A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast

David Rosenthal and Ben Gilbert — of the Acquired podcast — invited me to San Francisco for a discussion on our mutual obsession: spending every waking hour studying the history of entrepreneurship and sharing those lessons on our podcasts. ---- Follow Acquired in your podcast player here or at Acquired.fm This episode is brought to you by: Tiny: Tiny is the easiest way to sell your business. Tiny provides quick and straightforward exits for Founders. Get in touch with Tiny by emailing [email protected]. [3:00] David’s time with Charlie Munger [5:30] Henry Flagler after Standard Oil [8:30] What makes a great biography, and how to capture all sides of complex characters? [11:00] Studying history is a form of leverage to achieve success [13:00] How do we figure out what the true story is for an episode we're doing? [20:30] Silicon Valley should focus more on durability than growth [21:30] How David got into reading biographies and podcasting [25:40] What were each of their influences before starting Acquired and Founders? [35:30] How to suck less over time [37:30] What motivates, Ben, David, and David to get better? [45:00] Dead ends: business model changes, paid podcasts, changing the name to “Adapting”, and Senra's “Autotelic” [51:30] “You’re not advertising to a standing army, you’re advertising to a moving parade” [56:00] Comparison of podcasting business models [1:00:10] Senra’s insane Readwise "healthy twitter" habit [1:04:30] Is it possible for the ultra-wealthy not to mess up their kids? [1:14:30] The fleeting moments you get to spend with your kids [1:17:00] The value of building relationships with best-in-class peers [1:19:30] How the book publishing industry works [1:28:45] How to differentiate yourself as an investor in 2023? [1:38:30] The greatest historical examples as content marketing [2:02:00] The best businesses are cults (and Senra starts one on the episode) [2:07:00] Senra gives feedback to Ben and David on Acquired episode format [2:15:30] Steve Jobs’ 1997 product matrix [2:17:00] The moral imperative to market products that help people [2:23:00] Ray Kroc and Steve Jobs: deeply flawed founders [2:23:30] The founders we idolize are world-builders [2:28:00] When yachts and jets are underpriced assets [2:32:00] How to compete when money is cheap vs. when there are real interest rates [2:39:30] When Ben and David have fixed broken episodes in post-production [2:44:30] Why masters of craft are so interesting to study [2:45:30] Should you listen to advice? [2:51:00] David’s first job detailing cars [2:52:30] The Cuban experience immigrating to Miami [3:01:00] College entrepreneurship programs [3:04:00] Ben’s experience learning UNIX as a kid [3:08:30] David remembers Tim Ferriss guest lecturing in college If you have scrolled this far and still haven't followed Acquired in your podcast player please do so here! ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Senra?

  So I'm about to do something that I've never done before. I've been working on this podcast for over six years, read over 300 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, well over 100,000 pages. And in that entire time, you have never heard another voice on this feed besides my own. But I want to make sure you don't miss this conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast. So, right after my dinner with Charlie Munger, I flew directly from Los Angeles to San Francisco because David and Ben very graciously invited me to be a guest on their world-class podcast. What you're about to hear is a three-hour-long conversation between three people that are so obsessed with studying the history of entrepreneurship that they're dedicating, it's their life's work. They're dedicating almost every waking hour to do so, to finding great ideas from the

• 0:44David Senra?

  past and then sharing those ideas on our podcasts so future generations of entrepreneurs, founders, and investors can benefit. And as you already know, I've been obsessed with David Ogilvie ever since I was reading Warren Buffett's shareholder letters. And Warren Buffett said that David Ogilvie was a genius. I then went and found every single book that he ever wrote or was written about him and read it. And there's a line in one of the biographies of David Ogilvie that says, "David Ogilvie was building his first-class business in a first-class way." Ben and David of Acquired are doing the exact same thing. I believe that Acquired and founders are perfect complements to one another. I focus on the founder, the actual individual and the person through biographies. They do these hours-long, really in-depth company histories that are just absolutely excellent.

• 1:29David Senra?

