cane's. This is your options. You can have three chicken fingers, four chicken fingers, six chicken fingers. When they told him you need a chicken sandwich, he's like, okay, I'm putting chicken fingers in between two slices of bun. There's your goddamn chicken sandwich. That's literally what he does. It's hilarious and it works. But the point was you just show up there. It's like, do I want three, four or six? That's a five second decision.

24:09David Senra:When you have one store, it doesn't matter. He's got 915. I think he's getting another 100 this year. He's growing faster in year 30 than he ever has. That makes a huge difference. And for him, you can see that you can clock that in a clip. Oh, this guy knows his business. Where the opposite of that is a lot of these like fake promoting startup founders that are just lying to you to get to their next round, which I'm not interested in at all. So true. You know what's fascinating about the world's greatest founders like Steve Jobs? Steve Jobs didn't just control the product, aka the iPhone or the MacBook and the computers that you're on every day.

24:44He controlled the distribution. He controlled the back end of it. What do I mean? Well, the app store, right? He knew that he wanted to control the way that apps got delivered to you. He wanted to actually be the entire marketplace. You want to distribute your product, but you want to make sure that you also own the distribution network. So what can you own instead? Your newsletter. That is why I'm obsessed with this company called Beehive, so much so that I invested in it. I have a newsletter that now goes out to a million people and I get to control if they get my information or not. And so with Beehive, you have a founding team that is obsessed on one thing, how to get your clients to read your things.

25:21How do you get to have better open rates? How do you get to get more subscribers? How do you get better design? How do you get ads placed in there so you can get paid to even go and distribute your ideas to other people? That's why I'm obsessed with Beehive. And if you already have a newsletter, you should move to this platform. If you don't have a newsletter, you need to get one. And I've got a discount code for you on it today. If you go to beehive.com, B-E-E-H-I-I-V.com and use code CODI30 for 30 % off, I am going to hook you up. So just like Jobs, you own the distribution, not just the product.

25:55One makes me think of like Ray from McDonald's too. But the other day I was at this place called Pop-Up Bagels. Have you ever into it? No. I can't stop going back. I'm trying to limit my carbs. Yeah, this is not good for you. Don't go there. Don't go there if you want a six pack. I'm on camera a lot this year. Come on. The part that I find fascinating is the exact same thing. You can have three mini bagels, six mini bagels, or maybe you can have 12. Those are the only options. The line is always around the corner. It's this big. It's the tiniest little center that you can imagine. They give you like kind of an astronomically large three types of cream cheese.

26:27You could pick between each type of cream cheese. And watching it is a masterclass in business because the line is incredibly long. The bagel options are all the same. It's all open, so you can see the bagels being made simultaneously. By the time you order, they've already pulled up your bag, even in a line of hundreds of people with your name on it. The bagels are hot the second that you get them. They're just small enough where you want to order a few more than you probably need, so they're not the large ones. $15.75 for three bagels and a cream cheese. The margin must be incredible on it. And you see these people run through the business.

27:03And I just watch that and think, everybody's like, oh my God, aren't these bagels amazing? I'm like, that's the least interesting part about this business. And so it is so fascinating when you can see an entrepreneur who understands that every business is a widget business in some way. If you can get excited about chicken fingers or bagels or whatever, you can win. And I think the bagels are probably amazing because it's not people like oh to be a master or something it's 10 000 hours no it's 10 000 iterations and the amount of iterations they they had gone through to to finally perfect their product and then the whole thing is they don't stop so you go back to this so like todd graze did it for 30 years that dude you talk about obsessing i told him i was having i was so excited so like i'm obsessed with podcasts people think i love reading and i definitely do but what i realize is like my real obsession is podcasting and so what happens is when i have these conversations now.

27:50I'm usually like, I don't do drugs. We were talking about this right before we started recording and I've never done ecstasy or any kind of psychedelics, but I would have to imagine this is what it feels like to do ecstasy because I'm so wired and like high as a kite on excitement because you just, you absorb their energy and enthusiasm for their business and it translates to you. And I was telling Todd, I was like, dude, I need help sleeping. And a friend of mine recommended this like non-addictive sleeping medication. And he's like, what is that? I go, why he goes i need it too i he's like i slept three hours last night i go why did you sleep three hours because i couldn't wait to wake up and get inside of a store he calls his his restaurant stores and that's what he does he travels around and like he literally 30 years in

28:29David Senra:he'll like you go to some raising canes he's working the drive-thru his his business card says fry fryer cook cashier ceo he does all the jobs uh the fifth guest michael ovitz who now like i I text and talk to all the time. And he's been an entrepreneur for 40 years. He ran CA for like 30 years. Obsessive. Like the guy almost killed himself. He was working so much. I won't go through the whole list. Six guests, James Dyson. He's been running Dyson for 45 years. Obsessed. Same thing. Like we just went through this whole list. They either did it for at least was two decades to four to five decades.

29:09David Senra:And when you sit down with these wiser, older entrepreneurs and you listen, hopefully listen to the podcast, they could just tell you things. They just know so much more. In many cases, they have more entrepreneur experience than I've been alive. 100%. Yeah, I just get a lot of energy and value from it. Yesterday, I had Jeremy Zimmer on the podcast, the co-founder of UTA. And it was fascinating because I was going down the rabbit hole on him. And he had this line about Michael Ovitz because obviously him, Ari Emanuel, Zimmer, were all like, they were fierce competitors. And I was asking him, I'm like, I asked him, do you think competitors are good for you?

29:45Like, do you kind of hate them, but you're glad they exist because you make them better? And he was like, yes. But he's like, when we started UTA, Michael Ovitz, he had his foot on our fucking neck. He wanted to murder our business. And he goes, now we have a lot of respect for each other. But it is also fascinating when you go to these founders and you get to speak or listen to people who have built multi-billion dollar enterprises that are lasting. you understand that like all the little decisions that you have that's just a Tuesday for them. And so like it's kind of interesting. You can see the compounding effect of like how you can handle pain as you go forward.

30:23So that's also why I like your pod. One of the greatest maxims from a history of entrepreneurship is excellence is the capacity to take pain. And you just see this over and over again. It actually came from the biography of the founder of Four Seasons. That's where I first saw that line. But I would say with Ovitz, I would highly recommend reading his autobiography. I think it's one of the most important entrepreneur autobiographies ever written. and it's called Who is Michael Ovitz? Because he talks about the regrets that he has and the stuff that he would do differently. And I really think people should avoid as much as you can working in like these zero-sum environments where in his case, like if he lost, somebody's going to be Tom Cruise's agent or this other actor's agent and only one of us can win.

30:58And I think, and I've talked to Michael about this in private, like I think almost if he took his exact same skill set because he essentially, what is an agent?

31:06David Senra:Agent is a salesperson. He was like the world's greatest agent. So it was like world's greatest salesperson and literally just moved it to the East coast and just worked it. Cause he was running the fund and he's been like, he's one of the greatest fundraisers I've ever seen. And he's got all these crazy connections. And I just think one, not that he made enough money. He's got, he's a multi-billionaire. He's fine over there. He would have made more money, but I think he would have been, he just wouldn't have been a universally hated because you know, he, he essentially monopolized the entertainment industry.

31:37I think he had something like 80 % market share with all of the directors, the actors. I forgot the exact number. It's in the book, but I think it's, he just did a service to the future generation of entrepreneurs. He was like, Hey, that was actually a mistake. You know, burning through relationships with all kinds of people was a mistake. Um, it's something I definitely learned from like, I am pretty obsessive with my work, but I actually think my relationships now, my deep, true friendships are more important to me, either equal to, or more important than my work. And that is like a relatively new revelation for me.

32:09I thought I was an introvert. I thought, you know, I was like a lone wolf. I thought I didn't need anybody. And I realized, oh no, I just had like low quality people around me. And like, if you can surround yourself with high quality people, hold yourself to high standards. And then they also hold you to high standards. It's like one of the greatest things about being alive. So at this point we're like, I will literally take time away from work to make, to deepen an existing relationship and friendship. And I think that's the stuff. I mean, I talked to John Mackey for the new show too, for another 45 years he worked on Whole Foods.

32:40And after we recorded, I wish we got this on recording, but we didn't. And he goes, he's 72. He goes, David, when you're my age, you're not going to be thinking about the 5 ,000th Whole Foods store. And he's very proud of building Whole Foods. You're not going to be thinking about the 5 ,000th Whole Foods store. You're going to be thinking about the relationship you have with the people you love. And I'm like, okay, well, he's got 35 something, 30 something years on me. What's the point of me having these conversations? I'm not going to change my behavior. If I just like, oh, I agree. I'm collecting information and not changing anything.

33:09Then what is this? This is a waste of time. I wonder though, if some of this is like the right guidance for the right season. For instance, if Michael Ovitz and Jeremy Zimmer and Ari Emanuel didn't have their feet on the proverbial neck of some of their competitors early on, would they be who they are today? Like, do you have to be one way when you're young? And then as you get older, you become the wise elder. And that's when you stop going to attack the, you know, other parties and instead kind of go together with them. The interesting thing, and I'm somewhat skeptical of people that say they would do things differently.

