The Tim Ferriss Show - #828: David Senra — How Extreme Winners Think and Win: Lessons from 400+ of History’s Greatest Founders and Investors (Including Buffett, Munger, Rockefeller, Jobs, Ovitz, Zell, and Names You Don’t Know But Should)

Episode Date: September 24, 2025

David Senra is the host of the Founders podcast. For the past nine years, David has intensely studied the life and work of hundreds of history’s greatest entrepreneurs. His new podcast, David Senra, showcases conversations with the best-of-the-best living founders and extreme winners.This episode is brought to you by:Cresset family office services for CEOs, founders, and entrepreneursOur Place’s Titanium Always Pan® Pro using nonstick technology that’s coating-free and made without PFAS, otherwise known as “Forever Chemicals”AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplementTimestamps:[00:00:00] Who is David Senra?[00:01:11] Brad Jacobs: Roll-up king and positive-driven billionaire founder.[00:02:26] Rare positive archetypes: Ed Thorp, Sol Price, Brunello Cucinelli.[00:06:04] Michael Dell as another exception; fear of failure and motivation.[00:06:47] Negative self-talk, excellence, and its ripple effects.[00:08:26] Jensen Huang story: “Why do you suck so much?”[00:08:54] Inspiration from Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History.[00:10:00] Derek Sivers: unconventional, philosophical entrepreneur.[00:11:04] Learning equals behavior change, not memorization.[00:11:48] Jeremy Giffon insight: biographies as substitute mentors.[00:12:37] Reading biographies as one-sided conversations.[00:13:16] The chain of influence.[00:14:09] Podcasting as “relationships at scale.”[00:14:28] Coping with trauma and breaking cycles.[00:20:18] Note-taking process: books, Post-its, ruler, Readwise.[00:29:27] OCD tendencies and love of doing things the hard way.[00:31:04] Comparing our reading/re-reading workflows.[00:35:04] A family falling out and the randomness of student housing.[00:38:58] David’s introduction to my work during his MySpace-era college years.[00:40:07] Podcasting influences: Jocko Willink, Kevin Rose’s Elon Musk interview.[00:44:14] Five-and-a-half years of obscurity before breakthrough.[00:46:50] Graphtreon and experiments with subscription models.[00:49:25] Patrick O’Shaughnessy’s endorsement sparks growth.[00:51:23] Sam Hinkie and Patrick connections fuel momentum.[00:52:19] Transition to ads and joining Patrick’s network.[00:55:17] Edwin Land: patron saint of founders and Steve Jobs’ influence.[00:57:02] Lessons from Sam Zell, Jay Pritzker, and William Zeckendorf.[00:58:48] Need a generous, well-connected person? You can’t go wrong with Rick Gerson.[01:03:04] Edwin Land’s philosophies: Differentiation and doing to excess.[01:04:30] Entrepreneurial archetypes and conflicting advice.[01:06:00] Daniel Ek as an alternative founder archetype and mentor.[01:10:59] Further founder archetypes and contrasts.[01:13:41] What is an anti-business billionaire?[01:19:55] Advice from “shark” Michael Ovitz about the value of truth in one’s inner circle.[01:22:30] The hands-on approach of practical founders who live for the love of their business.[01:23:28] Doing one thing relentlessly.[01:23:51] “This can’t be my life” as a powerful motivator.[01:26:57] Low introspection as a common trait among founders — and its implications about human nature.[01:30:15] Robert Caro: The only writer David believes should be allowed to write thousand-page biographies.[01:32:40] James Dyson’s persistence vs. the risk of blind stubbornness.[01:34:22] Todd Graves (Raising Cane’s) as an example of relentless focus on one idea.[01:35:41] Separating fact from fiction in biographies/histories.[01:41:55] Considering trainable vs. non-trainable attributes in potential role models.[01:46:11] Perusing Charlie Munger’s library.[01:49:35] Dealmaking lessons on Eddie Lampert’s superyacht.[01:55:34] The smartest person David knows.[01:56:55] David’s obsessive craftsman approach to podcast creation.[01:58:51] Why David decided to begin a second podcast.[02:01:21] The economics of trust.[02:03:40] The benefits of cultivating a purposeful aloofness about current events.[02:07:11] Using the pulpit of publicity for good, not evil.[02:09:57] New show frequency/dynamic and how David plans to balance the burden of running two shows.[02:13:30] Teamwork with essence of turtle.[02:15:40] Adapting the Rockefeller “secret allies” strategy to podcasting.[02:17:56] Chris Hutchins: The mad scientist of podcasting?[02:18:30] Working with Rob Mohr and Andrew Huberman of SciComm.[02:20:54] Why David focuses on 24-hour cycles over long-term planning.[02:24:54] Does David worry the extra workload will disrupt his lifestyle?[02:30:18] What makes one potential guest more interesting to David than another?[02:34:34] Making an impact vs. happiness.[02:36:32] Playing the status game when your heart’s not in it is for suckers.[02:44:23] Travel observations and the rarity of truly unique experiences.[02:46:26] Books as philosophical operating systems.[02:48:39] Parting thoughts.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. My guest today is David Senra. David is the host of the Founders podcast, a cult favorite at this point, which explores the life and work of hundreds of history's greatest entrepreneurs. For each episode, he does something that most people will not do. He reads one or more biographies about a single founder and then shares the key lessons. It has become incredibly popular.

His new podcast, David Senra, is brought to you by the Huberman Lab team. It showcases conversations with the best of the best, living founders, and extreme winners. You can visit david senra.com. That's S-E-N-R-A. Davidsonra.com for all things, David, and to check out the news show. And now, without further ado, please enjoy this very wide-ranging conversation with David Senra. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I answer your personal question? Now, we'll have seen an appropriate time.

What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living this year over metal end uprocellular. Me, Tim Ferriss Show. Who is Brad Jacobs? So Brad Jacobs is, I think, the only person in history to start eight separate billion-dollar companies. So a lot of people, like, on the West Coast, you know, in texting, they don't really know who he is because he's just been an East Coast guy's life. But he started his first company when he was, like, 23. He's 68 years old.

He is by far the most energetic person I have ever been around. And he wrote this book called How to Make a Few Billion Dollars. What are some of his companies? He's like the roll up like logistics companies and trucking companies. And now he's got a massive one. He just took public that's doing like building supplies. And so like early in your career you might roll up like a $5 million company or a $20 million company. His first acquisition I think was like $9 billion.

So he's like, he just gets progressively like bigger and bigger. bigger. But what I find interesting about him is usually when you study like extreme winters and he's obviously an extreme winter, what motivates him is like kind of dark. Like issues with their father, some kind of insecurity never felt good enough. They grew up poor and they felt they were born in like the wrong place. Brad does it out of love. He's got no negativity. He's just a very special human being. And the fact that I get to text them and call him and go to his house is insane he's just an amazing human being there's another legend who defeated roulette and then went on to beat the market ed thorpe yes probably another exception right where he the exception the exception

where he did not eviscerate his personal life in the quest for business mastery yeah i don't think anybody's master life clearly as much as ed thorpe did your interview your two interviews that you did with him were incredible yeah thank you that was uh was such a such a moment of gratitude to have the chance to interview him, especially because he is so, so sharp at his age. I can't recall this exact age right now. It was like 89 or something like that. That's the, if you want a holistic figure to consider emulating, Ed Thorpe would be on a very, very, very short list. I can think of three out of 400. All right. Who are the, who are the three? Ed Thorpe's at the top. Soul Price, who's the one that invented essentially like the warehouse

model, like Costco, like Jim Senegal was, was mentored by Soul Price when Jim Sinigal was like 18. So Jim Sinigal, founder of Costco, built one of the greatest companies in history, and he has this great line in Soul Price's autobiography, and Soul Price's son wrote his biography. People like, oh, you must, when Soul died, he's like, you must have learned a lot from Soul. He was, no, I didn't learn a lot. I learned everything. Everything that I know, I learned from this guy. So Soul Price, same thing. Good husband, good father. Didn't chase after more money at the expense of other areas of his life after he already had enough money, which is what Ed Thorpe turned down so much hundreds of millions if not billions he could have like collected he's just like I

already have more money that can ever spend like why would I do that and then I would say brunello Cuchinelli how are those examples different you should explain for folks I mean look everything I'm wearing I got for free so you should explain to people I did not know the last name you mentioned until a few years ago yeah because I won't dox them but Tony my friend Tony is basically covered in Brunello who is this so Brunello Cuchinelli wrote this I don't even know the name. I read the book. It's like something about Salomeo. Essentially, he sells five thousand dollars. He sells sweaters that were more than my first car. But he grew up in like very rural Italy. And then everybody at the time, there was essentially the hollowing out of his community.

Everybody had moved to the cities. He is a very soulful dude. So Brunello essentially works. He essentially bounds his life where it's like you work nine to five. You're not allowed to like send an email to the company after five. You have to like take a break for lunch and have these like great Italian food. And then he spends his nights reading and then going on long walks and then sitting in the cafes in this little town that he essentially like rebuilt and reinvested in. And he likes having cappuccino and like debating philosophy. He's just like a real soulful dude. Now the one criticism people have is like, yeah, that business model works when you have, you know, 70% margins and your sweaters are as much as a Honda Civic, you know. But he was very intent. I don't care

what people do it. He's just very intentional. So let me come back to this question of clean fuel versus let's call it dirty fuel and there's a lot in between so I don't want to look at it in a totally binary way. But why do you think of the say 400 plus that you can only call to mind three or four? Ed Thorpe, Saul Price, Brunello Cuccinelli, Brad Jacobs. Why are there so few who seem driven in that particular, let's just call it, positive way or that they can pursue business excellence without having a lot of collateral damage in their personal lives. What do you draw from that? And look, maybe these are just different animals. And out of the box, these four are just fundamentally different from the other 396 or so. What is your take on that thin slice of the

total? I would add another one to the list. You've also interviewed him, Michael Dell. Recently, I've spent like hours and hours with them. We had like a five-hour dinner and then I just recorded a two and have our conversation with him for the new show, he is in love. His is very positive. Now, he has a big fear of failure, which almost, I think me and you probably show this is like, I won't speak fear. I want to ask you actually. I am way more afraid of failure than like I love winning. I mean, that's true for everyone I know. Yes. Who wins a lot. I don't think I can think of a single exception in terms of someone who celebrates the wins as much as they punish themselves for the losses. I'm not saying that's a good thing. I'm just saying

that's pattern matching. But even now, with all the success that you've had, like, is your inner monologue still negative? I mean, there's a lot of negative. I'm working on that. I look at some of the, I don't want to call the maxims, but you've quoted the, I think it's the founder of the four seasons. Yeah, excellence is the capacity to take pain. Right. And there may be some truth to that, but I feel like it's very risky for me to take something like that and wear it as a marching order for life because I already tilt in that direction and not all pain is productive. And I think for me, when you are already tilted in that direction where you believe if there isn't pain, if there isn't some degree of suffering and you're not trying hard enough,

it's very easy to become a hammer looking for nails and that can have a lot of repercussions for your relationships also for sure and if your self-talk is negative at least in my experience when I've seen in a lot of my friends and peers and founders very often you end up having a similar type of dialogue with people around you and that can have huge repercussions so that doesn't give anyone a neat, tidy silver bullet of an answer. But yeah, the negative self-talk, there's a place for it, but the nuance to me matters a lot. If it's like you're a piece of shit, you always do X, why don't you do Y?

And that has a good outcome. I would still want to refine the process. I read this biography of Jensen Wong, which is fascinating because right after one of the best quarters in Nvidia history, he starts this meeting. And he says, I woke up this morning, looked in the mirror and said, why do you suck so much? So he's definitely driven by. He's hardcore. Oh, he's very hardcore.

He's hardcore. He's hardcore. So I guess what I'd also like to ask you is about not necessarily the people you study. And hopefully you take this as a compliment. It's intended like the highest compliment. When people ask me about you, and they're like, so what's the story? Like, why do people like stuff? And I'm like, well, you know, I can only really speculate.

But I feel like you are in a way. way like what Dan Carlin did with hardcore history like you do for business and hardcore history is my favorite podcast. I think Dan Carlin's the greatest podcast server live. The reason I do a solo history show is because Dan Carlin I've given away his back catalog. I wish you would change his business model. It is a bit janky. But like if you want to just listen to like the greats, I mean the wrath of the cons blueprint for Armageddon, wrath of cons, I think is the best. I think is the best podcast series ever created, in my opinion. Blueprint for Armageddon, like, just everything.

I've listened to, he only's like 55 episodes. He was doing it for like 15 years. I fall asleep at night. Right now, last night, I fell asleep listening to his new one. It's not even new. It's like six months old because he never released as any episodes. Mania for Subjugation Part 2 about the relationship between Alexander the Great and King Philip.

Amazing. He just puts me to sleep. He is the greatest. You know, the reason that I mentioned that is like I feel like I've learned so much from Dan Carlin. I've learned so much from your episodes. I'm curious, though, as I know another person, you're a fan of, Derek Sivers,

who I've known, I think, since 2007, amazing entrepreneur. People can look them up. I'll give the one-liner, which is sort of this philosopher-king programmer entrepreneur, who started companies, gave the vast majority to a charitable trust to fund musical education. At one point was the ringleader in a traveling circus,

played guitar and sang it like a pig state fair and has just crafted the most unusual and Derek life for himself and given his family permission to do the same for themselves. Really a true original thinker who also shows it in his actions, and this is where I'm going. So Derek has this line, which is along the, I may be paraphrasing it slightly, but the gist is If more information were the answer, we'd all be billionaires with six-back abs. So what do you see or surmise about people who make the leap from listening to your podcast about all of these icons and people who have not just, you know, once you're lucky twice, you're good, but in some cases they built, you know, eight billion dollar companies or

in that case, I might come back to the acquisition kind of roll-up archetype. So the people who make the leap from ingesting information to actually implementing and those who don't. What's the missing piece in the middle? The way I think about it, the maxim I've made for myself on this is like learning is not memorizing information. Learning is changing your behavior. And so if you didn't change your behavior, this is just all mental gymnastics for you. You're just wasting your time. And so what I'm trying to do, I didn't even understand what I was doing. I had to have, as many, happens in many cases, like somebody outside of you seeing what you're doing actually gives you what this whole thing is about. I have a good friend of mine. His name is Jeremy Gaffon. And he's really quick-witted and he has a way to condense ideas really well. And we're just walking around, taking a walk in Miami Beach one day. And he's like, oh, yeah, it's pretty obvious like what this whole thing is. And I didn't even think he was thinking about it, right? I was like, what do you mean? And he's just like, oh, you never had any positive influences. You didn't have any mentors. And so if you take somebody like you who's like psychopathically driven and really has an obsessive personality, like that's what this whole thing is. You're just reading book after book after book to try to find the path, to try to find the answer, to try to find the way out. And I felt like naked when he said this. I'm like, I think he's right. I think he's right. And so for me, like I'm definitely not just reading. Like I've been taking all these ideas. The unfair advantage I have is like I have one-sided conversations with history's greatest entrepreneurs. Right. So like every week I sit down and read another biography.

And then because I like to talk, this is good because I have to shut up. I can only listen because this is what I think it is. That's what I think reading about it is like a one-sided conversation. And then I take that and I would be doing this even if I didn't record it. But then sitting down once a week and condensing my thoughts, right, and reacting to it turns it to an act of service, right? So then I take the ideas. I'm like, oh, that's a good idea.

I'll take that and apply it to my business, which is the podcast. And it keeps getting better and better. I'm like, oh, these ideas work. So I'll keep doing this. And then now what has happened is the people that, that are trying to be great, have studied great people that came before them throughout human history. Caesar was studying Alexander and like Steve Jobs was studying Edwin Land and Edwin Land was studying Alexander Graham Bell and everybody, if you're interested in American entrepreneurship,

it all kind of goes back to Benjamin Franklin. Everybody looks backwards like, that guy or that woman was great. How did they do that? And so that is an enduring part of human nature will never change. It's going to happen while we're alive. It's going to happen a thousand years from now. And so what I didn't understand what I was doing is that you put it out into the world, just like your work is like a tuning fork.

It's like, then the people that are really great also do this. And they have a deep love of history. And so if you look at the people that I've been talking to from the new show that's not even released yet, they came because they're fans. They're in the audience. And it's just like the pariscial relationship, people have a podcast. I'm close to the people at Spotify, spent in Stockholm twice the last six months. And I was talking to the head of business at Spotify.

His name's Alex. we were talking for two and a half hours, like pretty animated. And I was like, I'm not building a media company. I'm building relationships at scale. And he's like, what? You say that again. I go, what a podcast is is building relationships to scale. This is the first time we've ever met.

We should talk about how I found you. I found you on MySpace. I'm going to tell you that. Oh, my God. But like, the reason we, and we'll go to like the influence that you played on having founders, just like, but I know who you are. Like, we can sit down and talk for eight hours because I know you. There's no possible way I can consume all of your books and, I don't know,

600 hours of your podcast and not know, Tim, you can't act for that long. And so what I didn't understand is like, oh, this other path of me trying to find good information, valuable information. Like, I came from a family. It was like, oh, I'm the first to graduate college. That's nice. No one even graduated high school in my family. Like, there's no reading. There's no self-improvement. The only thing my family read is the Bible. And like that can be taken to a crazy extreme. My mom. You also didn't go prison. Yeah, exactly. The first, and my grandfather, my, I shouldn't even say this publicly anymore. You have a big podcast. I would say stuff on small podcasts and forget that things get bigger later on. So I say crazy stuff that I should not be

saying, but whatever, we're too late now. But yeah, my grandfather, my father, my brother. Like, I remember being in high school and hearing bang and five guys at 530 in the morning come and grab my brother and I don't see him for four years. Like, that's a fact. So my point being is, then I'm like, oh, wait, I put this podcast out and then it tracks the same people that are in the books and then, And the fact that I can spend five hours with Michael Dell, and he tweets about the podcast, he LinkedIn's about it, and just giving me phenomenal advice. And then obviously we recorded a conversation, but before that, they just want to help you because they got value from that.

Just a quick thanks to our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. Listeners have heard me talk about making before you manage for years. All that means to me is that when I wake up, I block out three to four hours to do the most important things that are generative, creative, podcasting, writing, et cetera, before I get to the email and the admin stuff and the reactive stuff and everyone else's agenda for my time. For me, let's just say I'm a writer and entrepreneur, I need to focus on the making to be happy. If I get sucked into all the little bits and pieces that are constantly churning, I end up feeling stressed out. And that is why today's sponsor is so interesting. It's been one of

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returns. Check it out. Fromhourplace.com slash Tim. I want to go back to the note-taking and then converting that into some type of action. Yes. You've done that. You're hitting, and you've had a number of these, but inflection points where now you can sit down with some of these icons and have these extended conversations. Even if you did not have that direct access, maybe your process with the note taking wouldn't change. I'm just curious how you read one biography or multiple biographies on a person and what the actual note taking process looks like, right? Because I have, I'll volunteer what I do a lot. I use Kindle, not for the convenience of the device, although that is

convenient, not because I can listen on Audible or actually do it through the Kindle app and then stop and highlight things, which is also why I use it. But the highlighting overall is the reason. And then exporting or using something like readwise in addition to synthesizing my highlights. And I believe you also use readwise quite a bit. I'm not sure if you still use it. Oh, yeah. But what does your process look like? And I know, for instance, like Maria Popova, who's this voluminous, prodigious genius of a writer. He used to be brain picking since the margin alien now. She has a very particular process for synthesizing

and putting everything together. How do you do that? Okay, so I actually think I'm going to sit down and make an episode about how I make these. There's actually an older idea here that I just went through when I reread James Dyson's autobiography, both of them actually. But the first autobiography, I've read like five times. The second one, I think this is the second or third time I read it.

