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

Most of the greatest entrepreneurs, you actually would not want them as an employee. Ha! I was literally going to bring this up. Steve was an eccentric. He was 19 years old. Showed up barefoot. He only wanted to work at night. Everybody's telling Nolan Bushnell, get rid of this guy. He's like, no, I want to capture the upside. And because the upside is so extreme, I'm willing to deal with the downside. The guy that I have on today, David Senra, has become a friend. There is nobody in the world I'm convinced that knows more about the world's greatest founders. So if you want to see inside Jeff Bezos's head and inside of founders that don't even exist anymore, but have shaped our world, you're going to want to listen to this episode. Keep your freedom. You can control what you work on. If you love it, you'll do it all the time. If you do it all the time, you'll get really good at it and money will come as a result. Yeah, obsession is kind of contagious, isn't it? I would say passion is infectious. You have me piqued. I want to hear this Mr. Beast story. Oh, so this is the funniest ever. He goes, I want to run an ad where it says, Mr. Beast wants founder friends. Stop it. A lot of people don't understand. The founder life, it is kind of lonely and only other entrepreneurs and other founders kind of understand that. Do you need to cut people from your life that do not want to win? I was literally thinking about this this morning. I was curious for you, you've talked a little bit about relationships of famous founders and entrepreneurs. Like, what have you found are the marriages or relationships like by the greatest entrepreneurs? Marriages? Yeah. Terrible. They're terrible. I mean, there's very few people because you tend to be obsessed like i also think like it's important to note so the people that appear on founders podcasts right they they were so good at their jobs that somebody wrote a book about their life this is like the tiniest percentage of any humans that have ever existed so of course they're like outliers of outliers and what i would say is most people over optimize their professional life to the detriment of their personal life and there's a great documentary on this called the defiant ones which is one of my favorites it's probably my second favorite documentary besides the last dance if you're like an obsessive person and i've probably watched the defiant ones at least 10 times jimmy ivine who many people would be surprised they're like you know of all the people you want to meet who would you want to meet and in my top three jimmy ivine was in there it was james dyson jeff bezos and jimmy ivine and dyson and jeff bezos makes perfect sense for somebody that you know studies the history history entrepreneurs were like jimmy why and so you just got to watch the defiant ones because it's a great documentary people think it's a documentary on the the part the relationship and partnership between dr dre and jimmy no it's a documentary on entrepreneurship they're just very entrepreneurial and um in that documentary they interview jimmy's ex-wife and they interview dr trey's wife who then has they've since been divorced after that and you know they both talk openly both of the the women and talk openly about how difficult it is to be married to people like this. And I think they can describe it better than anybody else because it's from the spouse's perspective. But it essentially comes from you have usually highly disagreeable people, very driven people, obsessed people, have a hard time taking a break, are dedicated, and you can have a relationship if you're not spending time with the other person and making them a priority. Yeah. Do you think that entrepreneurship is a trauma response in some ways? like it's like ptsd and so you become an entrepreneur i actually have a lot of people you know because when you think about these these life stories there's usually some kind of like unhappiness uh usually an issue with like their parents like a relationship with the father is a big instigator maybe they grew up in poverty i would just say that i don't think it's prerequisite for extreme success it's just that most humans grow up in bad environments and so i think you just it's literally just a bigger sample size um there you can you know grow up with in a loving household and still have extreme success i don't know if it's a trauma response i do think i i have a different view of this like i i hope i just talking to toby luke of shopify about this he says something interesting because i had a long-form conversation with him for the new show and he said on at the very end he's like oh me and you have the same job our job is to create more entrepreneurs. And I never thought about that because he was a fan of both founders, of the podcast founders too. And I would like to help entrepreneurs surface useful information for them, but I don't know if you can create more of them. Maybe he could. I just think that there is something almost innate in it. It's like a personality. I don't think you choose to be an entrepreneur. I think like there's this great line from Jeff Bezos where he says, we don't choose our passions, our passions choose us. That's how I kind of think about it. So I think even if that entrepreneur type didn't even have trauma, they still would do what they're doing. Like, I'm an unmanageable person. There's no way I could ever work for somebody. I'd get fired. Like, I just can't not say what's on my mind. I like to – me and you are both control freaks. It's very obvious. We talk about this before we're recording. Control enthusiast, I like to say. Yeah, exactly. I want to, you know, pick what I work on, who I work with, how I work. These are just things that are incompatible with, you know, with being an employee. So I didn't think there was an option, you know, whether I had trauma in my childhood or not. Yeah, I kind of think, I don't know if it's a story you tell yourself when you're an entrepreneur, but I do think I at least am unemployable now. And probably it seems to me like most of the greatest entrepreneurs, you actually would not want them as an employee. They might be incredible, but you might not. But I'm curious because you have a story. I think you're the one that I heard it from. It was about Steve Jobs and the founder of Atari. I swear to God that was on my mind just now. Really? I was literally going to bring this up. Okay, tell us the story. So there's an interesting thing that I'm very interested in these ideas that people that didn't know each other lived at different times, worked in different industries, and in many cases, you know, were in different parts of the world, arrived at similar conclusions. And this idea that I've now heard from a bunch of living entrepreneurs. So Daniel, founder of Spotify, told me this. Kareem, founder of Ramp, told me this, that they hire for Spikes. and their point was that you know big corporations the advantage that you have as like a as a founder like company it's like big corporations kind of like manage to the middle so they want you to look a certain way act a certain way there's just a lot there's a lot more like structure around them where if you're a founder-led company you have the authority that like you know a non-founding CEO probably lacks and so their whole thing is just like I'm not I don't judge you by your worst idea I judge you by your best and usually if you want the most talented designer in the world or the most talented programmer in the world or the most talented ex of anything in the world they're going to be unusual people with very distinct personalities and a lot of their personality types will usually lead to like bad behavior and so like one example of this is like one of the best designers that uh spotify ever had and this is the early days of spotify it's like he was a bipolar and also an alcoholic but also the world's best designer and if the ceo and the founder didn't sit next to him why he designed if daniel got up to go take a call or something else they'd lose track of this guy for days he would just like take off running so he literally people were telling daniel like what are you doing you're the founder of this company your ceo is like you can't just sit and babysit this guy it's like he's so talented yes i do it's it's a very high leverage you know thing i'm doing right now as opposed and they knew it wouldn't last forever these is not it's not something's gonna work with you for 20 years and this is not new he's like these you'll see these characters in these books. And so I didn't know this until I read, I think, I think I've done like 15 episodes on Steve Jobs right now. But one of the funniest things was Nolan Bushnell. A lot of people don't realize that in that time of Silicon Valley, this was probably 40 years ago, very common for founder starts company, raises money, bring in professional management. There was very few of these like founders in their twenties left to run their companies. And Nolan was one of the first ones He was like 27. And he thought Steve, both Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were very talented. But Steve was an eccentric. He would show up to the office barefoot. He was 19 years old, show up barefoot, refused to shower, would only I think at the time was only eating like a fruit diet. Like he just had a very extreme personality type. And then he only wanted to work at night. And he insisted that he could sleep in the office. And everybody's telling Nolan Bush, I was like, what the hell is wrong with you? Like, get rid of this guy. He's like, no, I, he's like, I want to capture the upside. And I'm willing, because the upside is so extreme, I'm willing to deal with the downside. And so he's like, okay, we just kept, we kind of secluded Steve away from the rest of the general population. And we let him work at night and just, you know, told people to hold their nose because he had such offensive body odor. And he slept at the office. And he wound up being very, like, that would wind up being a good trade that Nolan did. Yeah, I think I saw somewhere, it was a video on Divas. and hiring divas one way or the other. It might've been Steve Jobs too. And I thought about it because we had a, one of my best engineers, he's brilliant and I won't say who he is. Um, but he is building one of our products. And, um, anyway, he, he's not, doesn't have very high EQ. So his engagements with other people are either extremely passive or like psychopathic. So I have to have a chat with him every so often. And the other day, so I'm like, Hey man, we gotta, uh, you gotta push on this team. You gotta push harder. And he, and he's like, no, I'm pushing. I'm like, I need you to have some big energy get in there i want you to tell him what to do like you are in charge you go well that translation to turned into him walking into a room full of like 80 women and going cody told me i had to put my on the table i was like my life so the women came to me they're like this was odd behavior i'm like listen that's probably my fault i'll i'll correspond with him but you know we're not you know we're not doing anything about it because he's so good so i do i do relate to this idea of divas or really high performers sometimes being somebody that you have to keep, sometimes somebody you have to get rid of. You know, there was another one that you talked about that I really liked, which is I'm obsessed with George Lucas. I just love that he's a world builder plus has been transcendent for decades. And he was supposedly like really difficult to work with. And I loved the, you know, some of your stories that you've told about him. But I was wondering, like, he not only was really difficult, but came up with wild ideas and worked with really spiky people. Do you have a favorite story from George Lucas? Or do you have something that you think George Lucas would teach people that most people don't realize? There's a great biography of George Lucas called George Lucas to Life. It's written by Brian J. Jones, who's also a prolific biographer. He has a bunch of biographies I like. But it says the most important line in that book is that George Lucas unapologetically invested in what he believed in most himself. and he was another control freak and one of the biggest bets he did so he did this movie called american graffiti and he didn't have any leverage at the time because he was still rather unknown director again another thing that was very rare is to have directors in their early 20s the director that kind of blazed the path for all these guys was a guy named francis ford coppola who was running major big budget major movies in he was like in his late 20s he's probably 20s around 27 as well And so Steven Spielberg saw this. George Lucas saw this. Brian De Palma saw this. All these directors and filmmakers that were friends with each other. And I think Coppola is like maybe half a decade older, maybe a decade older. And so he played a huge role. But at the time that he's making American Graffiti, which is one of the best returns on investments, I think he did the movie for like a million dollars, if I remember. And he made like $57 million at the box office. but because he didn't have creative control they and he wanted final cut on his movie because it wasn't just a movie it's very personal to him they they cut like four minutes from the movie and he said it's like cutting off fingers it was so painful for him and that led him to once he had now i think he made like four to five million dollars on that movie which a ton of money back then and then that gave him he wrestled on the next project for creative control over star wars and then he wanted ownership of the merchandise rights. And I think the merchandise rights were the most important thing. I forgot the other thing that he argued. It was like a very simple contract. But I think just the idea of like, I believe in myself. I'm willing to take less money up front, you know, because a lot of directors are just like, no, just pay me $10 million and you keep all the money in the back end. He's like, I don't care about the money. I care about the control. And if you're talented and you maintain control, you wind up with the money anyways. That was, I think, one of the most important lessons from George Lucas. Yeah. You know what you've also talked a lot about, which I'm curious, and you almost only talk to entrepreneurs that have had massive longevity. And you have some great quotes on longevity too, how history's greatest entrepreneurs think in decades. There was another one I really liked while talking about personal standards. I'm curious, what have you seen it takes to last as an entrepreneur? Like so many people flame out. What do you want to do if you want to succeed for the long term and not be a footnote in history? I don't think I'm glad you picked up on that because it is one