The Startup Ideas Podcast - I Met Charlie Munger and Discovered How Billionaires Really Think

Episode Date: January 27, 2025

Meet David Senra, the guy who turned his obsession with reading about successful people into a million-dollar podcast. He's read over 300 books about the world's biggest entrepreneurs and shares all the best bits on his show, Founders. In this episode, David breaks down exactly how he finds golden nuggets of wisdom in these books, building deep relationships with founders, and insights from meetings with figures like Charlie Munger.Timestamps:00:00 - Intro and Founders Origin Story 07:10 - The importance of Naming and Branding14:56 - Energy Transfer in Relationships and Cities 19:51 - How to become World-Class25:03 - Startup Idea 1: Founders for Kids26:52 - The Value of Biographies31:28 - The Power of Long Attention Spans37:42 - You’re never too late39:32 - Innovative ways entrepreneurs monetized their business44:05 - Work - Life Balance Problems with High Achievers48:38 - Meeting with Charlie Munger55:22 - Monetization strategy and business model of Founders 1:01:28 - Biography recommendations and reading strategies1:08:55 - Career Advice from Charlie Munger1) On Building a World-Class Podcast:"Find what you're meant to do and let time carry the weight"David's moat: 375+ books read, connecting historical figures across episodes. To compete, you'd need to read all those books first.And he keeps going. 2) On Business Models:Fascinating approach to podcast monetization:• Only 2 long-term partners (2-year contracts)• Focus on brand partnerships vs CPM• Deep relationships with founders first• Think Nike/Tiger Woods, not traditional podcast ads3) On Learning from History:"Biographies are the closest thing to finding a cheat code in real life"Every great entrepreneur studied other great entrepreneurs:• Elon read Franklin, Ford, Tesla• Edison read every bio in Detroit library• Jobs studied Edwin Land4) On Work Ethic & Balance:Key insight: Almost every legendary figure sacrificed balance for greatnessOne exception: Ed Thorpe (Episode 222)• Built first quant hedge fund• Amazing father/husband• Stayed in shape• Lived a thrilling life5) On Memory & Knowledge:It's not natural talent - it's "maddening repetition"David's method:• Rereads highlights daily• Re-listens to old episodes• Updates/re-edits past content• Constantly connects historical figures6) STARTUP IDEA "Founders for Kids" - Comic book-style biographies teaching entrepreneurship to childrenWhy it works:• Proven model (worked for @SamParr)• Huge educational value• Underserved market• Scalable content7) Key Quote Worth Remembering:"Money comes naturally as a result of service" - Henry FordThe best entrepreneurs don't chase billions - they chase excellence in service.8) Final Wisdom:Want to be world-class? The competition isn't as fierce as you think.Most people:• Never try• Quit quickly• Lack patienceNotable Quotes:"I think podcasting is building relationships at scale." - David Senra"Money comes naturally as a result of service." - Henry Ford (quoted by David Senra)LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/BoringAds — ads agency that will build you profitable ad campaigns http://boringads.com/BoringMarketing — SEO agency and tools to get your organic customers http://boringmarketing.com/Startup Empire - a membership for builders who want to build cash-flowing businesses https://www.startupempire.coFIND ME ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/FIND DAVID ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://x.com/FoundersPodcastYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@founderspodcast4055Founders Podcast: https://www.founderspodcast.com/

The reason I run a solo history podcast is because I think the best podcaster of a live is Dan Carlin from Herger History. And so for like fucking years before I did my own podcast, I would fall asleep listening to Dan every night. Almost every night I still fall asleep listening to Dan Carlin. And so I just fell in love. I think there should be way more monologue podcast. I think it's a huge like opportunity. What do you love about Dan's podcast? Him.

Just him. His personality, how he talks, his stories. He's a phenomenal storyteller. Yeah. And I think somebody said something one time. One of the best tweets I ever read was that they said newspapers were a fad. The village storyteller is as old as language. And now the campfire is 6 billion people connected to the internet.

And for Dan, like his download numbers are nuts. He's only talked about it a few times. My guess would be his audience size, you know, for some of his bigger things were probably like 10 to 15 million. people, I would guess. Because I remember one time he said that he never mentioned downloads. He's like, my last episode got like 19 million downloads. I was like, that's insane. But then he said that there was a glitch and it was double counted.

So even if it's double count, it's nine million people. Totally. And yeah, I just think he's a phenomenal storyteller. And the way he does the podcast is crazy because I've listened to interviews on this where I thought, again, it sounds like it's, I thought it was scripted. And it's like, no, he's going to read 30 books, right? He's going to spend half a year doing that, and he's going to sit down and he records it little by little. So he'll record, you know, little segments over half a year, nine months, and then stitches them all together. And I was like, that's, that's incredible.

But the benefit he had is he was on, he was on the radio for like 20 years or 15 years, whatever it was, a long time before podcast. He started his podcast in 2005. Yeah. Yeah. Dude, I went to Podcamp, Boston, 2006, which was like an event for podcasters. Let me put it this way.

The people at that podcast, at that event, there was some, it was like fringe people. Like you were, to be a podcaster in 2005, 2006, you were fringe. I mean, yeah. How did you discover it that early? I went to go visit Boston. And I saw someone wearing a t-shirt that says,

that said, I pod, therefore I am. So I said, hey, where did you get that T-shirt? And they said, at Podcamp. And I said, well, it's Podcamp. And they said, have you ever heard of podcasts? And I was like, yeah, I have. Because I had been working on the iPod video, actually. So do you remember the iPod video?

No. The iPod came out. This is not that of an interesting story, but the iPod came out and Steve Jobs had this idea that wouldn't be cool if you can play videos on your iPod. So they built it, but they didn't have any content. And I was working on a website called startcooking.com,

which was animations for learning how to cook. So Star Cooking was a partner to the iPod video. Oh, wow. Yeah. Anyways. She had a front row of a seat. So I was like, bro, I know about a podcast. But you weren't listening to them.

No. I just knew that. What would you listen to back then? It'd be Dan Carlin. Yeah, exactly. One of the early ones I got into, too, were Bill Burr, the comedian. So he was so early that the way he recorded his podcast is you would call a phone number and you would leave a voicemail. And there's a service that changed the voicemail into an MP3 player.

They would take that MP3 and then upload it for you. So he would literally, his early podcast, He's just calling a number. He's just rambling into a voicemail and that's converted into a podcast. It's incredible. It is incredible. I really do feel it's an absolute miracle. And I still feel this to this day where it's like it doesn't matter what in the world that you're interested in.

You can find we were just talking about before we start recording about like what the hell do you do? Like you, I have two kids. Like what is schooling and what is education in the world of chat GPT? Like my 12 year old daughter is just using chat GPT for. everything and the school is just acting like this doesn't exist. And the idea is like what I try to teach her is like obviously like she's kind of forced to listen to podcasts in the car and audiobooks. And my thing with her is like I don't care what you're interested in. It's like anything you're interested in, just search the directory. You're going to find some absolute

nut that is dedicated like their entire lives to teaching about whatever subject matter you're into. And they've done it in many cases for, you know, a decade, half a decade. There's hundreds of hours you can consume all on demand and you can go as deep as you want. Like that is a miracle. Like I remember my mom taking me and dropping me off at the public library when I was a kid because we didn't have any money. I remember going to Barnes and Nobles and sitting there because they would let you read. It's like, you know, hard it was to get information as like some young, you know, smart kid, which, you know, my daughter definitely is.

It's just like you don't even know what you have that's in front of you. And then if you podcast isn't the way you learn, that's fine. Read. If reading is not the way you learn. watch videos. It's like there's world class education everywhere. It's just absolutely crazy. So yeah,

I still to this day don't ever like take it for granted. And I still can't believe that anybody, like no one gave you permission to start this podcast. It's like, I'm going to start it one day. You're going to upload it. And then people all over the world get to enjoy it. That's fucking crazy.

One of the, we were talking before about, you know, I started this podcast with Sahel Bloom. And it was- I love Sahel. He's a friend of mine. Yeah, he's awesome.

I see him every time he comes to Miami. And he, We named it where it happens. Horrible name, by the way. Horrible name because I call it a tofu name. Why? What's a tofu name? Tofu name is quick break in the pod

to tell you a little bit about startup empire. So startup empire is my private membership where it's a bunch of people like me, like you, who want to build out their startup ideas. Now they're looking for content to help accelerate that. They're looking for potential co-fellate. They're looking for tutorials from people like me to come in and tell them, how do you do email marketing? How do you build an audience? How do you go viral on Twitter? All these different things.