But one of the genius things that he did, you know when no one knew he was dyson wasn't a thing like now it's one of the most valuable private health companies in the world you walk into a retail store he had one product in one market at the time and you see you know i want to buy a vacuum cleaner five of them kind of look the same and then you have this like alien looking thing at the end but then what he said he's like hey what is the advantage i have i'm going against all these like huge multi national conglomerates and i'm just some bloke that cares about vacuum cleaners in this remote part of england so he convinced all the retailers to let him write a story on a little leafly

and they would hang it on the handle of the Dyson. And it tells a story. It's like two or two hundred words of who made it, why they made it, why they love it so much, and why you should buy it. People buy stories. So that's what I was saying is like, that's not the first time I came across that idea. You go back to the early 1900s and there's this guy named Claude Hopkins. I am always interested.

You are. I read scientific advertising. Yes, in the very beginning. Okay. I'm always interested. Who influences the influencers? Right. Right.

So let me give you an example. God, I haven't thought of that name in so many years. So much shit on this guy. Claude Hopkins. So, like, I became obsessed. We were talking before recorded that we both, well, I won't speak for you. Love and admire, and mine is borderline idolize Charlie Munger. If I can only learn from one person first of my life, if I could say, hey, you can only read this guy's words.

Pick one person, I'm picking Munger. I just love everything about him. And the idea that I got to meet him is insane, like absolutely insane. So when I'm reading about Munger and Buffett, I'm like, man, these guys are really genius. didn't know anything at this time. It's like 10 years ago. And I'm like, these guys are genius. And then they kept mentioning this guy named Henry Singleton over and over again. And they will tell you, if you admire somebody, what I think is hugely important, they will tell you who influenced them. And then you have to go and read about these people. And then you'll find

who influenced them. And you realize that the ideas didn't start with them. They don't start with us. They can't die with us either. You have to push them forward down the generations. And so I'm like, oh, this guy's interesting. Charlie Munger said that the smartest person he ever met was Henry Singleton, he's best friends of Buffett. Like, Buffett's obviously, how did he say that? And then Buffett says that it's a crime that business schools don't study singleton. That's hell of language.

Like, that's very strong language. And so then you start reading, I'm like, oh my God, the ideas that I thought were Buffett and Mungers were singletons. And so you see this over and number again. I was obsessed. Another guy that Buffett introduced me was David Ogilvie. David Ogby, I think, is one of the best writers I've ever come across. And Buffett keeps mentioning me as shareholders.

He's like, this genius named David Ogivie. Why is Buffett calling this guy a genius? I read this guy. He said, at the same time that I read Hopkins. Because if you read Ogrivy, what does he talk about? He's like, that's the genius. I'm not the genius. I'm just regurgitating Claude Hopkins work.

And then he tells the story of Albert Lasker, who made more money. He's like, you know, let's call him a dozen great advertising agency founders, you know, the madman era. And then one that made the most money was this guy named Albert Lasker. And he had the simplest business. No art department, no research department. he had Claude Hopkins writing copy and his words rang the cash register

and if you can bring more customers to businesses they will pay you a lot of money and it turns out that this guy wrote Claude Hopkins wrote this book called Scientific Advertising he would try to publish it it was essentially the way he the secrets of Lasker and Lasker hit it in a safe

for 20 years and if you... Yeah I'll get that right over to the agent stick that in the safe and so if you read this he's like hey it may be boring to you. He uses an example of Schlitz beer, right? They were fifth in the market chair, and they hire Hopkins. Like, we want to sell more beer. And so he's like, okay, well, he does the same thing he does. He does a lot of research. And he goes and he tours it a distillery. And he's blown

away by like, you know, we triple distill the water. And I don't know how beer made. We're made. I don't even drink that much. But like, he explains the entire process. And clause, like, this is amazing. Why don't you guys talk about this? He goes, because our process isn't different than any other distiller. He goes, yeah, but no one's telling that story. And so he writes these huge, essentially, know, 1,500 words of this is how the beer that you're about to drink is made and goes from fifth to first because people buy stories. And so to answer your question on like, I think what I should do is sit down. Maybe I'll just clip this and be like, okay, this is how I make the podcast or how I consume information. So I think me and you share love of the writing of Cormac

McCarthy. Sure. Oh my God. Yeah. Beautiful and brutal and equal measure. So the road, blood meridian i mean there are many other examples all the pretty horses the border trilogy just everything the guy just read everything he's just incredible the road no country for old men i saw the movie before saw the book it's crazy how like they barely had to change any words it's like he wrote a script so he says something is fascinating that subconscious is older than language they're like how did you write blood meridian he goes i didn't he's like i sat there and it came all from my subconscious i just like i eliminated anything that got in the way of it it. You must have a busy therapist. Oh, I can imagine what in that guy's head to write that book,

the judge. The judge is the craziest. So dark, so dark anyway. So anyways, so I am all intuition, all feeling. So basically what I do is I sit down with a book and usually I do this physically. And it's like I'm doing arts and crafts over here. I sit down with a physical book because that's how I fell in love with reading. You know, like I don't have memories before I had a love of reading. and I think one of the best things that ever happened to me is the fact that I don't know why I'm reading grabbed a hold of me since I was like four or five years old so my mom was dying of breast cancer

what I said about the only thing they read is the Bible that you could take that to an extreme because like she tried for two years she tried to pray her cancer away and by that time by the time we convinced her to see an oncologist the word he used was the horses out of the barn and there's just the most grueling way to die

when you get it spreads to your bones like if that happens I'm calling you to put a pillow over my face I'm just not going through that. It was just a terrible thing to see. But one thing she said, she's like, you've just been like this forever. Like, you were a kid and you'd read the back of cereal boxes. I'd walk in every single room. I did this when I come in here and just automatically read everything that's on the walls.

So I have no idea where this came from. I didn't choose the passion of reading. It chose me. And all of it is intuition. I sit down with a physical book because that's how I fell in love with reading. I sit down with pen. And your mom would bring you to the bookstore, right? Yes.

Yeah. Because they won't kick you out for reading. Yeah, exactly. And the library. and then like, even this is, I remember the first time, it's like, this made me before I even knew words because I was obsessed of where's Waldo? So it's like my first memory. So you're not reading anything. You're just like finding the guy with a stripe shirt or striped sweater. So basically I sit down, physical book, pen, six inch ruler, posted notes, and scissors. And I just read

and I don't think. And if something jumps out to me, I highlight it. Whatever pops to my mind. And normally, as are mutual friends, like Patrick, Chris, Rick, they'll all see this. It's just like, I'm not actually listening to what you're saying. There's an idea behind it. Right. Meaning you're not taking what the author says, literally. You're looking at the idea behind. I'm just looking for the essence.

So like if me and Rick are talking about like a giant deal that he wants to invest in, I'm thinking about how that's similar to how Fred Smith built FedEx or how Jim Casey built UPS or how Buffett thought about, you know, buying sees candy. So what, so what do you do with the post-it notes and the scissors in the ruler? So basically, like, I underline that sentence and then whatever popped my mind. And I'm like, oh, this is kind of like James J. Hill when he was building the only profitable, successful American railroad. And like, you just write down whatever comes to mind. It's all on the post-it. On the post-it. And that goes on the page. It goes on the page. So then, like, you know, I might have three sentences, but the post-it notes, three by five. So I have to cut. It has to be

clean. It has to look good. Like, there's a beauty to it. Like, I am irrational, like, crazy when it comes to this stuff. This is why I think I picked up on your work right away, because I see a fellow nutcase and obsessive, where like, I can edit now my transcripts. So everybody's like, you should outsource it to AI. You should outsource it to India. No, I have to touch it. I have to feel it. I have to like, I just love it. I'm not doing it to do it quicker. I like what Jerry Sandfield says. The hard way is the right way. I like the hard way. This also goes back to obviously have some kind of like dark thing driving me, which we can dive into if you want. So then you go through the entire book, right? And so then I have to take

pictures of it into the Readwise app because you do it the smarter way. Kindle would just automatically go to Readwise. Well, I still use physical. I'll explain. I'll trade. I'll tell you how I use physical. Want to go to do it now? Are you one? Yeah, sure. Well, okay, so don't lose your place. I won't. All right, you got the scissors. I want to know about the ruler. Oh, I guess the ruler, well, I want you to explain. Straight lines. It has to be straight. Okay. So we both have pretty moderate to severe OCD I remember when I was diagnosed by the psychiatrist who was doing

some like preliminary formality of taking me through these assessments before I was going to have this experimental brain stimulation and he had to check the boxes and he went through these hours and hours and stuff and he's like you know if I need to take a seat if we need to take a break I understand

and he gave me this OCD diagnosis I'm like yeah what else is new I just keep going I know this about it yeah I don't need time So the way I use physical, and I do use physical still quite a bit, is I will, this is another question that maybe you can answer when you pick back up is how a second or third reading differs from the first. Because when I read it the first time, I'm doing something very similar to you, I'm underlining

things or if that's just too much work because the book is actually a gem and it has a lot, then I will just like bracket it on the side of the paragraph so that I know what the highlight is then i will go through if i read it a second time and i will put t2 in a circle next to the things that still stuck out on a second reading now sometimes you're just a different person if you read it like five years later and your lived experience and your position is life is different uh but if i'm doing it in somewhat rapid succession i want to see what sticks on a second or third reading so you'll see like to T2, T3, et cetera. Sometimes it's just fun to see how I change over time with like the moral letters to

Lucilius by Seneca the Younger. People can find it in all sorts of compendions. I put out a free PDF called the Tao of Seneca. I like to just see where I am at different points in my life, what resonates. And then typically with any physical book I'm creating, I just did this with a book I finished yesterday called Deep Tech by Pablo's Holman, where I'm creating an index in the front. So whenever there's a page that really, really sticks out, I'll write down like 168, whatever it might be, right? Someone I want to look up, someone like a Claude Hopkins, whose name gets dropped.

And I'm like, that seems important. All right. And so I have this index. And then I'll take a photograph of the index, just in case I lose the book, which has happened. And that's always painful. I also will have, I'll make a little box on the bottom right hand corner of some of the front matter pages. And I'll put next steps there. Wait, what's the front matter?

So the front matter would be the copyright page, the title page, the pages that don't really have any content on them. Maybe there's a dedication page, it's like, to ma, you know, it's like, okay, that's a blank page that I can use. So on the, like, the bottom right hand corner, just two lines that create sort of a box, I will write down next step. So for every book, not every book, in some cases, it was just for pleasure and it's fiction, but even then sometimes ideas will pop into mind.

I'm like, okay, what is at least one kind of next step? Maybe it's looking up someone like Claude Hopkins. Maybe it's an action. Maybe it's a phone call. Maybe it's an email, but like along the lines of David Allen and getting anything's done. It's like one physical next action. And so I almost always have that in nonfiction books. I take photos of all that.

I used to put it all into Evernote. I still sometimes do that because I've been using it forever and I have thousands of them. You're the last Evernote standing? I might be. Yeah, I use Scannable to get it into Evernote. But the point is I have a way to then OCR it so I can search it. All right. So that's basically what I have to do now, which takes an unbelievable amount of time.

But again, then now, so I've already read it one time. Now I have to input it into readwise. So you take a picture of it and it's laborious and now I've read it for the second or maybe a third time because then you like you stay on the page and then you have to make sure that it matches up between the page and what's on your screen. And so you're reading it over and over again. So then I get it all into readwise. You wouldn't it take a sidebar just to explain what readwise is?

Readwise is essentially just a way to keep track of your notes and highlights from everything you read. And now they're expanding out because it turns out the total addressable market for people that want to keep highlights and notes. First of all, how many people are reading books now? That number is dwindling, unfortunately. And then of that subset of smaller and dwindling people, how many are read as much as you and I do? And then they want to essentially a giant searchable database of everything you've ever read. It's like super valuable. And they charge like $99 a year for it. So now they have, basically they were running this for six years. They have a new web reader app and they said they made more money in six months from that that they didn't read wise for six years.

This is like, obviously not a lot of people that want to do this, what the thing that we're describing doing. I used to read the physical book because I actually, let's back up and I want to tell you like the role that you played and don't let me figure where I'm at though. Yeah, I don't know. So I went to like a shitty college because I remember like when I was in your senior year, you know, I went to public high school and everybody's like, where you're going to school and I didn't understand what they meant. I'm like one I can drive to, like the one I can like go to at night because I have to work during the day. Like I don't know where you're talking about. I didn't know. I got kicked in my house when I was 18 and I had to live in student housing.

Why did you get kicked out? My mom's side of the family has like severe mental illness and just like some of the worst people you've ever met and they just had this belief that like you kick your kids out when you're 18. I got it out of the nest. It's not even that. It's like they pick a fake fight. That was the point of contention between my mom is she had undiagnosed mental illness for

maybe not schizophrenic, definitely bipolar. Her sister was schizophrenic. And listen, man, as you get older, at the time, I had a lot of anger, super, a lot of anger because they didn't understand why they're doing what you're doing. And then you get older and then you have your own kids. So I went through this crazy thing where, like, I think I, like, hated them even more because when my daughter was born, I'm like, I remember seeing her for the first time. I was like, like, you think you love a woman?

No. Enzaferi has this great line that they're just, it's important. possible for a mantle of a woman. The only true love he has is for his kids. And I understand what he meant. I think Ryan Reynolds said it best where it's like, I never thought I'd love anybody as much I love Blake lively. And then she gave birth to our daughter. And as soon as I looked at the daughter, I knew if we were ever under attack, I would use Blake as a human shield to protect that baby. Like it's funny, but it's literally, when I heard him say that, I go, yes, that's it. So that means the memory of all the more pain. Then I was like, how do you do this

to your children, then you get more experience, and then you're like, yeah, but, like, imagine you grew up like they did, like poor white trash. My grandfather raped all his daughters, including my mother, raped all of his daughters. I didn't know about this after he died, or else I would have been going to put him in his grave, raped his daughters, raped his granddaughters. They lived in this, like, shitty house in Indiana with one bathroom. There was two bedroom she had three sisters the only bathroom is in my grand i call them grandparents i hate them with all of my being in their room and so if you wanted to go in the bedroom at night he was a monster they would urinate in cups and pour it out the window wow so again it doesn't excuse the bad

decisions they made and the unhappy marriage my parents had and all this other crap but it's just like all right like imagine that imagine that you destroyed your kids That person was supposed to protect them. I can't even talk about this, but anyways, we would fight a lot. And she'd be alternate, depending on the day, like, she'd be the kindest person in the world or like a storm. And so the unfortunate part was when she got diagnosed with cancer, we hadn't spoken six months. So she only survived another, I think, two years. So that means the last two and a half years.

I miss what? Like that's 20% or 25% of her life. And somebody's like, what were you guys fighting over? It's like, the sad thing is I don't remember. I was not one to let, you know, I was very hard-headed. And so she had some weird fight with me. I don't remember what it was. And then she's like, you're not allowed to live here, kick me out, and I didn't have

anything. And so anyways, I went to, lived in student housing. And that was the first time. They randomly assign you like a roommate. And it was like the son of a rich rancher because our fridge was like full of like all this meat stuff, which is bad because it was the summer where Florida got hit by like four hurricanes and all the meat went rotting. Oh, yeah, it was disgusting.

But I didn't know that there were people. legitimately. This makes me sound like an absolute moron, but I didn't know that there were people that only went to college. Because my roommate didn't have a job. He just drank and went to, I'm like, what else do you do? Yeah, yeah. What? This is crazy. So I don't know where I was going with that. You were saying, you were taking a pause on readwise and multiple reads and you're like, I got to tell you how I found you. Oh, okay. So again, I'm a crappy school. It's a state school in Orlando, UCF, I almost said UFC, like we're, it's MMA. That would have probably more useful now. So UCF, and this is when Facebook was coming out, but Facebook was only

at the fancy schools. Yeah, right. It was very much at the fancy schools. We didn't have Facebook. You know, we had, we had MySpace. And so remember, like, you'd go and they were like music playing on somebody's profile. Well, people would list like their favorite movies and favorite books. And I think I was like looking at a girl's probably profile. Yeah. And under favorite books, I said, four-hour work week. I'm like, that's a great title. What is that? And I immediately ordered it on Amazon and then I start reading it.

Obviously, then that book, you know, inspired, I don't know, 25 million people, maybe even more, but now. And then I start consuming all your stuff. So, like, I'd buy all your books. I bought your TV show. Oh, I appreciate that. Like, sometimes I'll forget because you go on, like, whatever, it's not called iTunes anymore. And, like, I don't buy anything because everything streams.

I'm like, Tim Ferriss for shit. I know from the Natural History Museum back in the day. I was obsessed with podcasts. I discovered in 2010. And before I started mine in 2016, I listened to thousands of them. And you had one that changed my life, which was when you did Jocko. Yeah. And that was 2015, if I remember correctly.

And you told him to start a podcast. And I think Rogan told him to do it as well. And he's like, well, if I got these two guys, obviously he's smart. Just take the advice. And I started listening to his podcast. And he changed format. But in the beginning, it was just him doing, he would read a first person account. So an autobiography is somebody in combat.

And I could not believe what I was hearing. And so what I would do is I'd listen to maybe like 100 of his episodes and maybe buy a dozen of the books. So you learn, even on the episodes, you don't read the book, you learn so much and you're inspired. And in the books, he kept introducing me all kinds of crazy stories. And I was like, hey, a couple months later. And then obviously, like, I'd started reading biographies because your friend Kevin Rose did this excellent interview, Elon Musk we can talk about from 2012.

And I was like, what if I do like Jocco's format, but I'm, I'm interested in like four things. I'm interested in reading, history, podcasts, and entrepreneurship. And so if you look at it, it's like, it just sits in between those four. And I started doing that. And essentially, I was just imitating Jocko. And no one gave a shit for five and a half years. Yeah.

Wow. What a wild story. So I want to dive into that. The interview with Jocko, I owe special thanks to, I think it was Peter Tia, who made the introduction. He said, just trust me on this. Yeah. And then didn't you just show up at your house or something?

Yeah, we hung out in San Francisco. I remember exactly which coffee shop we went to. And I made the mistake, I wasn't even thinking properly. I had a camo shirt on and I was like, I can't believe I wore a fucking camo shirt to meet someone as legitimate as Jacco Willink. And I was just like, oh, face palm. But we ended up connecting. That was this first ever public interview, which is wild.

