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

Most of the greatest entrepreneurs, you actually would not want them as an employee.

Ha! I was literally going to bring this up. Steve was an eccentric. He was 19 years old, showed up barefoot, and he only wanted to work at night. Everybody's telling Nolan Bushnell, get rid of this guy. He's like, no, I want to capture the upside. And because the upside is so extreme, I'm willing to deal with the downside.

The guy that I have on today, David Senra, has become a friend. There is nobody in the world, I'm convinced, that knows more about the world's greatest founders. So if you want to see inside Jeff Bezos's head and inside of founders that don't even exist anymore but have shaped our world, you're going to want to listen to this episode. Keep your freedom.

You can control what you work on. If you love it, you'll do it all the time. If you do it all the time, you'll get really good at it and money will come as a result.

Yeah, obsession is kind of contagious, isn't it?

I would say passion is infectious.

You have me piqued. I want to hear this MrBeast story.

Oh, so this is the funniest shit ever. He goes, I want to run an ad where it says MrBeast wants founder friends.

Stop it.

A lot of people don't understand the founder life. It is kind of lonely and only other entrepreneurs and other founders kind of understand that.

Do you need to cut people from your life that do not want to win?

Yeah, I was literally thinking about this this morning. This morning.

Um, I was curious for you, you've talked a little bit about relationships of famous founders and entrepreneurs. Like, what have you found are the marriages or relationships like by the greatest entrepreneurs?

Marriages?

Yeah.

Terrible. They're terrible. I mean, there's very few people, uh, because you tend to be obsessed. Like, I, I also think like it's important to note, so the, the people that appear on Founders Podcast, right? They, they were so good at their jobs that somebody wrote a book about their life. This is like the tiniest percentage of any humans that have ever existed. So of course they're like outliers of outliers. And what I would say is most people over-optimize their professional life to the detriment of their personal life. And there's a great documentary on this, uh, 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 Iovine, who many people would be surprised, they're like, you know, out of all the people you want to meet, who would you want to meet? And in my top 3, Jimmy Iovine was in there. It was James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, and Jimmy Iovine. Dyson and Jeff Bezos makes perfect sense for somebody that, you know, studies the history, history's greatest entrepreneurs. We're like, Jimmy Iovine, why? I was like, 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 Iovine. No, it's a documentary on entrepreneurship. They're just very entrepreneurial. And in that documentary, they interview Jimmy's ex-wife and they interview Dr. Dre's wife, who then has— they've since been divorced after that. And 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 anybody else cuz it's from the, the spouse's perspective. But it, you know, it, it essentially comes from, you have usually highly disagreeable people, very driven people, obsessed people, have a hard time, you know, taking a break, um, are dedicated. And you can't have a relationship if you're not, you know, spending time with the other person and making them a priority.

Yeah. Do you think that, 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 you just— it's literally just a bigger sample size there. You can, you know, grow up with in a loving household and still have extreme success. I don't know if it's a trauma response. I do think I, I have a different view of this. Like, I, I hope I was just talking to Toby Luque of Shopify about this. He says something interesting 'cause I, 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, uh, 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.

Um, his— maybe he could. I just think that there is something almost innate in it. It's like a personality. I don't think you choose to be an entrepreneur. I think like there's this great line from Jeff Bezos where he says, all right, we don't choose our passions, our passions choose us. Yeah. That's how I kind of think about it. So I think even if they, that entrepreneur type didn't even have trauma, they still would do what they're doing. I'm an unmanageable person. There's no way I could ever work for somebody. I'd get fired. I just can't not say what's on my mind. Me and you are both control freaks. It's very obvious. We talked about this before recording.

Control freaksist, I like to say.

Yeah, exactly. I want to pick what I work on, who I work with, how I work. These are just things that are incompatible with being an employee. So I didn't think there was an option, you know, whether I had trauma in my childhood or not.

Yeah, I kind of think, I don't know if it's a story you tell yourself when you're an entrepreneur, but I do think I at least am unemployable now. 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 it's, I think you're the one that I heard it from. It was about Steve Jobs and the founder of Atari. Huh.

I swear to God that was on my mind just now. Really? I was literally gonna bring this up.

Yeah.

Okay.

Tell us a story.

So there's, there's interesting thing that, um, I'm very interested in these ideas that people that didn't know each other, lived at different times, worked in different industries, and in many cases, you know, were in different parts of the world, arrived at similar conclusions. Mm-hmm. And this idea that I've now heard from a bunch of living entrepreneurs. So Daniel Ek, founder of Spotify, told me this. Kareem, founder of Ramp, told me this, that they hire for spikes. And their point was that, you know, big corporations, the advantage that you have as like a, as, as a founder-led company is like big corporations kind of like manage to the middle. So they want you to look a certain way, act a certain way. There's just a lot, there's just a lot more like structure around them where if you're a founder-led company, you have the authority that like, you know, a non-founding CEO probably lacks. And so their whole thing is just like, I'm not, I don't judge you by your worst idea. I judge you by your best. And usually if you want the most talented designer in the world, are the most talented programmer in the world, or the most talented X of anything in the world, they're going to be unusual people with very distinct personalities. And a lot of their personality types will usually lead to like bad behavior. And so like one example of this is like one of the best designers that, uh, Spotify ever had, and this is the early days of Spotify. It's like he was, uh, bipolar and also an alcoholic, but also the world's best designer. Yeah. 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'd 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. Your CEO is like, 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 thing I'm doing right now as opposed, and they knew it wouldn't last forever. These not, it's not something he's gonna work with you for 20 years. And this is not new. He's like, these, you'll see these characters in these books. And so I didn't know this until I read, I think, I think I've done like 15 episodes on Steve Jobs by now, but one of the funniest things was Nolan Bushnell. A lot of people don't realize that in that time in Silicon Valley, this was probably 40 years ago, very common for founder starts company, raises money, bring in professional management. There was very few of these like founders in their 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 Wozniak, were very talented. But Steve was an eccentric. He would show up to the office barefoot. He was 19 years old, show up barefoot, uh, 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. Uh, and he insisted that 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, I, I, 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 is like, okay, we just kept, we, we kind of secluded Steve away from the rest of the general population and we let him work at night and we just, you know, told people to hold their nose 'cause he had such offensive body odor and he slept at the office and he wound up being a very, like, that would wind up being a good trade that, that Nolan did.

Yeah, I think I saw somewhere it was a video on divas and hiring divas one way or the other. It might've been Steve Jobs too. And I thought about it 'cause we had, uh, 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 doesn't have very high EQ, so his engagements with other people are either extremely passive or psychopathic. So I have to have a chat with him every so often. And the other day, so I'm like, hey man, you gotta push on this team, you gotta push harder. And he's like, no, I'm pushing. And I'm like, fuck, need you to have some big dick energy. Get in there. I want you to tell 'em what to do. You are in charge, you go. Well, that translation to E turned into him walking into a room full of like 80% women and going, "Codie told me I had to put my dick on the table." And I was like, fuck my life. And 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 correspond with him, but 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 sometimes somebody that you have to keep, sometimes somebody you have to get rid of. 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 really difficult to work with. And I loved some of your stories that you've told about him, but I was wondering, 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: A Life. It's written by Brian J. Jones, who's also a prolific biographer. He has a bunch of biographies I like, but it says the most important line in that book is that George Lucas unapologetically invested in what he believed in most himself. And he was another control freak. And one of the biggest bets he did— so he did this movie called American Graffiti., and he didn't have any leverage at the time because he was still 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 a guy named Francis Ford Coppola, who was running major, big budget, major movies in— he was like in his late 20s. He's probably 20s, around 27 as well. And so, uh, Steven Spielberg saw this, George Lucas saw this, Brian De Palma saw this, all these, uh, these directors and filmmakers that were friends with each other. And I think Coppola is maybe half a decade older, maybe a decade older. And so he played a huge role. But at the time that he's making American Graffiti, which is one of the best returns on investments, I think he did the movie for like a million dollars, if I remember, and 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 to him, they cut like 4 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 $4 to $5 million on that movie, which was a ton of money back then. And then that gave him, he wrestled on the next project for creative control over Star Wars. And then he wanted ownership of the merchandise rights. And I think the merchandise rights were the most important thing. I forgot the other thing that he argued. It was like a very simple contract. But I think just the idea of like, I believe in myself. I'm willing to take less money up front because a lot of directors are just like, no, just pay me $10 million and you keep all the money in the back end. He's like, I don't care about the money. I care about the control. And if you're talented and you maintain control, you wind up with the money anyways. That was, I think, one of the most important lessons from George Lucas.

Yeah. You know what you've also talked a lot about, which I'm curious, and you almost only talk to entrepreneurs that have had massive longevity, and you have some great quotes on longevity too, how history's greatest entrepreneurs think in decades. There was another one I I really liked, uh, while talking about personal standards. I'm curious, what have you seen it takes to last as an entrepreneur? Like so many people flame out. What do you wanna do if you wanna succeed for the long term and not be a footnote in history?

I don't think, I'm glad you picked up on that because it is one of the most important things for me. Like I'm terrified of being successful for a year or fi— I almost think like being successful and losing it is, is worse than never being successful. So somebody runs a company and looks like success on paper for a year or 5 years. That's not interesting to me. So for the new show, if you look at— we can go through the first 3 guests. First guest, I picked them on purpose for this exact— we both share this love and admiration for Charlie Munger. You and I do. And he thought durability was a first-rate virtue. What he means is you build a company to last, not to just make a bag of money and then disappear onto an island. I'm not interested in that. And so when I thought about the, the people I wanted to talk to, and this is who I, this, this haunts me in my dreams. So, you know, I had a nightmare the other night. I'm literally arguing with people cuz they're like, why don't you interview more startup founders? And I was like, I want people that have done, that are not just promoting something. Cuz a lot of the entrepreneurship industry, especially people that you're consuming this content, it's all, you know, usually tied to some kind of like VC-backed company.

Yeah.

There's just, they're promoting, they're talking about stuff they may do in the future and a small percentage of them will do what they're saying in the future. Somebody else can do that. I want you to be able to point to a body at work and be like, this is what I did and this is what I learned by doing this. And I wanna surface those ideas.

Mm-hmm.

Um, and so like Daniel Ek, first guest on the new show, Daniel Ek worked on Spotify for 20 years. Second guest, let me see if I can go through this by memory. Second guest, Michael Dell. Mm-hmm. He started Dell when he is 19. He's 61 and he's still doing it.

