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

you actually would not want them as an employee. - Ha, I was literally gonna bring this up. Steve was in his center. He was 19 years old, show up barefoot and he only wanted to work at night.

Everybody's telling no one on Bush and I'll get rid of this guy. He's like, no, I wanna capture the upside and because the upside's so extreme, I'm willing to deal with the downside. - The guy that I have on today, David Sennra, has become a friend.

There is nobody in the world I have convinced that knows more about the world's greatest founders.

“So if you want to see inside Jeff Bezos' head”

and inside of founders that don't even exist anymore but have shaped our world, you're gonna wanna 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 peaked.

I wanna hear this Mr. Beastory.

- Oh, so this is the funniest, never.

He goes, I wanna run an ad where it says, Mr. Beast wants counter 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 them. Do you need to cut people from your life that do not want to win? - Yeah, 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 if you found are the marriages or relationships

like by the greatest entrepreneurs? - Marriages? - Yeah. - Terrible, they're terrible. I mean, it's very few people, because you tend to be obsessed, I also think it's important to note.

“So the people that appear on founders' podcasts, right?”

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 all layers of outliers.

And what I would say is most people overoptimize their professional life to the detriment of their personal life. And there's a great documentary in 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 Iveen, who many people would be surprised, they're like, you know, of all the people that you want to meet,

who would you want to meet. And in my top three, Jimmy Iveen was in there. It was James Dyson Jeff Bezos and Jimmy Iveen. Dyson and Jeff Bezos makes perfect sense for somebody that, you know, studies,

his huge, his huge, huge, huge entrepreneurs were like, Jimmy Iveen, why? Now, so you just got to watch the Defiant ones, because it's a great documentary. People think it's a documentary on the relationship

and partnership between Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iveen. No, it's a documentary on entrepreneurship. They're just very entrepreneurial. And in that documentary, they interviewed Jimmy's ex-wife and they interviewed Dr. Dre's wife,

who then has, they've since been divorced after that. And, you know, they both talk openly, both of the women talk openly about how difficult it is to be married to people like this.

“And I think they can describe it better than anyone else,”

'cause it's from the spouse's perspective. But it, you know, essentially comes from, you have usually highly disagreeable people, very different people, obsessed people, have a hard time, you know, taking a break,

or dedicating, and you kind of relationship, if you're not, you know, 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, 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 it's literally just a bigger sample size. You can, you know, grow up with, you know, loving household and still have extreme success. I don't know if it's a trauma response. I do think, I have a different view of this,

like I hope, I'm just talking to Toby Luke of Shopify about this. He says something interesting, 'cause 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,

'cause 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.

- Mm-hmm. - 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 just great line from Jeff Bezos, where he says, we don't choose our passions or our passions, she's 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 it's unmountable 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 mean you were both control for it. It's very obvious we talked about this for recording. - Of course, yes, I like to say. - Yeah, exactly.

I wanna pick who, what I work on, who I work with, how I work. These are just things that are incompatible with being an employee.

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, you would, 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, 'cause 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 I was literally gonna bring this up. - Okay, it's all as a story. - So, there's an interesting thing that I'm very interested

in these ideas that people that didn't know each other, live the different times, work in different industries, and many cases 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, Dan, your ex-founder, Spotify told me this, Korean founder of ramp told me this, that they hire for spikes. And their point was that big corporations,

they advantage that you have as a founder like company, it's like big corporations kind of managed to the middle. So, they want you to look a certain way, act a certain way.

There's just a lot more structure around them,

where if you're a founder of that company, you have the authority that like, you know, a non-founding CO, 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 program 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 bad behavior. And so, like, one example of this is like, one of the best designers that Spotify ever had.

And this is the early days of Spotify. It's like, he was 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, while he designed, if Daniel got up to go take a call,

or something else, they lose track of this guy for days. He would just take off running. So, he literally, people were telling Daniel, like, "What are you doing? "You're the founder of this company, CO.

"You can't just sit and babysit this guy." He's like, "He's so talented." Yes, I do, it's a very high leverage, you know, thing I'm doing right now, as a poet, and they knew it wouldn't last forever.

These are not, it's not somebody's been working for 20 years. And this is not new. You'll see these characters in these books. And so, I didn't know this until I read,

“I think I've done like 15 episodes on Steve Jusper, no.”

But one of the funny things was, no one Bushnell, a lot of people don't realize that, in that time in Silicon Valley, this is probably 40 years ago, very common for founder of such a company, racist money, bringing in professional management.

There was very few of these founders in their 20s, left to run their companies.

And Nolan was one of the first ones,

and he was like 27. And he thought Steve, both Steve Jobs and Steve was an act we're very talented. But Steve was in his centric. He, what, 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, and since they, he could sleep in the office. And everybody's telling Nolan Bushnell, like, what the hell is wrong with you? Like, get rid of this guy. He's like, no, he's like, I want to capture the upside.

And I'm willing, because the upside's 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 a night, and just, you know,

tell people a holder knows, 'cause he hid such offensive body odor, and he's set to the office. And he wind up being a very, like, that we 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 have been Steve Jobs too. And I thought about it, 'cause we had one of my best engineers. He's brilliant, and I won't say who he is. But he is building one of our products.

And anyway, 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. On the other day, so I'm like, "Hey, man, we gotta,

"you gotta push on this team, we gotta push harder." And he's like, "No, I'm pushing, I'm not like, "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 (beep) turned into him walking into a room full of like 80% women and going, "Cody told me I had to put my gun the table." I was like, "My life, so the women came to me

and they're like, "This was odd behavior." I'm like, "Listen, that's probably my fault." I'll all correspond with him, but, you know, we're not doing anything about it 'cause he's so good. So 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

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 the Life. It's written by Brian J. Jones, who's also a prolific biography,

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 'cause he was still a 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 scanning Francis for Copla, who was running major, big budget, major movies in, he was like in his late 20s. He's probably around 27 as well. And so Steven Spielberg saw this,

George Lucas saw this Brian to pome saw this, all these directors that were, and filmmakers that were friends with each other. And I think Copla 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 the movie, he did the movie

for like a million dollars of our member.

And it made like 57 million at the box office. But because he didn't have creative control, and he wanted final cut on his movie, because it wasn't just a movie, it's very personal time. 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 is a ton of money back then.

And then they gave him, he wrestled on the next project for creative control over Star Wars, and then he wanted ownership of 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 myself, I'm willing to take less money up front, 'cause a lot of directors just like,

no, just pay me $10 million dollars, and you keep all the money back in. 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 the thing, 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 is another one I really liked. We'll talk about personal standards. I'm curious, what if you've seen it takes

to last as an entrepreneur? Like, so many people flame out. What do you wanna do if you wanna succeed for the long term and not be a footnote in history? - I don't think I've got 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 I almost think like being successful in losing it is worse than never being successful. So, you know, some of you are in the company looks like a success on paper for a year or five years.