One of the best ones ever done. Oh, I mean, he really brought the heat as Jacko. He's my alarm every morning. He's like, get up. I swear to God, I'm not joking. He's been my alarm for like half a decade. Yeah. He yells at me.

He just, I'm like, you're right. Extreme ownership still highly, highly, highly recommend to everyone. And if you want to hear me and Jago go toe to toe to toe, not really toe to toe to or shoulder to shoulder with a book, we did Musashi. Episode 100. Episode 100, which was like four and a half, five hours long. Yes. Going through this historical novel about the most famous swordsman in Japanese history.

I read that because of the episode. Oh, so good. I think I read the audiobook first, and it's like 60 hours long or something. It's really long. And keeping in mind, this was originally published in Japanese in a country of whatever the population is, like 120, 150 million. I think it sold like 80 to 100 million copies. I mean, something just completely insane as I might be getting that off. But the numbers are just astonishing as a ratio of the total population. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. many of you know how deeply I love Japan and its culture of unwavering dedication to craft

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and experience the difference firsthand. Simply go to drink, AG1.com slash Tim. That's drinkag1.com slash Tim. So five and a half years. How do you explain no one giving a shit for five and a half years? In other words, was there something that happened, a decision you made, something that changed things around the five and a half year mark?

Was it a change in technology? Was it the ecosystem? What happened? Yeah. Literally, I was doing nothing different. change in business model. So you remember podcasting back in there because you're like one of the OGs. And like you had this massive audience. Your blog was crazy. Like you were huge and still are. And I was none of those things. I was a weird introvert. I didn't have any social media.

I didn't know anything about like the internet. I don't know how to describe like I just would like to read and record a podcast in my kitchen on a hundred dollar microphone. And I remember calling around and trying to figure out like what's the business model here? And everybody's like, oh, it's ads. I'm like, oh, that's great. And so at the time, there was, like, these ad networks essentially they just sell ads for you. And they're like, we'd love to work with you. You just have to have 50,000 downloads per show. And I go, what? I will never, 50,000? Like, that, it seemed like such a big number. Like, it's just like, that will never, ever happen. In the universe of podcast, that's still a big number. Yes, but now, like, there's a million,

like, think about how many people listen to Tim Ferriss show and Farras show and there's millions, like millions of people, you know, like over the course of a year or whatever. So I was like, oh my God, like that's never going to happen. And so then you'd say, okay, well, what can you do? And like back then it would be like affiliate. So like, remember, Audible scaled massively. People don't realize how big businesses can get on the back of podcast and how many have because it was on every, it was on everything.

It was on everything. It was Dan Carlin had one ad and it was an audible ad. It was audible. Yes. They were very smart about that. Yes. Yeah, they've been able to change a lot of their economics. Yes. For the better for Audible and Amazon since capturing more market share. but they did an excellent job of marketing and advertising.

They were on every single podcast, and so I did that, and then there was this company called Blinkist, which was kind of like a summaries, 10-minute summary app for like business books, non-fiction books. And that blew my mind because you only got paid on sales, and they would show you like,

not the people, but like where the country was. And I remember the first time somebody in Japan bought, I'm like, I'm sitting in Miami in my kitchen. Great acoustics, by the way, you idiot. on a $100 mic with no pop filter, no nothing.

Like, there was nothing out there. There's no, like, editing a podcast now with a script and all the AI tools, it's like magic compared to what we had to do. Oh, yeah. And I was like, what? Somebody in Japan listened to this thing? This was crazy. So the one idea I had, I actually got the business model from a socialist podcast.

Might have been the beginning of the troubles. So there was this first. a long time when I opened a browser, my home page would be this thing called Graftreon. Graftreon is they used the Patreon API and you see people building membership communities. And what was interesting about them is like, you know, people would tell comic books, they would sell podcasts, they would sell newsletters videos. And the most popular category was podcasts. I'm like, that's weird. And so at the time, this podcast called Chapo Trap House was the number one. And they had 25,000 people. This is on Patreon. Yes. And the only way you see this is because Grafton

would aggregate the data for you and present it to you. And so at the time, I think they had 20,000 paid subscribers at least $5 a month. And their business model is simple. Every other podcast you have to pay for. So you can listen to half them for free. If you want more, just pay five bucks a month and you can listen to it in a podcast player like anything else. You just have to go through the paywall. And every month I'm watching and the number gets higher and higher and higher. Now if you pull up Grafton, I think the number one is Shane Gillis. I think he's got like 120,000 paid subscribers. So I was like, oh, there's like a business here where like, what if I had a subscription podcast? So it's one thing to pay five bucks a month for a comedy podcast.

But my podcast are about business. If there's ideas on this podcast that will make people more money, which is essentially what business education comes down to, like you want to be more successful what you do, some kind of like, hopefully you see like a better economic outcome for yourself and your family. I was like, what if I could just sell subscriptions? I'm not selling enough audible subscriptions and blink. guess it's not going to happen. And my idea was just like, I think I was completely in love with podcasting as still am. It's like the only thing I think about I work on a seven days a week. It's

completely taken over my life. And my idea was like, I don't even have to be wealthy. I just have to do this for a living. It has to come out of me. It's like, I have no control over this. And I was like, maybe I can make like dentist money. And so my idea was like, I bitch I can sell 3,000 paid subscriptions at $100 a pop, make 300 grand a year. And then I also have a lot of self-confidence. like, well, if I could sell 3,000, I can sell 20,000, and then, like, maybe I can sell as as many as chapo can, and then I'm making two million. Like, this is the idea I had. And so my idea was like, the genius idea I had was like, hey, your most valuable asset you have, which is like, you know, your podcasts that are easy to share and everything else. Like, let's put a big wall

in front of that. Yeah, yeah. And so I put a giant paywall in front of it. And obviously, it slows growth because how are you going to share the episode? The one benefit I had, which really kept me going, and I don't think I would quit anyways. I really don't think I had any other option was that, you know, we don't know who's going to listen to this one. We just see numbers on a screen. But with a subscription, you see the email address. And the emails were like the top founders and top VCs. And I had a very small audience. And one of them was our mutual friend, Patrick O'Shaunsi. And I was a huge fan of Patrick. And I saw, I'm not going to repeat his email address here, but I know what the, I was like, I saw that come across. And there were so few. Like,

I saw every single one. Yeah, sure. you're getting like 10 a day, I don't know, five a day or something like that, paid. And I'm like, oh my God, Patrick Brawl. He didn't know who I was. He didn't know I was a big fan of his. I didn't know anything. I had no followers.

I think of like 7,000 followers across like every one of my accounts. And I was like trying really hard back then. And he goes, I never find good podcasts to listen to. I think David Sender's founder's podcast is excellent. You should listen to it. And he linked to that one on essay Lauder. And I could not believe it because I was like, why do I have these mentions on Twitter?

What is a mention? Like, I don't get mentions. Like, what is this new thing? I log into my email because I would, back then, you would get an email every time you get a new page subscription. And off of one tweet of an endorsement by people, this is why, like you and Andrew are kind of like the male Oprah. And I mean that in the most, like, you know how much shit I've bought because you told

me that it's good? Why? Because of the trust. People chase numbers. It's like that. You're not chasing numbers. You're chasing trust and relationships. I love what Warren Buffett said.

A brand is a promise. the fact that you guys have such high standards. I've never bought anything like, how was Tim thinking? And so that's what makes you so valuable. So Patrick extended that trust to me where I logged into my email and you couldn't stop scrolling.

Yeah, that's cool. You couldn't stop scrolling. And so I screen shouted that because... Patrick's a good dude. Very smart too. And best like the best. Yeah, you did an excellent episode with him for when you hit your 10-year anniversary.

Oh, yeah, 10 years. And then I was a huge NBA fan and one of the... With a person that found me that's been really, really, really helpful when I had like 1,500 listeners, getting him Sam Hinky, former general manager of the 76ers. Very, very intelligent, like, intense and kind of reclusive guy now. It's really hard to get to.

And we had talked a bunch, and he's just like, I really think you have something here. I think you're, like, what you're doing is important. And I've tried to help you as much as I can. And I knew him and Patrick were friends. And I screenshotted Patrick's tweet. I was like, look what your friend Patrick did. Sam didn't say anything. He just put it.

And again, Patrick trusts Sam. And Sam's telling Patrick, this guy's worth your time. He puts in group chat. He goes, you two need to know each other. And I was like, Patrick, I'm a huge fan, love to talk to you. And Patrick doesn't have a calendar. He's like, what about right now? And I was like, well, let me look at my calendar.

Nothing. Nothing, literally nothing. First time we talked was like an hour and a half. And we get to the end, he goes, I thought I was in the podcast. And then we become friends. And then I joined his network. And then he just poured gasoline on a promising spark. Was he the one who convinced you to remove the wall?

No. So a friend of mine, again, this is the sad part about, getting more following is so many of my close friends now came from like DMs and now you can't do that you can't even look at mentions I'd be curious

Yeah it's like such a magical thing and now because Yeah well once verified could be purchased It destroyed the utility of meeting those people on It's like what Charlie Longer said Like if you have a bunch of raisins And just a few turd you still got turds

And you could have 99% of people Are nice to you and then it's these psychos And you're like I can't read my mentions anymore Can't check my DMs like it's like sad but one of the I met a couple friends through them and again I was like grinding out $100 year subscriptions just like going to the factory every day trying to like you know sell a few more and one of my friends told me like what one of his friends company just paid to advertise on like one of the biggest business podcasts and the number was like what what did you say

and then Sam and other people like Patrick you know they're just like Like, this is kind of weird thing that you're doing. Like, why don't you just sell ads like everybody else, you know? And I was like, look at China. They're 90% subscription to your podcast. I'm like, yeah, but you're American, you idiot. And so I came up with all these like crazy, because I can be very convincing in the opposite direction. Like, it doesn't have to be a good idea.

I can talk myself into really, I can talk myself into good ideas, but I can talk myself into bad ideas too. And so eventually I was, I called Patrick one day. And I was just like, man, I am like fighting with like one hand behind my back. this is really, really difficult. I think I'm going to make an ad-based version of founders. And he means, he's like, yeah, no shit. I've been telling you to do this forever. And then I was like, and I'd like it to be on your network.

And he's like, ooh, that's interesting. And again, he's just a good dude. And he's like, yeah, but I own all podcasts on my network. He's like, well, you sell me equity. And I don't know why I said this. I was like, no. It was like crazy. And I had had all these acquisition and investment offers up until that point,

because obviously everybody in the audience, likes to do deals. Yeah. So they're like kind of allocate capital. That's their sport. Yeah. And I was like, no, no, no. It's like, it wasn't a business thing to me.

It's like a special thing. It's like part of my soul, you know. Michael Dell has this great answer when he was like fighting with car icon when, you know, and they're like, why don't you just like start another company? He's like, I like, I like this company. It has my name on it. And he goes, I'm going to care about this company after I'm dead. So that's how I feel.

Like, it's a rational love that I have for this. And so I was like, uh, I don't want to sell equity, but he's like, what do you want? I was like, I want you to help amplify my audience and connect me with first rate advertisers. Then we could just share ad revenue. And one call, he's like, done. And that like completely changed everything. That was four years ago.

Wow. Thank God for Patrick, huh? Oh, for sure. I talked to him almost every day. We're like brothers. I called him to this morning. He's a great guy. He was a very, very good guy.

Let's just, actually, I'm going to zoom into your sort of expertise, subject matter for a second. And then I want to talk more about podcasting, but just so it doesn't become too much inside baseball, I do want to come back and talk about podcasting. But you have mentioned, you have mentioned a number of different names kind of at the top of your list, people to learn from. Where does Edwin Land fit into that? Oh. And who is Edwin Land? So Edwin Land is the patron saint of founders.

So I want a picture of him in my house. Like, you know, the Last Supper would just be like Edwin Land in the middle, like Jesus. So again, I'm very interested. in who influences the influencers. And, like, where do these ideas actually come from? And, you know, Steve Jobs, if you have a Mount Rushmore of greatest entrepreneurs, like his face has got to be on it, undoubtedly. He created the most successful product in history.

I think he did it for the right reasons. I think he's a very fascinating person, obviously incredibly flawed as, like, a human, which he even said, you know. But what's fascinating is if you go back and which I do is, like, when I read a biography of somebody, I will make a list going back to, you know, your outline of what I'll do in the front of the books which you called what it front matter front matter I even know that term till now thank you

I will write down all the other founders or all the other people they'll talk about and so like I just did this James Dyson he's like obsessed with Buckminster Fuller and Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Jeremy Fry and Alex Isaganis and all these people he just repeats them over and over again and you just realize oh he studied these guys

and then took their ideas and said those ideas are good I'll use them and then makes $60 billion or whatever's company's worth Everyone should read about Buckminster Fuller I haven't read the book yet. I've read his ideas, but not the book that James read when he was in college. It's fascinating to me how it's almost all, like in the issue you find it early. I had lunch with Sam Zell.

How did he make his money for people who don't know? People consider him an investor. He calls himself an entrepreneur. He called himself an entrepreneur. So what he's most well known for is in 2007 he sold the, I think the biggest real estate company in history for like $38 billion to Blackstone. And it kind of like tipped the very top of the market, but he just likes that. to essentially buy businesses, try to make them grow, he would sell some. So that's why people consider him an investor, but he considered himself an entrepreneur. By the time I met him, he had

61 years of experience as an entrepreneur. And my favorite entrepreneurs are, I love talking to these people that have 40, 50. I'm not interested in the startup founder at all. Like this 25-year-old kid that thinks he's smart, he doesn't have enough experience yet. Life is going to teach you what you know. People who have ridden like many multiple macroeconomic cycles, who have had to contend with different challenges at different points in their lives, not just when they have no responsibilities and no dependence, et cetera, et cetera.

Well, he says something in his autobiography that you were speaking to earlier. He's like, yeah, and earlier in my life, my career fought my marriages and my career won. And that's why I've been married three times. The very recurring theme is that you look at life as everything that's not work

as kind of an unpleasant distraction and you wonder why your relationship's broken because you're not spending any time there. Like, of course, it's the outcome. And they all make this mistake over and over again. So what's fascinating about this is we'll go back to Edwin Land in a minute. Sam Zell in his biography. He's like, dude, I'm in college. This guy was making millions of dollars a year when he was in law school. That's how good of an entrepreneur he was from day one. Was that real estate? He was developing, I think, student housing at the time. I think the student housing, but he was also like doing deals. He's just a very gifted dealmaker. And you see this with Rick, understanding, like, you'll bring something to Rick. And you're like, oh, here's like 10 things that are important. Do you want to explain who Rick is briefly? So his name is Rick Gerson, one of my closest friends. You've known him for what?

Yeah, I don't know, 15, 20 years, a long time. 15, 20 years. He's one of the most generous, thoughtful, and also simultaneously super intense people I know. He was a master of finance, came out of this just sort of amazing training environment. We can just call that what it is for now in simplicity, and is one also of the best connected humans I've ever met. He identifies, no, there's just like one thing. He learned that from Sam, and then Sam learned that from this guy named Jay Prisker. It's very fascinating.

So Chicago royalty. Yes, 100%. I actually just backed, it's not a Kickstarter, but there's no biography to Jay Prisker. And so this guy named Rockwood Notes that essentially put his hat out. He's like, hey, I want to do this, but I need to make at least, I think, $40,000 a year to write this book. And he's selling $800 or $1,000 or $1,000 your subscriptions. I was like, yeah, I'll obviously sign up for this. Like, I wanted Jay Pritz's biography.

So Sam Zell in his autobiography, he's like, yeah, I read this book by William Zeckendorf. And it changed my life because there's one idea in this book. It's what Charlie Munger said. There's ideas worth billions in a $30 history book. And there was this thing called Hawaiian technique. William Zekindorf was like this real estate developer in New York. And he came from nothing and then made a lot of money, then lost it all. And then made a lot of money and then lost it all again and dies with no money.

So you want to avoid that too. But he had this thing called a Hawaiian technique, which was, hey, if you just parcel out a building, and you sell the different parts to whoever values it more, you'll make more money. So like the lease is valued higher by these guys and the land is valued higher and maybe the commercial real estate there or whatever. Like he just would break it apart like Legos and sell it independently and make money. What Sam realized, he started using that real estate and he goes, oh, this works in business too. So he'd buy a business and like, maybe you want the IP, maybe you want the talent, maybe you want the actual physical assets and he'd do this over and over again. So I remember telling Sam to

his face, and Sam had no filter, and he was exactly who you thought he was. If you watched any videos, he's just like this. And I go, yeah, I bought that book that you recommend it. He goes, did you read it? I go, no. He goes, read it. Like, he's got the gravelly voice. Like, rate it. I was like, oh, shit, okay. And I read it as soon as I went home and started reading it. Like Sam Zell tells you read a book, just read a book. But the reason I bring this up is because you'll see this over and over again. They'll find somebody early. So you can go back and read this Playboy interview, just for the, I hope when you, it's just for the interview. It's not for anything else of Steve Jobs when he's 25, 26. And he's talking about the fact that we have the wrong role models

and heroes as a society. We want to be, you know, now he'd say you want to be YouTube or something. We want to be athletes. We want to be all these other things. We should want to be Edwin Land. And at the time, Edwin Land was the founder of Polaroid. Edwin Land's in his 70s. Jobs meets him and spends time with him a bunch of times, okay? Edwin-Land at that time had the third most patents of any American in history. I think it was Thomas Edison, the second guy and then Edwin-Land, or maybe it's, you know, the first guy and then Thomas Edison, but Edwin-Land was up there. And what you would realize is when Jobs goes on stage and says, hey, I wanted to build Apple,

I wanted to build a company at the intersection of liberal arts and technology, and he has that, he literally puts the, you know, the street sign up on there. That is literally a direct quote from Edwin Land. Edwin Land wanted to build a company at the intersection of liberal arts and technology. He wanted to make completely vertically integrated consumer products that were magical, that had a magical experience. In Edwin Land's case, he invented the industry that he then comes to dominate. There was no such thing as instant photography. So when we're like, how great is the iPhone compared to one that came before it? The difference is vast, but not Not the same thing as me, if you, me and you were hanging out before Edwin Land was on this earth,

we take a picture at a party, like, how did you come out? Well, we'll find out two weeks from now when you get back in Kodak, as opposed. Turns out it was a shot of my foot. As opposed to like, wait a minute and we're going to see it right here in the Polaroid. And then, dude, the amount of ideas that Jobs took from him, go look at the freaking tables that Jobs uses when he gives presentations, the actual table. It's the same table that Edwin Land gave when he gave presentations. So if somebody wants to study Edwin Land, where do they start?

I read this biography of Edwin Land. I thought it was incredible. It's called Insisting on the Impossible. It's the most comprehensive biography of him. People read it. They're like, this book sucks. I think it's riveting. There is a book, I think it's called Land's Polaroid.