of the most important things for me. Like I'm terrified of being successful for a year or five. I almost think like being successful and losing it is is worse than never being successful. So, you know, somebody runs a company and looks like success on paper for a year or five years. Like it's like that's not interesting to me. So for the new show, if you look at we can go through like the first three guests, first guests. I pick them on purpose for this exact. We both share this this love and admiration for Charlie Munger. you and I do. And he thought durability was a first rate virtue. What do you mean? It's like you build a company to last, not to just make a bag of money and then disappear onto an island. I'm not interested in that. And so when I thought about the people I wanted to talk to, and this haunts me in my dreams. I had a nightmare the other night. I'm literally arguing with people because they're like, why don't you interview more startup founders? And I was like, I want people that have done that are not just promoting something. Because a lot of the entrepreneurship industry especially people that you're consuming this content it's all you know usually tied to some kind of like vc back company they're just they're promoting they're talking about stuff they may do in the future and a small percentage of them will do what they're saying in the future somebody else can do that i want you to be able to point to a body of work and like this is what i did and this is what i learned by doing this and i want to surface those ideas um and so like daniel first guest on the new show january worked on spotify for 20 years second guest let me see if I could go through this by memory. Second guess, Michael Dell. He started Dell when he's 19. He's 61 and he's still doing it. Dude, tell him that line that Michael Dell has about how many days of the week he works. I have it on my wall. So this was hilarious because I actually DM Michael Dell because he's been very nice to me and he tweets and posts on LinkedIn about founders that he thinks it's a useful tool for the world and I really appreciate it. And then I get to spend time with him. I think he's the goat he's one of the most kind but fascinating people to talk to because if again we're starting company in 19 this is how crazy is i'll get to that um statement one one second i highly recommend everybody read his autobiography or listen to it because he actually reads the autobiography but there's a crazy line in there where i didn't even know that ibm at the time was the most valuable company in the world it was the first company in history to hit 100 billion market cap which I also didn't know. And he goes, I'm, I'm in the university of Texas dorm room. I have a thousand dollars. And he's telling, he's trying to convince his parents to let him like work on his company and drop out of school. And he's like, I'm going to, with this thousand dollars, I'm going to take on the biggest, the most valuable company in the world, which is IBM. It's such a wild statement. And then to go on and to succeed and to, to navigate all these different technological, you know, revolutions that he successfully endured. He built a durable company and you know somebody like that that has 41 years of entrepreneur experience like you just sit there and talk to him zach dell is a friend and he's building this great company called he is a smart dude which is not always the case for billionaires kids yeah he's going after it zach that's our company or that energy company has is incredible yeah but he says he goes um you know the bloomberg terminal he's like i have dad terminal so he's like i call my dad's like i I have an issue with my supply chain. Well, guess what? Michael's seen everything. He's so helpful as a thought partner on this. I think it's just insanely valuable. But this is also why I wanted to start the new show because I resisted for a long time. I was like, no, no, no. It's like I can't start another podcast. It's like a loss of focus. I'm just going to focus on reading biographies of future good entrepreneurs and just doing one episode a week and that's it. But then when you put something out like that, Guess what? Anybody that lived a life so remarkable that somebody wrote a book about it in every biography, you'll realize almost everyone. They were reading biographies when they were younger and they were trying to figure out. So this is, again, a line from Charlie Munger, where it's like learning from history is a form of leverage. Why did Munger read hundreds of biographies? Why did Buffett read hundreds of biographies? Why did Elon read hundreds of biographies? Why did Jeff Bezos like Steve Jobs? This just over and over again, obviously one of the highest value things you can do. So I was like, let me just focus on that because I think it's good for the world and other people are getting value of it. Some of the best entrepreneurs in the world obviously listen to it. Michael Dell was one of them. But then what was happening is as a result of this work, I got to get to know these people, have conversations with them. And then I'm learning so much in the conversations too. It's like being able to prompt a book instead of me being just reading the book. And I can – what do you mean by that? Follow up. Explain that a little bit more. And so I was like, oh, I should just record these conversations. And then other people can benefit from them, not just me. And I also thought because I had this like catalog, this encyclopedic knowledge of the history of entrepreneurship, I could create something truly differentiated where if like Michael Dell sitting across from me and he says something, oh, wait, that's just like Faso said this in his shareholder letter. And like this guy named Daniel Ludwig said this and Rockefeller said this. And so it's almost like tying it all together, like this giant weave. and I knew that because god bless him but there was this guy he runs a great podcast but he asked he had Michael Dell on his podcast one time and he goes so uh when you're starting Dell uh how many hours did you work a week and Michael's so polite and so kind and he's a great person and he just looked at him like uh and he goes uh he literally I think pauses uh all of them because like you No, if you started a company, you know what the answer to that question is. It's like, oh, no, I clocked out at 5 o'clock. I have $1,000 going against a $100 billion company. 5 o'clock, guys, see you tomorrow? Like, come on, you know what the answer is. So I just thought, okay, I think I understand these people on a very, you know, fundamental level, and that could maybe hopefully make the conversations interesting. Do you think you have to be obsessed to win? Like, if you want to be one of the greatest, do you have to be obsessed? Is there anybody I've talked to that wasn't obsessed? So we can go back through the guest list. So 20 years, Daniel, obsessed. He couldn't work on anything. He just stepped down because his natural state is to work on multiple companies at one time. And we should talk about founder archetypes because we're working on this project together, which you might find interesting. And really the importance of like knowing yourself. And then you're not going to be successful unless you can build a company that's a reflection of you. You know, essentially like an echo or a shadow of the founder. So Daniel had to be obsessed if Spotify wouldn't have worked. michael dell is still obsessed to this day he's obsessed with puzzles and he just looks at like reinventing constantly reinventing his company is like a giant puzzle so he's been doing it for 40 years uh brad jacobs has 43 years of experience as an entrepreneur he started eight separate billion dollar companies you should get him on here he's a fascinating character one of those he's on my list he changed my life we should talk about inner monologues too because i had a very negative inner monologue and brad i spent a bunch of time with brad and he's the one who's just like this is stupid like he used to have an inner monologue a very negative inner monologue very self-critical talks about this in his book called how to make a few billion dollars which i recommend reading and you know i knew this for a long time but just something with the conversation with him just finally clicked where i'm like my fuel source now is not like i'm you know fixing the wrongs that happen like being born you know not with money or whatever it's like no i just love what i do and should be a more positive field source and like me talking to myself this way is stupid it's not so it served me when i was younger it doesn't serve me anymore so you should change that's a direct uh drastic change in my life as a direct result of brad jacobs book and then talking to him so 43 he's 43 44 years of uh experience as an entrepreneur brad jacobs will tell you he's obsessed still oh he just loves deals he like dances he's just giddy like a little school girl i think he's 68 or 69 years old he still wakes up every day fired up work he's like dude there was eight days in a week i'd work eight he's just like can't he can't help himself the fourth one was todd graves okay yeah obsessed the guy is worth 20 billion dollars and all he does is sell chicken fingers that's insane but he just sells chicken fingers better than anybody else in the world and also didn't he do a boating he was like fishing and that was the i can i can tell you stories from him so you found i mean not that you found him he was obviously very very successful but nobody was really bound down at the altar of todd graves before you found this because you you you astutely picked up what i'm actually interested in it's like i like people that are obsessed and do things for a long time that's very simple and i don't care what that is it could be a tech company it could be you know you're creating hardware software you could sell chicken fingers could be real estate i just they they nerd out and they think about things in such a deep way where then you talk to them or you read about them it makes you like oh i can take what I'm doing seriously. Go back to Charlie Munger, which me and you will talk about over and over again. I think one of the most important things I've ever heard Charlie Munger say, which is like oftentimes we find that the winning system in business goes ridiculously, this is the word he used, ridiculously far, minimizing and are maximizing one or a few variables. There's an extension to that idea, which I think is almost like a way to describe that idea in simpler terms is find a simple idea and take it seriously. Todd Graves has not changed his menu. He started the business when he's 23. He's 53 now. He has not changed the menu in 30 years. And what did he do? He came out to the West Coast, saw the success of In-N-Out. It's like, look, we're in LA right now. I'll probably go to In-N-Out after this because I haven't eaten anything today. I've just had coffee all day long. And he's like, well, a simple menu, stripped down, very simple menu worked in cheeseburgers. Why wouldn't it work for Chicken Fingers? And his original idea was like, I'm going to sell Chicken Fingers to drunk college students outside of LSU. Turns out a lot of people like fried chicken. I like fried chicken too, and I'm not a drunk college student. And then he just didn't interrupt the compounding. But I didn't find him. I saw a clip. He went on Theo Vaughn. And this is the thing that once you again have this – I think everybody listening should just find people you admire and just read their life story. and then in those books, they will talk about the people they admire and then go read their life story and just keep following that chain back and back and back. I think it's a very fascinating and a good use of your time. So I wouldn't have understood this clip I saw if I, you know, maybe the first year I started Founders Podcast, but I was in like the seventh year. I'd read like 300 of these things. I have an idea of how the entrepreneurs, these entrepreneurs think. And it's a one minute clip on TikTok or something. and he was talking about the fact that the simpler the menu is, it relates to even how fast he can turn over in the drive-thru. And I was like, oh, so this guy understands how one decision impacts everything else and that you should limit the amount of details and then make every detail perfect. That's how I would describe what Todd Graves has done. And then you don't interrupt the compounding and you're worth $20 billion selling. Go to Raising Cane's. Why does a simple menu matter, right? because when he has one restaurant and he's saving 15 or 20 seconds in order because the menu is simple, you pull to Raising Cane's. This is your options. You can have three chicken fingers, four chicken fingers, six chicken fingers. When they told him you need a chicken sandwich, he's like, okay, I'm putting chicken fingers in between two slices of bun. There's your goddamn chicken sandwich. That's literally what he does. It's hilarious and it works. But the point was, you just show up there. It's like, do I want three, four or six? That's a five second decision. When you have one store, it doesn't matter. He's got 915. I think he's getting another 100 this year. He's growing faster in year 30 than he ever has. That makes a huge difference. And for him, you can see that you can clock that in a clip. Oh, this guy knows his business. Where the opposite of that is a lot of these like fake promoting startup founders that are just lying to you to get to their next round, which I'm not interested in at all. You know what's fascinating about the world's greatest founders like Steve Jobs? Steve Jobs didn't just control the product, aka the iPhone or the MacBook and the computers that you're on every day. He controlled the distribution. He controlled the back end of it. What do I mean? Well, the app store, right? He knew that he wanted to control the way that apps got delivered to you. He wanted to actually be the entire marketplace. You want to distribute your product, but you want to make sure that you also own the distribution network. So what can you own instead? Your newsletter. That is why I'm obsessed with this company called Beehive, so much so that I invested in it. I have a newsletter that now goes out to a million people, and I get to control if they get my information or not. And so with Beehive, you have a founding team that is obsessed on one thing, how to get your clients to read your things. How do you get to have better open rates? How do you get to get more subscribers? How do you get better design? How do you get ads placed in there so you can get paid to even go and distribute your ideas to other people? That's why I'm obsessed with Beehive. And if you already have a newsletter, you should move to this platform. If you don have a newsletter you need to get one And I got a discount code for you