#828: David Senra — How Extreme Winners Think and Win: Lessons from 400+ of History’s Greatest Founders and Investors (Including Buffett, Munger, Rockefeller, Jobs, Ovitz, Zell, and Names You Don’t Know But Should)

28:55I'm just looking for the essence. So like if me and Rick are talking about like a giant deal that he wants to invest in, I'm thinking about how that's similar to how Fred Smith built FedEx or how Jim Casey built UPS or how Buffett thought about, you know, buying seized candy. So what do you do with the post-it notes and the scissors and the ruler? so basically like i underlined that sentence and then whatever popped my mind and i'm like oh this is kind of like james j hill when he was building the only profitable successful american railroad and like you just write down whatever comes to mind it's on the post it on the post it and that goes on the page it goes on the page so then i'm writing it down and then like you know i might have three sentences but the post-it notes three by five so i have to cut it has to be clean it has to look good like there's a beauty to it like i am irrational like crazy when it comes to this stuff this is why i think i picked up on your work right away because i see a fellow nutcase and obsessive where like I hand edit now my transcripts.

29:46So everybody's like, you should outsource it to AI. You should outsource it to India. No, I have to touch it. I have to feel it. I have to like, I just love it. I'm not doing it to do it quicker. I like what Jerry Sanfield says, the hard way is the right way. I like the hard way. This also goes back to obviously have some kind of like dark thing driving me, which we can dive into if you want. But so then you go through you take pictures of it into the readwise app because you do the smarter way kindle would just automatically go to readwise well i still use physical i'll explain i'll trade i'll tell you how i use physical you want to do it now or you want yeah sure well okay so don't lose your place all right you got the scissors i want to i want to know about the ruler oh i guess the ruler well i want you to straight lines it has to be straight okay has to be beautiful so we both have pretty moderate to severe ocd uh i remember when i was diagnosed by the psychiatrist who was doing some like preliminary formality of taking me through these assessments before I was going to have this experimental brain stimulation.

30:49Semi-experimental. And he had to check the boxes and he went through these hours and hours of stuff. And he's like, you know, if I need to take a seat, if we need to take a break, I understand. And he gave me this OCD diagnosis. I'm like, yeah, what else is new? I knew this about myself. Yeah, I don't need time. so the way I use physical and I do use physical still quite a bit is I will this is another question that maybe you can answer when you pick back up is how a second or third reading differs from the first because when I read it the first time I'm doing something very similar to you I'm underlining things or if that's just too much work because the book is actually a gem and has a lot then I will just like bracket it on the side of the paragraph so that I know what the highlight it is then i will go through if i read it a second time and i will put t2 in a circle next to the things that still stuck out on a second reading now sometimes you're just a different person if you read it like five years later and your lived experience and your position is life is different but if i'm doing it in somewhat rapid succession i want to see what sticks on a second or third reading.

31:56So you'll see like T2, T3, etc. Sometimes it's just fun to see how I change over time with like the moral letters to Lucilius by Seneca the Younger. People can find it in all sorts of compendiums. I put out a free PDF called The Tao of Seneca. I like to just see where I am at different points in my life, what resonates. And then typically with any physical book I'm creating, I just did this with a book I finished yesterday called Deep Tech by Pablo's Holman, where I'm creating an index in the front. So whenever there's a page that really, really sticks out, I'll write down like 168, whatever it might be, right?

32:32Someone I want to look up, someone like a Claude Hopkins, whose name gets dropped. And I'm like, that seems important. All right. And so I have this index and then I'll take a photograph of the index, just in case I lose the book, which has happened. And that's always painful. I also will have, I'll make a little box on the bottom right-hand corner of some of the front matter pages and i'll put next steps wait what's the front matter so the front matter would be the copyright page the title page the pages that don't really have any content on them maybe there's a dedication page it's like to ma you know it's like okay that's a blank page that i can use so on the like the bottom right hand corner just two lines that create sort of a box i will write down next step so for every book not every book in some cases it was just for pleasure and it's fiction, but even then sometimes ideas will pop into mind.

33:20I'm like, okay, what is at least one kind of next step? Maybe it's looking up someone like Claude Hopkins. Maybe it's an action. Maybe it's a phone call. Maybe it's an email, but like along the lines of David Allen and getting things done. It's like one physical next action. And so I almost always have that in nonfiction books. I take photos of all that. I used to put it all into Evernote. I still sometimes do that because I've been using it forever and I have thousands of them. You're the last Evernote standing. I might be. Yeah, I use Scannable to get it into Evernote. But the point is, I have a way to then OCR it so I can search it.

33:53All right, back to you. That's basically what I have to do now, which takes an unbelievable amount of time. But again, then now, so I've already read it one time. Now I have to input it into Readwise. So you take a picture of it, and it's laborious. And now I've read it for the second or maybe third time, because then you see on the page, and then you have to make sure that it matches up between the page and what's on your screen. And so you're reading it over and over again. So then I get it all into Readwise. You want to take a sidebar just to explain what Readwise is? Readwise is essentially just a way to keep track of your notes and highlights from everything you read.

34:23And now they're expanding out because it turns out the total adjustable market for people that want to keep highlights and notes. First of all, how many people are reading books now? That number is dwindling, unfortunately. And then of that subset of smaller and dwindling people, how many read as much as you and I do? And then they want to essentially giant searchable database of everything you've ever read. It's like super valuable. And they charge like$99 a year for it. so now they have basically they were running this for six years they have a new like web reader app and they said they made more money in six months from that that they didn't read wise for six years this is like obviously not a lot of people that want to do this what the thing that we're describing doing i used to read the physical book because i actually let's back up and i want to tell you like the role that you played and don't let me forget where i'm at though yeah so i went to like a shitty college because i remember like when i was in your senior year but you know i went to public high school and everybody's like where are you going to school and i didn't understand what they meant i'm like one i can drive to like the one i can like go to at night because i have to work during the day like i don't know what you're talking about like i didn't know i got kicked in my house when i was 18 and i had to live in student housing why'd you get kicked out my mom's side of the family has like severe mental illness and just like some of the worst people you've ever met and they just had this belief that like you kick your kids out when you're 18 i got it out of the nest it's not even that it's like they pick a fake fight that was the point of contention between my mom is she had undiagnosed mental illness for sure maybe not schizophrenic definitely bipolar her sister is schizophrenic and listen man as you get older at the time i had a lot of anger super a lot of anger because i didn't understand why they're doing what you're doing and then you get older and then you have your own kids.

36:05So I went through this crazy thing where I think I hated them even more because when my daughter was born, I'm like, I remember seeing her for the first time. I was like, you think you love a woman? No. Enzo Ferrari has this great line that it's impossible for a man to love a woman. The only true love he has is for his kids. And I understand what he meant. I think Ryan Reynolds said it best where it's like, I never thought I'd love anybody as much as I love Blake Lively. And then she gave birth to our daughter. and as soon as I looked at the daughter, I knew if we were ever under attack, I would use Blake as a human shield to protect that baby.

36:36Like it's funny, but it's literally when I heard him say that, I go, yes, that's it. So that means the memory all the more painful. Then I was like, how the, how did you do this to your children? Then you get more experience. And then you're like, yeah, but like, imagine you grew up like they did, like poor white trash. My grandfather raped all his daughters, including my mother. Raped all of his daughters. I didn't know about this until after he died or else I would have been the one who put him in his grave. Raped his daughters, raped his granddaughters. They lived in this like shitty house in Indiana with one bathroom.

37:12There was a two bedroom. She had three sisters. The only bathroom is in my grand, I call them grandparents. I hate them with all of my being in their room. And so if you wanted to go in the bedroom at night, he was a monster. they would urinate in cups and pour it out the window wow so again it doesn't excuse the bad decisions they made and the unhappy marriage my parents had and all this other crap which is like all right like imagine that imagine that you destroyed your kids that person was supposed to protect them we i can't even talk about this but anyways we would fight a lot and she'd be alternate depending on the day like she'd be the kindest person in the world or like like a storm.

37:55And so the unfortunate part was when she got diagnosed with cancer, we hadn't spoken six months. So she only survived another, I think two years. So that means the last two and a half years, I missed what, like that's 20%, 25 % of her life. And somebody was like, what were you guys fighting over? I was like, the sad thing is I don't remember. I was not one to let, you know, I was very hardheaded. And so she had some weird fight with me. I don't remember what it was. And then she's like, you're not allowed to live here. Kick me out. And I didn't have anything. And so anyways, I went to, lived in student housing and that was the first time they randomly assign you like a roommate and it was like the son of a rich rancher because our fridge was like full of like all this meat stuff which is bad because it was the summer where florida got hit by like four hurricanes and all the meat went rotting oh yeah it was disgusting but i didn't know that there were people legitimately this makes me sound like an absolute moron but i didn't know that there were people that that only went to college because like my roommate didn't have a job he just like drank and like went to i'm like what else do you do yeah what this is crazy so i don't know where i was going with that you were saying you're taking a pause on read wise and multiple reads and you're like i gotta tell you how i found you oh okay so i again i'm a crappy school it's a state school in orlando you ucf i almost said ufc like we're it's mma that would have been probably more useful now so ucf and this is when facebook was coming out but facebook was only at the fancy schools yeah right it was very much of the fancy we didn't have facebook you know we had we had myspace and so remember like you'd go and they were like music playing on somebody's profile well people would list like their favorite movies and favorite books and i think i was like looking at a girl's probably profile yeah and under favorite books it said four hour work week i'm like that's a great title what is that and i immediately ordered it on amazon and then i started reading it obviously then that book you know inspired i don't know 25 million people maybe even more, but now, and then I start consuming all your stuff.

39:53So like I'd buy all your books. I bought your TV show. Oh, I appreciate that. Like sometimes I'll forget. Cause you go on like whatever. It's not called iTunes anymore. And like, I don't buy anything cause everything streams. I'm like Tim Ferriss right here. I know from the natural history museum back in the day. So I was obsessed with podcasts. I discovered in 2010 and before I started mine in 2016, I listened to thousands of them and you had one that changed my life, which was when you did jaco yeah and that was 2015 if i remember correctly and you told him to start a podcast and i think rogan told him to do it as well and he's like well if i got these two guys obviously he's smart just take the advice and i started listening to his podcast and he changed format but in the beginning it was just him doing he would read a first person account so an autobiography of somebody in combat and i could not believe what i was hearing and so what i would do is i'd listen maybe like a hundred of his episodes and maybe buy a dozen of the books.

40:46So you learn, even on the episodes, you don't read the book, you learn so much and you're inspired. And in the books, he kept introducing me all kinds of crazy stories. And I was like, Hey, a couple months later, and then obviously like I'd started reading biographies because your friend, Kevin Rose did this excellent interview, Elon Musk, we can talk about from 2012. And I was like, what if I do like Jocko's format, but I'm interested in like four things. I'm interested in reading history, podcasts, and entrepreneurship. And so if you look at it, it's like, just sits in between those four and i started doing that and essentially i was just imitating jaco and no one gave a shit for five and a half years yeah wow what a wild story so i want to dive into that the interview with jaco i i owe special thanks to i think it was peter tia who made the introduction and he said just trust me on this yeah and then didn't you just show up at your house or something uh yeah we we hung out in san francisco i remember exactly which coffee shop we went to and i made the mistake i wasn't even thinking properly i had a camo shirt on and i was like i can't believe i wore a fucking camo shirt to meet someone as legitimate as jaco willink and i was just like oh facepalm but we ended up connecting that was his first ever public interview which is wild and one of the best ones ever done oh i mean he really brought the heat he's my alarm every morning he's like get up i swear to god i'm not joking he's been my alarm for like half a decade yeah he yells at me and just i'm like extreme ownership still highly highly highly recommend to everyone and if you want to hear me and jaco go toe-to-toe not really toe-to-toe sort of shoulder to shoulder with a book we did musashi episode 100 episode 100 which was like four and a half five hours long yes going through this historical novel about the most famous swordsman in Japanese history.

42:35I read that because of the episode. Oh, so good. I think I read the audiobook first and it's like 60 hours long or something. It's really long. And keeping in mind, this was originally published in Japanese in a country of whatever the population is, like 120, 150 million. I think it sold like 80 to 100 million copies. I mean, something just completely insane as I might be getting that off, but the numbers are just astonishing as a ratio of the total population.

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44:15So five and a half years. How do you explain no one giving a shit for five and a half years? In other words, was there something that happened, a decision you made, something that changed things around the five and a half year mark? Was it a change in technology? Was it the ecosystem? What happened? Yeah. Literally, I was doing nothing different, changing business models. So you remember podcasting back in there because you were like one of the OGs. And you had this massive audience. Your blog was crazy. You were huge and still are. And I was none of those things. I was a weird introvert. I didn't have any social media.

44:49I didn't know anything about the internet. I don't know how to describe. I just would like to read and record a podcast in my kitchen on a$100 microphone. and i remember calling around and trying to figure out like what's the business model here and everybody's like oh it's ads i'm like oh that's great and so at the time there's like these ad networks essentially they just sell ads for you and they're like we'd love to work with you you just have to have 50 000 downloads per show and i go what i will never 50 000 like that i just it seemed like such a big number like it's just like that will never ever happen in the universe podcast that's still a big number yes but now like there's a million like how many people listen to tim ferris show and found like there's millions like millions and millions of people you know like over the course of a year or whatever so i was like oh my god like that's never gonna happen and so then you say okay well what can you do and like back then it'd be like affiliate so like remember audible scaled massively people don't realize how big businesses can get on the back of podcasts and how many have because like audible was it was on every it was dan carlin had one ad and it was an audible audible yes they were very smart about that yes yeah they've been able to change a lot of their economics yes for the better for audible and amazon since capturing more market share but they did an excellent job of marketing and advertising they were on every single podcast and so i did that and then there was this uh company called blinkist which was kind of like a summary 10 minute summary app for like business books non-fiction books and that blew my mind because you only got paid on sales and they would show you like not the people but like where the country was and i remember the first time somebody in japan bought i'm like i'm sitting in miami in my kitchen great acoustics by the way you idiot on a hundred dollar mic with no pop filter no nothing like there was nothing out there there's no like editing a podcast now with the script and all the ai tools it's like magic compared to what we had to do oh yeah and i was like, what?

46:46Somebody in Japan listened to this thing? This was crazy. So the one idea I had, I actually got the business model from a socialist podcast. Might've been the beginning of the troubles.

47:02So there was this for a long time, when I opened a browser, my homepage would be this thing called Graphtreon. Graphtreon is, they use the Patreon API and you see people building membership communities. And what was interesting about them is like, you know, people tell comic books, they would sell podcasts, they would sell newsletters, videos. And the most popular category was podcasts. I'm like, that's weird. And so at the time, this podcast called Chapo Trap House was the number one. And they had 25 ,000 people. This is on Patreon. Yes. And the only way you see this is because Grafton would aggregate the data for you and present it to you.

47:36And so at the time, I think they had 20 ,000 paid subscribers at at least$5 a month. And their business model is simple. Every other podcast you have to pay for. So you can listen to half them for free. If you want more, just pay five bucks a month and you can listen to it in a podcast player like anything else. You just have to go through the paywall. And every month I'm watching and the number gets higher and higher and higher. Now, if you pull up Grafton, I think the number one is Shane Gillis. I think he's got like 120 ,000 paid subscribers. So I was like, oh, there's like a business here where like, what if I had a subscription podcast?

