Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy - David Senra - The Focused Few - [Invest Like the Best, EP.422]

Episode Date: May 6, 2025

My guest today is David Senra. David is the host of Founders podcast and a dear friend. This is our third time doing Invest Like the Best together and we have conversations like this one all the time. In today’s episode, David distills wisdom from 400 entrepreneur biographies into a single word: focus. He reveals why exceptional builders like Todd Graves and James Dyson create billion-dollar empires through obsessive dedication to simple ideas—whether perfecting chicken fingers or designing vacuum cleaners—while rejecting conventional growth timelines and investor pressure. David challenges us all to find the one thing we’d pursue even without recognition or reward, or what I like to call your life’s work. We discuss the concept of “anti-business,” raising capital as a founder, and decades-long commitment. Please enjoy this discussion with David Senra.  For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here. ----- This episode is brought to you by Ramp. Ramp’s mission is to help companies manage their spend in a way that reduces expenses and frees up time for teams to work on more valuable projects. Go to Ramp.com/invest to sign up for free and get a $250 welcome bonus. –  This episode is brought to you by AlphaSense. AlphaSense has completely transformed the research process with cutting-edge AI technology and a vast collection of top-tier, reliable business content. Invest Like the Best listeners can get a free trial now at Alpha-Sense.com/Invest and experience firsthand how AlphaSense and Tegus help you make smarter decisions faster. – This episode is brought to you by Ridgeline. Ridgeline has built a complete, real-time, modern operating system for investment managers. It handles trading, portfolio management, compliance, customer reporting, and much more through an all-in-one real-time cloud platform. Head to ridgelineapps.com to learn more about the platform. ----- Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com). Show Notes: (00:00:00) Welcome to Invest Like the Best (00:05:43) The Essence of Focus in Entrepreneurship (00:09:20) The Value of Long-Term Commitment (00:17:41) The Importance of Simplicity and Mastery (00:37:11) The Miracle of Entrepreneurship (00:44:56) James Dyson's Journey to Success (00:47:03) The Importance of Passion in Business (00:49:12) Critique of Modern Consumerism (00:52:18) The Value of Craftsmanship (00:56:36) The Drive for Excellence (01:04:06) The Importance of Hiring Top Talent (01:09:54) Creative Financing Strategies (01:19:35) Defining a Founder

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To see what happens when you eliminate the busy work, check out Ramp.com slash Inverc. Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. If you enjoy these conversations and want to go deeper, check out Colossus Review, our quarterly publication with in-depth profiles of the people shaping business and investing. You can find Colossus Review along with all of our podcasts at joincolossus.com. Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions. expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the

opinion of positive sum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of positive sum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc. My guest today is David Senra. David is the host of the Founders podcast and a dear friend. This is our third time doing invests like the best together, and we have conversations like this one all the time. In today's episode, David distills wisdom from more than 400 biographies of entrepreneurs into a single word, focus. He reveals why exceptional builders like Todd Graves and James Dyson create billion-dollar empires through obsessive dedication to simple ideas, whether perfecting chicken fingers or designing

vacuum cleaners, all while rejecting conventional growth timelines and investor pressures. David challenges us all to find the one thing we'd pursue even without recognition or reward. We discussed the concept of anti-business, raising capital as a founder, and decades-long commitment. Please enjoy this great discussion with David Senra. If I think about founders and try to simplify what it is, I would say that it's an entrepreneur lives 40 years and builds something. A biographer spends four-ish years researching them and writing something. You spend like 40 hours reading the book. thinking about it and tying it to all the other lessons.

And then you spend 40 minutes. And so we spend 40 minutes listening to your summary of that thing. And if you think about that incredible amount of distillation, like that's a big reason it's so interesting and so valuable. So I guess my first question is to distill it even more. Like if you think about the entire project, the entire corpus, and we're forced to distill it all, all your work, and therefore all the work that came before it down to one thing,

what that one thing would be. Yeah, one word would be focused. The way I think about this is like I'm, by the end of this year, I would have studied, read over 400 biographies of history-scraised entrepreneurs, right? I'm like eight years into the project. And if I was forced to distill that down to one word, the word would be focus. And the reason I think that pops out is because the way I look at this, and I've told you this before, we've talked about this a bunch. I feel that when I, when you read a biography of somebody or an autobiography is even a better example of this, I feel you get to have a one-sided conversation with somebody. and obviously if I do a monologue podcast, I like to talk. And so I can't talk. So I'm just forced to sit there and listen. And I feel that person is telling me, you know, the most important parts of their life, their 40, 50, 60 year career. Then I go online, you know, and we live in this very modern environment. I open up Instagram. I look at TikTok, look at X. And it's like, oh, the exact opposite of what this person did their whole career and what I've just spent 40 hours doing is this. It's like, let's not focus on something for 40.

years or five decades or even 40 hours. Let's focus on it for four seconds. We were on the walk over here. I mentioned the point where I was like maybe the best thing for me to do because where I do is like what I get joy is just literally like I like to spend about half my, the time that I'm awake alone. And most of that is reading. I get a lot of joy out of that. And then the way I feel after I read a good book or even make an episode that I'm proud of. And then the way I feel like when I go online, I'm like, oh, these are like the complete opposite. They're the contrast. And one is feeds my soul and one is good for me and one is the opposite.

And so I told you, I was like, maybe what I should do is just like not read online at all and just post all day long about the stuff I'm reading. Like, use it as a tool instead of a giant distraction where I think a lot of people, like, it's just completely destroying their ability to focus. And I think it's related to maybe why you asked me the question. It's like, I'm very reluctant to like have an opinion on, like, when you listen to the podcast or when we have conversations or we're on the phone. if something comes up, it's like, well, you know, Steve Jobs would say, do this, or David Ogadie did

this, or Buffett looked it this way, or Munger looked at it this way. It's not like, David thinks you should do this. And because I don't really have an opinion on what other people should do. I just think of, like, how I want to run my life. And now I'm thinking maybe I should actually, like, be a little more vocal about, hey, it's kind of weird that the people that were literally the best at what they did in their life were completely focused, were not in this huge rush. They obviously worked very fast, but they're not like, they didn't have goals like when I'm seeing a lot online. It's like, we're the fastest company ever to X revenue. It's just like, they didn't talk that way. Like Sam Walton did not talk that way. Coco Chanel did not talk that way. And so Ferrari,

they understood they found something they loved to do and did it for an incredibly long time. And so I talked about this where I get to meet a lot of great entrepreneurs. And my favorite entrepreneurs, I've been the most impressed with, they're all over the age of 70, like all of them. It was like, who's the young entrepreneur who's your minders? I don't even know any of their names. because I'm so focused on this person has spent five decades thinking deeply about what they're doing. And the stuff they can convey to you over like a dinner, a phone call, a conversation. I just, I don't find that anywhere else. And I think that's a complete byproduct of the fact that they were able to focus on something for many, many decades,

which is completely, I would say, opposite of human nature. I think that is why it's valuable because it's so rare for people to do that. Why does that interest you? Like, why is the 50-year version of a business story more interesting than a 10-year version, which I'm picking 10? Because it's like a decade's a long time. Time is the best filter. Time is the only filter that I trust. You know, most of the people I cover are dead.

If they're not dead, they're their career. They're at the end of the career. They're an older, wiser person. And they're passing on these lessons, right? And I remember people, I got a lot of pushback when FTX was taking off. And all these people were telling me, you got to do an episode on SBF. This guy's a genius.

He's the fastest person to like a $35 billion net worth or whatever the number was. And so I was like, oh, like, maybe I'm like missing something. Like that's maybe they're right. And we got to talk about Todd Graves in the episode I just did because I'm really proud of it. I think, you know, when people ask me... It's my favorite episode now.

Yeah, when people ask me who's my favorite living entrepreneur, they expect me to say like a tech entrepreneur. It's like, no, the guy that owns Raising Cain. So, like, what are you talking about? Like, he owns 90% of a business that he started in college. He's been doing it for 30 years. The business is worth at least $10 million is growing at 30% a year, and he refuses to sell.

What would be the opposite of that, right? The slow grind to really perfecting what you're doing before you try to like just scale it up. There's a great line, I think, in Nick Sleep's partnership letters, which I just did. And he's like, we just don't understand where we go to these companies. They're losing money and they want to figure out how to get bigger. And so lose more money. And he's not talking about like an Amazon where you actually have to do that. SBF, I'm like, oh, well, maybe I'm wrong.

Like, maybe these people are right. And the reason I thought about Todd Graves because there's so many people in his career, which we'll get to, that said, no, you're doing it wrong. And when he was younger, he's like, damn, they're like experts. They're smarter.