That's exactly what startup empire is. And it's for people who want to start a startup but are looking for ideas or it's for people who have a startup, but just they're not seeing the traction that they need. So you can check out the link to startup empire.com in the description. Like tofu doesn't really have a taste that takes on the sauce of whatever it is. You know, tofu name is something that isn't memorable in people's brains. Like it's just, but, you know, when you're talking about your daughter, how, you know, go search for, you know, if she's into design. Yeah. Or she's into animation.

She can just go search animation. So I renamed this podcast to the startup ideas podcast. The thesis was that people are searching for startup ideas. Since doing that, the pod has, like, I think like 90 days after I renamed it, I think the pod grew like 3x. I think I read every single biography I can find on Larry Ellison, and I find him of infinitely fascinating person. In fact, a friend of mine was at dinner with Elon Musk a few months ago in Palm Beach right before the election.

And everybody at dinner, you can imagine, was just lighting Elon up with questions. And he was asked, like, who's his mentor? who he turns to it for advice. And he's like, the person I ask, I admire the most, he used different words. He's like, Larry Ellison. He's just like, he's like, Larry Ellis is fucking awesome. I don't know. Did you see the leaked text messages that between Larry Ellison and Elon that came out recently?

I saw it, but I didn't go deep in it. So I didn't either. I just saw one that was hilarious where Elon texts him. He's like, hey, are you in for, for, I'm raising money to buy Twitter. Are you in? He's like, yeah, of course. He's like, I'm not going to hold you to anything, Larry, but like, do you know the amount? And he's like, I don't know, a billion, whatever you.

want. And Elon's like, I appreciate it, but like, I think you should at least do $2 billion. And I think Larry, you respond, okay, it's exciting, whatever. And it's like the thumbs up emoji. It's like, I'm just going to raise $2 billion from a friend of mine through text message. Which, by the way, sorry to interrupt. The thumbs up emoji is the official emoji of dads. Yeah. I use it all time. You know? I don't know what it is about dads, but it's like you can write to your dad, I love you. Yeah. And they'll respond with a thumbs up. Or like, hey, you know, I think that there's, you know, someone's robbing my house. And it's like, thumbs up. Larry Allison, hell yeah.

So in one of Larry's biographies, he talks about the fact that he thinks, especially for technology companies and names are actually really important. And I always think about this. So it was funny, you know, because I knew that the podcast is about startup ideas. And so I was talking to a friend on my drive over here. I was like, well, it's, I'm, it's very nice for Greg to invite me on. My startup idea is like whatever you're doing, if you love it, just do it until you die. So like, don't start anything new. Just like keep doing what you're doing forever.

Like if you think about the people I study, it's like they just find something and they usually do it for decades. But I do think this startup idea I would have is like around podcasts. Like I think a lot about like the open space and podcasting. My friend Eric Glyman, who's the co-founder and CEO of Ramp, I just gave him this book that a friend of mine gave me. I gave me extra copies for it. It's the guy that, it's the guy that did like, what's the chicken company? It's like Tyson Chicken. I'm going to pull up this excerpt because I think it's really important.

Jamie, pull up. Yeah, do we have, do we have a Jamie here? There's a, I'll find out the exact excerpt. And I'm just going to read this to you. Because I think it's a good way to find startup ideas because it's like, what do you think about when as soon as your eyes open and what are you thinking about before you go to bed? The name of the book is called Tough Man Tender Tender Chicken. Can you tell me the company that he started?

Tough Man Tender Chicken is the book. So it's Purdue? Okay. So there's a great line that my friend Eric tweeted out. I want to read to you real quick. And they wanted to start a line, they want to start selling hot dogs. And so he's asked, he's like, Frank, how's the chicken hot dog thing going? And he goes, it's too early to tell.

The guy goes, what do you mean? He goes, I haven't been able to find my Mr. Hot Dog. And he goes, what do you mean you're Mr. Hot Dog? And this guy that's writing the book, Tough Man, Tender Chicken, Response. He goes, there's a guy who gets to bed thinking about chicken hot dogs. And then the first thing he thinks of when he wakes up is chicken hot dogs. And so his whole point is like, you have to find your chicken hot dog, your hot dog guy, right? And so for my version, it's like podcasts.

And so when I think of like new podcasts to start, one, I actually think you should spend a lot of time based on the story you just said, thinking about the goddamn name, right? I lucked into founders. I think it's a very good name. I think you're not going to click on founders like, I wonder what this is about. You have an idea what it's about. And then the first five words in the description is gives you the value proposition, which is learned from history's greatest entrepreneur. The two other names that I heard that I think are even better than that, are Ben Wilson's How to Take Over the World, right?

The value prop is in the title. And then Patrick O'Shaughnessy's invest like the best. And I think naming, like, think about what you want the podcast to be, but also thinking about the name is really, really important because you're just infinitely scrolling. And I think there's like a lot of, like, if you think about how much information that we're all reading or consuming a different, different on a daily basis, like how much time you're giving into every single tweet or every single video, it's like seconds.

And so the name has to like jump out at you where it's like starting. up ideas. I wonder what that's about. I fucking know what's about. It's about startup ideas, how to find them, to generate them, to maybe hear another guest sharing one that you could possibly do. So I actually think that's really smart. The way people think is they bucket people, ideas, businesses, right? So when you just got to dumb it down, right? So I think naming comes, the best names with respect to podcasting, I think has to dumb it down. I'm a big believer in that right now. Yeah. And the ones that we were talking about earlier, how I don't think about it's a way to be your authentic self. I think it's a way to be your authentic self. I think it's

podcasting is building relationships at scale. And I think there's something to the fact that, you know, most of the biggest podcast in the world, they don't have a name other than the person's name. Like that's a lot harder to grow, especially if you're not famous or if you're not known. But once you have that audience, it's like they're really attached to you. I remember I had dinner with Daniel Act, founder of Spotify, who's been like, a massive supporter and absolutely love. And we were talking about, it was like over a four-hour conversation was telling me the history of Spotify.

Daniel's fucking brilliant, as you can imagine. Super polite, but also like you could tell that he's really intense. And he was talking about how, one of the most stressful times of building Spotify is when, yeah, that controversy, you know, they just signed Rogan to this massive deal. He's making this huge bet on podcasting. And there's this huge cancellation campaign that happens in Rogan's for a few weeks. And Daniel's like, you know, very stressed about this. And he's like, and then his subscriber count over the few weeks went up.

He added two million new subscribers. And I was like, of course that happened. Because if you listen to Rogan or anybody else and you've heard him talk for a thousand. In his case, I bet you he's a large percentage of his fans that heard him speak for over a thousand hours. There's nothing that a two-minute clip on the mainstream media. can tell you about the guy that you've heard talk for a thousand hours. There's no form of education that could take place. You know who he is because you've heard him speak for so long.

So I think there's actually this, I don't think it was intentional, but this wisdom of just naming these shows after yourself. Again, accruing that audience is a lot harder. But once you get it, it's like they're there for you for, you know, for a very long time, if not forever. What else have you learned from Daniel Eck? Because I feel like, you know, he's a legend, no question. but maybe it's in my bubble.

I don't see him at the limelight very much. I talked about this where it's like, it's very bizarre. Like, okay, I'm almost at Shopify. They always do the joke that Spotify and Shopify and then they kind of look alike. You have a founder and CEO.

He's been running the company for 18 years, right? It's worth over $100 billion. He's only 41 or something like that. And yet he's still somehow underrated. I just think every single person. So I get to meet a lot of like remarkable people as a result of the podcast. And almost all of them, like it's not the same personality type, but it's the same kind of archetype over and over again.

They're just like unbelievably intense and dedicated to their work. And so that's it. I just left the conversation which is like, I thought I was pretty intense and I thought I was working a lot. I'm like, he makes me look like nothing. So it's like, I just left there. It's like with a lot of motivation. Right before we started recording, you had another guest here that was really big on Tony Robbins and like spending a lot of money to spend time with him.

And I know some people. $250,000 per year. Well, like, I know some people could be like, oh, that's bullshit or whatever the case is. But this idea, I don't think, I think, and the way somebody makes you feel and the energy transfer that occurs between two people is like actually underrated. and this isn't some like willy-foo-foo nonsense shit. You go back and read old biographies of Warren Buffett and way before he was known. There was this thing where there would be like the small groups

that gets together every year. And I remember in one of the books, there was this guy's wife that was like bitching at him because he had spent like $1,500 to travel to like Omaha. This is probably in the 70s or something like a long time ago. So even $1,500, even a lot more money even back then. And his wife's like, why are you spending all this money? And his response was great.