48:08So it's one thing to pay five bucks a month for a comedy podcast. But my podcasts are about business. If there's ideas on this podcast that will make people more money, which is essentially what business education comes down to. Like you want to be more successful at what you do. Some kind of like, hopefully you see like a better economic outcome for yourself and your family. I was like, what if I could just sell subscriptions? I'm not selling enough audible subscriptions and blinkers, it's not going to happen. and my idea was like I think I was completely in love with podcasting as still I am it's like the only thing I think about I work on seven days a week it's completely taken over my life and my idea was like I don't even have to be wealthy I just have to do this for a living it has to come out of me it's like I have no control over this and I was like maybe I can make like dentist money and so my idea was like I bet you I can sell 3 ,000 paid subscriptions at a hundred dollars a pop make 300 grand a year and then I also have a lot of self-confidence like well if I can sell 3 ,000 I sell 20 ,000.

49:03And then like, maybe I can sell as many as Chapo can. And then I'm making 2 million. Like, this is the idea I had. And so my idea was like, the genius idea I had was like, hey, your most valuable asset you have, which is like, you know, your podcasts that are easy to share and everything else. Like, let's put a big wall in front of that. And so I put a giant paywall in front of it. And obviously it slows growth because how are you going to share the episode? The one benefit I had, which really kept me going, and I don't think I would quit anyways. I really I don't think I had any other option, was that, you know, we don't know who's going to listen to this one.

49:33We just see numbers on a screen. But with a subscription, you see the email address. And the emails were like the top founders and top VCs. And I had a very small audience. And one of them was our mutual friend, Patrick O'Shaughnessy. And I was a huge fan of Patrick. And I saw, I'm not going to repeat his email address here, but I know what the, I was like, I saw that come across. And there were so few. like I saw every single one. Yeah, sure. Because you're getting like 10 a day, I don't know, five a day or something like that paid. And I'm like, oh my God, Patrick Brawam. He didn't know who I was.

50:09He didn't know I was a big fan of his, didn't know anything. I had no followers. I think I had like 7 ,000 followers across like every one of my accounts. And I was like trying really hard back then. And he goes, I never find good podcasts to listen to. I think David Senders Founders Podcast is excellent. You should listen to it. And he linked to that one on S.A. Lauder. and I could not believe it because I was like, why do I have these mentions on Twitter? What is a mention? Like I don't get mentions. Like what is this new thing? I log into my email because I would, back then you would get an email every time you get a new page subscription and off of one tweet of an endorsement by people.

50:43This is why like you and Andrew are kind of like the male Oprah. And I mean that in the most, like, you know how much shit I've bought because you told me that it's good. Why? Because of the trust. People chase numbers. It's like that. You're not chasing numbers you're chasing trust and relationships i love what warren buffett said a brand is a promise the fact that you guys have such high standards i've never bought anything like how was tim thinking and so that's what makes you so valuable so patrick extended that trust to me where i logged into my email and you couldn't stop scrolling yeah you couldn't stop scrolling and so i screenshotted that because patrick's a good dude very smart too invest like the best yeah you you did an excellent episode with him for when you hit your 10 year anniversary oh yeah 10 years and then i was a huge nba fan and one of the the person that found me that's been really really helpful when i had like 1500 listeners this guy named sam hinkey former general manager of the 76ers very very intelligent like intense and kind of reclusive guy now it's really hard to get to and we had talked a bunch and he's just like i really think you have something here i think you're like what you're doing is important and i've tried to help you as much as i can and i knew him and patrick were friends and i screenshotted patrick's tweet i was like look what your friend patrick did sam didn't say anything he just put it and again patrick trusts Sam.

51:52And Sam's telling Patrick, this guy's worth your time. He puts us in a group chat. He goes, you two need to know each other. And I was like, Patrick, I'm a huge fan. Love to talk to you. And Patrick doesn't have a calendar. He's like, what about right now? And I was like, well, let me look at my calendar. Nothing, nothing, literally nothing. First time we talked was like an hour and a half. And we get to the end and he goes, I thought I was in the podcast. And then, uh, then we become friends and then I joined his network and then he just poured gasoline on a, on a promising spark. Was he the one who convinced you to remove the wall?

52:22No. So a friend of mine, again, this is the sad part about getting more following is so many of my close friends now came from like DMS and now you can't do that. You can't even look at mentions. Yeah. I'd be curious. It doesn't work. Yeah. It's like such a magical thing. And now because yeah. Well, once verified could be purchased, it, it destroyed the utility of meeting those people on it's like what Charlie Wunger said like if you have a bunch of raisins and just a few turds you still got turds and you could have 99 % of people are nice to you and then these psychos and you're like I can't read my mentions anymore can't check my dms like it's like sad but one of the I met a couple friends through them and again I was like grinding out hundred dollar subscriptions just like going to the factory every day trying to like you know sell a few more and one of my friends told me like what one of his friends company just paid to advertise on like one of the biggest business podcasts and the number was like what what did you say and then sam and other people like patrick you know they're just like this is kind of weird thing that you're doing like why don't you just sell ads like everybody else you know and i was like look at china they they're 90 subscription to your podcast like yeah but you're american you idiot and so i came up with all these like crazy because I'm, I can be very convincing in the opposite direction.

53:42Like it doesn't have to be a good idea. I can talk myself into really, I can talk myself into good ideas, but I can talk myself into bad ideas too. And so eventually I was, I called Patrick one day and I was just like, man, I am like fighting with like one hand behind my back. This is really, really difficult. I think I'm going to make an ad based version of founders. And he immediately is like, yeah, no shit. I've been telling you to do this forever. And then I was like, and I'd like it to be on your network. And he's like, ooh, that's interesting. And again, he's just a good dude. And he's like, yeah, but I own all podcasts on my network.

54:15He's like, will you sell me equity? And I don't know why I said this. I was like, no. It was like crazy. And I'd had all these acquisition and investment offers up until that point. Because obviously everybody in the audience likes to do deals. So they're trying to allocate capital all the time. That's their sport. Yeah. And I was like, no, no. It wasn't a business thing to me. It's like a special thing. It's like part of my soul. you know michael dell has this great answer when he was like fighting with car icon when you know and they're like why don't you just like start another company he's like i like this company first of all it has my name on it and he goes i'm gonna care about this company after i'm dead so that's how i feel like it's a rational love that i have for this and so um i was like uh i don't want to sell equity but he's like what do you want i was like i want you to help amplify my audience and connect me with first rate advertisers then we can just share ad revenue and one call he's like done and that like completely changed everything that was four years ago wow thank god for patrick huh oh for sure i talked to him almost every day we're like brothers i called him he's a great guy he's a very very good guy let's just actually i'm going to zoom into your sort of expertise subject matter for a second and then i want to talk more about podcasting but just so it doesn't become too much inside baseball.

55:28I do want to come back and talk about podcasting, but you had mentioned, you have mentioned a number of different names kind of at the top of your list, people to learn from. Where does Edwin Land fit into that? And who is Edwin Land? So Edwin Land is the patron saint of founders. So I want a picture of him in my house. Like, you know, the last supper would just be like Edwin Land in the middle, like Jesus. So again, I'm very interested in who influences the influencers and like, where do these ideas has actually come from. And, you know, Steve Jobs, if you have a Mount Rushmore of greatest entrepreneurs, like his face has got to be on it.

56:03Undoubtedly. He created the most successful product in history. I think he did it for the right reasons. I think he's a very fascinating person, obviously incredibly flawed as like a human, which he even said, you know, but what's fascinating is if you go back in, in which I do is like, when I read a biography, somebody, I will make a list going back to, you know, your outline of what I'll do in the front of the books, which you called what front matter front matter i didn't even know that term till now thank you yeah i will write down all the other founders or all the other people they'll talk about and so like i just did this with james dyson he's like obsessed with buckminster fuller and isambard kingdom brunel and jeremy fry and alex isaganis and all these people he just repeats them over and over again and you just realize oh he studied these guys and then took their ideas and said those ideas are good i'll use them and then makes 60 billion dollars or whatever his company's worth everyone should read about buckminster fuller i haven't read the book yet I read his ideas, but not the book that James read when he was in college.

56:58It's fascinating to me how it's almost all, and you usually find it early. I had lunch with Sam Zell. How did he make his money for people who don't know? People consider him an investor. He calls himself an entrepreneur. He called himself an entrepreneur. So what he's most well known for is in 2007, he sold, I think, the biggest real estate company in history for like$38 billion to Blackstone. And it kind of like tipped the very top of the market, but he just likes to essentially buy businesses, try to make them grow. He would sell some. So that's why people consider him an investor, but he considered himself an entrepreneur.

57:29By the time I met him, he had 61 years of experience as an entrepreneur. And my favorite entrepreneurs are, I love talking to these people that have 40, 50. I'm not interested in the startup founder at all. Like this 25-year-old kid that thinks he's smart. He doesn't have enough experience yet. Life is going to teach you what union, you know. People who've ridden like many multiple macroeconomic cycles who have had to contend with different challenges at different points in their lives, not just when they have no responsibilities and no dependence. Yeah. Et cetera, et cetera. Well, he says something in his autobiography that you were speaking to earlier.

58:03He's like, yeah, earlier in my life, my career fought my marriages and my career won. And that's why I've been married three times. The very recurring theme is that you look at life as everything that's not work as kind of an unpleasant distraction and you wonder why your relationship's broken because you're not spending any time there. Like, of course, it's the outcome. And they all make this mistake over and over again. So what's fascinating about this is we'll go back to Edwin Landon in a minute. Sam Zell in his biography, he's like, dude, I'm in college. This guy was making millions of dollars a year when he was in law school.

58:31That's how good of an entrepreneur he was from day one. Was that real estate? He was developing, I think, student housing at the time. I think the student housing, but he was also like doing deals. Like he's just a very gifted dealmaker. And you see this with Rick. Understanding like you'll bring something to Rick and you're like, oh, here's like 10 things that are important. Do you want to explain who Rick is briefly? So his name is Rick Gerson. One of my closest friends. You've known him for what? Yeah, I don't know. 15, 20 years. A long time. 15, 20 years. He's one of the most generous, thoughtful, and also simultaneously super intense people I know.

59:03He's a master of finance, came out of this just sort of amazing training environment. We can just call that what it is for now in simplicity and is one also of the best connected humans I've ever met. He identifies, no, there's just like one thing. He learned that from Sam. And then Sam learned that from this guy named Jay Pritzker. It's very fascinating. Chicago royalty. Yes. A hundred percent. I actually just backed, it's not a Kickstarter, but there's no biographies of Jay Pritzker. And so this guy named Rockwood Notes that essentially put his hat out. He's like, Hey, I want to do this, but I need to make at least, I think 40 ,000 a year.

59:39to write this book and he's selling like$800 or$1 ,000 a year subscriptions. I was like, yeah, I'll obviously sign up for this. Like I want a Jay Pritzker biography. So Sam Zell in his autobiography, he's like, yeah, I read this book by William Zeckendorf and it changed my life because there's one idea in this book. It's what Charlie Munger said. There's ideas worth billions in a$30 history book. And there was this thing called Hawaiian Technique. William Zeckendorf was like this real estate developer in New York and he came from nothing and then made a lot of money, then lost it all and then made a lot of money, then lost it all again and dies with no money.

1:00:08So you want to avoid that too. But he had this thing called the Hawaiian technique, which was, Hey, if you just parcel out a building and you sell the different parts to whoever values it more, you'll make more money. So like the lease is valued higher by these guys and the land is valued higher. And maybe the commercial real estate there or whatever, like he just would break it apart like Legos and sell it independently and make a lot of money. What Sam realized, he started using that real estate and he goes, Oh, this works in business too. So he'd buy a business and like, maybe you want the IP, maybe you want the talent, maybe you want the actual physical assets.

1:00:38And he'd do this over and over again. So I remember telling Sam to his face and Sam had no filter and he was exactly who you thought he was. If you watch any videos, he's just like this. And I go, yeah, I bought that book that you recommended. He goes, did you read it? I go, no. He goes, read it. Like he's got the gravelly voice, like read it. I was like, oh shit. Okay. And I read it as soon as I went home and started reading it. Like Sam Zill tells you to read a book, just read a book. But the reason I bring this up is because you'll see this over and over again. They'll find somebody early. So you can go back and read this Playboy interview just for the, I hope when you, it's just for the interview.

1:01:13It's not for anything else of Steve Jobs when he's 25, 26. And he's talking about the fact that we have the wrong role models and heroes as a society. We want to be, you know, now he'd say you want to be YouTube or something. we want to be athletes we want to be all these other things we should want to be edwin land and at the time edwin land was the founder of polaroid edwin lands in his 70s jobs meets him spends time with him a bunch of times okay edwin land at that time had the third most patents of any american in history i think it was thomas edison the second guy and then edwin land or maybe it's you know the first guy and then thomas edison but edwin land was up there and what you would realize is when Jobs goes on stage and says, hey, I wanted to build Apple.

1:02:01I wanted to build a company at the intersection of liberal arts and technology. And he has that. He literally puts the street sign up on there. That is literally a direct quote from Edwin Land. Edwin Land wanted to build a company at the intersection of liberal arts and technology. He wanted to make completely vertically integrated consumer products that were magical, that had a magical experience. in edwin land's case he invented the industry that he then comes to dominate there was no such thing as instant photography so when we're like how great is the iphone compared to one that came before it the difference is vast but not the same thing as me if you me and you were hanging out before edwin land was on this earth we take a picture at a party like how did it come out well we'll find out two weeks from now when we get back from kodak as opposed turns out it was a shot of my foot as opposed to like wait a minute and we're we're gonna see it right here in the polaroid And then dude, the amount of ideas that Jobs took from him, go look at the freaking tables that Jobs uses when he gives presentations.

1:02:59The actual table. It's the same table that Edwin Land gave when he gave presentations. So if somebody wants to study Edwin Land, where do they start? I read this biography of Edwin Land. I thought it was incredible. It's called Insisting on the Impossible. It's the most comprehensive biography of him. People read it. They're like, this book sucks. I think it's riveting. there is a book i think it's called land's polaroid that's the one i'd read because it's only 250 pages and it's written by a guy that worked for and with edwin land for like 20 years and i love those kind of things because you see him over a decade but my point being is like jobs is talking about this guy when he was 25 jobs knows he's dying when he's working with isaacson on the biography he knows he's dying and he's still talking about edwin land appears in isaacson's biography of jobs like six times why is he still talking about this guy how could you not be interested in understanding why what is it about this guy that he admired and liked yeah and he has a saying that he has a personal motto

1:04:22That I love and that I try to do. He goes, there's something they don't teach you at Harvard Business School, that anything worth doing is worth doing to excess. So how do you think about different archetypes, perhaps that's the best word to use, within the pantheon of successful entrepreneurs? The reason I ask that is that I imagine you get questions along the lines of, and I get questions like this also. So when you look across all of the biographies, what are some of the common patterns? Give me the top five, top six, and then people want to grab that recipe. But it could be like, just to use a sports analogy, it's like, all right, you're taking the stretching routine from LeBron James, the weight training routine from Arnold Schwarzenegger, and this, this, and this.

1:05:07You're grabbing habits from mutants that are in entirely different spheres of different bodies entirely, and then trying to cobble it together. it may not work right that's point number one probably won't work number two is that within the world of business advice whether it's autobiographies biographies interviews there's a lot that conflicts right so you have one person who says you know anything that's worth doing is worth overdoing and then there is like you can tell who the novice is because they do too much yes right and i'm wondering how you think of entrepreneurship for yourself in terms of modeling different people or taking advice because you have two people just to use a metric that's easy for everybody to wrap their head around like two billionaires and they give you diametrically opposed advice how do you personally pick there's no formula one of the things i'm like so thrilled with is the fact that like i've become friends with daniel act the founder of spotify and this is something we're actually trying to work on together because he brings us up he's Like we need alternative founder archetypes.