Dude, tell him that line that Michael Dell has about how many days of the week he works. Oh, so I have that on my wall.

So this was hilarious because, uh, I actually DM Michael Dell because he's been very nice to me and he, he like tweets and posts on LinkedIn about founders that he thinks it's like a useful tool for the world and I really appreciate it. And then, um, I get to spend time with him and I, I think he's the GOAT. He's just one of the most kind but fascinating people to talk to because of, again, we're, we're starting a company at 19. This is how crazy it is. I'll, I'll get to that, um, statement in one, one second. I highly recommend everybody read his autobiography or listen to it because he actually reads the autobiography. Mm-hmm. But there's a crazy line in there where I didn't even know that IBM at the time was the most valuable company in the world. It was the first company in history to hit a $100 billion market cap, which I also didn't know.

Wow.

And he goes, I'm, I'm in the University of Texas dorm room. I have $1,000. And he's telling his, trying to convince his parents to let him like work on his company and drop outta school. And he's like, I'm gonna, with this $1,000, I'm going to take on the biggest, the most valuable company in the world, which is IBM. It's such a wild, uh, statement. And then to go on and, and to succeed and to, to navigate all these different technological, you know, revolutions that he successfully endured. He built a durable company. And you know, somebody like that, that, that has 41 years of entrepreneur experience, like you just sit there and talk to him. Zach Dell's a friend. And he's building this great company called—

he is a smart dude, which is not always the case for billionaires' kids.

Yeah, he's going after it.

Zach, that's the company, or that energy company has— is incredible.

Yeah. But he says, he goes, you know, the Bloomberg terminal. He's like, I have Dad terminal. So he's like, I call my dad, like, I have an issue with my supply chain. Well, guess what? Michael's seen everything. Like, he's so helpful as like a, as like, you know, a thought partner on this. I think it's just like insanely valuable. Um, but I was, this is also why I wanted to start the new show. 'Cause I resisted for a long time. I was like, no, no, no. It's like, I can't start another podcast. It's like a loss of focus. I'm just gonna focus on reading biographies of history entrepreneurs and just doing one episode a week and that's it. But then when you put something out like that, guess what? Anybody that lived a life so remarkable that somebody wrote a book about it, in every biography, you'll realize, almost everyone, they were reading biographies when they were younger and they were trying to figure out, so this is again a line from Charlie Munger where it's like, learning from history is a form of leverage. Why did Munger read hundreds of biographies? Why did Buffett read hundreds of biographies? Why did Elon read hundreds of biographies? Why did Jeff Bezos, like Steve Jobs? This just over and over again, it's obviously one of the highest value things you can do. So I was like, let me just focus on that. 'Cause I think it's good for the world and, and other people getting value of it. Some of the best entrepreneurs in the world obviously listen to it. Michael Dell was one of them.. But then what was happening is, as a result of this work, I got to get to know these people, have conversations with them. And then I'm learning so much in the conversations too. Just, it's like being able to prompt a book instead of me being just reading the book and I can, wait, wait, what do you mean by that? Follow up, explain that a little bit more. And so I was like, oh, I should just record these conversations and then other people can benefit from them, not just me. And I also thought because I had this catalog, this encyclopedic knowledge of the history of entrepreneurship, I could create something truly differentiated where if you, like, if Michael Dell's sitting across from me and he says something, I'm like, oh wait, that's just like Bezos said this in his shareholder letter. And like this guy named Daniel Ludwig said this and Rockefeller said this. And so it's almost like tying it all together like this giant weave. And I knew that because God bless him, but there was this guy, he runs a great podcast, but he asked, he had Michael Dell on his podcast one time. And he goes, so, uh, when you're starting Dell, uh, how many hours did you work a week? And Michael's so polite and so kind and he's a great person. And he just looked at him like, uh, and he goes, uh, he literally, I think, pauses, uh, all of them.

So good.

Because like, you know, if you started a company, you know what the answer to that question is. Like, he's like, oh no, I clocked out at 5 o'clock. I have $1,000. I'm going against a $100 billion company. 5 o'clock, guys.

See you tomorrow. Like, come on.

You know that. The answer is. So I just thought, okay, I think I understand these people on a very fundamental level, and that could maybe hopefully make the conversations interesting.

Do you think you have to be obsessed to win? Like, if you want to be one of the greatest, do you have to be obsessed?

Is there anybody I've talked to that wasn't obsessed? So we can go back through the guest list. So 20 years, Daniel Ek, obsessed. He couldn't work on anything. He just stepped down because his natural state is to work on multiple companies at one time. And we should talk about founder archetypes because we're working on this project together, which you might find interesting. And really the importance of knowing yourself and then you're not going to be successful unless you can build a company that's a reflection of you, essentially like an echo or a shadow of the founder. So Daniel had to be obsessive. Spotify wouldn't have worked. Michael Dell is still obsessed to this day. He's obsessed with puzzles and he just looks at reinventing, constantly reinventing his company as 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 8 separate billion-dollar companies. You should get him on here. He's a fascinating character.

One of the most— he's on my list.

He changed my life. We should talk about inner monologues too, because I had a very negative inner monologue. And Brad— I've spent a bunch of time with Brad, and he's the one who's just like, this is stupid. He used to have an inner monologue, a very negative inner monologue, very self-critical. Talks about this in his book called How to Make a Few Billion Dollars, which I recommend reading.. And I knew this for a long time, but just something with the conversation with him just finally clicked where I'm like, my fuel source now is not fixing the wrongs that happened, like being born not with money or whatever. It's like, no, I just love what I do and should be a more positive fuel source. And me talking to myself this way is stupid. 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 experience as an entrepreneur. Brad Jacobs will tell you he's obsessed still. Oh, he just loves deals. He like dances. He's just giddy like a little schoolgirl. I think he's 68 or 69 years old. He still wakes up every day fired up, work. He's like, dude, there was 8 days in a week. I'd work 8. He's just like, can't, he can't help himself. The fourth one was Todd Graves. Okay. Yeah, obsessed. The guy is worth $20 billion and all he does is sell chicken fingers.

That's insane.

But he just sells chicken fingers better than anybody else in the world.

And also, didn't he do a boating— he was like fishing and that was the—

I can tell you stories from him.

So you found— I mean, not that you found him, he was obviously very, very successful, but nobody was really bound down at the altar of Todd Graves before you found this guy.

Because you astutely picked up what I'm actually interested in. It's like, I like people that are obsessed and do things for a long time. That's, I'm very simple and I don't care what that is. It could be a tech company, it could be, you know, you're, you're creating hardware, software, you could sell chicken fingers, it could be real estate. I just, they, they nerd out and they think about things in such a deep way where then you talk to them or you read about them, it makes you like, oh, I can take what I'm doing seriously. Go back to Charlie Munger, which me and you will talk about over and over again. I think one of the most important things I ever heard Charlie Munger say which is like a— he's like, oftentimes we find that the winning system in business goes ridiculously— this is the word he used— ridiculously far minimizing and/or maximizing one or a few variables. There's an extension to that idea, which I think is almost like a way to describe that idea in simpler terms, is find a simple idea and take it seriously. Todd Graves has not changed his menu, and he started the business when he was 23. He's 53 now. He has not changed the menu in 30 years. And what did he do? He came out to the West Coast, saw the success of In-N-Out. It's like, look how we're, we're in LA right now. I'll probably go to In-N-Out after this cuz I haven't eaten anything today. I've just had coffee over all day long. And he's like, well, if a simple menu stripped down, very simple menu worked in cheeseburgers, why wouldn't it work for chicken fingers? And his original idea was like, I'm 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 Von. And this is the thing that once you again have this, I think everybody listening should just find people you admire and then just read their life story. And then in those books, they will talk about the people they admire and then go read their life story and just keep following that chain back and back and back. I think it's a very fascinating and a good use of your time. So I wouldn't have understood this clip I saw if I, you know, maybe the first year I started Founders Podcast, but I was in like the 7th year. I'd read like 300 of these things. I have an idea of how the entrepreneurs, these entrepreneurs think. And it's a 1-minute clip on TikTok or something. And he was talking about the fact that the simpler the menu is, it, 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 describe what Todd Graves has done. And then you don't interrupt the compounding and you're worth $20 billion selling. Go to Raising Cane's. Why does a simple menu matter? Right? Because when he has one restaurant and he's saving 15 or 20 seconds in order because the menu's simple, you, you pull up to Raising Cane's, this is your options. You can have 3 chicken fingers. 4 chicken fingers, 6 chicken fingers. When they told him, you need a chicken sandwich, he's like, okay, I'm putting chicken fingers in between 2 slices of bun. There's your goddamn chicken sandwich. That's literally what he does. It's hilarious and it works. But the point was, you just show up there, it's like, do I want 3, 4, or 6? That's a 5-second decision. When you have one store, it doesn't matter. He's got 915. I think he's adding another 100 this year. He's growing faster in year 30 than he ever has. That makes a huge difference. And for him, you can see that, you can clock that in a clip. Oh, this guy knows his business. Where the opposite of that is a lot of these like fake promoting startup founders that are just lying to you to get to their next round, which I'm not interested in at all.

So true. You know what's fascinating about the world's greatest founders like Steve Jobs? Steve Jobs didn't just control the product, aka the iPhone or the MacBook and the computers that you're on every day. He controlled the distribution. He controlled the back end of it. What do I mean? Well, the App Store, right? He knew that he wanted to control the way that apps got delivered to you. He wanted to actually be the entire marketplace. You want to distribute your product, but you want to make sure that you also own the distribution network. So what can you own instead? Your newsletter. That is why I'm obsessed with this company called beehive, so much so that I invested in it. I have a newsletter that now goes out to a million people and I get to control if they get my information or not. And so with Beehive, you have a founding team that is obsessed on one thing: how to get your clients to read your things. How do you get to have better open rates? How do you get to get more subscribers? How do you get better design? How do you get ads placed in there so you can get paid to even go and distribute your ideas to other people? That's why I'm obsessed with Beehive. And if you already have a newsletter, you should move to this platform. If you don't have a newsletter, you need to get one. And I've got a discount code for you on it today. If you go to beehive.com, B-E-E-H-I-I-V.com, and use code CODIE30 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 Ray from McDonald's too. But the other day I was at this place called Pop-Up Bagels. Have you ever been to it? No. I can't stop going back.

I'm trying to limit my carbs.

Yeah, this is not good for you. Don't go there. Don't go there if you want a six-pack.

I'm on camera a lot this year.