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 picked them on purpose for this exact, I, we both share this love and admiration for Charlie Munger, you and I do. And he thought durability was the first rate virtue. When you mean this is like, you build a company to last.

That's just just make a bag of money and then disappear into an island. I'm not interested in that. And so, when I thought about the people that I wanted to talk to,

and this is who, this, this haunts me my dreams. So, you know, I had a nightmare the other night. I'm literally arguing with people 'cause they're like, why don't you interview more start-up founders?

And I was like, I want people that have done that are not just promoting something 'cause a lot of the entrepreneurship industry, so she 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 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. And so like, Daniel, first guest on the new show.

Daniel, I worked on Spotify for 20 years. Second guest, let me see if I can go through this. But I remember his second guest, Michael Dell. He started Dell with 19. He's 61 and he's still doing it. - Did tell that line that Michael Dell

has about how many days the week he works? - Oh, so that's my wall. - So this was hilarious because I actually DM Michael Dell because he's been very nice to me and he like tweets and post on LinkedIn about founders

that he thinks it's like a useful tool for the world. And I really appreciate it. And then I got to spend time with him. And I think he's the goat. He's just one of the most kind,

but fascinating people to talk to. Because again, we're showing company 19. This is how crazy. I'll get to that statement 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

which I also didn't know.

And he goes, I'm in the University of Texas dorm room. I have a thousand dollars. And he's telling us to try and convince his parents to let him like work on his company and drop out of school. And he's like, I mean, 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 navigate all these different technological revolutions that he successfully endured.

He built a durable company. And somebody like that that has 41 years of entrepreneur experience. Like you just sit there and talk to him, Zack Dells, a friend, and he's building this great company called

“- I think he is smart dude, which is not always a case”

for billionaires kids. - Yeah, he's going after it, Zack's. - That's so lucky. - That's so lucky. - Yeah, but he says he goes, you know,

the Bloomberg term in all, he's like, I have dad terminal. So he's like, I call my dad's like, I have an issue with my supply chain. Well, guess what? My cool scene, everything.

He's so helpful as like a thought partner on this. I think it's just like insanely valuable. But I was, this is also why I wanted to start the new show 'cause I resist it for a long time. I was like, no, no, no, no, it's like,

I can't start another podcast. It's like a loss of focus. Just gonna focus on reading biographies, of history, of careers 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-serve marketable 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 as 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. So obviously one of the highest values things you can do. So I was like, let me just focus on that 'cause 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 Dawes, 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. Just it's like a game builder prompt a book, instead of me being just reading the book. And I can, what do you mean by that? Follow, 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 is a psychopathic knowledge of this entrepreneurship, I could create something truly differentiated

where if Michael Dawes sitting across from me and he says something, oh wait, that's just like, Bezos said this and 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 had Michael Dawes' podcast one time.

And he goes, so when you're starting Dell, 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 looks at him like, and he goes, you literally, I think pausing all of them.

'Cause like, you know, if you started a company, you know what the answer that question is. Like, it's like, oh, no, I clocked out a five o'clock. I have $1,000 going to $100 billion company. Five o'clock guys, see you tomorrow.

I'm like, I'm on, you know what the answer is.

So I just thought, okay, I think I understand these people in a very, you know, the fundamental level and that could maybe hopefully make the conversation that's interesting.

“- Do you think you have to be obsessed to win?”

Like, if you wanna be one of the greatest, do you have to be obsessed? - And is there anybody I've talked to that was an obsessed? So we can go back through the, the, the, the, the guessless. So 20 years, Daniel, I've 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 'cause we're going 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 in some reflection of you, you know,

essentially like an echo or shadow of the founder. So Daniels had to be obsessed about if I wouldn't work. Michael Dell still obsessed this day. He's obsessed with puzzles. And he just looks at like reinventing

constantly reinventing his companies like a giant puzzle. So he's been doing it for 40 years. 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. Oh yeah. He's so my list. He changed my life. We should talk about intermonologues, too,

because I had a very negative intermonologue. And Brad, I spent a bunch of time with Brad. And he's the one who just like, this is stupid. Like, he used to have an intermonologue,

a very negative intermonologue, 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 it's just something with the conversation with him. Just finally clicked where I'm like,

my fuel source now is not like I, you know, fixing the wrongs that happened like being born,

It's like, no, I just love what I do. And it should be a more positive fuel 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 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 experiences in Brad Jacobs. We'll tell you, success still. All he just loves deals, he like dances.

He's just getting like a little school, right? 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 help himself.

The fourth one was Todd Graves. (laughs) Okay, yeah, obsessed.

The guy is worth $20 billion

and all he does is he'll chicken fingers. - That's insane. - But he just sells chicken fingers better than any of us in the world. And so didn't he do a bodeal?

He was like fishing? - Oh, I can tell you stories from him. So, you found, I mean, not that you found him. It was obviously very, very successful. But nobody was really bound down

at the altar of Todd Graves, but before you found this side. - Well, you could 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 a 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 nerd out and they think about things in such a deep way, where then you talk to them or you read about them and makes you like,

oh, I can take what I'm doing, seriously.

Go back to Charlie Munger, which I mean, you will talk about over and over again.

“I think one of the most important things ever”

are Charlie Munger say, which is like, he's like, oftentimes, we find that the winning system in business goes ridiculously. This is the word he's ridiculously far. Minimizing and our maximizing one or few variables.

There's an extension to that idea, which I think it's almost like a way to describe that idea in a simpler terms is find, find a simple idea and take it seriously. Todd Graes has not changed his menu.

And he started the business with his 23, he's 53 now. He has not changed the menu in 30 years. And what do he do? He came out to the west coast, saw the success of in and out. It's like, look, we're in LA right now.

I'll probably go to in and out after this 'cause I haven't eaten anything today. I've just had coffee over all day long. And he's like, well, a simple menu. Stripped down very simple menu worked in cheeseburgers.

Why wouldn't work for chicken fingers? And his original idea was like, I'm gonna 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 Vaughan.

And this is the thing that, once you again, have this, I think everybody listening should just find people in my or in this reader, 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 falling at 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 Founder Sparkhouse. But I was in like the 70, or 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 through. And I was like, oh, so this guy understands how one decision

impacts everything else.

“And that you should limit the amount of details”

and then make every detail perfect. That's how I described what Todd Graves has done. And then you don't interrupt the compounding

and you ever worth $20 billion selling,

go to talk, raise and cancel. Why is this simple menu matter, right? Because when he has one restaurant and he's saving 15 or 20 seconds in order because the menu's simple, you pull to raise and cancel 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 slice of bun.

There's, 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 and he's like, do I want three, four or six?