They're, like, older than me. Like, and he started to doubt himself for a little bit. And he's like, wait, no, they didn't know what the fuck they were talking about. And so I was really resistant to the SPF thing. So I started listening to all these podcasts on them. And then when he does podcast, he would like multitask,

which my personal hero is Charlie Munger. I think he's the wisest person ever come across, the wisest person ever talked to. and what does he say? He's like, you're, you're going to get half-assed effort. That's not an exact quote. Like, if you multitask, he's single tax. Like, I'm just focused on whatever's in front of me. He's this great quote that I put up that went viral. It's like obvious. He's, and he's like, I didn't succeed in because of intelligence. It's succeeded because I had a long attention span. And that's what I'm so

interested in to go back to your point. But then I start watching these SBF podcasts and no disrespect. I'm sure he's a nice guy. I'm not trying to insult him. But he's like, I've been on a bunch of podcast. I've never played fucking video games while I'm... They didn't. I interviewed him. Yeah. It's like this is so, first of all, it's kind of disrespectful as like a human level. It's like you don't even deserve my full attention. You know what? My phone's not here. Like we're like just having this conversation. But then so I said, okay, well, maybe there's interesting ideas here. And then he explains what he was doing. And then I heard him say something.

And immediately he said this. He's like, well, I actually think no one ever has to read a book. And he talks about like he doesn't read books. Books are stupid. Should just be a blog post and I was like, oh, there's no way I'm doing. What's the chance that this young kid, right, he arrived at a conclusion that for the last 5,000 years of humanity, you have all these people talking about how valuable it is to write down the lessons from the people that came before us and to pick up that book and read the lessons. And this guy comes along and says, no, no, just disregard that mass of humanity. That's not a valuable activity. I'm sorry, I'm going to take Munger over SPF every day. And I'm so glad I didn't do.

the episode. Because imagine if I had in the Founders Back catalog, a podcast on History's greatest entrepreneur, and it's a guy that, you know, was essentially a fraud. If you think about that over 70 category of entrepreneur that you've learned so much from, what do they do most differently in contrast to the in a hurry fastest to 100 million ARR type entrepreneurs that you've also spent time with? One, they just, I think great anything takes time. Like, a great business takes time. You can be phenomenal. If you look at the early days of Amazon, obviously Jeff was really gifted. He's really smart. He was doing a lot of smart things. Even before he started Amazon. But if you look at how good he was and how great the business was, a decade to three decades in. I always say this

quote, and I think it's dead right. It's fascinating that everybody in technology has read zero to one, right? If you're only going to read one book, probably that would be the one to read. I think it's excellent. But they missed the part of what he says in there, where he's like, hey, there's a big problem with technology companies is they optimize for growth at the expense of durability. But if you look at when do these giant companies, and he said tech companies, but you see this in all these companies, Raising Keynes is another example. We're like, they actually make more money three, four, five, six decades into the future. All the real money is out there. So therefore, if you're optimizing for growth at the expense of durability, you're never going to get to the real rewards. And the reason

you do that is because growth you can track and durability you cannot. And I just did this episode in Ken Griffin. And it was fascinating. He's found a Citadel, I think 35 years ago, and I think he found a Citadel's security, he's 23 years ago. And he just said, we've had the most, the best financial years of our entire life in the last four years. He's 30 years, 30 years into that business is the best time he's had. And he's, you know, hopefully keeps compounding that. So where does the durability come from? Like, how do they, those long stories, how do they earn the durability? I think what this really comes down to, like, like you're kind of hitting at this. I think this is why, even though I'm not an investor,

I do like your framing of like trying to back people that it's their life's work. I am very interested in people that have a mission. And I don't know why. It took me 32 years to find my mission, another five and a half to make it to where it can actually support my family. And then, you know, now I realize like, oh, this is it. This is the thing I'm doing. I want to tie into something I read yesterday. You guys actually made this great profile on Neil.

Yeah. And what I would say is there's a lot of good quotes in there. I feel like I should do like a miniature like episode, bonus episode on that one. He gave this analogy of like the helicopter. It's like most people are like doing due diligence on a company or whatever. And they're at like 8,000 feet. And they maybe go, they'll hover down to 5,000 feet. They're like, oh, we did our job.

They're like, no, no. Neil lands the helicopter, then gets out of the helicopter, then goes underneath the helicopter, and then puts his hands in the dirt. And I read that. I don't think of any entrepreneur living. I think, oh, that's Walt Disney. That's Steve Jobs. That's S.A. Lauder.

That's all the people that admire. That's Todd Graves. It sounds like I heard stories. I was just at this dinner last weekend for somebody who knows Ken. And they asked what episode I'm working on. I'm working on episode Ken Griffin. And they were telling stories that were very similar at that. Paying attention to even,

the tiniest corner of the business, you wouldn't even think he's paying attention to you. But he's sitting in and sit there and talk to the person responsible for three straight hours to make sure it's being done. I just like people that take what they're doing seriously. The feedback on the Todd Grays episode, it's absolutely ripping.

But the only negative feedback is like, I can't, because he says in the episode that he believes that God put him on earth to be good at chicken fingers to help people. So he can make a lot of money and he does a lot of like charitable work. And people are like, you know, they think they're smarter. To assess to chicken fingers. They think they're smarter in him. Essentially what they're saying is like, you know, have you built a $10 billion company? Have you done that?

Are you the best in your profession? Are you the top of your craft? It doesn't matter what the craft is. At least he has a mission. You may laugh at his mission. You think it's ridiculous, but one, I know he believes it for a fact, or he's the world's greatest actor for three decades, right? And we can go through the level of commitment

that he had to make that dream real, right? Or, like, and you can make fun of the fact that he's a mission, but it's like he's already ahead of most of humanity that is alive today and has ever lived. Most people don't have a mission. There's a great example of this in Steve Jobs, that he was heavily criticized in that early of his career because he would make the inside of the computer

that you couldn't even open up beautiful. And people are you're wasting your time. it wasn't a waste of time to him. The reason I like the Graves one so much is because it's chicken fingers, like the object of his obsession is like this sort of low status thing. I think so many people would love to build a fancy piece of technology or something very sexy as their lifelong mission or something. But in many of my conversations with you,

the object of obsession is something very simple like chicken fingers. And I just think chicken fingers is such like a visceral thing. we've all eaten chicken fingers. And a man like Todd has devoted himself to one thing. I think you said on the episode he won't even make people wanted this sandwich and he just took his chicken fingers and put buns around it and that's the sandwich. Like he is singularly obsessed with this chicken finger dream. And I love the question now, what is your chicken finger dream?

And chicken fingers better than something else because of almost how absurd it is. So tell us a little bit more about what you've learned from. studying him. It was probably my favorite episode of founders ever, and maybe just hit me at the right time, and I needed to hear that message right then and there to work on something for an absurdly long time, not think short term, whatever. Lots of common lessons. But what is it about? Why do you think this one is so, especially this person and this business, which is so simple and so lowbrow, so resonant with so many people? I truly believe, like, I'm obsessed. and we talk about this all the time.

Like, you know, I get literally emails. They're like, why do you quote Munger in every single episode? And it's just like, because all I do is listen to this, what I thought this brilliant guy, his advice, and I just did it. Like, I always say learning is not memorizing information. Learning is changing your behavior. And there's been a handful of times where I meet people,

I read a book, I have a conversation where literally my behavior, my behavior is changed. The trajectory of my life has changed. The way he was able to describe things to me, he's just like, there's a bunch of examples. And he's like, you know, He knows everything about business history. He had 60 years of experience, and he would share freely with everybody.

And he's like, occasionally we find scaling down and upping the intensity, you get an advantage. That sounds like Todd Graves to me. He's like, oh, you have, my competitors have 10 things on the menu. I have one. You can get three chicken fingers, four chicken fingers, six chicken fingers, and you want chicken sandwich, here's two buns, and that's it. And then find a simple idea and take it seriously is another mongerism. And then what he realized when he analyzed Costco, where he's like, we find, oftentimes in business,

we find the winning system goes ridiculously far. That's the most important two words in this sentence, ridiculously far in maximizing and or minimizing one or a few variables. I think it was Ken Griffin talked about this. I've seen this with a bunch of investors. We talked about this with Richard Rainwater before. Jay Pritzker was like this. Sam Zell was like this because we'll tie this investing.

It's like if you bring them a deal and there's like seven different things that have to go right, like the chance of every single one going right is very, very small. And so, like, I love what Richard Rainwater would do, where it's like, you bring me your idea on one piece of paper, you write it on one piece of paper, explain to me in simple words, and then at the end, just tell me how much your own money you're putting in. And then I'll decide if I'm going to do this. this guy was one of the best dealmakers, you know, investors of all time. You see it over and ever again. Sam Zell told me when I got to meet him, it's also in his autobiography. He's like, Jay Prisker was the most brilliant financial mind have ever come across. He was like an older brother to Sam.

He was like 20 years older. And his whole point was like, I'd come to him when I was younger and bring him like, okay, there's like six things we have to do. And Jay would look at it. He's like, no, one. If you nail that, everything else will, everything else will either work out. It will either live or die off of that. I think go back to win in the huge mania in, you know, with 2020, 21, all this huge tech bubble where Samzo goes on CNBC.

He's like, we works going to zero. Like, no, not going to work. And it was like at all times high, Maslow was spending in like $20 billion, what a case is. And it was like asset price liability mismatch or whatever the word. He's like, nope, this guy in 1972 did this, failed. 82, this other guy did it. This is the company. Failed.

Why? Because there's only one thing that's important in an app doesn't fucking solve that. You're not paying attention. And so when I look at Todd Graves, the reason I wanted to do that episode is one, I just saw a clip. This is what I mean about learning is not memorizing information. Learning is you changing behavior. I talk to a lot of people and they're like, I love your podcast and some of them become friends with. And I see the decisions they're making their business.