33:40I wonder if they would, right? Or does it just sound better? Maybe you're valuing different things when you're in your 70s and 80s than you did when you were 25 or 35, you know? So you have to figure that out. Like, what is actually important to you? and this is a lot of this when we like i'm spending a lot of time thinking about like different founder archetypes uh something me and daniel ecker trying to figure and it was his idea just because he what he what he realized was for him he is he's like all the new entrepreneurs if you talk to young entrepreneurs like who do they want to be like everyone wants to be elon and before that they wanted to be steve jobs and so daniel was the same way and he's just like but he tried to like this like imitation he's like but wait i'm not like this and his if you look at the actual structure of Spotify, it's much more like almost like a team as opposed to like just one visionary genius.

34:27And what Daniel's realizing, and it's been very helpful because he definitely shapes my thinking on a lot of things is he's like, I just think I'm a better player than coach or excuse me, better coach than player. And Steve's a player. Elon's a player. He says, but I'm not like that. So then that doesn't mean you can't build a successful company, but you have to know who you are. And Daniel spent decades trying to figure out who he is. and I think that's why I'm very skeptical like in Sam Walton's autobiography which again if no one's read you should read that immediately you know he's like yeah I missed out on a lot of my you know essentially Walmart was his entire life he worked like a dog all the time you know he did have this weird balance where he would take off in the middle of the day he'd work on Walmart seven days a week but he'd take like an hour to play tennis or an hour to go hunt uh with his dogs in the middle of the day but then you'd be right back on it but you know you miss out on some of your kid's childhood, time with his wife and everything else.

35:19And he's dying of cancer when he's writing that, when he's writing that book, he knows he doesn't have much time left.

35:24David Senra:And he's like, but if I'm being honest, I wouldn't really do much different. I would still do exactly what I did. And so, yeah, that's a great way you were like insight that your, your question was actually getting to, which is just like, do they actually mean it? If they could replay it, would they do it? They might replay it as a 70 or 80 year old man. Would they replay that 35 super aggressive, of still trying to prove themselves, I don't know. I doubt that they would. Do you think that you also have to surround yourself only with other people who want to win like you do? Like, is that old saying, you're the average of the five people you spend time with, the Jim Rohn-ism.

35:59Like, is that true? And have you seen with the history's greatest entrepreneurs, do you need to cut people from your life that do not want to win? This is something, it's funny. I was literally thinking about this this morning. um there's a line in brad jacobs new book which is hilarious called how to make a few more billion dollars so good it's so good i aspire to write that book don't you okay so i didn't grow up with any money right my parents i was my parents never even graduated high school much less college right as the first person in my family graduated high school which is a crazy thing to look back on and i thought uh i was unhappy when i was younger because i didn't have money and you start to make money.

36:37And then you're like, why am I still unhappy? And so I am much more focused on inputs than anything else. Um, and I think a lot of like, there's this great book. Have you ever read Bill Walsh's book, the score will take care of itself. So I think there's a lot of wisdom in that book where it's like, just do the best job you possibly can with the opportunity right in front of you. This is something that reoccurs in a lot of the biographies that opportunity handled well leads to more opportunity. And we were talking earlier before we recorded that one of my closest his friends is Patrick O'Shaughnessy from he's an investor, but he's more well known because he has this great podcast called invest like the best.

37:11And his whole thing with me talks about this all time.

37:13David Senra:He almost thinks like, um, uh, a little retarded yesterday. He goes, you're going to retard max into becoming a billionaire because he's like, you don't, you have no like long-term plan. You just wake up every day and you, you like, don't look for forms of leverage. You literally just obsess over making, trying to make a good podcast. And then you do the next thing, the next, the same thing the next day and the next day, and you've been doing it for 10 years and like, look where it's getting you. And I'm just like, I just do what I like to do. I don't care. So if you tell me, oh, I'll never be able to write a book, like how to make a billion dollars.

37:44I never became a billionaire, but I got to do what I love to do. Like, I think the best definition we're kind of like dancing around here is like, how do you define success?

37:53David Senra:And five years from now, what does your life look like? I'm like, I have no idea. I was like, hopefully I'm doing this because I like doing this. And I just try to design a good 24 hours that I like and then do it again and do it again. And again, I want to add value to other people's lives. And I think me making these podcasts, hopefully that has information, educational and inspiring information to help you build your business. And if I just do that over and over again, then the score will take care of, uh, like the score will take care of itself. Um, and my, I guess my answer to the question is like, to what is the success in general could be five years from now or forever.

38:29It's like, by the way I legitimately think about this, and I think a lot of history's greatest entrepreneurs did, you won't find many of them that are obsessed over, I have to hit a certain net worth or I have to hit a certain market cap. I almost never hear that. Mine, I would just echo what Steve Jobs' answer to this question was when they're like, how do you define success? He's like, did I make something I'm proud of? And I think that's like really, really important. But going back to this, there's a line in the new book, How to Make a Few Billion Dollars by Brad Jacobs, where he says, or how to make a few more billion dollars, I should say, where he says that the people you have around you is the most important thing in your life, right?

39:05And he says it more eloquently than that, but that's the general thing he's talking about.

39:10David Senra:And one thing that you observe when you're reading about great histories, greatest entrepreneurs, you get to talk to some of the greatest entrepreneurs is how small their circles are and how they're very slow to add new people. They almost go to great lengths to vet the people they have around them, which is another fascinating thing I've been thinking about. It's almost very clannish. It's almost very human to be leery of other people, especially when you become, a lot of these people are well-known. They're multi, multi-billionaires. Everybody all day long wants something from them. Invest in my thing or become my customer.

39:42David Senra:They want to use them for something. but I would say keeping your circles the advice I've been given and you kind of observe it also is like keep your circle really really small make sure everybody's a high quality individual not just like it can't just be that they want to win because there's a lot of people that are winning with you know sacrificing all sense of ethics and morals uh you don't want those people around you what did Buffett and Munger say you can't do a good deal with a bad person uh but I would say, yeah, they most, they have very high bars for who they surround themselves with because you are going to, you know, imitate and mimic and just be influenced by the people around you.

40:20And then the line, as far as professionally, it's like, I like the Steve Jobs line where he's like, you need to be a yardstick for quality. Most people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected. Not like once in a while. It's like, no, our standard default is excellence. And I think this ties to a lot of what you and I've been talking about or what we touched on. It's like, it's really hard to be excellent in 50 different things. And so what I would say a lot of these people have in common is like they focus on one or two or basically no bigger than a handful of things to be really excellent at.

40:48I keep thinking about how a computer in the hands of somebody like Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak or Michael Dell has the potential to unleash the most powerful products and companies the world has ever seen. But if you had that same computer in the wrong hands, well, that's where things go sideways. You know, in 2024 alone, there were six mega breaches, incidents where over 100 million records of everyday people were actually stolen. So if you think you're safe, I don't know. I think you got to think about it. Google yourself. See what comes up next. It's fascinating. It's your address, usually, your relatives, your phone number.

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41:54And it doesn't matter if you're a public figure or not. Everyone should protect their privacy. So go to incogni.com slash big deal and get protected. You have a quote I like, actually, which is, the greats had incredibly high personal standards. And it's such like, it's a simple line. It's not that it's incredibly eloquent. But if you don't have, if you don't hold the standard, I've never seen a world in which a founder holds a standard that is less than what the company gives back. Yeah, I think that would probably be impossible. It's impossible. And so if you know that you are the highest standard in the company, then you have this moral imperative to make sure that you are holding it as high as humanly possible.

42:35In fact, I think it probably was from you too, but there was something I was listening to about Steve Jobs and how he would talk about how your job as a CEO is to give your employees unreasonable amounts of confidence and push them to be great. And I think about that often. Like our job is to push our people past the level in which they think that they are capable of. And if you can't do that, then you probably shouldn't be in charge. And I think that's true. Or like Jensen Wong, who talks about, like, I will pressure you into greatness. Torture. Torture you. I will torture you into greatness.

43:09Right. I think that's from you, too. You did an episode on, too. Yeah. His belief was that that's how he became great, right? Well, what you realize is, like, when you read that, he's like, I don't like to give up on people. I'd rather torture them into greatness is the exact line from his biography. The book is called The NVIDIA Way. I think it's written by Tay Kim, if I remember correctly. And then you realize, as you read more about him, you're like, oh, he tortured. He did that to himself first. He tortured himself into greatness first. What I would say is about being the ultimate authority figure.

43:38I find it very useful to take these ideas because we're limited to how much we can remember. So I try to distill the basic idea down to a maxim or aphorism. And then you contextually apply it to your situation. But the way I would think about this is Sidney Harmon, this engineer, founder of Harmon carden uh says that the founder is the guardian of the company's soul what a line yeah and so i think like you're the one that sets the standards i would say some people might be listening to this and like oh but i heard steve jobs was a jerk one of the most important things you can read the the person that worked with steve jobs the longest was not anybody apple it was actually ed catmell the founder of pixar yeah and ed catmell's got this great um autobiography but also really almost like a Bible on how to make great creative work called Creativity Inc, which talks about how he started Pixar and his life story and how they approach things.

