30: David Senra - The Clarity of Commitment

47:48Yeah, they can't be out of context. So this is what - Less useful out of context. Yeah, so like we were just talking about our mutual friend, Jeremy Gaffan, who walked over here with me. And I didn't even, he's really good at like getting to the essence of things. We should cut this part because I don't want him to feel good about himself. I want him to feel bad about himself. But he kind of like nailed this really fast when we started becoming friends, like, I don't know, like four years ago or however long it's been. And he's like, yeah, it's pretty obvious like what you're doing. He's like, you're a psychopathically obsessed personality.

48:15You didn't have any good mentors. so you just you're doing that like that's what founders is it's like it's not for so going back to time to tammy's idea is not for you it's for me it's just you needed that kind of personality type to do it and then the act of sitting down and recording it makes an act of service to the world and to other people that so they can benefit from this activity you'd be doing even if no one listened that's based in love yeah and fear probably fear failure fear of being a loser like definitely more like that's a very i think that's a very common um motivator for anybody that has an unusual like extreme career if you we talked about confidence earlier you have this amazing i can find out you have this amazing um line from kobe uh about fear the greatest fear you have is yourself it's scary to accept that dream you have it's scary to say what you want less you fail and then you also said jimmy iovine's career was built on a tremendous lack of fear of moving forward on one hand you have like this radical self-confidence and like the love of the thing like do you experience any kind of fear or have you had have there been periods of fear with founders yeah i feel fear like every day so like i don't like it's weird for me because this is okay well i guess to back up it's also like bizarre it's like some people get into what they're doing for different reasons yeah right and one of the things that i started podcasting where it's extremely low status.

49:43Like, it was like a dorky thing to do, especially to do it by yourself with a$100 microphone in a kitchen. Like, it's just a weird paid only. Yeah, yeah. It's like, it's just a weird, like, what is going on here? It's just like something I was obsessed with for like a very long period of time. And then I've become close with a lot of the people at Spotify. And I've spent a lot of time, I've traveled to Stockholm twice this year alone, just because I think they're geniuses and they're very like generous with their insights and time for me. and they were talking about the fact that, like, they, one of their biggest mistakes was, like, when they were signing all these people, they'd start, the beauty of podcasting is, like, you can, it's, like, Andrew Heumann says, like, punk rock.

50:20It's, like, you can start in, like, a garage, right? And you come up with, like, there's no money and equipment. You're just doing it for the love, and you get better, right? Yes. Spotify, what they said is, like, we signed, like, I don't know. Celebrities. Celebrities that are expensive. Meghan Markle. And then, yeah, and then we had, like, expensive production, and they're, like, we should have partnered with people like you that like came up with because of the love it's the whole story of content on the internet broadly by the way youtube go down yeah and so there's a lot of people that start podcasting because like they want like fame right and so i don't have guests so i don't like i it's just a solo thing and like it's one of the few podcasts in the world uh that is made by one person so like i think that's why daniel ak like he'll be interviewed he says over and over again like his favorite show is founders and he's very generous with his insights and advice to me and one of the things he does is like when we've been together, like he'll introduce me and we'll start talking about the podcast.

51:10And he goes, he does everything himself. He's like, he's like, he's like Prince. It's like playing every single instrument. Right, right. And it's because it's very unusual to like read, record, edit. I'm hand updating the transcripts now. So like the amount of time that - You're writing them? No, after the fact, because now I had this idea of like these beautiful captions I did for like the Elon episode. I think it's just better than my face. Yeah, yeah. And like, there's other ideas. I wanted to talk about that when you said you still like kill, you hold on to, I used to do it X way. So I have to keep doing X.

51:42I'm like, no, I'm going to do what I feel is best today. The fear, basically, I didn't understand other people's impression of me was different than my impression of me. Yeah. And so I think this is a conversation with me and Jeremy just having a walk on the way over here. We're like, I don't think about other people. Like I am kind of like lost in my own world. and Jeremy's a little bit like that too. This is kind of the fear Kobe was talking about, by the way. It's not actually fear of other people. It's this internalized fear almost. It's like you just wasted your life. So what I mean by I don't think about other people is I'm so lost in what I'm doing that I don't pop my head out and wonder.

52:25The idea that who I just ran into in this office is like, oh my God, I'm a fan, or I got recognized on the street earlier, and then at the airport issued it. It's like, I asked him, how the fuck do you even know what I look like? It's so weird to me because I didn't even look at numbers. I just did this like giant multi-year like partnership with Ramp. And we had hammered everything out. Like we had everything in agreement. They're like, hey, what are your numbers, by the way? Right? Because audience quality over everything else. And I was like, good question. Let me look. It's like he's shocked at how many fucking people listen because I'm not doing it for that.

52:56I honestly didn't even want to know. But I didn't want to know because like then what happens? I put an episode and it's like, oh, I usually get X. and now it's like 10 % less? Yeah, you're focused on the wrong. No, it's just, what did it? Or it's how it puts over input. Yeah, it's just quality. It just doesn't matter. I'm making this for me. And so like the fear that I have is like, I still wake up every day thinking that like, this could be taken from me. Or in many cases, like if you go back to the Michael Dell's advice, like how you sabotage yourself. Conor McGregor, right? He has this great line where he's like, if you go to sleep on a win, you wake up with a loss.

53:28And so his whole thing, if you look at young Conor's, like he just, he wakes up every day, doesn't think right he's just like a gozy he's like a shark wait wake up go train eat rest go train again eat rest train again do that again over and over again then what happens he makes hundreds of millions of dollars and he's doing coke he's on boats he's doing all this other stuff he's not training goes then he goes back into fights and what happens he gets knocked the fuck out and so my fear is that my fear is that like like the way to not go to not rest in your laurels to not have a rear view mirror, to not go to sleep on a win and wake up with a loss is just my routine, which is also just like, you're going to wake up and you're going to read for a few hours every day and you're going to do that.

54:11And then once you finish the book, you're going to sit down and you're going to talk about what you learned and you do that over and over and over and over again. It's the same conversation we had out there. We're like, it's so perplexing to me when people ask, the example I use is like, people are like, hey, I love what you do. What's next? This, today, tomorrow and forever. That's the only way. And as soon as I stop doing that, everything will go away. So that is the fear. You brought up Gagosian, crazy article. He talks about, they ask him something along the lines of like, something introspective.

54:43And he's like, oh, I try to avoid self-reflection. That's how you lose your edge. That's a great quote, by the way. And 100 % true. So this is my question. First, a brief excerpt. You did an interview years ago with Frederick Gieschen for Compound. and in it you say whoever you are and whatever is important to you put that into your company don't shy away from the eccentric part of your personality because your personality is the foundation and the beginning of the culture of your company and you all you also talk about like everything everybody has something they loved as a kid they forgot they forget about they forget the love and yet you often say along the lines of gregosian like great entrepreneurs have low to zero introspection yeah like can you square that for me am i am i like to me it sort of sounds like, like you might not, I understand that there's like maybe a spectrum of introspection, but you actually seem to know yourself really well.

55:32And so, and frankly, some of the entrepreneurs you study, maybe some of the more evolved ones or whatever, some of them at least do. Why do you think... yeah like am i am i making a false equivalency i don't think they're like those two things are in conflict um so i think there's a lot of introspection they go through this is why reading biographies is so good because like you see you know them like go down these false starts they they make mistakes they have to backtrack they have to change their mind about things they have to direct their energy elsewhere and but so it takes a lot of like introspection to figure out like what you want to do but once they find their thing so gagosian did a bunch of shit he was you know he worked for ovitz i just had dinner with ovitz he was talking about gagosian he was like his assistant or something i forgot he's like selling art in a parking lot in a parking lot but then once he found his thing he's like oh there's nothing else boom so um our mutual friend patrick like i text him i text people crazy shit sometimes again sometimes i get in trouble because like i don't have a filter and sometimes i think i should have a filter like some dudes like like researching some of the ideas and he's like i've been researching you and here's a list of ideas you've said on other podcasts and they'll be at the podcast i did like years ago i remember and some i'm like i can't that i believe i don't remember saying that but that sounds like something i would say and i should not be sharing that publicly and then every time and sometimes i think about you know if you think about founders is like my reaction to what i'm reading and sometimes i'm like man i shouldn't say what i'm about to say but every time i have that and just say it where it's like you know you're just like damn like you know i haven't processed the death of my mom or like just like some shit you would not tell fucking millions of strangers every time i do that you hear from people like i'm like that too i'm so glad you said that i had that exact same thought so that's why i try to like just like let it rip and like not have i don't i'm a bad actor i don't want to act like if people listen to the podcast and then we hang out there's not like oh it's kind of weird here it's like oh it's the same freaking guy that's all the best bill i met bill simmons years ago like literally exactly the same yes to it all of the best people are like this yeah and it just it makes life easier because like listen you don't have to like it that's fine but the people that love you will will deeply love you and so i'm like you know i text some random stuff and like you know inner monologue stuff and actually because me and patrick work together and like we both are obsessed with podcasts and like we talk about podcasts a lot and uh i remember like it was like 7 a.m on a saturday and i text him like this whole game is for the taking like there's nobody else like there's just like the the work ethic's not there like it's just this is bad news like this is fait accompli like as long as i don't stop like blue ocean and he texts me back he's like first of all he's like in i think like nantucket with his family what the fuck are you doing on a saturday morning but uh he was just like out of all the people i know and he knows a lot of people he's like you are the person that wakes up every day the most sure about what they want to do i thought that was a great like response and so Gagosian is like that.