That's a five second decision. When you have one sort, it doesn't matter. He's got nine hundred and fifteen. I think he's got another hundred this year. He's going faster in your 30 and he ever has.

That makes a huge difference. And for him, you can see that you can clock that in a clip of this guy knows his business. Where the opposite of that is a lot of these fake promoting startup founders that are just lying to you

to get to their next round, which I'm not interested in all. I don't know. It was 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 App's 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.

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 you have better open rates?

How do you get to get more subscribers? How do you get better design? How do you get ads placed in there so you can get paid to even go and distribute your ideas to other people?

That's why I'm obsessed with Beehive. And if you already have a newsletter, you should move to this platform.

“If you don't have a newsletter, you need to get one.”

And I've got a discount code for you on it today. If you go to beehive.com, BEehive.com and use code code 30 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 like RAV from McDonald's too. But the other day, I was at this place called Papa Bagels. Have you ever been to it? No. I can't stop going back.

I'm going to limit my carbs. Yeah, this is not going for you. Don't go there. Don't go there if you want to expect. I'm on care more a lot this year.

But the part that I find fast and it 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 the, it's 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. It's almostaneously 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. $15.75 for three bagels on 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, are these bagels amazing? 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.

And 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 had gone through to finally perfect their product.

And then the whole thing is they don't stop. So you go back to this. So like Todd Grace did it for 30 years. That dude, you talked about obsessive. I told him I was having, I was so excited.

So like, I'm obsessed with podcasts. It's people think I love breeding and I definitely do. But what I realized 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 highs a kite on excitement because you just absorb their energy and enthusiasm for their business and it translates to you. And I was telling Todd, I was like, dude, I need 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 think he's like, I slept three hours last night.

I go, why'd you sleep three hours? Because I couldn't wake up and get inside of a store. He calls 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 reason. He says he's working the drive there. His business card says fry, fry, cook, cashier, CEO. He does all the jobs.

The fifth guest, my goal of it's, who'd now like, I text and talk to all the time. And he was an, he's been out for 40 years. He ran CA for like 30 years. Obsessive, like the guy almost killed himself.

He was working so much. I won't go to 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. The either did it for at least was two decades to four to five decades. And when you sit down with these wiser old 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 that I've been alive. - 100%.

- Yeah, I just get a lot of energy and value. - Yesterday I had Jeremy Zimmer on the podcast, the co-founder of UTA. And it was fascinating. Because I was going down the rabbit hole on him.

And he had this line about Michael Ovidz, because obviously him, Ari Manuel Zimmer, we're all like, there were fierce competitors. And I was asking him, I'm like,

“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 Ovidz,

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. And when you go to these founders,

and you get to speak or listen to people

that are last in, you understand that all the little decisions that you have, that's just a Tuesday for them. And so, 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 like your pod. - One of the greatest maximists from the history of entrepreneurship is excellence is the capacity to take pain.

And you just see it so whenever you're gonna actually came from the biography of the founder of Four Seasons,

that's where I first saw that line.

But I would say with Ovidz, I would highly recommend reading his autobiography.

“I think it's one of the most important entrepreneur”

autobiographies I've ever written. It's called Who is Michael Ovidz, because he talks about the regret city 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 some environments where in his case, like if somebody's gonna 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, 'cause he's essentially the world, what is an agent? Asian is the salesperson. He was like, the world's greatest agent,

so it's like world's greatest salesperson. And literally just moved it to the East Coast and just worked because he was running the fund

and 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 most of the multi-billionaires, he's fine over there. He would have made more money, but I think he would have been, he just wouldn't have been universally hated

because 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 who 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 of 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 and 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 have 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 5,000 Whole Foods or you're going to be thinking about the relationship you're having with the people you love.

And I'm like, OK, well, he's got 35, something, something years on me. What's the point you may have in these conversations that I'm not going to change my behavior? If I just like, oh, yeah, I'm collecting your information

and not changing anything. And 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 Lovitz and Jeremy

Zimmer and Arya manual 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 other parties and instead kind of go together with that. The interesting thing, and somewhat skeptical 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 and you did when you're 25 or 35. So you have to figure out what is actually important to you.

And this is a lot of this. When I was spending a lot of time thinking about different founder archetypes, something mean Daniel Acre trying to figure it out as his idea. Just because what he realized was for him,

he is all the new entrepreneurs. If you talk to young entrepreneurs, 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 just like, but he tried to like this like imitation. He's like, but wait, I'm not like this. And if you look at the actual structure of Spotify, it's much more like, almost like a team. As opposed to like just one visionary genius.

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 should be 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 70s a week, but he'd take like an hour to play tennis

But then you write back on it. But you know, you miss out on some of your kids childhood, time with his wife and everything else. And he's dying of cancer when he's writing that book. He knows he doesn't have much time left.

And he's like, but if I'm be honest, I wouldn't really do much different. I would still do exactly what I did. And so yeah, that's a great way you were, like, insight that your 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 it at 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 all saying you're the average of the five people

you've spent time with, the gym runism? 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. 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, my parents never even graduated high school,

much less college, right? It was the first person my family graduated high school, which is a crazy thing to look back on. And I thought, I was unhappy enough younger because I didn't have money, and then you start to make money,

and then you're like, why am I still unhappy? And so I, much more focused on inputs than anything else. And I think a lot, like, there's this great book, if you're about red bill washes book, this girl 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 in front of you. This is something you recur as 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 Oshanasey, from his investor, but he's more well-known because he has this great podcast called Invest like the Best. And his whole thing with me, he talks about this all the time.

He almost thinks like a little retarded yesterday, he goes, you're gonna retard Max into becoming a billionaire, because he's like, you don't, you have no long-term plan. You just wake up every day, and you 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're doing it for 10 years,

and like, look where it's getting you. And I'm just like, I just do what I like to do. I don't care, so if you tell me,

oh, I'll never be able to write a book,

like how to make a billion dollars. I never became a billionaire, but I got to do what I love to do. Like I think the best definition, we were kind of like dancing around here,

is like, how do you define success? And at five years from now, what is your life look like? I'm like, I have no idea. I was like, I hope I'm doing this, 'cause I like doing this.

And I just try to design a good 24 hours that I like, and then do it again, and do it again. And again, I want to add value to other people's lives. And I think me making these podcasts, hopefully that has information, educational,

and inspiring information, to help you build your business. And if I just do that over and over again, then the score will take care of itself. 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, by the way, I legitimately think about this. And I think a lot of history's great as entrepreneurs did, you won't find many of them that are obsessed over, I have to hit a certain net worth.

Or I have to hit a certain market cap.

I'm almost never here that.

Mine, I would just echo what Steve Jobs answered this question was when they're like, how do you define success? He's like, did I make something a proud of?

“And I think that's like really, really important.”