44:26David Senra:There's a 20 or 30, maybe 20 page afterward in the book called The Steve We Knew. And, you know, he's like, I worked with this guy for, I don't know, I forgot, 26 consecutive years. And he talked about the maturation and how much Steve changed when he first met him to when, And, you know, I think there was 20, he was probably maybe 30 years old when he met him. And then Steve was in his 50s when he died. And I think that's one of the most important things to learn and to read is like, yeah, that Steve was obviously very aggressive and he could be called an asshole or a jerk. Not saying he wasn't even later on, but he learned how to manage and to deal with excessively talented people.

45:06And he changed over time. And that afterward, which, you know, you can read in a half hour, I think is really important to understand how he truly was, not how he's depicted, you know, in some of these stories. Have you met a lot of incredible founders or have you covered a lot of incredible founders that you would call nice as like the first word to describe them? My initial answer would be no, but that's probably not true. So my personal hero, there was three people I wanted to meet, right? And accidentally, unexpectedly, I met all three of them last year. It was James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, and Jimmy Iveen.

45:45I spent, I don't know how many hours talking to Dyson. The episode I did on the new show, David Senra, that episode is episode number six. I don't even think we're numbering them. That was one of the best days of my life because that guy's book changed my entire life. We can go into more detail about that if you want. And it's somebody I read about. I read his first autobiography at least five times. I read his history talk about how so many people that are great with what they do have this love. And he says he's obsessed with the past and studying history. He wrote an encyclopedia. He considers himself an inventor, not an entrepreneur.

46:19He just became an inventor so he could continue to, or he just became an entrepreneur so he can continue to invent. Bezos thinks about it the

46:26David Senra:same way. But he wrote, James Dyson wrote a book on, it's called A History of Great Inventions. He literally cataloged, I don't know, there's like 100 or 200 inventions in there. He tells the story of these things. Read that book. And he was unbelievably kind and generous and witty. And, you know, to the point where there's a picture, I think I posted online where I was like, afterwards, this is kind of embarrassing, but he, you know, he did play a big role in my life. I was like, I got to give you a hug, dude. Like you literally changed my life. Like you encouraged me. You didn't even know who I was.

46:55And your book encouraged me not to give up when I went through five and a half years of doing the podcast and no one gave a shit. Like no, there was like nobody listening.

47:02David Senra:I should have quit year one, year two, year three, year four, and just reading that book early and just rereading. It's like, this guy's struggled for 14 years, built 5 ,127 prototypes. His kids grow up thinking that their dad's a loser because all they see is him failing. And that guy didn't give up. I can, I can figure things out. It was very, very motivating for me. He was unbelievably kind. Uh, now how much of this is like, they're just being nice to me because we're doing a, we're making a podcast together. I don't know. Uh, Bezos, I talked to him for three straight hours. Unbelievable. Uh, now there's a crazy, obviously when you built one of the most, if not one of the most impressive companies of all time, and there's all kinds of stories when he's 30 and he's starting Amazon that he's obviously he's, he wanted to name it relentless.

47:44He owns relentless.com. What is that kind of personality type? And he's pushing, but you know, very, very kind Jimmy, same thing. Jimmy Iveen, like, I mean, they're rough around the edges for sure, but I wouldn't say, I don't know. Nice. I think they have just like mission. I guess some of my favorite entrepreneurs, and if you think about your work in this way, it can help you not quit. It's just like, what is your actual mission? And no, I would not call them nice. I would say that they're driven. I wouldn't say they're assholes, though. I do think like, I just finished reading, rereading Snowball, 700-page biography of Warren Buffett.

48:19I'm actually not going to do another episode on it. I think I could do a better job with his shareholder letters, so I'm going to read all them instead. This happens quite frequently, where I read like hundreds and hundreds of pages don't use it but um i think they had this like no asshole rule that even if they could make money they didn't want people around them like that i would not consider them nice no i think in many cases they they are extreme personality types and that their mission comes in front of everything else i don't think you have to be that way you know i'm trying i have a mission my mission is like i want to catalog how history has how history's greatest entrepreneurs thought and then push that forward to the next generation so you can say, hey, that idea, I can use that in my business or I can use that idea.

49:00And I don't think I have to be an asshole to do that. And I'd prefer not to be. And I think as I age, I think being kind, which has not come natural to me and did not come from like my family's super hotheaded and kind of mean to each other. And so you kind of learn like, I don't want to be that way. No, I don't think that's necessary. But I do think, I mean, I don't aspire for people to call me nice, perhaps kind. But, you know, when I think about our mission at Contrarian, thinking the entire purpose of this crazy game we're playing is to be for entrepreneurs because it's miserable. It's a miserable game that we've chosen to play often.

49:35You know, it's hard running a business. It is very hard when it's a Friday night and you can't afford payroll and nobody else can handle it but you. And you don't even tell your spouse because they probably couldn't handle that stress and would tell you to go and do something else. And so I'm not there to be nice to anybody. I think our mission is I want to be there to say the things out loud that nobody else will tell you that I wish somebody had told me. And maybe I'm right and maybe I'm wrong. But at least you have somebody else that kind of tells you the truth. and we get to learn from all the data of the other entrepreneurs.

50:07So I guess what I would say is like the trait they have is they're uncompromising. And so if you're uncompromising, it's going to be very hard to be described as nice. Starting a business can seem like a daunting task unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website to marketing to selling and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need. There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Heinz, and Allbirds continue to trust and use them. With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into... Sign up for your$1 per month trial at shopify.com slash special offer.

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51:23or I want my company to be worth a billion dollars. This is the disturbing things about talking to young founders because there was never any kind of like entrepreneur, like ecosystem, right? Like there is now and there's like all these like weird incentives behind it. Actually, we've tried to convince, I've been trying to, what I'm interested in is like, I think about a lot about differentiation. And so there's some world-class entrepreneurs that don't do any podcasts at all. And I've tried to meet with them and try to convince them to do my new show and explain why. And a lot of this is because a lot of the content that entrepreneurs are actually consuming are actually created by investors.

52:02And so you could have incentive alignment with them, but in many cases, your incentives are misaligned and we should just think about that. And what's disturbing about that is how much of it is about start, scale, sell. And as we just discussed, I'm interested in the people that created something that made somebody else's life better. So the best, we can step back. What is a business? The best definition of the best answer to that question, what is a business? I actually heard from Richard Branson and he says, all a businesses is an idea that makes somebody else's life better. And so there's a ton of tech companies right now and things are being invented all the time.

52:37Is that making people's life better? No, you're making a shit ton of money, which, okay, now you're rich.

52:42David Senra:That's great. But you know, what you're doing is not good for the world and you don't care. And so my whole thing is like, I'm interested in people that made a product that makes somebody else's life better. And it could be Spotify's maybe the best app on my phone besides one of the AI assistants, right? Made my life better. So I'm glad that the team there makes all, you know, they're worth all the money they're worth. Going to racing canes. I can't eat every day because I don't want to be fat, but like that 15 minutes of eating some great fried chicken that just made my life a little bit better.

53:13David Senra:You see what I mean here? It doesn't matter the scale. It could be an app. It could be, I think Spotify is worth, I don't know, a hundred billion dollars today, or it could be this guy making chicken fingers in a box and then just doing it forever and not doing it for, you know, to make a lot of money to start scale. So, but when I talk to young entrepreneurs, it's like a lot of them start out with that thing where it's like, well, I can get acquired by this company and I can make this money. And it's just like, you get to choose the game you want to play. And that's great. And guess what? If you didn't start out with money and then you created wealth for yourself, your family and your employees, that's admirable too.

53:46It's just not the game I'm interested in. The game I'm interested in is like, you couldn't pay me to stop. What I'm interested in is like, what is the business? What is your, not your first business. What is your last business? The business that you want to work on forever. Yeah. It's so funny. Somebody was asking me the other day. I can't remember. I did a podcast this week. Oh. And, uh, and she said, why haven't you taken investors? She had taken investors, whatever. And I said, cause you got to pull this thing out of my cold dead fingers. Like I, now, will I always have to be in front of the, the, you know, TV or whatever it is we're doing here.

54:15Like, no, I actually don't care about fame at all. I find it a really useful tool to do the things we want to do in the world. It's just a different type of leverage, but you have to pull it out of my cold dead fingers. I like, I love this game. Do I love it all day, every day? Of course not. But I think, and I think that's where people get confused that, that idea of like passion versus like, I don't know what you would call it, relentlessness or whatever, where you find that thing that you're just so obsessed with the game. You can't stop. And my passions are different. I like smutty fairy books.

54:44That's a passion. What is a smutty fairy book? Oh, you're really outside the zeitgeist of women, huh? Now, this is, do you know what the best selling books are of all time?

54:52David Senra:50. Okay. So this was hilarious. So you like 50 shades of gray. No. Is that what you mean? No, it's not a fantasy. There's no fairies in sight, David. Okay. I didn't, we should smutty. I didn't know if it was like, this turned sexual. I didn't know what was going on here. Well, they are sexual. It's actually a giant asset class. I should figure out how to invest in this thing. But obviously, you know, the OGs, we've got like Harry Potter, not sexual, but fantasy. But there's this huge ecosystem for women. So 50 Shades of Grey meets Harry Potter. Literally. And so they're everywhere. And it's the number one selling book category.