58:36Sam Walton is like that. Steve Jobs was like that. Phil Knight was like that. Elon Musk. They're all like that. It's like they're not sitting there wondering like, how do I feel today? What should I do? It's like they it's like blinders on. Wake up. Go. Yes. Yeah. When you know what you're working on, especially if you have momentum, you spend very little time wondering about like what else? I would be curious your perspective on this because we've talked for a while and like you were kind of like in the wind trying to figure it out. And what I would say is like I've been in that spot too once you find it the sense of relief it literally feels like like this thing just comes off of you and then now you can direct your energy you still have the love and the fear and all you're human beings you have these like these oscillations of emotions but the fucking relief that i have that like i've found something it's what is it what's the ikajay ikajay yeah so it's like something you're something the world wants something that you're good at something that you love and there's a yeah like that intersection yes and so if you look at like what are my actual interests well i'm interested in like four primary things i'm interested in podcasts reading entrepreneurship industry yeah well that's kind of funny like what sits and it's also valuable for the founders yeah so it actually like and it's actually beneficial for people we're like this just happened we were at a like a really fancy wedding this past weekend and one of my friends who's an absolute killer uh just remarkable one of the world's best at what he does and he's it's like man and we we spend a lot of time together he knows he's like you have no idea like and maybe because you don't want to think about it you have no idea the impact you're having like you are changing people's lives you're it's one of the few things that you can put out into the world it's like there's no negative externalities like it is good work and i appreciate that he said that and then as soon as he says that you think about it and then you forget it and then you go back to doing it because then the dangerous part is like oh yeah yeah like i heard another podcaster super famous probably top five in the world and this person mentioned that like now these interviews that this person is doing she is doing but give it away she's like i can do this in my sleep i'm like no you can't no you can't if you believe that you won't be one of the top ones a few years from now i have something related but just to directly kind of respond or answer your question one of the things i found myself telling people very early on in the podcast it was i'm not totally sure what this is but it's easy for me to care a lot about it and that was the that was like the thread that was like oh i have that i have to keep pulling on this side there's another quote that i really loved in your interview with chris williamson he brought up this quote somebody he knew's like works with tim cook at apple and tim said like when you find the thing when you're focused on the thing you're gonna have to work super hard or whatever else but the your tools will feel light in your hands.

1:01:22And I feel like that so captures what you just said. It's this sort of like, when you're on a mission, the other stuff falls away. And that's, that's cool. I don't spend a lot of time with VCs, but one of my favorite VCs is a guy named Ho Nam from Altos Ventures. Okay. And I went and he invited me to have dinner with him and his whole team in their office in the Bay Area. And the reason we bond is because he's got this great blog post that i think came from like good to great or something it's called the hedge hedgehogs foxes and their investment thesis is very simple or like simple they back hedgehogs and so you go to their office and there's like a giant picture of a hedgehog like right when you walk in and the hedgehog knows a lot about one thing and the fox knows very little about a lot of things and so i'm like a hedgehog guy like ho says that founders is a podcast about hedgehogs run by hedgehog and spiky and the interesting part about this is at the very bottom is uh there's he quotes from this book on vince labardi and it was about commitment it says something about like the latin um the original like latin wherever commitment is derived from meant to like in an incision to cut and ho's point was like once you make a commitment you cut away everything else yeah i think most X-humans are very scared to commit to something.

1:02:42Yes. They want to maintain optionality. I'm not interested in optionality. I don't want to think about anything else. Like, you know how many people are like, you should raise the phone. You should do all this other stuff. No, I will keep podcasting. Thank you very much. Like, you're not going to distract me because I know that 99 % of the people on the planet cannot focus on a single thing for a long period of time. That's why 99 % or probably larger than that will never be great at what they do. It is very important for me to be really great at what I do, if not the best in the world at what I do.

1:03:10there's a monger idea about learning is changing your behavior. And so I have a joke that there are a lot of things I know but haven't yet learned. And I think this is one of the things I'm in the process of maybe finally starting to learn is as someone who's very freedom-seeking, the most freeing thing is commitment. Because when you commit, it's what you were saying earlier, which is like the other stuff drops away and you're free to run. Like there's open road. And I think like what's fascinating to me is like when you commit to something, You have a fundamental, like my favorite people, my favorite founders to hang out with are like old.

1:03:42When I mean old, I mean like over 70. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And because they've been working on their business for, you know, 30, 40, 50 years. And you get the sense of them. It's like they have an understanding. They can't even, there's not language that they can explain it to you. It's just like they, it's like this intuition. It's like, it's built up over an excessively long period of time. They can tell you certain principles that are important. Like, you know, they're usually micromanagers. They're upset. They were like very close to the customer. They spend all their time with the people actually delivering the service or the product to the customer and none with their executives.

1:04:13You see a lot of the same patterns over and over again. I mentioned Todd Graves. The reason he couldn't sleep is because he wanted to wake up to go to one of his stores. His stores are restaurants. He owns 915 of them. That kind of guy will not franchise. They're all corporate-owned. It's just like he's not hanging out at the office. He wants to be there making bread and handing chicken fingers out the drive-thru. It's like that's what's important to him. You see that over and over again. So the reason I think that's important is once you make the commitment, you that's where you like true knowledge, like specific, I think you used the word specific knowledge earlier.

1:04:44That's where like true specific knowledge comes from. It's like this going down this path and like iterating and, you know, making a mistake. I was like, oh, that's a form of education. And then adapting that to your work where the reason I think I'm going to make this episode about how I make founders, because like I talked to a lot of other podcasters and they're like, you do what? and they're very surprised i i was just at this uh uh dinner they they sat me next to harry stebbings on on purpose and harry's been really nice to me and it's the first time i met him in person but they sat me next to him because they know if i'm sitting next to a podcaster like everybody else falls away and i'm just gonna fuck him like how do you do this why do you do this and so 30 minutes in harry's like oh my god he's like you're like an artist he's like because we do different things he's like i'm glad i would like i wouldn't compete with you because i couldn't like i couldn't compete with you yes like we're not doing the same thing so it doesn't matter and i i highly i think uh people overate like the competitiveness and podcasts i think actually like it doesn't the world's very big out there like you're very positive some for a highly competitive person i would add i wish it was zero some believe me i wish at the end of the year there was some way to say i told you motherfuckers that you shouldn't have competed with me it might be eventually but uh no but like because i think the best analogy for for podcasters is filmmakers it's like they were all friends they shared information they shared techniques they in some cases helped each other finance their films and if somebody goes and listened or watched jaws on tuesday and star wars on wednesday it doesn't take away from spielberg didn't take away from lucas yeah and it's just a better way to get through life because the tide raises yeah it's just like it's weird because i know some other podcasters like fight and like with each other and it's just like funny it's just like to me it doesn't it's not it's not a competitive thing it's it just doesn't i wish it was it's just not um and i think it's fascinating how to see people that are doing similar work to you like how they approach it and i think that's my point it's like if you've thought about it and only thought about that for nine years of course you're going to come up with like some weird technique that would be impossible to predict from the outside yes there's there's one little thread there uh i talked about with tammy which is the the people the the seven-year-old entrepreneurs and and clearly like i think someone like you is giving this point you actually have this level of mastery where you go from there's these stages of unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence meaning you don't know what you don't know to you know what you don't know to conscious competence which is most people and then at that final level you actually get to the unconscious competence where like you you started to say this like they can't even really describe exactly what it is yeah like i i almost wonder i i have to imagine the 70 year old david center that's doing this in however many years is like or like it's like rick rubin he's like what do you mean i i don't know what i'm doing i'm just like it's it's simple the other thing uh that made me think of that is sort of a selfish question but i was thinking about like if you were going to do and maybe this is sacrilegious already but you were going to do anything else the one thing that i could see being a natural extension of founders um speaking of filmmakers would be making a documentary in many ways that sort of feels what founders is a mini version of and i'm curious if there's anybody who you would that would immediately come to mind as like someone big enough or interesting enough or whatever that you would, that that would be exciting?

1:08:01It wouldn't come to mind. No. No. Is there anybody you... Like that's so, that's work for somebody else. Like they're writing the book. You know how many people, all the publishers, because I sell a lot of books, like obviously sell a lot of books. Like, well, but there's writing. I think my version of that question would be similar, which would be, would you write a biography? Not would you write a book about all the... No, I will podcast. is there if the if your if your question is will you do something else in podcast the answer has to be no and so like right now uh there's this there's this kid that like traveled all over the world and he like made the founder's book and spent all this money and then like i was hosting this event at ramp and they're like dude this guy won't fucking water yes exactly meeting him next week yeah and he's doing like crazy research and everything else and like will you please just take the ramp events team we're like just take two minutes yeah fucking paid five thousand dollars are making me a book like that's kind of crazy thing to do and so i wind up talking to him and like i just like people that like show effort in whatever they're doing like sweeping the floor making a podcast or building a company don't care i just want you to take what you do seriously and um and then we sat around it's like me him patrick and then the two founders of ramp and given this like young kid from like the Netherlands or something like how much value information did he get out of that conversation like you know and um so i was like listen if you want to do this what you have here is not what i want but if you want to partner with my friend eric jorgensen who i can't like eric was one of the first people put me on this podcast no one knew me who the hell i was like i think it was the second podcast ever went on he's the one introduced me to chris williamson like yeah he does uh nabal nabal almanac and some others yeah and he's the ceo of scribe which is the like a way to self-publish um and i was like eric's got to be the one that does the book but if you can build if you can make some i'm never going to sit down and write the book because it's not podcasting yeah and all the podcasters I know they write books.