on it today If you go to beehive B and use code CODY30 for 30 off I am going to hook you up so just like Jobs, you own the distribution, not just the product. One makes me think of Ray from McDonald's, too. But the other day, I was at this place called Pop-Up Bagels. Have you ever been to it? No. I can't stop going back. I'm trying to limit my carbs. Yeah, this is not good for you. Don't go there. Don't go there if you want to six-pack. I'm on camera a lot this year. Go on. the part that I find fascinating is the exact same thing. You can have three mini bagels, six mini bagels, or maybe you can have 12. Those are the only options. The line is always around the corner. It's this big. It's the tiniest little center that you can imagine. They give you like kind of an astronomically large three types of cream cheese. You could pick between each type of cream cheese. And watching it is a masterclass in business because the line is incredibly long. The bagel options are all the same. It's all open. So you can see the bagels being made simultaneously. By the time you order, they've already pulled up your bag, even in a line of hundreds of people with your name on it. The bagels are hot the second that you get them. They're just small enough where like you want to order a few more than you probably need. So they're not the large ones. $15 and 75 cents for three bagels and a cream cheese. The margin must be incredible on it. And you see these people run through the business. And I just watch that and think everybody's like oh my god aren't these bagels amazing like that's the least interesting part about this business and so it is so fascinating when you can see an entrepreneur who understands that like every business is a widget business in some way if you can get excited about chicken fingers or bagels or whatever you can win and i think the bagels are probably amazing because it's not people like oh to be a master something it's 10 000 hours no it's 10 000 iterations and the amount of iterations they they had gone through to to finally perfect their product and then the whole thing is they don't stop so you go back to this so like todd graze did it for 30 years that dude you talk about obsessing i told him i was having i was so excited so like i'm obsessed with podcasts people think i love reading and i definitely do but what i realize is like my real obsession is podcasting and so what happens is when i have these conversations now i'm usually like i don't do drugs we were talking about this right before we started recording and i've never done ecstasy or any kind of psychedelics but i would have to imagine this is what it feels like to do ecstasy because i'm so wired and like high as a kite on excitement because you just you absorb their energy and enthusiasm for their business and it translates to you and i was telling um todd i was like dude i need to like help sleeping and a friend of mine recommended this like non-addictive sleeping medication and he's like what is that i go why he goes i need it too i he's like i slept three hours last night i go why did you sleep three hours because i couldn't wait to wake up and get inside of a store he calls his his restaurant stores and that's what he does he travels around and like he literally 30 years in he'll like you go to some raising canes and he's working the drive-thru his his business card says uh fry fryer cook cashier ceo he does all the jobs uh the fifth guest michael ovitz who now like i text and talk to all the time and he was he's been an entrepreneur for 40 years he ran ca for like 30 years obsessive like the guy almost killed himself he was working so much uh i won't go through the whole list. Six guests, James Dyson, he's been running Dyson for 45 years. Obsessed. Same thing. Like we just went through this whole list. They either did it for at least was two decades to four to five decades. And when you sit down with these wiser, older entrepreneurs and you listen, hopefully listen to the podcast, they could just tell you things. They just know so much more. In many cases, they have more entrepreneur experience than I've been alive. 100%. Yeah. I just get a lot of energy and value. Yesterday I had Jeremy Zimmer on the podcast, you know, the co-founder of UTA. And it was fascinating because I was going down the rabbit hole on him. And, you know, he had this line about Michael Ovitz because obviously him, Ari Emanuel, Zimmer were all like, they were fierce competitors. And I was asking him, I'm like, you know, I asked him, do you think competitors are good for you? Like, do you kind of hate them, but you're glad they exist because you make them better? He was like, yes. But he's like, when we started UTA, Michael Ovitz, he had his foot on our fucking neck. He wanted to murder our business. And he goes, now we have a lot of respect for each other. But it is also fascinating when you go to these founders and you get to speak or listen to people who have built multi-billion dollar enterprises that are lasting. you understand that like all the little decisions that you have that's just a Tuesday for them. And so like it's kind of interesting you can see the compounding effect of like how you can handle pain as you go forward. So that's also why I like your pod. One of the greatest maxims from a history of entrepreneurship is excellence is the capacity to take pain. And you just see this over and over again. It actually came from the biography of the founder of Four Seasons. That's where I first saw that line. But I would say with Ovitz I would highly recommend reading his autobiography. I think it's one of the most important entrepreneur autobiographies ever written. it's called who is michael ovitz because he talks about the regrets that he has and stuff that he would do differently and i really think people should avoid as much as you can working in like these zero-sum environments where in his case like if he lost somebody's going to be tom cruise's agent or this other actor's agent and only one of us can win and i think and i've talked to michael about this in private like i think almost if he took his exact same skill set because he's essentially the world what is an agent agent is a salesperson he's like the world's greatest agent So it was like world's greatest salesperson and literally just moved it to the East Coast and just worked it because he was running the fund and he's been like he's one of the greatest fundraisers I've ever seen. And he's got all these crazy connections. And I just think, one, not that he made enough money. He's got a multibillionaire. He's fine over there. He would have made more money, but I think he would have been he just wouldn't have been a universally hated because, you know, he essentially monopolized the entertainment industry. I think he had something like 80% market share with all of the directors, the actors. I forgot the exact number. It's in the book. But I think he just did a service to the future generation of entrepreneurs. He was like, hey, that was actually a mistake. Burning through relationships with all kinds of people was a mistake. It's something I definitely learned from. I am pretty obsessive with my work, but I actually think my relationships now, my deep, true friendships are more important to me, either equal to or more important than my work. And that is like a relatively new revelation for me. I thought I was an introvert. I thought, you know, I was like a lone wolf. I thought I didn't need anybody. And I realized, oh, no, I just had like low quality people around me. And like if you can surround yourself with high quality people, hold yourself to high standards. And then they also hold you to high standards. It's like one of the greatest things about being alive. So at this point, we're like, I will literally take time away from work to deepen an existing relationship and friendship. And I think that's the stuff. I mean, I talked to John Mackey for the new show, too. Another 45 years he worked on Whole Foods. And after we recorded, I wish we got this on recording, but we didn't. And he goes, he's 72. He goes, David, when you're my age, you're not going to be thinking about the 5,000th Whole Foods store. And he's very proud of building Whole Foods. You're not going to be thinking about the 5,000th Whole Foods store. You're going to be thinking about the relationship you have with the people you love. And I'm like, okay, well, he's got 35-something years on me. what's the point of me having these conversations I'm not going to change my behavior if I just like oh I agree I'm collecting information and not changing anything then what is this this is a waste of time I wonder though if some of this is like the right guidance for the right season for instance if Michael Ovitz and Jeremy Zimmer and Ari Emanuel didn't have their feet on the proverbial neck of some of their competitors early on would they be who they are today like do you have to be one way when you're young and then as you get older you become the wise elder and that's when you stop going to attack the, you know, other parties and instead kind of go together with them. The interesting thing, and I'm somewhat skeptical of people that say they would do things differently. I wonder if they would. Right. Or does it just sound better? Maybe you're valuing different things when you're in your 70s and 80s than you did when you're 25 or 35. You know, so you have to figure that out. Like what is actually important to you? And this is a lot of this when we like I'm spending a lot of time thinking about like different founder archetypes. something me and daniel ecker trying to figure it was his idea just because he what he what he realized was for him he is he's like all the new entrepreneurs if you talk to young entrepreneurs like who do they want to be like everyone wants to be elon and before that they wanted to be steve jobs and so daniel was the same way and he's just like but he tried to like this like imitation he's like but wait i'm not like this and his if you look at the actual structure spotify it's much more like almost like a team as opposed to like just one visionary genius and what daniel's realizing and it's been very helpful because he definitely shapes my thinking on a lot of things is he's like i just think i'm a better player than coach or excuse me better coach than player and steve's a player elon's a player he says but i'm not like that so then that doesn't mean you can't build a successful company but you have to know who you are daniel spent decades trying to figure out who he is and i think that's why i'm very skeptical like in sam walton's autobiography which again if no one's read you should read that immediately you know he's like yeah i missed out on a lot of my you know essentially walmart was his entire life he worked like a dog all the time you know he did have this weird balance where he would take off in the middle of the day he'd work on walmart seven days a week but he'd take like an hour to play tennis or an hour to go hunt uh with his dogs in the middle of the day but then you'd be right back on it but you know you miss out on some of your kid's childhood time with his wife and everything else and he's dying of cancer when he's writing that when he's writing that book he knows he doesn't have much time left and he's like but if i'm being honest i wouldn't really do much different i would still do exactly what i did and so yeah that's a great way you're like insight that your question was actually getting to which is just like do they actually mean it if they could replay it would they do it they might replay it as a 70 or 80 year old man would they replay that 35 super aggressive still trying to prove themselves. I don't know. I doubt that they would. Do you think that you also have to surround yourself only with other people who want to win like you do? Like, is that old saying, you're the average of the five people you spend time with, the Jim Rohnism. Like, is that true? And have you seen with the history's greatest entrepreneurs, do you need to cut people from your life that do not want to win? This is something, it's funny. I was literally thinking about this this morning um there's a line in brad jacobs new book which is hilarious called how to make a few more billion dollars so good it's so good i aspire to write that book don't you okay so i didn't grow up with any money right my parents i was my parents never even graduated high school much less college right as the first person in my family graduated high school which is a crazy thing to look back on and i thought uh i was unhappy when i was younger because i didn't have money and you start to make money and then you're like why am i still unhappy and so i am much more focused on inputs than anything else um and i think a lot of like there's this great book have you ever read bill walsh's book the score will take care of itself yep so i think there's a lot of wisdom in that book where it's like just do the best job you possibly can with the opportunity right right in front of you this is something that reoccurs in a lot of the biographies that opportunity handled well leads to more opportunity and we were talking earlier before we recorded that one of my closest friends is Patrick O'Shaughnessy from he's an investor, but he's more well known because he has this great podcast called invest like the best. And his whole thing with me talks about this all the time. He almost thinks like, um, uh, a little retarded yesterday. He goes, you're going to retard max into becoming a billionaire because he's like, you don't, you have no like long-term plan. You just wake up every day and you, you like, don't look for forms of leverage. You literally just obsess over making, trying to make a good podcast and then you do the next thing the next the same thing the next day and the next day and you've been doing it for 10 years and like look where it's getting you and i'm just like i i just do what i like to do i don't care so if you tell me oh i'll never be able to write a book like how to make a billion dollars i never became a billionaire but i got to do what i love to dude like i think the best definition we're kind of like dancing around here is like how do you define success and five years from now what does your life look like i'm like i have no idea I was like, hopefully I'm doing this because I like doing this. And I just try to design a good 24 hours that I like and then do it again and do it again. And again, I want to add value to other people's lives. And I think me making these podcasts, hopefully it has information, educational and inspiring information to help you build your business. And if I just do that over and over again, then the score will take care of like the score will take care of itself. um and my i guess my answer to the question is like to what is the success in general could be five years from now or forever it's like my the