1:06:15And back up. First of all, like Daniel is an alien. There is a specific reason that I wanted him to be the very first guest on the new show is I'm able to like build relations with other people. Daniel's very special in the sense that like he's only a few years older than me, but he's so much more wiser than I am. I don't know how I can put this in words and make sense, but like, because he's founded and is still running$120 billion company. He's been running for 19 years, but he's to me is still so underrated. And the thing about Daniel is not only is he wicked smart, but he's given me some of the best advice and he does it in a very like reserved and very precise way.

1:06:55He's got very clear thinking and I just cannot get over like how generous he is with his time and his advice to me. And he told me one of the things that was really important. He said like an offhand comment, but he's like, you're really easy to understand so therefore you're easy to help and he's just like i know what is important to you and so therefore like you're easy to help and like you're easy to interface with and so his point is like every young founder thinks they have to be an elon or steve jobs and he's like but i'm not like an elon or steve jobs and the massive success is not only what he's done for spotify one of the best apps ever created i think they have the most i think there's only one other company in the world that has more paid subscribers than they do and that's Netflix, you know, but think about the way you feel when you get done using Spotify.

1:07:38And this is why I like all the top people there too. And they've also been working together for excessively long time. Gustav, Alex, Daniel, all of them is they want you when you're done using Spotify to feel good. If me and you spend an hour listening to our favorite music on Spotify, you feel great. You spend an hour listening to Tim Ferriss' podcast. You inspire, you feel great. An audio book now, you feel great. I spent an hour on TikTok or reels. I feel like shit. like twitter oh i can't like it just i feel like the anti-therapy but they're trying to put something if you want to send yourself backwards so i like what they're doing is there any other advice that has stuck from daniel to you and then i will not forget the archetype i will yeah i won't lose track of that so the archetype is i think is really important i think you'll really vibe with what his opinion on or his perspective on this is yeah daniel will tell you advice in like a where He's like a wise old man.

1:08:31I don't know how to describe it. So one thing is implied and never explicitly stated is he just doesn't feel he has any, like there's no ceiling on what he can achieve or what he can learn, the effect he can have in the world. And when you spend time with him, that is transferred to you. And it's like one of the most important things. And I don't even know if I told him this. I had like tears in my eyes thinking about it. I remember like hanging out with him in Stockholm and, you know, he's done phenomenal stuff with Spotify. One of the best apps ever created at best businesses. and he's like wildly successful as an investor too and so i remember asking him this is the funniest thing ever here and i go were you always interested in investing because i knew his story like we talked a lot about this and he goes no i didn't even know anything about it i started learning i go when did you start learning he's like 2018 i go how did you start learning he goes patrick's podcast and so he would just listen to people he's like i like that idea i'll take that idea oh i don't like that idea i don't like that at all i'll avoid that and the way patrick describes it's like out of anybody you know daniel has the ability to apply what he's learning faster anybody else and at a grander scale he's also a very very very good systems thinker so he's not at a risk of cobbling together this sort of camel that is a horse designed by committee yeah that has a bunch of inherent problems and conflicts within it right like he'll he'll be able to figure out how to put pieces together from first principles that function well as a whole.

1:10:02Let me tell one other piece of advice that he gave me and he tells it in a story form. This is why he's like the wise old man. And essentially it was, remember why people love you. You sit in a room and you read all the time and then you make this thing on the other side that educates and inspires us and gives us energy. And as soon as you stop doing that and you start saying yes to all these distractions, and I don't even know if like, I think we might've talked about this in the episode we did that comes out in a few weeks, but he tells it in a story and he tells a story from another person.

1:10:32So he's not telling you, David, go do this. He's like, let me tell you about this little genius or not little genius. This guy's really impressive. Look at what he's accomplished and everything else. And then the story will hit you like hours later. And he's like, oh yeah, we've invited him to the conference all over time. I've invited him to visit and I keep hearing no. And I'm like, oh, he's like telling me you're saying yes to too many things. The magic that you have is because you say no. And once you start saying yes, and you're at every conference, you're traveling around, you're doing all this other stuff, the magic disappears.

1:10:59I'm curious what you think are some of the different archetypes, because I think of the 100 plus startups that I've invested in since 2008. And there's a lot of variability. You've got the engineer, let's call it the engineer founder, right? Somebody like Toby of Shopify or Luis Van An of Duolingo. then you've got you know sort of like genius operator negotiator warrior like a travis kalanick right very different personalities very different superpowers and you just go down the list and you see some people come from like a finance numbers kind of like spreadsheet god perspective and like they just have an analytical advantage right it's very comparable to investing in some ways looking at the investing world they have this analytical advantage let's just call it and i was trying to pick out what if anything might be commonalities because you also have like the crazy artist who then figures out how to harness some of their superpower and it strikes me that there are at least two that immediately jump to mind one is longer term time horizon those are the people i'm obsessed with like the jeff bezos type of mindset where it's like if you have the exact same toolkit the exact same competency out of the box genetically you're built exactly the same as someone else but you are able to think and plan longer term it's just it can be a huge advantage second is something that you mentioned where daniel was saying to you like this is the magic so just remember this is the magic yeah when other opportunities other shiny objects show up because they will, even in very early stages.

1:12:51And if you deviate, it's incredibly easy to sort of self-immolate if you lose track of that. And you see that a lot when CEOs get replaced, sometimes founder CEOs, sometimes they need to be replaced. But what else would you add to that? Or how would you expand on any of it? Just look at the founders of some of the biggest companies in the world now. They would go to war against each other. So think about Oracle, Microsoft. you can't think of two different founder archetypes than bill gates and larry ellison larry ellison's like i'm a sprinter i have intense very intense periods of work weeks at a time months at a time and then i need to go on my boat with a bunch of italian models right this is what i have to live my life bill gates is you know we'd be walking into this room right here and his feet would be underneath his desk he's sleeping for three hours he's getting back up and he's going back on the He's a grinder.

1:13:41And then you have, I've been trying to name some of these and I haven't done this yet. But the problem is I never write anything. This is all like improv, you know? One of them is like the anti-business billionaire. And so in that category, it's like these people are so obsessed about one thing and that's the quality of the product they're making. They make non-financial decisions. Like Steve Jobs making sure that the inside of the Mac looks beautiful, even though you can't open it up and it costs more money. He doesn't care. He wants the best product. James Dyson's like this. He's an anti-business billionaire.

1:14:12Yvonne Chouinard, founder of Patagonia, anti-business billionaire. These guys, they're obsessed with two things, quality of the product that they're making and retaining control of their company over the long term. And the funny part about that, the reason I call them anti-business billionaire is because if you make the world's best product, right, and you retain control over your company, you wind up with the money anyways. Yeah. I can think of a few people, I mean, within my portfolio who retained a lot of their equity at least, and that's it, Which is kind of preserving the magic, right? In terms of the best product.

1:14:39Well, look at everybody's like, look at what having Larry Ellison right now. It's like, yeah, I could be wrong, but I think Oracle raised 32 million of equity in our IPO and no more after that. And then the guy would refuse, even when they were almost going out of business in 1990, he still wouldn't sell. They're like, sell your equity. Like, no, it's like, it might be worth nothing. He just wouldn't sell it. And then he's buying back stock. So he owns, I think 40, I think he went down to 24%. Now he's back to like 41 % of Oracle. The company's 50 years old, like 45 years old. I think it was like 30 something when he founded the company.

1:15:07He's just an anomaly. And then you have people like Elon, where it's just like, I'm going to run. I wouldn't even think that's possible. How the hell do you run seven companies at the same time? You can barely manage three employees. I don't know. Yeah, exactly. I don't have a good answer. That is the point. I do think Daniel hit on something that no one else has put in front of me. It's like the people are going to dominate. Obviously, Elon's the most famous entrepreneur in the world. But even like Bezos is very different. And then you have these people that some of the people just like to make money.

1:15:36That is their scoreboard. This is another thing I learned from Michael Dell. There's two things. One thing you just said, protecting the magic. The advice that Dell gave me when I had dinner with him, and he does this in story form too, because that guy's been running his business for 41 years, 41 years. It's insane. And his whole thing is just like, you're not going to be taken out by competition. You're going to sabotage yourself. Entrepreneurs sabotage themselves. And the amount of people that were doing the same thing I was doing, and they were ahead of me. This is Dell talking. They were ahead of me.

1:16:04But then they got the 500 million year revenue. And they're like, I have a house on Lake Austin now. They're in the same city. They're doing the same thing as him in the same city. And they're smoking them. They're ahead of them by like a few hundred million. Right. And they're like, oh, I can chill now. No, you can't. Because you got Michael Dell right across the river and he's not going to chill. That guy has no chill. I heard he's got this wonderful house in Hawaii. His son was telling me about this. And I was like, we were in Austin in July. You know. It's like, what are you doing here? And Michael's answer is simple.

1:16:33He goes, I love my business and my business is here. He wasn't being mean to me. He was like, that's a stupid question, David. Like I'm working. I love what I do. This is what I'm doing. So one thing from his autobiography though, is that I used to say it only works if you build a business that's authentic to you. And this is why I asked you about your inner monologue earlier, because I really feel the reason people do their best work usually later in life in business is obviously more experience, network, finances, everything else. but I think because they know themselves better. I think me and you, if we would have met 10 years ago, we would be different people and we also wouldn't know each other, like know ourselves as much as we do now.

1:17:08We're like, I think I've built a business and you have too, based on what I know about you, completely authentic to you. And that's the only way it's gonna work over the long term. And I used to say authentic and then in Michael Doe's autobiography, which he narrates, by the way, the audible is excellent. I listened to it three times before I read it to do the episode on it. And there is a guy named, I think Lee Walker, who Michael brought in when Michael was 21. He was in his 40s. And he was like an older, wiser man. And he had to quit after four years. He's like basically running the company with Michael.

1:17:38And he's like, we're taking on IBM with$1 ,000 of working capital from a shitty office in like the industrial part in like Austin, right? IBM's the biggest company in the world. It's the first, I didn't know this. It was the first company hit$100 billion market cap. And like my back hurts, I'm losing hair. I can't sleep. I got digestive issues. He's like, Lee's dead after four years. And he goes, and Michael's excited. It's invigorated him. And he gave me the line. He goes, because he built a business that was natural to him. I'm dying and he's thriving because it's natural to him and it's not natural to me.

1:18:12And I think that's the key, man. People are like, oh, I'm going to imitate X, Y, and Z. It's like, no, no, no. You should be copying the how, not the what. You don't copy what they did. You copy how they did. And then you just take the little ideas that make sense to you. So you asked like, how am I applying this for my homework? I am either completely apathetic and ignore something or completely obsessed. It's zero or a hundred and nothing in the middle. So the reason I love Munger because Munger gave me really like Munger and your friend of all, I had a big role in this too, gave me the kind of the blueprint where he's just like, Hey, we found that oftentimes Munger has this line that oftentimes the winning system in business goes ridiculously far maximizing and are minimizing one or a few variables.

1:18:53And he use Costco like the example. And then he has another line, find a simple idea and take it seriously. Sharing lessons from biographies of great people is a very, very simple idea. Doing it for nine years, working 70 hours a week at it, building systems for it, redoing it over and over again is not, that's the serious part. His other quote that I've already shared earlier, there's ideas worth billions and a$30 history book. That's another idea. That's maybe why the work would be valuable and attract the audience that it could attract. another idea from him you want to maneuver yourself into an area that you're intensely interested in that just being a fanatic like a sam walton or like a jim sinagal or like a soul price is just jeff bezos very helpful these are fanatics they're intensely interested in what they're doing that is worth a lot of money and i've become friends with michael ovitz who's also one of the first guests on my new show and his whole thing is like you cannot fight against your job that's one of the best pieces of advice he's like people fight against their job all the time and they lose you have to find something that you're intensely drawn to it so i have a couple of bullets you should explain who michael ovitz is why don't you do that first and then i'll i'll just hop to two questions related to michael ovitz specifically michael ovitz there's a shark he's one of the most intense people he i think he's 80 by now so rick and i live very close to each other in miami okay and we always have breakfast at the same spot that i'm not going to say publicly.

1:20:16Yeah, good idea. And so we're hanging out. To a disinformation campaign. It's always at Denny's. Moon's over Miami.

1:20:27And so his phone's on the table and it rings and it says Michael Ovitz. And I gasp. I'm like, oh! Because I read Michael Ovitz was the most powerful man in Hollywood at one time. He had like 75 % market share, 90 % market share. He was the most powerful agent. He's the founder of CAA, which still exists to this day. And I'm like, oh God, I know who that is. I've done episodes of this guy. And so he picks up and they've been friends for like 20 years, 25 years, something like that. And he goes, hey, I'm sitting here with somebody you might know. Have you ever heard of David Senra and the Founders Podcast?

1:21:01And Michael pauses. He goes, I listened to four of them yesterday. He was on his boat in St. Barts. That's incredible. No, but this is how, he's a shark and a killer. He's on his boat in St. Barts. He's like studying Rockefeller and Vanderbilt. and he's like quoting stuff from the episode. And so we wind up having dinner. Rockefeller, one of the biggest sharks to ever live. Oh, 100%. And so we wind up having dinner and this is one of the things I asked him, you know, because his whole thing is like, you're going to run through, you know, you're going to meet thousands of people in your life. He's going to definitely meet way more people than I will because I'm an introvert.

1:21:31And he used to like call 300 people a day because he was like kind of running Hollywood. But his ovates' advice to me was just like, you know, you're going to meet thousands of people in your life. And what I would recommend is just spend all the time him with the handful that really matter and he's like for me rick is one of those people and i go why and obviously you know he's like oh he's intelligent and basically but he's like because he tells me the truth that's one thing you can rely on rick for i'm not sure he can help himself but it's a conscious decision but no but in general his whole point is like when you get to be as famous and as well known as wealthy as ovates everybody's going to kiss your ass everybody wants something from you they want to either want to tell you how great you are or they want money from you or they want you to sell, like buy something.

1:22:14And he's just like, there's so few people that you know that like truly love you for you and don't want anything from you. They just want to be friends and they will tell you the truth. And this is the very dangerous thing that really successful people do. They surround themselves with people that don't tell them the truth. This is an idea I got from Jim Casey, the founder of UPS. He realized that there's this weird like capture if you only talk to your top executives. So let's say you have 10 top executives and then they distribute everything else for the company, they work themselves as a position where they have the ear of the king and you hear nothing good.

1:22:47So he's like, I don't want to talk to them at all. He would stop and talk to every single, he'd make his driver stop every single time they see a brown truck. And he would talk to the people doing the actual service. Because he wouldn't get the bad news. They would tell them what actually is going on, what is actually happening. And the crazy, impressive founders that I've been able to spend a lot of time with. Most of them are 60, 70, 80 years old. Those are my favorite. I love them. They're not in their office. They're in their warehouses. They're on the factory line. They're in their stores.

1:23:16They're constant contact with the customer and the person delivering the service to the customer. They're not looking at a white board with their executives. They're very practical, non-theoretical people. I think it's really important. So yeah, I think in my own thing, it's just like, I like to be obsessed and focus on one thing. I don't like to multitask. So therefore, you know, every single publisher is like, write a book. You should do this. I'm like, everybody says, hey, I like X, so do Y. And I'm like, but then if I do Y, I don't do X. And so my whole thing is just like very simple. I just want to do one thing relentlessly.