Go on. But the part that I find fascinating is the exact same thing. You can have 3 mini bagels, 6 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, 3 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 simultaneously. By the time you order, they've already pulled up your bag, even in a line of hundreds of people with your name on it. The bagels are hot the second that you get them. They're just small enough where like you wanna order a few more than you probably need. So they're not the large ones. $15.75. For 3 bagels and a cream cheese. The margin must be incredible on it. And you see these people run through the business and I just watch that and think, everybody's like, oh my God, aren't these bagels amazing? I'm like, that's the least interesting part about this business. And so it is so fascinating when you can see an entrepreneur who understands that every business is a widget business in some way. If you can get excited about chicken fingers or bagels or whatever, you can win.

And I think the bagels are probably amazing because it's not people like, oh, to be a master of 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 Graves did it for 30 years. That dude, you talk about obsessing. I told him I was having— I was so excited. So like, I'm obsessed with podcasts. People think I love reading, and I definitely do. But what I realize is like, my real obsession is podcasting. And so what happens is when I have these conversations now, I'm usually like, I don't do drugs. We were talking about this right before we started recording. And I've never done ecstasy or any kind of psychedelics, but I would have to imagine this is what it feels like to do ecstasy because I'm so wired and high as a kite on excitement because you absorb their energy and enthusiasm for their business and it translates to you. And I was telling Todd, I was like, dude, I need help sleeping. And a friend of mine recommended this non-addictive sleeping medication. And he's like, what is that? I go, why? He goes, I need it too. He's like, I slept 3 hours last night. I go, why did you sleep 3 hours? He's like, couldn't wait to wake up and get inside of a store. He calls his restaurants stores, and that's what he does. He travels around and he literally, 30 years in, you go to some Raising Cane's, he's working the drive-thru. His business card says fryer, cook, cashier, CEO. He does all the jobs. The fifth guest, Mike Lovitz, who now I text and talk to all the time. And he was an, he's been an entrepreneur for 40 years. He ran CA for like 30 years. Obsessive. Like the guy almost killed himself. He was working so much. Uh, I won't go through the whole list. 6th guest, James Dyson. He's been running Dyson for 45 years. Obsessed. Same thing like this, like we just went through this whole list. They either did it for at least was 2 decades to 4 to 5 decades. And when you sit down with these wiser older entrepreneurs and you listen, hopefully listen to the podcast, they could just tell you things. They just know so much more. In many cases, they have more entrepreneur experience than I've been alive.

100%.

Yeah. I just get a lot of, uh, energy and, and value.

Yesterday I had Jeremy Zimmer on the podcast, you know, the co-founder of UTA. And it was fascinating 'cause I was going down the rabbit hole on him and, you know, he had this line about Michael Ovitz because obviously him, Ari Emanuel, uh, Zimmer were all like, they were fierce competitors. And I, and I was asking him, I'm like, You know, I asked him, do you think competitors are good for you? Like, do you kind of hate them, but you're glad they exist because you make them better? And he was like, pfft, yes. But he is like, when we started UTA, Michael Ovitz, he had his foot on our fucking neck. He wanted to murder our business. And he goes, now we have a lot of respect for each other. But it is also fascinating when you go to these founders and you get to speak or listen, to people who have built multi-billion dollar enterprises that are lasting, you understand that like all the little decisions that you have, that's just a Tuesday for them. And so like, it's kind of interesting. You can see the compounding effect of like how you can handle pain as you go forward. So that's also why I like your pod.

One of the greatest maxims from the history of entrepreneurship is excellence is the capacity to take pain. And you just see this over and over again. It actually came from the biography of the founder of Four Seasons. That's where I first saw that line. But I would say with Ovitz, I would highly recommend reading his autobiography. I think it's one of the most important entrepreneur autobiographies ever written. It's called Who Is Michael Ovitz? Because he talks about the regrets that he has and the stuff that he would do differently. And I really think people should avoid as much as you can working in like these zero-sum environments where in his case, like if he lost, somebody's gonna be Tom Cruise's agent or this other actor's agent and only one of us can win. Yeah. And I think, and I've talked to Michael about this in private, like I think almost if he took his exact same skillset 'cause he essentially, the world— what is an agent? Agent is a salesperson. He was like the world's greatest agent. So it was like world's greatest salesperson and literally just moved it to the East Coast and just worked it. 'Cause he was running the fund and he's been like, he's one of the greatest fundraisers I've ever seen. And he's got all these crazy connections. And I just think one, not that he, he made enough money, he's got, he's a multi-billionaire, he's fine over there. He would've made more money, but I think he would've 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 were 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 about my work., but I actually think my relationships now, my deep true friendships are more important to me, either equal to or more important than my work. And that is like a relatively new revelation for me. I thought I was an introvert. I thought, you know, I was like a lone wolf. I thought I didn't need anybody. And I realized, oh no, I just had like low quality people around me. And like, if you can surround yourself with high quality people, hold yourself to high standards, and then they also hold you to high standards. It's like one of the greatest things about being alive. So at this point, we're like, I will literally take time away from work to deepen an existing relationship and friendship. And I think that's the stuff. I mean, I talked to John Mackey for the new show too, for another 45 years. He worked on Whole Foods. And after we recorded, I wish we got this on recording, but we didn't. And he goes, he's 72. He goes, David, when you're my age, you're not going to be thinking about the 5,000th Whole Foods store, and he's very proud of building Whole Foods. You're not gonna be thinking about the 5,000 Whole Foods stores. You're gonna be thinking about the relationship you have with the people you love.

Yeah.

And I'm like, okay, well, he's got 35-something, 30-something years on me. What's the point of me having these conversations if I'm not gonna change my behavior? If I just like, oh, great, I'm collecting information and not changing anything, then what is this? This is a waste of time.

I wonder though if some of this is like the right guidance for the right season. For instance, if Michael Ovitz and Jeremy Zimmer and Ari Emanuel didn't have their feet on the proverbial neck of some of their competitors early on, would they be who they are today? 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 them?

The interesting thing, and I'm somewhat skeptical of people that say they would do things differently, I wonder if they would. Mm-hmm.

Right. Or does it just sound better?

Maybe you, you're valuing different things when you're in your 70s and 80s than you did when you were 25 or 35, you know? So you have to figure that out. Like what is actually important to you? And this is a lot of this when we, like, I'm spending a lot of time thinking about like different founder archetypes. Uh, it's something me and Daniel Ek are trying to figure, and it was his idea just because he, what he, what he realized was for him, he is, he's like all the new entrepreneurs. If you talk to young entrepreneurs, like who do they wanna be like? Everyone wants to be Elon, and before that they wanted to be Steve Jobs. And so Daniel was the same way and he's just like, but he, he tried to like do this like imitation. He's like, but wait, I'm not like this. And his, if you look at the actual structure of Spotify, it's much more like almost like a team as opposed to like just one visionary genius. And what Daniel's realizing, and it's been very helpful 'cause he, uh, like definitely shapes my thinking on a lot of things, is he's like, I just think I'm a better player than coach. Or excuse me, better coach than player.

Mm-hmm.

And Steve's a player. Elon's a player. He says, but I'm not like that. So then that doesn't mean you can't build a successful company, but you have to know who you are. And Daniel spent decades trying to figure out who he is. And I think that's why I'm very skeptical. Like in, 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 7 days a week, but he'd take like an hour to play tennis or an hour to go hunt, uh, with his dogs in the middle of the day. But then you'd be right back on it. But you know, you miss out on some of your kids' childhood time with his wife and everything else. And he's dying of cancer when he's writing that, when he's writing that book, he, he knows he doesn't have much time left. And he is like, but if I'm being honest, I wouldn't really do much different. I would still do exactly what I did. And so, yeah, that's a great way you were like insight that your question was actually getting to, which is just like, do they actually mean it? If they could replay it, would they do it? They might replay it as a 70 or 80-year-old man. Would they replay that 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? Is that old saying, you're the average of the 5 people you spend time with, the Jim Rohnism? 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, I was, my parents never even graduated high school. Much less college, right? I was the first person in my family to graduate high school, which is a crazy thing to look back on. And I thought, uh, I was unhappy when I was younger because I didn't have money. And then you start to make money and then you're like, why am I still unhappy? And so I am much more focused on inputs than anything else. Um, and I think a lot of, like, there's this great book. Have you ever read Bill Walsh's book? The Score Will Take Care of Itself?

Yep.

So I think there's a lot of wisdom in that book where it's like, just do the best job you possibly can. With the opportunity right in front of you. This is something that recurs in a lot of the biographies, that opportunity handled well leads to more opportunity. And we were talking earlier before we recorded that one of my closest friends is Patrick O'Shaughnessy. He's an investor, but he's more well known because he has this great podcast called Invest Like the Best. And his whole thing with me, he talks about this all the time. He almost thinks like I'm a little retarded. Yesterday he goes, you're going to retard Max into becoming a billionaire because he's like, you don't You have no like long-term plan. You just wake up every day and you, you like don't look for forms of leverage. You literally just obsess over making, trying to make a good podcast, and then you do the next thing, the next, the same thing the next day and the next day. And you've been doing it for 10 years and like, look where it's getting you. And I'm just like, I, I just do what I like to do. I don't care. So if you tell me, oh, I'll never be able to write a book, like how to make a billion dollars. I never became a billionaire, but I got to do what I love to do. Like, I think the best definition we're kind of like dancing around here is like, how do you define success?

Mm-hmm.