way i legitimately think about this and i think a lot of history's greatest entrepreneurs did you won't find many of them that are obsessed over i have to hit a certain net worth or i had to hit a certain market cap i almost never hear that mine i would just echo with steve jobs answer this question was when they're like how do you define success he's like did i make something i'm proud of and i think that's like really really important but going back to this this there's a line in um the new book how to make a few billion dollars by brad jacobs where he says or how to make a few more billion dollars i should say where he says that the the people you have around you is the most important thing in your life right and he says it more eloquently than that but that's the the general like thing he's talking about and one thing that you observe when you're reading about great histories entrepreneurs you get to talk to some of the greatest entrepreneurs is how small their circles are and how like they're very slow to add new people they almost go to great lengths to vet the people they have around them which is another fascinating thing i've been thinking about it's almost a very clannish it's almost like very human to be like leery of other people especially when you become a lot of these people are well known they're multi multi-billionaires everybody all day long wants something from them like invest in my thing or become my customer they want to like use them for something um but i would say keeping your circles the advice i've been given and you kind of observe it also is like keep your circle really really small make sure everybody's a high quality individual not just like it can't just be that they want to win because there's a lot of people that are winning with you know sacrificing all sense of ethics and morals uh you don't want those people around you what did buffett and munger say you can't do a good deal with a bad person but I would say yeah they most they have very high bars for who they surround themselves with because you are going to you know imitate and mimic and just be influenced by the people around you and then the line as far as professionally it's like I like the Steve Jobs line where he's like you need to be a yardstick for quality most people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected not like once in a while it's like no our standard default is excellence and I think this ties to a lot of what you and I've been talking about or what we touched on it's like it's really hard to be excellent in 50 different things. And so what I would say a lot of these people have in common is like they focus on one or two or basically no bigger than a handful of things to be really excellent at. I keep thinking about how a computer in the hands of somebody like Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak or Michael Dell has the potential to unleash the most powerful products and companies the world has ever seen. But if you had that same computer in the wrong hands, well, that's where things go sideways. You know, in 2024 alone, there were six mega breaches. Incidents where over 100 million records of everyday people were actually stolen. So if you think you're safe, I don't know. I think you got to think about it. Google yourself. See what comes up next. It's fascinating. It's your address, usually. Your relatives. Your phone number. That info can easily be collected and sold by data brokers whose entire job is turning your life into a product. When I saw how much of my personal data was floating around online, I freaked out. That's what Incogni helps with. They find the sites that collect and sell your personal information and remove it for you automatically. No emailing sketchy websites or chasing one down. And if there's something specific you really want gone, Incogni also offers these custom removals for extra coverage. So think of your data like loose change scattered across the Internet. Incogni tracks it down and cleans it up. And it doesn't matter if you're a public figure or not. Everyone should protect their privacy. So go to incogni.com slash big deal and get protected. You have a quote I like, actually, which is the greats had incredibly high personal standards. And it's such like it's a simple line. It's not that it's incredibly eloquent. But if you don't have if you don't hold the standard, I've never seen a world in which a founder holds a standard that is less than what the company gives back. Yeah, I think that probably impossible. It's impossible. And so if you know that you are the highest standard in the company, then you have this moral imperative to make sure that you are holding it as high as humanly possible. In fact, I think it probably was from you, too, but there was something I was listening to about Steve Jobs and how he would talk about how your job as a CEO is to give your employees unreasonable amounts of confidence and push them to be great. And I think about that often, like our job is to push our people past the level in which they think that they are capable of. And if you can't do that, then you probably shouldn't be in charge. And I think that's true. Or like Jensen Wong, who talks about, like, I will pressure you into greatness. Torture. Torture you. I will torture you into greatness. Right. I think that's from you, too. You did an episode on, too. Yeah. His belief was that that's how he became great, right? Well, what you realize is, like, when you read that, he's like, I don't like to give up on people. I'd rather torture them into greatness. This is the exact line from his biography. The book is called The NVIDIA Way. I think it's written by Tay Kim, if I remember correctly. And then you realize as you read more about him, you're like, oh, he tortured. He did that to himself first. He tortured himself into greatness first. What I would say is about being the ultimate authority figure. I think I find it very useful to take these ideas because we're limited to like how much we can remember. So I try to distill the basic idea down to like a maxim or aphorism. And then you contextually apply it to like your situation. But the way I would think about this is Sidney Harmon, this engineer, founder of Harmon Kardon. uh says that the founder is the guardian of the company's soul what a line yeah and so i think like you're the one that sets the standards i would say some people might be listening to this and like oh but i heard steve jobs was a jerk one of the most important things you can read the the person that worked with steve jobs the longest was not anybody apple it was actually ed catmell the founder of pixar yeah and ed catmell's got this great um autobiography but also uh really almost like a bible on how to make great creative work called creativity inc which talks about how he started pixar and his life story and how they approach things there's a 20 or 30 maybe 20 page afterward in the book called the steve we knew and you know he's like i worked with this guy for i don't know i forgot 26 on 26 consecutive years and he talked about the maturation and how much steve changed when he first met him to when you know i think there was 20 surprised maybe 30 years old when he met him and then steve was in his 50s when he died and i think that's one of the most important things to to learn and to read is like yeah that steve steve was obviously very aggressive and he could be called an asshole or a jerk not saying he wasn't even later on but he learned how to manage and to deal with excessively talented people and he changed over time and that afterward which you know you can read in a half hour i think is really important to understand how he truly was not how he's depicted you know in some of these stories have you met a lot of incredible founders or have you covered a lot of incredible founders that you would call nice as like the first word to describe them my initial answer would be no but that's probably not true so my personal hero uh there's three people i wanted to meet right and accidentally unexpectedly i met all three of them last year it was james dyson jeff bezos and uh and jim adfine i spent i don't know how many hours talking to dyson the episode i did on the new show david center that episode is episode number six i don't think we're labeling number numbering them that was one of the best days of my life because that guy's book changed my entire life we can go into more detail about that if you want and it's somebody i read about i read his first autobiography five at least five times i I read his second autobiography at least twice. I read his history, talk about how so many people that are great with what they do have this love. And he says he's obsessed with the past and studying history. He wrote an encyclopedia. He considers himself an inventor, not an entrepreneur. He just became an inventor so he could continue to, or he just became an entrepreneur so he can continue to invent. Bezos thinks about it the same way. But he wrote, James Dyson wrote a book on, it's called A History of Great Inventions. He literally cataloged, I don't know, there's like 100 or 200 inventions in there. He tells the story of these things. Read that book. and he was unbelievably kind and generous and witty and you know to the point where there's a picture i think i posted online where i was like afterwards this is kind of embarrassing but he you know he did play a big role in my life i was like i gotta give you a hug dude like you literally changed my life like you encouraged me you didn't even know who i was and your book encouraged me not to give up when i went through five and a half years of doing the podcast and no one gave a shit like no there was like nobody listening i should have quit year one year two year three year four and just reading that book early and just rereading. It's like, this guy's struggled for 14 years. Built 5,127 prototypes. His kids grow up thinking that their dad's a loser because all they see is him failing, and that guy didn't give up. I can figure things out. It was very, very motivating for me. He was unbelievably kind. Now, how much of this is like they're just being nice to me because we're making a podcast together? I don't know. Bezos. I talked to him for three straight hours. Unbelievable. uh now there's crazy obviously when you built one of the most if not one of the most impressive companies of all time and there's all kinds of stories when he's 30 and starting amazon that he's obviously he wanted to name it relentless he owns relentless.com what is that kind of personality type and he's pushing but you know very very kind jimmy same thing jimmy iveen like i mean they're rough around the edges for sure but i wouldn't say i don't know nice i think they're just like mission that i guess my favorite some of my favorite entrepreneurs and if you think about your work in this way it can help you not quit it's like what is your actual mission and no i would not call them nice i would say that they're driven i wouldn't say they're assholes though i do think like i just finished reading um rereading snowball um 700 page biography of warren buffett i'm actually not going to do another episode on it i think i could do a better job with his shareholder letters so i'm going to read all them as it said this happens quite frequently where i read like hundreds and hundreds of pages don't use it but um i think they had this like no asshole rule that even if they could make money they didn't want people around them like that i would not consider them nice no i think in many cases they they are extreme personality types and that their mission comes in front of everything else i don't think you have to be that way you know i'm trying i have a mission my mission is like i want to catalog how history has how history's greatest entrepreneur is thought and then push that forward to the next generation so you can say hey that idea i can use that in my business or i can use that idea and i don't think i have to be an asshole to do that and i'd prefer not to be yeah and i think as i age i think being kind which has not come natural to me and did not come from like my family's super hot-headed and kind of mean to each other and so you kind of learn like i don't want to be that way no i don't think that's necessary but i do think i mean i don't aspire for people to call me nice, perhaps kind. But, you know, when I think about our mission at Kenturian, thinking the entire purpose of this crazy game we're playing is to be for entrepreneurs because it's miserable. It's a miserable game that we've chosen to play often. You know, it's hard running a business. It is very hard when it's a Friday night and you can't afford payroll and nobody else can handle it but you and you don't even tell your spouse because they probably couldn't handle that stress and would tell you to go and do something else. And so I'm not there to be nice to anybody. I think our mission is I want to be there to say the things out loud that nobody else will tell you that I wish somebody had told me. And maybe I'm right and maybe I'm wrong, but at least you have somebody else that kind of tells you the truth. And we get to learn from all the data of the other entrepreneurs. So I guess what I would say is like the trait they have is they're uncompromising. And so if you're uncompromising, it's going to be very hard to be described as nice. Yeah. Do you think that entrepreneurs who go into greatness, do they ever start with the exit in mind? Are they ever like, well, I want to sell my company for this or I want my company to be worth a billion dollars? This is the disturbing things about talking to young founders because there was never any kind of like entrepreneur ecosystem, right? Like there is now and there's like all these weird incentives behind it. actually try to convince I've been trying to what I'm interested in is like I think about a lot about differentiation and so there's some world-class entrepreneurs that don't do any podcast at all and I've tried to meet with them and try to convince them to do my new show and explain why and a lot of this is because a lot of the content that entrepreneurs are actually consuming are actually created by investors and so you could have incentive alignment with them but in many cases your incentives are misaligned and we should just think about that. And what's disturbing about that is how much of it is about start, scale, sell. And as we just discussed, like I'm interested in the people that created something that made somebody else life better So the best we can step back What is a business The best definition of the best answer to that question what is a business I actually heard from Richard Branson And he says all a business is an idea that makes somebody else life better And so there's a ton of tech companies right now, and things are being invented all the time. Is that making people's life better? No, you're