1:23:50So related to Michael Ovitz, there are a few notes here that I think relate to the new show and the interview you did with him. And I want to ask about two of them. So the first is the benefits of low introspection. And the second, so you can tackle these in either order is this can't be my life in quotation marks is a powerful motivator. Can you expand on those? So this can't be my life is a very powerful motivator. You see it over and over again. I think the sense of drive, like the way you grew up on Long Island, the way I grew up, I was like, I'm not going out like this. I don't care what I have to do.

1:24:25I'm not going to replay this movie. No way. I think in many cases, seeing examples of what you don't want your life to be. is more powerful than seeing what you want it to be. I think maybe that one comes first, and then you start to see, oh, actually, this is the path I want to go down. There's an expression in Japanese, which is hanmen kyoshi. Hanmen is like opposite side. Kyoshi is teacher. And it's someone who teaches you by showing you what not to do. Yeah, I would say my family definitely. A lot of those. Yeah, you just see this over and over again. And so with him, he grew up in the valley.

1:24:58He could see where he wanted to be. He could see the mansions of Beverly Hills. He saw the contrast between, this is what I'm worried about with social media. It's like, before we grew up, what do you see? You basically see like, oh, that's a nice neighborhood over there. That's kind of a bad neighborhood. Now you see the richest people in the world every day and the poorest people in the world. You're exposed to nothing but extremes, which is like we've never, in human history, we've never been exposed to that. And what is the long-term effects of that? I have a teenage daughter now. and i think there's like a lot of negativity of this like you only see the most beautiful people if you were just in a town like where we grew up you might see a really beautiful woman you're not seeing them all day long like these it's just like this unfair barrage yeah a barrage of like you know unattainable standards so with him he was like fiercely driven to succeed and one of my favorite parts of his book you know the guy now wildly successful but even before that like when he left, I think it was William Morris Agency, he starts CIA, they start to have a little success.

1:25:57He winds up buying a house in Brentwood and it was like$650 ,000, right? Which is fantastic, but nothing compared to what's going to happen over the next decades in his life. But he just woke up every morning. He's like, I can't believe I live in Brentwood. I can't believe this. I did this. And then once you start seeing results, the grind becomes very addictive. And he, if you add what's the sarcotype? Grinder. I'm going to throw sheer hours and energy. He's also an amazing, one of the best salespeople alive, very charismatic. He's got a lot of superpowers. I actually met Marc Andreessen. I asked him this because Marc Andreessen's on record saying that when he started A16Z, they essentially copied CAA.

1:26:38I think they brought Michael Lovitz in. They did. They both talk about this. And I asked him, I go, what do you think Michael's superpower. He's like, he's the world's greatest agent and therefore the greatest salesperson, world's greatest salesperson. And so that's like one example from his book is just like, this can't be my life. I don't want to be like this. I'm going to do direct all my energy and do something different. Now, the low introspection thing is I'm not a controversial person. I'm just sharing lessons from history that I read in a book. You don't have to listen. You don't have to pay attention.

1:27:05It doesn't matter. But when I bring up the fact that a lot of these people have low or zero introspection, meaning that when they find what they want to do in life, they wake up and they know exactly what they're doing that day. Sam Walton was not waking up like, what are my feelings like today? What should I do? Should I think about the meaning of life? He's like, no, I found Walmart. I made one Walmart. I'm going to make another one and another one and another one. I'm going to make every Walmart better and better and better. And I think having low introspection after you found your mission in life.

1:27:34And this is the sad thing i think most people never find their mission i know i found my mission i don't think about what should i do today we're going to talk obviously about the new show we've been alluding to it and mentioning some of the guests but before we get there so you're about to meet michael and he had been ostensibly on vacation but he's listening to yeah your episodes on rockefeller and others yeah do you recall any of the other episodes the vanderbilt one stuck up in my mind i mean we text about them i don't remember the vanderbilt's the one that really the rockefell and the vanderbilt the vanderbilt especially because vanderbilt's like uh what i say is like i'm kind of telling the same story over and over again i think it's more like church than it is like just like i went to church i grew up as a fundamentalist christian like we met together with like believers on regular intervals on wednesday and sunday and it's not like the preacher got up there and it's like hey we talked about that jesus guy enough we're gonna move on to somebody else.

1:28:31Like we literally just go to the same book over and over again. And so I always say there's like always a historical equivalent to anybody we're dealing with today or in the past. But Vanderbilt to me is not, there's not like an entrepreneurial historical equipment. He's like Putin or something. When he died, he controlled 5 % of the money supply. One out of$20. So I guess the reason I was asking about the episodes and I don't know Michael, so this is not a judgment or criticism of Michael at all, but I suppose if you believe that there is a value to low introspection for the purposes of building a business, which I would agree, right?

1:29:08Is there not a risk? And I have not listened to those particular episodes on Rockefeller and Vanderbilt, but I've read a bit of the history. These are not necessarily people you automatically want to model everything in all of. No, I think Obitz would. This is, I suppose, my question is like, is there a risk of ending up sort of amoral immoral or like sociopathic if you one of the things you optimize for is low introspection because or maybe that's just hardwiring frankly and you're just not inclined to do it because that's a great question because this archetype does exist just like the rape pillage destroy archetype is an archetype they're overrepresented in entrepreneurship why because if entrepreneurship done correctly yield the greatest material rewards in human history so of course it's going to be full of psychopaths and sociopaths like i don't know if you know the numbers on this what they assume five percent of the population sociopathic or something like that is that you know it's something i don't know the number so let's just make it up it's five percent of the general population it's probably you know five times that of entrepreneurs and investors and people like this or anybody political power power in general this is why i think the work of robert caro is so interesting and i always make the argument that like there should be a law the only one law that I would foist upon society is that there's only one person allowed to write a thousand page biography.

1:30:26I have no problem reading. Almost none of the books that I've read that are a thousand pages needed to be a thousand pages. They just didn't know what to put in there. Robert Caro is the only one that should be able to write long biographies because everything that he has in there should be in there. I think he's a master of his craft. He's the best to ever do it, but he's saying, I'm not writing biographies. I'm writing about how humans accumulate and then wield power. And I did it first on a local level in New York with Robert Moses, and now I'm showing what happens on a national level. And guess what?

1:30:52LBJ would sacrifice everything to get what he wanted. Personal ethics, his relationships, everything. Stealing elections? Yeah. This is the wonderful thing about studying history. History doesn't repeat, human nature does. So if you just read, me and you both love Will and Ariel Durant, read their history of human civilization, read their 100-page book, Lessons of History. The same stuff repeats over and over again. So when it comes out and you see this on the news, like, oh, of course no one stole the election. It's like in all different countries, stealing elections is an American pastime. Just read Robert Carls and it could be like a little, you know, Senate election in Texas.

1:31:27Exactly. If you don't think that - The missing ballot box. Yeah. It's just like, it's, the line I have about this is from Will Durant, where he's just like, in every age, humans are dishonest and governments are corrupt. It's one of my favorite quotes from lessons of history. In every age, nothing that we're doing is new. We're just, we're telling the same stories over and over and over again. You see the same people over and over again. So yeah i'm sure there's a ton of people that read these biographies and i listen to my podcast that are absolute psychopaths i don't think obits is a psychopath he's an extreme winner he wants to win the line may be pretty thin yeah of course of course i'm not saying he is by the way uh sociopath is just that just like you were mentioning you can convince yourself of a bad idea very compellingly just as you can a good idea it's like when you start to get into the gray waters of morality like as winning compounds upon winning oftentimes the person who cares less about other people wins if they can discard that consideration 100 that's been true in the past true today will be true that's the point that this is why it's so interesting i look at this as almost i think something i didn't even understand is i have the ability to like step outside of myself and i'm kind of like a casual observer of human nature i want to ask you and then i'm going to hop to questions about podcasting on the new show about how you think about assessing leaders entrepreneurs reading biographies or autobiographies and figuring out what people claim as things that help them succeed to succeed actually help them versus hindering them in other words like what are the because of versus the in spite of?

1:33:09So for instance, if high disagreeability or low agreeability is common across a lot of founders, to what extent can you point to that as one of the causal factors for their success as opposed to just an emergency break they had on causing all sorts of problems that they managed to overcome? So they succeeded despite. How do you think about separating those two things? One of the things I love about James Dyson, who is a hero of mine. It's a person on the planet that I want to meet that I haven't met. The number one is him. And what I love about him is how stubborn he is because I see myself in that.

1:33:43And it turns out his stubbornness worked out for him because he had the right idea. But this is where it goes back to you can't blindly copy. There's no formula. There's no formula. There's no track. So it's like he's stubborn on an idea that was a great idea. It just needed more time. You could be stubborn on an idea that's terrible and going nowhere. and then you did the exact same thing for the exact same amount of time. And on the other side of that, he has one of the most valuable private health companies in the world and you have a miserable life. There's no answer to that. There's nobody coming to save you.

1:34:10None of this shit works if you can't trust your own judgment and figure things out. That's why when people are like, oh, more people should be entrepreneurs. I don't know about that. I want to like encourage the people that think they can do it to do it. But I think in many cases, most people should work. They should choose a different path because it's very, very risky. You know, like Todd Graves, the Raising Canes guy I told you about, right? His whole thing is entrepreneurs should have higher risk tolerance. James Dyson, multiple times, risked every single possession he had to chase his dream.

1:34:41He signed over his house multiple times. If he failed, they could have been homeless. It worked out for him. Todd Graves had this crazy way to finance the first 28 Raising Canes, where essentially he goes to an angel investor. He goes to Tim Ferriss and says, hey, you going going to give me$200 ,000 loan. Okay. It's going to be subjugated loan to the bank. I'm going to guarantee you a 15 % return on the$200 ,000 for X amount of time. You say, oh, that sounds great. You're paying me 15 % on my 200 grand, but you don't get any equity. I take that 200 ,000 equity that I have from this document from Tim.

1:35:14I go to a bank and say, this is as collateral, loan me the other 600 grand or whatever the number is to get this up and running. And he did that for 28 times. And he's like, oh, I'm rolling, rolling, rolling. Leverage up to his eyeballs. What's the problem? I open up every time I open a new Raising Cane's, there's a line at the door from day one. Well, then a little thing called Hurricane Katrina comes and guess where? 28 of his restaurants are all in Louisiana and he almost died. And he says, like, if I didn't come out of that, there would be no story. It'd be gone. And then I guess the second part of, I don't know why this popped in my mind, but you know, when you're reading history, right?

1:35:48We're reading about stories that happened a hundred years ago, 200 years ago, 50 years ago. Some of them are from that person's own mouth. Like imagine if you tell your own life story, here's the good part. You're going to like, you're going to hide the bad you're human. And so people are like, well, how do you know if what you're reading is true? The line is, it's like, if you think the news is fake, wait, you read history. It's like, it's just old news. I don't know. My idea is like, we're not taking a test at the end of this. I'm not saying like, did this actually happen in 1912? It's like, is the idea behind what he's doing a good idea for me.

1:36:21And so like the example of Rockefeller, right? That you see that Elon used where like Rockefeller tells the story. I don't know if it actually happened, but he tells the story where they would have to solder closed the barrels that they transport oil in. And he goes up one day and he says, how many do you drops of solder to use? He's like, I use 40. It's like, have you ever tried 38? He's like, no, we've never tried 38. can you try 38? They tried 38, it leaks. Okay. Try 39. They tried 39, doesn't leak. That one drop of solder at the time of the business saved them, you know,$25 a year, business grows and compounds for the next three decades.

1:36:56And now he's saving like, you know, hundreds of thousands from that. Did that actually happen? I don't know, but that's a good idea to find the limit to actually, Hey, maybe I should control my costs a little bit more. Maybe I should, I need to actually see if I can do this in a more efficient way. I don't know if it happened. I just want the idea behind it. Yeah. Just to reiterate what you're saying, it's tough to separate the fact from fiction, right? And then sometimes this is actually why I just read fiction. So I'm like, there still are truths to extract. There are principles that you can extract from, this is now cliched because it's been made into a popular movie, but Dune or Stranger in a Strange Land.

1:37:32Like you can actually pull a lot from just straight up fiction. and then when it comes to the business side you know because i've read so many not as many as you but tons of business books still have my early copies and my notes from those books with losing my virginity richard branson early evan chouinard yeah i think it's let my people go surfing etc still have all those books and when you look at part of the reason also that i like early biographies so let's just say like hard drive oh first on bill gates versus like a later i don't want to say sanitized but let's say sanitized version where i'm going through this right now right or it's like look warren buffett love the guy he's turned himself into like the aw shucks grandpa neighbor who takes this garbage out killer a robe he's a killer and i remember reading i think it was the making of an american capitalist yes way back in the day and the story that stuck out and I hope I'm not inventing this.

1:38:30I don't see why I would, but his routine was to go home, walk upstairs and read. Step over his children. Exactly. So his son who's fallen down the stairs is like sprawled out like a chalk outline in a crime scene, steps over his injured son to go upstairs to do more reading of S1 filings or whatever he was doing. You bring up something interesting. This is why I don't believe them when they say they have regrets at the end of their life. So if I read Making American Capitalist, right? Excellent book. I think that's actually the best biography. You read Snowball after his wife leaves him, right?

1:39:08And he says, the biggest mistake, if I could go back and live life again, the biggest mistake I would do, I would change whatever I need. So I think her name was Susie didn't leave me. No, I don't believe you. I don't buy it. No, none of them. When they all say like Leonardo DiVecchio, the guy that started Luxottica. Yeah. I think I had to like translate it from Italian. Some of these biographies are in different languages. And so again, go back to differentiation. What can I do that no one else is doing? We've translated the Red Bull book from German. Which was awesome. I listened to that. I appreciate that.

1:39:37But he gets to the end of his life. He's an orphan. Dad dies young. What was the company again? Luxottica. So they essentially monopolize glasses, everything. So Mark Zuckerberg just invested, I think, three and a half billion dollars for like 3 % of the company. Wow. And so for essentially 60 years, he does this slow methodical rockefeller-esque march through the entire industry till he controls every single component of eyeglasses sunglasses everything it's like completely dominant and he gets the end of his life he's like oh yeah like the one regret i have is like he's married multiple times i think there's like a 50 year gap between like his oldest son and his youngest son so it's like he's like a wild boy but he's like the one regret i have is like i didn't spend more time my kids no that's not you wouldn't change a thing it's not true it's not true you could i don't think they could to that's what what you just said it's like maybe they didn't have a choice maybe it's just hardwired and so i'm going through that really right now because this week i read source code which is bill gates autobiography about the first 20 years of his life his version i reread hard drive overdrive which is also written by the same guys that wrote hard drive And then I pulled all my highlights and notes for Paul Allen's description of Bill Gates and Paul Allen's autobiography.

1:40:52There is a vast difference between what's in source code and what is in hard drive. And it's obviously hard drive is more accurate. It's written right after it happened. Bill is not the 70-year-old man he is now. And, you know, he's in a different world. But watch his interviews. Watch the documentary on Netflix about him. He's like, I was hardcore. That was my advantage. He was. Killer. Yeah. And also, a lot of the questions that I ask myself when I'm reading any nonfiction, I shouldn't say any nonfiction, let's say biographies where I'm hoping to model something. One is like, is or an autobiography.