1:09:50They're like, fuck, I shouldn't have done this. I was like, yeah, I told you. So they're in the process of doing that right now. And the deal I made is like, I want to make sure it's available for free to read. Just like one of all did. I think it's a great idea. You can read it for free. And if you want to buy it, then whatever, it's 15, 20 bucks. And the money it makes can go to you. I don't need to make money off the book. I will, if it's high quality enough, I will make my audience aware that it exists. And then I would love to give this kid, you know, if it sells enough, the kid would probably make a million dollars and then that's fine i just want it has to be good enough and so far the drafts that they've sent are not good enough so this book may never come out because i have to like put you know say no this is worth like you spending 20 bucks on or not even the money really spending eight hours to read or whatever on this note if focus is saying no uh this is the classic like steve jobs idea it's not saying no to bad ideas saying no to good ideas have there been any either personally or if not that uh other examples from boundaries you studied of like truly painful things you've had to say no to like it doesn't that didn't sound painful at all i'm not gonna do it like it seems really you make it sound easy so the johnny i've quote yeah i have me personally have never experienced something that was like truly painful i think the the one thing that you could say is a distraction from the podcast is something i always prioritize is relationships.

1:11:16And so like I'm in New York right now, right? My schedule is going to be different when I'm in New York than from in my studio, you know, at home. And part of the reasons it's so important is because relationships are really important to me. Like what is the podcast? It's ability for me to build relationships at scale. And then that is another form of education because I'm reading about great people, but now I get access to them. And then we build relationships. I learn from them. They'll also check you, which is very, very like i have two or three people that like i've become close with that i've met through the podcast that will like tell me when i'm fucking up ah in like a direct way like this isn't good enough yeah this you're making a bad decision here they're not they're not trying to do it to like belittle me or anything like that they're just like no you don't understand this is not this is not quality it doesn't fit the rest of the stuff that you're doing um and it's not a good use of your time.

1:12:06And so the one thing that would say would be painful if there was thing to say no to is like, I don't spend as much time with the people I could spend time with because my work is so labor intensive. I feel like I'm a manufacturer. Like I'm not the guy, I'm not capital, I'm labor. Like I am the labor. Yes. Yes. No, I think that point like actually can't be overstated in this case. Yeah. And it's, that is the foundational thing that I actually think is like most people are odds with and they're always like looking for the next like most people are looking for to automate and like get leverage on a thing so they don't have to do the thing you know you're the quite literally the inverse of that yeah like you don't work your entire life to do something you love to not do it it's the charlie brown guy yes and so the the the interesting thing about that is i've literally you know i've had dinners with very powerful people in media and in entrepreneurship and they're like, I have an idea for you.

1:13:04Have you ever thought about somebody else reading the books for you? That's crazy. And I'm like, what? You do not understand what this is. It's like, I'm not doing it for that. I think the hard way is the right way. And then if you just think about that, right? It's like, if you just, this is not intelligence. This is effort. If you just apply considerable more effort over a longer period of time, by default, by human nature, you will just have less competition. I'm sure there is another me out there. I'm sure there's probably 10. Are there a thousand? Unlikely. Unlikely. So if there's 10 of them, and if there was a competitive game going on - We'll share the prizes.

1:13:47It's 10%. I have a 10%. That's a way better, the odds are way better in my favor than something that is a low-hanging fruit, something that is less labor-intensive, less time-intensive. it's just like man just yeah the friction is good yes one question on this um you walt disney idea if we lose the details we lose everything elon talks about sort of not separating yourself from the pain of your decisions like you want to have your hand on the stove um you're very anti-delegation automation i have i just think about this we are entering a world now where we have like truly intelligent help um or automation and it's only going to get better um you recently hired maxim You have somebody actually doing shorts for you.

1:14:28It's like the one thing that isn't the podcast, but it's kind of adjacent to it. And most people with businesses aren't like podcasts. They have to hire people. They have to delegate. Elon has a line in the recent episode where he talks about if you automate things, you have to make sure you fully do the whole process first. And so my question is like, maybe not explicitly for you, but maybe even for you. There are like even Mr. Beast has an editor now. He used to not. But what is the line for that type of thing? Or is it actually going to go the other way? And like most things are gonna become more like podcasting and you'll have one person companies.

1:15:02And like, is there a line on Dell? Like what enables you to actually go hire someone like Maxim maybe is an even simpler version of the question. So this is the interesting part. So obviously like making videos to promote the podcast is not the podcast, right? Totally, and maybe that's the point. So I could take time away from making the podcast to try to like learn how to video edit. That doesn't make sense. So I went through and I did what every other podcaster does. And like you have podcaster friends and they're like, oh, use this. And they all like outsource it. God bless them. But like, I am like, I don't, they're outsourced to like, you know, the Philippines or India.

1:15:37And I was like, I'm not trying to make the cheapest thing. I'm trying to make the best thing. I want great. And great is above scale. Critically, you care about scale, but scale never surpasses. i went through so many of these people and i'd watch what they make and it's like considerably worse than the podcast where i feel the the edits that maxim does are on par if not better yes and so how did that get that for years of trial and error of me buying clips that you never saw because i spent money on shit that no one ever saw i was like this is embarrassing it's just i won't have clips i'd rather have nothing than shit and so um and then blake robbins can you know he hangs on the edge of the internet and he's got great taste and he's like there's this kid maxim i met him on that same trip to you yeah and um and he's obsessed with one podcast will you take time to meet him and so me him and patrick met in new york and i think maxim was 23 at the time and it wasn't for to work together i saw he's blake had sent me something i was like oh shit this this guy's good like he was making his own he went from like zero to like 800 000 followers he's making video every edit every day yeah so uh and he did in like i don't know six months nine months something like that and so uh then we just talked to the kid it's like obvious like you can tell if somebody's just with it got a brain serious it's a lot easier if they have a body of work to point to yes and so like you realize like this is a serious player i can like spend i'm not wasting my time here and the whole time i wasn't convincing him uh to work i was like you need to get your ass to america i go how old are you he's like 23 do you have a girlfriend no kind do you have any kids no like what are you doing like you're super talented like the opportunity here is like so much better than i think he was in england at the time and now he's in france but uh he didn't listen to that but we just like i thought he was smart and interesting and so like we would text and it took me like i don't know like i don't know six months something like that because i know what he wanted to do like what he was like making documentary and then he wants to make like he didn't want to just say in short form he has like other ambitions and so um and he was going back and forth because he's doing this like insane like uh full-length documentary on Steve Jobs and I remember texting him one day and it was just like like how are you paying your bills because he stopped uploading he's not doing any brand deals not doing anything and he's just like well everybody always like asked me like how to do my edits so I made like a course on how to do it and uh like i'm living off that i go do you want to do that he goes no and i was like why don't you do this like why don't you just like exclusively come and make clips for founders and i'm pretty sure we did this over text the whole thing and this is a sign of like working with truly talented people uh like just make they're easy to understand they make things easy uh and so i was like listen this is what I want.

1:18:30I don't care about numbers. I want great. And so I go, can you do, you know, one a day or I think one every weekday and name your price. And then I wake up, I go to bed because we're in different times. I wake up and it's like three paragraphs lays out exactly what how he envisions it. Says the same thing. Like, can we not judge it on views, which obviously, again it's audience quality this is what people don't understand in business podcasts if you're chasing numbers you don't know what you're doing you chase the because you can measure numbers you can't measure quality you had it's way harder to measure growth in duration yeah so um and then he named his price and i think i sent him back which is six times what other people pay sure and i sent back one word done and that's it and so like i don't give him any direction doesn't take any of my time he sends them to me i don't give any access to my social media you're not fucking posting for me you're not doing any of that i watch them if i would watch that if i think it's good i post it and we've done i don't know like 150 and i think i've only not posted maybe like six so this is this is getting something really interesting which is obviously he's an exception but there is something to the notion of like i don't delegate at all and also i allow for exception you have another thing you have a post-it or at least you used to have a post-it note on your computer, one of two post-it notes, which is what assets do I have that I'm not currently using?