And 5 years from now, what does your life look like? I'm like, I have no idea. I was like, hopefully I'm doing this cuz 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. Yeah. And I think me making these podcasts, hopefully that has information, educational and inspiring information to help you build your business.. And if I just do that over and over again, then the score will take care of, uh, like the score will take care of itself. Um, and my, I guess my answer to the question is like, to what is success in general? Could be 5 years from now or forever. It's like, by the way, I legitimately think about this, and I think a lot of history's greatest entrepreneurs did. You won't find many of 'em that are obsessed over, I have to hit a certain net worth, or I have to hit a certain market cap. I almost never hear that. Mine, I would just echo what Steve Jobs' answer to this question was when they're like, how do you define success? He's like, did I make something I'm proud of? And I think that's really, really important. But going back to this, there's a line in the new book, How to Make a Few Billion Dollars by Brad Jacobs, where he says, or how to make a few more billion dollars, I should say, where he says that the people you have around you is the most important thing in your life. And he says it more eloquently than that, but that's the general thing he's talking about. And one thing that you observe, whether you're reading about great history, greatest entrepreneurs, you get to talk to some of the, the greatest entrepreneurs is how small their circles are and how like they're very slow to add new people. They almost go to great lengths to vet the people they have around them, which is another fascinating thing I've been thinking about. It's almost very clannish. Mm-hmm. It's almost like very human to be like leery of other people, especially when you become, a lot of these people are well known. They're multi, multi-billionaires. Everybody all day long wants something from them, like invest in my thing or become my customer, or they want to like use them for something. Um, but I would say keeping your circles— the advice I've been given, and you kind of observe it also, is like keep your circle really, really small. Make sure everybody's a high-quality individual. Not just like, it can't just be that they want to win because there's a lot of people that are winning with sacrificing all sense of ethics and morals. So you don't want those people around you. What did Buffett and Munger say? You can't do a good deal with a bad person. But I would say, yeah, they most, they have very high bars for who they surround themselves with because you are going to imitate and mimic and just be influenced by the people around you. And then the line, as far as professionally, it's like, I like the Steve Jobs line where he's like, you need to be a yardstick for quality. Most people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected. Not like once in a while. It's like, no, our standard default is excellence. And I think this ties to a lot of what you and I have been talking about or what we touched on. It's like, it's really hard to be excellent in 50 different things. And so what I would say a lot of these people have in common is like they focus on 1 or 2 or basically no bigger than a handful of things to be really excellent at.

I keep thinking about how a computer in the hands of somebody like Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak or Michael Dell has the potential to unleash the most powerful products and companies the world has ever seen. But if you had that same computer in the wrong hands, well, that's where things go sideways. You know, in 2024 alone, there were 6 mega breaches, incidents where over 100 million records of everyday people were actually stolen. So if you think you're safe, I don't know. I think you got to think about it. Google yourself. See what comes up next. It's fascinating. It's your address, usually your relatives, your phone number. That info can easily be collected and sold by data brokers whose entire job is turning your life into a product. When I saw how much of my personal data was floating around online, I freaked out. That's what Incogni helps with. They find the sites that collect and sell your personal information and remove it for you automatically. No emailing sketchy websites or chasing anyone down. And if there's something specific you really want gone, Incogni also offers these custom removals for extra coverage. So think of your data like loose change scattered across the internet. Incogni tracks it down and cleans it up. And it doesn't matter if you're a public figure or not. Everyone should protect their privacy. So go to incogni.com/bigdeal and get protected. You have a quote I like actually, which is, um, the greats had incredibly high personal standards. And it's such like, it's a simple line. It's not that it's incredibly eloquent, but if you don't have, if you don't hold the standard, I've never seen a world in which a founder holds a standard that is less than what the company gives back.

Yeah, I think that'd probably be impossible.

It's impossible. And so if you know that you are the highest standard in the company, then you have this moral imperative to make sure that you are holding it as high as humanly possible. In fact, I think it probably was from you too, but there was something I was listening to about Steve Jobs and how he would talk about how your job as a CEO is to give your employees unreasonable amounts of confidence and push them to be great. And I think about that often. Our job is to push our people past the level in which they think that they are capable of. And if you can't do that, then you probably shouldn't be in charge. And I think that's true. Or like Jensen Huang, who talks about, I will pressure you into greatness.

Torture.

Torture you.

He says, I will torture you into greatness.

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

Yeah.

His belief was that that's how he became great, right? Me too.

Well, what you realize is like when you read that, he's like, I don't like to give up on people. I'd rather torture them into greatness. This is the exact line from his biography. The book is called The NVIDIA Way. I think it's written by Tae Kim, if I remember correctly. And then you realize as you read more about him, you're like, oh, he tortured— he did that to himself first. He tortured himself into greatness first. What I would say is about being the ultimate authority figure, I think I find it very useful to take these ideas because we're limited to how much we can remember. So I try to distill the basic idea down to a maxim or aphorism, and then you contextually apply it to your situation. But the way I would think about this is Sidney Harman, this engineer, founder of Harman Kardon, says that the founder is the guardian of the company's soul.

What a line.

Yeah. And so I think you're the one that sets the standards. I would say some people might be listening to this and they're like, oh, but I heard Steve Jobs was a jerk. One of the most important things you can read— the person that worked with Steve Jobs the longest was not anybody at Apple. It was actually Ed Catmull, the founder of Pixar. And Ed Catmull'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 afterword in the book called the Steve we knew. And he's like, I worked with this guy for, I don't know, I forgot, 26 consecutive years. And he talked about the maturation and how much Steve changed when he first met him to when I think there was 20, he's probably maybe 30 years old when he met him. And then Steve was in his 50s when he died. And I think that's one of the most important things to learn and to read is like, yeah, Steve was obviously very aggressive and he could be called an asshole or a jerk. Not saying he wasn't even later on, but he learned how to manage and to deal with excessively talented people and he changed over time. And that afterward, which you could read in a half hour, I think is really important to understand how he truly was, not how he's depicted in some of these stories.

Have you met a lot of incredible founders or have you covered a lot of incredible founders? That you would call nice as like the first word to describe them?

My initial answer would be no, but that's probably not true. So my personal hero, uh, there was 3 people I wanted to meet, right? And accidentally, unexpectedly, I met all 3 of them last year. It was James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, and, uh, and Jimmy Iovine. I spent, I don't know how many hours talking to Dyson. We, the episode I did on the new show, David Center, that episode, it's episode number 6. I don't even think we're labeling, numbering them. That was one of the best days of my life because that guy's book changed my entire life. Uh, we can go into more detail about that if you want. And it's somebody I read about. I read his first autobiography at least 5 times. I read his second autobiography at least twice. I read his history. Talk about how so many of the people that are great with what they do have this love. And he says he's obsessed with the past and studying history. He wrote an encyclopedia. He considers himself an inventor, not an entrepreneur. He just became an inventor so he could continue to, or he just became an entrepreneur so he can continue to invent. Bezos thinks about it the same way, but he wrote, James Dyson wrote a book on, it's called A History of Great Inventions. He literally cataloged, I don't know, there's like 100 or 200 inventions in there. He tells the story of these things, read that book, and he was unbelievably kind and generous and witty and to the point where there's a picture I think I posted online where I was like, Afterwards, this is kind of embarrassing, but he did play a big role in my life. I was like, I got to give you a hug, dude. You literally changed my life. You encouraged me. You didn't even know who I was, and your book encouraged me not to give up when I went through 5 and a half years of doing the podcast and no one gave a shit. There was nobody listening. I should have quit year 1, year 2, year 3, year 4. And just reading that book early and just rereading, it's like, this guy struggled for 14 years, built 5,127 prototypes. His kids grow up thinking that their dad's a loser cuz 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 a, we're making a podcast together. I don't know. Bezos, I talked to him for 3 straight hours. Unbelievable. Now there's crazy, obviously when you built one of the most, if not one of the most impressive companies of all time. And there's all kinds of stories when he's 30 and he's starting Amazon that he's obviously, he wanted to name it Relentless. He owns relentless.com. What is that kind of personality type? And he's pushing, but very, very kind. Jimmy, same thing. Jimmy Iovine, they're rough around the edges for sure, but I wouldn't say, I don't know, nice. I think they're just like mission. I guess some of my favorite entrepreneurs, and if you think about your work in this way, it can help you not quit. It's just like, What is your actual mission? And no, I would not call them nice. I would say that they're driven. I wouldn't say they're assholes though. I do think like I just finished reading, um, rereading Snowball, um, 700-page biography of Warren Buffett. I'm actually not gonna do another episode on it. I think I could do a better job with his shareholder letters, so I'm gonna read all them instead.

Mm-hmm.

This happens quite frequently where I read like hundreds and hundreds of pages and don't use it. But, um, I, I think they had this like no asshole rule. That even if they could make money, they didn't want people around them like that. I would not consider them nice. No. Yeah. I think in many cases they, they are extreme personality types and that their mission comes in front of everything else. I don't think you have to be that way. You know, I'm trying, I have a mission. My mission is like, I wanna catalog how history has, how history's greatest entrepreneurs thought and then push that forward to the next generation so you can say, hey, that idea, I can use that in my business, or I can use that idea. And I don't think I have to be an asshole to do that, and I'd prefer not to be. And I think as I age, I think being kind, which has not come natural to me and did not come from, like, my family's super hotheaded and kind of mean to each other. And so you kind of learn, you're 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 when I think about our mission at Contrarian, thinking the entire purpose of this crazy game we're playing is to be for entrepreneurs because it's miserable. It's a miserable game that we've chosen to play often. 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 wanna be there to say the things out loud that nobody else will tell you that I wish somebody had told me. And maybe I'm right and maybe I'm wrong, Um, but at least you have somebody else that kind of tells you the truth. Um, and we get to learn from all the data of the other entrepreneurs.

So I, I, I guess what I would say is like the trait they have is they're uncompromising.

Mm-hmm.

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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 wanna 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? Um, like there is now and there's like all these like weird incentives behind it. Um, actually we try to convince, I've been trying to, what I'm interested in is like, I think about a lot about differentiation.. And so there's some world-class entrepreneurs that don't do any podcasts at all. And I've tried to meet with them and try to convince them to do my new show and explain why. And a lot of this is because a lot of the content that entrepreneurs are actually consuming are actually created by investors. And so you could have incentive alignment with them, but in many cases your incentives are misaligned and we should just think about that. Um, and what's disturbing about that is how much of it is about start, scale, sell.. And as we just discussed, like I'm interested in like create the people that created something that made somebody else's life better. So the best, lemme, we can step back. What is a business? The best definition of the, the best answer to that question, what is a business? I actually heard from Richard Branson and he says all a business is, is an idea that makes somebody else's life better. And so there's a ton of tech companies right now and things are being invented all the time. Is that making people's life better? No, you're making a shit ton of money. Which, okay, now you're rich, that's great, but you know what you're doing is not good for the world and you don't care. And so my whole thing is like, I'm interested in people that made a product that makes somebody else's life better. And it could be Spotify is maybe the best app on my phone besides one of the AI assistants, right? Made my life better. So I'm glad that the team there makes all, you know, they're worth all the money they're worth going to Raising Cane's. I can't eat every day 'cause I don't wanna be fat, but like that 15 minutes of eating some great fried chicken, that just made my life a little bit better. You see what I mean here? It doesn't matter the scale. It could be an app, it could be, and I think Spotify's worth, I don't know, $100 billion today. Or it could be this guy making chicken fingers in a box and then just doing it forever and not doing it for, you know, to make a lot of money to start, scale, sell. But when I talk to young entrepreneurs, it's like a lot of them start out with that thing where it's like, well, I can get acquired by this company and I can make this money. And it's just like, You get to choose the game you wanna play, and that's great. And guess what? If you didn't start out with money and then you created wealth for yourself, your family, and your employees, that's admirable too. It's just not the game I'm interested in. 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?