1:41:26Like, okay, what's the bias here? Are there any particular biases I should be aware of? Okay. Is anyone in like reputation rehab mode before they die? Okay, let's keep that. Sure. What type of survivorship bias might there be? Who tried the same? Do we have 99 out of 100 who tried something similar and failed? let's take a look at the tape okay luck is luck luck's everywhere right so the fact that bill gates ended up with a computer when he ended up with the computer is just like you know timing i think timing timing is a huge piece by the way these are not all reasons to discount anything but i just want to mention a couple of that i try to think of the other i try to think of because i might try to mimic someone in sports right if i'm trying to learn something new or language learning or whatever it might be what is trainable and what is not trainable because i've heard these stories from people who know bill gates and they're like well we were going to go on this like short vacation in fill in the blank i can't remember costa rica right and they're going to go on a birding trip in the morning it's just like a two three hour thing with a world-class birding guide and they do the trip and the night before bill has stayed up and read five books on birding memorized them yeah seemingly without trying and is basically having like a peer-to-peer discussion with the birding expert as they're going through the rainforest.

1:42:44That's not normal. No. Right? That's like, I'm going to do calf raises to make my body look like Michael Phelps. Like, no, you're not. That's not going to work. So it's like, when I'm looking for people to model, I'm trying to find people who have hopefully a comparable composition of strengths that I can amplify in myself or that are coachable. Right? And so the question after all that is, does anyone stand out to you of the biographies or people you've met where you're like in terms of someone doing the most with the hand they've been dealt right so maybe they're not so not a freak of nature like they're not a freak of nature necessarily because there are freaks of nature among the people that you study the people i study but it's like all right these people might have a few strengths but they're not complete freaks they're not the usain baltz of fill in the blank.

1:43:34And man, oh man, did they play their hand well. They're just so good at playing the hands that they are dealt. That person. Does anybody stick out? Sam Walton. Sam Walton's one of my favorite entrepreneurs. If you really think about it, he had this crazy thing, this crazy idea. I don't even think, he obviously didn't know what Walmart was going to turn into, but one of the ways they avoided all the inheritance tax is if you give away the equity before it's valuable. So if you look at, the last time I checked, if you look at all of the Walmart equity owned by the family. That means the wealth that came from his idea would be like 432 billion today if it was consolidated in one person, right?

1:44:14And when you study Sam, he's like obviously smart, but he was just like, he didn't really know what he was going to do. Then he had this idea of like, well, maybe I can be good at retailing. And then he starts out in Newport, Arkansas with one store. And this is what drives me insane about the modern day entrepreneurship industry. He's like, everybody, they start out with like weird goals. Like I'm going to build a trillion dollar company or I'm going to be the fastest person to a hundred million ARR. And you're just like, okay, but none of these people talk like that. Like you're doing it for the wrong reason.

1:44:42So you probably won't get there if that's just the case. Like what Jerry Seinfeld says, like if you're just doing it for the money, you only get so far. And with him, he was just like fascinated by stores and trying to make it a little bit better every day. Well, it was on vacation, right? He would, didn't matter where he was, he would go into retail store. His kids told the story. It's just like vacation was essentially driving to different towns and checking out different retailers. And so, but the reason, the most important thing about his story, one of the most important things is this idea to go slow now so you can go faster later.

1:45:13And so you're like, okay, the beginning of his career, he's like in one tiny store. I think they start doing like 25 ,000 a year, 25 ,000 a year in revenue. I think he gets up to like 250 grand. Took him five years, but for five years, you just had one story. He was like experimenting, understanding, trying to figure out what the different parts of retail are because there's no such thing as discounting and wholesale and all the other stuff that he was doing that he's going to do later on. And then what's fascinating is later in his career, after Walmart, he then takes that idea. He goes and fits the sole price who we mentioned earlier.

1:45:41He takes that idea. He's like, oh, this is a great idea. I'm going to do this. He does Sam's Club. And in that same five-year period, so you have the first five years, one store separated by maybe 40 years in the career. That second five years when he's starting something else, in that five-year period, he doesn't have one store. He winds up doing, I think, a hundred stores and like 7 billion in revenue from this new category because you see him learning. And so like, yes, I think he was brilliant. He's not memorizing five books overnight and doing that. This is like mine. One of the reasons that I do what I do is because Munger became a hero and he talks over and over again about being a biography nut, that he read more biographies than anybody else.

1:46:19I got to spend three hours inside of his house, right? Talking to him right before he died. I don't care how many biographies I read, how many books I read for the rest of my life, I cannot have a brain like him. I will never have a brain like him. Anybody at 99 is going to have some level of cognitive decline. You know what one of my first thoughts was about an hour and a half in the conversation with him was this guy had to be terrifying when he was 60. Terrifying. Terrifying. Think about this. Everybody that I know, when I get to meet fancy people, I always ask them, who's the smartest person you know?

1:46:51What's the best business you know? And it can't being like Apple, like these interesting weird things. And every single person that says, if they have no Buffett and they don't tell you it's Buffett, they're wrong. And Buffett chose this guy to let him mold and shape his thinking. What does that tell you about his intelligence? And I remember, because this is what I do, I'm like laying bricks every day. I don't think I'm a brilliant person. I just like show up every day and don't quit. And so once I find Munger, I read literally not, oh, I read some of the books. I read every single book on Munger.

1:47:21then I reread my highlights which like over and over again so my days I wake up work out read for a few hours have lunch then reread past highlights in the afternoon all my social media posts are just me rereading highlights and so I read every single book on Munger then I reread all the highlights but then I read all the books he tells me to read because he'll tell you read Les Schwab he'll tell you all these things he'll tell you Henry Kaiser I was like who the hell is Henry Kaiser Henry Kaiser started 100 companies he built a Hoover Dam he built Liberty Ships I go what by the way just the fact that pretty much everyone listening to this podcast will have no idea of who that person is yeah just underscores i think how ridiculous it is to get overly fixated on legacy as an excuse for all sorts of behaviors yes nobody's gonna remember i'm anti-legacy and i'm anti-family dynasty i think like bequeathing your kids a bunch of wealth is that's another story for another day but okay 100 companies right hoover dan which by the way was made in what like eight years or 12 years or something i mean some insane time span and so then first of all i'm freaked out i'm there it's me two other young entrepreneurs in their 30s and they had both met charlie before and then like i'm like 10 minutes in and i'm just like oh i just couldn't believe what's happening to me i'm like that's charlie munger over there and like and then you know he's looking at you because he's like blind and so like he'll if he's looking at you like this he's not looking at you he's got to go like this and this because then he's got to look through his glasses so you know when he's looking at you.

1:48:43And then my friend looks at me, he's like, get in here, like do something. I literally sat there and me not speaking for 10 minutes, it's really hard for me to do. There's a reason I do monologue podcasts. So then I see we're in his library. So then I'm like, oh, this is my savior. Cause I've read all those books behind him because he told me to read them. And so this is why I said, it doesn't matter what I do. And this will answer your question a long way. I start asking questions about Henry Kaiser and all these books. And he knows the revenue. He knows the partner. He knows how the business ended.

1:49:13He knows the mistakes they made. And then I go, Charlie, like when's the last time you read these books? And he's like 15 years ago when we were shifting from the library to dinner. I was like, Charlie, can I go through your library? He's like, of course. And he's just sitting in his chair and I'm going through the books and I opened them. No notes. Different stock. Yeah. Different stock. Oh my God. So, all right, we are going to get to the things I promised, but I have to ask you. So in addition to smartest person, best business, what are some of your other go-to questions when you meet the fancy folks?

1:49:47So who's the smartest person you know? What's the best business you know? I actually got to spend some time with Eddie Lampert. And Eddie Lampert at one time was thought to be like the next Buffett. And he was mentored by Richard Rainwater. And I find Richard Rainwater really fascinating because Richard Rainwater has probably - Great name too. Oh, excellent. Richard, first of all, no biographies on him. He died rather young. he probably created more billionaire investors in america than any other person and direct mentorship and eddie broke the record i think in like the 80s or 90s for like the most taxable income made by an american and he was like super young and so eddie lives in miami and i was at his house he was like never again i'm moving to miami no so no no so that might be one of the best investments because he probably paid 12 million dollars for his house and his house will probably sell for 150 million today because it's on the island that bezos lives on and the house is beautiful i'm sure he won't even notice it on his yeah on his balance or in his life he's like much more like out of the spotlight now but again he's like one of these older guys just like very very wise and like very quiet and he's like me he's like introverted just like you go to his house there's just books everywhere he's got this insane yacht that i went on called the fountainhead i'll let people google it it is insane i mean great name too yeah but same thing you go on the boat dude and it's like full of books ran out of room at his house for the books it's the weirdest unintended hack ever to build a world-class network of just like read a bunch of history and they'll come get you i've never sent a cold dm in my life ever i've never sent a cold email in my life so what do you why did why did lampard come out you're asking him no so i'm i'm asking these questions right basically and they're not mean to me so he's like yeah but there's like better questions you can ask i was like okay like tell me what they are and so what his answers are like the smartest person he's like well i spent a bunch of time with buffett and i go okay and he goes it's obviously buffett so and he goes there's actually more interesting and then like who's the best investor you know that was another question i asked and he goes there's actually a more interesting question that you're not asking and i go what's that he goes who's the best deal maker and i go i don't know what that means like i don't know anything about investing like the question i've asked rick and patrick they probably think i'm retarded like i don't know you can you can edit that question out if you edit that word out but like they're just like what is wrong with this yeah god we didn't even get to i mean i would say brad jacobs would fit in sort of the deal maker yeah but he yeah but his is like a different this is very fascinating what eddie said so again eddie you can go back and like read profiles of him like he was like a boy wonder kid rick told me a funny story they used to all be at the same golf club in New Jersey and Richard Rainwater walked in and Rick's like a young kid and Rainwater's a legend.

1:52:32And he's like making conversation with him. He goes, we just wait. The best investor in America is going to walk through that door. And Rick goes, Buffett? And it was Eddie. So anyways, Eddie's like, there's a better question that you're not asking. I was like, all right, well, you're way smarter than I am. Like, tell me. And he goes, who's the best dealmaker? I don't know what that means. And he goes, well, an investor is judged on ROIC, return on invested capital. He goes, the two best dealmakers I ever knew were Richard Rainwater and David Geffen. So the thing about David Geffen is super underrated.

1:53:03He's another person I'd like to spend time with, if I could, is it's one thing to have a bunch of money. It's another thing to have a bunch of money and be liquid. There is a line in this profile in Larry Gosian that I read that says, anytime there's a downturn, Larry Gosian is one of the, maybe the most successful art dealer in the world. There's all these like, you know, art soars during great economic times and kind of doesn't do so well in other times. anytime there was a like a dip and they needed to make money they'd call david because they said david is as liquid as a day is long david gave like a 26 year old eddie lamper like 200 million of his own money to run so david is just like liquid staked him and so he goes david is a crazy deal maker i guess he didn't stake him he was an lp i don't think it was a fun structure i think it was here's 200 make it bigger make it bigger like i don't think you'd be like you make money if i make money it wasn't i don't think it was a permanent structure which is interesting Sam Zell never had a permanent structure.

1:53:55There's actually a lot of, I find those more interesting. But anyways, I was like, okay, so why is Richard Rainwater one of the best deal makers? And he's like, because with Richard, it was all returns, no capital. And I was like, what? And he goes, Richard maneuvered himself into such a influential position in the American economy because of who he knew and him being involved in your deal immediately made more valuable that people just gave them the equity. All returns, no capital. And I was like, that was like one of my favorite ideas that I've like ever heard. Yeah, and he would just tell amazing stories.

1:54:30Like he told me a story where like Richard, when he mentors you, he like, he recruited Eddie. Eddie was living in New York, working at Goldman Sachs if I remember correctly. He convinced him to move to Fort Worth, Texas. Have you ever been to Fort Worth? I have. Okay, I've been there too. There's nothing there. And in the 80s, there was less than nothing there. And this kid moves there. they would travel together and eddie said richard would want to like summer somewhere in like massachusetts and it was like this this like 20 room hotel that was the members only okay so it's like not open to a random public and he insisted that eddie be put in the room next to him and one day a bunch of guys are knock on eddie's door while he's in the room especially like working and like researching and they come in with a bunch of tools like what are you doing he's like richard wants us to put a hole in this wall and richard didn't want to go in the hallway and walk around to eddie's room so he made them knock a hall and then install the door so he could just go he should have direct access to eddie just with the door that didn't exist that's incredible he just had all kinds of crazy stories all right so not buffett not munger smartest person that i met yes smartest person let's revise that and just say if you pick one person you've met to be like your coach slash Yoda.

1:55:49Oh, Daniel. Daniel. Easily. All right. That was fast. Brad Jacobs gives me great advice. Michael Dell would give me great advice. Todd Graves. But like this guy is around my age. Yeah. Yeah. It's like the gap between us is like so obvious when you solve for that. And again, I just think of like the stuff he does, his clarity of thought. I greatly admire the product. I like products. I guess we should back up like what is actually important to you. I don't actually give a shit how much money you have. I know a lot of people and I love these we're in New York right now. Some of my favorite people.

1:56:21I like the PE guys way more than I like the VC guys. Cause they're just more honest. They're like, you know, the PE guys are like the VC gets, they have great lines about this. They go VC gets all the attention PE gets all the money. And then they're like, the VCs are lying because they say the founders are the customers. No, the LPs are our customers. The founders didn't give you any money. Then the PE guys are just honest. Why do you wake up every day to maximize the value of my LP dollars. I don't want to play that game. I don't want to play it at all, but I respect their, their honesty is refreshing.

1:56:49You know, their scoreboard is I have$6 billion and I'll be better if I have eight. I am obsessed with product. The fact that I work on my podcast for seven days a week, the fact that I hand edit the transcript, like Mr. Beast drives me. He's like, you're stupid. Basically you need an editor. You need all these other things. And like, I just am obsessed. It's like you don't work all your life to do what you love, to not do it. I don't want to outsource stuff. I like the craft of making the product. I'm very proud. Some people might consider this embarrassing. When Spotify, my Spotify rap comes out this year, the number one podcast on that is going to be my own.

1:57:25I go back and listen to it. One, I think of it as a tool. I was on a treadmill in Malibu a few weeks ago, listening to episode 221, which I think is a biography of Charlie Munger. I said Charlie Munger all the time. We forget how much we forget. I listened to this hour-long podcast. I'm like, oh God, he's got a lot of great ideas that I forgot. I'm not doing it for like, because I like to hear the sound of my own voice. I also do it because you think Kobe watched game tape? Like, how am I going to get better if I don't? I just went and when I interviewed Michael Dell, really more of a conversation than interview, but I listened to the Michael Dell episode that I just did a few months ago.

1:57:58And all I hear is the flaws. All I hear is like, you stupid idiot. You should use three sentences. That could have been one sentence. That is not even interesting. Cut that next time. And it's just like, that's how I get better. I go back and listen to it. So I am obsessed with product. The people that I admire the most are like great products. It could be Jiro's sushi. It could be the Spotify app. It could be, it doesn't matter. Shoes that I like, you know, I just love when people take what they do very seriously. And I like the craft of it. And I want to dedicate my life to making a product that makes somebody else's life better.

1:58:28That is what drives me. I understand. And I have a bunch of friends that like the money or like building the systems. if you want to go back to archetypes or just like having a big empire. I don't have any employees. You know, you have three, I guess I have two technical like subcontractors, you know, doing clips for me and thumbnails and stuff like that. But yeah, I don't, I don't have any desire for like a giant empire. I'm like a little craftsman in my local shed over here. So why do the new podcast? David Senra. Yes. Why do it? And we can use any number of different entry points here. So number one, why do it?