1:19:56And I realized that's not exactly the same thing. That's kind of related here, which is like, yes, don't delegate, focus on the thing. But also like, that's a really important question. I'm sure someone like you, you're at a level now where you're probably doing a pretty good job of leveraging the assets available to you, but I'm sure you haven't capped out on that. And I think most of us are actually way behind. How does that fit with the focus? Or maybe just broadly like how has that question enabled you i don't like you stay in the details but there's nothing that i'm currently doing that i could delegate so it's like i'm gonna read because i like to read right that's why the podcast is good because i enjoy the activity of reading itself yeah i prefer to be alone half my waking hours yeah i think we said earlier something about like an event or like people being there's like oh no i don't want to be around people like this is not it's not interesting to me i don't go to group dinners i don't do any of this shit i don't go to sports games like i like small intimate gatherings of really smart people and nothing else yeah um and so the reading is going to stay the same somebody else going to fucking record the podcast you want me to outsource that no the editing the biggest thing people say and mr beast told me this he tells me this all the time his favorite podcast is founders um it's like remember who introduced you yeah you and somebody else you and blake and somebody else there's like two or three people i have the dms yeah that's fine no no that's fine um but i forgot who told him about the pod who got him listening but doesn't matter so it might have been you you definitely put us in a group chat but yeah so anyways um so the biggest thing is like oh that person doesn't need to edit if they just sit next to you they understand your taste yeah i just fundamentally disagree like i think the value is in the edit but there are assets that you have that you're not currently using do you agree with that oh for sure so like one example of this is the i i'm i can't force myself to be interested in investing i just can't like i'm just not interested in it i'm interested in making a phenomenal world-class product that's what i think of yet i have crazy relationships and access to all these investors in the world to all these founders and best investors in the world right and so like i've done very little angel investing and it's all because like basically have been pulled into it and the crazy thing i realized is like there you no one else could even get in that yeah and they're just like i like there's this guy named uh james from he does this company called profound right and uh this was a very interesting uh wait this might be an interesting story i spent a lot of time with kareem one of the founders of ramp and what i like about kareem is how discontent and dissatisfied he always is and so he has excessively high bars for products and people and everything else.

1:22:40And so I was at his house for dinner and he's just like railing on all the shit he doesn't like. And I was like, all right, dude, what the fuck do you actually like? Like, is there something like, I don't want to hear what you don't like. Tell me what you do. Cause like a great signal, the guy that like nothing's high enough quality. What's above the line. Yeah. And so he was talking about this, this company and this founder. And I pull up my phone and I searched the guy's name and it turns out he followed me on Twitter. I was like, oh, I'll follow him. Cause like Kareem says, kid smart. And then immediately I get a DM.

1:23:07He's like, oh, a huge fucking fan of the podcast are you ever in new york city i'm like i'll be there in two days he's like come by and so we wind up having this meeting he tells me this crazy story where he like i think he had sold his last company didn't know what he'd do he was in that trough of like doesn't like i don't know what my next thing is lives in new york city has a big ass dog would walk like 20 000 30 000 steps a day just listening to founders for hours and he's like you helped me and now their thing is ripping they race from like sequoia and all this crazy stuff um and so he he goes hey i may be over my skis here but like do you angel invest like the ground is closed but do you want to get in and i was like i don't know like i guess like i just did not it's exhaust for you like that's really all it is but the reason this is important because a good friend of mine had somehow found out i knew this guy and he's like get me in the round i was like i said i text me he's like no so he's like there's no other room like he doesn't have a Exception is for you.

1:24:02He doesn't have a podcast that I love. And so there's a bunch of different ways to do this where it's like you could take the money that the podcast makes and I could partner with somebody like Jeremy who thinks about it all day long. Or you could just literally just be, there's a million other things I could be doing around this. I will never be taking fucking individual meetings to decide if I want to invest. This is so stupid for me to distract from what I'm doing. But yeah, so that is like one asset. the asset that i have i'm not utilizing is the relationships that i'm building from the podcast if you were to um give advice to david in 2017 um to maybe like put this in perspective presumably there's gonna be a david in 2029 who could do the same thing but maybe even just in the looking back like what what could that david have been doing better aside from maybe simplifying uh what assets was he not using don't guess what your biggest asset that you have is your differentiated podcast and you put a giant wall in front of it that's the easiest answer ever maybe don't do that how about that like that you know the amount of people so hinky is one of them right yeah you couldn't even share like think about like how many people share how many people have shared the elon episode this week it's been crazy crazy how many such a great episode yeah but like it's crazy and so like Like, I've heard from so many people.

1:25:26I think he was spending, like, I think it was charging$100 a year. He was, like, buying gift subscriptions like it was candy. Because it's like, I can't share your stupid fucking podcast without buying an entire gift subscription and emailing it to them. And then they have to activate the RSS feed. Yeah, it's just like, what were you doing? Wait, that's the worst part. It's not even the money. It's like, get it, yeah, private RSS feed. Good luck. So this is the crazy thing. So not only could you see who was listening, you could see if they activated it. Or who subscribed, you could see if they activated it.

1:25:52So I was a huge fan of Invest Look The Best. And I saw, I'm not going to repeat the email address because he probably doesn't want to the podcast, but I knew, I know who that email address is. I was like, oh, I'm a fan of that guy's podcast. It's pretty cool. It's cool. And then I checked for some reason, like a few weeks later, not activated. I was like, oh, brutal. And then eventually he, cause he told me the story where he was just like, he heard about it from one person he trusted, then another person. the second time he heard about then he bought the subscription then he heard about again then he heard about it again and these are like people have his number and stuff they said god damn it now like activate the stupid private rss feed and they start listening to it then he tweeted about back to sam's point like there's a lot of stuff where i'll read one good essay or i was probably like i think i probably heard the the steve jobs one really early on or something something and you listen and you're like that's great but there's something in your brain that doesn't fully click of like oh my gosh all the other i did this with patrick i've told him this like i listened to like one or two or three or four interviews with him i'm like man all of those people are amazing and i did not process at all and then finally on like seven of them i was like oh either they're all they're all amazing which is kind of true or patrick is a really amazing person at drawing them out and so i do find that like i'm sure your show is the extreme version of this is that like sometimes you have to like go listen to three in a row and then you're like oh my gosh it's a treasure trove this is why um the the advice that anthony bourdain got when he was a first when he released his first book he met right before his first book came out he met with another successful author who's you know way further down the path than me and he goes do you have any advice for me he goes yeah promote promote promote or this all dies and so somebody what's the moving audience again yeah somebody um said they have like uh notifications on for when i tweet which is insane because i my phone is on permanent dnd like permanent you cannot get to me like and uh they're like you tweet a lot and i'm like how do you know that it's like because i have notifications on for your yeah the the best way to use twitter is what was shared on one of your episodes that i sent you it's like you just tweet all day long and you read none of it and so all of my thing yeah exactly all of my tweets are just me promoting essentially quotes from past episodes and then linking to the episode and the amount of people they're like i didn't even know you did an episode on bob dylan or xyz it's like you have to promote promote promote promote it's like somebody could listen to one two three but once they listen to 20 30 50 they've told so many people like you've got to get them to further down that we talked earlier a lot about it obviously one of the most common like recurring themes is storytelling and world building amongst entrepreneurs um i think you referenced the don valentine quote the money flows after them after the story there's a idea or a line from evan land about the keeper of the language as well so like the language is part of this like what makes for steve jobs some of these guys elon whatever somebody what makes for truly truly great storytelling and how does specific language factor into that i think the best storytellers are just probably the clearest thinkers so like you mentioned steve jobs he's probably the clearest thinker that i've ever come across and so therefore if you have clear thinking you probably have clear super clear communication there's actually a book i think i clear communication the same as great storytelling though no i think great storytelling is clear it's like it's like simplify so like i think some of the best storytellers i think it would be hard to argue that the best storytellers in the world aren't like musicians so if you look at like tom petty's lyrics or even taylor swift's lyrics my daughter's an amazing world builder yeah it's just like uh there was this this um song my daughter put me on too and i just like read i don't even think it has like a chorus it's called like l-o-m-l by taylor swift it's like not love of my life loss of my life or something like that and you just like read it's like four minutes long and i'm reading along in the lyrics i'm like wow she told an entire story here with like how many different words or like um i did the the biography of dr seuss i forgot his real name and one of his most successful you know the guy was like 50 years old and wasn't a success and he winds up selling like 700 million books he was at it for so long but one of his most successful selling books was i think the cat in the hat and he designed within constraints he's like can i tell an entire story with using 50 words 50 different words or less so not like 50 literally you can use reuse the same word over and over again but it's only these yeah yeah yeah and so that that it kind of necessity is a mother of all invention yeah that that economy of like just like beautiful simplicity of i think the best stories again like simple to understand and then therefore like simple to repeat simple to share um and i think that's my biggest critique of my some of my past episodes where it's just like, you're right now I'm under so much fucking stress and I'm working flat out that I'm telling people around me a line from Brad Jacobs' book where it's like, resist the urge to flood the channel with non-essential information.

1:30:45Like there's certain amount of stuff that I do not want to be aware of right now because I have way too much stuff in my head. So resist the urge to flood the channel of non-essential information. Like I think I hear it and I'm like, that's a better story that, that it's a better idea that's a better podcast if you it's always taking away it's never ever ever adding so that's why i think what is clarity of thought it's like it's the constant refinement and then you're like well how do jobs get like that now there is some level of verbal mastery because like there's a one of the first things i've ever written about him was like steve jobs at 22 he was like trying to sell the apple computer like a computer convention and some like random uh reporters interviewed him like one minute you're like wow so there's some level of talent but then you also combine some natural talent which you mentioned earlier like are you charismatic like are people do people want to talk to you do you want to have dinner with you like then maybe that's a sign that you should be doing things orally you know you should be giving speeches or doing podcasts or whatever so there is like talent you had some kind of built-in talent and then you worked at it for a long a long period of time where there's an entire book called the presentation secrets of steve jobs i think it's episode 349 of founders it might be 350 and it's essentially like how he crafted his storytelling and it is not just right off the tongue let it rip it is repetition over and over again practicing every single word over and over again is there a better way to say it can we edit that down yeah so wow yeah and and it's like a magician almost it's like on stage he pulls the ipod nano out of his pocket like he's hmm there's there's one other piece of this.