Yeah.

The business that you wanna 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 gotta pull this thing outta my cold dead fingers. Yeah. Like, I, now will I always have to be in front of the TV or whatever it is we're doing here? Like, no, I actually don't care about fame at all. I find it a really useful tool to do the things we wanna do in the world. It's just a different type of leverage. But you'd 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 passion versus, I don't know what you would call it, relentlessness or whatever, where you find that thing that you're just so obsessed with the game you can't stop. And my passions are different. I like smutty fairy books. That's a passion.

What is a smutty fairy book?

Oh, you're really outside the zeitgeist of women, huh? Now this is, do you know what the bestselling books are of all time?

Okay, so this was hilarious. So you like Fifty Shades of Grey.

No.

Is that what you mean?

No, it's not a fantasy. There's no fairies in sight, David.

Okay. I didn't— you said smutty. I didn't know if it was like this turned sexual. I didn't know what was going on here.

Well, they are sexual. It's actually a giant asset class. I should figure out how to invest in this thing. But obviously, you know, the OGs, we've got like Harry Potter, not sexual, but fantasy. But there's this huge ecosystem.

So it's Fifty Shades of Grey meets Harry Potter.

Literally. And so they're everywhere. And it is the— it's the number one selling book category. So this was crazy because, you know, obviously love books.

I read mostly old books, but I think it was our mutual friend.

Have you ever read ACOTAR?

No.

A Court of Thorns and Roses?

No.

The YouTube comments on this are going to be hysterical.

Oh, God.

Guys, let's find where David lives and send him some sparklers.

Don't do that. Please don't do that. No, maybe I should do an episode on one of these. But no, the funny point, I think it was Morgan Housel that told me this. Our mutual friend Morgan Housel, who just sold 10 million copies, who's now just hit 10 million copies sold of Psychology of Money. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. I absolutely love him.

Me too.

And I'm pretty sure he's the one that told me this. He's like, do you know what the bestselling book of the 2000s were? Maybe it was 2010s, that decade. I go, I have no idea. He goes, Fifty Shades of Grey. I was like, oh, okay, I haven't read it.

Yeah, Twilight before that.

No, no, it gets worse, or maybe better, depending on if you're into this. He goes, what was the second bestselling book of that decade? I don't know. He goes, the sequel to Fifty Shades of Grey. I'm like, damn, there's a lot of demand, pent-up demand for this again. He goes, What was the third bestselling book of the decade? I go, there's no way. Was there a— not a— what's the trilogy? Trilogy.

Yeah.

He's like, the third version of Fifty Shades of Grey. Wow. Yeah, it was an interesting fact that—

well, now we have more of a fragmented industry. There's a lot. But there are— there's this woman, Sarah J. Maas, and she basically came from nowhere to write this series of books that are just proliferating among women.

How do we get there from start, scale, sell?

Yeah, I don't know.

To go to—

natural progression.

Yeah. So to, to go back to that, it's like finding out why people are doing what they're doing, I think is actually really important. And so I ask that, and usually one of the things that we 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.

Mm.

And knowing your archetype and then knowing other archetypes of other entrepreneurs that came before you and that match your archetype would be very useful. So you're— make sure you're attacking the right problem.

And so what do you mean by archetypes? Have you fleshed that out yet?

So I need to name them, but like, think about, think about like all the different— and this is not a science, obviously, this is just a rough framework to figure things out. But if you think about all these like personality assessments, like Enneagram is very popular. Yeah. You know, the Enneagram.

Yeah.

So it's very popular.

16 personalities.

Yeah.

We 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, that companies use. The Enneagram is very popular with like a lot of my founder friends and just not only to know like what type they are, but also who like their partners could be or who they'd work well together. And it's just, again, it's not like, oh, I'm an 8 and you're a 3 and this does well together, so I only look for 3s or whatever the number case is. It's just like, okay, well there's all, there's like whatever archetype Steve Jobs is. Is different from the archetype of a Daniel Ek. So how are they different? What are the kind of characteristics? Who do they work well together? And then you now have 400 entrepreneurs that you've studied intensely, and can we match them all? And there might be 5 archetypes, there might be 10. We're not actually sure. But I think the important part here is that they don't go back to your original question. It's like, it's not, you know, I will, some people do do this because they just wanna make billions of dollars. I, I have a lot of friends that work in New York in PE, and I find them refreshing. It's not my game, but because their whole thing is like, I have never heard anybody call somebody in PE refreshing before. They're like, they have funny ways they think about it. They're like, VC gets all the attention, PE gets all the money. That's true. It's such a huge industry. And they're like, listen, the fact that VCs tell you that their customers are founders, he goes, they're goddamn liars. The LPs are our customers because they give us money. The founder's not giving us money. And he goes, I exist to make my LPs richer. And that's what I mean. It's not my game, but I like that they're not lying and they know what they're doing.

Yeah, that's honest.

That's what I mean about that. So that is their game. Their problem is take a big pile of money and make it into a bigger pile of money. I am not the right founder for that because I don't give a shit about that. So I like this idea of founder problem fit, right? I have this weird— I stumbled onto the problem that I'm solving, which is everybody's focused on, you know, what today's founders are saying or experiencing or their opinions. Where it's like we have 200 to maybe 300 years of the market economy and you have hundreds, maybe thou— no, you have thousands of really great entrepreneurs that lived their whole lives, ran all kinds of experiments, learned a bunch of stuff, and then people put down their main ideas in a book. Maybe somebody should go and dig through these books, find good ideas, and then push it down the generation. That's just a weird problem that fit me because I'm an introvert and I'd prefer to sit in a room by myself, read.

I mean, do you know, I was talking to Tony Robbins the other day. The amount of money they make, he owns part of DiSC profile.

I don't know what that is.

It's kind of like 16 Personalities, except think about a more fleshed out version that really helps you if you're a hiring manager for the most part. And then they have corporate licensing or whatever. And so we use that in a lot of our companies because if I'm like, listen, you could have a janitor who's an exceptional fucking janitor. They're so good at their job. But they could potentially move all the way up to senior leadership if you understand that that person is meant for more. But if your company doesn't know how to find them or source them, you have all this hidden talent inside your business. And one of the things that keeps me up at night is thinking about the people who work for me. One, if they're not like working enough and doing things to add value to the company, I don't like that. But also if I'm not doing enough to help them add value to the company and thus make more money in their life and all that. So anyway, but it's a big business, so it would be super interesting if you had that. For founders and entrepreneurs, because I do think we're all memetic. You wouldn't monetize it?

No.

Come on.

No. I think like, okay, so we should talk about this because, um, again, I think most people think, first of all, starting another business, like my whole thing is find a simple idea. Yeah. And take it very seriously. Yeah. Which is a Charlie Munger quote.

But you could just invest in it. Tell Daniel to no, have an operator. No, I, no investing either.

Very little.

Like, this is stressful for me. I can't believe Patrick probably and Morgan just yell at you all the time about this.

Yeah.

Okay.

Morgan doesn't, because Morgan doesn't invest in anything. What do you think? All his money is in indexes.

I know. I felt so pathetic listening to him because he's like, I'd be like, tell me about one unhinged thing you bought. And he's like, I did buy a house once. I'm like, fuck it. Never mind. New question.

The renovations on the house estate.

Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Which again, probably is good for marital bliss.

100%.

So maybe that's not an expense. Um, one, I think open sourcing this is more important, um, to the degree that other people find a value. And also, like, I'm very, very, I mean, it took me, there was probably 3 or 4 years of people around me, very close friends, just like, you should start another podcast talking to founders, you idiot. Do it, do it, do it. And I said, no, no, no. It's like, you know, it's like water on a rock. That's like, you want me to do something, you have to suggest it. And it's just, I'm going to say no, and it's going to take you years to break me down. And then I'm going to come to you and be like, I have this great idea, and it'll be your idea. This is not even a joke.

Sounds like how husbands and wives work.

This has happened to so many people in my life. They now know it's like Inception. They're like, if I want David to do something, I need to put in the idea now.

Whisper to his iPhone.

It really works. There's a great line in, I think, one of Buffett's shareholder letters, which I'm rereading right now, where he says, loss of focus is what worries Charlie and me the most. And so I think me starting another business that's outside of my life's mission, which is founders, and then my new obsession and passion, which is talking to entrepreneurs on the new show, uh, I'm full. I work 7 days 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 are obsessed with money. I would argue they're obsessed with control and that if you're talented and you're working on a valuable product or problem, and you solve the problem for other people and you maintain control, you wind up with the money. But yeah, uh, the very first person that I met that was renowned from the podcast was Sam Zell. Mm-hmm. Episode 269 of Founders is the autobiography. You know, he's my favorite investor of all time and he wouldn't call himself an investor. So we'll talk about this. So I, I, I'm almost positive it's episode 269. It's the autobiography of Sam Zell, which is incredible.

Yeah.

People should read it.. It's called Am I Being Subtle? I think is the title. And I put that out and then he listened to it and he thought it was, he liked it so much he asked to meet me. And I love the fact that somebody in their 80s was starting to listen to podcasts.

Mm-hmm.

Because he's, what is he at the fundamental? He's a learner. He's a learning machine. And so I had a 2-hour lunch with him before he died, and then we were scheduled to have dinner. I was going to do, I was going to have a dinner with him in Miami., and he wanted to have dinner and then me do an episode called I Had Dinner with Sam Zell and talk about the stories. And then the day, I think the day before the dinner, it was canceled. They said Sam's not flying down from Chicago. He's sick. I thought he had, like, COVID or something. 3 weeks later, he's dead. Yeah, from cancer. Fuck. And so, but he was spending his last— I probably saw him 6 months, 8 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 event, talking at conferences and events for entrepreneurs. And you know, that guy was as liquid as the day is long. His company was very, very interesting where it's like technically a family office, but it was his own money and he made all the investment decisions and never was gonna spend the money to begin with. He told me, I didn't know he was sick with cancer. He obviously didn't share that with me. That he's going to be doing deals until he died. Guess what? He did deals until the day he died. The day before I saw him, or the day after, the day before I saw him, I think he just bought, he calls them family businesses.

Mm-hmm.