He goes, because he gives. me energy. And again, like, I think that is a very real thing. Our friend, our mutual friend, George Mack has this idea of, he calls it sofa friends and treadmill friends. He's like, pay attention to the energy that you get when you're in active with your friends. Some people are like, oh my God, go home. You need to like lay into the sofa and just like recover. And other people, you want to go home and you want to run on the treadmill. You want to like run through walls. And I think being around like a Warren Buffett, Tony Robbins, I felt that way when I had dinner with Daniel. I feel that way when I get to meet a lot of these people. It's like, oh,

there's like levels to this. And I have. have so much more to learn and so much more room for improvement. And it just fucking excited me. I think the same is true, sofa versus treadmill with respect to cities. Right? Like there's some cities, New York City, for example, treadmill city. Definition of treadmill city. And some cities that are sofa cities or towns. Yeah. I would get out of sofa towns as much as possible. I almost move. I mean, I think Miami Beach to some degree is a is a sofa town. Especially because I don't party. Like, It's like I don't want to go out. Like I just want to work.

I want to spend time. I want to take care of my health, spend time my family, and work. That's all I'm interested in. And I almost left before COVID. And then after COVID, we had a huge influx of like way more talented people. A lot of them have since returned. They went back to L.A. or San Francisco or New York. But the people that stayed were good enough for the network.

It's like, oh, I'd stay here just for the network alone. But I, you know, go to New York every month. I spend a lot of time in California. I would, I just talked to, there's this really talented guy. Do you know Blake Robbins? Yeah. He was at benchmark. Totally.

He's really good at like finding, he's like obscure, like, people on the internet. And he put me and my friend Patrick onto this guy named Maxim. And I think he found him when he only had like a couple thousand followers or something like that. Maxim now is like a million followers. It's by Maximize on. Yeah, I follow him. Yeah, he's the best. I got to spend time with him in New York City because he's,

said the only podcast he listened to is founders. And so if you look at Maximus videos, a lot of them are ideas from the podcast. I was like, dude, can you make some videos for me, please? Seriously. He's going to. But he's like, like, it's a, you can look at his working like, this guy's a fucking world class talent. And we wind up spending a few hours together in New York.

And he was thinking about, he's like, should I move from England? And I was like, how old are you? He's like, 23. You have any kids? No. You're married? He's like, no. I go, you better get your ass over here immediately.

Like absolutely. To be super talented, 23 years old, no attachments. I even told him like, hey, like, I will guarantee you a contract for two years to cover your living expenses if you just make videos for us and you want to build your own company or whatever cases. Like, don't worry about that. And I don't even think he needs to do that because I think his side business is successful enough that he doesn't need that. But for that, it's like no brainer, dude. Okay, but, you know, he's world class of what he does, no question. Yeah.

For someone who wants to be world class, who has the ambition to be something. someone like that, should they, and they're 23 years old. I would still move. Now, that's different from what I did. I literally just like lock myself in a room. Like, you know the Kanye line where it's like, travel yourself in this, making five beats a day for three summers. Like that is how you get good at anything.

This is, so in the background, I'm obviously kind of a psycho where in the background during work, I just play the last dance that Michael Jordan documentary over and over again. So, like, my wife walked, and then, like, sometimes I'll switch it up. It'll be, like, Defiant Ones is another really great documentary because you just see the work ethic of, like, a Jimmy Avine, of a Dr. Dre, of a Bruce Springsteen, of anybody that's good at anything. It just takes so much time. And that's why, like, I always say if you want to be world-class anything,

like you really don't have that much competition. Like, the very top, you know, half of a percentile, you know, is very competitive. But the average person on the streets is never even going to. attempt it. And even if they do attempt, they quit at everything. Where like Maxim had, he had his huge growth. He's like, no matter what, I have to make a video a day. And he just made a video about the fact that he made a video a day. And he shows his follower account and all the crazy shit that happened to him when he just committed to the daily practice of getting better at his craft. So even for him, even if before he was good, I would still get around and try to get access to these people. And if you can't access to him. So like I started the very first episode of founders in September.

December 2016. It was Ashley Vance's book on Elon Musk. It was the very first one. And part of that was because I was watching this, this guy named Kevin Rose. You remember Dave? Yeah, he's been on the pod. Oh, has he? Okay.

So Kevin Rose had like one of this world class video podcast in 2012 called Foundation. Yeah. Like the quality of the shoot was incredible. The guests were fucking incredible. I thought he was really good at it.

And he interviews Elon when they're on the Tesla. They're at Tesla. I think the only Tesla on the market, they stopped making the roadster. And I think they just started producing the Model S. I want to get a little bit of context. So he, it wasn't just exceptional quality. It was exceptional quality when the quality was low.

Was non-existent? Non-existent. So I remember watching some of those first episodes And being like This is better This is the best content I've ever seen It was fucking incredible Even the website

Because I lived on YouTube I don't even know if he was uploading YouTube He had to be uploading YouTube But like the website It was like foundation dot KR or something It was like It was like the fucking website was incredible I wonder like

The alternate reality where he never stopped Kept doing it You know like It's just he'd have a decade of practice before, not realizing how valuable great podcasts can be, you know? It's interesting because now he's back to podcasting.

Yeah, but you jumped around a lot, which is like podcast compound. You know what I mean? Like if you look at, yeah, go ahead. No, it just goes back to like the bucketing thing, right? Like people, the new generation doesn't bucket Kevin Rose is as a podcaster. Yeah. But if he kept going, they would have.

So I think there's another conversation we can have. too about one of the most important ideas I've come across in the books is like the importance of being easy to interface with, which I think Steve Jobs is world class at. Oh, they're all really good at, but he was probably the best there was. But the reason I started with the Ashley Vance biography of Elon, this goes back to Maxim or any really talented person that's got to figure out what to do is like, if you can't act, if you can't move to a world class city, you don't have any money or you don't have a network. It's like, Kevin asked fucking Elon. He's just like, you moved from Canada. You didn't know anybody in California. Like, who was your mentor? He's

like, I didn't have a. mentor. He goes, I read, he's like, did you read business books, telling how to build your fucking first company? He's like, no, I don't read business books. I read biographies and this what Elon says. I read biographies and autobiographies, I think they're helpful. And he goes on on a list, you know, Ben Franklin, every single person ever built the rocket, Henry Ford, Nicoltecels, all these other people. And I was like, and he goes, I think that's a way to find mentors in historical context. That's the sentence that Elon said. I was like, oh, that's a really good idea. And I was like, I should read more biographies. And so I

start reading biographers. These things are pretty fucking great. They're very useful. You can download Toby Lucay has this great line where he says that biographies are books in general are the closest thing you'll come to finding a cheat code in real life because you can download the entire learnings of somebody's, you know, multi-decade long career in a few hours. That's exactly what Elon was doing. And then when you read more biographies, you realize that every person that lived a life so remarkable, somebody wrote a book about them, all read biographies. It's like this weird ongoing chain of, hey, let's use learning from history as a form of leverage.

find ideas from somebody else's experience that I can use in my life to kind of get me to where I want to go. So, yeah, that's what I would do. It's like if I was a young kid, I tell us to my own daughter. My son's too young for this. It's just like, I buy,

I probably bought her, I don't fucking know, 30, 40 of these little young biographies. It's called Little People Big Dreams. They're in every single bookstore that I've ever gone into. And it's, you know, every single person, Taylor Swift, Coco Chanel, Walt Disney, everybody.

And it's a biography that now she's getting a little too old for them. But when she was young, I was just having her read all these biographies. Like, you could do whatever you want to do. Start up idea for you. Well, it's funny. Founders for kids. So we talked about Sam Porier before. That's literally like the reason I knew he would text back fast is because we're working on a project for founders for kids.

It's actually going to be like more like comic book-esque because Sam's life was changed because when he was a young boy, his dad would read him like kid version of the biographies about great Frenchmen. And they were very specific. They had to be great people. I'm not surprised. Why am I not surprised? That were that were either living in France or living in Montreal, which I thought was funny. And it inspired him to become an entrepreneur and then led him to steal fellowship.

And, you know, kind of can change the trajectory of a young kid's life. And I was like, I don't know if it's probably a shit business, but it's a great service to the world. It would be really cool. So the first one we're working on, we'll see if it's good, is a kid's version of Rockefeller's biography. I'm surprised it's not a kid's version of Selendion,

but I'm sure that's coming up soon. Yeah, you've got to figure out who else is we're going to do. No, no one's Sam would probably be Napoleon. That's true. Do you want to talk podcast, startup ideas? I actually, now I just feel like I'm not reading enough biographies. Like how many... Probably not.