1:32:21You say people try to analyze business in a rational way, which is weird because humans are nothing but irrational. And so obviously a huge part of storytelling too is the emotional part or the feeling part. How do great products, founders to the iPhone or whatever, Raising Cane's, defy rationality? So me and Todd, Todd Graves from Raising Cane's just had this conversation. He's like anti-theoretical, anti-intellectual when it comes to business. It's like very, very simple. That's why he's also obsessed with like his, you can, he's very easy to understand because he, he has a very interesting, uh, simple organizing principle.

1:32:57He believes in, uh, doing one thing and doing it better than anybody else. Right. And he believes in limiting the amount of details and then making every detail perfect. So for him, it's just like, there's nothing theoretical about this. Like, is this the best chicken? Is this better? Like, what is the response? The sales go up? Like how, what's the time? Like he just manages like every element of his business. Like, can we make the coleslaw better? Is the bread fine? like he just like he thinks about this as like such like a granular um level and i think all of the iteration and behind the scenes work that goes into it is why it has like a coli following and so like i was just visiting my brother and sister they'd never been to raising canes before and i was like all right i'm gonna take you and we like they just opened up raising canes was in like the south for a long time and now it's in florida and so we show up and they're like what the hell is going on here because there's the drive-thru is like lying down the block and we can't even get a table inside because we have to wait for somebody to get up right and todd purposely puts his restaurants around what people view as his competitors that he does not view as his competitors and so there's like you know like a chili's or like a wendy's and so i remember looking at the wendy's across the street there is a single car in the drive-thru it's just like all that so i don't even know if you can put into words you can explain it was just like all the work he's done and the iterative work of making his product better first of all like keeping it saying this is going to be the product so all the all the iteration goes into making that existing product better not now it's this product and so now we're going to invite our attention to this product over here that the result of all that uh like knowledge and skill and practice has now compounded for three decades to now a new person gets this and they're like what is this they can't describe the magic there's a line in um dyson's autobiography that i thought was interesting that I missed the first few times I read it.

1:34:46And he said something like the magic of a product should never be underestimated. And he just defines the magic as like how it does what it does, right? It's not like, oh, the vacuum cleaner sucks air out. It's like, there's something magical about the experience when you use like a Dyson vacuum cleaner compared to like a Hoover. It's just, you can't even, I would, I guess it's irrational to back to your original question. It's like, I don't know what's going on here. I just know these two things are not, they're not giving me the same feeling, the same sensation. What's interesting though, is across all three of those, there's actually this combination of, with Jobs and with Cain's, there's so much work and effort and precision and detail and almost like rationality, at the very least, like almost like a scientific level of intensity to make this thing on the other end when like on the other side of the curtain seems like magic.

1:35:38This is why I always say like, jeff bezos deserves all the money it has it's because like he made a magic button like oh what is that magic button all the complexity behind it this is the physical world man and so like literally it's getting in more insane so uh a friend of mine i i so when i travel if i don't have a bunch of books with me i read entire books on my the kindle app on my iphone which is actually an idea i got from elon and the problem is is you're tempted to like jump off the kindle app and go to like something stupid like tiktok or twitter and so my friend's like just get a kindle paperweight and he showed me his this is like this past weekend oh this is really cool yeah they're like you know like the size of my hand or something like that but it's only you can only read on it it's like you know it's it's they've been i had the first kindle when it first came out it's huge it's complicated it's all the buttons they've removed everything now it's much more simple but the point being is like oh great okay i ordered it right away it came to my house four hours later it's it's it's yeah it's really one of those things where you're just like and we're used to this by the way one of the one of the really fascinating things about technology broadly is the goalposts like if you showed somebody google translate in 1980 they would think you had created like agi yeah and now we're just now with chat gbt5 it's two weeks old and i'm just kind of like this is also why i'm anti like redlining information fast or like i'm gonna listen to all your podcasts on 3x speed or whatever cases like that's the point you need to sit with it longer i had this thought where it's like what a miraculous piece of technology a book is because i'm sitting here with dyson's you know paperback book that was published in like 2003 it's one of the first editions it's like that book in my hand is 20 years old it's marked up but i'm looking at it's like these squiggly lines written on a piece of paper that somehow put like go directly into my brain from another human and i'm able to learn from his collective experience and it's light and I can take it with me and it's good on my eyes.

1:37:30It's perfect. That's why it's lasted, how long has books been around? 5 ,000 years. It's very hard to improve. In fact, Bezos talked about that when he was building the Kindle. You can't out book a book. So you got to come from a completely different angle than just like, I'm going to make a slightly better book. But even that, I just thought it was a beautiful experience of just sitting there with this, staring at the page and sitting with the ideas. Not like, okay, I'm on page 25. Let me get to 26. Let me get to 27. I'm done. There's not a test at the end. That's not the point. It's understanding.

1:38:02And then understanding what you said earlier, it's like, if you understand, then you'd actually change your behavior. One of your favorite lines is from Michael Jordan. They're deceiving themselves about what the game requires. You say also entrepreneurship is an internal thing. What are most founders deceiving themselves about? the founders that i study on the podcast almost nothing because they're the best like right i think i'm more asking about people towards the beginning of their journey or people today yeah one thing i would say is it tied you said something earlier about like uh having a fundamental like understanding of yourself and i think people don't i think it's very hard to fight against like your innate nature and sometimes you do it because you want money or you want prestige, you want status, or you're doing all kinds of things.

1:38:54So like you just, your best bet is just like follow your natural curiosity. And we have a hard time doing that because we're worried about the perceptions of other people. This is what I meant. Like, yeah, I just like, I just don't think about what other people, I just don't think about other people. I don't know how to describe this. And I had to like zoom out. Like we were walking through the park on the way here. And like, I had that moment where I like zoom out and realize there's other people around me. And I'm like, oh, this is interesting. Like people, all these people in the park are choosing different ways to live their life.

1:39:19Like I'm choosing to read books and make podcasts. this guy's dancing with no shirt on this guy's begging for money this fat guy's eating an ice cream cone like all this like literally the conversation is just had it's like oh like we're all choosing and then i go back into like work on founders read more books make more podcasts find more listeners like the stuff that i like i just naturally think about but um though the answer i would have to your question is something that i believe that i cannot prove is that the reason that the best entrepreneurs almost without a doubt make have their best work decades into their career obviously they have more experience they have more they have a better network they have more money they have more resources but i also think they just have a fundamental a much deeper and fundamental understanding of who they are and they've built a business to reflect that that business is completely natural to them and so that's i think where a lot of the younger founders are missing.

1:40:18And I, listen, I don't rule number two in the center of family household is my new business. Okay. So I don't care what other people do, but sometimes I forget the audience. So a friend of mine runs a fund and his thesis on the fund is backing second time founders. And I don't do many speaking gigs. It has to be like convenient for me, or we have to be a friend or something like that. This one was in Miami, so I could drive to it. I'm friends with them. That's fine. And so like, I just went up on stage and I just like talked about how stupid it is to sell your company. And that like, when people walk up to me now and they're like, I sold my company.

1:40:54I'm like, yeah, sorry to hear that. And like, and then they're just like, he's like, you know, who's in the audience? Like every single person in the audience, that's the whole premise. And I saw one of these guys was in the audience at this wedding. I was at last weekend. And he's like, this is funny though. This is like two years, a year and a half has passed. He's like, something you said that day is like really rattled my mind. and it was this idea. It was just like, I think it was a mistake because now he's got a job and he's really an entrepreneur, right? And so like, how much would you have to pay to be demoted to employee?

1:41:25Like, there's no money. I'm not working for you for any money. I don't care what the money is. I'm not working for you. And now he can't come up with a better idea. So his mistake that he made was that he sold his best idea. I'm not saying you should never sell your company. You should always be working on your best idea. And if you have a better idea, then sell the one and you can get a big bag of money. Good. I like wealth. Capitalists as they come. By the way, there's a lot of great entrepreneurs who had an early win and it's part of what, like Patrick and John Collison and great things like all of this.

1:41:54Their early win is actually what enabled them. Maybe not. Maybe they could have done it anyway, but like there's a lot of cases where that's actually kind of set them up. Yeah. If you're broke as shit, it's going to be a lot harder. And, you know, so my point is like, I think they're interested, the mistake like younger founders make, or I guess earlier, it's like they're interested in a startup I'm not interested in startup. I'm interested in your last business. Yeah. I want to know, is this your last business? Because then we can have really interesting conversations because I know you're going to be doing it forever.

1:42:21You're going to be investing things at Compound. We speak the same language. Totally. We're like this like start scale, sell scale. And I know we're doing this in a VC's office for God's sake. And this is our entire business. And like, good. They can make money and they love it. There are great VCs who like to invest in businesses and hold it forever too. Do whatever is interesting to you. It's just like, that's not interesting to me. And if you really want to be great at what you do, then like you have to hurt you have to try to get to your last business as much as fast as possible because the longer you're in it like think about what michael dell can explain to you having 41 years of business reinventing his business and and surfing how many different technological waves you know like think about what's in that guy's head like i hung out with his son zach the night before a few nights ago right yeah and he has this thing where you know he calls it dad terminal and you know instead of like bloomberg terminal you log into bloomberg terminal you type in a question you get some kind of answer query that you're looking for he's like no i just call my dad he's like hey i'm having a supply chain issue do you have any advice yeah i'm pretty sure michael dell knows a thing or two about supply chains um and yeah that's that's the stuff that's interesting to me and i think a lot of people you know there wasn't anything such thing as an entrepreneurship industry where there is now and there's all these so what i would what i would argue is like when you're talking to somebody you're building a relationship with them uh you're seeking their advice you really have to think about their incentives what did Charlie Munger say incentives rule everything around you like he says I'm in the top five I've been in the top five percent of my age cohort my entire life understanding the power of incentives and that a year goes by that I don't underestimate the power of incentives and so I think there's a lot of people like playing house is what Paul Graham says it's like they they think founders being glamorous or rich or famous and he's just doing it because of all the other stuff where I like people that love the activity for the sake of itself.