55:26So this was crazy because, you know, obviously I love books. I read mostly old books, but I think it was our mutual friend - Have you ever read ACOTAR? No. A Court of Thwarted Roses. The YouTube comments on this are going to be hysterical. Oh, God. Guys, let's find where David lives and send him some smut books. Don't do that.

55:42David Senra:Please don't do that. No, maybe I should do an episode on one of these. But the funny point, I think it was Morgan Housel that told me this. Our mutual friend Morgan Housel, who just sold 10 million copies. Now it just hit 10 million copies of psychology money. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. I absolutely love him. Me too. And I'm pretty sure he's the one that told me this. He's like, do you know what the best-selling book of the 2000s were? Maybe it was 2010s. That decade? I have no idea. He goes, Fifty Shades of Grey. I was like, oh, okay. I haven't read it. Yeah. Twilight before that?

56:11No, no, no. It gets worse. Or maybe better, depending on if you're into this. He goes, what was the second best-selling book of that decade? I don't know. He goes, the sequel to Fifty Shades of Grey.

56:20David Senra:I'm like, damn, there's a lot of pent-up demand for this. He goes, what was the third best-selling book of the decade? I go, there's no way. Was there a, not a, what's the trilogy? Yeah, he's like the third version of Fifty Shades of Grey. Wow. Yeah, it was an interesting fact that. Well, now we have more of a fragmented industry. There's a lot. But there are, you know, there's this woman, Sarah J. Maas, and she was like basically came from nowhere to write this series of books that are just proliferating among women. How did we get there from start scale? Yeah, I don't know. Natural progression, really.

56:52David Senra:To go back to that, it's like finding out why people are doing what they're doing, I think is actually really important. And so I ask that. And usually one of the things that we want to try to map out the founder archetypes for, and this is Daniel's idea, which I think is really smart. He's like, people think about founder market fit. And he actually thinks the more interesting idea is founder problem fit. And knowing your archetype and then knowing other archetypes of other entrepreneurs that came before you that match your archetype would be very useful. So make sure you're attacking the right problem.

57:22And so - What do you mean by archetypes? Have you fleshed that out yet? So I need to name them, but like, think about, think about like all the different, this is not a science, obviously. This is just a rough framework to figure things out. But if you think about all these like personality assessments, like Enneagram is very popular. You know, the Enneagram. So it's very popular. 16 personalities. We use a lot of those for hiring. Yeah. It's a lot of companies do this and there's culture indexes, all these other tools that companies use. The Enneagram is very popular with like a lot of my founder friends and just not only to know like what type they are, but also who like their partners could be or who they'd work well together.

57:57And it's just, again, it's not like, oh, I'm an eight and you're a three and this does well together. So I only look for threes or whatever the number case is. It's just like, okay, well, there's like, whatever archetype Steve Jobs is, is different from the archetype of a Dan Uek. So how are they different?

58:13David Senra:What are the kind of characteristics? Who do they work well together? And then you now have 400 entrepreneurs that you've studied intensely. and can we match them all? And there might be five archetypes. There might be 10. We're not actually sure. But I think the important part here is that they don't, go back to your original question. It's like, it's not, you know, some people do do this because they just want to make billions of dollars. I have a lot of friends that work in like New York in PE and I find them refreshing. It's not my game, but because their whole thing is like - I have never heard anybody call somebody in PE refreshing before, which I find amazing.

58:47They're like, they have funny ways they think about it. They're like, VC gets all the attention. PE gets all the money.

58:52David Senra:That's true. It's such a huge industry. And they're like, listen, the fact that VCs tell you that their customers are founders, he goes, they're goddamn liars. The LPs are our customers because they give us money. The founder's not giving us money. And he goes, I exist to make my LPs richer. And that's what I mean. It's not my game, but I like that they're not lying and they know what they're doing. Yeah, that's honest. That's what I mean about that. So that is their game. Their problem is take a big pile of money and make it into a bigger pile of money. I am not the right founder for that because I don't give a shit about that.

59:20David Senra:So I like this idea of founder problem fit, right? I have this weird, I stumbled onto the problem that I'm solving, which is everybody's focused on, you know, what today's founders are saying or experiencing or their opinions where it's like we have 200 to maybe 300 years of the market economy and you have hundreds, maybe thousands of really good entrepreneurs that live their whole lives, ran all kinds of experiments. learned a bunch of stuff and then people put down their main ideas in a book. Maybe somebody should go and dig through these books, find good ideas and then push it down the generation.

59:51David Senra:That's just a weird problem that fit me because I'm an introvert and I'd prefer to sit in a room by myself, read. I mean, do you know, I was talking to Tony Robbins the other day, the amount of money they make, you know, he owns part of disc profile. I don't know what that is. It's kind of like 16 personalities, except think about like a more flushed out version that really helps you if you're a hiring manager for the most part. And then they have like corporate licensing or whatever. And so we use that in a lot of our companies because if I'm like, listen, you could have a janitor who's like an exceptional fucking janitor.

1:00:23They're so good at their job. But they could potentially move all the way up to senior leadership if you understand that that person is meant for more. But if your company doesn't know how to find them or source them, you have all this hidden talent inside your business. And one of the things that keeps me up at night is thinking about the people who work for me. One, if they're not like working enough and doing things to add value to the company, I don't like that. But also if I'm not doing enough to help them add value to the company and thus make more money in their life and all that. So anyway, but it's a big business.

1:00:50So it would be super interesting if you had that for founders and entrepreneurs, because I do think we're all mimetic. You wouldn't monetize it? No. Come on. No. Okay. So we should talk about this because again, I think most people think, first of all starting another business like my whole thing is find a simple idea yeah take it very seriously yeah which is the charlie marger quote but you could just invest in it tell daniel that no have an operator no no investing either very little like this is stressful for me i can't believe patrick probably and morgan just yell at you all the time about this yeah morgan doesn't because morgan doesn't invest in anything what do you think all his money is in indexes i know i felt so pathetic listening to him because he's like i'd be like tell me about one unhinged things you bought and he's like i did buy a house once i'm like fuck it never mind new question the rent the renovations on his on the the the house will estate okay okay okay okay which again probably is

1:01:45David Senra:good for marital bliss 100 so maybe that's not an expense um one i think open sourcing this is more important um um... To the degree that other people find a value. And also, I'm very, very... I mean, it took me... There was probably three or four years of people around me, very close friends, just like, you should start another podcast, talking to founders, you idiot. Do it, do it, do it. And I said, no, no, no. It's like water on a rock. You want me to do something, you have to suggest it. And I'm going to say no, and it's going to take you years to break me down. And then I'm going to come to you and be like, I have this great idea, and it'll be your idea.

1:02:18This is not even a joke. Sounds like how husbands and wives work. This has happened to so many people in my life. they now know it's like inception they're like if i want david to do something i need to put in the idea now whispered his iphone it really works there's a great line in um in uh i think uh one of buffett's shareholder letters which i'm rereading right now where he says loss of focus is what worries charlie and me the most and so i think me starting another business that's outside of my life's mission which is founders and then my new obsession and passion which is talking to entrepreneurs on the new show uh i'm full i work seven days a week i don't have any time like i'm I'm not doing anything else.

1:02:53And I think this is a misconception where, or at least hopefully I can like, to the degree that I have any influence on this, it's like people think entrepreneurs are obsessed with money. I would argue they're obsessed with control and that if you're talented and you're working on a valuable product or problem and you solve the problem for other people and you maintain control, you wind up with the money. But the very first person that I met that was renowned from the podcast was Sam Zell. Episode 269 of Founders is the autobiography. You know, he's my favorite investor of all time. And he wouldn't call himself an investor.

1:03:25So we'll talk about this. So I'm almost positive it's episode 269. It's the autobiography of Sam Zell, which is incredible. People should read it. It's called Am I Being Subtle? I think is the title. And I put that out and he listened to it. And he thought it was, he liked it so much, he asked to meet me. And I love the fact that somebody in their 80s was starting to listen to podcasts. Because what is he? At the fundamental, he's a learner. He's a learning machine. and so I had a two hour lunch with him before he died and then we were scheduled to have dinner I was gonna do I was gonna have a dinner with him in Miami and he wanted to have dinner and then me do an episode called I had dinner with Sam Zell and talk about the stories and then the day I think the day before the dinner it was cancelled they said Sam's not flying down from Chicago he's sick I thought he had like COVID or something three weeks later he's dead yeah

1:04:17David Senra:Yeah, he, from cancer. Fuck. And so, but he was spending his last, I probably saw him six months, eight months before he died. He was flying all over the world at his expense, just sharing everything he learned with entrepreneurs, having lunch, dinner with entrepreneurs, talking at conferences and events for entrepreneurs. And, you know, that guy was as liquid as the day is long. His company was very, very interesting where it's like technically a family office, but it was his own money and he made all the investment decisions and never was going to spend the money to begin with. He told me, I didn't know he was sick with cancer.