That's the one I'd read because it's only 250 pages. And it's written by a guy that worked for and with Edwin Land for like 20 years. And I love those kind of things because you see him over a decade. But my point being is like, Jobs was just talking about this guy when he was 25. Jobs knows he's dying when he's working with Isaacson on the biography. He knows he's dying. And he's still talking about Edwin Land appears in Isison's biography of Jobs like six times. Why is he still talking about this guy?

How could you not be interested in understanding why? What is it about this guy that he admired and liked? Yeah, and he has a saying that he has a personal motto that I love and that I try to do. And Edwin Land's, there's two of them. Edwin Land says, my personal motto is very personal. It may not apply to anybody else or anybody else or any other company, but is don't do anything that someone else can do. The importance of differentiation,

I'm shocked at how few people understand how important it is. Dyson's whole thing is like it has to be different, even if it's worse. It should be different. That's interesting. He's a man's difference. He's got a very fascinating business philosophy.

Dyson's mind's incredible. And then the other thing is he knows because he dropped out of Harvard choice. He goes, there's something you know, teach you at Harvard Business School, that anything worth doing is worth doing to excess. So how do you think about different

archetypes, perhaps that's the best word to use, within the pantheon of successful entrepreneurs. The reason I ask that is that I imagine you get questions along the lines of, and I get questions like this also. When you look across all of the biographies, what are some of the common patterns? Give me the top five, top six, and then people want to grab that recipe.

But it could be like, just to use a sports analogy, it's like, all right, You're taking the stretching routine from LeBron James, the weight training routine from Arnold Schwarzenegger, and this, this and this, you're grabbing habits from mutants that are in entirely different spheres

of different bodies entirely, then trying to cobble it together. It may not work, right? That's point number one. Probably won't work. Number two is that within the world of business advice, whether it's autobiographies, biographies, interviews,

there's a lot that conflicts, right? So you have one person who says anything that's worth doing is worth overdoing. And then there is like you can tell who the novice is because they do too much. Yes. Right. And I'm wondering how you think of entrepreneurship for yourself in terms of modeling different people or taking advice. Because you have two people just to use a metric that's easy for everybody to wrap their head around like two billionaires. And they give you diametrically opposed advice.

how do you personally pick there's no formula one of the things i'm like so thrilled with is the fact that like i've become friends with daniel act founder of spotify and this is something we're actually trying to work on together because he brings us up he's like we need alternative founder archetypes and back up first of all like Daniel is an alien there's a specific reason that i wanted him to be the very first guest on the new show is i'm able to build relationships to other people. Daniel's very special in the sense that he's only a few years older than me, but he's so much more wiser than I am. I don't know how I can put this in words and make sense, but because he's founded and is still running a $120 billion company. He's been

running for 19 years, but he's, to me, he's still so underrated. And the thing about Daniel is not only he's being wicked smart, but he's given me some of the best advice and he does it in a very like reserved and very precise way. He's got very clear thinking. And I just cannot get over like how generous he is with his time and his advice to me. And he told me one of the things that was really important. He had like an offhand comment. But he's like, you're really easy to understand. So therefore you're easy to help. And he's just like, I know what is important to you. And so therefore like you're easy to help and like you're easy to interface with. And so his point And he's like, every young founder thinks they have to be in Elon or Steve Jobs. And he's like,

but I'm not like an Elon or Steve Jobs. And the massive success, it's not only what he's done for Spotify, one of the best apps ever created. I think they have the most, I think there's only one other company in the world that has more paid subscribers than they do. And that's Netflix, you know, but think about the way you feel when you get done using Spotify. And this is why I like all the top people there too. And they've also been working together for excessively a long time, Gustav, Alex, Daniel, all of them, is they want you when you're done using Spotify to feel good. If me and you spend an hour listening to our favorite music on Spotify, you feel great. You spend an hour listening to Tim Ferriss's podcast. You inspire. You feel great.

An audiobook now. You feel great. I spend an hour on TikTok or reels. I feel like shit. Like Twitter. I can't. Like it just, I feel like the anti-therapy. But they're trying to put something. Do you want to send yourself backwards? So I like what they're doing. Is there any other advice that has stuck from Daniel to you? you and then I will not let me forget the archetype I will yeah I won't lose track of that so the archetype is I think is really important I think you'll really vibe with what his opinion on or his perspective on this is yeah Daniel will tell you advice in like a he's like a wise old man I don't know how to describe it so one thing is is implied and never explicitly stated is he just doesn't feel he has any

like there's no ceiling on what he can achieve or what he can learn the effect he can have in the world and when you spend time with him that is transferred to you and it's like one of the most important things. And I don't even know if I told him this. I had like tears in my eyes thinking about it. I remember like hanging out with him in Stockholm. And, you know, he's done phenomenal stuff with Spotify, one of the best apps ever created at best businesses. And he's like wildly successful as an investor too. And so I remember asking him. This is the funny thing over here. And I go, were you always interested in investing? Because I knew his story. Like we talked a lot about this. And he goes, no. I didn't even know anything about it. I started learning. I go,

when did you start learning? He's like, 2018. I go, how did you start learning? He goes, Patrick's podcast. And so he would just listen to people. He was like, I like that idea. I'll take that idea. Oh, I don't like that idea.

I don't like that at all. I'll avoid that. And the way Patrick describes it, it's like, out of anybody you know, Daniel has the ability to apply what he's learning faster, anybody else and at a grander scale. He's also a very, very, very good systems thinker. So he's not at a risk of cobbling together this sort of

camel that is a horse designed by committee that has a bunch of inherent problems and conflicts within it, right? He'll be able to figure out how to put pieces together from first principles that function well as a whole. Let me tell one other piece of advice that he gave me

and he tells it in a story form. This is why he's like the wise old man. And essentially it was remember why people love you. You sit in a room and you read all the time and then you make this thing on the other side that educates and inspires us and gives us energy. And as soon as you stop doing that and you start saying yes to all these distractions and I don't even know, like, I think we might have talked about us on the episode we did

that comes out in a few weeks. But he tells it in a story. And he tells a story from another person. So he's not telling you, David, go do this. He's like, let me tell you about this little genius. Or not little genius. This guy's really impressive. Look at what he's accomplished and everything else.

And then the story will hit you like hours later. And he's like, oh, yeah, you know, we've invited him. to the conference over time. I've invited him to visit and I keep hearing no. And I'm like, oh, he's like telling me, you're saying yes to many things. The magic that you have is because you say no.

And once you start saying yes and you're at every conference, you're traveling around, you're doing all this sort of stuff, the magic disappears. I'm curious what you think are some of the different archetypes because I think of the 100 plus startups

that I've invested in since 2008. And there's a lot of variability. You've got the engineer, let's call it the engineer founder. somebody like Toby of Shopify or Luis Vanaan of Duolingo. Then you've got sort of like genius operator negotiator warrior like a Travis Kalanick, right? Very different personalities, very different superpowers.

And you just go down the list and you see some people come from like a finance numbers kind of like spreadsheet God perspective and like they just have an analytical advantage, right? It's very comparable to investing in some ways, looking at the investing world. They have this analytical advantage, let's just call it. And I was trying to pick out what, if anything, might be commonalities, because you also have like the crazy artist who then figures out how to harness some of their super power. And it strikes me that there are at least two that immediately jump to mind. One is longer term time horizon. Those are the People I'm obsessed with.

Like the Jeff Bezos type of mindset where it's like if you have the exact same toolkit, the exact same competency, out of the box genetically, you're built exactly the same as someone else, but you are able to think and plan longer term. It's just, it can be a huge advantage. Second is something that you mentioned where Daniel was saying to you, like, this is the magic. So just remember this is the magic. Yeah. when other opportunities, other shiny objects show up because they will, even in very early

stages. And if you deviate, it's incredibly easy to sort of self-immolate if you lose track of that. And you see that a lot when CEOs get replaced, sometimes founder CEOs. Sometimes they need to be replaced. But what else would you add to that or how would you expand on any of it? Just look at the founders or something like the biggest companies in the world now. They would go to ward against each other. So think about Oracle and Microsoft. You can't think of two different founder archetypes than Bill Gates and Larry Ellison. Larry Ellison's like, I'm a sprinter.

I have intense, very intense periods of work, weeks at a time, months of time, and then I need to go on my boat with a bunch of Italian models. This is how I have to live my life. Bill Gates is, you know, we'd be walking into this room right here and his feet would be underneath his desk. He's sleeping for three hours. He's getting back up and he's going back on the guy. He's a grinder.

error. And then you have, I've been trying to name some of these and I haven't done this yet, but the problem is I never write anything. This is all like improv, you know. One of them is like the anti-business billionaire. And so in that category, it's like these people are so obsessed about one thing and that's the quality of the product they're making. They make non-financial decisions. Like Steve Jobs making sure that the inside of the Mac looks beautiful even though you can't open it up and it costs more money. He doesn't care. He wants the best product. James Dyson's like this. He's an anti-business billionaire. Yvonne Schenard, founder of Patagonia, anti-business billionaire. These guys, they're obsessed to two things. Quality of the product that they're making and retaining

control of their company over long term. And the funny part about that, the reason I call them anti-business billionaire is because if you make the world's best product, right, and you retain control over your company, you wind up with the money anyways. Yeah, I can think of a few people, I mean, within my portfolio who retained a lot of their equity at least, and that's it, which is kind of preserving the magic, right, in terms of the best product. Well, look at everybody's like, look at having Larry Ellison right now. It's like, yeah, I could be wrong, but I think Oracle raised 32 million of equity in our IPO and no more after that.

And then the guy would refuse, even when they were almost going on a business in 1990, he still wouldn't sell. They're like, sell your equity. He's like, no. It's like, it might be worth nothing. He just wouldn't sell it. And then he'd buying back stock. So he owns, I think 40, I think he went down to 24%.

Now he's back to like 41% of Oracle. The company's 50 years old. Like 45 years old. I think it was like 30 something when he founded the company. He's just an anomaly. And then you have people like, you know, Elon where it's just like, I'm going to run. I wouldn't even think that's possible.

How the hell do you run seven companies at the same time? Can barely manage three employees. I don't know. Yeah, exactly. So like that is the point. I do think Daniel hit on something that no one else has put in front of me. It's like the people are going to dominate. Obviously, Elon's the most famous entrepreneur in the world.

But even like Bezos is very different. And then you have these people that some of the people would just like to make money. That is their scoreboard. This is another thing I learned from Michael Dell. there's two things. One thing you just said, protecting the magic. The advice that Dell gave me when I had dinner with him, and he does this in story form too, because that guy's been running his business for 41 years. 41 years. It's insane. And his whole thing is just like, you're not going to be taken out by competition. You're going to sabotage yourself. Entrepreneurs sabotage themselves. And the amount

of people that were doing the same thing I was doing, and they were ahead of me, this is Dell talking, they were ahead of me. But then they got the 500 million year revenue and they're like, I have a house on Lake Austin now. They're in the same city. They're doing the same thing as him in the same city. And they're smoking them. They're ahead of them by like a few hundred million, right? And they're like, oh, I can chill now. No, you can't because you got Michael Dell right across the river and he's not going to chill. That guy has no chill. I heard he's got this wonderful house in Hawaii. His son was telling me about this. And I was like, we were in Austin in July. You know. It's like, what are you doing here? And Michael's answer is simple. He says, I love my

business. And my business is here. He wasn't being mean to me. It was like, that's a stupid question, David. Like, I'm working. I love what I do. This is what I'm doing. So one thing from his autobiography, though, is that I used to say it only works if you build a business is authentic to you. And this is why I asked you about your inner monologue earlier, because I really feel the reason people do their best work, usually later in life in business is obviously more experience, network, finances, everything else. But I think they, because they know themselves better.

I think me and you, if we would have met 10 years ago, we would be different people and we also wouldn't know each other, like know ourselves. as much as we do now. We're like, I think I've built a business and you have two, based on what I know about you, completely authentic to you. And that's the only way it's going to work over long term.

And I used to say authentic. And then Michael does autobiography, which he narrates, by the way, the audible is excellent. I listened to it three times before I read it to do the episode on it. And there is a guy named, I think Lee Walker,

who Michael brought him when Michael was 21, he was in his 40s. And it was like an older, wiser man. And he had to quit after four years. He was like basically running the company with Michael.

and he's like, we're taking on IBM with $1,000 for working capital from shitty office and like the industrial part in like Austin, right? IBM's the biggest company in the world. It's the first, I didn't know this. It was the first company hit a $100 billion market cap. And like my back hurts. I'm losing hair. I can't sleep. I got digestive issues. Like Lee's dead after four years. And he goes, and Michael's excited. It's invigorated him and that he gave me the line. He goes, because he built a business that was natural to him. I'm dying and he's thriving because it's natural to him and it's not natural to me. And I think that's the key, man.

People are like, oh, I'm going to imitate X, Y, and Z. It's like, no, no, no. You should be copying the how, not to what. You don't copy what they did. You copy how they did. And then you just take the little ideas that makes sense to you. So you ask, like, how am I applying this for my own work? I am either completely apathetic and ignore something or completely obsessed.

It's zero or a hundred and nothing in the middle. So the reason I love Munger, because Munger gave me really like, Munger and your friend of all, I had a big role in this too, gave me the kind of the blueprint where he's just like, hey, we found that oftentimes Munger has this line, that oftentimes the winning system in business goes ridiculously far, maximizing and are minimizing one or a few variables. And he used Costco, like the example. And then he has another line.

Find a simple idea and take it seriously. Sharing lessons from biographies of great people is a very, very simple idea. Doing it for nine years, you know, working 70 hours a week at it, building systems for read doing it over and over again is not, that's the serious part. His other quote that I've already shared earlier, there's ideas worth billions and a $30 history book. That's another idea. That's maybe why the work would be valuable and attract the audience that it could attract. Another idea from him, you want to maneuver yourself into an area that you're intensely interested in. That just being a fanatic like a Sam Walton or like a Jim Sinigal or like a

sole price is just Jeff Bezos very helpful. These are fanatics. They are intensely interested in what they're doing. That is worth a lot of money. And I've become friends with Michael Ovitz, who's also one of the first guests on my new show. And his whole thing is like, you cannot fight against your job. That's one of the best pieces of vice. He's like, people fight against their job all the time and they lose. You have to find something that you're intensely drawn to it. So I have a couple of bullets. You should explain who Michael Ovitz is. Why don't you do that first? And then I'll just hop to two questions related to Michael Ovitz specifically. Michael Ovitz there's a shark he's one of the most intense people he I think he's 80 by now

so Rick and I live very close to each other in Miami okay and we always have breakfast at the same spot that I'm not going to say publicly yeah good idea and so we're hanging out to disinformation campaign sure yeah it's always a Denny's moon's over Miami and so his phone's on the table and it rings and it says my Michael Ovitz. And I gas. I'm like, oh, because I read Michael Ovitz was the most powerful man in Hollywood at one time. He had like 75% market share or 90% market share. He was the most powerful agent. He's the founder of CAA, which still exists this day. And I'm like, oh, God, I know who that is. I've done episodes on this guy. And so he picks up and they've been friends for like 20 years,

25 years or something like that. And he goes, hey, I'm sitting here with somebody you might know, have you ever heard of David Senra and the founders podcast? And Michael pauses, he goes, I listened to four of them yesterday. He was on his boat and St. Bartz. No, but this is how, why, he's a shark and a killer. He's on his boat in St. Bartz. He's, like, studying Rockefeller and Vanderbilt. He's, like, quoting stuff from the episode.

And so we wind up having dinner. Rockefeller, one of the biggest sharks to ever live. Oh, 100%. And so we went up having dinner. And this is one of the things I asked him, you know, because his whole thing is, like, you're going to run through, you know, you're going to meet thousands of people in your life. He's going to definitely meet way more people than I will because I'm an introvert. And he used to, like, call 300 people.

people a day because he was like kind of running Hollywood but his ovitz's advice to me was just like you know you're gonna be thousands of people in your life and what I would recommend is just spend all the time with a handful that really matter and he's like for me Rick is one of those people and I go why and obviously you know he's like oh he's intelligent and basically but he's like because he tells me the truth that's one thing you're going to rely on Rick for I'm not sure he can help himself but but it's a conscious decision but no but in general his whole point is like When you get to be as famous and as well-known, as wealthy as OVits, everybody's going to kiss your ass.

Everybody wants something from you. They want to tell you how great you are, or they want money from you, or they want you to sell, like, buy something. And he's just like, there's so few people that you know that, like, truly love you for you and don't want anything from you. They just want to be friends, and they will tell you the truth. And this is the very dangerous thing that really successful people do.

They surround themselves with people that don't tell them the truth. This is an idea I got from Jim Casey, the founder of UPS. he realized that there's this weird, like, capture if you only talk to your top executives. So let's say you have 10 top executives and then they distribute everything else for the company. They work themselves as a position

where they have the ear of the king and you hear nothing good. So he's like, I don't want to talk to them at all. He would stop and talk to every single, he'd make his driver stop every single time they see a brown truck. And he would talk to the people doing the actual service.

Because he wouldn't get the bad news. They would tell them what actually is going on. What is actually happening? And the crazy, impressive founders that I've been able to spend a lot of time with, most of them are 60, 70, 80 years old. Those are my favorite. I love them. They're not in their office.

They're in their warehouses. They're on the factory line. They're in their stores. They're constant contact with the customer and the person delivering the service to the customer. They're not looking at a whiteboard with their executives. They're very practical, non-theoretical people. I think it's like really important. So, yeah, I think in my own thing is just like I like to be obsessed.

and focus on one thing. I don't like to multitask. So therefore, you know, every single publisher. It's like, write a book. You should do this. I'm like, everybody says, hey, I like X. So do Y. And I'm like, but then if I do Y, I don't do X.

And so my whole thing is just like very simple. I just want to do one thing relentlessly. So related to Michael Ovitz, there are a few notes here that I think relate to the new show and the interview you did with him. And I want to ask about two of them. The first is the benefits of low introspection. And the second, so you can tackle these in either order, is this can't be my life, in quotation

marks, is a powerful motivator. Can you expand on those? So this can't be my life is a very powerful motivator. You see it over and over again. I think the sense of drive, like the way you grew up on Long Island, the way I grew up, I was like, I'm not going out like this. I don't care what I have to do. I'm not going to replay this movie.

No way. I think in many cases, seeing examples of what you don't want your life to be is more. more powerful than seeing what you want it to be. I think maybe that one comes first and then you start to see, oh, actually, this is the path I want to go down. There's an expression in Japanese, which is Hanming Kyoshi. Hanming is like opposite side, Kyoshi is teacher, and it's someone who teaches you by showing you what not to do.