making a shit ton of money, which, okay, now you're rich. That's great. But you know what you're doing is not good for the world, and you don't care. And so my whole thing is, like, I'm interested in people that made a product that makes somebody else's life better. And it could be Spotify is maybe the best app on my phone besides one of the AI assistants, right? Made my life better. So I'm glad that the team there makes all the money they're worth. Going to Racing Canes. I can't eat every day because I don't want to be fat. But like that 15 minutes of eating some great fried chicken, that just made my life a little bit better. You see what I mean here? It doesn't matter the scale. It could be an app. It could be – I think Spotify is worth, I don't know, $100 billion today. or it could be this guy making chicken fingers in a box and then just doing it forever and not doing it for you know to make a lot of money to start scale sell but when i talk to young entrepreneurs it's like a lot of them start out with that thing where it's like well i can get acquired by this company and i can make this money and it's just like you get to choose the game you want to play and that's great and guess what if you didn't start out with money and then you created wealth for yourself your family and your employees that's admirable too it's just not the game i'm interested in that game i mentioned is like you couldn't pay me to stop what i'm interested in is like what is the business what is your not your first business what is your last business the business that you want to work on forever yeah it's so funny somebody was asking me the other day i can't remember i did a podcast this week oh and uh and she said why haven't you taken investors she had taken investors whatever and i said because you got to pull this thing out of my cold dead fingers like i now will i always have to be in front of the the you know tv or whatever it is we're doing here like, no, I actually don't care about fame at all. I find it a really useful tool to do the things we want to do in the world. It's just a different type of leverage. But you have to pull it out of my cold dead fingers. I like I love this game. Do I love it all day, every day? Of course not. But I think and I think that's where people get confused that that idea of like passion versus like, I don't know what you would call it, relentlessness or whatever, where you find that thing that you're just so obsessed with the game, you can't stop. And my passions are different. I like smutty fairy books. That's a passion. What is a smutty fairy book? Oh, you're really outside the zeitgeist of women, huh? Now, this is, do you know what the best selling books are of all time? 50. Okay. So this was hilarious. So you like 50 shades of gray? No. Is that what you mean? No, it's not a fantasy. There's no fairies in sight, David. Okay. I didn't, we should smutty. I didn't know if it was like, this turned sexual. I didn't know what was going on here. Well, they aren't sexual. It's actually a giant asset class. I should figure out how to invest in this thing. But obviously, you know, the OGs, we've got like Harry Potter, not sexual, but fantasy. But there's this huge ecosystem for women. So 50 Shades of Grey meets Harry Potter. Literally. And so they're everywhere and it's the number one selling book category. So this was crazy because, you know, obviously I love books. I read mostly old books, but I think it was our mutual friend. Have you ever read ACOTAR? No. A Court of Roses. No. I think you should have comments on this. They're going to be hysterical. Oh, God. Guys, let's find where David lives and send him some smokebooks. No, don't do that. Please don't do that. No, maybe I should do an episode on one of these. But the funny thing, I think it was Morgan Housel that told me this, our mutual friend Morgan Housel, who just sold 10 million copies, who's now just hit 10 million copies of psychology money. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. I absolutely love him. And I'm pretty sure he's the one that told me this. He's like, do you know what the best-selling book of the 2000s were? Maybe it was 2010s, that decade. I have no idea. He goes, Fifty Shades of Grey. I was like, oh, okay, I haven't read it. Yeah. Twilight before that. No, no, it gets worse. Maybe better, depending on if you're into this. He goes, what was the second bestselling book of that decade? I don't know. He goes, the sequel to Fifty Shades of Grey. I'm like, damn, there's a lot of pent up demand for this. He goes, what was the third bestselling book of the decade? I go, there's no way. Was there a trilogy? Yeah, he's like, the third version of Fifty Shades of Grey. Yeah, it was an interesting fact. Well, now we have more of a fragmented industry. There's a lot. But there are, you know, there's this woman, Sarah J. Maas, and she was like basically came from nowhere to write this series of books that are just proliferating among women. How did we get there from start scale? Yeah, I don't know. Natural progression, really. To go back to that, it's like finding out why people are doing what they're doing, I think is actually really important. So I ask that. And usually one of the things that we want to try to map out like the founder archetypes for, and this is Daniel's idea, which I think is really smart. he's like people think about like founder market fit and he actually thinks the more interesting idea is founder problem fit and knowing your archetype and then knowing other archetypes of other entrepreneurs that came before you and that match your archetype would be very useful so you're make sure you're attacking the right problem and so what do you mean by archetypes have you flushed that out yet so i need to name them but like think about think about like all the different and this is not a science obviously this is just a rough framework to figure things out but if you think about all these like personality assessments like enneagram is very popular yeah you know the enneagram yeah so it's very popular 16 personalities yeah you use a lot of those for hiring yeah it's a lot of companies do this and there's culture index there's all these other tools that companies use the enneagram is very popular with like a lot of my founder friends and just not only to know like what type they are but also who like their partners could be or who they'd work well together and it's just again it's not like oh i'm an eight and you're a three and this does well together so i only look for threes or whatever the number the case is it's just like okay well there's all there's like whatever archetype steve jobs is is different from the archetype of a daniel so how are they different what are the kind of characteristics who do they work well together and then you now have 400 entrepreneurs that you've studied intensely and can we match them all and there might be five archetypes there might be 10 we're not actually sure but i think the important part here is that they don't go back to your original question it's like it's not you know i will some people do do this because they just want to make billions of dollars i have a lot of friends that work in like new york in pe and i find them refreshing it's not my game but because their whole thing is like i have never heard anybody call somebody in pe refreshing before they're like they have funny ways they think about they're like vc gets all the attention PE gets all the money. It's such a huge industry. And they're like, listen, the fact that VCs tell you that their customers are founders, he goes, they're goddamn liars. The LPs are our customers because they give us money. The founder's not giving us money. And he goes, I exist to make my LPs richer. And that's what I mean. It's not my game, but I like that they're not lying and they know what they're doing. Yeah, that's honest. That's what I mean about that. So that is their game. Their problem is take a big pile of money and make it into a bigger pile of money. I am not the right founder for that because I don't give a shit about that. So I like this idea of founder problem fit, right? I have this weird, I stumbled onto the problem that I'm solving, which is everybody's focused on, you know, what today's founders are saying or experiencing or their opinions where it's like we have 200 to maybe 300 years of the market economy and you have hundreds, maybe thousands of really good entrepreneurs that live their whole lives, ran all kinds of experiments, learned a bunch of stuff, and then people put down their main ideas in a book. Maybe somebody should go and dig through these books, find good ideas, and then push it down the generation. That's just a weird problem that fit me because I'm an introvert, and I'd prefer to sit in a room by myself, read. I mean, do you know, I was talking to Tony Robbins the other day. The amount of money they make, you know, he owns part of DISC profile. I don't know what that is. It's kind of like 16 personalities, except think about like a more flushed out version that really helps you if you're a hiring manager for the most part. And then they have like corporate licensing or whatever. And so we use that in a lot of our companies because if I'm like, listen, you could have a janitor who's like an exceptional fucking janitor. They're so good at their job. But they could potentially move all the way up to senior leadership if you understand that that person is meant for more. But if your company doesn't know how to find them or source them, you have all this hidden talent inside your business. And one of the things that keeps me up at night is thinking about the people who work for me. One, if they're not like working enough and doing things to add value to the company, I don't like that. but also if I'm not doing enough to help them add value to the company and thus make more money in their life and all that so anyway but it's a big business so it would be super interesting if you had that for founders and entrepreneurs because I do think we're all memetic yeah you wouldn't monetize it no come on no I think like okay so we should talk about this because um again I think most people think first of all starting another business like my whole thing is find a simple idea yeah take it very seriously yeah which is the Charlie Mugger quote you could just invest in it Tell Daniel to have an operator. No. No investing either? Very little. This is stressful for me. I can't believe Patrick probably and Morgan just yell at you all the time about this. Morgan doesn't because Morgan doesn't invest in anything. What do you think? All his money is in indexes. I know. I felt so pathetic listening to him because he's like, I'd be like, tell me about one unhinged things you bought. He's like, I did buy a house once. I'm like, fuck it. Never mind. New question. The renovations on the house estate. Okay. Okay. okay okay which again probably is good for marital bliss 100 so maybe that's not an expense um one i think open sourcing this is more important um to the degree that other people find a value and also like i'm very very i mean it took me there was probably three or four years of people around me very close friends just like you should start another podcast talking to founders you idiot do it do it do it and i said no no no it's like you know it's like water on a rock that's like you want me to do something you have to suggest it and it's i'm going to say no and it's going to take you years to break me down and then i'm going to come to you like i have this great idea and it'll be your idea this is this is not even a joke that's like how husbands and wives work this has happened to so many people in my life they now know it's like inception they're like if i want david to do something i need to put in the idea now whisper his iphone it really works there's a great line in um in uh i think uh one of buffett shareholder letters which i'm rereading right now where he says loss of focus is what worries Charlie and me the most. And so I think me starting another business that's outside of my life's mission, which is founders, and then my new obsession and passion, which is talking to entrepreneurs on the new show, I'm full. I work seven days a week. I don't have any time. I'm not doing anything else. And I think this is a misconception where, or at least hopefully I can like to the degree that I have any influence on this, it's like people think entrepreneurs are obsessed with money. I would argue they're obsessed with control. and that if you're talented and you're working on a valuable product or problem and you solve the problem for other people and you maintain control you wind up with the money but yeah uh the very first person that i met that was renowned from the podcast was sam sell episode 269 of founders is the autobiography you know he's my favorite investor of all time and he wouldn't call himself an investor so we'll talk about this so i i'm almost positive it's episode 269 it's the autobiography of sam's out which is incredible people should read it it's called am i being subtle i think is the title and i put that out and he listened to it and he thought it was he liked it so much he asked to meet me and i love the fact that somebody in their 80s was starting to listen to podcasts because he's what is he at the fundamental he's a learner he's a learning machine and so i had a two-hour uh lunch with him before he died and then we were scheduled to have dinner i was gonna do uh i was gonna have a dinner with him in miami and he wanted to have dinner and then me do an episode called i had dinner with sam's l and talk about the stories and then the day i think the day before the dinner it was canceled they said sam's not flying down from chicago he uh he's sick i thought he like covet or something three weeks later he's dead yeah he uh from cancer and so but he was spending his last i probably hung i probably saw him six months eight months before he died. He was flying all over the world at his expense, just sharing everything he learned with entrepreneurs, having lunch, dinner with entrepreneurs, talking at conferences and events for entrepreneurs. And that guy was as liquid as the day is long. His company was very, very interesting where it's like technically a family office, but it was his own money and he made all the decisions and never was going to spend the money to begin with. He told me, I didn't know he was sick with cancer. He obviously didn't share that with me. that he's going to be doing deals until he died. Guess what? He did deals until the day he died. The day before I saw him or the day after, the day before I saw him, I think he just bought, he calls them family businesses. He's like, I just bought, I forgot the number. It's like 75% of this company for $300 million, and they still run things on a fax machine. Like he just loved doing deals, loved it. But he had a bunch of pieces of