1:04:53He obviously didn't share that with me. That he's going to be doing deals until he died. Guess what? He did deals until the day he died. The day before I saw him or the day after, the day before I saw him, I think he just bought, he calls them family businesses. He's like, I just bought, I forgot the number. It's like 75 % of this company for 300 million and they still run things on a fax machine. He just loved doing deals, loved it. but he had a bunch of pieces of advice, which I would summarize the main piece of advice. And we're going to tie back to the money was, let me see if I can remember this correctly, his whole thing.

1:05:24And he was, he was not subtle at all. So he was kind of like, he was very nice to me,

1:05:29David Senra:but he wasn't like, I have a suggestion for you, Dave. He's like, do this, do this. I'm like, okay, I'm going to listen to you. So he says, go for freedom. He's like, if you keep your freedom, you can control what you work on. If you control what you work on, You can work on what you love. If you love it, you'll do it all the time. If you do it all the time, you'll get really good at it. And money will come as a result. So again, it goes back to your question. Do they start with, I want a billion dollar exit. I want a certain amount of ARR. I want a certain market cap. No, his whole thing is just like, I like doing deals.

1:06:00David Senra:And I do them all the time. I did them for 60 years. It turns out I'm really good at doing deals. But the money part was fascinating because he's like, listen, he goes, I know all the rich guys. This is exactly what he says. He goes, I know all the rich guys. And he goes, they're all guys. and he goes you would be surprised at how many of them are miserable he's like what's the point of having all this money if you're not having fun and he goes and he ties this to your financial decisions he's like the things that you own eventually own you and he there's a bunch of funny parts because he was hilarious he was just like you saw him on cnbc this is exactly how he is i love people like this where there isn't like there's no separation between their public and their private persona.

1:06:37And he goes, you know, I have all the money in the world. He goes, I have my place in Chicago and my compound in Malibu. That's the word he used. Remember, he's like 82, maybe 81, maybe 80, 81 when I met him. And he wanted me to see his Malibu house and he hands me his phone. So I think I'm going to look at pictures that he took on his iPhone of his Malibu house.

1:06:58David Senra:No, he Google image search, Sam Zell Malibu house. Oh, that's incredible. And so he goes, I take, he goes, I spend 38 weekends a year at my place in Malibu. I have my place in Chicago. And he goes, uh, everything else I rent. He goes, I don't own anything else. He goes, I own a jet, which I'll get to in a minute. He goes, I have my two houses and my jet. And he goes after, I think shortly after Thanksgiving and then up until like Christmas, he would take him and his like whole extended family. It sounded like there was like 30 people on this trip, 40 people on the trip to this, like small village in France.

1:07:33And he said something funny.

1:07:33David Senra:He goes, I could buy the whole village. And he goes, I don't, I rent it because I only think about it when I need it. And then when I leave, it's somebody else's problem. He's like, just eliminate. You don't want to be thinking about these things. And he goes, David, this is the funny part here. He goes, there's only one true luxury in life. He goes, try to get to private jet money. Because literally he goes, these guys drive themselves crazy. He goes, the difference between a$10 million house, this is what he said, the difference between a$10 million house and a $30 million house is like negligible.

1:07:57David Senra:He goes, they waste their time doing things they don't like to buy slightly nicer versions of the same shit. He's like, there's only one true luxury. Get to the jet. The jet actually makes a difference. And he said he uses his jet here. He uses jet. Like I think an average of like three, if you, um, did the math over the entire year, he would average like three hours a day. So he really used his jet. Yeah. You know what I loved about him? I loved the Zell's angels. I loved like, there's this other guy who used to work with George Soros back in the day, like back when he was just investing in things in hedge fund land.

1:08:28And he wrote a book called A Venture Capitalist and Investment Biker. Oh my God, I'm forgetting his name, which is so embarrassing. It was actually, I didn't even have a podcast. I made up a podcast like a billion years ago, like before they were cool, maybe 15, I don't even know. Yeah, I guess it would have been 15 years ago just to have a phone call with this guy who wrote these two books. He was in China at the time, Jim Rogers. And Jim Rogers at the time was like one of the best hedge fund managers of all time. Him and George, that was like in the first couple years of the quantum fund, I believe, and they had absolutely crushed it.

1:09:00But he left it all to go adventure around the world, invest, and tell stories about it. He had like this yellow Mercedes that he put these huge tires on and traveled all the way through Africa on his like top down Mercedes. This was like back in the day. I made investments all over the world and all over Latin America. And I ran a business before in Latin America. So I just found that so weird. And what I love about a lot of these people, Sam Zell included, is they're weird. Like he had a motorcycle club, basically. Like this kind of old, I don't know, it looks pretty stodgy guy running around on a motorcycle when he was a billionaire by then.

1:09:35David Senra:Like going on motorcycle trips in like Mongolia and stuff. With vests. Yes. So much danger. Smoking weed on the side of the road. He talked about that. He has some funny lines. I mean, he said some stuff. I don't even know if it's true. He's like, you know, I invented business casual. I was like, I didn't know that, but okay. He's like, yeah, I was the first person. He was just funny. but he wasn't i didn't mean in an arrogant way he was just so likable and i think this is another thing um the value this is why i think i would avoid assholes and we go back to the do the people have to be assholes and some of this i'm sure i'm gonna have some assholes on the new show like i'm interviewing or not even i think about really having conversations with these people but as far as like building relationships with it's like i just like likable people like i like nice people obviously you know zell obviously had an ego but he wasn't saying these things in like an arrogant way he was just likable and i think there's so many especially in the tech industry where they're just they're personality deficient and it's just there's a benefit a life benefit of just one being a good conversationalist like a good hang and just being easy to be around and being likable and one of the ways i think to do that is to be intensely interested in a subject like I don't I'm not particularly passionate about chicken fingers but I like that Todd Graves is and hearing him talk about like he even broke it down like what stage of rigor mortis that the chicken has to be in you wouldn't even think you'd be interested in that but I'm interested in that he was interested in it and therefore he is fascinating to me and I think the biggest way to be likable and to be like somebody that people want to be around is just like you have to be intensely interested in something because the most interesting people are the most interested they're like passionate about weird things but they're like I just heard Alex Honnold, the guy from Free Solo say, he's like, what do you think about fame?

1:11:19He's like, I think it's just a means to an end. It's a way for me to climb all the time and not have a job. And that documentary is fascinating. Like, I don't want to live in a van. I don't want to do the hand workouts he does and eat with a spatula and all the stuff he does. But he's just so into it that you just can't help it.

1:11:33David Senra:Like, you gravitate towards people like that. And Zell was the same way. Yeah, obsession is kind of contagious, isn't it? Like, if you're obsessed with something, you can make anybody else get a little bit of that obsession. I would say passion is infectious. And I think this is what I mentioned earlier. I don't do any drugs. I don't do ecstasy. I never would. But this is the way I feel after talking to any of them, Michael Dell, James Dyson. You're just like, wow. Like you took whatever passion you have for your business and you gave it to me. And now that charged me up to like go and apply that to whatever I'm working on.

1:12:04David Senra:This is beautiful, like virtuous, you know, flywheel or cycle. One of my favorite mentors said a line to me that was hard for me to hear, which is that like your business is more likely to die. because of you and the complex things that you do as opposed to external forces and the things they do to you. And so he's like, complexity is the great killer of all things. And then he's like, the problem is, is that through life, everything gets more complex. You know, as you get older, you have more stuff, you have responsibilities, you have aging, you have all these things. So life like kind of never gets simpler.

1:12:34It always gets more complex. And you have a guy on your podcast where you covered someone on your podcast, Rick Rubin, who talks, I want to talk about how he doesn't call himself a producer. He calls himself something else. Yeah. And to tell that story, because it's one that I think we all have to internalize a little bit more. You don't necessarily have to do less. You have to do more better. There's something that you said that this is how, again, reading all these books kind of works, like how my mind works now, where the advice that you were given echoes this advice, this guy named David Packard, who was the founder of HP.

1:13:06And HP, again, is this big old stodgy company by the time it was the, it was the, it was the influencer who influenced the influencers. So like all Steve jobs, Bill Gates, all these other people that went on and built a great technology companies in the seventies and eighties look to these guys before them, right? Just like the founders of Intel looked for the, it was one of the first technology companies in Silicon Valley in the 1950s or something like that. And he has a straight line that most, but more businesses dive indigestion than starvation. It's like, they just try to do too much. They essentially sabotage themselves.

1:13:33This is also advice that, that Michael Dell gave, I think on the podcast, maybe in private, but he's like most founders just sabotage themselves. Like you're not taken out by competition. You just can't handle your success or you took your foot off the gas. You just did something that you have. You honestly sabotage yourself as opposed to like being taken out by a superior product from a competitor. And so Rick Rubin's point was just like, we want, he has this thing called a ruthless edit, which I love. He's like, okay, we're working on album albums, 10, 12, 15 songs. We made 50. now we're going to pick the five that we absolutely cannot live without and so you force yourself you design within constraints which a lot of the history's greatest founders do they found it very valuable to design within constraints and these are the five now before we had any other ones it has to at least match the quality of this so what's number six it takes a long time and it's really hard to get to 10 and maybe you have to throw out the other 45 songs and you haven't done enough uh so now you have to do more and this is just very very common where it's like less is more, but to get less, you have to do more.