Yeah, I would say my family definitely, the case, yeah, like, you just see this over and over again. And so with him, like, he could literally, he grew up in the valley, he could see where he wanted to be. He could see the mansions of Beverly Hills. Hills. He saw the contrast between, this is what I'm worried about with social media. It's like, before we grew up, what do you see? You basically see like, oh, like, that's the nice neighborhood over there. That's kind of a bad neighborhood. Now you see, like, the richest

people in the world every day and the poorest people in the world. Like, you're exposed to nothing but extremes, which is like we've never, in human history, we've never been exposed to that. And like, what is the long term effects of that? I have a teenage daughter now. And I think there's like a lot of negativity of this, like, you only see the most beautiful people. If you were just in a town, like where we grew up, you might see a really beautiful woman. You're not seeing them all day long, like these, it's just like unfair, a barrage of like, you know, unattainable standards. So with him, he was like fiercely driven to succeed. And one of my favorite parts of his book, you know, the guy now wildly successful. But even before that, like when he left,

I think it was William Morris agency, he started to have a little success. He winds up buying a house in Brentwood. And it was like $650,000, right? Which is fantastic, but nothing compared to what's going to happen over the next decades in his life. But he just woke up every morning. He's like, I can't believe I live in Brentwood. I can't believe this. I did this. And then once you start seeing results, the grind becomes very addictive. And he, if you add, what's the archetype? Grindr. Like, I'm going to throw sheer hours and energy. He's also an amazing, one of the best salespeople alive, very charismatic. He's got a lot of superpowers. I actually met Mark and Dresen. I asked him this because Mark and Driesen's on record saying that when he started A16

Z, they essentially copied CAA. I think they brought Michael Lovitz in. They did. They both talk about this. And I said, I asked him, I go, what do you think Michael's superpower? He's like he's the world's greatest agent and therefore the greatest salesperson, world's greatest salesperson. And so that's like one example from his book. It's just like, this can't be my life. I don't want to be like this. I'm going to direct all my energy and do something different. Now, the low introspection thing is, I'm not a controversial person. I'm just sharing lessons from history that I read in a book. You don't have to listen. You don't have to pay attention. It doesn't matter. But when I bring up the fact that a lot of these people have low or zero introspection,

meaning that when they find what they want to do in life, they wake up and they know exactly what they're doing that day. Sam Walton was not waking up saying, what are my feelings like today? What should I do? Should I think about the meaning of life? He's like, no, I found Walmart. I made one Walmart. I'm going to make another one and another one and another one. I'm going to make every Walmart better and better and better.

And I think having low introspection after you found your mission in life, and this is a sad thing. I think most people never find their mission. I know I found my mission. I don't think about what should I do today. We're going to talk obviously about the new show. We've been alluding to it and mentioning some of the guests. But before we get there, so you're about to meet Michael and he had been.

ostensibly on vacation, but he's listening to your episodes on Rockefeller and others. Do you recall any of the other episodes? The Vanderbill one stuck up in my mind. I mean, we text about them. I don't remember.

The Vanderbilt's the one that really, the Rockefeller and the Vanderbilt, especially, because Vanderbilt's like, what I say is like, I'm kind of telling the same story over and over again. I think it's more like church than it is like, just like I went to church. I grew up as a fundamentalist Christian.

And we met together with like believers on regular intervals on Wednesday and Sunday. And it's not like the preacher got up there and said, hey, we talked about that Jesus guy enough. We're going to move on to somebody else. Like we literally just go to the same book over and over again. And so I always say there's like always a historical equivalent to anybody we're dealing with today or in the past. But Vanderbilt to me is not, there's not like an entrepreneurial historical equipment. He's like Putin or something. When he died, he controlled 5% on the money supply.

One out of $20. So I guess the reason I was asking about the episodes, and I don't know Michael. So this is not a judgment or criticism of Michael at all. But I suppose if you believe that there is a value to low introspection for the purposes of building a business, which I would agree, right, is there not a risk? And I have not listened to this particular episodes on Rockefeller and Vanderbilt, but I've read a bit of the history. These are not necessarily people you automatically want to model everything in all.

Oh, I think Obitz would. This is, I suppose, my question is, like, is there a risk of ending up sort of amoral, immoral, or, like, sociopathic if you, one of the things you optimize for is low introspection because, or maybe that's just hardwiring, frankly, and you're just not inclined to do it. That's a great question. Because this archetype does exist. Just like the rape, pillage destroy archetype is an archetype. They're overrepresented in entrepreneurship. Why? because if entrepreneurship done correctly,

yield the greatest material rewards in human history. So, of course, it's going to be full of psychopaths and sociopaths. Like, I don't know if you know know the numbers on this. What they assume 5% of the population sociopathic or something like that? Is that, you know, something you don't know the number. So let's just make it up. It's 5% of the general population. It's probably, you know, five times that of entrepreneurs and investors and people like this

or anybody, political power, power in general. This is why I think the work of Robert Caro is so interesting. and I always make the argument that there should be a law. The only one law that I would foist upon society is that there's only one person allowed to write a thousand page biography. I have no problem reading. Almost none of the books that I've read that are 1,000 pages needed to be 1,000 pages. They just didn't know what to put in there.

Robert Caro is the only one that should be able to write long biographies because everything that he has in there should be in there. I think he's a master of his craft. He's the best to ever do it. But he's saying I'm not writing biographies. I'm writing about how humans accumulate and then wield power. and I did it first on a local level in New York with Rob Moses, and now I'm showing what happens on a national level. And guess what? LBJ would sacrifice everything to get what

he wanted. Personal ethics, his relationships, everything. Stealing elections? Yeah. This is the wonderful thing about studying history. History does repeat human nature does. So if you just read, me and you both love Will and Ariel Durant, read their history of human civilization, read their 100-page book, Lessons of History. The same stuff repeats over and over again. So when it comes out and you see this on the news like, oh, of course no one stole the election. It's like in all different countries. Stealing elections is an American pastime. Just read Robert Caros. And it could be like a little, you know, Senate election in Texas. Exactly. If you don't think that the missing ballot box. Yeah. It's just like it's, the line I have about this is

from Will Durant where he's just like, in every age, humans are dishonest and governments are corrupt. It's one of my favorite quotes from lessons of history. In every age, nothing that we're doing is new. We're just telling the same stories over and over and over again. You see the same people over and over again. So yeah, I'm sure there's a ton of people that read these biographies and I listen to my podcast that are absolute psychopaths. I don't think Ovitz is a psychopath. He's an extreme winner. He wants to win. The line may be pretty thin. Yeah, of course. Of course. I'm not saying he is, by the way. The sociopath is just that just like you were mentioning, you can convince yourself of a bad idea very compellingly, just as you can a good idea. It's like

When you start to get into the gray waters of morality, as winning compounds upon winning, oftentimes the person who cares less about other people wins, if they can discard that consideration. 100%. That's been true in the past, true today, will be true. That's the point, that this is why it's so interesting. I look at this as almost,

I think something I didn't even understand, is I have the ability to, like, step outside of myself. And I'm kind of like a casual observer of human nature. I want to ask you, and then I'm going to hop to questions about podcasting on the new show, about how you think about assessing leaders, entrepreneurs, reading biographies or autobiographies, and figuring out what people claim as things that help them succeed, to succeed, actually help them versus hindering them. In other words, like, what are the because of versus the in spite of?

So, for instance, if high disagreeability or low agreeability is common across a lot of founders, to what extent can you point to that as one of the causal factors for their success, as opposed to just an emergency break they had on causing all sorts of problems that they managed to overcome. So they succeeded despite. How do you think about separating those two things? One of the things I love about James Dyson, who is a hero of mine, it's the person that on the planet that I want to meet that I haven't met, The number one is him. And what I love about him is, like, how stubborn he is, because I see

myself in that. And it turns out, his stubbornness worked out for him because he had the right idea. But this is where it goes back to, like, you can't blindly copy. There's no formula. Like, there's no formula. There's no track. So it's like, he's stubborn on an idea that was a great idea. It just needed more time. You could be stubborn on an idea that's terrible and going nowhere, and then you did the exact same thing for the exact same amount of time. And on the other side of that, he has one of the most valuable privately held company's world, and you have a miserable life. There's no answer to that. There's nobody coming to save you. None of this shit works if you can't trust your own judgment and figure things out. That's why when people are

like, oh, more people should be entrepreneurs. I don't know about that. I want to like encourage the people that think they can do it to do it. But I think in many cases, most people should work like they should choose a different path because it's very, very risky. You know, like Todd Graves, the Raising Kane's guy I told you about, right? His whole thing is entrepreneurs should have higher risk tolerance. James Dyson multiple times risked every single possession he had to chase his dream. He signed over his house multiple times. If he failed, they could have been homeless. It worked off for him. Todd Graves had this crazy way to finance the first 28 raising canes where essentially he goes to an angel investor. He goes to Tim Ferriss and says, hey, you're going to

give me $200,000 loan. It's going to be subjugated loan to the bank. I'm going to guarantee you a 15% return on the $200,000 for X amount a time. You say, oh, that sounds great. You're paying me 15% on my 200 grand, but you don't get any equity. I take that 200,000 equity that I have from this document from Tim. I go to a bank and say, this is as collateral, loan me the other 600 grand or whatever the number is to get the stuff running. And he did that for 28 times. And he's like, oh, I'm rolling, rolling, rolling. Leverage up to his eyeballs. What's the problem? I open up. Every time I open a new raisin canes, there's a line out the door from day one. Well, then a little thing called Hurricane Katrina comes. And guess where? Twenty-eight of his restaurants are all

Louisiana. And he almost died. And he says, like, if I didn't come out of that, there would be no story. It'd be gone. And then I guess the second part of, I don't know why this popped in my mind. But, you know, when you're reading history, right, we're reading about stories that happened 100 years ago, 200 years ago, 50 years ago. Some of them are from that person's own mouth. Like, imagine if you tell your own life story. Here's the good part. You're going to like, you're going to hide the bad. You're human. And so people are like, well, how do you know if what you're reading is true? The line is like, if you think the news is fake, wait, you read history. It's like, it's just old news. I don't know. My idea is like, we're not taking a test at the end of this.

I'm not saying, like, did this actually happen in 1912? It's like, is the idea behind what he's doing a good idea for me? And so like the example of Rockefeller, right, that you see that Elon used, where like Rockefeller tells the story. I don't know if it actually happened, but he tells the story, where they would have to solder closed the barrels that they transport oil in. And he goes up one day and he says, how many do you drops of solder to use? He's like, I use 40. It's like, have you ever tried 38? He's like, no, you've never tried 38.

Can you try 38? They try 38. It leaks. Okay. Try 39. It doesn't leak. That one drop of solder at the time of the business saved him, you know, $25 a year. Business grows and compounds for the next three decades.

And now he's saving like, you know, hundreds of thousands from that to that. Did that actually happen? I don't know, but that's a good idea to find the limit, to actually, hey, maybe I should control my costs a little bit more. Maybe I need to actually see if I can do this in a more efficient way. I don't know if it happened. I just want the idea behind it. Yeah.

Just to reiterate what you're saying, it's tough to separate the fact from fiction, right? And then sometimes this is actually why I just read fiction. So I'm like, there still are truths to extract. There are principles that you can extract from, this is now cliched because it's been made into a popular movie, but Dune or Stranger in a Strange Land. You can actually pull a lot from just straight up fiction. And then when it comes to the business side, because I've read so many, not as many as you, but tons of business books, still have my early copies and my notes from those

books with losing my virginity, Richard Branson, early of Ansonard, I think it's to let my people go surfing, et cetera, still have all those books. and when you look at part of the reason also that I like early biographies, so let's just say like hard drive first on Bill Gates versus like a later, I don't want to say sanitized, but let's say sanitized version where I'm going through this right now, right? Or it's like, look, Warren Buffett love the guy. He's turned himself into like the awshucks grandpa neighbor who takes this garbage out in a robe. He's a killer. And I remember reading, I think he's was the making of an American capitalist

way back in the day and the story that stuck out and I hope I'm not inventing this. I don't see why I would but his routine was to go home, walk upstairs and read... Step over his children. Exactly. So his son who had fallen down

the stairs is like sprawled out like a chalk outline and a crime scene steps over his injured son to go upstairs to do more reading of S1 filings or whatever. he was doing. You bring up something interesting. This is why I don't believe them when they say they have regrets at the end of their life. So if I read Making American Capitalist, right,

excellent book. I think that's actually the best biography. You read Snowball after his wife leaves him, right? And he says, the biggest mistake, if I could go back and live life again, the biggest mistake I would do, I would change whatever I need. So I think her name was Susie didn't leave me. No. Yeah. I don't believe you. I don't buy it. No, none of them. When they all say like Leonardo de Vecchio, the guy that started Luxaacca, I think I'd like translate it from Italian. Like some of these biographies are in different languages. And so like, again, go back to differentiation.

What can I do that no one else is doing? We've translated the Red Bull book from German. Which was awesome. Yeah, I listened to that. I appreciate that. But he gets the end of his life. You know, he's an orphan. Dad dies young.

Luxottica. So they essentially monopolized glasses, everything. So Mark Zuckerberg just invested, I think, $3.5 billion for like 3% of the company. Wow. And so for essentially 60 years. years, he just a slow, methodical Rockefeller-esque march through the entire industry till he controls every single component of eyeglasses, sunglasses, everything.

It's, like, completely dominant. And he gets into his life, he's just like, oh, yeah, like, the one regret I have is, like, he's married multiple times. I think there's, like, a 50-year gap between, like, his oldest son and his youngest son. So it's like, he's like, he's like a wild boy. But he's like, one regret I have is like, I didn't spend more time with kids. No, that's not, you wouldn't change a thing. It's not true.

It's not true. I don't think they could. That's what you just said. It's like maybe they didn't have a choice. Maybe it's just hardwired. And so I'm going through that really right now because this week I read source code, which is Bill Gates' autobiography about the first 20 years of his life, his version. I reread hard drive, overdrive, which is also written by the same guys that wrote hard drive.

And then I pulled all my highlights and notes for Paul Allen's description of Bill Gates and Paul Allen's autobiography. There is a vast difference between what's in source code and what is in hard drive. And it's obviously hard drive is more accurate. It's written right after it happened. Bill is not the 70-year-old man he is now. And, you know, he's in a different world. But watch his interviews, watch the documentary on Netflix about him.

He's like, I was hardcore. That was my advantage. He was. Killer. Yeah. And also, you know, these questions, right, a lot of the questions that I ask myself when I'm reading any nonfiction. I shouldn't say any nonfiction.

Let's say biographies where I'm hoping to model something. One is like, is or an autobiography? Like, okay, what's the bias here? Are there any particular biases I should be aware of? Okay, is anyone in like reputation rehab mode before they die? Okay, let's keep that. Sure. What type of survivorship bias might there be?

Who tried the same? Do we have 99 out of 100 who tried something similar and failed? Let's take a look at the tape. Okay. Luck is luck. Luck's everywhere, right? So the fact that Bill Gates ended up with a computer, you're winning up with the computer.

It's just like, you know. Timing. I think timing. Timing is a huge piece. By the way, these are not all reasons to discount anything, but I just want to mention a couple of that I try to think of. The other I try to think of because I might try to mimic someone in sports, right? If I'm trying to learn something new or language learning or whatever it might be, what is

trainable and what is not trainable? Because I've heard these stories from people who know Bill Gates and they're like, well, we were going to go on this like short vacation in fill in the blank. I can't remember, Costa Rica, right? And they're going to go on a birding trip in the morning. It's just like a two, three hour thing with a world-class birding guide. And they do the trip, and the night before, Bill has stayed up and read five books on birding, memorized them, seemingly without trying, and is basically having like a peer-to-peer

discussion with the birding expert as they're going through the rainforest. That's not normal. No. Right? that's like I'm going to do calf raises to make my body look like Michael Phelps. Like, no, you're not. That's not going to work. So it's like when I'm looking for

people to model, I'm trying to find people who have hopefully comparable composition of strengths that I can amplify myself or that are coachable, right? The question, after all that, is does anyone stand out to you of the biographies

or people you've met where you're like, in terms of someone doing the most with the hand they've been dealt, So maybe they're not a freak of nature. Like they're not a freak of nature necessarily because there are freaks of nature among the people that you study, the people I study, but it's like, all right, these people might have a few strengths, but they're not complete freaks. They're not the Usain Bolt's fill in the blank.

And man, oh man, that they play their hand well. They're just so good at playing the hands that they are dealt that person. Does anybody stick out? Sam Walton. Sam Walton's one of my favorite entrepreneurs. If you really think about it, like he had this crazy thing, it's a crazy idea.

I don't think, he obviously didn't know what Walmart was going to turn into. But one of the ways they avoided all the inheritance tax is if you give away the equity before it's valuable. So if you look at,

the last time I checked, if you look at all of the Walmart equity owned by the family, that means the wealth that came from his idea would be like $432 billion today if it was consolidated in one person, right?

And when you study Sam, he's like obviously smart, but he was just like, he didn't really know what he was going to do. Then he had this idea is like, well, maybe I can be good at retailing. And then he starts out in Newport, Arkansas with one store. And this is what drives me insane about the modern day entrepreneurship industry. He's like everybody, they start out with like weird goals. Like, I'm going to build a trillion dollar company. Or I'm going to be the fastest person to 100 million ARR. It's just like, okay, but none of these people talk like that. Like you're doing it for the wrong reason. So you, probably won't get there if that's just the case. Like what Jerry Seinfeld says. Like if you're just doing it for the money, you only get so far. And with him, he was just, like, fascinated by stores and trying to make it a little bit better every day. Well, there's on vacation, right? He didn't matter where he was.

He would go into retail store. His kids told the story. It's just like, vacation was essentially driving to different towns and checking out different retailers. But the most important thing about his story, one of the most important things, is this idea to go slow now so you can go faster. later. And so you're like, okay, the beginning of his career, he's like in one tiny store. I think they start doing like $25,000 a year. 25,000 year in revenue. I think he gets up to like

$250,000. It took him five years. But for five years, you just had one story. It was like experimenting, understanding, trying to figure out what the different parts of retail are because there's no such thing as discounting and wholesale and all the other stuff that he was doing that he's going to do later on. And then what's fascinating is later in his career after Walmart, he then takes that idea. He goes in bits of sole price, who we mentioned earlier. He takes that idea. He's like, oh, this is a great idea. I'm going to do this. He does Sam's Club. And in that same five year period. So you have the first five years, one store, separated by maybe 40 years in the career. That second five years when he's starting something else. In that five year period, he doesn't have one store. He

ends up doing, I think, a hundred stores and like seven billion in revenue from this new category. Because you see him learning. And so, like, yes, I think he was brilliant. He's not memorized in five books overnight in doing that. This is like mine. One of the reasons that I do what I do, is because Munger became a hero and he talks over and over again about being a biography nut that he read more biographies and anywhere else. I got to spend three hours inside of his house talking to him right before he died. I don't care how many biographies I read, how many books I read for the rest of my life. I cannot have a brain like him. I will never have a brain like him. Anybody at 99 is going to have some level of cognitive decline. You know what one of my

first thoughts was about an hour and a half in the conversation with him was this guy had to be terrifying when he was 60. Terrifying. Like, terrifying. Think about this. Everybody that I know, I always, when I get to meet fancy people, I always ask him, like, who's the smartest you know, what's the best business you know? And it can't be like Apple, like these interesting weird things. And every single person that says, if they have no Buffett and they don't tell you as Buffett, they're wrong. And Buffett chose this guy to let him mold and shape his thinking. What does that tell you about his intelligence? And I remember, because this is what I do, I'm like laying bricks every day. I don't think I'm a brilliant person. I just, like, show up every day and don't quit.