He's like, I just bought, I forgot the number. It's like 75% of this company for $300 million and they still run things on a fax machine. Like he just loved doing deals, loved it. But he had a bunch of pieces of advice, which I would summarize the main piece of advice, and we're going to tie back to the money, was Let me see if I can remember this correctly. His whole thing, and he was not subtle at all, so he was kind of like, he was very nice to me, but he wasn't like, I have a suggestion for you, Dave. He's like, do this, do this. I'm like, okay, I'm going to listen to you. So he says, go for freedom. He's like, if you keep your freedom, you can control what you work on. If you control what you work on, you can work on what you love. If you love it, you'll do it all the time. If you do it all the time, you'll get really good at it and money will come as a result. So again, goes back to your question. Do they start with, I want a billion-dollar exit, I want a certain amount of ARR, I want a certain market cap? No, his whole thing is just like, I like doing deals and I do 'em all the time. I did 'em for 60 years and turns out I'm really good at doing deals. But the money part was fascinating because he's like, listen, he goes, I know all the rich guys. This is exactly what he says. He goes, I know all the rich guys. And he goes, they're all guys. And he goes, you would be surprised at how many of them are miserable. He's like, what's the point of having all this money if you're not having fun? And he goes, and he ties this to your financial decisions. He's like, the things that you own eventually own you. And there was a bunch of funny parts because he was hilarious. He was just like you saw him on CNBC. This is exactly how he is. I love people like this where there isn't, like, there's no separation between their public and their private persona. And he goes, I have all the money in the world. He goes, I have my place in Chicago and my compound in Malibu. That's the word he used. Remember, he's like 82, maybe 81, maybe 80, 81 when I met him. And he wanted me to see his Malibu house and he hands me his phone. So I think I'm going to look at pictures that he took on his iPhone of his Malibu house. No, he Google image searched Sam Zell 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 then up until like Christmas, he would take him and 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. He goes, I could buy the whole village. And he goes, I don't. I rent it. Because I only think about it when I need it, and then when I leave, it's somebody else's problem. He's like, just eliminate. You don't want to be thinking about these things. And he goes, David, this is the funny part here. He goes, there's only one true luxury in life. He goes, try to get to private jet money.

Yeah, I said it.

Because literally, he goes, these guys drive themselves crazy. He goes, the difference between a $10 million house— this is what he said— the difference between a $10 million house and a $30 million house is, like, negligible. He goes, they waste their time doing things they don't like to buy slightly nicer versions of the same shit. He's like, there's only one true luxury. Get to the jet. The jet actually makes a difference. And he said he uses his jet here. He uses jet like, I think an average of like 3. If you, um, did the math over the entire year, he would average like 3 hours a day. So he really used his jet. Wow. Yeah.

You know what I loved about him? I loved the Zells Angels.

Yeah.

I loved, like, there's this other guy who used to work with George Soros back in the day, like back when he was just investing in things in hedge fund land. Um, and he wrote a book called The Venture Capitalist and Investment Biker. Oh my God, I'm forgetting his name, which is so embarrassing. It was actually, I didn't even have a podcast. I made up a podcast like a billion years ago, like before they were cool, maybe 15, I don't even know. Yeah, I guess it would'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 around the world, invest, and tell stories about it. He had like this yellow Mercedes that he put these huge tires on and traveled all the way through Africa on his like top-down Mercedes. This is like back in the day and made investments all over the world and all over Latin America. And I ran a business before in Latin America, so I just found that so weird. And what I love about a lot of these people, Sam Zell included, is they're weird. Like he had a motorcycle club, basically, like this kind of old— I don't know, it looks pretty stodgy guy running around on a motorcycle when he was a billionaire.

By, by that, like going on like motorcycle trips in like Mongolia and stuff, like in danger.

With vests.

Yes. So dangerous. Smoking weed on the side of the road. He would like— 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 don't— I didn't know that, but okay. Like, It's like, yeah, I was the first person. He was just funny, but he wasn't— I didn't mean it in an arrogant way. He was just so likable. And I think this is another thing, the value. This is why I think I would avoid assholes and go back to the people have to be assholes. And some of this, I'm sure I'm going to have some assholes on the new show. Like, I'm interviewing, or not even interviewing. I think about really having conversations with some of these people. But as far as building relationships with, it's like, I just like likable people. I like nice people. Obviously, Zell obviously had an ego, but he wasn't saying these things in an arrogant way. He was just likable. And I think there's so many, especially in the tech industry, where they're just, they're personality deficient. And it's just 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, I'm not particularly passionate about chicken fingers, but I like that Todd Graves is. And hearing him talk about, like, he even broke it down, like, what stage of rigor mortis that the chicken has to be in. You wouldn't think he'd be, you wouldn't even think he'd be interested in that. But I'm interested in that he was interested in it, and therefore he is fascinating to me. And I think the big, the biggest way to be likable and to be like somebody that people wanna be around is just like, you have to be intensely interested in something because the most interesting people are the most interested. They're, like, passionate about weird things. I just heard Alex Honnold, the guy from Free Solo, say, he's like, what do you think about fame? He's like, I think it's just a means to an end. It's a way for me to climb all the time and not have a job. And that documentary is fascinating. Like, I don't want to live in a van. I don't want to do the hand workouts he does and eat with a spatula and all the stuff he does, but he's just so into it that you just can't help but, 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 a good—

and I think this is what I mentioned earlier. I don't do any drugs. I don't do ecstasy. I don't— I never would. But this is the way I feel after talking to any of them. Michael Dell, James Dyson. You're just like, wow. Like, you took whatever passion you have for your business and you gave it to me. And now that charged me up to, like, go and apply that to whatever I'm working on. And this is beautiful, like virtuous, you know, flywheel or cycle.

One of my favorite mentors said a line to me that was hard for me to hear, which is that like your business is more likely to die because of you and the complex things that you do as opposed to external forces and the things they do to you. And so he's like, complexity is the great killer of all things. And, and then he's like, the problem is, is that through life everything gets more complex. You know, as you get older, you have more stuff, you have responsibilities, you have aging, you have all these things. So life never gets simpler, it always gets more complex. And you have a guy on your podcast, or you covered someone on your podcast, Rick Rubin, who talks, I wanna talk about how he doesn't call himself a producer, he calls himself some—

A producer.

Yeah, and to tell that story because it's one that I think we all have to internalize a little bit more. You don't necessarily have to do less, you have to do more better.

There's something that you said that this is how, again, reading all these books works. Uh, like how my mind works now, where the, the advice that you were given echoes this advice. This guy named David Packard, who was the founder of HP, and HP again is this big old stodgy company. By the time it was the, it was the, it was the influencer who influenced the influencers. So like all Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, all these other people that went on and built great technology companies in the '70s and '80s looked to these guys before them, right? Just like the founders of Intel looked to the, it was one of the first technology companies in Silicon Valley in the 1950s or something. Like that. And he has a great line that most, more businesses die of indigestion than starvation. It's like they just try to do too much. They essentially sabotage themselves. This is also advice that Michael Dell gave, I think on the podcast, maybe in private, but he's like, most founders just sabotage themselves. Like you're not taken out by competition, you just can't handle your success, or you took your foot off the gas, or you just did something that you, you honestly sabotage yourself as opposed to like being taken out by a superior product from a competitor. And so Rick Rubin's point was just like, we want— he has this thing called the ruthless edit, which I love. He's like, okay, we're working on album, albums, 10, 12, 15 songs. We made 50. Now we're going to pick the 5 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 5. Now, before we had any other ones, It has to at least match the quality of this. So what's number 6? It takes a long time and it's really hard to get to 10 and maybe you have to throw out the other 45 songs and you haven't done enough. Uh, so now you have to do more. And this is just very, very common where it's like less is more, but to get less you have to do more. And one thing that I love that is tied to the bagel place you mentioned and Raising Cane's, and we talked about this, or even look at like, uh, the Apple II, like the first very successful product that Steve Jobs, commercially successful product that Steve Jobs and Apple made, where it's like you just have to do one thing really, really great. Just one thing. And that's usually because you made something easier for other people. And there is this weird paradox in humanity where we, I think we abhor complexity and we crave simplicity, but we make everything that's simple complex over time.

Yeah.

And so knowing that you, uh, there's a great line from, um, from Sam Walton's autobiography that's about this. Walton's is telling a story in the autobiography, but really it's a metaphor where all of the products are getting shipped from the Walmart distribution centers into the stores. And then he found that many of them were mispriced.

Mm-hmm.

So then they start this thing where now there's this other layer of these people that go around with these like scanning devices and making sure, verifying that the price in the system is what the price says here. And his whole point was just like, we're adding layers of complexity when we should just, he, he, he's like, you have to beat bureaucracy back across the line. It's gonna creep and you beat it back. It's gonna creep and then you beat it back. He goes, the solution is not scanners. The solution is doing it right the first time, but we can't help ourselves. We made it more complex. And so he looked for these kind of weird decisions that people make where it's like the solution is just doing it right, not overcomplicating it, which is again, I think more in line with human nature. We just love to complicate things, even if we abhor complexity.

Yeah. Well, and I think the other part is when you have more complex things, you feel like you've accomplished more. And so I see it a lot of time in our companies. It's like, well, I hit all these 47 activities today. It's like, yeah, but you didn't do the one thing that really fucking mattered that needed to be done more than anything else because it was harder than doing those 47 things. Because sometimes to put that one thing on the list doesn't feel as good as doing the 47.

Larry Ellison, there's like 3 good biographies of Larry Ellison. In 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 gonna focus on these four and ignore every single thing else because all the value, if I can solve these four problems or these three problems or these two problems, this one problem, that's actually what I do. And this rest of the stuff can, can be ignored. But the, the reason I tied it to like the, the bagel shop that you, 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 like, I'm not a producer, I'm a reducer. You came in with this body of work. There's in essence in this course a lot of value. You overcomplicated it. You need somebody else with other eyes to see, hey, we can cut away everything else and make it to like, what is the thing that we cannot delete that we have to have? And this is why a lot of the stuff that was produced or reduced by Rick Rubin 30 years ago, you can listen to today, still sounds good.

Mm-hmm.