Like, oh, you're listening and you're just wasting your time because you're not actually applying the lessons. Take what they did and what they said and see if that works in your business and then actually change it. And so I saw a clip. and it was a clip, I think, on TikTok, where Todd Graves was being interviewed on a comedian's podcast, De Yovon. And he was talking about, he's like, I've been a big believer

in always doing one thing and doing it better than anybody else. And then they kept cutting the clip, you know, it's probably 45 seconds, and he talked about, he even got down to the minutiaia of how simple is my menu? If this, how easy can I make it to select

what the customer wants? Okay, so that customer is now going to take, five seconds to decide. I go to Raisin Keynes, I know exactly what I'm getting, right? As opposed to you go to McDonald's or another competitor's. Now it's instead of a 10 second order, it's a 40 second order. That mean make not a big difference when you're having, you know, a hundred orders a day and you have one store. He's got 800 now. It makes a huge difference and he just immediately understood. And so when I might, this is how, because of fucking brainwash myself about this, I don't think of Todd Graves when I hear that. I'm like, oh, that's like Rockefeller going over to one of his employees who was soldering,

closing up oil cans and says, how many drops of solder do you use? And they guys like 40. Have you ever tried less? Try 38. Okay, I tried 38. It leaked. Okay, try 39.

Oh, 39. It works. So we were wasting one drop of solder, which might not make a shit of difference when the business is, you know, making a couple thousand. That business went up scaling 10, 20, 30X. Makes a huge difference. All of these people,

they're obsessed with their business. They're in the details. Another thing that Todd Graves said that was very fascinating. He's like, I had all these experts. Tell them, hey, like you should delegate. And he has the funny sign. He goes,

delegate, what is that word even? He goes, what kind of word is that? Right? Because he was literally being interviewed in one of the, in one of the podcasts

I used as a source material to make mine. And he's, again, this happened in the last few months, maybe a year ago. And he stops the interview to look at the Instagram reel

because they just had an event. I think they were like throwing a Super Bowl party or something like that. And he's like, I'm going to watch it before it goes out. I don't think of Todd Graves. I think of Steve Jobs.

every Wednesday having a three-hour meeting in Apple, reviewing every single ad that goes out. Nothing went out of Apple, not a billboard in Missouri, not a what's on their landing page without Steve looking at it. There's a guy that wrote the book called it. I think it's called Insanely Simple. I think his name is Ken Siegel,

if I'm correct about that. He was running, he was the ad executive for the marketing company, the ad company that Steve was using. And he said, Steve would call me at midnight and we'd have to talk for an hour about a single word. That's obsession. That's loving what you do.

That's taking what you do very seriously. I don't care if it's building computers, if it's making a podcast, if it's making chicken fingers. I just love people that take what they do seriously. This idea of anything worth doing being worth doing for its own sake. And my favorite maxim, you know, that I've stumbled across, I think originally from Kevin Kelly, the old editor of Wired magazine was that the reward for great work is more work. And it seems like so much of the fastest to 100 million of ARR type thing is that the target is something that's not the work itself. It's some other thing.

And that the healthy orientation that you're describing that Todd Graves has and all these other people have is actually just towards the work itself. And you had this really interesting notion of almost anti-business people. Yvonne Schoenard is the founder of Patagonia comes most immediately to mind. I love that book of his, Let My People Go Surfing. So talk a little bit of more dig deeper on this idea of anything worth doing for its own sake. The reward for great work is more work. Being anti-business as an entrepreneur. There's some depths to this that I think continue to pull at the same threat.

You can change the name of a podcast. I can log into my podcast host and change founders to whatever I want. Whatever. You can't change the URL slogan. for the RSS feed for the first name you picked. And the first name I picked for founders was telling you from day one. Back in 2016, the name of the podcast was called Autotelic.

Autotelic, the definition of that is an activity done for the sake of itself. I was telling you from the rip. I don't care if nobody listens. I need to do this. I got some advice the other day. And they're like, this reminds me of Ted Graves. Henry Ford has the exact same thing about, you know, experts.

People outside of your business try to give you advice. And this is why I like read Twitter. I'm like, these people, like, sorry, I'm not going to read that tweet. I'd rather, I'll just listen to what Steve Jobs said. He probably has better advice than this random fucking guy on Twitter. And so somebody goes, hey, have a great idea for you. Have you ever thought about hiring other people to read the books for you? Like, that's not what I'm doing it for. I'm not taking the easy way. The hard,

and I love what Jerry Seinfeld said, the hard way is the right way. And so I told them a story. And this is the line that, this is my response to this. And this is the line that I say. It's like, you don't work all your life. to do what you love, to not do it. And all I know is that person doesn't have a mission. They don't have a love. That's fine. Most people never do, but I don't go around giving advice to people

about what they should be doing. It's the weird thing where the source of this advice comes from. And I remember reading about Charles Schultz, the guy, I was a fucking kid, and I'd read Charlie Brown and peanuts every Christmas. We'd watch Charlie Brown's Christmas. Yeah, so I think he came on in the 1960s. So I was like, oh, I'm going to read his biography.

And then you read it. And it's like crazy. It's like the guy ran, you know, I'm going to, these are approximately right. He ran the comic strip for like, let's say 40 or 50 years. He drew, drew, came up with the idea, penciled everything, drew it and everything. Every single strip over 50 years, I think it was 17,000 different individual ones that he did. He had already had one plan. So when he dies, this is the lot.

No one can ever take it over. When I die, this is what you put out. Like, when I die. this is the last one that's ever published, and people would go through it, if I remember correctly, living somewhere in California, to come to a studio.

At the time, he's a much older man. He's like, 60, 7 years old, and they're like, well, who's doing this? He's like, what do you mean who's doing this? He's like, me. And they couldn't, these people touring the street couldn't wrap their head.

Like, well, could you hire somebody else to do it so then you could take a vacation or you could take some time off? And that was his line. He's like, you couldn't understand why they were asking him that. And he's like, but you don't work your entire life to do what you love,

to not do it. that's why I think thinking a long time, you know, most of this is trial and error. Some people find what they love to do really, like I think of Kobe Bryant, the episodes have done on him. He's 12 years old. He would tell you, I'm going to be the best best player of all time. No one finds what they love to do at 12.

I'm working on this Michael Dell episode right now. You could see from 12 years old, the guy was a moneymaker, obsessed with computers. There's a part in the story that's great where he takes apart an IBM. And he has this realization. He says, wait a minute, IBM's selling the computer, but they don't make any of the components.

And like you just see as like a little kid, like, there might be an opportunity here that he's going to pursue later on. And he gets in trouble in class because he's not paying attention to class. He's just reading computer magazines. He's telling you what his life is going to be. You just have to listen. And every single person has something like that.

They just don't fucking listen. They don't listen to themselves. What does it feel like when you find it? Because you said earlier you were 32 before you kind of stumbled on it and then five years after that, was it like actually the full-time thing that you could do to earn a living and much more? what was the change in feeling of, what does it feel like to do the thing that you love to you?

Unbelievable relief. Like a weight off your shoulders that, like, I can't describe it. And then from there, that doesn't mean like, oh, I wake up, you know this. Like, I'm kind of a tortured person. Like, so there was a clip of me on another podcast that just went out and the person's like,

you know the podcast is good. If the host looks sleep deprived, I'm like, that's as bad as good as I can look. Okay, because that's like, My sleep score on my eight sleep right now is like 60. Like, it's not, I'm not doing well because I am completely obsessed with what I'm doing.

And I, you know what's weird? Like, people keep telling me. It's like, you shouldn't be obsessed with this like, low status. I was like,

I, I, I don't, it's high status now. I don't even hear it. Because I'm like, I, I know exactly where I am

and I know exactly what I want to do. And we talk about this. We have mutual friends that like, they're kind of up so obsessed to their detriment about like, what will somebody else think of me? Or like, if I do X, well,

like, I'm worried about the public perception or what my friends will think me. I don't think about that at all. There's a great line. The reason that people are surprised with some of the people that I want to meet that are still living.

And so I have like, you know, a list. And in the top three of that list is a guy named Jimmy Iveen. Me and you share a love for that Define ones. Define ones documentary. Last dance, Defiant Ones. Like those are the best documentaries. I watch them over and over again.

And Jimmy Iveen has this great line. He's just like, when you're running after something, he goes, They do this great editing job where it shows horses on a racetrack. And it goes back and forth between that and Jimmy. And Jimmy's like, you know why they put fucking blinders on those horses? And he goes, he goes, because if they look left or right, they'll miss a step. And humans should have that too.

When you're chasing after something, don't look left, don't look right, go. And that's why it's like, I wake up every day. We talked about this when we did that live show in New York City. It was obvious if you read the books that the great entrepreneurs, once they find what they love to do, low to zero introspection. Now they think deeply about their business, but they wake up every morning. They're not wondering like,

what should I do today? They know exactly what they're doing. And to find that, for me to know, I'm going to wake up and do this for as long as I have a voice, I have eyes, like hopefully I have life.