1:59:03you don't have to answer that as number one i'm also curious where you see the podcast ecosystem is it early is it late is it oversaturated is it undersaturated etc and then how do you diversify an interview based podcast okay so let's take the number one the why to do it i was resistant on doing it for years because i like to do one thing and i don't like to not focus a huge thing if you could summarize nine years 400 biographies down to one word what i've learned is focus these people whether they're psychos nice people different industries they're remarkably focused compared like they're a different species than the current level of you know lack of attention spans that we have now that i think are getting worse so focus is excessively important if you look at how i spend my time though right we just talked about the importance of building a business is natural to you.

1:59:57Half my waking time, I would like to be completely alone. Not in even the house with somebody else. Alone. Just reading, thinking. I like solitude a lot to a scary degree. So that makes sense. Founders, you're reading books all day. That's what you do. That makes perfect sense. When I'm not doing that though, if you look at what else I'm doing, I essentially do this data dump where I'm in silence half the day and then I go out every night that I'm not with my family. I usually have dinner with another founder, usually that I met through the podcast. And we talk for three, two, three, and there's no like, some people are like, oh, really impressive people will send me like, I would love to talk to you.

2:00:35And they like send me a calendar for 30 minutes. I go, I don't do 30. Like we're not even going to start. We haven't even started. Like, if that's what you think this is, like, I don't care that you're a billionaire. Like we're just never going to meet ever. And it's always super long. The very first time, first time I can mention all these people we talked for a long time so i'm doing this anyways and for years people like patrick were like you stupid idiot you should be recording these like this is crazy and so there's two things to answer your question that happened one is the first time me and Patrick grab dinner in New York with Danielak okay we talk for four hours and we get in the car because we're leaving the city and going back to Patrick's house because I'm going to spend the night there before I go back home.

2:01:18And the first thing Patrick says, and again, this is why it's important to like, the piece of advice that Charlie Munger gave us when we were at his house, he's like, your job at your age is to build a seamless web of deserved trust with other people who are like you. He's like, everybody knows that me and Buffett, I met Buffett when I was 35, he was 28, but they didn't understand there's a bunch of other guys around our age that we built the same level of trust with and we did life with and did deals with forever. Most of them were dead by the time I met Charlie. And so relationships are very important.

2:01:44And Munger has a line that trust is one of the greatest economic factors in the world, which is, I've never heard anybody say that. That's a truly unique idea. I agree with that. And so like, there's a level of trust that I am very standoffish. People call me a turtle. Like I get my shell, right? And so once you've penetrated that, like I have a level of trust that you want what's right for me. Like there's no weird competitive vibes here. We're not like secret adversaries. Like we just, I want to see you win. And we get in the car and he's just like, God damn it. You need to record these. And he's like, I've known Daniel for four years.

2:02:18You got more out of him in four hours than I did in four years. He's like, I spoke 2 % of time. You spoke 49%. He spoke the other 49%. And he's just like, there's no way that can speak to the soul of the founder in the world that you can. And it's because he says something and it's not what he's saying. It's what Henry Ford did here and Henry Kaiser did there and Jim Casey did over here. That's how my brain actually works. so i was like okay that was interesting and then part of the conversation was you know daniel saying to take i wasn't doing video 375 episodes i'm not doing for fame i'm introverted and daniel just saying in a very nice way what are you doing like you stop riding the fence this is the game that you chose and i have the data video obviously is important in podcasts like you're lying to yourself again you know the importance of somebody telling the truth i want people around me to check me.

2:03:07I don't want sycophants. And I'll tell you the second person that influenced me, that calls me and checks me all the time. That got in my mind for a while. I was like, okay, that's interesting. And I get sad when I don't podcast. I would like to podcast every day and I can't because I have to read an entire book before I sit down to make an episode. I cannot make more than 52 episodes a year. I just can't. People are like, you must read fast. No, I read slow, 25 pages an hour at most. And I have to do all the other shit I just told you I had to do, like the highlighting and like you know how long this takes it's like taking photographs putting it in to read wise right and so then um something that's else that's important to me is it's like i'm not a political person at all i don't even read the news i will find out the important stuff if there's a pandemic i'll hear about it if there's a war i'll hear about it other stuff no idea what's going on i have no idea what's going on i'm purposely aloof but one thing that i am passionate about is that like entrepreneurship is good for the world as long as you're spending your time building because all businesses, you mentioned losing your virginity by Richard Branson.

2:04:06He has the best description I've ever heard of a business. All of businesses is an idea that makes somebody else's life better. And therefore there's always opportunity because there's infinite ways to make other people's lives better. And so that's what I'm trying to do. And so another person that I've become close with is Jared Kushner. We live in Miami together and we went and met for dinner. And Jared's like a really smart and like buttoned up guy. And again, I don't pay attention to politics so like the way i met him is actually he reached out to rick and it's like i'm a huge founders fan can you see if david would speak at my company off site a lot of companies ask me to speak at their company off site and i didn't know anything about jared all i know is that people on the internet like to argue about him because of the trump stuff you know but i judge people on how they are with me this had to happen to you or you're like that person's great and you deal with like oh that guy's terrible or vice versa i've had both yeah exactly so it's like i'm gonna go into this i have no idea about all this stuff i'm just gonna see how this is gonna go and then we hit it off right away and he was like try to pay me i was like no no like it's in miami i can drive over there i could talk about this shit all the time i like talking about this so like and then uh we just built a relationship and a friendship from that we have similar interests and so we meet for dinner one day and it's right after basically he went and spoke at this conference in miami and he thought he was gonna go talk about his new fund and he thought he was friends with the guy and the guy's like selling tickets and making money off his name being there and like it's not like you're paying the speakers and the guy like essentially ambushed him and starts asking questions like how can you do business with saudi arabia they chop up chisogi and all this other stuff and then before the talk was even done his social media team was like clipping it and like sending it out and like press releases what a mess so i show up at this dinner and jared's always buttoned up and you know always got his shit together and he's just like what the hell is going on here by the time the dinner ends it's everywhere and again i'm like this is weird that the business and tech press in america they hate business and tech they like cover things i'm an enthusiast i'm not a journalist i'm not a critic i read books all the time where i hate the person or something you'll never see me do a podcast about it i want to talk about stuff i like not things i hate it's a weird thing to go through like imagine waking up every day and your job is to like cover people that you secretly like wish you were.

2:06:24Like there's just weird stuff that around this, right? And so we had this idea at dinner. I was like, there should be a place where, I'm not talking about sycophant. I'm saying like Todd Graves, people make fun of him because he says that God made him good at chicken fingers and that he's living a chicken finger dream and he thinks it's a mission. But I'll tell you what, he believes it. He's been offered billions. He owns over 90 % of that company. He will never sell that company. He's not doing it for money. He's doing it because he wants to make money and he does a lot of great things in the community.

2:06:51and I think people should know that this guy exists and his ideas should be spread that's a good for the world so those two things happened and I'm like oh this is interesting I have this weird base of knowledge so the way Jared describes it is like he's like talking to you he's like talking to 50 of history's greatest entrepreneurs at the same time because like we'll talk about something and same thing you see I do and then Daniel's way of saying that he's like you're like a LLM trained on history's greatest entrepreneurs with the temperature turned up because you're crazy. And so it makes it like entertaining.

2:07:22I mean, I think that's no small contributor to why you have a diehard fan base. Like it's the pulpit preacher kind of fervor that you bring to it. But I didn't understand that until I thought about my childhood. When people say they go to church, that's not the kind of churches I went to. This is like, this is really gets me sad where I was almost crying earlier. It's like my mom deserved a better life. She didn't deserve to grow up with the monster of her father and the frankly the bitch that her mom was like the one thing that i remember about my mom's mom that she said to me was that i was a faggot that is literally the only memory i have is her she was mentally ill you'd go to her house you know national choir and like all those things that uh there's national choirs like the sun and all this other stuff that you you get like right when you go to the grocery store she was like a hoarder so So she would, you'd go in the bathroom and there's like stacks all the way up to the, she wouldn't throw them out.

2:08:18But she read them like we read the Wall Street Journal. Like you assume the stock is what the stock, they said the stock price is. She'd read it like, this is true. Like Bigfoot is true. President, this is, I was a kid. This is the memory. I was the age when President Clinton, when Clinton was in the White House and she was convinced because that Clinton was gay and his wife was lesbian. And so she saw like conspiracy everywhere. And she would direct that her grandchildren, which is like monstrous. And so like she deserved, my mom deserved better. And then the problem was my mom didn't have an education and she was a very naive person.

2:08:51And so she turned to the church, but the church she turned to was like, you know, Benny Hinnis. I do know the name. Yeah. Okay. So that's like, you come up there and he blows on you and you don't have leprosy anymore. Yeah. Or he hits you in the face, like does this thing and you can walk now. And all this stuff was acting. They caught these people over and over again. and like i remember my mom didn't have a bunch of money and her putting like a couple crumpled up dollars and giving it to them because she thought this is like what she's going to get in her life it's sickening to me now that that happened to her and that you know she fell prey to that and that these people did this they have private jets they have all kind of crazy i'm sure there's some people that do that and they believe it that's a different thing if they really believe it i know that guy didn't believe like the heat come on you didn't believe that but then i didn't understand that oh my god that influenced the way i make my podcast because it is like preacher i feel i shouldn't be sitting at a desk i should be sitting at a pulpit somebody bought the domain churchforfounders.com and it points to my podcast that's amazing so that's why i'm doing it and then the other thing was like i just like podcasting and i can have a conversation every day.

2:10:05So we're going to start out like every other week and then move up to every week. And then I want to be having multiple conversations a week. That's what I want to do because I'm doing it anyways. Let's just put a microphone there. And it's not an interview. Yeah. There's some questions I have for them, but it's like a conversation. The idea that I'm going to do a business show interview and compete with Patrick is I think he's the best interviewer by far. He's so concise and perfect. And like, he's just really good at it. And I like to talk. I I want to talk 49 % of the time. How will you balance the two shows?

2:10:35So it seems like Founders Podcast takes a lot as it is. Yes. One of the benefits of that format is now this might put a cap on growth to some extent, but if you're not playing the video game, it removes a lot of complexity, right? You don't necessarily need to travel. You just read, you enjoy your solitude. You do some long form audio. you can have notes in front of you, you can be picking your nose as you take a deep breath. There's a lot of flexibility there. How are you going to balance the two without sacrificing founders, right? Like snuffing out the magic X when you're working on Y? That's a great question.

2:11:18And it's something I was very concerned with. And that's why I said no for so many years. And so then you think, if you said yes, then how would you do it? Instead of just blankly saying no. And there's a secret of dealing with me that everybody that knows me for a long time realize this it's like water on a rock okay so like you're gonna come up to like this is literally gonna happen multiple times so let's say like patrick or sam hinky would be like i have this idea and immediately like that's the stupidest idea i've ever heard i'll be like really like aggressive and angry it's like stupid idea terrible idea then they mention it like two weeks later now it's just dumb idea mention it again like a few weeks later silence then a few later.

2:11:54Like, Hey guys, I have a great idea. It's that idea. It's the right idea. So the slow bake they're just like, they know they're just like, okay, I just gonna, it's just a water on a rock. I'll get to it. We're just going to take a while. So the problem is now I've said that they know that. And then he had other people that have to deal with me that like, I'm very difficult to deal with. Obviously you are too. And like, I think like that's the one thing we can bond over. You're not trying to be mean. Just like, it's just a part of our personalities. And so the answer to question is founders is a one person so like i read i read research i record i set my own mics i do all the editing i can do the transcripts i do everything the only thing i outsource is that i think i have the clip guy i have is a little genius a young kid living in paris his name is maximum he's incredible and then i have somebody now because i have to play the youtube game which i hate and i refuse to do and all this other you know the youtube thing like yeah yeah i hate it i haven't exactly i've sort of cauterized myself on that so yeah so like i won't do That kind of shit.

2:12:52I'd rather not get views. I have to see something and say, I would click on that myself. I'm not doing things for numbers. I didn't even know how many people were listening to founders till like recent, till like first like six years. I never looked. And then I started doing these big sponsorship deals and they're like, oh, I should look. And they're like, oh, this is great. But I don't like thinking about numbers. I don't want it to influence anything that I do. And so founders basically take seven days. Usually I'm late on the episode. I could see. Something in common with Dan Carlin. Yeah. I'm like five days late.

2:13:21He's five months late. God, man. Love you, Dan. You know that. Yeah. He's literally the best podcaster ever lived. So what I realized is if I was going to do this, I would need a team. And I don't like working with other people because I am difficult. I can be mean. I just am. And I don't want to be mean. You know, I really don't. Like you mentioned earlier, like not getting some of the bad personality traits from them, you know? And I was worried. like i've asked friends like do you think i'm like sociopathic am i this is like no you have empathy like you're like you have a hard outer shell but you're really soft in the middle patrick will tell you that he's just like turtle yeah exactly when i was in japan they we went to some what's the ones where you have like 20 course meals almost oh omakase yeah and they try to literally means basically i'll leave it to you omakase is like leave it to you so you can use it that way too ah omakase but why do they call it omakase and it's like multiple what does it to do with omakase is you you don't pick anything a la carte you let the chef yes sit down and they just give you what they want to give you yes and then they come in there so you're leaving it up to them but then they come in after everything and they like like want to talk to you about it oh that's very on japanese okay that's probably for foreigners okay so they try to give me i mean they might be like this is this and then they stop well but this guy was giving you a little mini mini he tried to give me no he tried to give me the essence of turtle it was baby turtle i was Doesn't sound great.

2:14:45Not, I'm not excited about the face you just made should be the, I mean, I feel like if David center doesn't work as a podcast name, you could have essence of turtle. So what I realized is I need a team. So what I could see is eventually going down. Like right now I'm making a new founders episode, like every like 10 to 14 days, which is not good. And I've tried to do every week. The cadence probably should be every two weeks. Cause how me and Rick were talking about this this morning in regards to you the same way. it's like what's that old apocryphal saying that wrote a short letter but i didn't have time so it's a long one yeah he says me and you share that thing where it's like the reading is not taking longer the recording is taking longer it's the editing before i do anything it's this wieldy 15 000 word thing i'm trying to get down to 5 000 words takes so long to do so answer your question could see a future where i'm never gonna stop doing founders where i have to reduce it can't you know 52 a year second and biggest thing is i took an idea from one of rockefeller's biographies so one of the things that i do that i also think is important is you read all the famous biographies but you got to go through the bibliographies books are made out of books everybody has read titan by ron trinnell in the bibliography of that there's a better the best rockefeller biography i've ever read and i have like eight at the house i haven't read yet i collect obscure Rockefeller biographies that I'll eventually get to.

2:16:08What's your favorite one? It's called John D. The Founding Fathers of Rockefellers by David Freeman Hawk. Better writer than a titler, I guess. Yes. 250 pages instead of 800, but all about what you really want to know. You don't want to know about where his grandfather was born. You want to know how he built standard oil. And there's this idea in there that I've used called Secret Allies. This is going to answer your other question about podcasting, where he's at the beginning of the oil industry. it's the very beginning and he's there rough and tumble time yeah no one knows shit about oil refining so what does he do he goes and builds a network of secret allies with other oil refiners and then eventually do something that's even more nefarious they start something called like the oil refiners association of america or something and then he gets himself elected president for that and then what happens is like it's like if we had a podcaster union i'm president of the podcaster union and then i go to you and like tim what's your downloads this month.

2:16:57Okay. And how much are you charging for ads? And then who's your next guest? And he's getting all this data. So then he sees that's a joker. I don't have to, that guy's already out of business. He doesn't even know yet. We don't have to worry about that guy. Yeah. That guy's a killer. I need to buy his company and make him a partner. And so this idea of secret allies, so I'm obsessed with podcasting. And so what I would go do, I'd go around and I would talk to any podcaster would talk to me. And we talk about everything, downloads, ads, who are you selling to, how are you selling, who are you using for editing?