But going back to this, there's a line in the new book, how to make a few billion dollars by Brad Jacobs, where he says, or how to make a few more billion dollars, as you say, where he says that 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 general, I think he's talking about. And one thing that you observe when you're reading about history's greatest entrepreneurs, you get to talk to some of the greatest entrepreneurs,

is how small their circles are. And how they're very slow to add new people, they almost go to great lengths to vet the people they have around them, which is another fascinating thing to think about.

It's almost a very clanish. It's almost very human to be like, "Leary of other people, "especially when you become a lot of these people well-known, "they're multi-multip billionaires. "Everybody all day long wants something from them,

"like invest in my thing, or become my customer, "or they want to like use them for something." But I would say keeping your circles, the device 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 sacrificing all sense of ethics and morals. So you don't want those people around you.

What did Buffett and Muggers say? You can't do a good deal with a bad person.

for who they surround themselves with, because you are going to imitate and mimic and just be influenced by the people around you. And then the line, as far as professionally, it's 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 where we touch 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 our computer and the hands of somebody like Steve Jobs or Steve Wagner's snack or Michael Dell has the potential to unleash

the most powerful products and companies

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had incredibly high personal standards. And 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 they're 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 YouTube, 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, like, Jensen Wong, who talks about, like, I will pressure you into greatness. Torture. Torture you. And that was torturing to greatness. Right.

I think that's from YouTube that you did an episode on, too.

“His belief was that that's how he became great, right?”

What would you realize is when you read that? He's like, I don't like to give up on people. I'd rather torture them into greatness as 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 it, I'm 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 you can remember. So I try to distill the basic idea down to, like, a maximum of our aphorism and then you can actually apply it to your situation.

But the way I would think about this is Sidney Harman, this engineer, founder of Harman Cardan, says that the founder is the guardian of the company's soul. What a lie. 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 I'm like, oh, but I heard Steve Jobs was a jerk.

One of the most important things you can read,

the person I worked with Steve Jobs the longest was not anybody Apple. It was actually Ed Campbell, the founder of Pixar. And Ed Campbell's got this great autobiography, but also really almost like a Bible on how

to make great creative work called Creativity Inc. Which talks about how he started Pixar and his life story and how they approach things. There's a 20 or 30, maybe 20 page afterward in the book called The Steve We New.

And he's like, I worked with this guy for, I don't know, I forgot, 26, 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 learn and to read is like, yeah, that Steve, Steve is obviously very aggressive and he could be called an asshole or jerk. And I was saying he wasn't even later on, but he learned how to manage and to deal

with excessively tells people and he changed over time. And that afterward, which, you know, can read in a half hour, I think is really important

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 is there was three people

I wanted to meet, right? And accidentally, unexpected, they all three of them last year. It was James Licent, Jeff Bezos, and Angie Meffin. I spent, I don't know how many hours talking to Dyson.

The episode I did on the new show, David Center. That episode, it's episode number six. I don't even think we're label number numbering them. That was one of the best days of my life because that guy's book changed my entire life.

I 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 read his second autobiography, at least twice.

I read his history, talk about how so many people are great way they do have this love.

And he says he's obsessed with the past

and studying history. He wrote an encyclopedia. He can say himself an inventor, not an entrepreneur. He just became an inventor so he can continue to, all right, he just came in entrepreneur.

So he can continue to invent. Bezos thinks about the same way. But he wrote James Licent wrote a book on, it's called a history of great inventions. He literally kind of, I don't know,

it's like 100, 200 inventions in there. He tells the story of these things, read that book. And he was unbelievably kind and generous and witty. And to the point where there's a picture,

“I think I put some on my mind where I was like,”

afterwards, this is kind of embarrassing, but 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, no, it 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. I was like, it's guys struggle for 14 years.

Bill 5127 prototypes. His kids grew up thinking that your dad's a loser 'cause 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 doing, we're making a podcast together, I don't know, basis.

I talked him for three straight hours, unbelievable. Now there's crazy, obviously we built one of the most, if not one of the most impressive companies of all time and it's all kinds of stories when he's 30 and he's starting Amazon.

He's obviously, he wanted to name it relentless. He owns relentless.com. What does that kind of personality type? And he's pushing, but you know, very, very kind. Jimmy, same thing, Jimmy Avine,

like, I mean, they're rough around the edges for sure, but I wouldn't say, I don't know, nice. I think they've just like missioned it, I guess my favorite, some of my favorite entrepreneurs and if you think about your work in this way,

I can't 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, rereading snowball, 700 page biography of Warren Buffen. I'm actually not gonna do another episode on it.

“I think I could do a better job with his shareholders,”

so I'm gonna read all of them as a stead. This happens quite frequently, where I read like hundreds of hundreds of pages and don't use it. But 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. I think in many cases 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 is, how history is greatest entrepreneurs thought and then push that forward to the next generation.

So you can say, hey, that idea, I can use that in my business, so 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 is 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 learned like,

I don't want to be that way. - No, I don't think that's necessary. But I do think, I mean, I don't aspire for people to call me nice, perhaps kind.

“But you know, when I think about our mission at contrarian,”

thinking the entire purpose of this crazy game or a plan is to be four 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 that allowed 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

that 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 treat they have is they're uncompromising.

it's going to be very hard to be described as the 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

like ecosystem, right? Like there is now, and there's like all these weird incentives behind it, actually we have tried to convince. I've been trying to, what I'm interested in is like, I think about a lot about differentiation.

And so there's some world class entrepreneurs that don't do any 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 or actually created by investors. And so you could have incentive alignment with them, but many cases your incentives are misaligned.

And we should just think about that. And what it's disturbing about that is how much of it is about start scale, so. And as we just discussed, like I'm interested in the people that created something

that made somebody else's life better. So the best, we can step back, what is a business? The best definition of the best answer to that question, what is a business? I actually heard from Richard Branson.

And he says all businesses is an idea that makes somebody else's life better. And so there's a con 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's, maybe the best apple my phone besides one of the AI systems, right? Made my life better. So I'm glad that the team there makes all, you know,

they're worth all the money they're worth. Going to racing kines, I can't eat every day 'cause 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 as a scale. It could be an app, it could be,

“I think Spotify's worth, I don't know, $100 a day,”

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. Or it's like, well, I can get a choir with this company and I can make this money and it's 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 employees, that's admirable too. It's just not the game I'm interested in. The game I'm interested in is like, you couldn't pay me to stop.

What I'm interested in is like, what is the business? What is your, not your first business? What is your last business? The business that you want to work on forever. - Yeah, it's so funny.

Somebody was asking me the other day. I can't remember, I did a podcast this week. Oh, and she said, why haven't you taken investors? She had taken investors, whatever, and I said, 'cause you got to pull this thing out of my cold dead fingers.

Like I, now will I always have to be in front of the TV

or whatever it is that 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 wanna 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 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 muddy fairy books, that's a passion. - What is a muddy fairy book?