1:14:34And one thing that I love that is tied to the bagel place you mentioned and raising canes that we talked about this, or even look at like the Apple too, like the first very successful product that Steve Jobs, commercially successful product that

1:14:45David Senra:Steve Jobs and Apple made, where it's like, you just have to do one thing really, really great. Just one thing. And that's usually because you made something easier for other people. and there is this weird paradox in humanity where I think we abhor complexity and we crave simplicity, but we make everything that's simple complex over time. And so knowing that, there's a great line from Sam Walton's autobiography that's about this. Walton is telling a story in the autobiography, but really it's a metaphor where all of the products are getting shipped from the Walmart distribution centers into the stores and then he found that many of them were mispriced.

1:15:29So then they start this thing where now there's this other layer of these people that go around with these like scanning devices and making sure, verifying that the price in the system is what the price says here. And his whole point was just like, we're adding layers of complexity when we should just, he's like, you have to beat bureaucracy back across the line. It's going to creep and you beat it back. It's going to creep and then you beat it back. He goes, the solution is not scanners.

1:15:51David Senra:The solution is doing it right the first time, but we can't help ourselves. We made it more complex. And so he looked for these kind of weird decisions that people make where it's like the solution is just doing it right, not overcomplicating it, which is, again, I think more in line with like human nature. We just love to complicate things even if we abhor complexity. Yeah. Well, and I think the other part is when you have more complex things, you feel like you've accomplished more. And so, you know, I see it a lot of time in our companies. It's like, well, I hit all these 47 activities today.

1:16:20It's like, yeah, but you didn't do the one thing that really fucking mattered that needed to be done more than anything else. because it was harder than doing those 47 things because sometimes to put that one thing on the list doesn't feel as good as doing the 47. Larry Ellison, there's like three good biographies of Larry Ellison and at least two of them, he's fighting with his assistant

1:16:36David Senra:because she's like, there's a thousand things we have to do. He goes, no, there's four. And I'm only going to focus on these four and ignore every single thing else because all the value, if I can solve these four problems or these three problems or these two problems, this one problem, that's actually what I do and the rest of the stuff can be ignored. But the reason I tied it to like the bagel shop that you mentioned earlier, and Todd Graves, his simple product, and Rick Rubin. Rick Rubin's point was just like, if you look at the work that he did, where he says, I'm not a producer, I'm a reducer.

1:17:03You came in with this body of work. In essence, in this course, a lot of value. You overcomplicated it.

1:17:08David Senra:You need somebody else with other eyes to see, hey, we can cut away everything else and make it to, like, what is the thing that we cannot delete that we have to have? And this is why a lot of the stuff that was produced or reduced by Rick Rubin 30 years ago, you can listen to today, still sounds good because he goes, hey, 50 years ago, a guy with a good voice strumming a guitar and singing sounds good. So if it sounded good 50 years ago, if it sounds good today, highly likely it'll sound good 50 years from now. Same thing with a piano, a piano and a beautiful woman's voice sounded good 50 years ago.

1:17:41David Senra:Sounds good today. We'll sound good 50 years from now. And I think what was happening is like when you hit on this essence, the reason people respond to it is because like you essentially made the decision for them, right? You eliminate everything that didn't have to be there. You only have the essential. It's the same reason why he talks about in that book. I would recommend listening to a song called Hurt by Johnny Cash, which was a cover. I think Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails is the first person to do it. He was like 21 when he wrote the article or wrote the song, sorry. And then Johnny Cash is like 70 when he's singing it.

1:18:12And you listen to that. Johnny's been dead for years.

1:18:14David Senra:And it still sounds good today. And the song's probably, I don't know, 15 years old or something like that. It still sounds good today. Just like, The going and eating at Raising Cane's or the bagel place you mentioned earlier. It's just like, you had a good experience there, right? These things have been going on in Raising Cane's case 30 years. He didn't interrupt the compounding. What you see there, you're like, oh my God, the guys were$20 billion. He has 915 stores. But he's like, time carried all the weight. Time did all the work. He just did the same thing every day and he waited for the world to catch up.

1:18:48And if you build something that's great, then what do humans do? you can't keep things that are great to yourself. When you see a great movie, listen to a great podcast, meet a great friend, go to a great restaurant. It's impossible to not tell other people about it. It's just what happens. And the problem is, I kind of ties, this will tie back to almost everything we've been talking about today, which is like, that's why it's so detrimental. And you see the success in most entrepreneurs' lives happen multiple decades in because they didn't interrupt the compounding. You had to wait for time to do most of the work.

1:19:15And that's why the start, scale, sell doesn't work. Unless you just care about money and you get the money and then you go, you know, do something, sit on the beach or whatever the case is. But my point is the people that we're obsessed, you have to do something.

1:19:27David Senra:Let's say somebody comes and buys everything from you tomorrow for whatever. What are you going to do the next day? You're going to start something else. A hundred percent. You're not, the personality type that can build a very valuable company is not the kind that can sit around and do nothing. It's also, I think, incredibly difficult to simplify things. You know, often, I'm sure you've found this too, but you're taking, I don't know, a 700-page book like Snowball and trying to synthesize it into one episode. That is actually quite a complex thing to do. You have a lot of decisions you have to make.

1:19:58You have to pull the soul out of it or the lessons that you want out of it. And I think sometimes about the stuff we do on the internet. We'll try to explain acquisitions in some way, shape, or form in a really simplistic way, which is actually incredibly difficult to do. Even the vernacular in finance is tribal knowledge, a lot of nouns and vowels in the words that don't need to be there. And so making something about even a word like acquisitions, which some people have a hard time spelling, and simplifying it is actually quite difficult. And so we talk about that a lot when we invest is, I think I stole it from Warren Buffett back in the day where it might have been Zelle.

1:20:37I think it was Zelle. Zelle basically said, if I can't, like one of his employees came in with like a big folder on one of the deals that he wanted to do. And, uh, and was like, here's the brief on doing this deal. And he was like, uh, tell it to me in a couple of sentences. He was like, I can't, he's like, then write it on a page. He's like, I can't do that. And it's like, if we can't understand the deal in a page, we shouldn't do the deal. If the only way to explain it is through a folder. And I think about that now, you know, it's like, well, Zell learned that

1:21:02David Senra:from Jay Pritzer. So my friend that I mentioned earlier, my friend Rick was mentored by Sam Zell for 25 years. And Sam took an interest in him when Rick was like in his 20s and what he would say is like, I was in my 20s and a nobody and Zell just decided he liked me. And so he took me all around the world and we would like work on deals together. But they also, Rick would try to, I think there's one, there's a great line in this book I just read by Kevin Kelly. It's called Excellent Advice for Living, Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier. And he says, one of the most counterintuitive rules of the universe is the more you give, the more you get.

1:21:37and so rick built a relationship with sam by giving by trying to hey here's this undervalued company in egypt we might want to look at or look at this deal over here and basically just being doing an active service right but what would happen is rick would bring him a deal and go hey here's exactly what you're saying here's the 10 things that we have to solve or whatever and zell would look at it like number five that's the only thing if we solve number five everything else falls in line. And Zell talks about this in his autobiography, that he was mentored by Jay Prisser, who was one of the best dealmakers, right?

1:22:11David Senra:Living probably a decade, maybe two decades older than Sam Zell at the time. And Sam would do exactly what Sam would do to Jay, what Rick was doing to Sam, which is I'd come bring him a deal. And Jay would just look at it. It's like, there's only one important thing here. You have a list of seven things. It's not seven. It's just this one thing. And if we take care of this one thing, everything else will fall in line. So it's that simplification. This is why I said it's not 10 ,000 hours, it's 10 ,000 iterations. Because how many deals by the time, you can't do that when it's your first deal, your second deal, your fifth deal.

1:22:38David Senra:Jay had probably looked at 10 ,000 deals by that time, 5 ,000 deals by that. He just understood it in a way. What we call intuition is really just like the sum of your experiences and your subconscious kind of explaining to you. You can't even, this is what I learned from Rick Rubin too, when you just mentioned really hard to take a 700 page biography and distill it down to its essence in an hour long podcast. And people are always just like, well, how do you do it? And it's just like, it's a skill because I've done it for 10 years. Go listen to episode one, two, five, 10, 25, 50. They're probably suck compared to what I can do now because I didn't understand that like I had to take time to train my intuition to do this.