Like, that's an unbelievable leaf. Now, because it's your mission and because I'm also super competitive and kind of a little crazy, our mutual friend, Daniel Eck, has the greatest line, he told me. He's just like, one of the reasons I like you so much

is because you're like an LLM trained on history's greatest entrepreneurs with the temperature turned up. Obviously, like some people are not going to like that, and that's fine. Then you kind of torture. I did this episode on Jensen Wong, and he has a great thing where he doesn't like to fire people. He's like, I'd rather to torture them into greatness. And then you realize how he goes about his life, he actually tortured himself into greatness.

You know, even this in recent few years, they tell a great story. Blow out quarter. companies doing incredible. And he walks into the meeting and goes, every morning I wake up, look myself in the mirror and say, why do you suck so much? We've heard that a few times from some exceptional people. They're all like this.

They're all like this. Say one click more about this anti-business, you call the anti-business billionaire so that I would get lots of views on Instagram or whatever. That's not why I did it, though, because that's what I believe them to be. I like, I appreciate that you thought it was clickbaiting. I'm not trying to clickbait anybody.

Although Todd Graves and his $10 billion chicken finger dream is probably good. That's a banger episode. What I mean by anti-and-it, and it really should be anti-business as usual billionaires. Okay? So, and again, I'm in my own business. I don't care. If people say, I want to wake up and all I'm going to do is take a pile of money and making it a bigger pile of money and they love it, cool.

I have no opinion what you're doing. The people I most admire, the people that I'm trying to powder myself off of is these people where it's like they have so, they're so obsessed about the product quality, right? And there's three people in that video. It's Yvonne Chouin, James Dyson, and Steve Jobs, right? One guy's making outdoor equipment, one guy's making high technology,

and one guy's making fucking vacuum cleaners. Okay, but there's the exact same approach where it's like the, the reasons company exists, and Jobs has said this multiple times, where the only reason to start a company is because the product. And then like, so the company needs to assemble

all the resources, but the product is, we exist to make the product. And then, of course, he talks about profitability a lot because the profits allow you to keep making the product. Everything starts from the product. So everything I do, the reason I still do every single social media post, the reason I answer all my emails,

the reason I don't have an assistant, the reason I don't have an editor, is because I'm trying to make the world's best product. I feel my podcast is a handmade artisanal, but it just happens to be like technology and infinite leverage. You know, the same amount of work is going to go into it. If one person listens or 10 million people listen. And I'm trying to build what drives me,

and I think annoys most of the people that are around me because I can be pretty fucking stubborn about this, is that I want to make the best product in the world based on what I like for the best people in the world. The very first time we talked, you kind of, and this is when I had like, I think like 3,000 people listening back then, and you kind of nailed it on our first talk. You're like, oh, you built it.

Like you're going to win by default. You built this pulling mechanism. or ecosystem, like, by the time people try to do it now, they're going to try to cat, they'll never be able to catch you. But I, it's really important to me as a competitive person that I build the best product for the best people in the world. I am not interested. I've told this story before. I know Mr. Beas, Jimmy's, he's been very nice to me. He's tweets about the podcast. It's very nice. He's invited me to go to, like, his headquarters, and he's like, you can use our studio to record here. We'll help you with a script. Jimmy's, there's no script.

We'll give you data analytics people. I don't even know how many fucking people listen to the podcast. I don't look at analytics. I build it. I build. what I want for me. So the reason I have to edit it is because when this is done, I listen to it. It's the Stephen King thing. I am not just the writer. I am the first reader. That's what Stephen King said. Quentin Tarantino says when I, people are like, when you make a movie, do you have an audience of mine? He's like, yeah, me. I'm making it for me. What is your own measure of good or great for your own product? That I like it. But why? What is it about whatever that episode was or the Todd Graves episode or like if I stacked ranked, there are 50 most recent episodes based on the

quality, your own perception of their quality. What's different about number one versus number 40? Like what's more true in number one than number 40? Like what is the measure of goodness? I've been thinking about this recently. And it applies specifically to the fact that I'm covering people that build companies. And what I realize is like, I've never been around impressive people in my entire life, right? We talked about this the very first time I was on your podcast. no one in my family even graduated high school, much just college. So it's like I never saw examples of great people. And then you add to the fact that my father, like I'm the son of a Cuban immigrant, I grew up meeting people that risked their lives and came over here on a raft.

And it's like kind of weird. Hey, like you have, like we both have kids. We love them more than life itself. Like I would die for my kids. Everybody would die for their kids. And it's like, things were so bad in your country that you risked your 14 year old son's life and put them on a boat. Like how bad does that have to be? And I'm like, well, let's, go to the Miami Beach. How many people, how many Americans are getting on a raft and going, that's a one-way trip. So that tells you something is very special about where we live and very, very bad about where they're coming from. And when I realized it's like not being, not being an educated family, parents never having money, being terrified, growing up terrified, being a loser,

it's like entrepreneurship is a miracle. Capitalism is a miracle where I meet some of these other people where they're like, they might be the son or the grandson of somebody really wealthy. and you'll find like a weird high correlation for like almost like socialistic, like perspectives. And I was like, this is so crazy to me. Just like my wife's from Columbia. Like no one in South America is like, that made it to America is like, no, I want to go back there. Like you don't even understand what you have. And so now what I realized about this is like one of the reasons I'm so passionate about it is, yeah, I like to read the most unbroken hobby I've ever had.

Yeah, I legitimately think podcast are miracles. You, we were at this conference together and you said something really funny. You walk over and every time I'm at another table. And I'm like, most of the people will listen to the podcast, but if not, I would grab their phone and you saw me installing it. And you had a quip. You're like, I wish I could find a way to make money for David's ability to turn every conversation back to podcasting. It's like 14 really successful capital allocators and me. I don't even know what the hell I was doing there.

The root cause is like, I really believe entrepreneurship is a miracle. The fact that anybody could say, hey, I have an idea that makes somebody else's like better. because that's the best, that's all businesses. Business is just an idea that makes somebody else's life better. No one can stop me from doing it to delivering value to other people. And then if I deliver, the more value I deliver to the higher number of people that generates wealth. What? Imagine going back to, you know, I might do this episode on Jenghis Khan.

Like the 1100s and saying like you could be the richest person in the world and you could invent a button and, you know, press that button and anything is to deliver to that. Or like any other, Sam Walton, I told the story. I was in Miami Beach Marine on a friend's boat. And I was like, that boat's huge. Who owns that boat? And I look it up. It's like Sam Walton's niece.

And I'm like, this guy, I had like this great experience. I'm looking at this giant boat. It's probably, I don't know, $300 million, some crazy number like that. And I'm like, and it came from your uncle just realizing, hey, if I just deliver everyday low prices, again, another simple idea taken very seriously, everyday low prices. No one was going to beat some pricing. So how do you work backwards from that idea? There's all kinds of technology.

There's logistics. There's talent. All those other stuff is very difficult. The idea is simple, but the implementation is very difficult. And look where you can generate. And people shit on Walmart. I had to shop at Walmart when I grew up. Like, I'm not shopping there now, but like, they did a service for my family.

And for millions of people. It's like, they destroyed Main Street businesses. It's like, we couldn't afford to not shop at Walmart. It's a miracle that he gave. And what's the byproduct of that? By making, I don't know, how many people do you think shop Walmart, billions by now? A lot. Billions.

Everyone at some point. Yeah. He deserves that money. Good. I'm glad he got that money. I mean, he wrote a lot in his books about the relationship between simplicity and mastery. Yeah. And that's, I mean, that's the theme of our conversation.

Like, it shows up over and over and over and over again. That conference you're referencing with the capital allocators, you know, you said, I don't know why I'm there. Well, I know why you were there. Like, I wanted you to go because I had a theory, which was correct, which is that the people there were going to be more interested in you and your project than, you know, the next guy is like, latest great investment. And I think the reason for that is that everyone recognizes a truth in this basic message of the power of finding one's mission and then pursuing it forever. And I would just love to hear you riff a little bit on what that has taken for you in the last, I guess we met in 2022, so call it three and a half, four years ago, something like that. In that period of time,

which is when this thing has really taken off, what are your, drops of, you know, glue or like, what are the things that you've done had to do to make this thing better? Because I just want to keep bringing this point to life that, like, once you find the thing, what kinds of things does it then take to make the thing great? So what have those things been for the last, you know, four years? I don't even know if I can, I have a good answer to that question other than there is something that I think is, two other lines from longer. Again, I go back to where it's like he says intense interest in any subject is necessary for like to master it he has a better line i'm messing that up and then he says fall in at your drift you know we talk about this all

a time where when i describe you to other people i'm like well you have to understand patrick is doing a best like the best episodes all day long every day like 10 times a day he just doesn't record them he's just naturally curious he will he just want he's curious around other people in the way that i am frankly not right i'm interested in books i don't i can't like deal with you know people. It's why I work alone. In general, like, obviously I have a handful of very close people. But I just think, I don't know why. There's a great line. So I just did this Ken and Griffin episode. And I made the point in the episode I think is really important. It's like, I'm not interested in timely. I'm interested in timeless. And so there's no book on Ken. There's a bunch

of great stories spread throughout the internet that I use, the source material, and then I listen to every single thing I could find all these talks. And most of the interviews he does is like, what do people want to know? What do you think about the market? What do you think about this president? But I did find, like, he had this hour-long talk at Yale. I highly recommend listening to it. Whereas, like, more like an oral biography, like more timeless principles. And then I transcribed that. And then, you know, I listened to, I don't know, 30 other hours of him talking.