- How you're really outside the zeitgeist of women, huh? Now, this is, you know what the best selling books are of all time? - Okay, so this was hilarious. - You probably forced you to--

- 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, you shouldn't smile. I didn't know it was like this, this turned sexual. I mean, it was going on here. - Well, they are sexual. It's actually a giant asset class.

I should figure out how to invest in this thing. But obviously, you know, the OGs, we've got like Harry Potter, not sexual, but fantasy. But there's this huge ecosystem in it. - So in 50 shades of gray, meets a Potter.

- Yeah, literally. - Literally. And so they're everywhere, and it is the, it's the number one selling book category. - Okay, this was crazy 'cause, you know,

obviously love books. I read mostly old books, but I think it was a, - I give a red ac guitar. - No. - A quarter of four to three roses.

They should have come and saw this or it could have been hysterical. - Oh, God. - Guys, let's find where David lives and said him so much.

- Don't smoke, don't do that. - That's it. - Please don't do it. - No, maybe I should do an episode on one of these. But the, you know, the funny point,

I think it was Morgan household to tell me this, our mutual friend Morgan household,

who just sold 10 million copies.

Now it just hit 10 million copies sold of psychology money. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. We have, I absolutely love him. - Me too.

- And I'm pretty sure he's willing to tell me this. He's like, do you know what the best selling book of the 2000s were? Maybe it's 2010s, that decade, I have no idea. He goes, 50 shades of gray.

I was like, okay, I haven't read it. - Yeah, do you like it before that?

- Or maybe better.

“- I think depending on if you're into this, it goes,”

what was the second best selling book of that decade?

I don't know, he goes, the sequel to 50 shades of gray. Like damn, there's a lot of pent up demand for this again. And then he goes, what was the third best selling book of the decade ago? There's no way, was there a, not a true,

what's the trilogy? Yeah, he's like the third version of 50 shades of gray. Yeah, it was an interesting fact that. - Well, now we have more of fragmented industry. There's a lot, but there are, you know,

there's this woman, Sarah J. Mass, and she's basically came from nowhere to write the series of books that are just proliferating. I'm not women. - How do we get there from start scale, so?

- Yeah, I don't know. - Natural progression. - Yeah, so to go to back to that, it's like, finding out why people are doing what they're doing, I think is actually really important

and so that I ask that. And usually, one of the things that we wanna 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 that match your archetype would be very useful,

so you're making sure you're attacking the right problem. - And so, what do you mean by archetypes? Have you flush that out yet when you-- - So, I need to name them, but like, think about, think about like, all the different,

this is not a science obviously, it's just a rough framework to figure things out, but you think about all these like personality assessments, like, anyogram is very popular. - Yeah, sure, sure, sure, sure.

- So, it's very popular. - 16 personalities 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 anyogram is very popular

is like a lot of my founder friends, and just not only to know 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 that this does well together, so I only look for three, so whatever the number of cases, it's just like, okay, well, there's like, whatever archetype Steve Jobs is,

is different from the archetype of a day and a week. 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 make there might be five archetypes or maybe 10?

“We're not actually sure, but I think the important part”

here is that they don't go back to your original questions, it's not, you know, some people do do this because they just want to make buildings 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 'cause their whole thing is like,

I have never heard anybody call somebody in PE

refreshing before. No, because they're like, they're like, they have funny ways to think about. They're like VC gets all the attention, PE gets all the money. That's just, it's such a huge industry.

And they're like, the fact that VC's tell you that their customers are founders, he goes, they're goddamn liars. The LPs are our customers, 'cause they give us money. The founders, 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 problem money and make it into a bigger problem money. I am not the right founder for that,

'cause 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, but maybe 300 years of the market economy, and you have hundreds, maybe thousands of really great entrepreneurs

that live their whole lives, ran all kinds of experiments, learned a bunch of stuff, and then 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. They 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 license and saying 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,

“'cause I do think we're all memetic, would monetize it?”

- No. - Come on. Like, okay, so we should talk about this because, again,

I think most people think, first of all,

starting another business, like my whole thing is to find a simple idea, take it seriously,

- But you could just invest in it until Daniel did. - No. - Have an off-right of note. - No investing either. - Very little, like...

- This is stressful for me. I can't believe Patrick probably and Morgan just yell at you all the time about this. - Yes. Morgan doesn't, 'cause Morgan doesn't invest in anything,

what do you think all his money is in? - Indexing. - I know, I felt so pathetic listening to him 'cause he's like, I'd be like, "Tell me about one unhinged things you bought."

He's like, "Did buy a house once?"

I'm like, "Fuck, it never bought."

- No question. - The renovations on his, on the, the household state. - Okay. - Okay. - Okay.

- Which again, probably is good for marital bliss. - 100%. - So maybe that's not an expense.

“One, I think, open sourcing this is more important”

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, 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 just, I'm gonna say no,

and it's gonna take you years to break me down, and then I'm gonna come to you and be like, I have this great idea, and it'll be your idea. (laughing) This is not a joke, this is like how husband's in life's work.

- This has happened to so many people in my life, they now know it's like conception. They're like, if I want David to do something, I need to put in the idea now, whisper to his iPhone. - It really works.

- There's a great line in, you know, I think one above it's your hotel 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 in the new show. I'm full, I work 70s a week,

I don't have any time, like, 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 obsessive money. I would argue that obsessive control, and that if you're talented and you're working on a valuable product,

our problem, and you solve the problem for other people, and you maintain control, you wind up with the money. But the very first person that I met that was renowned from the podcast was Sam Cell. Episode 269 of founders is the autobiography.

You know, he's my favorite investor in all time. - And he wouldn't come, so for investors. So we'll talk about this. So I'm almost positive at the episode 269. It's the autobiography of Sam Cell,

which is incredible, people should read it.

It's called "Am I Being Settle?" I think it's the title, and I put that out, and he listened to it, and he thought it was, he'd like to so much he asked to meet me. And I love the fact that somebody in their 80s

was starting to listen to podcasts, 'cause he's, what is he? At the fundamental, he's a learner. He's a learning machine. And so I had a two-hour lunch with them before he died,

and then we were scheduled to have dinner. I was gonna do, I was gonna have a dinner with him in Miami, and he wanted to have dinner, and then me do an episode called, I had dinner with Sam Cell and talk about the stories.

And then the day, the day before the dinner, it was canceled, they said, Sam's not flying down from Chicago, he's sick. I thought he'd like COVID or something. Three weeks later, he was dead.

Yeah, he from cancer. - Fuck. - Oh, but he was spending his last, I probably saw him six months, eight months before he died, he was flying all over the world at his expense,

just sharing everything he learned with entrepreneurs. Having lunch dinner with entrepreneurs, talking to a guy talking at conferences and events for entrepreneurs. And you know, that guy was as liquid as a day as long.