1:23:17David Senra:Rick Rubin would tell you the exact same thing where he's constantly critiquing the stuff he produced and created when he was, he started his record label. He started producing when he was in his dorm room. He's in the 60s now still doing it he's just like i didn't have enough training on my intuition and you'll see this in all kinds of different domains i'm reading roger federer's uh biography called the master right now it's excellent book and one of the things that he really annoys him is that everybody talks about how effortless his game looks it's so smooth it's beautiful he's like yeah you know how long it took me to make it look smooth and beautiful i wasn't born with his ability to play another great example of this is uh that i empathize with and i think rick rubin does and i would say steve jobs does is people ask steph curry what he thinks about when he's shooting and he goes absolutely nothing it's just i've shot this this this exact shot a hundred thousand times and so me thinking it thinking about it would make it worse there's a great story in johnny ives biography which is really good and i think it's episode 178 of founders um and he talks about the difference the contrast between the way google's run and and steve jobs are in apple and you know when google would do 200 ab tests on what color this button should be and they were making remember the imax the old school imax where like it had a big like this is when computers were big and fat and thick it was like orange and they had a handle and then they decided they were going to make them all different colors yeah yeah and he johnny says that uh there was no like focus group they didn't ab test anything he says steve came down to the design center and me and steve looked at the colors and in 30 minutes we picked every single color 30 minutes just taste and those are the colors that shipped that was steve's intuition for 30 years is not sure by the time he got to that point to be able to trust you shouldn't be trusting your judgment trusting intuition when you you have to prove to yourself that you should trust it.

1:25:15And Steve did the work necessary to trust his intuition and trust his judgment. I think you're going to see that in a lot of fields, music, entrepreneurship, sports. You just see it over and over again. I think a lot about what skills will matter in the future with how fast technology is changing, with what's happening in the world right now with AI. And it does seem like this idea of taste seems tantamount. What are you thinking about what's going on right now in the world of AI? What do you think the greatest entrepreneurs are thinking? Does this matter? Is this always just the same thing? Is there always just some new industrial or technological revolution, and there's opportunity in every market, and we need to not be defeatist about it.

1:25:50How do you think about this? If you agree that the best definition or great definition of a business is what Richard Branson said, that all a business is an idea that makes somebody else's life better, there is always infinite ways to make somebody else's life better, so therefore there's always infinite opportunities, in my opinion. With that said, I do think you do not ignore technological phenomenon and technological revolutions. We're obviously going through one now. I think you should use, so what I do is I just force myself to learn and to build these into my workflow now. So I'm sure there's going to be AI-generated podcasts that can do exactly what I do, 100%.

1:26:28I would imagine that's going to happen relatively soon if it's not this year, next year, five years from now. And so just to use the tools, the technology, because all technology is, my favorite definition of technology is from Peter Thiel in his book, Zero to One. Technology is just a better way to do something. And so I'm just using them to be better at making a podcast. And hopefully that podcast and that information in the podcast makes somebody else's life better. See how it connects? Now, I think the mistake when you're looking at history is like the only thing constant is change. And technology is never going to stop.

1:27:02And I think the smartest ones took advantage of it. So think about one of my favorite times in industries to study I've done like 13 different episodes on the early American automobile founders. So Henry Ford, Billy Durant, founder of GM, Henry Leland, the founder of Cadillac, the

1:27:22David Senra:Dodge Brothers, all the way down to some component makers like Albert Champion, who made the spark plugs they reused. Alfred Sloan, who made the ball bearings of all these companies. It's just very fascinating. It's like they all knew each other. They were all in one spot. And this was just happening in Detroit in 1900. If you were a young, mechanically inclined man that were interested in that industry, you better get your ass to Detroit right away. And one of the most fascinating things I realized was Billy Durant had a complete, there's multiple ways to succeed, right? So Henry Ford had one idea.

1:27:55He's like, I want to make the car for the everyman. He had literally one idea his entire career. And he didn't know how to do it yet. He's like, cars are luxury items. They're hand-built. their$6 ,000 when we're making not even a dollar an hour like I'll never afford to do one. I want to mass produce. I want to invent the mass production of the automobile so then I can,

1:28:13David Senra:the worker making the automobile can actually afford the automobile which was never, people making the cars could not even afford the cars. That was his one idea. He was wildly successful. One of the richest people on the planet as a result of the idea. Billy Durant also succeeded. He got kicked out of GM twice but that's a story for another day. And his idea was like, I'm just going to make a car conglomerate. And I'm going to buy all the early brands, put them together in General Motors today. But the fascinating about Billy Durant is what was he working on before he worked in the car industry?

1:28:43David Senra:He essentially built one of the most successful carriage companies. So he was making carriages that horses, horse-drawn carriages. He just took the idea that was working for horse-drawn carriages realizing, uh-oh, my business is in trouble with these cars running around. Maybe I should just take the same skill set and ideas and apply it to this new domain. So the future is always going to be unpredictable. I love people going around. It's like, you know, this is where not that far from, from new years. And everybody's like, here's my predictions for what? 2026. I just laugh. This is like, all I do is all day long is read.

1:29:21If you read history, you just have very smart people making all these kinds of predictions about the future that don't come true. Oh yeah. Humans don't really have great, you know, predictive ability, generalized predictive ability. You can identify a trend or an interesting idea in an industry that you're paying attention to and then build a business around that insight. I'm not saying you can't do that. That's what Billy Durant just did. But I don't, I have the answer to the question is like, I want to learn these tools because I'm interested in technology. I'm interested in finding tools that make my business better, right?

1:29:50And then I'm just going to do the best job with the opportunities in front of me. And I'm going to do that every single day. And the score will take care of itself. I'll get what I, you know, deserve out of life. but there's just impossible to know what's happening. I do think this is like, I think reading right now, like about the industrial revolution in the 1800s, I think reading about the early compute industry would be interesting. There'd be analogies there. I talked to Bezos about this. Bezos' analogy for this, because he's all like, all he thinks about is AI all day long now, is he calls it these thin horizontal enabling layers.

1:30:28And he thinks AI is more akin to electricity than it is to anything else. The internet was a thin horizontal enabling layer. Electricity was a thin horizontal enabling layer. AI is a thin horizontal enabling layer. And he goes, once a new thin horizontal enabling layer is invented, it goes everywhere. Like electricity, like they weren't thinking they were gonna install electricity. They're thinking, I want lighting. And guess what? If it's useful for that, how many other inventions have now that now plug into electricity that we could have never possibly predicted? Same thing with the internet.

1:31:00you know the origins of the internet well what did they think it was going to be used for and then they could not have possibly predicted all the different the millions hundreds of millions of different inventions and things that you could do on top of that and so he his belief is that ai is going to be the exact same way where it's like the intelligent intelligence as a service is going to go everywhere and you're going to invent countless other ways there's no way to predict all the way uh all the different inventions that humans are going to use utilize this tool for And it won't be, I talked to a lot of some of these, they think it's like the last invention.

1:31:32It's like, it's not the last invention. Like humans are going to invent, assuming we're around, are going to constantly invent more and more things. When you want your spring break to feel like, and your kid's pool day to feel like, and your hotel bed to feel like, and room service to feel like, because at Hilton, hospitality feels like your cabana's ready. Would you like fresh towels? It matters where you stay. Book now at Hilton.com. Hilton for this day. This episode is brought to you by Indeed. Stop waiting around for the perfect candidate. Instead, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs to find the right people with the right skills fast.

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1:32:51um i here's the thing i think thinking like that i have this this maxim i got from um conor mcgregor have you ever seen this documentary it's on netflix it's called notorious oh it's incredible i'll tell you the maxim first and then tell you like one of the lessons that he didn't even adhere to himself which is like if you go to sleep on a win you wake up with a loss

1:33:11David Senra:and that documentary is incredible because you know he's literally living at home has no money I think he's working as a plumber's assistant or something. He's somehow had the foresight to have a camera crew follow around what at this point was just like kind of like a loser, right? Chasing a dream, but nothing to point. He had this, there's another maxim, belief comes before ability, which I hate when people are like, oh, you shouldn't have so much self-belief. You tell us entrepreneurs, like generate evidence and then have belief. And I'm like, well, I've read 400 of these books and none of these people did that.

1:33:41David Senra:They believed in themselves way before. Everybody around them is telling them they couldn't do what they were doing. And all the data actually says you're right. Exactly. Belief comes before ability, not after. I think that's very important. But what's fascinating is like, you know, there's one thing where he's like in his mom's kitchen and there's like the Ireland's like, he's like cashing welfare checks. And I think he's in collections on some credit card bills. And he's just like, I'm going to be the champion of the world. He's saying all this other crazy stuff. But what he realized is just like the value comes from the work and doing the work every day.

1:34:11And that's why he said, if you go to sleep on a win, you wake up with a loss. and then he made hundreds of million dollars. Not judging anybody else, supposedly he has got a very fierce drug habit, which kind of looks, might be the case to me. And so I don't, it goes back to this quote tweet where I just quote tweeted Andrew Huberman, where it's like mute the world and build your own. I just wake up every day. Like I really do think Patrick's probably right that I don't have like this master plan.

1:34:40David Senra:I don't even seek points of leverage. I do all these things that I don't seek efficiency. I like, no one else works on the podcast. Like they're like, why don't you hire an editor? Why don't you hire a researcher? It's just like, I like doing it. There's a great line from Charles Schultz, who's the founder of a guy that did Peanuts, remember? And grew up reading Charlie Brown and Snoopy. And he was still, he penciled every single comic strip. He wrote the stories, he did everything. He had this like thing in his will about like what happens to Peanuts after he dies. he wouldn't let anybody else continue it on and then you have to publish this is the last one i ever want published like he thought a lot about this but he would give tours of like his studio and i think it was like in his 70s then they're like why don't you just like write a bunch of them uh they were first like why are you still doing this is the question and they're like why don't you like batch them and then you know take time off and his answer to this was great it's like he didn't understand the question like why are you still doing this he goes you don't work all your life to do what you love to do to not do it.