How many biographies should I be reading on a yearly basis? It's many as you can. Like, I don't know what your day-to-day life is. Do you like audiobooks? How do you like to read? I'm an audiobook guy. Yeah, so I feel like there's no reason you can't read, listen to one audiobook a week. By the way, I made a controversial tweet that got a lot of people angry.

I said, what did I say? Audiobooks not reading? What did I say, Jordan? Do you remember? Jamie. I know. I said basically... The worst form of reading is e-books.

I agree with that. And then in a reply, I was like, for me, the best thing is physical books is the best, followed by audio books, followed by e-books. Yeah, I have a irrational love affair with physical books. My workflow for the podcast is literally twice as long because I insist on reading physical books. than if I read like Kindle versions. Also, I read a lot of old books that there are no fucking audio boulder.

There is nothing besides the physical book. There's no Kindle. There's no audio. Nothing. But it's the way of reading I fell in love with. And like for me, I actually think there's an important part where like I feel we live in a society

where it's like over, everything is like over optimized and like way too much prioritization spent on like efficiency and like speeding things up. We actually think spending longer with the material makes my output. put better. Like instead of, I'm not trying to take what's going to take me 40 hours, usually for

every one hour of audio that I produce, it takes about 40 hours of reading and research. People are like, well, you can, you can do all those other stuff and make it to 20. It's like, yeah, but then it'll be more than half worse because it's the fact that I spend so much time with the material that then I can then turn around and teach it or explain it in an useful way to somebody else. So I have this line that I stole from Jerry Seinfeld that the hard way is the right way. And so I use that for like, you know, I sit there when you look at how I go through these books, looks like I'm doing goddamn arts and crafts. Like I sit down with a pen, a ruler, a posted note, scissors.

Like I'm literally doing like an art project into these books. But I think forcing myself to slow down and spend more time with the material and then doing that every day for eight years actually makes that that compounds. And like doing it, you don't see what you miss out by taking like the shorter route. And I think actually taking like a longer time. but I'm one of these people which is like, I have, you know,

I think 600 physical books in my house, but I also have like 300 on the Kindle. Like I'll read whatever. I don't care. I actually told another idea from Elon where he said that

he read entire books because he traveled so much on the Kindle app on the iPhone. I was like, that can't work. And I started using it. I was like, that shit works.

Like, especially when you're traveling, it's like so much easier than carrying a book with you or whatever. But I also think that I'm one of the rare people think audio, listening to audio book is reading. People are like,

it's not reading. It's like, It is. It's the same thing. It's getting the ideas from the book into your head. I don't care how you do it. But yeah, I mean, if you can't do a biography a week, do one a month. Like, it depends on what your schedule is and what, like, what you have going on.

But think about it. It's like the average person, young person, especially for it, like, all the people in the room, you guys probably are exercising five hours a week, even if it's like walking, running, lifting weights, whatever you're doing. Okay, five hours of audiobook, 20 hours. There's two books a month right there. And then 24 this year, you know, you just, 48 the next year. Go back and also I think it's smart a day to go back and like relisten and reread

things. Especially like you we forget that we forget. And so like I'll go and I, there's some books. James Dyson's autobiography is a great example. I've read it four times. It's episode 25, 200, 200, 205 and 300. And when you say Reddit, you mean physical book? Yes. Yeah. Reddit. And then every time I'm like, I forgot that part or like something has happened in my life or I learned something else that then changes the meaning are my interpretation of the words on the page. So I'm a huge proponent of that. But yeah, I think everybody, like I am an evangelist for reading biographies. I just think it's so fucking smart.

And it sounds like physical books are preferred. So have you ever seen what my library looks like? No, let me see. Let me see it. So Patrick tweeted that out. It's in order by episode number starting in the top left-hand corner. So everywhere where my hand is, before that, that I've read for the podcast, everything after that is yet to be read.

But it's not like the unread books are not in order. I don't know what I'm going to read next week until I just like pick it up that week. I went for dinner recently, well, very well-known entrepreneur. And we were talking about reading books. And he was saying, and this is a common, very, very common feedback about reading physical books. I can't, I don't have the attention span. Yeah. what advice do you have for for people who want to get into physical books but you know it's hard for

them to to focus and they don't have you know it sounds like this is you have an innate ability and you just kind of love these books like what you have what advice do you have for people who aren't born with this i don't i don't know because like i i didn't understand that i just have like a shockingly long attention span and i think having a long attention span is going to get more valuable in the world because I think, I do think because of the tools we use every day, it's like shrinking. There's a great line that Charlie Munger said where he's just like, I didn't succeed because of intelligence, succeeded because I had a long attention span. And like I'm working on an episode on Jensen Wong right now.

And what's remarkable is like this guy's been in love with Navidia and building Navidia and running Navidia for three decades. And he's like more interested in it today than he's ever been. It's like that's the definition of the long attention span. I get invited sometimes to give these talks at these conferences. And most of them in fact, especially you have to travel

because I have young kids. I was like, no. Like, I don't care what the price is. Like, it's like missing one day of my four-year-old's life right now is like missing like 100 days,

you know, because these early years are so important. So I'm very like hesitant to do that. But I've done a few locally there in Miami. I'm like, oh, fuck it. I can just like drive over here. I'll do it for free.

I don't even care. And one of the funny ones was, it was a conference run by a friend of mine who I really like, and it's for post-exit founders. And essentially my talk was just like when people walk up to me or text me or call me, like I sold my company. I always say the same thing. I'm like, sorry to hear that.

Like your goal, especially if it's not your life's work, right, I think your goal in life is to find what you are unique. created to do. And it should be an active service for other human beings. One of my favorite lines from the history of entrepreneurship comes from Henry Ford, where he said money comes naturally as a result of service. What I can't stand is entrepreneurs that are like, I get emails are like,

hey, I want to build like a $100 billion company. There's like some kind of fucking number attached. And then I'll ask them, like, who are your entrepreneur heroes? And they're like, Steve Jobs or whatever. It's like, you think Steve Jobs started Apple because he thought he's going to build $3 trillion company? It's like your, your motivation's wrong for this. And so what I think is happening is like people have much shorter attention spans.

And you're also reflecting that in the fact that there is now such thing as an entrepreneurial industry, which did not exist when we were younger, right? This is something that's relatively new. Most of is funded obviously. Like you look at the incentive structure in all forms of media. Most of it's funded from VC. Like if you think about all the media that founders are consuming, it's like created by and funded by VCs. It's really weird. It's fucking weird to me.

And so, like, I don't have advice other than if you have a short attention span that probably is a good indicator that you're not, you haven't found what you should be working on. Because I can sit there and read a fascinating, like I just told you I finished reading before we started recording. Maybe I didn't, maybe I was talking about on the phone on the way over. No, I think I said this to you. I just finished reading. There's a secret biography written by Michael Moritz of Don Valentine that's passed around

in Sequoia and Sequoia founders have it too. I'll tell you, it's only, like, I sat there and read the whole fucking thing. Like, I had to, it was so entertaining. I didn't want to go to sleep. I wasn't like, oh, let me read one page. Let me go scroll Twitter. Let me read one page. Go to scroll TikTok.

It's like, this shit is fucking incredible. And I think that, you know, a lot of the best founders, like, I don't think Steve Jobs, when he was working an Apple, it's, like, you know, worried about what else was going on other than what he was working on an Apple. So I think the anecdote to a short attention span is like, literally find like taking some time to yourself and figuring out like what is authentic to you what is natural to you what are you actually interested in and trying to do munger's advice is like what do you intensely interested in and then do that for money and at the beginning you might not

make any money but anything that you're interested in there's probably millions of people that are interested in that as well like I remember when I first started the podcast people are like you can't do an entrepreneurship podcast this is 2016 first they said it's too late to do a podcast which is fucking hilarious and so I was like I don't think that's true. They're like, why? I go, there's 750,000 podcasts in the Apple directory right now. 250,000 of them are active. Humans quit at everything all the time. And even you fast forward to now. I'm close to the human lab guys. They just sent me data. Even now,

that's what, eight years later, there's like only like 33,000, 330,000 podcasts that have uploaded a new episode in the last month. That is tiny. But back then, they're like, one, it's too late. You've already missed the boat. Two, entrepreneurship is a niche subject. And I'm like, that just doesn't make any sense to me. I go, how many people own businesses, right? There's a business owner to me, entrepreneur, like business owners. So my idea was like how many people own a business, speak English, and are connected to the internet?