His company was very, very interesting, where it's like technically a family office, but it was his own money, and he made all the investment decisions.

And never, who was gonna spend the money to begin with,

he told me, I didn't know he was sick with cancer, he'd obviously didn't share it with me. Now, he's gonna be doing deals until he died. Guess what? He did deals until the day he died.

The day before I saw him or day after the day before I saw him,

“I think he just bought, he calls him a family businesses.”

He's like, I just bought, I forgot the number, it's like 75% of his 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 gonna tie back to the money was, let me see if I can remember this correctly. His whole thing, and he was not subtle at all. So he was kind of like, he was very nice to me,

but he was like, I have a suggestion for you, Dave. He's like, do this, do this. I'm like, okay, I'm gonna listen to you. So he says, go for freedom. He's like, if you keep your freedom,

you can control what you work on. If you control what you work on, you can work on what you love. If you love it, you'll do it all the time. If you do it all the time, you'll get really good at it,

and money will come as a result. So again, it goes back to your question. Do they start with, I want a billion dollar exit. I want a certain amount of ARR. I want a certain market gap.

No, he's holding this, it's like, I like doing deals. And I do him all the time, I did him for 60 years, in terms of, 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. I know all the rich guys and he goes, they're all guys.

at how many of them are miserable. He's like, what's the point of having those 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 there was a bunch of funny parts because he was hilarious. He was just like you saw him on CMBC. 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, I have all the money in the world. He goes, I have my place in Chicago and my compound in Malibu.

That's the word he used. Remember, he's like 82, maybe 81, maybe 81, maybe 81 when I met him. And he wanted me to see his Malibu house. And he hands me his phone.

“So I think I'm going to look at pictures”

that he took on his iPhone of his Malibu house. No, he Google Image Search SAMZEL Malibu house. 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, 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 an up until Christmas, he would take him his whole extended family. It sounded like there was like 30 people on this trip, 40 people on the trip to this small village in France.

And he said something funny 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, he's only one true luxury in life. He goes, try to get to private jet money.

Yeah, I said it because literally he goes, he's guys drive themselves crazy.

He goes, the difference between a $10 million

or how this is what he said. The difference between a $10 million and a $30 million in a house is 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, he's only one true luxury, get to the jet. The jet actually makes a difference. And he said, he uses his jet here.

“He uses jet like, I think an average like three,”

if you did the math over in the entire year, he would average like three hours a day. So he really used his jet. Yeah, you know what I loved about him? I loved the Zell's Angels.

I loved, like there's this other guy who used to work with George Soros back in the day. Like back when he was just investing in things in hedge fund land. And he wrote a book called Adventure Capitalist

and Investment Biker. Oh my God, I'm forgetting his name, which is so embarrassing. It was actually, I didn't even have a podcast. I made up the podcast like a billion years ago. But before they were cool, maybe 50, I don't even know.

Yeah, I guess what I've been 15 years ago, just to have a phone call with this guy who wrote these two books. He was in China at the time, Jim Rogers. And Jim Rogers at the time was like one of the best hedge fund managers of all time.

Him and George, that was like in the first couple years

of the quantum fund I believe, and they had absolutely crushed it. But he left it all to go adventure on the world invest and tell stories about it. He had like this, 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. And made investments all over the world

in all over Latin America. And I ran a business before in Latin America. So I just found it 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 staggy guy running around on a motorcycle when he was a billionaire by that. Like going on like motorcycle trips and like mungolian stuff,

like in danger. - With that. - Yes. - In danger smoking weed on the side of the road. He would talk 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.

Like yeah, it was the first person.

He was just funny. But he wasn't, I don't mean 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 go back to the people have to be assholes. And some of those, I'm sure I'm gonna have some assholes on the new show. Like I'm interviewing or not even knew very. 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, it's obviously at 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 he's just like, there's a benefit, a life benefit of just one being a good conversationalist,

like a good hang. And just being easy to be around and being likable. And one of the ways I think to do that is to be intensely interested in a subject. Like I don't, not particularly passionate

about chicken fingers. But I like the Todd Graves this. And hearing him talk about like, he even broke it down like, what stage of rigour mortist that the chicken has to be in.

You wouldn't even give me an issue in that. But I'm interested in that he was interested in it. And therefore he is fascinating to me. And I think the biggest way to be likable and to be like somebody that people want to be around

“is just like you have to have to be intensely interested”

in something because the most interesting people are the most interested.

I just heard on Alexander, the guy from Free Solo say, you're 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. I don't want to live in a van. I don't want to do the handwork out. 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 you like, you gravitate towards people like that. And Zell was the same way? Yeah, obsession is kind of contagious, isn't it? Like if you're obsessed with something, you can make anybody else get a little bit of that obsession.

I would say passion is infectious. That's okay.

“And I think this is what I mentioned earlier, right?”

I don't do any drugs. I don't do ecstasy.

I don't, I would never would.

But this is the way I feel after talking to any of them. Michael Dell, James Dyson, you're just like, wow. Like you took whatever passion you have for your business that you gave it to me and now that charge me up to like go and apply that to whatever I'm working on.

This is beautiful, like virtuous, you know, flywall 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 it's like complexity is the great killer. A full things. And then he's like, the problem is is that through life,

everything gets more complex. 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. No, it gets more complex. And you have a guy on your podcast where you covered someone on your podcast, Rick Rubin, who talks, I want to talk about how he doesn't call himself

a producer, he calls himself some producer. Yeah. And to tell that story because it's one that I think we all have to internalize a little bit more. He don't necessarily have to do less.

You have to do more better. There's something that you said that this is how, again, reading all these books kind of works. Like how my mind works now. Where the advice that you were given, echoes this advice,

this guy named David Packard, who is founder of HP. And HP, again, is this big old study company by the time, it was the influence or influence to influencers. So like all Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, all these other people went out and built a great technology companies

in the 70s and 80s, looked to these guys before them, right? Just like the founders of Intel looked to the,

there's one of the first technology companies

to come about in the 1950s or something like that. And he has a straight line that most bit more businesses dive into gestion than starvation. Like they just tried to do too much. They essentially sabotage themselves.

This is also advice that Michael Delgabe, I think on the podcast, maybe in private, but he's like most founders just sabotage themselves. Like you're not taking out by competition. You just can handle your success or you took your foot off the gas.

You just did something that you obviously sabotage yourself. It's opposed to like being taken out by a superior product from a competitor. And so Rick Rubens 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 add any other ones, it has to at least match the quality of this.

So what's the number six? It takes a long time and it's really hard to get to 10.

“And maybe you have to draw out the other 45 songs.”