1:44:11Steve Jobs was going to make, so Steve Jobs was going to make insanely great products, whether he was rich or not. He was compelled to do that. That's the stuff that's very fascinating to me. So I would just be like, hey, why don't you just do a business based on something that, around an activity that you love for the sake of itself. It could be building supply, you could be obsessed with supply chain management. you could be obsessed with investing you could be obsessed with reading i remember telling one of my oldest friends when i started the podcast i think i'm gonna like like make a living reading books and they thought it was the stupidest thing they'd ever heard and then like six years later like i and we they were like named the restaurant we were at and where we were standing when this happened he's like i can't believe you did this i thought it was the dumbest thing ever it's like because that's think about how much effort and time i put into that because i loved the activity for the sake of itself.

1:45:01I have a bunch of questions we can take quickly, like a sort of lightning round. They don't have to be instant. But you, I think it's in the Nolan episode, you talked about like how instinct kept coming around, coming up across all these founders. Why do you think instinct and like intuition is such a common theme? I don't know about instinct. I think intuition, so my, well, he just died, unfortunately. So I was going to say my favorite living novelist was Cormac McCarthy. and he didn't give many interviews throughout his entire life but he uh he did give a few and he was remarkably consistent about what he said so like when he writes like blood meridian which is like a masterpiece it's gonna be probably read 100 years from now right he's like well i actually didn't write it it's like just came from my subconscious and i like let let that channel open and then my fingers just were like tied directly to my subconscious and like out this this this story came right and he the he says something was fascinating i never heard before that, you know, people underestimate or underprioritize like their subconscious mind and that their subconscious is actually older than language.

1:46:05And so like it's survived as we evolve for a reason. Like it's very powerful. We definitely do. Yeah, wise, we don't understand it. And so my life is entirely based on intuition. When I was growing up, I thought it was like the value was in like being analytical and like numbers based. And I was like, oh, I don't want to live that way. it's like not interesting to me and so everything i do is like me spending time with you when somebody just asked me before i came over i was like how do you like do you say yes to every podcast that i should be honest like of course not but like i like jackson there's just something about like why i don't know and i also think there's weird things where like we keep like we almost ran into each other in japan we're like on the side of the wall you didn't know i was in new york we're on the same street like we the universe is like putting us together without us planning yeah i was just like my intuition says like i i like this guy and i like i i'm a fan of your podcasts like most podcasts suck they're terrible and i think you're good at it and you're good early which is a sign that like you know there's something here um and even like when people ask like how do you pick what to include in the podcast like what do you underline it's all intuition i don't i don't think there's a line that um that again i mentioned steph curry a few times today and i guess he's on my mind for some reason but it's probably because this clip i I keep watching over and over again.

1:47:22They're like, you know, what do you think when you shoot? And he goes, absolutely nothing. Because it's like, just like the practice over time. And then, you know, to me, it's almost like a form of intuition. It's like, there's just like the subconscious. It's like, it's not, I'm sitting here. Let me pause. Let me think. Oh, where's my elbow? It's like what I'm doing. It's like, I don't know why I got to this page. There's what, 500 words on a single piece of normal book. I don't know what the number is. Those seven jump out to me. So I'm going to underline them. And then when I read them two, three, four, five, six times before I record the podcast, do I still feel that way?

1:47:55Then that should be in there. Like, I don't, there is no other justification than that. And I would just say, like, if you think about Steve Jobs, obviously one of the greatest entrepreneurs, he just says that intuition has been far more important to his career than intellect. And as he got older, he was able to trust his intuition more and more. And that's really the only thing that guides me. And I go off, like, it sounds so, 10 years ago, David, like, would hear me say this, like, what is wrong with you? so willy foo foo but it's just like i go off intuition vibes like how does this there's some kind of intelligence that i can't even comprehend that i've trust and has guided me to this point i should keep doing that yeah yeah uh you and i think a conversation with patrick talked about being easy to interface with how have you gotten better at that or have you gotten better at that yeah so this is really again another um another idea from steve jobs where easy to interface with easy to understand i think ideas and products are if they're easy to understand they're easy to spread so that's what's important that's why he's like go back to the clear communication you understand like i tend to think in maxims and i spend a lot of time like distilling all the ideas down to maxims you know that chris williamson episode like i wrote that outline it was just i think 15 or 17 maxims and i have i think 150 in like a notebook from that i learn from um like just a podcast and then you just distill them down so you can remember them and then you carry them with you and then you creating internal memes yeah and then you can apply them as these situations come up and so this is something that daniel eck told me he's again he's ridiculous somehow somebody that you know i think the only people that have more paid subscribers than they they do than spotify does is netflix and so it's it's crazy he's built business he has and he's still to me vastly under it underrated and it's also i mean um gustav as well he's a killer oh my gosh that guy i spent two and a half two hours two and a half hours in stockholm recently like two months ago talking to him so um there are whole teams like that yeah and so the reason i bring that up is because he's also very wise and he's like just he's like a sniper he like completely identifies what you're doing wrong or like he's just like he inputs ideas into my head probably better than almost anybody else because there's not many of them but they're very impactful and he's just very wise for being so young cool you know we're like similar age and he's just like way wiser than i am and he said something to me he's like you're really easy to understand so therefore you're easy to help and i think it's very powerful because he's like you just like you only i know what you care about so oh my gosh that is one of the most profoundly important idea at least in the modern world where there's just so much noise yes oh my gosh that's powerful and so i think i i easy to interface with i don't know if i would even say i'm definitely easy to interface with because like i think my intensity is like a lot of biting or um or uh infectious oh i think it's some people don't like scary to some people like so like sure so like uh passion is definitely infectious right enthusiasm and definitely enthusiastic but i also like very fucking stubborn and like very hard to deal with like this is why i say like i'm sure hinky loves me but also hates me at the same time where he's just like very frustrating to deal with this pig headed mule of a fucking person you know the guy that will literally like i'll have experiences where like you'll give me an idea like this is the stupidest thing ever heard i'm not doing it and like i'm very direct i don't have a filter and then six months later like i have this great idea and you're like that was my idea i told you about six months i'm sure that so yeah so um but the good news is like you kind of know where you like i don't want to act i don't have like the social graces and so like there's no like hidden motive with me yeah and i think so that's like that may be easy interface with but i am difficult to deal with i don't really like we were just at this wedding and like one of my close friends with there is like yeah david he said we're in a group and i forgot we're deciding what to do or something and like yeah but david doesn't roll with the punches very easily like i'm just like very like rigid and how i want to spend my time and kind of ruthless about that where it's just like no i don't want to go spend you know six hours on a tour or something i'd rather like read or whatever the case is um but yeah i just think distilling down what's important to you in an easy to remember phrase and then repeating that to people will actually like be a benefit because then you'll have something like that where it's like oh you're easy to understand so therefore you're easy to to help and then if you're marketing product like if your idea is easy to understand it's easy to spread is there a biography that you think most founders would benefit from reading in full yeah james dyson's against the odds he wrote two he wrote one when he's 45 and one when he's 69 the i'm doing i'm i've just reread both of them i'm packaging them in one episode and that's why the episode's late because like the outline is i'm like wrestling an alligator here it's like way too much information it's like i'm I could make an episode today and it's going to be complicated and annoying to me when I listen to it a year from now.

1:52:59So I'm like editing, editing, editing, which we never went back to how they're getting simpler because it's something I learned from Walt Disney that you need to animation at the time was so expensive that he said you have you're forced to edit before you create. So we can go there in one second. What was the thread that we were just on? James Dyson. So they're both good. the the the second one is called invention a life of learning through failure and you have a much wiser version of him but the reason the first one is because if you excellence is a capacity take pain and if you want to be excellent like you're gonna have to endure through periods of pain i have a good friend of mine who's running a massively successful company he's like i cannot believe this our first you know five years we've had no problems and we just had this conversation It's like, oh, that's not going to stay that way.

1:53:48Like you are going to one day and many times, especially because you want to do this for a short life, you're going to experience a hell of a lot of pain. So like there's no such thing as like, oh, it's just restarted and everything. It's not going to happen. So the reason that book is so important is because it's 90 % of us is just him failing year after year after year and him refusing to give up. He is he's funny as hell in the book. He has a distinct point of view. He has a very unique. I think that's what I think that what I'm cutting away with the episode is not the story of even the perseverance through struggle, because I think I've covered that on episode 25, episode 200, 205, 300.