And you run the numbers. It's like 140 million people. Like you grab less than 1% of them and you have a phenomenally successful business. Like, this is not a niche subject. And now it turns out, like if you look at what 11 Labs is doing, what Spotify is doing, what YouTube's doing, my calculation was way off because it's not just English speaking people. At the platform level, they're going to, you're going to be in Brazil, you're going to love founders. It's going to know that you speak Portuguese and you're going to hear me speaking fucking Portuguese. Yeah, so I don't have a good answer other than like find something where you don't have an attention, a short attention span.

You ever seen a fucking kid play video games? Do they do it for two minutes and put it down? No, they play forever. They just haven't found something they're actually interested in. 100%. It reminds me the too late piece is a really, really big insight.

I remember in 2000, it must have been 2005, 2006. I went to my first first and last actually ever Fish Show, the band. Dude, no, it almost fit out on. I thought it was actually like fishing. No, no.

Fish is a wild. They're a fascinating business story too. Fascinating business, but I show up and I get to the campsite because that's how it works. You know, you don't just get a hotel or something. There's a campsite near the events in Burlington, Vermont, around there. And I meet this woman, you know, she's like, hey, you're here for the fish show. And she slaps my hand. I said, yeah. She goes, well, it's too late. And I was like, what do you mean? She's like,

you should have come in 98. Fish is like over. You missed the good years. It's done. And I remember thinking myself, I actually felt bad. Like here I am. I traveled the distance, spent all this money. I convinced my friend to come with me. And I'm seeing like a diluted version of this band. This sucks. Go to the show. I had an incredible time. My friend had an incredible time. And the next day, I run into the same lady. What did you think of the show?

Wasn't it amazing? She's like, ah, no. It was horrible. And fast forward to, like, today. Now I hear stories that, like, that era of, like, the early to mid-2000s in Fish was, like, the best possible era. I'm sure that lady today was, like, that show was amazing. I think there's an interesting, the fish story,

brought something else to mine where I'm always interested in, especially for the people that build businesses that are essentially a complete opposite of the way everybody else in their industry does. I think there's like a lot of insight there. There's two examples.

I remember reading, there was this blog that was run by this guy in San Francisco who actually just started following on Twitter. Turns out he listens to founders. It's called Prisonomics. Do you remember this? Sounds familiar. They would publish their blog in a book.

And one of the blogs they would do is they'd find these like weird, you know, things about economics. And one was the economics of fish, where it's like they don't have any top 10 hits. You know, they make almost, I think they gave away a lot of their music for free before people were doing that. Yet they were making like 140 million a year in tour revenue at like a decent margin, like unbelievable amount of money. And so I just did an episode last year, maybe a year and a half ago on Jimmy Buffett. And I think it's right after he died.

And the reason I had the idea to do that is because if you look, there's like these lists. make of, you know, top wealthiest people in whatever industry. And I remember looking one time at the top wealthiest, uh, musicians. It's everybody you would expect, right? Like, you know everybody in the list. And then you get down here, it's like number seven. It's like, Jimmy Buff is like, what the fuck? It's like not like Rihanna has hits, you know, you two or whoever, like all these people,

Bruce Springsteen, like, it makes perfect sense why they're on this list. How the hell did Jimmy Buffet get on the list? So that made it be like really fascinating. is a very similar situation to fish where it's like essentially he started like what I would consider like a traveling cult and the way he was able to compound his he made his money on tour right so if you're on tour it doesn't matter what what what what what what where you chart on the billboard just matters like when you come to Austin Texas in May every year can you sell the amount of ticket you want and then he was doing it so long that his audience would compound so you'd be going there now and then 10 years from now you're bringing your 10 year old business. you. And then your 10 year old is bringing, you know, now your 10 year old's 25 and going without you or whatever the case is. And there was also a very fascinating way that he'd make money is essentially he made the vast majority of his money through licensing. Right. And so as his audience age, and they were, you know, they were just like him. He was in the keys. He liked to drink all the time.

They like to party. They don't like to work. Except he had a fierce work ethic, right? So everybody else in his audience didn't like to work. He worked all the time. And so he winds up, making like seven, I forgot the numbers that are in the podcast. It's like, you fast forward 15, 20 years. Again, don't, you know, find what you're meant to do. And then just time carries most of the weight. Like, do not interrupt the compounding. Time carries most of the weight.

That's so important. And all these entrepreneurs are jumping around are just missing all the monies in the future. So you fast forward 15, 20 years. He's making like 75 million a year in his pocket just from the license agreements, right? Not including the equity value. So when he passed away, he gave the equity head and his company to his wife, I think it was like another $1.7 billion. There's 1.7 billion equity, but the guy's been pocketing 50 million plus year after year for

decade and a half. And I just love that idea. It's like, he saw what everybody else said. He's like, well, I can't make money like Bono. I can't make money like Bruce Springsteen. I can't make money like Rihanna. I can do it my way. There's like, the biggest thing is like there's, it's not, it's never like what you do.

It's how you do it. Like you could find people that make a ton of money in music, ton of money in podcasting, a ton of money in media, ton of money in clothing. a ton of money in clothing, whatever it is, ton of money, realtors. There's like all these different ways

to make money. It's like not what you do. It's how you do it. And I'm fascinated by the people that are just like, find their own weird route in and just, again,

compound it for decades like he did. It's a fascinating story. And the idea of fish, I read that blog post probably when you went to that fucking show, like 2005. We're talking about 20 years later. Are they still touring?

They're still touring. Oh my God. Yeah. So like how much money have they made since then? They've probably been 24. what, 40 years. I just watched the Defiant ones, which is one of my, arguing my all-time favorite documentary.

And there's footage in there. I was thinking about this. And I might do an episode of Bruce Springsteen because of that. And they're showing footage when he's 1975, he's doing Born to Run. And he has this crazy work ethic that he's still known to this day. And I'm like, wait a minute, 75. Like, I'm bad at math. But I think that's like 50 years ago.

It's like the guy just sold 80,000 tickets in Italy like a few weeks ago. a few months ago. It's incredible. It's incredible. All these people that you study, you know, all these people you've mentioned, like Elon Musk and Bezos and Bruce Springsteen, all these people,

they have one thing in common. I think they have extremely high work ethic. And I'm noticing, even on your can, it says, discipline equals freedom. Right? Yeah. When I meet a lot of these people,

and I learn about their work ethic, I find that they have very successful businesses, but very unsuccessful personal lives. You know, how do you think about the balance between, you know, discipline equals freedom and work ethic and, you know, having a balanced life? Yeah, I mean, they're not going to write, they don't write biographies that people have balanced life.

So it was like, there is a selection bias here. So I can tell you like my stated preference. And then if you look at like my revealed preference, it's probably different. So I would always said like in many cases the people I read about it's like cautionary tales. Because like exactly what you said. They pursue professional achievement to the detriment of every single thing else. Health, family, spouses, kids, friendships. Like it can get pretty crazy.

And there's one guy named Ed Thorpe. It's episode 222 of founders. And he's to me the one that came the closest to like mass. her life. So I think the subtitle of that episode is like my personal blueprint because he made like he, first of all, lived a remarkable life. He's still alive to this day. He's in like 91 in phenomenal shape, still super intelligent. He started the first quantitative hedge fund, built the world's first wearable computer with Claude Shannon. You know, you ever played Blackjack? Yeah. You know how counting cards works? I mean, I don't count cards. No, but I know how it works.

That system was invented by Ed Thorpe in the 60s, and then he wrote a book about the system called Beat the Dealer. He sold millions of copies. He was the first LPN Citadel. A 19-year-old Ken Griffin comes to Ed Dorp's house. After Ed closed his hedge fund, gives him all the files. It's like, this is what we were doing. And then at the beginning of Citadel, Ken runs that playbook.