advice, which I would summarize, the main piece of advice, and we're going to tie back to the money, was, let me see if I can remember this correctly. his whole thing and he was he was not subtle at all so he was kind of like he was very nice to me but he wasn't like i have a suggestion for you david he's like do this do this i'm like okay i'm gonna listen to you so he says uh go for freedom he's like if you keep your freedom you can control what you work on if you control what you work on you can work on what you love if you love it you'll do it all the time if you do it all the time you'll get really good at it And money will come as a result. So again, it goes back to your question. Do they start with, I want a billion dollar exit. I want a certain amount of ARR. I want a certain market cap. No, his whole thing is, I like doing deals. And I do them all the time. I did them for 60 years. It turns out I'm really good at doing deals. But the money part was fascinating because he's like, listen, he goes, I know all the rich guys. This is exactly what he says. He goes, I know all the rich guys. And he goes, they're all guys. And he goes, you would be surprised at how many of them are miserable. He's like, what's the point of having all this money if you're not having fun? and he goes and he ties this to your financial decisions he's like the things that you own eventually own you and he there's a bunch of funny parts because he was hilarious he was just like you saw him on cnbc this is exactly how he is i love people like this where there isn't like there's no separation between their public and their private persona and he goes you know i have all the money in the world he goes uh i have my place in chicago and my compound in malibu that's the word he used remember he's like 82 maybe 81 when maybe 80 81 when i met him and he wanted me to see his malibu house and he hands me his phone so i think i'm going to look at pictures that he took on his iphone of his mouth house no he google image search sam zell malibu that's incredible and so he goes i take he goes i spend 38 weekends a year at my place in malibu i have my place in chicago and he goes uh everything else i rent he goes i don't own anything else he goes i own a jet which i'll get to in a minute he goes i have my two houses and my jet and he goes after i think shortly after thanksgiving and then up until like christmas he would take him his like whole extended family it sounded like there was like 30 people on this trip 40 people on the trip to this like small village in france and he said something funny he goes i could buy the whole village and he goes i don't i rent it because i only think about it when I need it. And then when I leave, it's somebody else's problem. He's like, just eliminate. You don't want to be thinking about these things. And he goes, David, this is the funny part here. He goes, there's only one true luxury in life. He goes, try to get to private jet money. Cause literally he goes, these guys drive themselves crazy. He goes, the difference between a $10 million house, this is what he said. The difference between a $10 million house and a $30 million house is like negligible. He goes, they waste their time doing things they don't like to buy slightly nicer versions of the same shit. He's like, there's only one true luxury. Get to the jet. The jet actually makes a difference. And he said he uses his jet. He uses jet like I think an average of like three. If you did the math over the entire year, he would average like three hours a day. So he really used his jet. Wow. Yeah. You know what I loved about him? I loved the Zell's Angels. Yeah. I loved like there's this other guy who used to work with George Soros back in the day, like back when he was just investing in things and hedge fund land. And he wrote a book called Adventure Capitalist and Investment Biker. Oh, my God. I'm forgetting his name, which is so embarrassing. saying. It was actually, I didn't even have a podcast. I made up a podcast like a billion years ago, like before they were cool, maybe 15, I don't even know. Yeah, I guess it would have been 15 years ago just to have a phone call with this guy who wrote these two books. He was in China at the time, Jim Rogers. And Jim Rogers at the time was like one of the best hedge fund managers of all time. Him and George, that was like in the first couple of years of the quantum fund, I believe. and they had absolutely crushed it. But he left it all to go adventure around the world, invest, and tell stories about it. He had like this yellow Mercedes that he put these huge tires on and traveled all the way through Africa on his like top down Mercedes. This is like back in the day. I made investments all over the world and all over Latin America. And I ran a business before in Latin America. So I just found that so weird. And what I love about a lot of these people, Sam Zell included, is they're weird. Like he had a motorcycle club, basically. Like this kind of old, I don't know, it looks pretty stodgy guy running around on a motorcycle when he was a billionaire by then. Like going on motorcycle trips in like Mongolia and stuff. With vests. Yes. So much dangerous. Smoking weed on the side of the road. He talked about that. He has some funny lines. I mean, he said some stuff. I don't even know if it's true. He's like, you know, I invented business casual. I was like, I didn't know that, but okay. He's like, yeah, I was the first person. He was just funny. But I didn't mean it in an arrogant way. He was just so likable. And I think this is another thing. The value, this is why I think I would avoid assholes. And we go back to the people have to be assholes. And some of this, I'm sure I'm going to have some assholes on the new show. Like I'm interviewing or not even interviewing. I think about really having conversations with these people. But as far as like building relationships with, it's like, I just like likable people. Like I like nice people. Obviously, you know, Zell obviously had an ego, but he wasn't saying these things in like an arrogant way. He was just likable. And I think there's so many, especially in the tech industry, where they're just, they're personality deficient. And there's a benefit, a life benefit of just one, being a good conversationalist, like a good hang, and just being easy to be around and being likable. And one of the ways I think to do that is to be intensely interested in the subject. Like I don't, I'm not particularly passionate about chicken fingers, but I like that Todd Graves is. and hearing him talk about like he even broke it down like what stage of rigor mortis that the chicken has to be in you wouldn't even think you'd be interested in that but i'm interested that he was interested in it and therefore he is fascinating to me and i think the big the biggest way to be likable and to be like somebody that people want to be around is just like you have to be intensely interested in something because the most interesting people are the most interested they're like passionate about weird things i just heard um alex honnold the guy from pre-solo say he's like what do you think about fame he's like i think it's just a means to an end it's a way for me to climb all the time and not have a job and that documentary is fascinating like i don't want to live in a van i don't want to do the hand workouts he does and eat with a spatula and all the stuff he does but he's just so into it that you just can't help it like you gravitate towards people like that yeah it's always the same way yeah obsession is kind of contagious isn't it like if you're obsessed with something you could make anybody else get a little bit of that obsession i would say passion is infectious that's a good and i think this is what i mentioned earlier i don't do any drugs i don't do ecstasy i don't i never would um but this is the way i feel after talking to any of them michael dell james dyson you're just like wow like you took whatever passion you have for your business and you gave it to me and now that charged me up to like go and apply that to whatever i'm working on this is beautiful like virtuous uh you know flywheel or cycle. One of my favorite mentors said a line to me that was hard for me to hear, which is that like your business is more likely to die because of you and the complex things that you do, as opposed to external forces and the things they do to you. And so he's like, complexity is the great killer of all things. And then he's like, the problem is, is that through life, everything gets more complex. You know, as you get older, you have more stuff, you have responsibilities, you have aging, you have all these things. So life like kind of never gets simpler, it always gets more complex and you have a guy on your podcast uh where you covered someone on your podcast rick rubin who talks i want to talk about how he doesn't call himself a producer he calls himself some something else yeah and to tell that story because it's one that i think we all have to internalize a little bit more you don't necessarily have to do less you have to do more better there's something that you said that this is how again reading all these books kind of works uh like how my mind works now where the the advice that you were given echoes this advice this guy named David Packard, who was the founder of HP. And HP, again, is this big old strategy company. By the time, it was the influencer who influenced the influencers. So like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, all these other people that went out and built great technology companies in the 70s and 80s looked to these guys before them, right? Just like the founders of Intel looked to the – it was one of the first technology companies in Silicon Valley in the 1950s or something like that. And he has a straight line that more businesses die of indigestion than starvation. It's like they just try to do too much. They essentially sabotage themselves. This is also advice that Michael Dell gave, I think, on the podcast, maybe in private. But he's like most founders just sabotage themselves. You're not taken out by competition. You just can't handle your success or you took your foot off the gas. You just did something. You honestly sabotage yourself as opposed to being taken out by a superior product from a competitor. And so Rick Rubin's point was just like we want – he has this thing called a ruthless edit, which I love. He's like, okay, we're working on albums, 10, 12, 15 songs. We made 50. now we're going to pick the five that we absolutely cannot live without and so you force yourself you design within constraints which a lot of the history's greatest founders do they found it very valuable to design within constraints and these are the five now before we had any other ones it has to at least match the quality of this so what's number six it takes a long time and it's really hard to get to 10 and maybe you have to throw out the other 45 songs and you haven't done enough uh so now you have to do more and this is just very very common where it's like less is more but to get less, you have to do more. And one thing that I love that is tied to the bagel place you mentioned and raising canes. We talked about this or even look at like the Apple, too, like the first very successful product that Steve Jobs, commercially successful product that Steve Jobs and Apple made where it's like you just have to do one thing really, really great. Just one thing. And that's usually because you made something easier for other people. And there is this weird paradox in humanity where we i think we abhor complexity and we crave simplicity but we make everything that's simple complex over time and so knowing that you there's a great line from um from sam walton's autobiography that's about this walton's is telling a story in the autobiography but really it's a metaphor where all of the products are getting shipped from the walmart distribution centers into the stores and then he found that many of them were mispriced so So then they start this thing where now there's this other layer of these people that go around with these like scanning devices and making sure, verifying that the price in the system is what the price says here. And his whole point was just like, we're adding layers of complexity when we should just, he's like, you have to beat bureaucracy back across the line. It's going to creep and you beat it back. It's going to creep and then you beat it back. He goes, the solution is not scanners. The solution is doing it right the first time, but we can't help ourselves. We made it more complex. And so he looked for these kind of weird decisions that people make where it's like the solution is just doing it right, not overcomplicating it, which is, again, I think more in line with like human nature. We just love to complicate things even if we abhor complexity. Yeah. Well, and I think the other part is when you have more complex things, you feel like you've accomplished more. And so, you know, I see it a lot of time in our companies. It's like, well, I hit all these 47 activities today. It's like, yeah, but you didn't do the one thing that really fucking mattered that needed to be done more than anything else. because it was harder than doing those 47 things because sometimes to put that one thing on the list doesn't feel as good as doing the 47. Larry Ellison, there's like three good biographies of Larry Ellison and at least two of them, he's fighting with his assistant because she's like, there's a thousand things we have to do. He goes, no, there's four. And I'm only going to focus on these four and ignore every single thing else because all the value, if I can solve these four problems or these three problems or these two problems, this one problem, that's actually what I do and the rest of the stuff can be ignored. But the reason I tied it to like the bagel shop that you mentioned earlier, and Todd Graves, his simple product, and Rick Rubin. Rick Rubin's point was just like, if you look at the work that he did, where he says, I'm not a producer, I'm a reducer. You came in with this body of work. In essence, in this course, a lot of value. You overcomplicate it. You need somebody else with other eyes to see, hey, we can cut away everything else and make it to, like, what is the thing that we cannot delete, that we have to have? And this is why a lot of the stuff that was produced or reduced by Rick Rubin 30 years ago you can listen to today still sounds good because he goes he goes hey uh 50 years ago a guy with a good voice strumming a guitar and singing sounds good so if it sounded good 50 years ago if it sounds good today highly likely it'll sound good 50 years from now same thing with a piano a piano and a beautiful woman's voice sounded good 50 years ago sounds good today will sound good 50 years from now and i think what was happening is like when you hit on this essence the reason