2:17:25Maybe that's the better sense I got.

2:17:30no because i give yeah i know i'm kidding there's there's people literally like they'll even tell you like there's podcasters that literally like i took an idea from one podcast and gave it to another podcast because that's the whole thing we don't i don't collect it and hold it we spread it around and they've made millions and millions of dollars from these ideas a friend named kevin kelly kevin rose does that too yeah just gives away derek sivers does it too gives away as many as possible and if he can't get rid of one that keeps him up at night we share so if you're talking about podcast data who's the mad scientist podcast data chris hutchins and you talked to him we both talked to him and we you like he has good shit because you tell he tells you stuff and he tells me stuff you know like that i didn't know and he's like this weird mad scientist but he's in like this weird part of podcasting i don't even think about all the hacks people check him out he's been on your podcast twice like yeah and um once because he wanted to have this long conversation with me about a bunch of stuff i was doing and i was like if we're gonna do that make it good with your questions and we'll just record it and then i can share it because I don't want to answer all these questions over and over again.

2:18:27It was about podcasting. It's a, it's a great idea. And so basically I took that idea. So anyways, I was able to build a lot of relationships with a lot of great podcasters who are friends, we share information, but then you also see like, oh wait, there's like a lot of disparity between like podcast teams and stuff. And so Rob Moore and Andrew Huberman tried to recruit me years ago because they have a podcast network called Psycom that they really don't do much with. Okay. because it's really hard to like launch another health podcast when they're kind of dominating that vertical like is there another human in that vertical that's not discovered unlikely and everything parallels everything around us and so i got this crazy dm and then a phone call with rob and he's just like dude who are you and this is when i had no again 5 000 listeners and he's like i've never come across anything like this and then we went up talking i think every single time we talked about this on the phone for over two hours every time and it's all about podcasting they're like we're looking for other humans and you're like this giant nerd that like loves reading obscure shit and breaking it down in like an entertaining manner just like andrew does and he's like would you be interested in joining us on psycom and i was like you are two weeks too late because it's not announced yet but i have a verbal agreement with this guy named patrick and I'm joining Colossus.

2:19:44But we still became friends and everything else. And so basically me and Rob, we'd spend a lot of time. I spend my summers in Malibu. So I see them all the time. That's where they're and I've talked to Andrew and like they're just killers. Yeah, they're very good at what they do. They're just operationally excellent. And they have a small but mighty team and every single person on that team, they're very focused. So like they're photographers, one of the best photographers. They're editors, one of the best editors. They're video people, one of the best video people. They're internet guys. One of the best internet guys.

2:20:12It's just everything. And so their whole point was just, I was like, listen, Founders is never going anywhere. It's staying on Colossus, staying exactly what it is. But if I do something new, I'll let you know. So when I went to them, it was just like, here's the thing. I am going to pick the guests. I'm highly disagreeable. I will never take direction from anybody. I want to pick the guests and I want to have the conversations and then everything else has to be a plus team around me and that means from visuals to editing to clips to every single thing and that's they're operationally excellent i have not met a better like just spend time with them very well architected and then the way they built their business is genius so what does success look like for you two years from now three five pick your time frame success looks the same now and forever that i'm proud of what i made that's it like I don't care what the numbers are let's say this show does really well oh it is going to so David Sanna yeah does really well yeah and then I'm not saying Rob would do this but it's like you know what we would really love to do is a third show and it's incredibly compelling maybe it's slightly different angle or a totally different angle who knows right it's like who the hell knows interviewing spouses of all these famous people, which I think would actually be an amazing podcast.

2:21:37I'm sure someone's doing it, but besides the quality of the product and being proud of the product, like there is such a thing as too many different products. There is such a thing as simply burning the candle at both ends. So you're at a battery capacity that compromises the product, maybe long-term or your life, right? You've got more considerations than just business. Yep. so how do you think about those other factors when you telescope out a few years i'm not a long-term planner so like i would say like i'm basically non-analytical at all i go straight off intuition steve jobs has a great line where he's just like he thinks intuition is more important than intelligence and the intuition played a larger role in like his success anything else intuition and perseverance and so like i used to think i was like more analytical and like I have a five-year plan, a 10-year plan.

2:22:32All a great life is, is a string of great days. And so the furthest I plan out is like 24 hours. I actually have this weird, I don't even know if I should say this publicly. I don't think people like humans actually understand time at all. And like, when you say a decade, like, yeah, we know decades, like 10 years, but like, do we actually understand what that means? Like, I think we understand, we maybe understand a week, a month. We definitely understand a day because that's how we live. We live 24 hours at a time. And so all I try to do is like, can I design a day that I really enjoyed? Not like hedonistic.

2:23:03I'm not like laying around doing nothing. Like I have to work. I feel guilt and shame when I'm not being productive. And that's probably a bad thing. There's all reasons that you can psychoanalyze why that is the case. But I just know how I am. I like to work. I like to get up and get after it. I don't like taking vacations. I don't like doing the stuff I get invited to is crazy. It's just like, I like to work. I like podcasting. I'm obsessed with it. Everybody's like, why don't we talk about this? Most of us, like, why don't you do something else? I like doing this. I will keep doing this. So to answer your question, I just try to make a great day.

2:23:31And the way I make a great day is like, I want to wake up. I want to take care of my health. I want to read. I want to make a product I'm really proud of. And I want to spend time with people that I love and admire. And I'm going to do that the next day and the next day and the next day. And I think if I have a great day today and a great day tomorrow and a shitty day a month from now, and then a better day the next day, and I get to my life and it's just a string of great days, that will be a great life. And so two years from now, I don't know, because if you asked me two years ago, I said, there's no way I'm going to do another podcast.

2:24:00But I would say like, my answer is that simple. The maxim I like about this is like, I love the climb. I don't care what the summit is. I just like the activity for the sake of itself. And so therefore I'm going to do it. And I hope it's well-received, but I couldn't have predicted that founders was going to turn out the way it was. So I don't know. I'm just going to do great work that I'm completely fascinated by and it gives me energy. And on the other side of that, like this was Stephen King said, I'm not just the writer. I'm the first reader. I listened to every single episode of Founders before anybody else.

2:24:35And I just threw out one. So the book is great. Bill Walsh's The Score Takes Care of Itself. I read it the first time five, six years ago. I read it again. Love the book. I made a podcast on it. It's like hour and 15 minutes long. I finished editing it. I listened to it. Not good enough. Threw it away. That's it. Can I make something that I'm proud of? So I believe all of that. And I want to push on it a little bit because the great days make great lives. I agree with, but now your sort of circle of interaction is expanding with a show that involves other people with very busy schedules. So to what extent are you going to be traveling to all these people versus having people travel to you i mean that type of decision has longer term implications right so i'm curious how you think about that so the way i think about this is this goes to the other side of me that's probably not healthy that like i have a ruthless competitive drive that i think would terrify most people i have a very negative inner monologue that i never think i'm doing enough i have like entire like multiple people depending on me financially way above and beyond just your wife and kids, like other people that I have to make sure that I can take care of.

2:25:47So I have a lot of pressure on me. I want the pressure. So my answer to the question is like, I'll do whatever it takes to win. And so if that means I got to get on a plane or I get a little less sleep, then like, that's what's going to happen. But I also think like, you're also smart and you can think about these things. Like, okay, you want to talk to extreme winners in business is essentially like not really startup founders. I want people that have like decades of experience. Every single person, if you look at the people we've been recording with so long, I'm just more interested in talking to people that have done things for a long time that are smarter and more productive and better than I am.

2:26:22And so setting up here where we are in New York, probably a good idea because everybody comes through New York. Now we've recorded several in LA. Here's also a thing to consider. Most of the people I'm talking to have plans. Rick pulls me to say and says this all the time. Multiple people have told me this. You don't understand the impact that you're having on people because I don't think about it. I'm by myself all the time. I don't look at numbers. And so people have literally gotten their jets and flown across the country because I was like, hey, can you do it on this day in LA? Are the teams there?

2:26:54It's like more convenient. And they do it because they think I've done something for them. But I'm just like, no, no, no. I haven't done anything for you. I just thank you for listening. The fact that you listen to my podcast means I get to do this for a living. This is where Munger has really heavily basically influenced my thinking. He's just like the reciprocation tendency in humans is so pronounced and it's evolved. Yes. And it's never going away. And what I didn't understand, and I still don't understand, cause I don't like talking about, I don't like thinking about this shit. I think about like, as if I'm talking to one person, right?

2:27:23Is the fact that so many people have gotten value, like every single person's recorded an episode with us for the new show so far has listened to a ton of shows of mine. And their point was it's important work. Todd Graves has actually told me this two weeks ago. He's like, it's important work and it's more important the bigger company gets. Because if I can hear a single idea or either avoid a mistake or get a good idea and it makes a 1 % difference on my business, that's, I can't do math. I can't do public math. A billion dollars, whatever the number is,$2 billion. Like it's a huge, I don't know, that'd be 10%.

2:27:56So it makes a 10 % difference in his business. It's a huge swing. And so, so far, and again, you have a private jet. Like where do you actually live? We're, we're, wherever you happen to be. Also your carrying costs for that jet are pretty high. Yeah. So I, a little bit of pressure just to utilize the damn thing. You want to hear something funny? I'll go back to why I think New York and LA is going to be where I'm recording most of these. And we're willing to travel. We will, if we have to. Dyson says, come do it. I'm coming to England. I don't give a shit. Sam Zell told me, he's like, I told you that, that lunch I had with him changed my life.

2:28:27he's like don't make the same mistake he's like i know all the rich guys he says first of all they're all guys so what he's telling me he goes two you'd be surprised how many of them are miserable and they like do stuff they don't like for more money that they can't spend and then they make the same mistake where they buy slight this is his words not mine he goes they buy slightly nicer versions of the same shit he goes the difference between a 10 million dollar house and a$30 million house is negligible. And he's like, I own my place in Chicago and my compound in Malibu. That's the word he used, compound.

2:28:58And he goes, I rent everything else. The things that you own start to own you. And he said every year after I think Thanksgiving and in between Christmas, he'd take his entire family, extended family to this little village in France. And he said, Zell was a shit talker. And he said funny things. He goes, I could buy the whole village. He goes, I don't, I rent it. And then I don't think about it until I go back. It's somebody else's problem. And he goes, there's only one true luxury in life. He goes, private jet, try to get to private jet money. And he's like, I use my jet three hours a day. On average, he uses a jet three hours a day.

2:29:31He was in South Florida because he's like, I woke up Chicago this morning, got on my jet. I went across the street, gave a talk to a bunch of investors and entrepreneurs because that's what he wanted to spend his last days doing. He knew he was dying. He didn't tell me though. I didn't know that. We were scheduled to have another dinner and it got canceled and they said he was sick. I was like, oh, he got COVID. He died three weeks later. so I never got to see him again. The way he was spending his last days at his own expense, traveling all over the world on his beautiful giant plane, spending a lot of money, is passing on the knowledge that he learned through 61 years to other investors and younger entrepreneurs.

2:30:01And so he goes, I did that this morning, came over here, had lunch. I'm going to get in my car and go back to Chicago. He used it three hours a day. So, so far, people have been willing to fly. They come to us. I'll come to some people if they're super busy schedules. And then I think just setting up in a place where they all will come through would make a lot of sense anyone on your wish list you haven't been able to track down no surprisingly again i don't like thinking about this where like i don't understand that today right now if i do an episode on somebody living it's going to get to them they might not be a listener this just happened with jimmy iveen so people are always surprised they think you know who's on your list like obviously i look like respect bezos respect elon like all them you know but i would say like todd graves i'm like what the hell's wrong with you jenna james dyson the vacuum cleaner guy they're like they're just like i'm weirdly obsessed with these people and so one of the people i'm obsessed with jimmy ivine and jimmy ivine defiant ones such a good series i watch it oh my god it is so well done if anyone hasn't seen fine once go watch it it's head spinning with the description of the four-part documentaries oh it's a relationship between dr dre and jimmy ivine yeah it's really a documentary about entrepreneurship it's about chasing a path there's no path in front of you there was no path for dre to get out of compton there's no path from jimmy to get from the son of a longshoreman in brooklyn to go what happened to him he's fascinating and then this is my point about like what do you actually value in life jimmy's a billionaire you know i don't know he's got a billion two billion dollars in other cases i'd be more interested in that than if he had a hundred billion dollars like if you ask me whose life would you want buffett or munger buffett was 100 times richer.

2:31:38I'm taking Munger every day. What I like about Jimmy is that he lived an interesting life. The episode, you see it on Defy Once, crazy stories in there, but Rick Rubin, who you mentioned if podcasting is saturated, which we can get to. Rick Rubin's really good because he's a world-class listener. He took a skill set. What was his skill for the work that he did why are these musicians hiring him to listen to hear something they don't hear and to suggest something they might not hear might not understand and the episode he did with jimmy iv i think came out in 2023 i think it was like the single best podcast i listened to all year and it's just jimmy iv telling insane story after insane story about the music business because the music business is a wild business and what i like about my business is that it's like a unique experience generator.

2:32:31It creates opportunities and experiences you can't buy. And the amount of people I get to meet and talk to, my memoirs are going to be wild because of the weird dinners I've been to and the planes I've been on and the boats I've been on. And it started because I was a giant nerd with a giant head sitting in a room by himself for five years, just mainlining biography after biography after biography. Jimmy's really interesting to me. And then what happened is part of this, I can't tell you how I got connected. He agreed to do the show. And one of the previous guests is the one that connected me, which again, like I just don't feel I deserve how nice these people have been to me and what they're willing to do.

2:33:08And I don't even like asking them for this, but it got to me. Is that true? The worst possible. You put a lot of work into your podcast. It doesn't matter though. The worst possible thing. Do you feel like you don't deserve it? I feel like that's an important question. I'll answer that question in a minute. Buffett has a line. It's like the people that win are the ones that their eyes are on the field, not the scoreboard. I don't, I was going for a walk last night and like, you know, this happens the whole time. I'm way earlier. You're like an OG, man. You've been famous like way. Like when people stop me on the street, which happens, I'm like, how do you know what I look like?

2:33:41That's going to happen more and more. Yeah, exactly. So like, I've read all your blog posts about this too. I've been like, I was on the phone with Morgan Housel this morning, who's a big fan of yours. Obviously you guys are fans. Yeah. And we were talking about that, like the security around this and all this other stuff. And then we were talking about you. who mortgages the peach of a human. He's the opposite of me. Psychology of Money. Great book. It won't stop selling. Yeah. Stop selling. I know, man. Got lightning in a bottle on that one. So - Yeah, earned it. Earned it too. Oh, 100%. And the nicest guy.

2:34:10If you think you want to find my directional opposite, and we'll go back to the question you think is important, Morgan genuinely believes that his ceiling, that he should be an insurance salesman somewhere in the Midwest making 100 ,000 a year. and the fact that this guy got really, really wealthy. Astronomical numbers. Really, really wealthy and just wakes up every day, can't believe his life. I wake up every day like, why am I not a billionaire? It's like, he's happy in a way I will never be. And this is why I think Daniel X advice about chasing. Daniel does not believe. This is one of the first things I asked him on the show was he was the one that put this idea out there that his life is not about happiness.