Remarkable story. Wends up having dinner with a 37-year-old Warren Buffett. They walk outside the car. He tells his wife, hey, I think that guy's going to be the richest person in the world one day. winds up starting to acquire Berkshire Hathaway stock at like $600 a share or something back then. So like phenomenal shape,

great father, his kids still love him to this day. His wife passed away from cancer like 10 years ago. They were happily married forever. Once he had more money he could spend, he stopped trading money for time, even though he was really good at making money. He's like,

what the hell am I going to do with it anyways? Very rare to have like that pullback and that discipline to have it. So if you look at that, it's like he had a balance of work that just filled him intellectually stimulating, he enjoyed it, made his unborn, great-grandkids, rich, phenomenal husband, phenomenal father,

top 1% in physical shape, and also fucking had fun and lived an adventure. In fact, Nassim Teleb wrote the forward of that book, and they said that his autobiography reads like a thriller because it does. It's like, that guy had an incredible life story. So that is my stated preference. If you look at how I spend my time,

it's like almost all on the podcast. My kids were just on winter break, right? And I was like, oh, they're not in school. I'm going to spend a ton of time with them. And I got to last night was the last night of the break. And I was like, oh, I fucked this up. Like I spent, we went on walks, took it to the park, went out to eat, did all this other stuff, went to the beach. But I did not spend nearly.

It's been half the time I thought I was going to spend with them. So, yeah, I don't, I just think there's a certain personality type that reappe peers over and over again. And that personality type seems to like be fine. They're addicted to what they do. They love what they do. And they have a hard time putting barriers on it. I just mentioned the defiant ones. If you watch part four of the defiant ones, Jimmy Avine's wife and Dr. Dre's wife were like, it's really hard to be married to people like this. Jimmy was already divorced by the time the documentary ends. Dr. Drew is like, oh, you know, we're not, we kind of made it out. And then you find out, the doctor

read your hands and they get divorced a few years later. So I, obviously, there's no solution to this because every single person I said he is smarter, more productive than me, and they didn't figure it out. Dude, how the hell do you remember everything? You know, you're like, I notice you, your memory is absolutely insane. No, it's not, though. So, okay, for me, it's maddening repetition. Like, how do I do what, what you do? That's what I want to do. I want to replicate remembering that on episode 22, I said XYZ. So here's the thing. I got to go to Charlie Munger's house and have dinner with him before he died for three hours, okay? Charlie is, like, I consider the wisest person I've ever come

across, like, and before I met him. And he's also the one that said, you should read biographies. He's read hundreds of biographies. He's read more biographies than me. Now I'll be able to catch him because he died, right? So like, I will eventually pass him because I started earlier and I just said, said you copied him. But this is the scary thing about him. Because anybody at 99 is going to have some level of cognitive decline. Doesn't matter who the fuck you are, right? It's going to be some level of cognitive decline.

I sat in his library. So you start the first, the night starts in his library for like the first hour and half. Then we moved to his dining room and have dinner. So first of all, I'm sitting there. And Charlie was a legit hero of mine. I read every single book about him. I read all the books he told, he said that he read.

I watched all the AGM videos on news. YouTube and I'm sitting there in his library and I'm looking at it. I'm like, that's fucking Charlie Monger. Like I had an out of body experience. I was like this how is this my life? I sat in a room by myself for years, reading books, talking into a microphone by myself. Somehow that got me invited here. This is bizarre. And so my friend who invited me, Andrew Wilkinson, so this is going on. He had met him a bunch. Him and Chris had met him a bunch. And they're talking for like five or ten minutes. I'm just like, what the fuck is it going on? I could not believe this.

And then Andrew looks at me. He's like, like jump in. Like, what are you doing? You've got to say something. And then I snap out of it. I look behind Charlie's head. And I see all these books that he had recommended that I read. So then I just started lighting them up with questions.

One, that kind of freaked me out because Charlie was like partially blind. And so you know he's paying attention to you because he turns his head towards you. And then he has to look to his bifococals. So he goes like this. And he's looking down at you. Now you know, there's no, like, you're not guessing who he's paying attention to. And so then I'm like, Charlie fucking monger's looking at me. Like, what is happening here?

So I started lighting him up with questions on all these books, right? Dude, he knew everything. He could name the company, their partners, what their revenue was, what industry they were in. And I even asked him, I was like, dude, did you just reread this? He's like, no, I haven't read the book in 15 years. After we got done talking, I was like, Charlie, can I go through? I asked him, I was like, can I go through your life? library. He's like, yes. Very, very polite. And he was, he was very polite. So I pull books off the

shelves. It gets even worse. There's no notes in them. So it's like every once, every like 150 pages, you'll see like some random like name written at pencil. But like I mark things up. I highlight them. I add them to a giant database. I reread them. Charlie had a remarkable memory. I don't. For me, it's all work. It's like everything I'm telling you about is just like, I go back to the same episodes. I'll, like, re-listen to my old episodes again. I'll reread highlights. I reread highlights every single day, you know, for years.

I'll, like, I get bored and I get frustrated because I can't find any new podcast listen to, so I'll listen to old episodes of mine, like over and over again. Like, oh, shit, I did that four years ago. I forgot about that. I just did this with this guy named Chun Jung. And I spent, like, a few hours re-editing it. At the time, I was recording like a shitty $100 microphone. in like my kitchen. I didn't know anything. I did this episode probably five or six years ago.

Now you can run it through the script. They use their AI, their studio sound. It sounds fucking perfect, right? And so what I do, I spent like half of my day going back and rereading all my highlights from Chung Jung's autobiography. He's the founder of Hyundai. It's the most inspiring autobiography ever read. He grew up so poor. He had a tree bark to survive. He dies. The richest person in Korea. Fucking remarkable life story. But the reason I would be able to quote that even now is I just finished rereading it and just finished re-listening to it. So it's not like if, well, you just said you have a good memory. You tell my wife that she'd be like, she'd laugh at you.

She's like, no, he does. She's like, he missed my anniversary last week. No, it's just, it's just work. And it's just, it's another idea I took from Charlie Munger where he's like, you need to find a simple idea and take it seriously. And he says you can get outsized business success. He's like, many times of business we find that the winning system goes ridiculously far in maximizing or minimizing one or a handful of variables.

And so my idea was like once you start reading biographies, from the very first biography I read for the podcast was Elon Musk. It's like, oh, all these guys read biographies. So that's an indication like Elon Musk, whether you hate him for his politics or anything else, seems like he's pretty fucking smart. And then you read Walt Disney. Walt Disney's reading biographies. Thomas Edison is reading every single biography in the Detroit Library. I'm not as smart as Thomas Edison. I'll just fucking copy what this guy does.

And so then I was like, oh, so all of history's greatest entrepreneurs studied history's goodest entrepreneurs. What if I just build literally the world's best podcast that does that? And then do it every single day, seven days a week for eight years and then just keep doing it. And then keep making it better and better and better. I think I'm doing this episode in Jensen Wong and one of his things that he told in a video is like we have to do things that other people cannot do. And so my version of a moat, right, which another idea, I don't have any original ideas. I just like copy what I find in the books. So Warren Buffett and Charlie Longer says, your company should have a moat. I'm like, okay, the podcast is a podcast, but it's also a business and

my life works. Like, what's my moat? My moat's like every single episode you listen to today, it's not, like the Jensen Wong episode I'm recording to speak. It's not just going to be about Jensen. It's going to be how Jensen was like Steve Jobs, how he was like Edlin, how he was like Alexander Graham Bell, how he was like Ed Dorp, all these other people. So to catch, to be able to compete with me, you have to read 375 books to get to where I am now. But I'm not going to stop. So in my opinion, it's like the game's already over as long as I don't stop. I just, I have to make sure that what I, like, what I thought of and I probably figured this out a few years ago. It's like, I'm just going to, like, I'm going to have a really, really small but valuable niche. And that's if

you want to learn from history, your case and affairs, then you're going to go to this podcast. Anybody does anything else outside of that? None of my business. You jump in here. I'm going to compete very ferociously with you. And I'm going to beat you to death because I take this very fucking seriously. We talked about kind of like going against the grain and weird ways to make money that goes against what other, you know, main people in your category are doing. What's founders doing that's different in terms of monetization and building the business around that? So there's another idea that I didn't even, that wasn't even mine, really. So I've become friends with Jared Kushner through the podcast.

And he's a very sharp and fascinating guy. I would highly recommend listening to the episode he did with Lex Free. and then once he just did with my friend Petro Czhaughnessy. And really his idea was just like, you have one of the world's most valuable audiences. He's like, I know all the elite people in the world. They're all listening to you. You're the best in the world at what you do.

He's like his whole thing that he's constantly reinforcing. He's like constant refinement of association, constant refinement of association. And he's like inventory destroys value. So just getting in front of the audience you have is excessively valuable to any company. He's like, so take your time picking partners. And then when you do pick partners, you know, that's what you do.

You have two long-term partners. You're on two-year contracts with them, right? It's finite. It's like, like I just did this with Ramp. So I got to know the founders of Ramp. I think they are the best in the category. I spent a ton of time with them. Two of them are in Miami.