people respond to it is because like you essentially made the decision for them right You eliminate everything that didn't have to be there. You only have the essential. It's the same reason why he talks about in that book. I would recommend listening to a song called Hurt by Johnny Cash, which was a cover. I think Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails is the first person to do it. He was like 21 when he wrote the article or wrote the song Sorry And then Johnny Cash is like 70 when he singing it and you listen to that johnny been dead for years and it still sounds good today and the song is probably i don't know 15 years old or something like that it still sounds good say just like the the going and eat like eating at raising canes or the bagel place you mentioned earlier it's like you had a good experience there right these things have been going on in raising canes case 30 decade or 30 years he didn't interrupt the compounding that what you see there you're like oh my god the guys were 20 billion dollars that's 915 stores but he's like he just didn't time carried all the weight time did all the work he just did the same thing every day and waited for the world to catch up and if you build something that's great then what do humans do you can't keep things that are great to yourself when you see a great movie listen to a great podcast you know meet a great friend go to a great restaurant it's impossible to not tell other people about it. It's just what happens. And the problem is this, I kind of ties, this will tie back to almost everything we've been talking about today, which is like, that's why it's so detrimental. And you see the success in most entrepreneurs' lives happen multiple decades in because they didn't interrupt the compounding. You had to wait for time to do most of the work. And that's why the start scale sell doesn't work unless you just care about money and you get the money and then you go, you know, do something, sit on the beach or whatever the case is. But my point is the people that were obsessed, you have to do something. Let's say somebody comes and buys everything from you tomorrow for whatever. What are you going to do the next day? You're going to start something else. You're not the personality type that can build a very valuable company is not the kind that can sit around and do nothing. It's also, I think, incredibly difficult to simplify things. You know, often I'm sure you've found this too, but you're taking, I don't know, a 700 page book like Snowball and trying to synthesize it into one episode. That is actually quite a complex thing to do. You have a lot of decisions you have to make. You have to pull the soul out of it or the lessons that you want out of it. And I think sometimes about the stuff we do on the internet, like we'll try to explain acquisitions in some way, shape, or form in a really simplistic way, which is actually incredibly difficult to do. Even the vernacular in finance is tribal knowledge, a lot of nouns and vowels in the words that don't need to be there. And so making something about even a word like acquisitions, which some people have a hard time spelling and simplifying it is actually quite difficult. And so, you know, we talk about that a lot when we invest is I think I stole it from Warren Buffett back in the day where I might have in Zell. I think it was Zell. Zell basically said, if I can't like one of his employees came in with like a big folder on one of the deals that he wanted to do and was like, here's the brief on doing this deal. And he was like, tell it to me in a couple of sentences. he's like i can't he's like then write it on a page he's like i can't do that and it's like if we can't understand the deal in a page we shouldn't do the deal if the only way to explain it is through a folder and i think about that now you know it's like well zell learned that from jay prisser so my friend i mentioned earlier my friend rick was mentored by sam zell for 25 years and sam took an interest in him when rick was like in his 20s and what he would say is like i was in my 20s and a nobody and zell just decided he liked me and so he took me all around the world and we would like work on deals together but they also rick would try to i think there's one of this great line in this book i just read by kevin kelly it's called excellent advice for living wisdom i wish i'd known earlier and he says one of the most counter counterintuitive rules of the universe is the more you give the more you get and so rick built a relationship with sam by giving by trying to hey here's this undervalued company in egypt we might want to look at or look at this deal over here and basically just being doing an active service right but what would happen is rick would bring him a deal and go hey here's exactly what you're saying here's the 10 things that we have to solve or whatever and zell would look at it like number five that's the only thing if we solve number five everything else falls in in in line and zell talks about this in his autobiography that he was mentored by jay presser who was one of the best deal makers right living probably a decade maybe two decades older than sam's at the time and sam would do exactly what sam would do to jay what rick was doing to sam which is i'd come bring him a deal and jay would just look at it's like there's only one important thing here you have a list of seven things it's not seven it's just this one thing and if we take care of this one thing everything else will fall in line so it's that simplification this is why i said it's not 10 000 hours it's 10 000 iterations because how many deals by the time you can't do that when it's your first deal your second deal your fifth deal jay had probably looked at 10 000 deals by that time 5 000 deals by that he just understood it in a way what we call intuition is really just like the sum of your experiences and and your subconscious kind of explaining to you you can't even this is what i learned from rick rubin too when um you just mentioned really hard to take a 700 page biography and distill it down to its essence in an hour long podcast and people always just like well how do you do it and it's just like it's a skill because i've done it for 10 years go listen to episode 1 2 5 10 25 50 they probably suck compared to what I can do now because I didn't understand that like I had to take time to train my intuition to do this Rick Rubin would tell you the exact same thing where he's constantly critiquing the stuff he produced and created when he was he started his record label he started producing when he was in his dorm room he's in his 60s now still doing it he's like I didn't have enough training on my intuition and you'll see this in all kinds of different domains I'm reading Roger Federer's uh biography called the master right now it's excellent book and one of the things that he really annoys him is that everybody talks about how effortless his game looks it's so smooth it's beautiful he's like yeah you know how long it took me to make it look smooth and beautiful it wasn't born with his ability to play another great example of this is uh that i empathize with and i think rick rubin does and i would say steve jobs does is people ask steph curry what he thinks about when he's shooting and he goes absolutely nothing it's just i've shot this this this exact shot a hundred thousand times and so me thinking it thinking about it would make it worse there's a great uh story in johnny ives biography which is really good and i think it's episode 178 of founders um and he talks about the difference of the contrast between the way google's run and and steve jobs are in apple and you know when google would do 200 ab tests on what color this button should be and they were making remember the imax the old school imax where like it had a big like this is when computers were big and fat and thick it was like orange and they had a handle and then they decided they were going to make them all different colors yeah yeah and he johnny says that uh there was no like focus group they didn't ab test anything he says steve came down to the design center and me and steve looked at the colors and in 30 minutes we picked every single color 30 minutes, just taste. And those are the colors that shipped. That was Steve's intuition for 30 years. I'm not sure by the time he got to that point to be able to trust. You shouldn't be trusting your judgment, trusting intuition when you have to prove yourself that you should trust it. And Steve did the work necessary to trust his intuition and trust his judgment. I think you're going to see that in a lot of fields, music, entrepreneurship, sports. You just see it over and over again. I think a lot about what skills will matter in the future with how fast technology is changing, what's what's happening in the world right now with AI. And it does seem like this idea of taste seems tantamount. What are you thinking about what's going on right now in the world of AI? What do you think the greatest entrepreneurs are thinking? Does this matter? Is this always just the same thing? Is there always just some new industrial or technological revolution and there's opportunity in every market and we need to not be defeatist about it? How do you think about this? If you agree that the best definition or great definition of a business is what Richard Branson said that all the businesses is an idea that makes somebody else's life better. There is always infinite ways to make somebody else's life better. So there's therefore there's always infinite opportunities, in my opinion. With that said, I do think you do not ignore technological phenomenon, technological revolutions. We're obviously going through one now. I think you should use like so what I do is like I just force myself to learn and to build these into my workflow now. so i'm sure there's going to be ai generated podcasts that can do exactly what i do a hundred percent like i would imagine that's going to happen relatively soon if it's not you know this year next year five years from now um and so like just to use the tools the technology because all technology is my best my favorite definition of technology is um from peter teal in his book zero to one this is just a technology is a better way to do something and so i'm just using them to be better making a podcast and hopefully that podcast and that information in the podcast makes somebody else's life better see how it connects now i think the mistake when you're looking back history is like the only thing constant is change and technology is never going to stop and i think the smartest ones took advantage of it so like think about one of my favorite times in industries to study is i've done like 13 different episodes on the the um early american automobile founders So Henry Ford, Billy Durant, founder of GM, Henry Leland, the founder of Cadillac, the Dodge Brothers, all the way down to some component makers like Albert Champion, who made the spark plugs they reused. Alfred Sloan made the ball bearings of all these companies. It's just very fascinating. It's like they all knew each other. They were all in one spot. And this was just happening in Detroit in 1900. If you were a young, mechanically inclined man that were interested in that industry, you got to get your ass to Detroit right away. and one of the most fascinating things i realized was billy durant had a complete there's multiple ways to succeed right so henry ford had one idea he's like i want to make the car for the everyman he had literally one idea his entire career and you didn't know how to do it yet he's like cars are luxury items they're hand built they're six thousand dollars when you know we're making not even a dollar an hour like i'll never afford to do one i want to mass produce i want to invent the mass production of the automobile so then i can any any the worker making the automobile can actually afford the automobile which was never people making the cars could not even afford the cars that was his one idea he was wildly successful one of the richest people on the planet as a result of the idea billy durant also succeeded he got kicked out of gm twice but that's a story for another day and his idea is like i'm just going to make a car conglomerate and i'm going to buy all the the early brands put them together in general motors you know general motors today but But the fascinating about Billy Durant is what was he working on before he worked in the car industry? He essentially built one of the most successful carriage companies. So he was making carriages that horses, horse-drawn carriages. He just took the idea that was working for horse-drawn carriages realizing, uh-oh, my business is in trouble with these cars running around. Maybe I should just take the same skill set and ideas and apply it to this new domain. so the future is always going to be unpredictable i love people going around like you know this is we're only not that far from from new year's and everybody's like here's my predictions for what 2026 i just laugh this is like all i do is all day long is read if you read history you just have very smart people making all these kind of predictions about the future that don't come true oh yeah humans don't really have great you know predictive ability generalized predictive ability You can identify a trend or an interesting idea in an industry that you're paying attention to and then build a business around that insight. I'm not saying you can't do that. That's what Billy Durant just did. But I don't – I have – the answer to the question is I want to learn these tools because I'm interested in technology. I'm interested in finding tools that make my business better, right? And then I'm just going to do the best job with the opportunities in front of me, and I'm going to do that every single day, and the score will take care of itself. I'll get what I, you know, deserve out of life. But there's just impossible to know what's happening. I do think this is like, I think reading right now, like about the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s. I think reading about the early compute industry would be interesting. There'd be analogies there. I talked to Bezos about this. Bezos' analogy for this, because he's all like, all he thinks about is AI all day long now, is he calls it these thin horizontal enabling layers. and he thinks ai is more akin to electricity than it is to anything else the internet was a thin horizontal enabling layer electricity was a thin horizontal enabling layer ai is a thin horizontal enabling layer and he goes once you a new thin horizontal enabling layer is invented it goes everywhere like electricity like they weren't thinking they're going to install electricity they're thinking i want lighting and guess what if it's useful for that how many other inventions have now that now plug into electricity that we could have never possibly