And you haven't done enough. 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 that we talked about this. Or even look at like the Apple 2. Like the first very successful product that Steve Jobs, conversation, 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 I think we have horror, complexity, and we crave simplicity. But we make everything that's simple, complex over time. And so knowing that, there's a great line from Sam Walton's autobiography that's about this.

Walton's is telling a story in 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 then they start this thing. We're now this is 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 over complicating it, which is, again, I think more in line with like human nature, we just love to complicate things, even if we apply complexity. - Yeah, well I think the other part is,

when you have more complex things,

And so 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 matter that needed to be done more than anything else.

So it's harder than doing those 47 things, because sometimes to put that one thing on the list doesn't feel as good, it's doing the 47. - 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,

so these three problems, so these two problems, this one problem. That's actually what I'm doing. The rest of the talking can be ignored, but the reason I tied it to the big ol' 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.

There's an essence in this course, a lot of value. You over-complicated it, you need somebody else with other eyes, 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 are reduced by Rick Rubin 30 years ago, you can listen to today, so sounds good. 'Cause he goes, hey, 50 years ago, a guy with a good voice, strumming a guitar and singing, sounds good.

So if it sounded good, 50 years ago, if it sounds good today, highly likely, it'll sound good 50 years from now. Same thing with a piano, a piano in a beautiful moments voice. Sound good, 50 years ago, sounds good today,

it'll sound good 50 years from now.

“And I think what's 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 they 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 Resner from Nine Names is the first person to do it. He was like 21 when he wrote the article,

wrote the songs, sorry. And then Johnny Cash is like 70 when he's singing it. And you listen to that Johnny's been dead for years. And it still sounds good today. And then, so long as part, I don't know, 15 years old,

or something like that, it still sounds good today. Just like the going and eating at Raising Cains 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 Cains case, 30 decades,

or 30 years, he didn't interrupt the compounding. That would you see there, like, oh my God, the guys were 20 billion dollars as nine or 15 stores. But he's like, he just didn't time carry it all the way. 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 humans do, you can't keep things that are great to yourself. When you see a great movie, listen to a great podcast,

meet a great friend, go to a great restaurant. It's impossible to not tell other people about it. It's just what happens.

And the problem is, I kind of ties this will tie back

to almost everything we've talked about today,

“which is like, that's why it's so detrimental.”

And you see the success in most entrepreneurs' lives happened 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 gonna do next day? You're gonna start something else? 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, 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 cool or a 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 been 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 sentences. He was like, I can't, he's like, then right on a page.

He's like, I can't do that. And he'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 Priser. 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 then nobody and Zell just decided he'd like 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,”

just read by Kevin Kelly. It's called Excellent Advice for Living, Wisdom, I wish I'd known earlier. And he says one of the most counterintuitive rules of the universe is the more you give, the more you get.

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, he's just being doing an active service, right?

But what would happen is Rick would bring him a deal and like, hey, here's the, exactly what you're saying. Here's the 10 things that we have to solve or whatever. And Zell would look at him, like, number five.

That's the only thing. If we solve number five, everything else falls in line. And Zell talks about this in his autobiography that he was mentored by Jay Presser who was one of the best deal makers, right?

Living, probably a decade, maybe two decades older and same as all 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,

I'd just like, there's only one important thing here. You have a list of seven things, it's not seven. It's just one thing. And if we take care of this one thing, everything else will fall in line.

So it's at simplification. This 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. Five thousand deals by that. He just understood it in a way, what we call intuition is really just like the sum of your experiences and your subconscious kind of explaining to you.

You can't even, this is what I learned from Rick Rubin too, when you just mentioned really hard to take a 700 page biography and distill it down to its essence and 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. It goal is to episode one, two, five, 10, 25, 50. They're probably suck compared to what I can do now because I didn't understand that like, I had to take time to train my intuition to do this.

Rick Rubin would totally exactly the same thing. Where he's constantly critiquing the stuff he produced and created when he was, he started his record label, and he started producing when he was in his dorm room. He's in his 60s now, still doing it.

He's just like, I didn't have enough training on my intuition and you'll see this in all kinds of different domains. I'm reading Roger Federer's 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 was a boring business ability to play.

Another great example of this is 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 exact shot 100,000 times.

And so me thinking it, thinking about it would make it worse. There's a great story in Johnny Iv's biography, which is really good. And I think it's episode 178 of Founders. And he talks about the difference the contrast between the way Google's run and Steve Jobs are an apple.

And you know, when Google would do 200 A.B. tests on what color this button should be. And they were making, remember the IMAX, the old school IMAX. We're like, you had a big, like, this is when computers were big and fat and thick. I was like orange, and they had a handle. And then they decided they were going to make them all different colors.

And he, Johnny says that there was no like focus group. They didn't A.B. tests anything. He just a 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 of shift.

That was Steve's intuition for 30 years is not sure by time he got to that point. To be able to trust, you shouldn't be trusting your judgment, trusting your 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 technologies change in 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 defeated about it? How do you think about this? If you agree that the best definition or a great definition of a business is what Richard Branson said that all the businesses and idea that makes somebody else's life better,

there is always infinite ways to make somebody else's life better. So therefore there's always infinite opportunities in my opinion. With that said, I do think you do not ignore technological phenomenon and technological revolutions where obviously going through one now I think you should use.

So I'm sure there's going to be AI-generated podcasts that can do exactly what I do. 100% I would imagine that's going to happen relatively soon if it's not this year next year or five years from now. And so just to use the tools and technology, because all technology is my favorite definition of technology is from Peter Teele and his books there at a one.

It's just a technology that's just a better way to do something. And so I'm just using them to be better making a podcast and hopefully that podcast and the 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 when my favorite times and industry is to study is I've done like 13 different episodes on the early American automobile founders. So Henry Ford, Billy Durant, founder of GM, Henry Leeland, the founder of Cadillac, the Dodge Brothers all the way down to some company makers like Albert, champion who made the

spark plugs they were used, Alfred Sloan who made the ball bearings of all these companies. It's just very fascinating. It's like they're all in each other, they're on one spot and this is just happening in Detroit in 1900, if you were young, mechanically inclined man that were interested in that industry, you got to get your asset 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 every man. 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 $6,000 when we're making

not even a dollar an hour, like on everybody at Ford doing it. I want to mass produce, I want to invent the mass production of the automobile, so then I can any, any, the work or making the automobile can actually afford the automobile, which

was never, people making the car, it 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. He's like, I'm just going to make a car conglomerate, and I'm going to buy all the early

brands, putting together in general motors, you know, general motors today. But the fast thing about Billy Durant is, what was he working on before he worked in the car industry? He is 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, oh, oh, my business is in trouble with these cars running around. Maybe I should just take the same skill set ideas and apply to this new domain.

So the future is always going to be unpredictable.

I love people going around, it's like, you know, this is, we're all, not that far from from New Year's. And anyway, it's like, here's my predictions for, what, in 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, generalize 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. And I say, you can't do that.