So I'm with them a couple times a week. And I have been for a long time way before we consider working together. And I was like, these guys are fucking geniuses. I think they have the best technical talent. in their industry by far. And I think the technical talent is just going to win. Like the gap between them and everybody else is just going to keep expanding because of that. And so like you just do large, instead of selling like most people selling like a CPM basis,

we were talking about that right before we got here or right before we started recording. There is no CPM. It's just like you know who's in the audience. One of the founders, how this deal came about or this partnership came about, it's because one of the founders was talking to me on day. He's like, I know 10 to 15 billionaires per. personally that listen to your podcast. He's like, this is not normal at all. He's like, what's the chance?

I know all the billionaires that are in your audience. Like, fucking zero. That's just impossible. You know how, what is their hourly, what is the hourly, what is an hour of their time worth? Right. What would people pay to get an hour of their time? And they give it to you for free. Like, that is very unusual.

And so basically the idea I had is like, they're not even just giving it to you. They're not saying a word and listening. to you. Yeah. They're consuming. And then you become friends with them, which is even wilder. But the idea was, hey, essentially, you know, most, let's just major this backup.

Business podcasts, it's like bizarre a world. It does not, you can't think of it as like a normal podcast. So let me explain how normal podcasts operate. You know, you'll have a ton of ad partners. Hopefully you're vetting them and you're not just like taking anybody, right? But even like if you're heavily vetted, like human lab guys, they have eight to 10 advertising partners on a yearly basis. They have over 100 on their waiting list, right? They vet the hell out of them and they'll like rotate who's in the podcast and usually sold on like some kind of CPM basis.

Now, human men's like the male Oprah. So like you're going to pay a higher CPM because he's going to, if he says he uses your product, his people will buy that product. I know how much he, like, he can move vast amounts of products. That's why he has a huge weight in. I'm not, I don't want, one, I work by myself. I don't have an assistant. I don't have a researcher. I don't have anybody.

It's just me. And so therefore, like any time taking, like for me to do ad sales takes time away from making the podcast. I have to be very careful to take time away from making the podcast. So Jared's idea of, hey, just grab, you know, you have dozens of people that want to advertise in your podcast, pick the two best ones that you feel most comfortable with the most, like, that makes most sense for your audience. Like, Ramp's the perfect example. It's like, what does Ramp do? Ramp should. Like, it's cost control. The biggest, the idea,

the difference between the people I said in the podcast with, like, how most entrepreneurs are taught today, it's like every single great entrepreneurs obsessed with controlling costs. And they have been for hundreds of years. So it's like perfect partnership there. And so the idea is like you pick, you have like two of those long-term partnerships and you can add in a couple other ones to experiment or if you want to do that. And then you just go to them month 12. You start developing relationships for other people. You take a real slow. You vet their product. You build relationship with them. Like I have people that want to advertise on the podcast. It's like, I don't know the founder. I will never advertise anything where I haven't talked to.

I have to, I have to build a relationship with the founder. Like the podcast is called founders for God's sake. And so you start building relationships and you go to your existing partners six months before your contract expires and say, hey, I have X, Y, Z, this is what they're interested in. Do you want to continue the partnership? Do you want to modify? What do you want to do? But essentially, just like you pick, I think of them much more as like brand partnerships, like the way like Nike would be with like Tiger Woods. And I think that's going to be very, way more common than even podcast ads on normal podcasts. I talked to a bunch of the biggest podcast advertisers in the world to become friends with the founders of these companies.

And so, because I want like a God-level view of the entire industry. And they were even saying, like, for a lot of the early days of the podcast, it's like a lot of direct response. And I think, one, a lot of the direct response advertisers, they've noticed the efficacy of podcast ads because they're saturating the whole ecosystem has greatly declined. And a lot of podcasters are, I think you're just going to see a lot more brand advertising in general. And so that's what I'm much more interested. It's much more like a partnership.

We do events together. I advise on marketing. I help them place ads on other podcasts. It's much more of like you're getting me on the team. And everybody in my network is like I will try to help you as much as I can. I love it, dude. Man, this has been a lot of fun. I just feel I haven't.

I got to read some autobiographies and some biographies, too. Well, what are you interested in? Like, well, you know, whatever. The easiest way to get started is like, who do you most admire? When I say who do you most admire? Give me a list of three or four names that come to mind right away. Living or dead. I'm going to get judged on this, but judge me, you know?

You can't give a fuck with anybody else says. So, or thanks. I mean, I think Mark Zuckerberg. Okay. Just a really fascinating guy that he, what's really impressing me of him lately is how much he's been able to reinvent himself. I love this concept of constantly reinvention. for example, like right now he's like, he's an AI guy. He was a Metaverse guy.

He was a social network guy. He was a mobile guy. He's a web guy. He's just constantly reinventing. Undeniably the most impressive young entrepreneur in the world. Yeah. You mentioned Jared Kushner. Yeah.

I think he's fascinating. I'm also interested in Josh Kushner. Yep. I remember I met Josh when I was, he's about a year or two older than me. So when I was 22 maybe around there, 21, I remember having coffee with him in Manhattan, which to me was like an exotic place at this fancy hotel. And he was kind of like picking my brain around raising his first fund. We were talking about his first fund that he was raising.

You know how small his first fund was? Five million. It was smaller. Yeah. It was two million if my memory serves me correctly. And it was just so cool of him that he, like obviously he can raise $2 million. Yeah. But the fact that he was, you know, getting feedback from other people,

how do I think about positioning? How do I think about portfolio construction? Yeah. Not having an ego about it. I think Josh Kushner, like if Josh Kushner had a book, I would read it. So I just talked to Josh, like last week. And he listens to founders a lot. He told me he finds it very comforting because he's a very, very, very unbelievably polite.

If you do any kind of reference check on him, it's like, it's not an act. It's like he is on, he's like old school polite, but he's also a grinder, which I love. And just completely obsessed with every single aspect of his business. And what he said about listening to founders is that it's comforting to realize that he, like, he's not the only one. They're all like this. If you want to be great, like they're all very similar. what I would say is like so Zuckerberg right there

I'll give you book recommendation when he was before he started Facebook he's at Harvard he goes and watch watches Bill Gates speak because he looked up to Bill Gates so read hard drive have you read hard drive Bill Gates in the making of the Microsoft Empire

one of the best fucking books I've read it twice I have two episodes on it this is how I know my memory is not that great I don't remember the episode number on the last one just search and if you search and founders always listen to the second episode I did on them because I get a lot better with time but there's the first one

read hard drive. It's one of the best biographies I've ever read. It covers the first 35 years of Bill Gates life up until the IPO of Microsoft and right after. And one of the, there's crazy fucking stats in that book. Like, for example, Microsoft's the first software business in history to sell more than a billion dollars of software. It might have been the first pure software company in history. The first 30, this is why I always bitch and yell at my founder's friends because they hire all these fucking people that are not doing actual work. I go, dude, I just had a walk with a friend of mine in Miami Beach because he's like raising all his money. He said, no, no, you sell before you have a product. He was, what are you talking about? I go, Bill Gates sold before he had a product. Steve Jobs sold before he had a product. Larry Ellison sold before he had a product. Do you need three other examples besides that?

The first 30 employees of Microsoft, 28 programmers, Bill Gates, secretary and assistant and Bill Gates. And Bill was doing all the sales. He was all founder-led sales. They were unbelievably profitable. That is the biggest bootstrap business of all. all time. It fucking drives me insane. We're like, oh, they raised VC. The year before they went public, which is maybe 1976, can you, can you double check to see if I'm right about this?

They were doing 140 million a year in revenue and 39 million year profit. They sold nine hundred, they sold a million shares for $995,000 a couple months before the IPO. That's a fucking venture back. That's not a venture back company. They wanted the guy's expertise and they wanted to incentivize him for that. 1976, boom. 1986. Yeah, there go. They started in 1976. Sorry about that. Apple, I think, was founded the same year. So there's your first biography to read. Jared Kushner, read his fucking book, breaking history. It's incredible.

The life experiences that the guy has had, and then he will talk about reading The Art of War. He'll talk about reading Theodore Roosevelt. Every single book, books are made out of books, right? They will lead you. You just name three people you're interested. You're probably a fucking ten more. We pick up one of the books, the biography of them,

or a book they recommend. And then in that book, they will then recommend. recommend other biographies of the person or other people they admire. And so what I'll do is I'll map out every single person. Like I became interested in Charlie Munger. So I go and read everything on Charlie Munger, but then I also read everything that he read. And then what you do is you go and you go in the bibliography of the books.