1:35:42David Senra:And so my whole thing is like, I really do mute the world. Okay. I'll tell you an embarrassing story. This is, this is embarrassing to me. So every once in a while, some of my friends have companies and they like, just want me to like, sit in on like meetings, like board meetings and stuff. And I'm not any boards. I have no interest in doing that. Uh, I am interested in fiercely interest in entrepreneurship and how they think about building businesses. And I look at this as like a way to learn. And so I was doing this the other day with two close friends of mine. They were talking about acquiring a business in New York.

1:36:11David Senra:Okay. And, uh, I was paying attention, but then they kept saying this name over and over again. And they kept saying Maduro, Maduro, Maduro. And again, I don't read the news. Okay. And again, because we were talking about New York, uh, I was like, why do you guys keep bringing this up? And they're like, dude, did you not see, this is going to be real embarrassing. They're like, Trump kidnapped Maduro. I thought they meant, because we're talking about his business in New York, I thought they meant Mandami. I'm like, he kidnapped the mayor of New York City? Like, how do I not hear about this? Like, no, you idiot.

1:36:47David Senra:The president of Venezuela, as if that was anything else. More normal. Yeah, I was like, I don't look at the news. I didn't know this. Now, that's embarrassing. But my point being is just like, listen, the big stuff will get to me. If there's a war, if there's a pandemic, I'll hear about that. That will come down to me. But no, I think the worst thing I could ever do is think about who I get to meet or who's listening to the podcast. It's just like, hey, this is my retard maxing, to use Patrick's term. It's like, I designed, I only think in 24 hours, literally. So it's like, what do I like to do?

1:37:21I like to wake up, work out. I like to read. Then I'll have lunch. Then I'll reread past highlights. Do that multiple days a week. at night, I usually go to dinner with a founder. All my friends are entrepreneurs, you know, do calls throughout the day, like not like meeting calls, like friendship calls with other smart people is another form of education. Once or twice a week, I sit down with a founder that I'm intensely interested in talking to, record another podcast. And I just, that's it. And then I'm like, oh, that day was pretty cool.

1:37:51David Senra:I like that day. I'm going to do that day again tomorrow. And then I'll do it again the next day. I don't even know what today is. I assume it's a weekday? Could be Sunday. Don't know because my schedule looks the same all the time. It's also very difficult for some relationships in my life, but like this is, so no, I never think about anything. I just think about like podcasts to me is like, oh, these are miracles. I've learned so much from listening to podcasts. They're great tools for education. I hope I'm building something that makes somebody else's life better. If it's fascinating to me, if it's fascinating to me, I'm not, there's probably 10 million Davids out there.

1:38:21David Senra:Me and you have, we've never met before today, we have almost the exact same interest. There's 10 million Cody and David's out there, and they'll probably like this podcast too. That's it. There's nothing, there's no other grand plan. It's just like, oh, this is great. I like to learn all the time. And then I sit down and share what I learned. Well, I think it's so cool. I mean, I think what keeps me up at night with this is, can you imagine what a tragedy it would be if there's going to be millions of people that listen to this across all the social channels, right? That's millions of people's hours.

1:38:48That's that's years in like a human collective life. And what if it sucked? What if it was not valuable to them? Like that is a tragedy to do to people who have a very finite thing called time. And so I just want to thank you for being here. This was so useful. I am a huge fan of both of your podcasts. They're not easy to make. So thank you for making them. It's David Senra is the new podcast. Founders podcast is the longstanding podcast. And I will say also you increasingly do incredible shorts now on Instagram too for the attention deprived that need the 60 second spots. And that is Founders Podcast on Instagram, right?

1:39:26Instagram. Yeah. Instagram is the biggest channel there. Oh, so there's a real quick story there too. Where like, I believe in like tiny teams, essentially mission driven, concentrated on like focused. This is like my framework for entrepreneurship. So pick a mission, be really concentrated on like your resources, time, money, energy attention all to that mission tiny teams of just a players because again all i'm doing is reading the books and taking the ideas from the books and applying it to my own business which is you know hopefully the what the podcast served for other people as well and steve jow is like a tiny team of a players can run circles around giant team of b and c players so my shorts which

1:40:02David Senra:i like too literally is one genius kid living in france dude they're all the same too i don't manage him he was obsessed i met him through this guy let me guess he's also white he's like sub 30 he's probably like 26 27 he's he's in his early 20s yeah um but but the funny part is a little like slightly autistic and really obsessed with the game of video no well he is he is an obsessive person but i met him through blake robbins who uh blake robbins is a investor he used to be a benchmark now he's his own fund but i think his twitter bio says he like hangs out on the edge of the internet and he finds like weirdly talented people and he's like hey will you meet this kid.

1:40:42He's in from Europe. He's in New York. He's obsessed. He's obsessed with a single podcast and it's yours. And I was just talking to the kid because I thought he was talented. I was like, you should move to America. He was doing all this other way to make money that he wasn't passionate about. And I was like, just how much do you need? Like, what if you just made these shorts for me? Right. How much you need? Named his price. I was like, done. Didn't even negotiate with him. And now I'm helping him because he's going to be one of the greatest filmmakers, I think. He mastered short form. Now he's making short movies.

1:41:11Then he wants to make, he wants to be like Christopher Nolan and Steven Spielberg. And I was like, listen, to the degree that I can help you in any way, you have been so helpful to me.

1:41:21David Senra:If I can make an introduction for you, if I could, I'd invest in you. And I don't even like investing. I'll do whatever you can because you're so talented. I just think about things in terms of people. But this also applies to the reason that you want high quality people around you is I don't need to manage him. He makes them. He sends them to me. This is our workflow. I literally, and then he was like, I don't manage him at all. He sends them to me. I watch him. Like, I'd watch that. And if I like it, I posted the channels. And if I don't, I don't post it. And he's made, I don't know, like 200.

1:41:48David Senra:And I probably haven't posted, I don't know, five. Like I have a big backlogging you need to post, but I'm talking about ones I didn't like. That's it. How much time did it take? I just identify a great person and say, name your price. And he named his price and that's it. it just makes my life a lot easier. So I appreciate it. Well, this was an incredible podcast. And also I have to give you one more compliment, which is, do you know what we obsess on about you and your podcast? No. Your ad reads. You're the fucking best. And I like never thought I would like an ad read, but like whatever ramp is paying you, they need to increase it because literally, do we not?

1:42:22I literally go, if this isn't David Senra level ad read, I'm not fucking reading it. Give me a new version. Then we go like three or four versions on it. We have our own. It's not like, copying your style, but meaning like the intent of it. Like you can just tell. And I think other people do this too, but I'm always like, is it coming? I think he's going to talk about savings. And then you sneak me and it's not it. And then, then it's it.

1:42:45David Senra:Well, and again, this goes back to like the importance of concentration and focus. Cause to me, it's like anything you hear on the podcast, whether it's an intro, an ad read, anything, a single word, it has to make sense. And so I appreciate you saying that, but like, it was just like, Hey, since I don't work on anything else, I can spend a lot of time. So every single ad is custom to that actual episode. And I'll reference what's going on in the episode. They take a long time to make. Totally. But why wouldn't you do that? Like, I love what I do. I would want to listen. Again, this goes back to Stephen King where he says, I'm not only the writer, I'm the first reader.

1:43:16I listen to it.

1:43:17David Senra:I edit the podcast. So I listen to every single, I'm the person that makes it, but also the first listener. Why would I put into things that I don't, stuff I don't want to hear? And to me, some of the podcast ads are so jarring. I'm like, oh, this is like, we were in this like beautiful flow of this conversation. and it's just like, and then it's almost like the DJ like stopped the music. 100%. That's how ours were. But then, because I listened to, and it's funny because I'll have new team members come and they'll say, well, why do you review every piece of content that goes out across Contrary?

1:43:44I'm thinking, I do, I have a very, it's like a workflow. I'd review from every tweet to every email to every whatever. And they'll be like, well, somebody else could do that. And that horrifies me because it has my name and face on it and it's somebody else's time. But your ads are incredible and you've made me think about ads differently.

1:44:01David Senra:Again, this is not a new idea. This is a beautiful thing. I literally have no original ideas. And I don't, people are like, you shouldn't say that out loud. Why? Like the, every single person I read about is smarter than me. I don't feel bad about that. They are smarter than me. That idea, the fact that I check everything and you check everything. That was Steve Jobs. It's a great book. I highly recommend everybody read. It's called Insanely Simple. It was the obsession that drove Apple's success. I think the guy's name is like Ken Siegel. He was Steve's ad guy. And he said every Wednesday, I think at three o 'clock, He had a marketing meeting.

1:44:31I could be wrong on the dates, but basically said it didn't matter if it was a billboard in Times Square or one in rural Missouri.

1:44:39David Senra:Nothing went out without Steve personally okaying every single piece of Apple marketing. So what'd you do when you care? Yeah, that's so good. David Sutherland, you're the man.

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