And I'd maybe only made like five or 10 other notes, something small. But something he said is very fascinating. He's like, for reasons I don't quite understand, since I was in the third grade, I've been obsessed with the stock market. How does it work? How do you make money? What are these problems you can solve? And that line, for reasons I don't understand.

I truly believe that Jeff Bezos nailed it when he said, you don't pick your passions, your passions choose you. You don't choose your passions, your passions choose you. I was not like, you know, at five years old wondering, like, what's a good hobby for self-development in my future? Maybe I should read. I just read. I told you the first time we talked.

Like my mom before she died, she said, I would read the back of cereal boxes. I have no idea. And so all I do is like I'm just intensely interested in, everything that I'm learning. And then I like the craftsmanship. I heard, there's an idea that Ken has that, again, I think is the entire reason that founders is valuable is a podcast. He says, you really, you want to know what's going on your business. You want to sell your competitors, but you really should be grabbing ideas from other businesses far afield from your

industry. And he told the story about a way to mitigate his risk. And he got an idea from Saudi Ramco. Saudi Ramco and Citadel. It was very different businesses, right? What was the idea? Okay, so I'll explain this. Make sure I don't forget that because I'm in the middle of the weave. So he uses the term, I think they were like, they were like a B player in risk. They weren't doing well in risk. And he was still in Chicago at the time.

And he goes and visits Saudi Ramco and he sees this giant screen on a wall on their headquarters there. And it's like 30 feet long, 10 feet wide. And it has all the most important data, not like 100 things, but like where the ships are, how many barrels of oil were reducing. like the handful of metrics, and they just look at it all day. Yeah, their distillation. Exactly. What's going to happen? Like, you look at all day.

Like, then you're going to improve it, right? And he's like, oh, what if we took all the important risk metrics and put on a giant wall in our headquarters? And he said it took them from like, you know, a B player to like one of the best in their field. And his whole advice was like, you really need to be taking ideas that are far afield of like your own industry. And, you know, this is what you do when you read a book. Like, I'm not going to build Walmart.

I'm not going to build Ferrari. I'm not building Apple. I'm building my podcast. But there's all these ideas. that it can take from them. So as I've exposed myself to that, I just find little ideas that I can use in the craftsmanship of the product.

And one of the main ideas goes back to your question about the anti-business billionaires. The reason I say, and I do this same book over and over again, so I've done on episode 25, episode 200, episode 200, and it'll be episode 400.

It's James Dyson's first autobiography called Against the Outs. It took him 14 years, 5,127 prototypes, until he got the first, the world's first cyclone vacuum cleaner that he owned 100% of that it was up to his standards. And so all I'm trying to figure out is just like, can I make something that I would listen to?

I don't know any other way. And so last week, I actually had to republish an old episode, which is still a great episode. But the reason was because I read a book where I found the person I did not like and I don't want to spend any time in his mind. So I'm not going to make an episode on him, because not only you have to finish reading the book, which I threw across the fucking room. But then I have to spend another, you know, probably 30. This one together, if it's the one I think. Yes. And then I spent another 30 hours making the podcast. I don't want to be like this person.

I'm looking for role models because I didn't have any when I grew up. And then I read a fabulous book that me and you both read Pappyland by Wright Thompson. Excellent writing. Great writer too. Unbelievable. But I couldn't figure out how to make an episode on it because it's really like it's about a family business. It's really about a family. And it's really about the relationship between a father and son.

And I'm very interested in that relationship. I think it's the most powerful relationship in the world, which I got heckled at one of our live shows when I said that. Why did you get heckled? I don't remember. They were just because I said it was the most, it's not discounting the relationship between the father and a daughter or mother and daughter. It's clearly something that pops up in these biographies over and over again all the time.

And Wright has great, Tom's son has great writing about, you know, relationship that the grandson had with the father and the father with the, there's a lot of family dynamic. Excellent book. But I was like, this isn't good enough that the book was, but I can't make anything good enough.

So I'm not putting anything out. Nothing. I'm not going to put out something I wouldn't listen to. One of my favorite things that happens with you is someone will say something that just bothers you and sets you off and gets you going on this stream of lessons that we're talking about today that you've learned, that you've shared with people. What other things that you see people do bother you the most in business? You have a great line on this.

You talk to a way more people I do. And I'll ask you about like, oh, is this person, this person reached out. And you're like, oh, no, he's a casual. Again, I don't care what people do because they're, you're, I know, because I study fucking people's lives for a living. Like so much of what shapes you is like happens when you're so young. And you can't even describe why you're interested in what you're interested in. But I think the only thing that bothers me is like, there's a great line that I mentioned in the Ovid's episode that.

Mediocrity is invisible until passion shows up and exposes it. And so much of the people that you meet, so many of the products that you deal with, so many of the people, it's just like they're, casual. They have a casual affectation about them that I find personally disgusting. And I'm not, again, it's not like it's not like a growing up judging people. It's going to make me sound like a terrible human being. It's just like it's a way for me to filter who I want to spend time with. And my favorite people to spend time with, like they're all, they all work in vastly different things, but they take what they do so seriously. And it's not a selfish thing. They're making something that they feel makes somebody else's life better. So the only thing I could think of is like,

I don't like the, you know, casualness. And then I'm not a fan personally of like the over-financialization of business. I think a lot of people aren't starting companies. They're creating financial instruments, which is fine. But I think you're going to realize, like, just these kind of people just don't have enough experience and they haven't read enough biographies or realize, like, you think what you want is money, but what you really want is meaning. You're going to get the money.

And then you're going to be like, why am I so unhappy? Because you're human and this happens over and over again. That doesn't mean people don't like money and that obviously solves a lot benefits, but you're going to feel a lot better. If you think about the reasons that people sell a business, typically it's either because they have a chance to make it a tremendous amount of money or some amount of money, or it's because they're tired of the thing of the business, therefore, of the product of the whole endeavor. Why do you think that the money thing has become, I would think about it as like a false idol or something. Like it has become the unit of interest, of obsession, of showing off, of status, of all this kind of stuff. What's your theory for why this seems to have inflected like so crazily in the last couple of years? Well, now we have like a giant mirror into everybody else's life.

We never had like this way. Like, think of like one good thing about decentralization of media is like there's no gatekeepers. That's also the bad thing in the sense of like now there's somebody just put me on to crazy rich Asians of TikTok. and it is some of the most... I haven't caught that one. Oh, we should... I'll send you some clips. And it's some of the most disgusting behavior.

Like one lady is, I guess, her parents own... She lives in California, but her parents own... One of the largest cloud computing companies in China. Another one is like some giant, maybe even, like, government collusion in Singapore or something like that. But it's like all the videos... All the videos are just... straight consumption. It's look what I got. Me and my, and they do this, this thing where it's like,

me and my mom went shopping today, and we spent 25,000 of Van Cleef, and then we bought a Hermeat thing and we did this. And it's just like, this is disgusting behavior because you shouldn't take pride in what you consume. That doesn't take skill or talent. You should take pride in what you built. That is the most selfish thing you could possibly do. And I'm not like, dude, like I'm building, the goal here is to, you know, to change the trajectory of my entire family tree. I'm going to build generational wealth, not so my kids can do that shit. That'll never happen. But to try to teach them, it's like, man, the wealth came because you made somebody else's life better. You dedicate it. It's a selfless act, even if you love it. And this idea that, like, we are,

so I understand that. So then young people see that and they're like, oh, that I need to figure out how to make money. And I was like this. Like, I was so embarrassed when I was younger that had to, like, how much I had to work or like, I didn't have a car or like all this other stuff that happened. remember being deeply, deeply embarrassed. And then it's switching from embarrassment to like almost like relentless self-belief that like I am better than that person. Like I remember going, there was this kid that lived close to like went to the same school as me. It was a public high school. But I remember the crazy story I heard where like I think it again, this was like, it's funny when you think of wealth, but like his dad owned like, I don't know, like 100 dominoes or

something. But I just remember they used to take a helicopter to lunch. And I'm like, what? And I remember him bragging about the car. His dad bought him like $120,000 a car. He'd park in front of the country club, which obviously I would never even be able to get into the country club. And I remember flipping and I was like, I'm better than that kid.

Like, I'm smarter than him. I work harder. Like, I'm going to fuck him up. And it turned into like this competitive, like, I will prove to you that like, you always handed to you, I will get myself. And there was like some kind of weird drive behind that. But so when I see people like that

where it's just like, you're glorifying the wrong thing. where like if you think about there's this great talk that Steve Jobs gave when he came back to Apple and he's talking about Apple and he spends all this money in marketing you would never know it it sucks all your marketing sucks and he's like who are the best what is the best example of marketing and he talked about Nike and he's like what does Nike do he doesn't talk about like the shoe is has a bunch of six bubbles or whatever they glorify great athletes they glorify great achievement and so that's why he did the crazy ones ad and so I think that it's like to some degree what I'm trying to do is like the reason I make these clips on the anti-business billionaires a reason I make these clips on the anti-business billionaires a I spend so much time talking about these people and the craftsmanship and talk about this guy that is literally a craftsmanship with his chicken fingers is because I, to some degree, I want to celebrate these people saying, hey, I'm going to dedicate my life to building the best possible product I can and to make somebody else's life better. And I'll talk all day long about that and not about the fact that, you know, I'm building a yacht or I'm doing all this other stuff. Like you can have all these things, but like what are you actually proud of? You're not proud of your consumption. Well, you probably, anybody can go to the store and buy that. Not everybody can build a truly great product. Why are the people that are doing it that way so much better at marketing than like if you read a marketing book and, you know, tried to go market your product or had some marketing person at your company in charge of how the world here is about you? I'm thinking about the Red Bull founder, Estee Lauder.