And then you'll discover, like there's a Bill Gates biography, right? In that biography, there'll be other biographies of Bill Gates are important people in there. And then you go and get that book and you just go on and on and on. You take it very seriously. You sort of mapping this out. You'll have a very fun. You can read five books on a person and maybe another five books on people they admire and you have a good idea of how they think. And that's really what I'm trying to go after.

It's like in many cases, like what would monger do like in my situation? And it's very simple. It's like what do you intentionally, I've mentioned it multiple times. What do you intentionally interested in? Do that for work. Find a simple idea and take it seriously. Just all kinds of ideas. Minimize or go out of your way to minimize or maximize one or handful of variables.

Well, that's the cool part about reading biographies is it's not just what would Munger think. It's what would Jared Kushner think in this situation. What would... This is the other, you mentioned the business model of founders too. It's like, I didn't know shit about shit when it comes to finance. And so now what do you have? You have a business that has cash flow, right? What are you going to do with the money?

And so now I literally get to have access to some of the greatest financial minds. I'm like, what would you do? They become friends. And then so another extension of this weird. businesses like they say hey you should look at this investment or you should look at this or you should do that it's like now i have another form of education where it's like i don't know any of this other than like and i've been interested like the episode i just put out on heady green she was the single biggest individual financier in the world when she was alive she was so rich she bailed out

the city of new york herself she ran her own money like how did she do that what did she invest in what advice did she have i'm very interested in learning how to do this because it's such you're going to have like a one man, Berkshire Hathaway. But it starts with founders, it starts with founders. It's like, okay, then what do you do now? And then you have this unfair advantage. Then you start building relationships with the founders that listen to your podcast. And a lot of them want you involved where they don't even want your money.

They just start giving you stock. What would Charlie Munger, if you asked Charlie Munger, hey, I've got this business. Is that what he would tell you to do? No, he would tell you to learn exactly what he would. I think I would do. I'm doing what he. did, which is he didn't know anything about investing. He was an attorney. So they set aside a certain amount of his time of day. At that time, I think it was a first hour of every day. He sold back to

himself to learn real estate investing and then investing in stock. And then he winds up being coming friends with all the people like Buffett and all the other people. It wasn't just Buffett, though. I talked to Charlie about this at his house. Because his whole point was, um, the book I gave him, I was able to give him a book. Because he has two bus in his house. It's Lee Kwan You and Ben Franklin. And if you go to Charlie Amonger's library, he's got every single biography of Ben Franklin you could find. And somehow I was able to give him a biography of Franklin he didn't have. And it was this book called Franklin and Washington.

He didn't read the book, but he fucking knew everything in the book already. And he was just like, yeah, one of the things that Ben Franklin did was he sought out a young George, this is what the book is about. Ben Franklin's 48 years old. He's the most famous person in the colonies. He reads, George Washington is fighting the Native Americans with the British, when he's 21 years old, he winds up seeing one of the best British generals

to get absolutely killed and massacred because he was taking the, basically the playbook that worked in Europe and try to fight the Native Americans with it, which is not going to work, right? And so a young George Washington writes in a journal about his experience. It winds of being published

in all the newspapers throughout America. Ben Franklin reads it. He's like, this guy's fucking smart. He has information I need. I need to get to him. And so he reaches out to him. He says building a relationship. They went up having up until, they weave in and out of each other's lives,

up until 40, 30 years later, something like that, when Franklin dies. And Munger's advice to me was like exactly what Ben did. He went out of his way to build relationships with other talented people. He's like, that's exactly what we did. And he goes, everybody knows about me and Warren. It wasn't just me and Warren. It was all these guys. We built a seamless web of deserved trust and we did deals together forever.

And the sad thing was most of them by the time I met Charlie had already passed on besides him and Warren. But I think that's, he would be like, you need to learn stuff. You can't outsource it. He let other people run his money. This is why Heady Green was so interesting to me. I love people that running their run. Like the idea of running our own money is fascinating.

And I'm uniquely unfit to manage institutional money. I don't have that personality. A good friend of mine was mentored by Sam Zell. And I just did another episode on Sam Zell. And he's like, come over to my house the night before. I'll tell you all these stories from Sam. You can put in your episode. And one of that was just like Sam was too wild and crazy.

He would say crazy shit. So he can't. He said something like he was constitutionally unfit to run an institution, to manage institutional money, which is a nice way of saying Sam's a fucking crazy guy. But I think Munger's point was like he only let one other person run, one other outsider manage Munger family money. That was a Lilu.

And he said in nine, once in 95 years he gave money to an extra to an outside person he's like in li lu and he has a fascinating story with this where he's like i read baron's magazine for 40 years for 50 years i found one idea i could act on in that 50 years of reading that magazine i made 40 million no i made 80 million dollars on that charlie speaking charlie's like i made 80 million dollars on that deal then i gave that 80 million and lee lou i gave the 80 million to li lu and li lu turned it into 400 million. So he goes, so I made 400 million by reading Barron's magazine for 50 years and giving that money to Lilo. So he's very, very, you know, selective. And he's just like, you have to learn

yourself. We got to wrap this up. But dude, this has been super special. If you've made it this far, you have to go check out Founders Podcasts. Absolutely. Go check it out. I guess the recommendation is just scroll the list of episodes. Yeah. It, we, weird thing about founders. It's like, if you, most other podcasts will, like, they'll have like a consensus. This is the best episode. There is no consensus.

It's like depends. There's 375 of them as of today. Actually, 391 because I have 16 that are not numbered. I check that today. So that's not memory. I literally checked it today. Sure. Sure you did. 16 bonus episodes

that are not numbered. But yeah, I just think like, the obvious thing is find, one, if you already know you're to somebody like Bill Gates, what I would do is I would search Bill Gates and I'd listen to that. And in the episodes, I'm going to reference other episodes. And so it's like, oh, this is like, you know, Ed Thorpe or this is like Edwin Land or whoever it was. And so in every single episode will be like a pathway to other episodes. And then I think the thing I'm most interested in, Sam Poiré, we referenced a few times. The first time I had dinner with him when he was in town

for the Tiel Fellowship meetup and he skipped it to have dinner with me, which I thought was very, like, nice of him. And he says the product market, fit of your podcast is not the Steve Jobs episodes or the Alexander Graham Bell or Thomas Edison or the Walt Disney. He's like, it's the guys I've never fucking heard of that are remarkable. Like one of my favorite ones is episode 292. Can you check this for me? Daniel Ludwig, The Invisible Billionaire. I might be wrong on that. He was the richest person in the world. I got it right. Okay. 292, Daniel Ludwig, Invisible Billionaire. He was the richest person in the world and no one knew his name. He paid a PR agency to keep his name out of the papers.

And it's just like that book was written. It was published in 1980 something. This guy lived remarkable life. No one knew who they was. I went up randomly picking up a book, probably a used bookstore, reading about him. And now you get to know that he existed and learn from him and read the book. It's remarkable. Is it Brad Jacobs?

Is that his name? Yeah, Brad Jacobs is the man. The man. I heard about him through what episode? No, this was the one that 331? No, that's wrong. There's, is there two episodes? So Brad was a huge fan of founders.

So he's like my LinkedIn reply guy. It's hilarious. And 3.30. 3.7. No, no, that's the breakfast of Brad Jacobs. There's another one. Yeah. It's called How to Make a few billion dollars.

Exactly. What episode number that is? So I can talk about this publicly because Jared said it on the conversation you had with Patrick. He's very fucking nice. to say this and I don't, I don't deserve it. 335, so I was off by four. He talks about this on Patrick's podcast. He's like, he heard about Brad Jacobson, listening to that episode,

goes to meet him. They get, they hit it off. He hears about Brad's idea for his new company, XPO, I think it's called. He ends up investing $150 million to joining the board. So Brad is another person where it's like the amount of information that's in that guy's That is scary. Yeah. He's 68 years old, the most energetic person.

I just went to his house. 68 years old, the most energetic person ever been around. And just relentless note taker, relentless reader, relentless podcaster. In his book, how to make a few billion dollars, you got to read the section on the research he does

before he invests. It's fucking incredible. Absolutely incredible. The amount of information he collects. Honestly, must listen to Pod. And, dude, this has been amazing. Thanks for inviting me. Sorry we didn't do any startup ideas. I don't have any besides the podcast. Next time. Next time. All right, cool.