And so once I find Munger, I read literally not, oh, I read some of the books. I read every single book on Munger. Then I reread my highlights, which, like, over and over again. So my days, I wake up, work out, read for a few hours, have lunch, then reread, then re-read past highlights in the afternoon. All my social media posts are just me rereading highlights. And so I read every single book on Munger, then I reread all the highlights. But then I read all the books he tells me to read, because he'll tell you, read Les Chois, they'll tell you, Henry Kaiser. I was like, Who the hell is Henry Kaiser? Enemy Kaiser started 100 companies.

He built a Hoover Dam. He built Liberty ships. I go, what? By the way, just the fact that pretty much everyone listening to this podcast will have no idea of who that person is. Yeah. Just underscores, I think, how ridiculous it is to get overly fixated on legacy as an excuse for all sorts of behaviors.

Yes. Nobody's going to run me. I'm anti-legacy and I'm anti-family dynasty. I think, like, requiething your kids a bunch of wealth is, well, that's another story for another day. But, okay, 100 companies, right. Hoover Dam, which, by the same. the way, it was made in what, like eight years or 12 years or something? I mean, some insane time span.

And so then, first of all, I'm freaked out. I'm there. It's me, two other young entrepreneurs in their 30s. And they had both met Charlie before. And then like, I'm like 10 minutes in. And I'm just like, I just couldn't believe what's happening to me. I'm like, that's fucking Charlie Munger over there. And like, and then you know he's looking at you because he's like blind. And so like, if he's looking at you like this, he's not looking at you. He's got to go like this and this. Because and he's got to look through his glasses. So you know when he's looking at you. And then my friend looks at me, he's like, get in here, like, do something.

I literally sat there and me not speaking for 10 minutes. It's really hard for me to do. There's a reason I do monologue podcasts. So then I see we're in his library. So then I'm like, oh, this is my savior because I've read all those books behind him because he told me to read them. And so this is why I said, it doesn't matter what I do. And this will answer your question a long way. I start asking questions about Henry Kaiser and all these books.

and he knows the revenue. He knows the partner. He knows how the business ended. He knows the mistakes they made. And then I go, Charlie, like, when's the last time you read these books? And he's like, 15 years ago when we were shifting from that library to dinner, I was like, Charlie, can I go through your library? He's like, of course.

And he's just sitting in his chair and I'm going through the books and I open them, no notes. Different stock. Yeah, different stock. Oh, my God. So, all right, we are going to get to the things I'm promised, but I have to ask you. So in addition to smartest person, best business, what are some of your other go-to questions when you meet the fancy folks? So who's the smartest person you know? What's the best business you know? I actually got to spend some time with Eddie Lampert.

And Eddie Lampert at one time was thought to be like the next Buffett. And he was mentored by Richard Rainwater. And I find Richard Rainwater really fascinating because Richard Rainwater has a problem too. Oh, excellent. Richard, first was no biographies on him. He died rather young. He probably created more billionaire investors in America than any other person in direct mentorship. And Eddie broke the record, I think in like the 80s or 90s for like the most taxable income made by an American. And he was like super young. And so Eddie lives in Miami and I was at his house. He was like never again. I'm moving to Miami. No, so no, no. So that might be one of the best investments because he probably paid $12 million for his house and his house

I'll probably sell for $150 million today because it's on the island that Bezos lives on. And the house is beautiful. I'm sure he won't even notice it on his balance. He's like much more like out of the spotlight now. But again, he's like one of these older guys, just like very, very wise and like very quiet. He's like me. He's like introverted. Just like you go to his house.

There's just books everywhere. He's got this insane yacht that I went on called the fountainhead. I'll let people Google it. It is insane. I mean, great name too. Yeah, but same thing. You go on the boat, dude. And it's like full of books.

Ran out of a room at his house, I bought a super yacht for the books. It's the weirdest, unintended hack ever to build a world-class network of just like read a bunch of history and they'll come get you. I've never sent a cold DM in my life, ever. I've never sent a cold email in my life.

So like, so why did Lampert come out? You're asking him. No, so I'm asking these questions, right? Basically, and they're not mean to me. So he's like, yeah, but there's like better questions you can ask. I was like, okay, like, tell me what they are. And so what his answers are like, the smartest person, he's like, well, I spend a bunch of time with Buffett. And I go, okay. And he goes, it's obviously Buffett. And he goes, there's actually more interesting. And then, like, who's the best investor you know? That was another question I ask. And he goes, there's actually a more interesting question that you're not asking. And I go, what's that. I don't know what that means. Like, I don't know anything about investing. Like, the question I've asked Rick and Patrick, they probably think I'm retarded. Like, I don't know. You can edit that. And you can edit that. And I don't know. You can edit that.

question out if you edit that word out but like they're just like what is wrong with this guy we didn't even get to I mean I would say Brad Jacobs would fit in sort of the deal maker yeah but he yeah but his is like a different this is very fascinating what Eddie said so again Eddie you can go back and like read profiles of him like he was like a boy wonder kid Rick told me a funny story they used to all be at the same golf club in New Jersey and Richard Rainwater walked in and Rick's like a young kid and Rainwater's legend and he's like making conversation with him. He goes, we just wait, the best investor in America is going to walk through that door. And Rick goes, Buffett? And it was Eddie. So anyways, Eddie's like,

there's a better question that you're not asking. I was like, all right, well, you're way smarter and I am. Like, tell me. And he goes, who's the best dealmaker? I don't know what that means. And he goes, well, an investor is judged on ROIC return on invested capital. He goes, the two best dealmakers I ever knew were Richard Rainwater and David Geffen. So the thing about David Geffen is super underrated. He's another person I'd like to spend time with, if I could, is it's one thing to have a bunch of money. It's another thing to have a bunch of money and be liquid.

There is a line in this profile in Largozian that I read that says anytime there's a downturn, Larry Goson is one of the, maybe the most successful art dealing in the world. There's all these, like, you know, art soars during great economic times and kind of doesn't do so well in other times. Anytime there was like a dip and they needed to make money, they'd call David because is they said David is as liquid as the day is long. David gave like a 26-year-old Eddie Lamper, like 200 million of his own money to run. So David is just like liquid. Staked him. And so he goes, David is a crazy dealmaker. He was an LP. I don't think it was a fund

structure. I think it was, here's 200. Make it bigger. Make it bigger. I don't think you'd be like, you make money if I make money. It wasn't, I don't think it was a permanent structure, which is interesting. Sam Zell never had a permanent structure. There's actually a lot of, I find those more interesting. But anyways, I was like, okay, so why is, Richard Raine, one of the best deal makers. And he's like, because with Richard, it was all returns, no capital. And I was like, what? And he goes, Richard maneuvered himself into such a influential position in the American economy because of who he knew. And him being involved in your deal immediately made more valuable, that people just gave them the equity. All returns, no capital.

And I was like, that was like one of my favorite ideas that I've like ever heard. Yeah, and he would just tell amazing stories. He told me a story where, like, Richard, when he mentors you, he, like, he recruited Eddie. Eddie was living in New York, working in Goldman Sachs if I remember correctly. He convinced him to move to Fort Worth, Texas. Have you ever been to Fort Worth? I have. Okay.

I've been there too. Yeah. There's nothing there. And in the 80s, there was less than nothing there. And this kid moves there. They would travel together. And Eddie said, Richard would want to, like, summer somewhere in, like, Massachusetts. And it was like this, this, like, 20 room.

hotel that was the members only. Okay, so it's like not open to a random public. And he insisted that Eddie be put in the room next to him. And one day, a bunch of guys are knock on Eddie's door while he's in the room, sort of working and like researching. And they come in with a bunch of tools. He's like, what are you doing? He's like, Richard wants us to put a hole in this wall. And Richard didn't want to go in the hallway and walk around to Eddie's room. So he made them knock a hall and then install the door so he could just go. He could have direct access to Eddie just for the door that didn't exist.

That's incredible. He just had all kinds of crazy stories. All right. So not Buffett, not Munger, smartest person. That I met? Yeah, smartest person, let's revise that and just say,

if you pick one person you've met to be like your coach slash Yoda. Oh, Daniel, like. Daniel, like. Easily. All right, that was fast. Brad Jacobs gives you, great advice. Michael Dell would give me great advice. Todd Graves. But like, this guy is around

my age. Yeah, yeah. It's like the gap between us is like so obvious when you solve for that. And again, I just think of like the stuff he does, his clarity of thought. I greatly admire the product. I like products. I guess we should back up like what is actually important to you. I don't actually give a shit how much money you have. I know a lot of people and I love these. We're in New York right now. Some of my favorite people. I like the PE guys way more and I like the VC guys. because they're just more honest. They're like, you know, the PE guys are like, the VC gets, they have great lines about this.

They go, VC gets all the attention, PE gets all the money. And then they're like, the VCs are lying because they say the founders are the customers. No, the LPs are our customers. The founders didn't give you any money. Then the P.E. guys are just honest. Why do you wake up every day to maximize the value of my LP dollars? I don't want to play that game.

I don't want to play it at all, but I respect their honesty is refreshing, you know? Their scoreboard is, I have $6 billion. and I'll be better if I have eight. I am obsessed with product. The fact that I work on my podcast for seven days a week, the fact that I hand edit the transcript, like, Mr. Peace drives me, he's like, you're stupid.

Basically, you need an editor, you need all these other things, and like I just end obsessed. It's like you don't work all your life to do what you love, to not do it. I don't want to outsource stuff. I like the craft of making the product. I'm very proud. Some people might consider it's embarrassing. When Spotify, my Spotify rap comes out this year,

the number one podcast on that is going to be my own. I go back and listen to it. One, I think of it as a tool. I was on a treadmill in Malibu a few weeks ago, listening to episode 221, which I think is a biography of Charlie Munger. I said he's trying to make how much we forget. I listen to this hour-long podcast and I'm like, oh, God, he's got a lot of great ideas that I forgot. I'm not doing it for like, because I like to hear the sound of my own voice. I also do it because you think Kobe watched game tape? Like, how am I going to get better if I don't? I just went and when I interviewed Michael Dell, really more of a conversation than interview, but I listened to the Michael Dell episode that I just did a few months ago. And all I hear is the floss. All I hear is

like, you stupid idiot, you should use three sentences. That could have been one sentence. That is not even interesting. Cut that next time. And it's just like, that's how I get better. I go back and listen to it. So I am obsessed with product. The people that I admire the most are like great products. It could be Jiro sushi. It could be the Spotify app. It could be, it doesn't matter. shoes that I like you know I just love when people take what they do very seriously and I like the craft of it and I want to dedicate my life to making a product that makes somebody else's life better that is what drives me I understand I have a bunch of friends that like the money or like building the systems if you want to work to archetypes or just like having a big empire

I don't have any employees you know you have three I guess I have two technical like subcontractors you know doing clips for me and thumbnails and stuff like that but yeah I don't I don't have any desire for like a giant empire. I'm like a little craftsman in my little chat over here. So why do the new podcast? David Senra. Yes. Why do it? And we can use any number of different entry points here. So number one, why do it? You don't have to answer that as number one. I'm also curious where you see the podcast ecosystem. Is it early? Is it late? Is it oversaturated? Is it undersaturated? Et cetera. And then how do you diversize? an interview-based podcast.

Okay, so let's take the number one, the why to do it. I was resistant on doing it for years because I like to do one thing and I don't like to not focus. A huge thing, if you could summarize nine years, 400 biographies under one word, what I've learned is focus. These people, whether they're psychos, nice people, different industries, they're remarkably focused compared to, like, they're a different species than the current level of, you know, lack of attention spans that we have now that I think are getting worse. So focus is

excessive important. If you look at how I spend my time though, right, we just talked about the importance of building a business is natural to you. Half my waking time, I would like to be completely alone. Like not in the, even the house with somebody else, like alone. Just reading, thinking, like I like solitude a lot to a scary degree. So that makes sense. Founders, you're reading books all day. That's what you do. Like that makes perfect sense. When I'm not doing that, though. If you look at what I'm doing, essentially do this data dump where I'm in silence half the day. And then I go out every night that I'm not with my family. I usually have dinner with another founder, usually that I met through the podcast. And we talk for three, two,

three. And there's no like, some people like, oh, really impressive people will send me, like, I would love to talk to you. And they like send me a calendar right for 30 minutes. I go, I don't do 30. Like, we're not even going to start. We haven't even started. Like, if that's what you think this is, like, I don't care that you're billionaire. Like, we're just never going to meet ever. And it's always. super long the very first time first time i can mention all these people we talked for a long time so i'm doing this anyways and for years people like patrick were like you stupid idiot you should be recording these like this is crazy and so there's two things to answer your question that

happened one is the first time me and patrick grab dinner in new york with dan yac okay we talk for four hours and we get in the car because we're going we're leaving a city going back to Patrick's house because I'm going to spend the night there before I go back home. And the first thing Patrick says. And again, this is why it's important to like, the piece of advice that Charlie Munger gave us when we were at his house, he's like, your job at your age is to build a seamless web of deserve trust with other people who are like you. He's like, everybody knows that me and Buffett. I met Buffett when I was 35, he was 28, but they didn't understand. There's a bunch of other guys around our age that we built the same level of trust with. And we did life with and did deals with forever. Most of them

were dead by the time I met Charlie. And so relationships are very important and munger has a line that trust is one of the greatest economic factors in the world which is I've never heard anybody say that that's a truly unique idea I agree with that so like there's a level of trust that I am very standoffish people call me a turtle like I get my shell right and so once you've penetrated that like I have a level of trust that you want what's right for me like there's no weird competitive vibes here we're not like secret adversaries like we just I want to see you win and we get in the car and he's just like god damn it you need to record these. And he's like, I've known Daniel for four years. You got more out of him

four hours than I did in four years. He's like, I spoke 2% of time. You spoke 49%. He spoke the other 49%. And he's just like, there's nobody that can speak to the soul of the founder in the world that you can. And it's because he says something and it's not what he's saying. It's what Henry Ford did here and Henry Kaiser did there and Jim Casey did over here. That's how my brain actually works. So I was okay. That was interesting. And then part of the conversation was, you know, Daniel saying to take, I wasn't doing video, 375 episodes. I'm not doing it for fame. I'm introverted. And Daniel was just saying in a very nice way,

what are you doing? Like, you stop riding the fence. This is the game that you chose. And I have the data. Video obviously is important in podcasts. Like, you're lying to yourself again. You know, the importance of somebody telling the truth. I want people around me at check me. I don't want sycophants, you know. And I'll tell you the second person that influenced me, that calls me and checks me all the time. that got in my mind for a while.

I was like, okay, that's interesting. And I get sad when I don't a podcast. I would like to podcast every day. And I can't because I have to read an entire book before I sit down to make an episode. I cannot make more than 52 episodes a year. I just can't. People are like, you must read fast.

No, I read slow. 25 pages an hour at most. And then I have to do all the other shit I just told you how I had to do. Highlighting and like, you know, long mistakes? Taking photographs. Putting it in to read wise.

Yeah. And so then something that's important to. me is it's like, I'm not a political person at all. I don't even read the news. I will find out the important stuff. If there's a pandemic, I'll hear about it. If there's a war, I'll hear about it. Other stuff, no idea what's going on. I have no idea what's going on. I'm purposely aloof. But one thing that I am passionate about is that like entrepreneurship is good for the world as long as you're spending your time building, because all businesses, you mentioned losing your virginity by Richard Branson. He has the best description I've ever heard of a business.

All of businesses is an idea that makes somebody else's life better. And therefore, there's always opportunity because there's infinite ways to make other people's lives better. And so that's what I'm trying to do. And so another person that I've become close with is Jared Kushner. We live in Miami together. And we went and met for dinner. And Jared's like a really smart and like buttoned up guy. And again, I don't pay attention to politics. So like the way I met him is actually he reached out to Rick and it's like, I'm a huge founder's fan. Can you see if David would have speak at my company offsite? A lot of companies asked me to speak at their company offsite. And I didn't know anything about Jared. All I know is that people on the internet like to argue about them because of

the Trump stuff, you know, but I judge people on how they are with me. You just have had to happen to you where you were like, that person's great and you deal with him like, oh, that guy's terrible or vice versa. I've had both. Yeah, exactly. So it's like, I'm going to go into this. I have no idea about all this stuff. I'm just going to see how this is going to go. And then we hit it off right away. And he was like, try to pay me. I was like, no, no, no. It's in Miami. I can drive over there. I can talk about the shit all the time. I like talking about this. So like, and then, uh, we just built a relationship and a friendship from that. We have similar interests. And so we meet for dinner one day and it's right after basically he went

and spoke at this conference in Miami and he thought he was going to go talk about his new fund. And he thought he was friends with the guy and the guy's like selling tickets and making money off his name being there and like, it's not like you're paying the speakers. And the guy like essentially ambushed him and starts asking questions like, how can you do business with Saudi Arabia. They chop up Shusogi and all this other stuff. And then before the talk was even done, his social media team was like clipping it and like sending it out and like press releases. What a mess. So I show up at this dinner and Jared's always buttoned up and, you know, always got a shit together. And he's just like, what the hell is going on here? By the time the dinner ends,

it's everywhere. And again, I'm like, this is weird that the business and tech press in America, they hate business and tech. They, like, cover things. I'm an enthusiast. I'm not a journalist. I'm not a critic. I read books all the time where I hate the person

or something. You'll never see me do a podcast about it. I want to talk about stuff I like, not things I hate. It's a weird thing to go to. Imagine waking up every day and your job is to, like,

cover people that you secretly, like, wish you were. Like, there's just weird stuff that around this, right? And so we had this idea at dinner. I was like, there should be a place where, I'm not talking about sycophant.

I'm saying, like, Todd Graves, people make fun of, him because he says that God made him good at chicken fingers and that he's living a chicken finger dream and he thinks it's a mission. But I'll tell you what, he believes it. He's been offered billions. He owns over 90% of that company. He will never sell that company. He's not doing it for money. He's doing it because he wants to make money and he does a lot of great things in the community. And I think people should know this this guy exists and his ideas should be spread.

That's a good for the world. So those two things happened. And I'm like, oh, this is interesting. I have this weird base of knowledge. So the way Jared describes it, is like, he's like talking to you, he's like talking to 50 of history's greatest entrepreneurs at the same time. Because like, we'll talk about something and same thing you see, I do. And then Daniel's way of saying that, he's like, you're like an LLM trained on history to greatest entrepreneurs with the temperature turned up because you're crazy. And so it makes it like entertaining.