Because he goes, hey, 50 years ago, a guy with a good voice strumming a guitar and singing sounds good. So if it sounded good 50 years ago, if it sounds good today, highly likely it'll sound good 50 years from now. Same thing with a, a piano. A piano and a beautiful woman's voice sounded good 50 years ago, sounds good today, will sound good 50 years from now. And I think what ha— was happening is like when you hit on this essence, the reason people respond to it is because like you essentially made the decision for them, right? You eliminated everything that didn't have to be there. You only have the essential. It's the same reason what, why, uh, he talks about in that book. I would recommend listening to a song called Hurt by Johnny Cash, which was a cover. I think Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails is the first person to do it. He was like 21 when he wrote the article or wrote the song. Sorry. And then Johnny Cash is like 70 when he's singing it. And you listen to that, Johnny's been dead for years and it still sounds good today. And the song's probably, I don't know, 15 years old or something like that. It still sounds good today. Just like the going and eating at Raising Cane's or the bagel place you mentioned earlier. It's just like, you had a good experience there, right? These things have been going on in, in Raising Cane's case, 30 decade or 30 years. He didn't interrupt the compounding that what you see there. You're like, oh my God, the guys were $20 billion, just 915 stores. But he's like, he just didn't. Time carried all the weight. Time did all the, the work. He just did the same thing every day and he 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 this kind of ties— this will tie back to almost everything we've been talking about today, which is like, that's why it's so detrimental. And you see the success in most entrepreneurs' lives happen multiple decades in because they didn't interrupt the compounding. You had to wait for time to do most of the work. And that's why the start, scale, sell doesn't work unless you just care about money and You get the money and then you go do something, sit on the beach or whatever the case is. But my point is the people that were obsessed, you have to do something. Let's say somebody comes and buys everything from you tomorrow for whatever. What are you going to do the next day? You're going to start something else.

100%.

You're not the personality type that can build a very valuable company is not the kind that can sit around and do nothing.

It's also, I think, incredibly difficult to simplify things. Often, I'm sure you've found this too, but you're taking I don't know, a 700-page book like Snowball and trying to synthesize it into one episode. That is actually quite a complex thing to do. You have a lot of decisions you have to make. You have to pull the core soul out of it or the lessons that you want out of it. And I think, you know, I think sometimes about the stuff we do on the internet, like we'll try to, you know, 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, um, tribal knowledge, um, a lot of nouns and vowels in, in, uh, the words that don't need to be there. And so, um, 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, or it might have been Zell. Um, I think it was Zell. Zell basically said, um, if I can't— like, one of his employees came in with like a 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. And he was like, I can't. He's like, then write it on a page. And 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. It's like—

Well, Zell learned that from Jay Pritzker. So my friend that I mentioned earlier, my friend Rick, was mentored by Sam Zell. For 25 years. And Sam took an interest in him when Rick was in his 20s. And what he would say is like, I was in my 20s and a nobody, and Zell just decided he liked me. And so he took me all around the world and we would work on deals together. But they also— Rick would try to— I think there's one— there's a great line in this book I just read by Kevin Kelly. It's called Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier. And he says one of the most counterintuitive rules of the universe is the more you give, the more you get. And so Rick built a relationship with Sam by giving, by trying to, hey, here's this undervalued company in Egypt we might want to look at, or look at this deal over here. And basically just doing an active service, right? But what would happen is Rick would bring him a deal and be like, okay, here's exactly what you're saying. Here's the 10 things that we have to solve or whatever. And Zell would look at it and be like, number 5. That's the only thing. If we solve number 5, everything else falls in line. And Zell talks about this in his autobiography, that he was mentored by Jay Pritzker, who was one of the best dealmakers, right? Living probably a decade, maybe two decades older than Sam Zell at the time. And Sam would do exactly what Sam would do to Jay, what Rick was doing to Sam, which is I'd come bring him a deal and Jay would just look at it. It's like, there's only one important thing here. You have a list of seven things. It's not seven, it's just this one thing. And if we take care of this one thing, everything else will fall in line. So it's that simplification. This is why I said it's not 10,000 hours, it's 10,000 iterations. Because how many deals by the time you, you can't do that when it's your first deal, your second deal, your fifth deal. Jay had probably looked at 10,000 deals by that time, 5,000 deals by that. He just understood it in a way. What we call intuition is really just like the, the sum of your experiences and, and your subconscious kind of explaining to you. You can't even, this is what I learned from Rick Rubin too when, um, you just mentioned really hard to take a 700-page biography. And distill it down to its essence in an hour-long podcast. And people are always just like, well, how do you do it? And it's just like, it's a skill because I've done it for 10 years. Go listen to episode 1, 2, 5, 10, 25, 50. They probably suck compared to what I could do now because I didn't understand that I had to take time to train my intuition to do this. Rick Rubin would tell you the exact same thing where he's constantly critiquing the stuff he produced and created when he was He started his record label. He started producing when he was in his dorm room. He's in his 60s now, still doing it. He's 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 an excellent book. And one of the things that he really annoys him is that everybody talks about how effortless his game looks. It's so smooth. It's beautiful. He's like, yeah, you know how long it took me to make it look smooth and beautiful? I wasn't born with this 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 Ive'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 was run and Steve Jobs ran Apple. And when Google would do 200 A/B tests on what color this button should be, and they were making— remember the iMacs, the old school iMacs where it had a big— this is when computers were big and fat and thick.

It was like orange or blue.

They had a handle and then they decided they were going to make them all different colors.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And he, Johnny says that, uh, the, there was no like focus group. They didn't A/B test anything. He says Steve came down to the design center and me and Steve looked at the colors and in 30 minutes we picked every single color. 30 minutes, just taste. And those are the colors that shipped. That was Steve's intuition for 30 years. He's not sure by the time he got to that point to be able to trust. You shouldn't just be trusting your judgment, trusting your intuition when you, you have to prove to yourself that you should trust it. And Steve did the work necessary to trust his intuition and trust his judgment. I think you're gonna see that in a lot of fields, music, entrepreneurship, sports. You just see it over and over again.

I think a lot about what skills will matter in the future with how fast technology's changing with what's happening in the world right now with AI. And it does seem like this idea of taste seems, 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 or technological revolution and, and there's opportunity in every market and we need to not be defeatist about it. Like how, 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, um, all a business is is an idea that makes somebody else's life better. There is always infinite ways to make somebody else's life better. So there's, therefore there's always infinite opportunities in my opinion.

Hmm.

With that said, I do think you do not ignore technological phenomenon and technological revolutions. Uh, we're obviously going through one now. I think you should use, like, so what I do is like, I just force myself to learn and to build these into my workflow now. So I'm sure there's going to be AI-generated podcasts that can do exactly what I do. 100%. Like, I would imagine that's going to happen relatively soon if it's not, you know, this year, next year, 5 years from now. Um, and so like just to use the tools, the technology, because all technology is— my best, my favorite definition of technology is, um, from Peter Thiel in his book Zero to One. This is just a technology, just a better way to do something. And so I'm just using them to be better at making a podcast. And hopefully that podcast and that information in the podcast makes somebody else's life better. See how it connects? Now, I think the mistake when you're looking back at history is like, the only thing constant is change. And technology is never going to stop. And I think the smartest ones took advantage of it. So like, think about one of my favorite times in industries to study is I've done like 13 different episodes on the, the, um, early American automobile founders. So Henry Ford, Billy Durant, founder of GM, Henry Leland, uh, the founder of Cadillac, uh, the Dodge brothers, all the way down to some component makers like Albert Champion, who made the spark plugs everybody used, Alfred Sloan, who made the ball bearings of all these companies.. It's just very fascinating. It's like they all knew each other. They were all in one spot, and this was just happening in Detroit in 1900. If you were a young mechanically inclined man that were interested in that industry, you better get your ass to Detroit right away. Yeah. 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 wanna make the car for the everyman. He had literally one idea his entire career, and he didn't know how to do it yet. He's like, cars are luxury items. They're hand-built. They're $6,000 when we're making not even a dollar an hour, like I'll never be able to afford one. I want to mass produce. I want to invent the mass production of the automobile so then the worker making the automobile can actually afford the automobile, which was never— the people making the cars could not even afford the cars. That was his one idea. He was wildly successful. One of the richest people on the planet as a result of that idea. Billy Durant also succeeded. He got kicked outta GM twice, but that's a story for another day. And his idea is like, I'm just going to make a, a car conglomerate and I'm going to buy all the, the early brands, put 'em together in General Motors. You know, General Motors is today. But the fascinating thing about Billy Durant is what was he working on before he worked in the car industry? He essentially built one of the most successful carriage companies. So he was making carriages that horses, horse-drawn carriages. He just took the idea that was working for horse-drawn carriages realizing, uh-oh, my business is in trouble with just this, these cars running around. Maybe I should just take the same skillset and ideas and apply it to this new domain. So the future's always gonna be unpredictable. I love people going around. It's like, you know, this is, we're only not that far from, from New Year's. And everybody's like, here's my predictions for what, 2026? And I just laugh. This is like, all I do is all day long is read. If you read history, you just have very smart people making all these kind of predictions about the future that don't come true.

Oh yeah.

Humans don't really have great, you know, predictive ability, generalized predictive ability. You can identify a trend or an, an interesting idea in an industry that you're paying attention to and then build a business around that insight. I'm not saying you can't do that. That's what Bill Durant just did. Did. But I don't, I have the answer. Question is like, I, I wanna 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 gonna do the best job with the opportunities in front of me, and I'm gonna do that every single day and the score will take care of itself. I'll get what I, I, you know, deserve outta life. But I, there's just impossible to know what's happening. I do think this is like, I think reading right now, like, about the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s, I think reading about the early compute industry would be interesting. There'd be analogies there. I talked to Bezos about this. Bezos's analogy for this, because he's all, like, all he thinks about is AI all day long now, is he calls it these thin horizontal enabling layers. And he thinks AI is more akin to electricity than it is to anything else. The internet was a thin horizontal enabling layer. Electricity was a thin horizontal enabling layer. AI is a thin horizontal enabling layer. And he goes, once you, uh, new thin horizontal enabling layer is invented, it goes everywhere. Like electricity, like they weren't thinking they were gonna install electricity. They're thinking, I want lighting. And guess what? If it's useful for that, how many other inventions have now that now plug into electricity that we could have never possibly predicted? Same thing with the internet, you know, the origins of the internet. What, what did they think it was gonna be used for? And then they could not have possibly predicted all the different, the millions, hundreds of millions of different inventions and things that you could do on top of that. And so he, his belief is that AI is gonna be the exact same way where it's like the intelligent intelligence as a service is gonna go everywhere and you're gonna invent countless other ways. There's no way to, to predict all the way, uh, all the different inventions that humans are gonna use. Utilize this tool for. And it won't be— I talked to a lot of— some of these AI, they think it's like the last invention. It's not the last invention. Humans are going to invent, assuming we're around, are going to constantly invent more and more things. Tomorrow morning is knocking.