Like, this seems to Steve Jobs, of course, this shows up over and over again that not only is the ability to create an incredible product. God, I love that line of mediocrity is invisible until passion shows up to expose it. I won't forget that one. But the same thing seems to happen. So that's the product side. The same thing seems to happen from all these same people on the marketing side. What is the flame there that's behind that? Like why, what have you learned about that side of business studying all these people where

they're not only responsible for the product, but also for how the world engages with it and hears about it? again, I'd go back to those three, Evanchard, James Dyson, and Steve Jobs, I think they have all these lessons in that. Evanchard calls it nonfiction marketing. He's like, if you have a shit product,

like you have to dress it up, you have to put, you have to have to have a mascot, you have to hire these expensive, advertising companies, you know, you have to make up all this stuff. It's all fiction.

But if you're just, in his thing, he didn't even want to be a billionaire. He just like, hey, I'm going to, again, he built a product for himself. He was a mountain.

He spent all his time outdoors. He fishes. He skis. He climbs mountains. He does all these super risky sports. All the gear I'm using sucks. I'm going to make the gear that I use. And guess what?

If I make the best gear, then everybody was like, where'd you get that? Oh, that's good too. And it takes... His best friend. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

And that'll compound. Again, if you don't sell after five years or four years or do anything that puts in jeopardy to durability of your company. And so I think about James Nicene. It's this great line. And I'll, like, paraphrase.

But how he wants to say, wants to spend his time, he wants to invent. He wants to be as close to the design of the product, the manufacturing of the product, he will be on the line of the product, even in the 70s, right? But what he realized is like, after he's done making the product, he's the one that went around the world and sold the product because he's like, the creator is the only person that can explain what went into the process of the thinking behind it. And then with his full heart, he's something like that, with the full heart and complete belief in what he's saying, foisted upon other people at a high price. Because he knows, hey, yeah, this, you can go and buy a vacuum cleaner for 40 bucks or

600. Guess what? My house, I have a Dyson. It's the best vacuum cleaner. It just is. And I'm asking you to pay 10x for where you can get, you know, anywhere else. Why? And I can tell you what went into it. The blood, sweat and tears. I kind of reject this, like, purely rational, like, the way people, like, they try to analyze business in a rational way, which is weird to me because humans are nothing but irrational. And they give money for reasons they can't describe. And some of this, why would somebody pay, you know, I love this, this thing that, uh, you see with like Enzo Ferrari, Ferrari, you guys did a great post about this when you did a Ferrari episode and it showed like the racetrack, the test track, and they're like, there's a test track. And then literally,

Enzo Ferrari's house, he built the racetrack around his house, right? And so it's like, why do people come from all over the world to meet this guy, right? And to buy a car that, you know, is 100 times, 10 times, 20, 30 times more expensive than just another car that could go fast. There's a story behind it. And I think that's where, like, you see the people that love the product so much, they put so much of their life's energy into it that then they can explain very clearly why it's valuable. The reason I'm not trying to be, like, obnoxious when I ask people to listen to the podcast

and if they don't, I tell them to take out their phone. I heard this great thing, and this is another idea I got from Paul Graham. We said in the early days of Stripe, they called the Collison Installation, where they're like, oh, the other YC company is like, I'd love to use Stripe. And they'd be like, oh, great, give me your laptop. And they would install it right then. And so I saw that idea.

Great idea. I'm going to do this center installation. And so I've done this over and over. I don't even know. I've probably installed it. I don't know, not joking, like 500 times. Like, oh, this is going to be the best day you've ever had. You're going to look back on this day.

Unbelievable what this podcast is going to do for your career. Here, follow right there. Like, I think to James Cameron episode is the best episode ever done. Maybe the Red Bull episode, maybe the chicken finger episode. But like, I can tell you that with a straight face and not feel shameful. or shameless or whatever the term is there about doing that because I believe in it. It took a lot of fucking work to make that. And I know the lessons are good because that guy told you they're good.

What is it about the Red Bull story? It's so unique. It's so different. It's one of my favorites that you've ever done. So this is another, again, like, it's like, you know me well. I'm getting hot. So you know me well enough. It's just like, I'm not like, somebody could offer me, like, come run my company or like

pay me more money. Like, there's just no way I would do that. Like, I'm not doing, there's other ulterior motives for it. And one, like, if you're really smart, you can find a way to build a good business is almost anything. It's not what you do. It's how you do it. With Dietrich's metastus, it's like his whole thing, one, the story's crazy because at the time I did that episode, there's no biographies in English. So like, this is also what drives me insane. And everything, you should be thinking about differentiation. The reason I started a solo podcast, right, on history in 2016, is because in 2016,

I thought there was way too many, I can't go interview entrepreneurs, everybody's already doing that, right? And there's obviously something I didn't understand, it's always room for great, right? But I have this natural inclination I've had my entire life

to go in the other direction that other people were doing. So I knew it was differentiated. And what I love about, the episodes I love the most is like, there's not even a book about it. You have to like make the content for the episode.

So I had to translate, or a friend of mine translated that biography from German. So first of all, it's like, oh, good. Like, how many people have done an episode on this guy based on this book? Well, if you haven't spoke German, none, right? So, and then you realize this story. It's just like, you know, he was working for a bunch of CPG companies traveling to Asia.

He's jetlocked all time. He winds up finding the Red Bull, but it's in a different language. It's like 15 cents or whatever the case is. He's like, oh, this works. And there's really no, like, energy drink category. So he helps create the category and then masters a category. And then realizes you have a lot of, like you really need to raise the price.

And then even the way he looked at things where he's like, oh, we're a marketing conglomerate, so we're going to outsource everything else but marketing. It's like everybody's talking about content to commerce and all this other stuff today. It's like, nothing is new. You just haven't read enough history. Like, you want to look at the best content of commerce?

Right there. And then what does he do? He optimizes for, he did not want to have a board directors. He did not want to be in the public stock market. He didn't want to be answerable to anybody. The guy, I mean, the guy wasn't married. Like, you just look at it. People will give you hints about what's important to them.

Just look, read between the lines. And you clearly see he doesn't like people telling him what to do. He has a ton of fun. He's also crazy. He likes to like, even when it says 70s, he was like taking risky sports, mountain biking. He was like flying his own planes, racing his own cars. He was like the Red Bull.

Like the brand of Red Bull was him. And then you get to the point where him and his partner, they each on 49% of the company. They pit $500,000 in each. Then they had a small bank loan. And every single thing from the growth from there was out of profits. How many people essentially can bootstrap? If me, if somebody gave, if me and you have a business right now, right, you're going to put it in half a million, I'll put it in half a million. We're going to get a small bank loan. You know how hardwood, the unlikely outcome that you and I build a business that's worth 40 or 50 or 60 billion dollars? You know how hard that is? How the hell did he do that? There's a great line by Charlie Munger. He says one of my favorite ways, one of my favorite ways to knowledge is finding an extreme example and asking what the hell happened here? You know, and in your like, in my case, it's like people. It's like, what? There's a guy.

There's some Austrian guy that owns Red Bull that is turning down, he turned on multiple offers where he would have made $20 billion for his 49%. He's paying himself $500 to $800 million a year. He's so private that he buys the magazine that's trying to write a story about him. Like there's a guy that is trying to write an unauthorized biography of him goes to his mom's house. Deatrice finds the guy and says, if you don't leave my mom alone, I'm going to pay a Russian guy to break your niece. your kneecaps. It's like, what is happening here? Who is this person? And I think that's really important because all it does is like completely pops off the top of your head about what is possible

in life. The reason I'm obsessed with these maniacs on emissions, these super driven people, the opposite of casual people is because it's like they stretch what I believe is possible. Let me give me a perfect example. There is this reoccurring theme on the podcast that's in all these biographies. And I, the shorthand I have for this is how bad do you want it? And I just came across an example of this with Ken Griffin. The reason I did the Ken Griffin episode, even though there's not a biography on him, I think there's one that's like crappy and it's like two stars on Amazon. So, you know, there's people writing, it's probably like ChatGPT wrote it or something,

or the old version of ChatGPD, the new version actually, the Deep Research can write. The Deep Research, hey, I use Deep Research every day. It's really good. He talks about when he was 33 years old and Rod blows up. John Arnold tells the story on Twitter and it goes viral on Twitter. And that's how I found it. That's what sparked me because I keep hearing about Canada. I was like, this is a founder's guy.