I mean, I think that's no small contributor to why you have a diehard fan base. Like, it's the pulpit preacher kind of fervor that you bring to it. But I didn't understand that until. I thought about my childhood. When people say they go to church, that's not the kind of church I went to. This is like, this is really gets me sad where I was almost crying earlier. It's like, my mom deserved a better life. She didn't deserve to grow up with the monster of her father and frankly, the bitch that her mom was. Like, the one thing that I remember about my mom's mom that she said to me was that I was a faggot. That is literally the only memory I have is her, she was

mentally ill. You'd go to her house. You know National Enquirer and like all those things that there's National Enquirers like the sun and all this other stuff that you get like right when you go to the grocery store. She was like a hoarder. So she would, you'd go in the bathroom and they like stacks all the up to the, she wouldn't throw them out. But she read them like we read the Wall Street Journal. Like you assume the stock is what the stuff. They said the stock price is. She'd read it like, this is true. Like Bigfoot is true. I was a kid. This is the memory. I was the age when President Clinton, when Clinton was in the White House and she was convinced because that Clinton was gay and his wife was lesbian. And so she saw

like conspiracy everywhere. And she directed at her grandchildren, which is like monstrous. And so like she desert, my mom deserved better. And then the problem was my mom didn't have an education and she was a very naive person. And so she turned to the church. But the church she turned to was like, do you know Benny Hinnis? I do know the name. Yeah. Okay. So that's like you come up there and he blows on you and you don't have leprosy anymore. Or he hits you in the face, like does this thing and you can walk now. And all all this stuff was acting. They caught these people over and over again. And like, I remember my mom didn't have a bunch of money and her putting like a couple crumpled up dollars and giving it to them because she thought this is like what

she's going to get in their life. It's sickening to me now that that happened to her and that, you know, she fell prey to that and that these people did this and they have private jets, name all, it's kind of crazy. I'm sure there's some people that do that. And they're, believe it, that's a different thing, if they really believe it. I know that guy didn't believe. Like, he, come on, you didn't believe that. And so, but then I didn't understand that, oh my God, that influenced the way I make my podcast because it is like preacher. I feel I shouldn't be sitting at a desk. I should be sitting at a pulpit. Somebody bought the domain church for founders.com and it points to my podcast. That's amazing. So that's why I'm doing it. And then the other thing

was like, I just like podcasting and I can have a conversation every day. So we're going to start out like every other week and then move up to every week and then I want to be having multiple conversations a week. That's what I want to do because I'm doing it anyways. Let's just put a microphone there. And it's not an interview. Yeah, there's some questions I have for them, but it's like a conversation. The idea that I'm going to do a business show interview and compete with Patrick is I think he's the best interviewer by four. He's so concise and perfect and like he's just really good at it. And I like to talk. I want to talk 49% of the time.

How will you balance the two shows? So it seems like Founders' Podcasts takes a lot as it is. Yes. One of the benefits of that format is, now this might put a cap on growth to some extent, but if you're not playing the video game, it removes a lot of complexity. You don't necessarily need to travel. You just read. You enjoy your solitude.

you do some long-form audio, you can have notes in front of you, you can be picking your nose as you take a deep breath, there's a lot of flexibility there. How are you going to balance the two without sacrificing founders, right? Like snuffing out the magic X when you're working on Y. That's a great question. And it's something I was very concerned with, and that's why I said no for so many years. And so then you think, if you said yes, then how would you do it? Instead of just blankly saying no. And there's a secret of dealing with me that everybody that knows me for a long time realizes. It's like water on a rock. Okay. So like you're going to come up to like this is literally going to happen multiple times. So let's say like Patrick or Sam Hinky would be like, I have this

idea. And immediately like that's the stupidest idea I've ever heard. I'll be like really like aggressive and angry. It's like stupid idea, terrible idea. Then they mentioned it like two weeks later. Now it's just dumb idea. Mentioned again like a few weeks later. Silence. Then a few weeks later, like, hey, guys, I have a great idea. It's that idea. It's their idea. So, a slow bake. They're just like, they know. They're just like, okay, I just gonna, it's just water on a rock. I'll get to it. We're just going to take a while. So the problem is now I've said that, they know that. And then you have to deal with me that, like, I'm very difficult to deal with, obviously. You are too. And like, I think, like, that's one thing we can bond

over. You're not trying to be mean. Just like, it's just a part of our personalities. And so the answer to your question is, founders is a one person. So like I read, I read research, I record, I set my own mics, I do all the editing, I hand do the transcripts, I do everything. The only thing I outsource is I think I have, the clip guy have is a little genius, the young kid living in Paris. His name is Maxim, he's incredible. And then I have somebody now because I have to play the YouTube game, which I hate, and

I refuse to do. And all this other, you know, the YouTube thing like, yeah, I hate it. I haven't. Exactly. I've sort of cauterized myself on that. Yeah, so like, I won't do that kind of shit. I'd rather not get views. I have to see something and say, I would click on that myself.

I'm not doing things for numbers. I didn't even know how many people were listening to Founders to the first six years. I never looked. And then I started doing these big sponsorship deals and I'm like, oh, I should look. And they're like, oh, this is great. I don't like thinking about numbers.

I don't want it to influence anything that I do. And so Founders basically take seven days. Usually I'm late on the episode. I could see something in common with Dan Carlin. Yeah. I'm like five days late. He's five months late. God, man.

Love you, Dan. You know that. Yeah, he's literally the best podcaster ever lived. So what I realized is if I was going to do this, I would need a team. And I don't like working with other people because I am difficult. I can be mean. I just am and I don't want to be mean. You know, I really don't.

Like you mentioned earlier, like not getting some of the bad personality traits from them, you know? And I was worried. I've asked friends, like, do you think I'm like sociopathic? am I. Listen, like, no, you have empathy. Like, you're like, you have a hard out of a shell, but you're really soft in the middle. Patrick would tell you that. You're just like, Turtle. Yeah, exactly. When I was in Japan, we went to some, what's the ones where you have like 20 course meals? Oh, omacase. Yeah. And they try to. Literally means basically, I'll leave it to you. Oh, macasere is like, leave it to you. So you can use it that way too. Ah, macasere you.

But why do they call it amacase? And it's like multiple, what does it have to do with? Oh, macas is you, you don't pick anything a la carte. You let the chef, you sit down and they just give you what they want to give you. Yes. And then they're literally. So you're leading it up to them. But then they come in after everything and they like, like want to talk to you about it. Oh, that's very on Japanese. Okay.

That's probably for foreigners. Okay. So they try to give me. I mean, they might be like, this is this and then they stop. Well, but this guy was giving you a little, many, many TED Talks. He tried to give me, no, he tried to give me the essence of turtle. It was baby turtle. I was like, I'm not eating turtle.

Doesn't sound great. Not, I'm not excited about essence of turtle. Hey, the face you just made should be the, I mean, I feel like if David Center doesn't work as a podcast name, you could have essence of turtle. So what I realize is I need a team. So what I could see is eventually going down, like right now I'm making a new Founders episode like every like 10 to 14 days, which is not good and I try to do every week. The cadence probably should be every two weeks because how me and Rick were talking about

this this morning in regards to you the same way. It's like, what's that old apocryphal saying that whatever your short letter, but I didn't have time, sorry, which a long one. He says me and you share that thing where it's like the reading is not taking a lot the recordings are taking more. It's the editing before I do anything. It's this will be 15,000 word thing. I'm trying to get down to 5,000 words. It takes so long to do. So answer your question, could see a future where I'm never going to stop doing founders, where I have to reduce, it can't be 52 a year. Second and biggest thing is I took an idea from one of Rockefeller's biographies. So one of the things that I do that I also think is important is you read all the famous biographies. but you got to go through the bibliographies. Books are made out of books. Everybody has read Titan by Ronchernow.

In the bibliography of that, there's a better, the best Rockefeller biography ever read. And I have like eight at the house. I haven't read yet. I collect like obscure Rockefeller biographies. That I'll eventually get to. What's your favorite one?

It's called John D. The Founding Fathers of Rockefellers by David Freeman Hawke. Better writer than a titler, I guess. Yes. to know how he built standard oil. And there's this idea in there that I've used called Secret Allies. This is going to answer your other question about podcasting, where he's at the beginning of the oil industry. It's the very beginning. And he's there. Rough and tumble time. Yeah, no one knows shit about oil refining. So what does he do? He goes

and builds a network of secret allies with other oil refiners. And then they eventually do something that's even more nefarious. They start something called like the Oil Refiners Association of America or something. And then he gets himself elected presidents to that. And then what happens is like, it's like if we had a podcaster union, I'm president of the podcaster union, and then I go to you and like, Tim, what's your downloads this month? Okay, and how much you're charging for ads? And then who's your next guest? And he's getting all this data. So then he sees, that's a joker. I don't have to, that guy's already out of business. He doesn't even know. Yeah. We don't have to worry about that guy. Yeah, that guy's a killer. I need to

to buy his company and make him a partner. And so this idea of secret allies, so I'm obsessed a podcast thing. And so what I would go do, I'd go around and I would talk to any podcast to talk to me. And we talk about everything, downloads, ads, who you're selling to, how you're selling, who are you using for editing. Maybe that's the better sense I got. No, I'm kidding. It's good. No, because I give. Yeah, I know. I know. I'm kidding. There's people literally, like, they'll even tell you, like, there's podcasters that literally, like, I took an idea from one podcast and gave it to another podcast because that's the whole thing. I don't collect it and hold it. We spread it around and they've made millions and millions of dollars from these ideas.

friend named Kevin Kelly. Kevin Rose does that too. Yeah. Just gives away. Derek Sivers does it too. Gives away as many as possible. And if he can't get rid of one that keeps him up at night, he's like, we share. So if you're talking about podcast data, who's the mad scientist's podcast data? Chris Hutchins.

And you talk to him. We both talk to him. And we, like, he has good shit because he tells you stuff and he tells me stuff, you know, like that I didn't know. And he's like this weird mad scientist, but he's in like this weird part of podcasting. I don't even think about. All the hacks.

Yeah. He's been on your podcast twice. Yeah. And, um, Once because he wanted to have this long conversation with me about a bunch of stuff I was doing and I was like, if we're going to do that, make it good with your questions and we'll just record it and then I can share it because I don't want to answer all these questions over and over again. It was about podcasting. It's a great idea. And so basically I took that idea. So anyways, I was able to build a lot of relationships with a lot of podcasts. We're friends. We share information. But then you also see like, oh, wait, there's like a lot of disparity between like podcast teams and stuff. And so Rob Moore and Andrew Newman tried to recruit me. years ago, because they have a podcast network called Saikom that they really don't do much with, okay? Because it's really hard to like launch another health podcast when they're kind of dominating that vertical. Like, is there another human human in that vertical that's not

discovered? Unlikely. And everything, power laws or everything around us. And so I got this crazy DM and then a phone call with Rob. And he's just like, dude, who are you? And this is when I had no, again, 5,000 listeners. And he's like, I've never come across anything like this. And And then we went up talking, I think every single time we talk, this is on the phone for over two hours every time. And it's all about podcasting. They're like, we're looking for other humans. And you're like this giant nerd that like loves reading obscure shit and breaking it down in like an entertaining manner just like Andrew does. And he's like, would you be interested in joining us on Saikom? And I was like, you are two weeks too late. Because it's not announced yet, but I have a verbal agreement with this guy named Patrick and I'm joining Colossus. But we still became friends and everything. else. And so basically me and Rob, like we'd spend a lot of time. I spend my summers in Malibu. So I see them all the time. That's where they're, and I've talked to Andrew and like, they're just killers. Yeah, they're very good at what they do. They're just operationally excellent. And they have a small but mighty team and every single person in that team, they're very focused. So like, they're

photographers, one of the best photographers. They're editors, one of the best editors. They're video people are some of the best video people. They're internet guys. One of the best internet guys. Like, it's just like, just everything. And so their whole. whole point was just, I was like, listen, founders is never going anywhere. It's staying on Colossus, like staying exactly what it is. But if I do something new, I'll let you know. So when I went to them, it was just like, here's the thing. I am going to pick the guess. I'm highly disagreeable. I will never take direction from anybody. I want to pick the guess and I want to have the conversations. And then everything else has to be a plus team around me. And that

means from visuals to editing to clips to every single thing and that's they're operationally excellent I have not met better like just spend time with them very well architect and then the way they built their business is genius so what does success look like for you two years from now three five pick your time frame success looks the same now and forever that I'm proud of what I made that's it like I don't care what the numbers are I love let's say this show does really well oh it's going to so David Santa. Yeah. Does really well. Yeah. And then, not saying Rob would do this, but it's like, you know what we would really

love to do is a third show. And it's incredibly compelling. Maybe it's slightly different angle or a totally different angle. Who knows? Right. It's like, who the hell knows? Interviewing spouses of all these famous people, which I think would actually be an amazing podcast. I'm sure someone's doing it. But besides the quality of the product and being proud of the product, like there is such a thing as too many different products. Oh, for sure.

There is such a thing as simply burning the candle at both ends. So you're at a battery capacity that compromises the product, maybe, a long term, or your life, right? You've got more considerations than just business. Yep. So how do you think about those other factors? when you telescope out a few years? I'm not a long-term planner.

So, like, I would say, like, I'm basically non-analytical at all. I go straight off intuition. Steve Jobs says his great line where he's just, like, he thinks intuition is more important in intelligence, and the intuition played a larger role in, like, his success and anything else, intuition and perseverance. And so, like, I used to think I was, like, more analytical, and, like, I have a five-year plan, a 10-year plan.

All a great life is, is a string of great days. And so the furthest I plan out is, like, 24, hours. I actually have this weird, I don't even know if I should say this publicly. I don't think people like humans actually understand time at all. And like when you say a decade, like yeah, we know decades, like 10 years, but like, do we actually understand what that means? Like, I think we understand, we maybe understand a week, a month. We definitely understand a day because that's how we live. We live 24 hours at a time. And so all I try to do is like, can I design a day that I really enjoyed? Not like hedonistic. I'm not like laying around doing nothing.

Like I have to work. I feel guilt and shame when I'm not being productive. And that's probably a bad thing. There's all reasons that you can psychoanalyze why that is the case. But I just know how I am. I like to work. I like to get up and get after it. I don't like taking vacations. I don't like doing.

The stuff I get invited to is crazy. It's just like, I like to work. I like podcasting. I'm obsessed with it. Everybody's like, we talked about this. Most of it's like,

why don't you do something else? I like doing this. I will keep doing this. So it's your question. I just try to make a great day. And the way I make a great day is like, I want to wake up. I want to take care of my health.

I want to read. I want to make a product I'm really proud of and I want to spend time with people that I love and admire and I'm going to do that the next day and the next day and the next day. And I think if I have a great day today and a great day tomorrow and a shitty day a month from now and then a better day the next day, and I get to my

life and it's just a string of great days that will be a great life. And so two years from now, I don't know because if you asked me two years ago, I said there's no way I'm going to do another podcast. But I would say my answer is that simple. The maximum I like about this is like, I love the climb. I don't care where the summit is I just like the activity for the sake of itself, and so therefore I'm going to do it.

And I hope it's well received, but I couldn't have predicted that founders were going to turn out the way it was. So I don't know. I'm just going to do great work that I'm completely fascinated by, and it gives me energy. And on the other side of that, like, this is what Stephen King said. I'm not just the writer. I'm the first reader. I listen to every single episode of founders before anybody else. and I just threw out one.

So the book is great. Bill Walsh's, the score takes care of itself. I read it the first time five, six years ago. I read it again. Love the book. I made a podcast on it.

It's like hour and 15 minutes long. I finish editing it. I listen to it. Not good, not. Throw it away. That's it. Can I make something that I'm proud of?

So I believe all of that and I want to push on a little bit because the great days make great lives I agree with. But now your sort of circle of interaction is expanding with a show that involves other people with very busy schedules. So to what extent are you going to be traveling to all these people versus having people travel to you? I mean, that type of decision has longer term implications, right? So I'm curious

how you think about that. So the way I think about this is this goes to the other side of me that's probably not healthy, that like I have a ruthless competitive drive that I think would terrify most people. I have a very negative inner monologue that I never think I'm doing enough. I have like entire like multiple people depending on me financially, way above and beyond just your wife and kids, like other people that I have to make sure that I can take care of. So I have a lot of pressure on me. I want the pressure. So my answer your question is like I'll do whatever it takes to win. And so if that means I got to get on a plane or I get a little less sleep, then like that's what's going to happen. But I also think like you're also smart.

And you can think about these things. Like, okay, you want to talk to extreme winners in business. It's essentially like not really start of founders. I want people that have like decades of experience. You know, every single person, if you look at the first, like the people we've been recording with so long, like, I'm just more interested in talking to people that have done things for a long time that are smarter and more productive and better than I am. And so setting up here where we are in New York, probably be a good idea because everybody

comes through New York. Now, we've recorded several in L.A. here's also a thing to consider. Most of the people I'm talking to have planes. Rick pulls me to aside and says this all the time. Multiple people have told me this. You don't understand the impact that you're having on people because I don't think about it.

I'm by myself all the time. I don't look at numbers. And so people have literally gotten their jets and flown across the country because I was like, hey, can you do it on this day in L.A.? Are the teams there? It's like more convenient. And they do it because they think I've done something for them.

But I'm just like, no, no, no. I haven't done anything for you. I just thank you for listening. The fact that you listen to my podcast means I get to do this for living. This is where Munger has really heavily basically influenced my thinking. He's just like,

the reciprocation tendency in humans is so pronounced. Evolved. Yes, and it's never going away. And what I didn't understand and I still don't understand because I don't like talking about, I don't like thinking about this shit.

I think about like as if I'm talking to one person, right? Is the fact that so many people have gotten value, like every single person's recorded an episode with us for the new show so far. has listened to a ton of shows of mine. And their point was, it's important work.

Todd Graves actually told me this two weeks ago. He's like, it's important work, and it's more important the bigger company gets. Because if I can hear a single idea or either avoid a mistake or get a good idea, and it makes a 1% difference on my business, I can't do math, I can't do public math. A billion dollars, whatever the number is,

$2 billion. Like, it's a huge, I don't have to be 10%. So it makes a 10% difference in his business. It's a huge swing. And so far, and again, you have a private jet. Like, where do you actually live? Where, wherever you happen to be. Also, your carrying costs for that jet are pretty high.

Yeah, so there's a little bit of pressure just to utilize the damn thing. You want to hear something funny? I'll go back to why I think New York and L.A. is going to be where I'm recording most of these. And we're willing to travel. We will if we have to. Dyson says, come do it. I'm coming to England. I don't give a shit.

Sam Zell told me, he's like, I told you that that lunch I had with him changed my life. He's like, don't make the same. mistake. He's like, I know all the rich guys. He says, first of all, they're all guys. So what he's told me? He goes, two, you'd be surprised how many of them are miserable. And they like do stuff they don't like for more money that they can't spend. And then they make the same mistake where they buy slight, this is his word, it's not mine. He goes, by slightly nicer versions of the same shit. He goes, the difference between a $10 million house and a $30 million house is negligible. And he's like, I own my place in Chicago and my compound amount. That's the word he used, compound.