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Upfront payment of $45 for 3 months, $90 for 6 months, or $180 for 12 months. 1-month plan required, $15 per month equivalent, taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only, greater than 50GB may slow when network is busy. See terms. Do you ever sometimes take a pause and just think, holy shit, what is my life that I get to talk to Elon Musk, all my heroes, all these people consistently?

No. Um, I, here's the thing, I think thinking like that, I have this, this maxim I got from, um, Conor McGregor. Have you ever seen this documentary? It's on Netflix called Notorious.

Oh, it's Incredible.

I'll tell you the maxim first and I'll tell you like one of the lessons that he didn't even adhere to himself, which is like, if you go to sleep on a win, you wake up with a loss. And that documentary is incredible because, you know, he's literally living at home, has no money. I think he's working as a plumber's assistant or something. He's somehow had the foresight to have a camera crew follow around what at this point was just like kind of like a loser, right? Chasing a dream, but nothing to point. He had this— there's another maxim, belief comes before ability, which I hate when people are like, oh, you shouldn't have so much self-belief. They tell us entrepreneurs, like, generate evidence and then have belief. And I'm like, well, I've read 400 of these books and none of these people did that. They believed in themselves way before everybody around them is telling them they couldn't do what they were doing.

And all of the data actually says you're right.

Exactly. Belief comes before ability, not after. I think that's very important. But what was fascinating is there's one thing where he's in his mom's kitchen and there's like the Ireland's, he's like cashing welfare checks and I think he's in collections on some credit card bills and he's just like, I'm going to be the champion of the world. He's saying all this other crazy stuff. But what he realized is just like the value comes from the work and doing the work every day. And that's why he said if you go to sleep on a win, you wake up with a loss. And then he made hundreds of million dollars. Not judging anybody else. Supposedly he has got a very fierce drug habit, which kind of looks similar, might be the case to me. And so I don't— it goes back to this quote tweet where I just quote tweeted Andrew Huberman, where it's like, mute the world and build your own. I just wake up every day. I really do think Patrick's probably right that I don't have this master plan. I don't even seek points of leverage. I do all these things that I don't seek efficiency. No one else works on the podcast. Like, they're like, why don't you hire an editor? Why don't you hire a researcher? It's just like, I like doing it. There's a great line from Charles Schulz, who's the founder of, uh, the guy that did Peanuts, remember? I grew up reading Charlie Brown and Snoopy, and he was still— he penciled every single comic strip. He wrote the stories. He did everything. He had this, like, thing in his will about, like, what happens to Peanuts after he dies. He wouldn't let anybody else continue it on. And then you have to publish, this is the last one I ever want published. Like, he He thought a lot about this, but he would give tours of like his studio and I think he was like in his 70s then. And they're like, why don't you just like write a bunch of them? Uh, they first like, why are you still doing this? Is the question. And then they're like, why don't you like batch them and then, you know, take time off? And his answer to this was great. It was like, he didn't understand the question. It was 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 embarrassing to me. So every once in a while, some of my friends have companies and they just want me to sit in on meetings, like board meetings and stuff. And I'm not on any boards. I have no interest in doing that. I am interested in, fiercely interested in entrepreneurship and how they think about building businesses. And I look at this as like a way to learn. And so I was doing this the other day with two close friends of mine and they were talking about acquiring a business in New York. Okay. And, uh, I was paying attention, but then they kept saying this name over and over again and they kept saying Maduro, Maduro, Maduro. And again, I don't read the news. Okay. And again, because we were talking about New York, uh, I was like, why do you guys keep bringing this up? And they're like, dude, did you not see, this is gonna be real embarrassing. They're like, Trump kidnapped Maduro. I thought they meant, because we're talking about his business in New York, I thought they meant Mendame. I'm like, he kidnapped the mayor of New York City. Like, how do I not hear about this? Like, no, you idiot. The president of Venezuela. As if that was anything else more normal.

Yeah.

I was like, I didn't know. I don't look at the news. I didn't know this. Now that's embarrassing. But my point being is just like, listen, the big stuff will get to me. If there's a war, there's a pandemic. I'll hear about that. That will come down to me. But no, I think the worst thing I could ever do is think about who I get to meet or who's listening to the podcast. It's just like, hey, this is my retard maxing. To use Patrick's term, it's like I only think in 24 hours, literally. So it's like, what do I like to do? I like to wake up, work out, I like to read, then I'll have lunch, then I'll reread past highlights. Do that multiple days a week. Uh, at night I usually go to dinner with founder. All my friends are entrepreneurs. Uh, you know, do calls throughout the day. Like, not like meeting calls, like friendship calls with other smart people is another form of education. Uh, once or twice a week I sit down with a founder that I'm intensely interested in talking to, record another podcast, and I just, that's it. And then I'm like, oh, that day was pretty cool. I like that day. I'm gonna do that day again tomorrow, and then I'll do it again the next day. I don't even know what today is. I assume it's a weekday. Could be Sunday. Don't know. Because my schedule looks the same all the time. It's also very difficult for some relationships in my life. But this is— so, no, I never think about anything. I just think about— podcasts to me is like, oh, these are miracles. I've learned so much from listening to podcasts. They're great tools for education. I hope I'm building something that makes somebody else's life better. 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 the exact same interests. There's 10 million Codie Sanchez 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 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, um, I just want to thank you for being here. This was 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. Um, it's David Senra is the new podcast.

Yep.

Founders Podcast is the longstanding podcast. And I will say also, you increasingly do incredible Shorts now on Instagram too for the attention deprived that need the 60-second spots. And that is Founders Podcast on Instagram, right?

Instagram. Yeah, Instagram's the biggest channel there. Oh, so there's a real quick story there too where like, I believe in like tiny teams, essentially mission-driven, concentrated on like focused. This is like my framework for entrepreneurship. So pick a mission, be really concentrated on like your resources, time, money, energy, attention, all to that mission. Tiny teams of just A players. Because again, all I'm doing is reading the books and taking the ideas from the books and applying it to my own business, which is hopefully what the podcast served for other people as well. And Steve Jobs, like, a tiny team of A players can run circles around giant team of B and C players. So my shorts, which I like too, literally is one genius kid living in France.

Dude, they're all the same too.

I don't manage him. He was obsessed. I met him through this guy.

Let me guess, he's also white. He's like sub-30. He's probably like 26, 27.

No, he's in his early 20s.

Yeah.

But the funny part is—

And a little like slightly autistic and really obsessed with the game of video.

No. Well, he is an obsessive person, but I met him through Blake Robbins, who— Blake Robbins is an investor. He used to be at Benchmark. Now he's his own fund. But I think his Twitter bio says he hangs out on the edge of the internet and he finds weirdly talented people. And he's like, hey, will you meet this kid? He's in from Europe. He's in New York. He's obsessed. He's obsessed with a single podcast, and it's yours. And I was just talking to the kid because I thought he was talented. I was like, you should move to America. He was doing all this other way to make money that he wasn't passionate about. And I was like, just how much do you need? Like, what if you just made these shorts for me, right? How much do you need? Named his price. I was like, done. Didn't even negotiate with him. And now I'm helping him because he's going to be one of the greatest filmmakers. I think he, like, mastered short form. Now he's making short movies. Then he wants to make, like, he wants to be like Christopher Nolan and Steven Spielberg. And I was like, listen, I'll not— to the degree that I can help you in any way, like, you have been so helpful to me. Like, if I can make an introduction for you, if I could, I'd invest in you. And I don't even like investing. Like, I'll do whatever you can because you're so talented. Like, I just think about things in terms of people. But this also applies to, like, the reason that you want high-quality people around you is I don't need to manage him. He makes them. He sends them to me. This is our workflow. I literally, and then he was like, I don't manage him at all. He sends them to me. I look, I watch it. I'm like, I'd watch that. And if I watch, if I like it, I post to the channels and if I don't, I don't post it. And he's made, I don't know, like 200 and I probably haven't posted, I don't know, 5. Like I have a big backlog I need to post, but I'm talking about ones I didn't like. That's it. How much time did it take? I just identify a great person and name, say, name your price. And you name this price and that's it. It just makes my life a lot easier. So I appreciate it.

Well, this was an incredible podcast. And also I have to give you one more compliment, which is, do you know what we obsess on about you and your podcast? No. Your ad reads. They're the fucking best. And I never thought I would like an ad read, but whatever Ramp is paying you, they need to increase it because literally, do we not? I literally go, if this isn't David Senra level ad read, I'm not fucking reading it. Give me a new version. Then we go like 3 or 4 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 gonna talk about savings. And then you sneak me and it's not it. Yeah. And then, then it's it.

Well, and again, this goes back to like the importance of concentration and focus. 'Cause to me it's like anything you hear on the podcast, whether it's an intro, an ad read, anything, a single word, it has to make sense. And so I appreciate you saying that, but like, it, it was just like, hey, since I don't work on anything else, I can spend a lot of time. So every single ad, yeah, is custom to that actual episode. And I'll reference what's going on in the episode. They take a long time to make.

Totally.

But why wouldn't you do that? Like, I love what I do. I want, I would want to listen again. This goes back to Stephen King where he says, uh, I'm not only the writer, I'm the first reader.

Yeah.

Oh, I listen to, I edit the podcast, so I listen to every single, I'm the person that makes it, but also the first listener. Why would I put into things that I don't— stuff I don't want to hear? And to me, some of the podcast ads are so jarring. I'm like, oh, this is like— we were in this beautiful flow of this conversation, and then it's almost like the DJ stopped the music.

100%. That's how ours were. But then, because I listen to— and it's funny because I'll have new team members come and they'll say, well, why do you review every piece of content that goes out across Contrarian Thinking? I do. I have a very It's like a workflow. I'd review every, from every tweet to every email to every whatever. And they'll be like, well, somebody else could do that. And that horrifies me because 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 not, again, this is not a new idea. This is the beautiful thing. I literally have no original ideas and I don't, people are like, you shouldn't say that out loud. Why? Like the, every single person I read about is smarter than me. I don't feel bad about that. I'm— they are smarter than 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 that drove Apple's success. I think the guy's name was like Ken Siegel. He was Steve's ad guy and he said every Wednesday, I think at 3:00, he had a marketing meeting. I could be wrong on the dates, but basically he said it didn't matter if it was a billboard in Times Square or one in rural Missouri. Nothing went out without Steve personally okaying every single piece of Apple marketing. It's what you do when you care.

Yeah, so good. David, send my good man.