have to do it. And Enron blows up spectacular in 2001. The day it blows up, Ken charters, a Gulfstream jet, sends like 16 people down to Houston, interviews every single person in the Enron energy, like the commodity business. Everyone finds out how they made money, what their competitors were, what worked, what didn't work, right? Then he finds the head trainer, which is John Arnold. And John Arnold's like, Ken's assistant calls. He's like, hey, Ken wants to talk to you, would you talk to him? It's like, listen, I'm not open for a job right now. I'm trying to close the books. But I respect what Ken is built, so I will talk to him. Okay? I'm headed to Aspen for an event right now. When I'm back in Houston, tell Ken,

I will take his phone call. Hangs up. Assistant calls back a few minutes later. Ken is willing to fly to where you are. If he flies to Aspen today, will you meet with him? He said, yeah, how bad do you want it? And Ken's point that he makes, I don't think that's in the Twitter post, but he tells that same story in the conversation with Yale. He goes, I hired all the best people at Enron. And since then, we've made about $30 billion. Trading commodities. How bad do you want it? Most people are like, oh, I'll wait until next week. I'll catch you a couple days. He's like, I'm coming today. 33 years old. You always see the true interest is revealed early. He was doing stuff like that. When long-term capital management blew up in 98, he was 30 years old. He went and

visit those guys. What do you want to know? You guys didn't lose control of your business until over 90% of your equity. How the hell did you keep it after like 30%, 40%, 50%? How is that possible? And then what happened? That was in 1998. He was 30. In 2008, when he was 40, he lost 50% of his equity. And he says, what I learned from those conversations, I used 10 years later to keep Citadel in business. I asked sort of the marketing version of this question, like the nonfiction marketing. Like if you believe so deeply in the thing, it actually becomes easier to sell the 600 dollar vacuum versus the $40 one. What about it on the talent side?

I know you've learned a lot from Brad Jacobs and other people about the power of hiring the very best people. Everybody says that. Like, of course you should have the best people. But they don't do it. But they don't do it. What do true founders in your sense of the word do differently?

And the same question I asked about marketing, but for talent. Yeah, there's a great line. I did this clip in this video called overpay for talent because you can't really overpay for talent. And Brad Jacobs in his book, you know, he talks about. that over and over again. We, me and you went to his house and he talked about, he told us, like, numbers he was paying for talent. Like, you know, it would shock you, uh, Mr. Bees' video editors, like this 22 year old, the main kid, 22 or 24 year old kid, like, if you know what he

paid him, like, you see us over and over again. Why? Because the example in the video is like, well, you know, did Apple really need next? No, they needed a job. So they paid five, they paid half a billion dollars to rehire the guy they shouldn't, that they needed. And he produced, you know, whatever return on that money. Like, they got a deal on getting him back. the reason I think people don't do it is one I don't think everything we describe and I do I think there's like a limit to like the actual application I guess these ideas you can scale down and scale up but like there's just not that many talented people in every field and they they're really hard to find they take a long term long time to to to usually convince they're usually really really expensive and in many cases they're working for themselves so like they're not like there's not like an abundance of people. but this just happened with me and you talked about this. Your new editor-in-chief just wrote that Neil made a piece. And how did you find him? You found he wrote the best Palmer Lucky, and Palmer Lucky's. The best profile, period. Yeah, and the best, and Palmer Lucky's, like, he's got a lot of coverage.

He does great interviews and everything. He's wildly entertaining. And yet this guy wrote the best piece on him. Jeremy Stern. So it's very simple. Jeremy Stern. Thank you. It's very simple. It's like, oh, this is what Munger told our mutual friend Brent. He's like, how do you find CEOs? I just find somebody did a great job at being a CEO. And said, do that, but for me. And then Brent's like, what about hiring for potential? And Munger's like, I don't do that. Like, I don't do that. I just find the great guy in time to come over here. So you just did this. You're like, hey, that guy's really good. What's the chance that he's only able to write one good possible? Like, you don't get that good without there's a skill there, you know? And so I have gone through. I realized I wasn't even taking it.

taking my own advice because I would use like all these people when you, there's like inside baseball this, like when you see all these podcasts that have all these clips, they're outsourced. Clip farms. Yeah, they're like, they're like all. The pitch is like, it's so cheap. And I even use some that my friends recommended. And I'm like, these are terrible. And I found a guy and we met him together.

And he is really young and really gifted. His name is Maxim. He is, my opinion, one of the best short form editors in the world. Shout out Blake Robbins for for connecting. us. It took me a while, a few months to do this. Only works because he's obsessed with the podcast. And he was like in the audience and he's predisposed and he's already listening to it anyways. And I was like, do that for me. And then he tells me the price. And the price is like six times. Six X what other people pay? And I said, done. Where do I send the wire? Because and then what happens?

The clips are coming out and the person that's doing your video right now, all these people with me, they're like, these are the best podcast clips. And then we, you've talked, like, what's the management? There is no management. Like, I bought your taste. It's like, I know, I already know you're great because I watch your videos and like, this is incredible. It's like hiring Tarantino and be like, I have some feedback for you. No, you should shut up. That's Tarantino. This happens to me where like, I get emails and the subject line feedback on the podcast. Don't even read it. Right in the garbage. You link me to a podcast that you have made that is even in the world, like even in the same category.

And then I will listen. But again, you think I'm making it for you. I'm making it for me. The act of publishing it makes it an act of service, but I made it for me first. So I can't do what you want me to do because I'm not making it for you. I'm making it for me.

I have to be satisfied first. And so the answer to a question is like, one, even me who every single episode is like overpaid for talent, find the best people, never ever forget the dynamic range of humans. You know, Steve Jobs says, you know, the best person is not 100 times better,

not twice as good. There are 100 times and 1,000 times better, which is obviously true. Think about the best investors. Like, you know, that profile you did on Neil Meda, like, I don't know, how many other investors in the world are better than him? It's not 10,000.

Whatever the number is, it's a small number, especially if you say the same age group. Now, what, five, two, one? I don't know. But that's so hard to actually find the person. In this case, it came because somebody else that's really good at spotting talent told me and you about this guy.

And maybe I probably wouldn't have found him if it wasn't for that. So these things take a lot of time. And then what I would say is just like, if you're not, you have to actually act yourself. And I think having a, I have a basic intolerance for casualness,

for mediocrity, for not being completely obsessed with what you're doing. And so that weeds out most of humanity anyways. And then what I do is like, I have this scrape back somewhere. It's like, you should limit,

you should limit the amount of details and then make every, detail perfect. And so for me, it's like, I don't need a much, I don't need anybody to make it. The only thing I can't do is I'll never be a video editor like him. So I can't, it's not like I have to go out and hire. I don't want to put myself in a position where my business only works if I find like the 15 best people in the world. That's not the game I'm playing. I love the answers on product, on marketing and on talent. Maybe the last one is on capital. Is there anything that you've seen the people that you've studied do different or especially

well when it comes to attracting the right sources and partnerships with on the capital side specifically, raising money, doing clever deals, clever financing. Is there any dimension there that's worth exploring? This is where I started getting in trouble too. I literally have no friends that aren't entrepreneurs, but I just can't talk to anybody that's not an entrepreneur. What I always tell them, they're like, yeah, I started this company and it's like software company. And they're like, all right, I got to go and like raise a bunch of money. I was like, you should take a look at like what Larry Ellison did, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. You listen to the podcast, right? You told me you listened to those episodes. What did they do? They raise

money? No, they sold the product. They started selling the product before the product was made. Well, maybe you should go out and see if you can get, like, other ways to do this. It's shocking to me how the default is, I must go out and convince other people that are not my customers to give me money. And sometimes you have to. Like, there's nothing, I'm not against, I'm not anti-raising money. I'm anti-wastefulness. And the, what, the, the point that Todd Graves makes in the episode is like, listen, man, a lot of these P.E. guys come in and they try to buy you out and everything else. It's just like, why do you think they want your equity?

Because it's very valuable. So it doesn't mean you can't change, you know, exchange money for equity. Sometimes you have to do it. But you should be very, very careful. And he came up with, like, think about this. This is how bad do you want it? And I'm doing the Michael Dell episode. I'm almost positive.

Michael Dell, his initial starter capital for Dell, was $1,000. I have to double check because I've already listened to the book three times. I've read it. I'm going through it again. So I could my memory. And I'm pretty sure when he went public, you know, like 70% of Dell. It's not my opinion. I would just go, how does Larry Ellison own so much of Oracle? Like, where did the funding come from Microsoft? What about Apple? Like, what did they do? Like, they obviously raise money. They go public to do all this other stuff. Just like, think about that. And do you have to do that? This is a really important decision. You should not be casual about what you're doing. So Todd Graves, chicken finger, right? How many people are going to criticize this guy for being put on this earth by God to make the world's best chicken fingers? And I love them. Fried chicken outside of like, I like fried chicken. Like, I like it.

I don't know what to tell you. I try not to eat it because I get fat immediately, but I like fried chicken. I've eaten a lot of fried chicken. I like his fried chicken. I think it's the best. So what do he do?