And he goes, I rent everything else. The things that you own start to own you. And he said every year after I think Thanksgiving and in between Christmas, he'd take his entire family, extended family to this little village in France. And he said, he was a shit talker. And he said funny things. He goes, I could buy the whole village. He goes, I don't.

I rent it. And then I don't think about it until I go back. It's somebody else's problem. And he goes, there's only one true luxury in life. He goes, private jet. Try to get to private jet money. And he's like, I use my jet. Three hours a day. On average, he uses a jet three hours a day. He was in South Florida because he's like, I woke up Chicago this morning, got on my jet. I went across the street, gave a talk to a bunch of investors and entrepreneurs because that's what he wanted to spend his last days doing. He knew he was dying. He didn't tell me, though. I didn't know that. We were scheduled to have another dinner. And it got canceled and they said he was sick. I was like, oh, he got COVID. He died three weeks later. So never got to see him again. The way he was spending his last days at his own expense, traveling all over the world on his beautiful giant plane, spending a lot of money, is passing on the knowledge.

he learned through 61 years to other investors and younger entrepreneurs. And so he goes, I did that this morning, came over here, had lunch, I'm going to get in my car and go back to Chicago. He used it three hours a day. So so far, people have been willing to fly. They come to us. I'll come to some people if they're super busy schedules. And then I think just setting up in like a place where they all will come through would make a lot of sense. Anyone on your wish list? You haven't been able to track down? No, surprisingly. Again, I don't like thinking about this where, like, I don't understand that today, right now, if I do an episode on somebody living, it's going to get to them.

They might not be a listener. This just happened with Jimmy Iveen. So people are always surprised. They think, you know, who's on your list? Like, obviously, I love, like, respect Bezos, respect Elon, like, all them, you know? But I would say, like, Todd Graves. I'm like, what the hell's wrong with you? James Dyson, the vacuum theater guy?

They're like, I'm weirdly obsessed with these people. And so one of the people I'm obsessed with is Jimmy Iveen. And Jimmy Iveen, defiant ones, such a good series. I watch it. Oh my God. It is so well done. If anyone hasn't seen fine once, go watch it.

It's head spinningly good. With the description of the four-part documentaries, oh, it's a relationship between Dr. Dre and Jamie Avine. Yeah, it's really a documentary. It's about chasing a path. There's no path in front of you. There was no path for Dre to get out of Compton. There's no path from Jimmy to get from the son of a longshoreman in Brooklyn to go

what happened to him. He's fascinating. And then this is my point about like, what do you actually value in life? Jimmy's a billionaire, you know? I don't know, he's got a billion, two billion dollars in the cases. I'd be more interested in that

than if he had $100 billion. Like if you asked me, whose life would you want, Buffett or Munger? Buffett was 100 times richer. I'm taking Munger every day. What I like about Jimmy is that he lived an interesting life.

The episode, you see it on Define once, crazy stories in there, but Rick Rubin, who you mentioned if podcasting is saturated, we can get to. Rick Rubin's really good because he's a world-class listener. He took a skill set. What was his skill for the work that he did? Why are these musicians hiring him? To listen,

to hear something they don't hear and to suggest something they might not hear, might not understand. And the episode he did with Jimmy Iveen, I think came out in 2023. I think it was like the single best podcast I listened to all year. And it's just Jimmy Iveen telling insane story after insane story about the music business. Because the music business is a wild business. and what I like about my business is that it's like a unique experience generator. It creates opportunities and experiences you can't buy. And the amount of people I get to meet and talk to, my memoirs are going to be wild because of like the weird dinners I've been to and the planes I've been on and the boats have been on. And it started because I was a giant nerd with a giant head sitting in a room by himself for five years just mainlining biography after biography after

Jimmy is really interesting to me. And then what happened is part of this, I can't tell you how I got connected. He agreed to do the show. And one of the previous guests is the one that connected me, which again, I just don't feel I deserve how nice these people have been to me and what they're willing to do.

And I don't even like asking them for this. But it got to Jimmy. The worst possible... You put a lot of work into your podcast. It doesn't matter, though. The worst possible thing. Do you feel like you don't deserve it? I feel like that's an important question.

I'll answer a question a minute. Buffett has the lines. Like, the people that win are the ones that their eyes are on the field, not the scoreboard. I don't, I was going for a walk last night and like, you know, this happens to the whole time. I'm way earlier. You're like an OG, man. You've been famous, like, way, like, when people stop me on the street, which happens,

I'm like, how do you know what I look like? That's going to happen more and more. Yeah, exactly. So, like, I've read all your blog posts about this, too. I've been, like, I was on the phone, Morgan Housel this morning, who's a big fan of yours. Obviously, you guys are fans. Yeah, and we were talking about that, like, the security around. this and all this other stuff and then we were talking about you, Morgan's just the peach of a

human. He's the opposite of me. Psychology money. Great book. It won't stop selling. Yeah. Stop selling. I know. Man, got lightning in a bottle on that one. So, yeah, earned it. Earned it, too. Oh, 100%. And the nicest guy. If you think you want to find my directional opposite, and we'll go back to the question you think is important, Morgan genuinely believes that his ceiling, that he should be an insurance salesman somewhere in the Midwest, making $100,000 a year. And the fact that this guy got really, really wealthy. Astronomical members. Really, really wealthy.

And just wakes up every day, can't believe his life. I wake up every day, like, why am I not a billionaire? It's like, he's happy in a way I will never be. And this is why I think Daniel X advice about chasing, Daniel does not believe, this is one of the first things I asked him on the show was he was the one that put this idea out there that life is not about happiness. It's about impact. He is not chasing happiness.

He's chasing impact. and he's the one that actually convinced Dara, the founder of Uber tells the story they were having drinks. Dara CEO. Sorry, yeah, sorry. Good distinction.

I met Travis too. Yeah. Most intense person I've ever been in contact with. He's, he is one hell of a builder, man. Oh, for sure. And different batteries. Most intense.

And I've been around a lot of tense. He is. Yeah, he's very fascinating. He has different gears than most people. Oh, and the storytelling and the rackintry. He's a phenomenal storyteller. Phenomenal communicator. So anyways,

when Dara was going back and forth about becoming CEO of Uber, he said, he was going to say no because like he was pretty happy with his life and Daniel in the very direct way is like since when's life about happiness it's like one of the most important companies in the world and you can have an impact on it you can have an impact on the way

to these are changed. You absolutely have to do this and I think that's like a really interesting idea. So I am trying to have impact. So to answer your question, do I think I deserve it? I obviously like know that I put a lot of work into it and I believe that the product is good

and I think I found what I put on the planet to do but I don't like thinking about it. I don't like thinking about its impact on other people. I like it because I like it. Like I make it. I'm like, I would listen to this podcast. I think it's valuable.

I think you start doing shit for the wrong reasons. I talked to a lot of the head people at Spotify, and they said one of the biggest mistakes they made. It's like the great thing about podcasting is like the people that come up like we did through like the garage. I listen to your first episode. Like I remember Tim Tim Tim, Talk Talk. Tim, Tom, Talk.

Yeah, like, I remember. From my kitchen table. With a friend. And why did you do? I think you had a couple of glass of wine, right? Yeah. And with a friend, because you're like, I don't- Figured out pretty quickly after listening to episode one that the second episode was

going to be sober. Yeah. Oh man. Josh Waitskin number two. Yeah. But you come up with like, you did it because you were curious. You only talk to people you really want to talk to you. You had no production costs.

And so Spotify said they flipped it. They're like, we took something that was low production costs done by enthusiasts and people in the garage. Huberman's analogy, this is like, it's punk rock. Punk rock is great because it started with it started with with people that just wanted to play in the garage, and then they got good, and then they played for stadiums. And so Spotify's like, oh, what we did was like,

we took a low production cost, made a high production cost, because we had these big ass contracts, and then we hired celebrities and no one listened, and the people that did listen, they stopped because the celebrities were just doing it for money, they didn't do because they love it. And I think that's the key.

It's like, I truly love this. I did it for five and a half years when no one was listening. That tells you that I love it. But I think one of the worst things you could do I was like, I'm going to do it because status is the funny thing. Podcasting is dorky. It's low status.

In 2016, you think that was fucking high status? No. No, it was like, you dorky nerd with a podcast. And to be clear, I'm not asking if you're seeking status. It was more if you feel that you're unworthy of people flying to you and doing these things. Oh, no. Those are two very different questions. I mean, like, I think you see this now, that podcasting is obviously very influential and can be,

there's so many people jumping into it that clearly don't love it. they like it because the CPMs are high or like whatever or they want to be famous. I had no video for eight years. Do you think I want to be famous? Do you think I want to be recognized? Like, no, I obviously don't. I had to fucking have the most powerful person in podcasting berate me at dinner in a nice way saying, you idiot, you have to do video. That's the only reason I did video because Daniel told me to.

And how smart am I if I don't listen to him? Like, then I'm an idiot. Like I have to do it. I don't like doing it. Like, I don't know, man. I don't know. I think at some point, like the platform gets big enough. Like, I flew here for this.

Why? Because you have a massive platform and you're willing to extend it to me and like I'd travel wherever you say it's Iceland. I'm coming to Iceland brother. I don't know what I tell you. I know you're like Argentina. Let's go down there. We'll do it in Argentina. So yeah, I think eventually when they see it's big enough that yeah, people would come to you. Also try to make it easier and you know, I'm not doing it in Columbia, Missouri. I'm doing it in New York or L.A. You're going to be there anyways, you know. And also with the particular cohort that you're interviewing with Joe. If they're like, sure, I'll fly to New York and then they can also set up like five other meetings with friends or business associates or fill in the blank. Make it easy. But I think really, man, like this is the turtle in me. I don't like asking the turtle. You can ask all the people that we have a bunch of mutual close friends. I don't like asking for help. And I think one of the weird ways that I think I built true friendships with some of these people is because all day long, it's gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme. Yeah, for sure. I have never. asked Rick for anything. I think one time to crash at his house. That's it. All I want is

to be homies, to be friends. I don't want anything from this. And I think I didn't understand because I didn't come from this background that when you're high profile and you're building these empires, these are all empire builders all day long. They're just surrounded by people that want something from them. And I'm just like, here, I have this podcast. I might be value for you. I don't want anything for me. And when they tell me, ask me for stuff, I still don't like doing to the, like, doing it. It, like, really hurt me to, like, would you be on my show? Yeah.

But I was like, all right, I'm going to ask for something. I'll do this. And not a single person I've asked. I said, no. Yeah. Well, you love what you do. I mean, that is essential to producing the quality that you produce. It's essential for the endurance to sort of outperform and outlast because podcasting as a whole is just,

an elephant graveyard of three to ten episode shows. Yes. So if you choose something you really like that you would make because you intrinsically enjoy it, right? If it's an outgrowth of reading the biographies, taking the notes, and you're like, well, this is really sort of,

in terms of additional work for me on top of something I might already be doing, actually not like the majority of the pie. And you have the fuel of the, that obsession, you're going to do well, even if it's just for yourself, but certainly with the longevity, you have the competitive advantage of durability. That means a lot coming from you and everything you've accomplished. And I think you actually hit to the essence of it where it's like, I can't sleep after these

things. I had to get up the next day when I was in Austin. I think I had a 7 a.m. flight. And I slept maybe three hours because, like, jam after jam after gem from Michael Dell. or like, you'll see this in the Todd Graves episode. Dude, we were like the same person. We're the same person.

And so we're like, we're like spontaneously high-fiving. This was, I'm sure I'm going to get a lot of like, this guy's a dork. Like, hey, give me another high five. Funny? Like, we're just like geeking out about like my new details of just being obsessed with his whole thing is like, do one thing and doing it better anybody else. I remember going from the airport. It's in Baton Rouge.

And I immediately called Sam Hinkie, who's the closest thing I have to our mentor. And I was like, I'm in trouble. And he's like, well, I go, I'm a deal. to the doing these things already like I I can't stop like this was crazy yeah it's a good sign crazy I mean that's how I pick my projects largely it's how I pick some of my startups too that I get involved with if I have what I would call sort of good insomnia yeah for at least a few nights in a given week and then I try to quell it doesn't matter how much tracidone I take or anything else. Like, I just am so excited by something that my mind is whirring and I can't go

to sleep. I'm like, okay, there's probably something there. Also, because it seems to be such an energetic unlock, I'm like, even if that one thing doesn't do very well, if I can kind of create the slick nuclear power from that, it's not compartmentalize it can apply to other things. So I get it. I get it. And I was listening to, I don't know how I found it. Actually, I was going on, I think it's Tom Papa's show. It's a comedian, great interviewer, and I was going on his show. This is a while ago, and I was doing some homework on my own, listen to an interview he did where he interviewed Joe Rogan.

And I'm paraphrasing here, obviously, but Rogan effectively said, he's like, yeah, I don't really think much about, like, discipline or willpower. He said, what I do have, though, is obsession. And when I find something that I'm obsessed with, when I deep dive. It's like, I don't need to worry about discipline. I don't need to worry about willpower. So it's like finding that thing that you are obsessed by. And so I think you've done that.

You've done that. So you found your lane. Like a lot of people don't find it. They don't find that thing. It's like you wonder if Kobe Bryant were born somewhere and didn't have the chance to pick a basketball. Would it have been something else? Like maybe if you're a Michael Jordan, okay, it's baseball or this or that.

But it's like you found your thing. That's kind of amazing. No, I appreciate it. And the way I think about it, It took me 32 years to find my path and five and a half years of struggle before it could even pay my bills. It was like a long time.

Kobe found it, like imagine finding it at 12 like he did and knowing. I read the 600-page biography on him by Roland Laselby and the middle school guidance counselor is like he wrote down, what are you going to do? He's like, I'm going to play in the NBA. He's like, you need to pick something else that's a one in a million shot.

He goes, I'm going to be that one in a million. To be like that's so sure at 12 years old. And this is what goes back to the lack of introspection. And, like, I had a lot of, like, angst and, like, what is the meaning of life or, like, what am I doing here? And then once you find your thing, like, there's, like, a definitely not resting on laurels, but there is, like, almost like a relief, like, because it's not just, like, finding something

you love to do. It's like, what is that, you're, like, a Japanese encyclopedia. Ica guy, what is the-I-Gai, what is the-I-Gai, yeah. Yeah, it's like, the intersection of, like, what you love to do, what you're good at and what's good for the world. Something like that. Yeah. Yeah.

He got gets used in a bunch of different ways. Japan's always good for these pithy conceptual words. I think I'm just going to be blasphemous for you, but I think travel is generally overrated. I am not jumping in. After you do it for a while, because the problem is like we keep going to all the nice places and like all the nice places are all the same to each other.

One thing that Japan blew my mind and why like it's the top of my list now of everywhere I've been and where I'd want to go again is because it's one of the few truly distinct cultures in the world. world. Yeah, it's a wild one. They also, they're kind of a, like a chameleon, because they pull so much from other cultures. So it's, when it was in isolation, it was certainly kind of an alien environment. And then you look at everything they've incorporated. And in some cases, in the case of, say, like the Toyota Way, right? Yeah. You have, I guess it was, I want to say, Deming, yep, right, who was basically not ignored, but certainly not embraced in his country of birth, gets adopted.

by the Japanese, and you see them do this over and over and over again. So yes, it's a fascinating place. And I would agree with you that especially people who travel in the lap of, it doesn't need to be luxury, it could just be comfort, like rich person travels the most boring shit in the world. Same stores, same restaurants. It's just like, okay, you're going to the four seasons in 12 different places, getting on the Wi-Fi, doing whatever it is you would have been doing at home, and then going

to the most expensive meals, it's just not interesting. So I think if anybody wants a great book on the art of long-term world travel, if that's of interest, vagabonding my Rolf Potts. I read that because of you. Yeah. The amount of books in my library because of you. It did the same thing with you that I did with all these other people. It's like, oh, Tim says it read it.

I read it. Yeah, and a lot of these books, they're underneath it all, at least in the case of Rolfoont's book Vagabunding. They're really kind of like philosophical. operating systems. And it's a hat you can try on. You don't have to wear it forever, but it's like, okay, if you only have one jacket to wear, which is like six-year workaholic, neglecting family guy, just expand your wardrobe. You can always put that jacket back on. You just hang it up for a moment. And similarly, I like these books, and they certainly can be business books,

whether it's Branson, who is in some ways, I mean, he took risks, but he's kind of the opposite, it at least in a lot of capacities to like a Dyson, right? Like he risk mitigates the hell out of his ventures and caps the downside in so many creative ways. Like his airline. Exactly. So like the artistry of deal making for minimizing or capping downside is one of Branson's superpowers.

Even though the stuff on the magazine covers back in the day, it was like the madman who's doing X, Y, and Z and has the models. And he's phenomenal marketer. And he's doing like the kiteboarding with a naked model on his back. You remember that? That's literally the picture I have in my mind. Oh my God. That looks fun.

I mean, he is also, can be a wild man. But I digress. I was just going to say that these are hats that you can put on to test them out as like philosophical operating systems, which is how I pick a lot of the books. Books, books, books. I mean, I was very similar to you when I was a kid. And also, I mean, all throughout just living in books, living and living in books. it's very common though in these stories

Rockefeller Abraham Lincoln Thomas Edison Edwin Land Winston Churchill the way I say this is like they don't just read they devour entire shelves

there's multiple examples of like Thomas Edison or Thomas Edison read every single book in the Detroit Library Edwin Land read every single book on light in Harvard then dropped out

because he didn't think he had anything else to learn moves to New York City I think one of the most beautiful buildings is the one we passed on the way here New York City Public Library read every single book

on light in there and then it's like okay I learned enough now I can do my experiments it's just our entire shelves monster David center what have we not talked about people will be able to find of course the show David center dot com yep is that the best website David center on all social channels Instagram channels podcast app founders podcast of course founders podcast dot com I appreciate you like you've included me in your newsletter in the past oh yeah on your blog like I read all your shit and I'm like and I didn't even know like It's shocking to me, like when I say, I'm like, oh, because it's not like you told me. I was like, what the hell?

Yeah, you put out, I mean, the obsession and attention to detail doesn't surprise me at all. Like when you told me about going through your transcripts by hand, I'm like, yeah, that makes sense. And I really have my fingers crossed for you. I don't think you need any luck, but that David Center is as durable as founders podcast. If anybody can do it, you can do it. So I appreciate it. It means a lot coming from you, man. Yeah, congratulations.

You've had a huge influence on me. Oh, thanks, man. It's long overdue. Like I said, I ran in the hallway and grabbed you. I was like, it's been too long. Yeah, it's a too long coming. Very, very, very long overdue. So everybody listening, check out David Senra.

I'm excited to check it out. And I also know the team at Huberman Lab, Andrew, Rob. Those guys are all top tier. So what's coming is going to be. absolutely top notch so I'm excited to see it and as always everybody we will put links to anything that came up in this conversation in the show notes tim dot blog slash podcast just search senra s enr a or essence of turtle and you'll be able to find everything and until next time just be a bit kinder than is necessary to others yes but also to yourself thanks for tuning in

this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter, called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my

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