2:34:48It's about impact. He is not chasing happiness. he's chasing impact and he's the one that actually convinced dara the founder of uber tells the story they were having drinks ceo sorry yeah sorry good good distinction i met travis too yeah most intense person i've ever been in in contact with he's he is one hell of a builder man oh for sure and different batteries most intense and i've been around a lot of tents he is yeah he's yeah very fascinating he has different gears than most oh and the storytelling and the he's a phenomenal storyteller phenomenal communicator so anyways when dara was going back and forth about becoming CEO of Uber, he said, he was just going to say no, because like he was pretty happy with his life.

2:35:25And Daniel, in a very direct way, is like, since when's life about happiness, but impact, it's like one of the most important companies in the world. And you can have an impact on it. You can have an impact on the way cities have changed. You absolutely have to do this. And I think that's like a really interesting idea. So I am trying to have impact. So to answer your question, do I think I deserve it? I obviously like know that I put a lot of work into it and I believe that the product is good. and I think I found what I've put on the planet to do but I don't like thinking about it I don't like thinking about its impact on other people I like it because I like it like I make it I'm like I would listen to this podcast I think it's valuable I think you start doing shit for the wrong reasons I talked to a lot of the head people at Spotify and they said one of the biggest mistakes they made it's like the great thing about podcasting is like the people that come up like we did do like the garage i listened to your first episode like i remember tim tim talk talk yeah like i remember my kitchen table with a friend and why did you do i think you had a couple glass of wine right yeah and with a friend because you're like i don't figure it out pretty quickly after listening to episode one that the second episode is going to be sober yeah oh man josh waitskin number two but you come up with like you did it because you were curious you you only talk to people you really want to talk to you you had no production costs and so spotify said they flipped it.

2:36:41They're like, we took something that was low production costs done by enthusiasts and people in the garage. Huberman's analogy of this is like, it's punk rock. Punk rock is great because it started with people that just wanted to play in the garage and then they got good and then they played for stadiums. And so Spotify is like, oh, what we did was like, we took a low production cost, made a high production cost because we had these big ass contracts. And then we hired celebrities and no one listened. And the people that did listen, they stopped because the celebrities were just doing it for money they didn't do because they love it and i think that's the key it's like i truly love this i did it for five and a half years when no one was listening that tells you that i like love it but i think one of the worst things you could do is like i'm going to do it because status is the funny thing podcasting is dorky it's low status in 2016 you think that was fucking high status no no it was like you dorky nerd with a podcast i'm not asking if you're seeking status it was more if you feel that you're unworthy of people flying to you and doing these things oh no is a very those are two very different yeah i meant like i think you see this now that podcasting is obviously very influential and can be there's so many people jumping into it that clearly don't love it they like it because the cpms are high or like whatever or they want to be famous i had no video for eight years do you think i want to be famous do you think i want to be recognized like no i obviously don't i had to fucking had the most powerful person podcasting berate me at dinner in a nice way saying you idiot you have to do video that's the only reason to video because daniel told me to and if how smart am i if i don't listen to him like then i'm an idiot like i have to do it i don't like doing it like i don't know man i don't know i think at some point like the platform gets big enough like i flew here for this why because you have a massive platform and you're willing to extend it to me and like i'd travel wherever you say which is iceland i'm coming to iceland brother like i don't know what to tell you like you want to go to i know you're like argentina let's go down there like we'll do in argentina so yeah i think eventually when they see it's big enough that yeah people would come to you also try to make it easier and you know i'm not doing it in columbia missouri i'm doing it in new york or la you're going to be there anyways you know and also with the particular cohort that you're interviewing with jets if they're like sure i'll fly to new york and then they can also set up like five other meetings with friends or business associates or fill in the blank right make it easy but i i think really man like this is the turtle in me i don't like asking the turtle you can ask all the people that we have a bunch of mutual close friends i don't like asking for help and i think one of the weird ways that i think i built true friendships with some of these people is because all day long it's gimme gimme gimme yeah they have never asked rick for anything i think one time to crash at his house that's it all i want is to be homies to be friends i don't want anything from this and i think i didn't understand because i didn't come from this background that when you're high profile and you're building these empires these are all empire builders all day long they're just surrounded by people that want something from them and i'm just like here i have this podcast that might be value for you you want it like i don't want anything from you and when they tell me ask me for stuff i still don't like doing it so they don't like doing it it like really hurt me to like would you be on my show yeah well i was like all right i'm gonna ask for something i'll do this and not a single person i've asked i said no yeah well you love what you do i mean that is essential to producing the quality that you produce it's essential for the endurance to sort of outperform and outlast because podcasting as a whole is just an elephant graveyard of three to ten episode shows yes yeah so if you choose something you really like that you would make because you intrinsically enjoy it right if it's an outgrowth of reading the biographies taking the notes and you're like well this is really sort of in terms of additional work for me on top of something i might already be doing actually not like the majority of the pie and you have the fuel of that obsession you're going to do well even if it's just for yourself but certainly with the longevity you have the competitive advantage of durability that means a lot coming from you and everything you've accomplished and i think you actually hit to the essence of it where it's like i can't sleep after these things i had to get up the next day when i was in austin i think i had a 7 a.m flight and i slept maybe three hours because like gem after gem after gem from michael dell or like you'll see this in the todd graves episode dude we were like the same person we're the same person and so we're like we're like spontaneously high-fiving this i'm sure i'm gonna get a lot of like this guy's a dork like hey give me another funny like we're just like geeking out about like minute details of just being obsessed with his whole thing is like do one thing and doing it better anybody else i remember going from the airport it's in baton rouge and i immediately called sam hinkey who's the closest thing i have to our mentor and i was like i'm in trouble and he's like why i go i'm addicted to doing these things already like i i can't stop like this was crazy yeah it's a good sign crazy i mean that's how i pick my projects largely it's how i pick some of my startups too that i get involved with if i have what i would call sort of good insomnia yeah for at least a few nights in a given week and then i try to quell it doesn't matter how much trazodone i take or anything else like i just am so excited by something that my mind is whirring and i can't go to sleep i'm like okay there's probably something there also because it seems to be such an energetic unlock i'm like even if that one thing doesn't do very well if i can kind of create this like nuclear power from that it's not compartmentalized it can apply to other things so i get it i get it and i was listening to, I don't know how I found it.

2:42:41Actually, I was going on, I think it's Tom Papa's show. It's a comedian, great interviewer. And I was going on his show, this is a while ago, and I was doing some homework on my own, listened to an interview he did where he interviewed Joe Rogan. And I'm paraphrasing here, obviously, but Rogan effectively said, he's like, yeah, I don't really think much about like discipline or willpower. He said, what I do have though is obsession and when i find something that i'm obsessed with when i deep dive it's like i don't need to worry about discipline i don't need to worry about willpower so it's like finding that thing that you are obsessed by and so i think you've done that you've done that so you found your lane like a lot of people don't find it they don't find that thing it's like you wonder if kobe bryant were born somewhere and didn't have the chance to pick up basketball would it have been something else like maybe if you're a michael jordan okay it's baseball or this or that but it's like you found your thing that's kind of amazing no i appreciate it and the way i think about it's like it took me 32 years to find my path and five and a half years of struggle before it could even pay my bills it was like a long time kobe found it like imagine finding it at 12 like he did and knowing i read the 600 page biography on him by roland lassoby and the middle school guidance counselor is like he wrote down what are you going to do he's like i'm going to play an nba he's like you need to pick something else that's a one in a million shot he goes i'm going to be that one in a million to be like that so sure at 12 years old and this is what goes back to the lack of introspection like i had a lot of like angst and like what is the meaning of life or like what am i doing here and then once you find your thing like there's like a definitely not resting on laurels but there is like almost like a relief like because it's not just like finding something you love to do it's like what is that you're like a japanese encyclopedia it could be a guy what is it guy yeah yeah it's like uh the intersection of like what you love to do what you're good at and what's good for the world something like that yeah he gets used in a bunch of different ways japan's always good for these pithy conceptual words i think i'm just gonna be blasphemous for you but like i think travel is generally overrated after you do it i am not jumping in after you do it for a while because the problem is like we keep going to all the nice places and like all the nice places are all the same to each other one thing that japan blew my mind and why like it's the top of my list now of everywhere i've been and where i'd want to go again is because it's it's one of the few truly distinct cultures in the world yeah it's a wild one they also they're kind of a like a chameleon because they pull so much from other cultures so it's when it was in isolation it was certainly kind of an alien environment and then you look at everything they've incorporated.

2:45:25And in some cases, in the case of say like the Toyota Way, right? You have, I guess it was, I want to say Deming, right? Who was basically not ignored, but certainly not embraced in his country of birth, gets adopted by the Japanese. And you see them do this over and over and over again. So yes, it's a fascinating place. And I would agree with you that especially people who travel in the lap of, it doesn't need to be luxury, it could just be comfort like rich person travels the most boring shit in the world same stores it's just like it's just like okay you're going to the four seasons in 12 different places getting on the wi-fi doing whatever it is you would have been doing at home and then going to the most expensive meals it's just not interesting so i think if anybody wants a great book on the art of long-term world travel if that's of interest vagabonding my rolf pots i read that because of you yeah the amount of books in my library because of you it did the same thing with you that i did with all these other people it's like oh tim says i read it i read it yeah and a lot of these books they're underneath it all at least in the case of rolf potts book bag of lining they're really kind of like philosophical operating systems and it's a hat you can try on you don't have to wear it forever but it's like okay if you only have one jacket to wear which is like sixth gear workaholic neglecting family guy just expand your wardrobe you can always put that jacket back on you just hang it up for a moment and similarly i like these books and they certainly can be business books whether it's branson who is in some ways i mean he took risks but he's kind of the opposite at least in a lot of capacities to like a dyson right like he risk mitigates the hell out of his ventures and caps the downside in so many creative ways.

2:47:17Like his airline. Exactly. So like the artistry of deal making for minimizing or capping downside is one of Branson's superpowers. Even though the stuff on the magazine covers back in the day, it was like the madman who's doing X, Y, and Z and has the models and he's phenomenal marketer and he's doing like the kiteboarding with a naked model on his back. Remember that picture I have in my mind. Oh my God. So that looks fun. I mean, he is also, can be a wild man, but I digress. I was just going to say that these are hats that you can put on to test them out as like philosophical operating systems, which is how I pick a lot of the books.

2:47:55Books, books, books. I mean, I was very similar to you when I was a kid. And also, I mean, all throughout just living in books, living and living in books. It's very common though, in these stories, Rockefeller, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Edison, Edwin Land, Winston Churchill. the way I say this is like they don't just read they devour entire shelves. There's multiple examples of like Thomas Edison read every single book in the Detroit library Edwin Land read every single book on light in Harvard then dropped out because he didn't think he had anything else to learn moves to New York City. I think one of the most beautiful buildings is the one we passed on the way here, New York City Public Library read every single book on light in there and then it's like okay I learned enough now I can do my experiments.

2:48:36They devour entire shelves. Monster. David Center what have we not talked about people will be able to find of course the show davidcenter.com yep is that the best website david center on all social channels instagram channels podcast app founders podcast of course founders podcast.com I appreciate you like you've included me in your newsletter in the past oh yeah on your blog like I read all your shit and I'm like and I didn't even know like it's shocking to me like when I said I'm like oh I didn't because it's not like you told me i was like what the hell yeah you put out i mean the the obsession and attention to detail doesn't surprise me at all like when you told me about going through your transcripts by hand i'm like yeah that makes sense and i really have my fingers crossed for you i don't think you need any luck but that david center is as durable as founders podcast if anybody can do it you can do it so i appreciate it means a lot coming from you man yeah congratulations you've had a huge influence on me oh thanks man it's a long overdue like i said i ran in the hallway and grabbed you i was like it's been too long yes very very very long overdue so everybody listening check out david senra i'm excited to check it out and i also know the team at human lab andrew rob those guys are all top tier so what's coming is going to be absolutely top notch so i'm excited to see it and as always everybody we will put links to anything that came up in this conversation in the show notes tim.blog slash podcast just search senra s-e-n-r-a or essence of turtle and you'll be able to find everything and until next time just be a bit kinder than is necessary to others yes but also to yourself thanks for tuning in hey guys this is tim again just one more thing before you take off and that is five bullet friday would you enjoy getting a short email from me every friday that provides a little fun before the weekend between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday.

2:50:48Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about.

2:51:28If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. In the last handful of years, I've become very interested in environmental toxins, avoiding microplastics, and many other commonly found compounds all over the place. One place I looked is in the kitchen. Many people don't realize just how toxic their cookware is or can be. A lot of nonstick pans, practically all of them, can release harmful forever chemicals, PFAS, in other words, spelled P-F-A-S, into your food, your home, and then ultimately that ends up in your body.

2:52:09Teflon is a prime example of this. It is still the forever chemical that most companies are using. So Our Place reached out to me as a potential sponsor. And the first thing I did was look at the reviews of their products and said, send me one. And that is the Titanium Always Pan Pro. And the claim is that it's the first nonstick pan with zero coating. So that means zero forever chemicals and durability that'll last forever. I was very skeptical. I was very busy. So I said, you know what? I want to test this thing quickly. It's supposed to be nonstick. It's supposed to be durable. I'm going to test it with two things.

2:52:45I'm going to test it with scrambled eggs in the morning because eggs are always a disaster in anything that isn't nonstick with the toxic coating. And then I'm going to test it with a steak sear because I want to see how much it retains heat. And it worked perfectly in both cases, and I was frankly astonished how well it worked. The Titanium Always Pan Pro has become my go-to pan in the kitchen. It replaces a lot of other things for searing, for eggs, for anything you can imagine. And the design is really clever. It does combine the best qualities of stainless steel, cast iron, and nonstick into one product.

2:53:24And now our place is expanding this first-of-its-kind technology to their Titanium Pro cookware sets, which are made in limited quantities. So if you're looking for non-toxic, long-lasting pots and pans that outperform everything else in your kitchen, just head to fromourplace.com slash Tim and use code Tim for 10 % off of your order. You can enjoy a 100-day risk-free trial, free shipping, and free returns. Check it out, fromourplace.com slash Tim. Listeners have heard me talk about making before you manage for years. All that means to me is that when I wake up, I block out three to four hours, to do the most important things that are generative, creative, podcasting, writing, etc.

2:54:05Before I get to the email and the admin stuff and the reactive stuff and everyone else's agenda for my time. For me, let's just say I'm a writer and entrepreneur, I need to focus on the making to be happy. If I get sucked into all the little bits and pieces that are constantly churning, I end up feeling stressed out. And that is why today's sponsor is so interesting. It's been one of the greatest energetic unlocks in the last few years. So here we go. I need to find people who are great at managing. And that is where Crescent Family Office comes in. You spell it C-R-E-S-S-E-T. Crescent Family Office.

2:54:44I was introduced to them by one of the top CPG investors in the world. Crescent is a prestigious family office for CEOs, founders, and entrepreneurs. They handle the complex financial planning, uncertain tax strategies, timely exit planning, bill pay, wires, all the dozens of other parts of wealth management, just financial management that would otherwise pull me away from doing what I love most, making things, mastering skills, spending time with the people I care about. And over many years, I was getting pulled away from that stuff at least a few days a week and I've completely eliminated that.

2:55:19So experience the freedom of focusing on what matters to you with the support of a top wealth management team. You can schedule a call today at CrescentCapital.com slash Tim. That's spelled C-R-E-S-S-E-T. CrescentCapital.com slash Tim to see how Crescent can help streamline your financial plans and grow your wealth. That's CrescentCapital.com slash Tim. And disclosure, I am a client of Crescent. There are no material conflicts other than this paid testimonial. And of course, all investing involves risk, including loss of principal. So do your due diligence.

2:55:55Thank you.