predicted same thing with the internet you know the origins of the internet well what did they think it was going to be used for and then they could not have possibly predicted all the different the millions hundreds of millions of different inventions and things that you could do on top of that and so he his belief is that ai is going to be the exact same way where it's like the intelligent intelligence as a service is going to go everywhere and you're going to invent countless other ways there's no way to predict all the way uh all the different inventions that humans are going to use utilize this tool for and it won't be i talked a lot of some of these they think it's like the last invention it's like it's not the last invention like humans are going to invent assuming we're around or going to constantly invent more and more things do you ever sometimes take a pause and just think holy shit what is my life that i get to talk to elon musk all my heroes all these people consistently no um I, here's the thing. I think thinking like that, I had this, this maximum I got from Conor McGregor. Have you ever seen this documentary? It's on Netflix. It's called notorious. Oh, it's incredible. I'll tell you the maximum first and then tell you like one of the lessons that he didn't even adhere to himself, which is like, if you go to sleep on a win, you wake up with a loss. And that documentary is incredible because, you know, he's literally living at home, has no money. I think he's wearing his, a plumber's assistant or something. He's somehow had the foresight to have a, a camera crew follow around what at this point was just like kind of like a loser, right? Chasing a dream, but nothing to point. He had this, there's another maxim, belief comes before ability, which I hate when people are like, oh, you shouldn't have so much self-belief. You tell us entrepreneurs, like generate evidence and then have belief. And I'm like, well, I've read 400 of these books and none of these people did that. They believe in themselves way before everybody around them is telling them they couldn't do what they're doing. And all the data actually says you're right. Exactly. Belief comes before ability, not after. I think that's, that's very important. but what's fascinating is like you know there's one thing where he's like in his mom's kitchen and there's like the the ireland's like uh he's like cashing welfare checks and i think he's in collections on some credit card bills and he's just like i'm gonna be the champion of the world he's saying all this other the crazy stuff but what he realized is just like the value comes from the work and doing the work every day and that's why he said if you go to sleep on a win you wake up with a loss and then he made hundreds of million dollars i not judging anybody else supposedly he's got a very fierce drug habit which kind of looks some might be the case to me and so i don't it goes back to the this quote tweet that where i just quote treated andrew where it's like mute the world and build your own i just wake up every day like i really do think patrick's probably right that i am don't have like this master plan i don't even seek points of leverage i do all these things that i don't seek efficiency i like no one else works on the podcasts like they're like why don't you hire an editor why don't you hire a researcher it's just like i like doing it there's a great line from charles schultz who's the the founder of uh the guy that did peanuts remember reading charlie brown and snoopy and he was still he penciled every single comic strip he wrote the stories he did everything he had this like thing in his will about like what happens to peanuts after he dies he wouldn't let anybody else continue it on and then you have to publish this is the last one i ever want published like he thought a lot about this but he would give tours of like his studio and i think it was like in his 70s then they're like why don't you just like write a bunch of them uh they were first like why are you still doing this is the question and they're like why don't you like batch them and then you know take time off and his answer to this was great it's like he didn't understand the question like why are you still doing this he goes you don't work all your life to do what you love to do to not do it. And so my whole thing is like, I really do mute the world. Okay. I'll tell you an embarrassing story. This is, this is embarrassing to me. So every once in a while, some of my friends have companies and they like, just want me to like sit in on like meetings, like board meetings and stuff. And I'm not any boards. I have no interest in doing that. I am interested in fiercely interest in entrepreneurship and how they think about building businesses. And I look at this as like a way to learn. And so I was doing this the other day with two close friends of mine. They were talking about acquiring a business in new york okay and uh i was paying attention but then they kept saying this name over and over again and they kept saying maduro maduro maduro and again i don't read the news okay and again because we were talking about new york uh i was like why do you guys keep bringing this up and they're like dude did you not see this is going to be real embarrassing they're like trump kidnapped maduro i thought they meant because we're talking about his business in new york i thought they meant mandami i'm like he he kidnapped the new york the mayor of new york city like how did i not hear about this like no you idiot the president of venezuela as if that was any you know anything else more normal yeah i was like i didn't know they're like i didn't i don't look at the news i didn't know this now that's embarrassing but my point being is it's like listen the big stuff will get to me if there's a war there's a pandemic i'll hear about that that will come down to me but no i i think the worst thing i could ever do is think about who i get to meet or who's listening to the podcast it's just like hey this is my this is my retard maxing with patrick to use patrick's term it's like i designed i only think in 24 hours literally so it's like what do i like to do i like to wake up work out i like to read uh then I'll have lunch. Then I'll read, I'll reread past highlights. Do that multiple days a week. Uh, at night, as you go to dinner with founder, all my friends are entrepreneurs, uh, you know, do calls throughout the day. Like not like meeting calls, like friendship calls with other smart people is another form of education. Uh, once or twice a week, I sit down with a founder that I'm intensely interested in talking to record another podcast and I just, that's it. And then I'm like, oh, that day was pretty cool. I like that day. I'm going to do that day again tomorrow. And then I'll do it again the next day. I don't even know what today is. I assume it's a weekday. Could be Sunday. Don't know because my schedule looks the same all the time. It's also very difficult for some relationships in my life, but like this is, so no, I never think about anything. I just think about like podcasts to me is like, oh, these are miracles. I've learned so much from listening to podcasts. They're great tools for education. I hope I'm building something that makes somebody else's life better. If that is fascinating to me, if it's fascinating to me, I'm not, there's probably 10 million Davids out there. Me and you have, we've never met before today. we have almost the exact same interests there's 10 million cody and davids out there and they'll probably like this podcast too that's it there's nothing there's no other grand plan it's just like oh this is great i like to learn all the time and then i sit down and share what i learned well i think it's so cool i mean i think what keeps me up at night with this is can you imagine what a tragedy it would be if there's going to be millions of people that listen to this across all the social channels right that's millions of people's hours that's that's years in like a human collective life. And what if it sucked? What if it was not valuable to them? Like that is a tragedy to do to people who have a very finite thing called time. And so I just want to thank you for being here. This is so useful. I am a huge fan of both of your podcasts. They're not easy to make. So thank you for making them. It's David's Henra is the new podcast. Founders podcast is the long standing podcast. And I will say also you increasingly do incredible shorts now on instagram too for the attention deprived that need the 60 second spots and that is founders podcast on instagram right instagram and yeah instagram is the the biggest channel there oh so there's a real quick story there too where like i believe in like tiny teams so it's mission driven concentrated on like focused this is like my framework for entrepreneurship so pick a mission be really concentrated on like your resources time money energy attention all to that mission tiny teams of just a players because again all i'm doing is reading the books and taking ideas from the books and applying it to my own business which is you know hopefully the what the podcast served for other people as well and see jobs like a tiny team of a players can run circles around giant team of b and c players so my shorts which i like too literally is one genius kid living in france dude they're all the same too i don't manage him he was obsessed i met him through Let me guess. He's also white. He's like sub 30. He's probably like 26, 27. He's in his early 20s. Yeah. But the funny part is. And a little like slightly autistic and really obsessed with the game of video. No. Well, he is an obsessive person. But I met him through Blake Robbins. Blake Robbins is the best. He used to be at Benchmark. Now he's on Fond. But I think his Twitter bio says he hangs out on the edge of the Internet. And he finds weirdly talented people. and he's like hey will you meet this kid he's in from europe he's in new york he's upset he's obsessed with what a single podcast and it's yours and i was just talking to the kid because i thought he was talented so you should move to america he was doing all this other way to make money that he wasn't passionate about and i was like just how much do you need like what if you just made these shorts for me right how much you need named his price i was like done didn't even negotiate with him and now i'm helping him because he's going to be one of the greatest filmmakers i think he like mastered short form now he's making short movies then he wants to make like he wants to be like Christopher Nolan and Steven Spielberg and I was like listen I'll not to the degree that I can help you in any way like you have been so helpful to me like if I can make an introduction for you if I could I'd invest in you and I don't even like investing like I'll do whatever you can because you're so talented like I just think about things in terms of people but this also applies to like the reason that you want high quality people around you is I don't need to manage him he makes them he sends them to me this is this is our workflow i literally and then he was like i don't manage him at all he sends them to me i look i watch him like i'd watch that and if i watch if i like it i posted the channels and if i don't i don't post it and he's made i don't know like 200 and i probably haven't posted i don't know five like i have a big backlog you need to post but i'm talking about ones i didn't like that's it how much time did it take i just identify a great person and name say name your price and you named his price and that's it it just makes my life a lot easier so well this This was an incredible podcast. And also I have to give you one more compliment, which is, do you know what we obsess on about you and your podcast? Your ad reads. You know the fucking best. And I like never thought I would like an ad read, but like whatever ramp is paying you, they need to increase it because literally, do we not? I literally go, if this isn't David Senra level ad read, I'm not fucking reading it. Give me a new version. Then we go like three or four versions on it. We have our own. It's not like copying your style, but meaning like the intent of it. Like you can just tell. And I think other people do this too, but I'm always like, is it coming? I think he's going to talk about savings. Then you sneak me and it's not it. And then, then it's it. Well, again, this goes back to like the importance of concentration focus. Cause to me, it's like anything you hear on the podcast, whether it's an intro, an ad read, anything, a single word, it has to make sense. And so I appreciate you saying that, but like, it was just like, Hey, since I don't work on anything else, I can spend a lot of time. So every single ad is custom to, that actual episode and i'll reference what's going on in the episode they take a long time to make but why wouldn't you do that like i love what i do i want i would want to listen again this goes back to stephen king where he says uh i'm not only the writer i'm the first reader yeah i listened to i edit the podcast so i listen to every single i'm the person that makes it but also the first listener why would i put into things that i don't stuff i don't want to hear and to me some of the podcast ads are so jarring i'm like oh this is like we were in this like beautiful flow of this conversation it's just like and then it's almost like the dj like stopped the music 100 that's how ours were but then because i listen to and it's funny because i'll have new team members come and they'll say well why do you why do you review every piece of content that goes out across country and thinking i do i have a very it's like a workflow i review every from every tweet to every email to every whatever and they'll be like well somebody else could do that and that horrifies me because uh it has my name and face on it and it's somebody else's time but your ads are incredible and you've made me think about ads differently this is again this is not a new idea this is a beautiful thing i literally have no original ideas and i don't people like you shouldn't say that out loud why like the every single person i read about is smarter than me i don't feel bad about that i'm they are smart on me that idea come the fact that i check everything and you check everything that was steve jobs which is a great book i highly recommend everybody read it's called insanely simple it was the obsession that drove apple success i think the guy's name is like ken siegel he was steve's ad guy and he said every wednesday I think at three o'clock he had a marketing meeting. I could be wrong on the dates, but basically he said it didn't matter if it was a billboard in Times Square or one in rural Missouri. Nothing went out without Steve personally. Okay. Every single piece of Apple marketing. It's what you do when you care. Yeah. David's having a good man.