That's what Billy Durant just did. But I don't, I have an answer, because she's like, I want to learn these tools, because I'm interested in technology.

“I'm interested in finding tools that make my business better, right?”

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 squirrel will take care of yourself. 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 would be analogies there. I talked to Basel about this, Basel's analogy for this, because he's all, like, all he thinks about his AI all day long now, is he calls it the 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.

There's a thing in, 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 useful?”

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 his belief is that AI is going to be the exact same way, where it's like, the intelligence, as a service is going to go everywhere, and you're going to invent countless

There's no way to predict all the different inventions that humans are going to utilize

this tool for. And it won't be, I talked a lot of, some of you say, they think it's like the last invention. It's like, it's not the last invention. Humans are going to, assuming we're around, are going to constantly invent more and more things.

And if you're a scientist, you'll see the answer to the answer. The answer is also very much too far. Stop, leave the recruiting spirit. With Stepstown All Jobs, you'll be able to show you all the answers for one year, in one package to a fixed price. So, they are going to be at the end of the 75% cost test and are going to be flexible. Now, let's start with Stepstown.de/Alljobs. Stepstown, just the real talent for all jobs. 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, here's the thing. I think thinking like that. I have this, this Max and my got from”

Conomer Garder. Have you ever seen this documentary? It's on Netflix called The Torious?

Oh, it's incredible. I'll tell you the Max and First and I'll tell you it's one of the lessons that he didn't even hear to himself, which is like, if you go to sleep on a win, you wake up with loss.

And that documentary is incredible because, you know, he's literally living at home has no money and he's working as a plumbers 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 Max and belief comes to forability, which I hate when people are like, oh, you shouldn't have so much self-belief. You tell us how much for nearest. Like generate evidence and then have belief and I'm like, well, I've read four of these books and none of these people did that.

They believe in themselves way before everybody around them selling their, they couldn't do what they're doing.

“And all of 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 islands like, uh, he's like caching welfare checks and I think he's in collections on some credit card bills and he's just like, I'm going to be the champion of the world. He's saying those other crazy stuff. But what he realized is it's just like the value comes from the work and doing the work every day.

And that's where he said if you go to sleep on a win, you wake up with a loss and then he made hundreds of million dollars, not judging anybody else.

Suppose he has 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 treat that we're just quote treated in your human where it's like mute the world and build your own. I just wake up every day like I really do think Patrick's party right that I and 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 in the podcast like they're like why don't you hire an editor why don't you hire a researcher.

“It's just like I like doing it. There's a great line from Charles Schultz who's the founder of a guy that had peanuts, remember?”

And we're reading Charlie Brown and 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 ever one 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 and they're like why don't you just like write a bunch of them. They were first like why are you still doing this is the question and then like why don't you like batch them and then you know take time off and his answer to this was great like he didn't understand the questions 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 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 fear of scenes and entrepreneurship and how they think about building businesses and I look at this is like a way to learn and so I was doing this the other day with two close friends of mine and they were talking about acquiring a business in New York okay and 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.

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 this business in New York. I thought they meant Madami. I'm like he kidnapped the mayor of New York City. Like how do I hear about this like idiot the president of Venezuela as if that was any you know anything else or normal yeah I was like I didn't know like I didn't I don't look at the news. I didn't know this now that's embarrassing.

This is my this is my retard maxing would project 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 I like to wake up work out I like to read Then I'll have lunch then I'll read our reread pass highlights do that multiple days a week and night as you go to dinner with founder all my friends are entrepreneurs You know do calls throughout the day like not like meeting calls like friendship calls with other smart people is another form of education Once a choice week I sit down with a founder 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 week a 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 to know I never think about anything I just think about like podcast to me is like all 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

It's 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 exact same interest. 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 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. Thank you. They're not easy to make so thank you for making them

It's David Sennra 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, yeah, Instagram is the biggest channel there. Oh, so there's a real quick story there too.

“We're like I believe in like tiny teams such you mission driven concentrated on like focus. 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 just like a tiny team of a players can run circles around giant team of B&C players. So my shorts which I like to literally is one genius kid living in France Dude, it's they're all the same to I don't manage him. He was obsessed. I'm going to guess he's also way he's like sub 30. He's probably like 26. No, he's in his early 20s

Yeah, but with the funny part and a little like slightly autistic and really obsessed with the game of video

“No, well, he is up. He is an obsessive person, but I met him through Blake Robbins who Blake Robbins is a investor. He used to be a benchmark now. He's his own fund, but I think his Twitter bio says he like hangs out on the edge of the internet”

And he finds like weirdly talented people and he's like, hey, will you meet this kid? He's in from Europe. He's in New York. He's obsessed with what a single podcast in his years And I was just talking to the kid because I thought he was talented. He 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, don didn't even negotiate with them.

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 Chris Fennelland and Steven Spielberg and I was like, listen, I'll not to degree that I can help you in any way. Like you've 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 to hide quality people around you.

Is that all you need to manage him? He makes them. He sends them to me. This is, this is our workflow. I literally, and then it 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 walk, if I like it, I post to the channels. And if I don't, I don't post it. And he's made out of 200. And I probably haven't posted, you know, five. Like I have a big backlog and 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 he named his price and that's it. It just makes my life a lot easier.

Your ad reads. You never have a fucking bet. 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's and real level ad read, I'm not fucking reading it. Give me a new version that 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 it's it.”

Well, and again, this goes back to like the importance of concentration focus because 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's just like, hey, since I don't work or anything else, I can spend a lot of time. So every single ad is custom to that actual episode. And all 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, I'm not only the writer, I'm the first reader.

Yeah, I listened to it. I edit the podcast. So 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 podcasts are so jarring and 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, stop 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 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 everything from every tweet to every email to every whatever.

“And they'll be like, well, somebody else could do that. And that horrifies me because it has my name and face on it. And it's somebody else's time. But your ads are incredible. And you've made me think about ads differently.”

This is, again, this is not a new idea. This is a beautiful thing. I literally have no original ideas. And I know 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 smarter me. That idea come, the fact that I check everything and you check everything. That was Steve Jobs. This is a great book. I highly recommend everybody read. It's called insanely simple. It was the obsession, the drove Apple success.

I think the guy's name is like, Ken Seagull. 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.

“That thing went out without Steve. Personally okay. Every single piece of Apple marketing.”

It's what you do in your care.

But what I want to do is not to know the whole studio. The master-by-tak lab-tabücher soft-behind the internet. It's a master's real-time.

You can say, you can do the same thing. You're a master-time, right? But you don't do anything.

That's right. You're a master-time. You're a master-time. You're a master-time. You're a master-time. And if you work, you'll be able to do it. That's right. You're a master-time. You're a master-time. Now you're a master-time.