He's like, listen, I went to a bank. He goes, the idea of Raisin Keynes was a paper in business school at LSU. And he got the worst grade in class, which is funny because FedEx, Fred Smith, got a bad grade. Phil Knight, Nike, bad grade. Maybe we shouldn't have professors

judging business plants. Maybe this is kind of stupid, right? So Todd Graves goes, I bought, he goes to Office Depot, buys a briefcase, you know, like the little shitty one with like the 0-000, like I put the brief, so I buy a $99 suit. I buy a briefcase. I put the business school paper that I got a bad grade on in the, in the briefcase. I go down the bank, and they're like, dude, we're not, you're not in a position

to loan you money. And one of the reasons was you have no experience. They saw them you should work in the industry for 10 years, even though he'd already worked through it in college, but you want to just make chicken fingers where your industry is going in the opposite direction. And this is where I got really pissed off in the episode. I was induced into a state of rage.

They said, Todd, obviously this is not going to work out because look what McDonald's is doing. They're going after variety. There's salads. There's all these other stuff on the menu. There's milkshakes. You just have chicken fingers. Like, what is it wrong with you?

And my point was, like, that shame on that person at the bank because, again, nothing we're doing is new. Go back to 1948. look up this guy named Harry Snyder, who founded this company called In-N-N-Out. All Todd Graves did, if you look at what he did, he's like, oh, I'll just do In-N-Out but for Chicken Fingers.

It's the exact same story, except he started earlier and is now, I think when Harry Snyder passed away, he only had like 17 restaurants, and, you know, Todd Stone's Charger's Company. He's got 800 and something. And so, like, that part, like, really frustrated me because it's like, there's already historical equivalent

of this succeeding beyond, like, your wildest dreams. In-N-Out probably wasn't an LSU, the guy didn't know, maybe there was no internet back then, whatever the case is. Like, I'm not like being overly harsh on this. So then what's Todd left to do? You're not going to loan me any money. What do I do? I guess I'll just give up. That's what most people would just stop right there. Oh, okay, I'll work for 10 years. These guys are right. I'm some young, stupid college kid. They're in fancy suits and a nice office. Like, they know what they're talking about. History. Clearly you see is that that, in many cases, not the case. So then what do you do?

He's like, okay, uh, these oil companies hire boil makers. And, what happens is if a refinery goes down, every day that thing is down, that's very expensive for them. So boilermakers come through and they either update the equipment or fix the equipment. And so if you're willing to work 95-hour weeks in grotesque environments and physical labor, you can make so much money working 100 hours a week for like five weeks at a time. Then he meets it, so he makes a ton of money. He saves up a couple of tens of thousands of dollars doing that. Then one of the boilermakers named Wild Bill, who's also one of his investors, which I love, he got the money from saving money from boiler making.

Right? Then he got, then they tell him, hey, you can go up and do commercial fishing in Alaska. At the time Todd is doing this, I'm like much younger watching Deadliest Catch. He was on, like the show is being filmed when he's doing this. And so, yeah, you may fall overboard and die, but if you don't, you're going to make, you know, 50 grand in two months as a 20-year-old kid. And he lived in a tent. He lived in a tent. He ate nothing with ramen noodles. He risked his life, right, on the boat. He went to the boiler maker. Then he comes back.

The boiler makers give him a little bit money. Like, you keep talking about chicken fingers. You're fucking crazy. I will give you a little bit money. Then he had a bookie. He guess what? My bookie has a lot of cash. He's a cash business.

This guy does not have a bank account. So then he invested. And that's how he got the money to do his first store. And then from there, he's like, okay, well, how do I do? Store two, store three, store four. The first 28 stores after this

was finance in a very unique way, which he says, this worked out for me. Do not do what I'm about to tell you to do. They're all geographically concentrated in Louisiana, right? And so he would go and he said, he called him angel investors. They're not angel investors. So he goes, so I have two chickens finger stores. I'm going to open a third. I don't have any money, right? Banks, I still don't give me money, right? But these things

start cash flowing right away. So I go to you. I go, dude, give me 200 grand. I'll give you a one-page contract, personally liable, not the company, personally liable, and I will guarantee you a 15% return on this 200 grand. And you say, okay, you don't, you give me the 200 grand. I put the 200 grand, in the bank, the bank now will lend me, like, oh, you have $200,000 equity. I'll lend you $800,000 on top of that, whatever the number is on top of that. And I start to store. And what happens? Well, day one, there's going to be some people buying chicken. So cash flow happens right away. I pay my rent 30 days later. I pay payroll two weeks later, and I pay all my supplies, you know, net 30 or net 60. And so it works as long as people come in and start buying chicken fingers. And so he's like,

I was rolling. I was bawling out of control. He gets to all the way up to 28 stores doing this. Leverage to the... Yeah, exactly. Leverage to the hilts. And then Hurricane Katrina comes through and goes, whoop, there goes all of your restaurants.

And so then he's like, oh my God, I'm going to lose everything. And then what happens? He turns the pandemic. He does this, and this is what great entrepreneurs and investors do. They find opportunity and catastrophe, right? And so he's like, listen, guys,

we have to open up. One, you guys want a paycheck. right? Two, every single other restaurant in Louisiana's closed, so people need to eat. Three, if we don't, I'm done. There's nothing like, I need to make money. He winds up being the first restaurant to open after Hurricane Katrina. He had like 90 days, something like 60 to 90 days to himself. So what happens? You live in Louisiana. Maybe you never tried Raising Keynes. Guess what? Now you try it now. Oh, this is really good. And now you're a fan and you tell other people and it keeps compounding. Same thing with the pandemic. What happens? happen. All the restaurants are closed. But the government said food is essential, right, an essential business, but it has to be in the drive-thru. He went from doing something like, I don't know, let's say $2 billion or let's say a billion dollars a year in 2020 to like five and like 2024. Yeah. So taking, you know, something is terrible and turning it into an actual opportunity. So that's like pretty creative way to finance something. And his whole point is just like,

yeah, or you could go. How bad do you want it? How bad do you want it? And just think through what you're doing because his whole point where he saw a bunch of other people, they raised money, and we know people that this happened to, they don't have control. And his thing was, he was not optimizing for money. He was, if it's your dream, the first thing, the most important thing is survival. It's to make sure that they can't take your company away from you. Steve Jobs. Again, this, people, founders talk about this all now, like this is something new. Steve Jobs said in like the 80s, victory in our industry is spelled survival. you go back and talk about like people think like he was unbelievable he was he said his line

it says something like you pay attention to the nickels because the nickels turned into quarters and he says when and when he's like at the beginning of apple we paid attention to all of our costs we watched what we were doing we we we bought intelligently he would call up his suppliers and had all the hell out of them and obviously he's probably the best husband ever lived and then when he started next he's like oh i didn't do anymore because i'm rich and i don't need to and have raspero writing fat checks and i'm on i'm famous and he stopped doing it he's like we got to get back to the basics. We have to be very creative and very, pay attention to this. We started our conversation talking about focus. To conclude it, can you just define after all this

study what the word founder means to you? That's a good question. I don't know if I ever thought about it. The way, so my definition for entrepreneur has always been like somebody has ideas and does them. And I think the reason I'm interested, we have this thing called like, the shorthand called like founder mentality. And there's the reason I profile not only just like founders, but investors and athletes and filmmakers and people like Napoleon and Churchill is because what they did is like they saw something missing in the world. It could be leadership. And like you think about Winston Churchill or during World War II, it could be, you know, a nonprofit, it could be a product. It could be a company. It could be a service. And they're like, this thing should exist. And like, I'm going

to make it come to life. And the way I'm going to do this is like I'm going to direct my energy on creating this thing from nothing and making it real. And I still think like, again, you know this because like you have small kids and especially when they're really small. They have a different kind of intelligence where everything to them was a wonder. And so they're constantly like, why is that? Why is that? My son's in this age right now. It's just why, why, why, why, why? And sometimes it can get frustrating, but it's also like kind of brilliant. It's like on the midwit meme, it's like all the way to the left, but like really actually brilliant. And I don't think I ever get over the fact that you can have an idea that you don't even know where it comes from. Maybe it comes from your subconscious,

maybe it comes from a dream, maybe it comes from God, whatever you call it. And that idea just starts with an idea. It's like, oh. And then that goes from your mind into real life. And the version of this is like, it's a little disorienting to this day where I just sat in a room by myself reading and then I spoke into a microphone not knowing what was going to happen and like that made something real, that act of creation. And it's the thing I'm most proud of the fact that like I was talking to a friend of mine, we went on a walk right before I flew up here to meet you. And I was like, I think the thing I'm most proud of in my life is like I grinded for five and a half years with like no visible, like, progress, and I didn't give up.

And, like, I don't know if I'd do that today. I don't know if I would do that today. And I look back, I'm like, you were making a lot of stupid decisions along this way, but, like, that is a really good decision. That you just something told you, you can't explain, you couldn't predict, that, like, just keep going. Like, you will figure it out. You have the self-belief.

Keep going. It's a wonderful closing thought. So cool to think about everything you've done the last, I guess, eight years now, nine years now. I love how you close your thing by saying, you know, 400 books down, a thousand to go. There's always a thousand to go. Wonderful closing sentiment. Thanks for doing this with me. If you enjoyed this episode, visit join colossus.com, where you'll find every episode of this podcast complete with hand-edited transcripts. You can also subscribe to Colossus Review, our quarterly print, digital, and private audio publication featuring in-depth

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