1:54:23Those are the four episodes I've done on Dyson so far. It's he's got a very unique philosophy on company building that I think is important to put out there. The way I would describe this is anti-business billionaires. and maybe it's anti-business as usual billionaires but i think anti-business billionaires is better like branding and it's people that are so obsessed with the quality of the products that they're making and they retain control so like that is all they focus on and then they make sure that they retain control of their company over the long term so they build the world's best products and they never relinquish control to other people and they wind up with the money anyways yeah the The business and the money are just gas for the engine.

1:55:04But it's like, if you can make a product, if you can make the iPhone, you're going to be rich. If you can make Patagonia, started with climate equipment and then clothing, you are going to be rich. If you can make the Dyson vacuum cleaner, you are going to be rich. That's why they're anti-business because it's like, they're not doing them for financial reasons. They're not like, okay, this is what the quarter was. How do we enhance shareholder value by 10 % over the year? It's quality over everything. i think that's a very important again i just told you it's like i didn't even know for years how many people were listening to the podcast i just tried to make the the best possible thing and i still do that like i i'm very glad that the elon episode is you know it's going to be the most elon episode of founders by by far i don't like i'm happy with that it's exciting for a day but it's just like i'm gonna go back and do it again and again and now i'm back struggling with the next one that's fucking because that one was like five days late yeah you're a sisyphus the rob Yeah, exactly.

1:55:58And it was five days late. And I went on TPBN. And I was like, then it wasn't sleeping. I looked like shit. And I'm close friends with John and Jordy. And they're like, what is going on? I was like, I can't find this Elon episode. I can't find it. It's here, but I can't. Yes, I can't find it. I know it's here. Yes. It's in the marble. Yes, I have to. David's in the marble. Yes, I have to find him. And so I'm going through the exact same thing. And I'll go through it again and again. But the fact that it was painful means it'll most likely be better. So in the back of Raising Canes in their kitchen that the customers never see, there's a great sign here that is a great sign that says, never sacrifice quality for speed.

1:56:37And they're fast. He knows. He's like, if you walk up there, it's two minutes and 29 seconds. And like he has everything dialed in, but he's like not at the expense of quality. It's almost like the Elon algorithm where you automate at the end. You add the speed after, but not first. The quality's got to be there. and so that's like you know a handful of words that have really like helped me for the last few weeks which is like no one's going to remember if the episode is five days late they'll remember if it's good or not walt disney edit before you make animation so this is how i'm doing so basically what i used to do is I go, I go through, I highlight or excuse me, underline with, uh, like a ruler.

1:57:19Like I don't do anything sloppy. So it's like a ruler and a pen. And then I post the notes and I write down like whatever comes to mind. It's like, Oh, like, that's like Henry Ford said that something similar. So like, that's how my brain works. Um, and I, I'll go through the entire book, right? This was my process for a long time. And then I would go through and read it again. So by the time I sit down and record it, I'd be like three or four times. Uh, and then I used to just move through the book in chronological order and then i get to the end and i'm done right and that's that that was the episode yeah and so what i started doing is instead taking out and then the first edit before i did was like sometimes i would be in the middle of a um an episode and i'd get to a page and i'd read that like oh that's actually now with the flow of the conversation and where it's gone and what i've already said i don't need that so i'm just gonna skip that so that was like editing i don't edit that out later i just edit it never even you never hear it into a microphone.

1:58:10And so what I've been doing now is this is ruthlessly editing where I take all of my notes and highlights, right? I put them into a single document and usually they're like a number document, right? So like really great episodes tend to have, you know, maybe like 50 things that I want to talk to you about. Like the Michael Ferraro episode that I'm really proud of. It's on this guy that owns Ferraro chocolate. It's probably held company worth$40 billion owned by a single person today. It's probably worth, you know, he died. It's probably worth, I don't know,$80 billion still owned by his son, or maybe his two sons.

1:58:40And so that's like, that had 65, because they're numbered, that had 65 things I wanted to talk about. And it was like perfect length. I think it was one of the best thing. To give you an indication where I am in the Dyson edit, I'm at like 180. And so I'm in big trouble. And so basically what I go, now I'm going back and doing is just like, how much, like what do I actually want the episode to be about? And so for Elon, it was like, I don't want to talk about his dad. I don't want to talk about politics. I don't want to talk about Twitter. I want to talk about the fact that this guy has the best goddamn company building principles you ever come across.

1:59:17By the way, you are not tracing the arc of the biography. Yeah. Like that is not what you're setting up. No, I'm not summarizing them. Yes. Books that can be summarized are books that are not worth reading. Biographies are worth reading. They nourish your soul. You're an idiot if you're not reading biographies. If all the smartest, most productive people in the world all have doing this activity, what are you going to do? Are you going to go scroll? like you're insane for not doing this you don't have to read you know a ton but you should find you might maybe it's the same one or a handful you read over and over again but you definitely should be doing this so i think it's one of the highest value activities in in the world for sure outside of you know spending time with your family taking care of your health and and working on you know hopefully something that's making the world better like somebody else's life better so now essentially what i do is just it's just the it's just the ruthless edit before i even record and it's just fucking chopping and chopping and chopping so like the the elon episode The reading was done.

2:00:06The reading took like four days. The editing of the outline took like five. And you had presumably like 180. No, less than that. But just like you're, you're not, you're cutting and you're cutting entire parts off. Then you're cutting individual words in each sentence. You're rephrasing them. So they, so it sounds better. So yeah. So it's not just like, it's not just taking out individual like lines or bullet points. It's like rewriting them. Then it's like organizing them where they should go together. there's like oh wait i kind of already said that that's like another way to say the similar idea so like we can just cut that and it's just literally like cutting cutting cutting cutting cutting it's the exact same idea that we talked about earlier it's like it takes a lot longer to write a shorter letter than it takes a longer one and then i was just talking to andrew human about this because i'm very interested in like the process behind like how you make it and he was showing me like he even like videotapes himself by himself talking out the ideas out loud i'm go how often do you talk to yourself he goes all the time i go i do too like i talk out loud constantly and then so sometimes it's like me hearing the ideas like does that make sense do i actually understand what i'm saying like i don't even know if i understand it and then what i'll do is like i will start saying the outline out loud to see how it sounds like i don't have to read the whole thing yep um and you just get to the point where it's like okay there's not there's nothing else to cut here like this is it and then once you sit down you record it and then after after you hear it you'll edit even more yeah yeah you have to feel it you have to feel it in your hands almost or feel it on your tongue i guess in this case well it's funny you use the word feel it because i started hand editing the transcripts at the same time i edit which is a bad idea i should do it after i edit but i do it as i edit that's why i describe it so it takes forever uh that's that's the way i describe it it's like i can like feel it this is like literally like feel because it's a it's your hand on the stove it's elon's thing it's the same thing it's like a it's weird because i would never do like another all digital thing again like if i did anything else i'd have to do something physical yeah i think there's just something magical about that there's a tighter feedback loop it's just not even the feedback it's just like more interesting and there's a magic in the fact that i talk about durability yeah there's just a magic in the fact that like you can talk into a microphone and anybody over the world can hear it and that's on demand it's just a miracle to it but i just it it's so disassociating it's like hard where like i actually i have no other way to describe it other than like i feel by editing the transcript i feel it i touch it like this is i feel the product that i'm making and in a way when i wasn't doing this i just didn't have that like sensation most of my listeners are in technology in some way or another you study a wide range of people some of the great technologists but lots of other people, including people make chicken tenders and vacuums.

2:02:53What do you think? Vacuum is technology though. That's the world's first dual cyclonic vacuum. You try to do that. That's off. That's patented. Do you think there's anything, and you at least spend enough time around some tech people to have a sense. Do you think there's anything that tech people in particular could learn from the other types of entrepreneurs you study? I don't make a distinction between them. So like, you know, Andrew Carnegie, he was a tech company founder. Bessemer Steel like it was a better way to do like what is technology I think the best definition of technology is in zero to one it's just a better way to do something right it's like one of the reasons that arbitrary distinction yeah one of the reasons that that book was so well received is because it's easy to understand easy to spread right so he distilled this down to like it's like what is actual technology it's just a better there's a great line in the book Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant where like all new technology is just new means to do old ends something like that yeah something like that or new ends to old means or whatever the term is.

2:03:54Andrew Carnegie was a technologist. Johnny Rockefeller, obviously, oil was technology. Did an episode on Charles Goodyear. Vulcanized rubber, that's a technology. Railroads, that was the technology of the day. Telegraphs, AC, electricity. These are all, now they're not thought of as technology, but they were technology in their day. And you would argue that they still are. So there's just a lot of lessons you can draw from them. So like, okay, if you're in tech and you're not studying like history, like then why did bezos get so many ideas go listen to the ted talk that bezos has from like 25 years ago and he says the electro electricity metaphor for the internet this is after remember when the internet was happening that the the first boom in the late 90s they called it an internet gold rush and he's like that's a really shitty metaphor and he thought of the internet as a thin horizontal enabling layer much more akin to electricity than to a gold rush and he goes it's same thing so they when these thin horizontal enabling layers once they're invented they go everywhere electricity once it was invented it went everywhere the internet was invented it went everywhere he just gave a talk with aaron ross sorkin at dealbook summit i did an episode on the interview because it was so good i think it's called rare uh jeff bezos uh interview i don't know the episode number for that one and he's like ai is the same thing it's a thin horizontal enabling layer and it will go everywhere and he's like the analogy for ai is fucking electricity and so the way i'd say is like i the the one the one critique i would have is like i talked to some young technology founders they don't know anything that went before them that's and so there's an old line from like cicero it's like the the man that doesn't understand what happened before he lived goes through life like a baby do you really want to go through life like a baby like and you have to ask yourself like why does steve jobs have historic knowledge he would do a product launch on the macintosh and talk about how the macintosh is similar to the work that alexander grand bell was doing in the 1870s how did he know that why did he know that why was jeff bezos staying setting a kio marita why was why are all these people the james license books i'm reading now there's like 17 fucking engineers and designers that he's talking about from the guy that started honda's the guy designed the mini to design the guy that built one of the biggest ships in the world in 1800s and railroads they're gritting they're they use the entire world as their classroom and if you just study like you can't build upon work that you didn't know exist so You should have that base of knowledge and then try to build upon it and then let it influence and enhance the work that you're already doing.

2:06:14You talk a lot about, you brought it up with Jeremy earlier, you talk a lot about sort of looking for role models and studying a lot of these people. And one thing that you brought up plenty is that many of them actually had kind of terrible personal lives. There's a line from Hans Zimmer that you brought up in the Nolan episode. He says, once your children are born, you can never look at yourself through your own eyes anymore. You look at yourself through their eyes. as someone who is as fascinated by and in many ways pursuing greatness as you are i think you clearly are attuned to this as well and so i'm curious what um at least today what you hope your kids someday say about you there should be i'll give you this clip we should like if you want to insert it it's up to you it's probably the best thing that i've heard all year so this guy named steve ranella and he's started out as a writer now he's got the biggest like outdoor like podcast in the world he does this uh great like series called meat eater on netflix but he fundamentally i think thinks about as like writer he's like a real soulful dude he's kind of like you and he's one of these people where it's like we talked about passion and is infectious energy and it does as an infectious i would say the most interesting people are the most interested I am not interested in, like, I don't camp.

2:07:28I don't hunt. Like, I think nature's beautiful, but, like, I'm probably never going to do those things. And yet, this is what Steve's dedicating his life to, and he's so passionate about it, that I would listen to this guy, like, read the phone book. He's just, like, I find him very, very fascinating. And I'm, like, learning about all this stuff that I may never even experience because he's just, you can feel his love in it. And, you know, obviously hunting is, like, a dying, is, like, not growing very fast, I don't think. And like he grew up, his dad's generations did it. If you live certain places in America and his dad taught him how to do it.

2:08:00And now he's trying to do that for his own kids. And he's always asked the question. He's just like, well, what if your kids don't like hunting like as much as you do? And he's like, well, few people do. And he's just like, I don't, you know, I don't care if they don't hunt, if they never hunt. But what I'm trying to show them is like what it means to go through life with like a passion and to like chase after something. Most important things you can demonstrate to your kids is like demonstrate to them what it's like to be passionate about something. If all you ever can bring to the table for your kids is just like this kind of like ambivalence, passivity.

2:08:39Well, I guess we'll go down to the park because what else you're supposed to do with a kid later on when they're grown up. and they're thinking about like what is their impression about how you engage with the world even if my kids and they probably won't i don't know i remember someone saying like what if your kids don't like to hunt and fish as much as you do i'm like not many people do man um whatever that happens to them if they don't go at all they will when they're when i'm dead and they're sitting around with their spouses and they're like goofing on their dad remembering and their dad they're gonna remember someone who was fucking on it do you know what i mean who was like driving hard and they maybe won't like it but they'll later they'll laugh about it and they'll probably uh begrudgingly they'll be like yeah i learned some shit from that and it'll be that like what you're gonna do like be fucking tenacious to me like getting them into the outdoors it's like selfish because that's what i want to do but it's also it's also like well i'm showing them what it's like to care about something what it's like to try to excel at what it's like to try to like be in it what it's like to try to do hard little goals you know and uh and it's not just to make them be outdoors people it's just to have them see that like that you can that it's good to go through life um fired up you know to be like this is fucking we're going man yeah it's windy it's fucking cold let's go and he's just like they're gonna see after i'm long dead right what it means to go through life you know chasing after something and they're gonna say like i learned a lot from my dad side up close yeah from his passion the fact that he didn't he wasn't apathetic throughout life this is my issue with you know the reason i don't really pay attention to most of the world is because like most people don't have a mission most people are just average by default i'm going to do an episode of nick saban because he's got all these great quotes on this where he's just like you know mediocre people hate high achievers and high high achievers hate mediocre people and it's normal to be mediocre you shouldn't be mad at those people like it's abnormal what you're trying to do and so what he's trying to show his kids like it doesn't matter what you direct this to you can direct it to whatever you want he's directing it to hunting and fishing and developing tv and making podcasts i'm obviously developing to reading and making podcasts like i don't care what my kids do but they're gonna damn sure say like my dad chased after something and so like this is our my daughter's old enough and she's like written me notes and like we've we've seen stuff with this um where like she's i'm just like really impressed with like the person she is i took her out of school and took her with me to go meet and i've got to keep doing this to some of these founders because i'm like listen you get a chance to meet this world famous guy that's worth you know nine it's not even a money thing but you know multi deca billionaires that like for some reason give me hours and hours of their time and you get to be there like you're going to learn way more from two hours this person and all year at school and one of the things i'm most proud of is like she's like you're extremely driven and obviously like you know what you want to do and and i also did something with her that i thought was really important because like you they you can never really tell like what your kids actually like understand like 13 years old but i took her to where so when my dad got out of jail and i was small we had to live in this like really shitty place in hialeah which is like the cuban part of miami my dad's a cuban immigrant he was born in cuba and my dad had a wife and two kids but no money and no prospects and we're living behind a really shitty grocery store in a duplex in a two-bedroom with my grandmother his mom my cousin who was developmentally disabled because her mom who's my dad's sister did a bunch of drugs when she was in the womb and so she's like mentally retarded and like would bang her head on the on the floor and like drool and like that kind of shit so that her and the grandmother's in one room and then the other room was me my mom and my older brother and the house is still there and like my daughter goes to private school she lives in an insane neighborhood she has tutors she has everything and so her understanding that she's like oh shit again she didn't curse uh but she understands like you as my father are very different from everybody else in your family because she knows she's met everybody else in the family she saw where like stuff i was doing when i was around your age like very different experience and she also sees me getting up every day she told my uh wife the other day uh because even like when we travel together like i'm obviously working all the time and she's uh and she's like oh he daddy doesn't stop and so i think like that's the most important thing i don't care what they direct it at i would just try to pick a mission and a mission in life should be in service of other people money comes naturally as a result of service so like what i think is the saddest thing is like the the the progeny of uh or descendants of like really wealthy people can i'm kind of anti-dynasty in most case because this is like they did they dedicate their lives to like drugs and sex and like think about what churchill wrote to his son like you're living a perfectly useful useless existence i still love you but i like you less even more uh, every, like every year, you know, cause it's like, you should be getting, getting up and getting after it.

2:14:12Um, and so, yeah, I don't care what they dedicate to. I'm not, I'm not going to try to guide them in any case. Like, Oh, you should be a doctor. You should be this. Like, well, I don't know. I, I wouldn't have listened to direction. There's no way anybody could have told me what to do. I will, you know, I have resources now. I have a network. Find your thing. Yeah. By exposure, help. Let me help you find. Yeah. I will not like give you any knowledge I have i will you know i mean you have to understand like i am obviously very extreme like i would quote cormac mccarthy's the road every night so every night when my daughter and i still do this i haven't done this in a long time but uh i would go around making sure all the doors and all the windows are locked and then take a night tour and then i'd quote a line from cormac mccarthy's book the road which is supposed to be a novel on like a post-apocalyptic thriller that's not what it is about a relationship between a father and son that's what it is and there's a line in there where he tells his son that I was sent here by God to protect you and I will kill anybody that harms you.

2:15:07That's what I would say before my daughter goes to bed. For her to understand, you can never be in trouble with me. I don't care if you're drunk at a party or you're in danger. You just call me because you will not understand how much I love you until you have your own kids. You say I love you to me, you don't even know what that means. More than anybody else, is like the unconditional love that I have for you. I love you more than you love yourself and I will do that until you die. And so, and I would say also say that to her when I drop her off at school. It says a lot that loving her that much, the thing maybe you want most for her outside of safety and health and these things is to find something that she can really pour herself into.

2:15:52Yeah, and if that fits her personality type too. Yeah. Because Sam Walton had a great line in his biography. He's like, listen, I didn't push my kids too hard because I understood that I was a fairly overactive fellow. That's the line. Well, that's a hell of an understatement, Sam. You built, like, if all of his wealth wasn't given away before it was valuable because he gave the stock in Walmart before it increased in value, and it was concentrating one person, I think combined their net worth right now was like$432 billion. Oh, my God. It came from that guy. so like if they want to be a normal person with a nine to five and they just want to barbecue on the weekends and you know i i don't i want them to do whatever they want to do but i do want them to see an example it's like there is something that's different that is you know a life of passion and a life that's like can be painful but unbelievably fulfilling this is what i love about these stories that they say so well and james dyson's biography the one i mentioned earlier does the best job of this it's like yeah it's difficult but it feels so good it's the best feeling in the world i was just talking to patrick and jeremy before i came over here about like what is actually what do i think about what's important and i think for me is like making something that's truly excellent that makes somebody else's life better that is a feeling better than anything else i've ever experienced i love it david center thank you very much thanks for inviting