  If you do not already follow Acquired in your favorite podcast player, please do so right now and start with their episode on the history of LVMH. It is one of the best episodes that I've ever heard, and I've been obsessed with podcasts for over 13 years now. I would listen to that episode first, but their episode on Walmart is excellent. Their three-part series on Berkshire Hathaway, excellent. Their episode on the NFL, Sequoia Capital, Benchmark, Amazon, the list goes on and on and on. And regardless of what episode that you choose to listen to, what Acquired and founders has in common is the fact that we both do an insane amount of research, and we do this so that when you press play, you're guaranteed a good return on the time invested listening to every episode. And one more thing I want to tell you about before we jump into this conversation is the presenting sponsor of this episode is Tiny.

• 2:12David Senra?

  Tiny is the easiest way for you to sell your business. They provide straightforward cash exits for founders, and they can do deals of all sizes. In the past, they've bought businesses. For as little as a million dollars and some businesses for well over $100 million. And as we've learned over the last two episodes, Bernard Arnault is the buyer of choice for family luxury businesses. Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger are the buyer of choice for family businesses of all types, and Tiny is well on their way to being the buyer of choice for founders of businesses worth anywhere from a million to over $100 million who want a hassle-free cash exit. If you have a business that you want to sell now or in the future, make sure you email [email protected] first. I hope you enjoy this

• 2:54David Senra?

  conversation and I hope you follow acquired in your podcast player like I do.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  So David, do you want to tell us who you had dinner with the other night?

• 3:03David Senra?

  I had a three-hour dinner with Charlie Munger.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  That is awesome.

• 3:07David Senra?

  Where I could ask him any questions that you want. Well, first of all, I guess we should back up. It's like, there's a reason that he's so admired, right, by so many people. But for me particularly, you get to meet a lot of really interesting people because of the work that we do, right? Yeah. And so that's like a blessing and something that I know we've had conversations in the past that we deeply appreciate. But Charlie's a different level for me. Like, I literally think of him like the wise grandfather I never had. You know, I've met all kinds of people. I don't really get like nervous or starstruck. I was legitimately like shaking the day before. I was like, I cannot believe. I didn't, I didn't want to tell that many people because like this is just, there's no way this is going to happen. Like, I just, I won't believe it till it actually happens. We do very similar work, right? Where it's

• 3:48David Senra?

  just like, how many people have spent six, seven years, tens of thousands of hours, reading hundreds of books about the history of entrepreneurship and investing and then not only reading it, taking notes on it, making a podcast. It's us and Charlie and Warren. Yeah. And so, and the reason I bring that up is because you think about all the different companies and founders you guys have studied, all the different companies and founders that I've studied, right? And like, even amongst the rarest group of people. Charlie still stands out. And the crazy thing is, he's 99, right? And so I get there and we start off in his library, which is like the best place for me that you could possibly see. Set the stage more. How big is the library? Like, how many books are we talking about? So it's not, so his, one of his family members was there too.

• 4:31David Senra?

  And she's like, oh, this is like, nothing. This is like the front room. Wait till you see the back. Yeah, so it's like, it's similar to like the room we're in. Like, you know, very similar size. And, you know, floor to ceiling shelves. And so I'm with a small group of friends. In fact, mutual friends for ours. So the people that set this up for us, or for me, was Andrew Wilkinson and Chris, the founders of Tiny, who are mutual friends. And so we're sitting there. And there's actually a funny thing where it starts out. And they know both Warren and Charlie. They've talked to them before. So they go right into it. And then like, I'm sitting there. And I had this whole list of probably like 25 questions. I was gonna ask if you like, prepared in advance. I know you did. I never got the chance to open my phone.

• 5:15David Senra?

  Cause I was just sitting there, I was like, I'm looking at him. And he's, you know, very close. Like, you know, maybe a little bit further for me to remember.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  That would feel super disrespectful to like, take out my phone.

• 5:23David Senra?

  That too. And I had, you know, read every single book on Charlie. I watched all of his videos. Like, I've studied this guy forever. And so every time he had said, hey, read this book, I go and read the book. And then I see a bunch of the books that he has recommended behind him. So people are like, oh, was he as like you expected? Like, they say, hey, be careful, don't meet your heroes, right? It's like, he was unbelievably gracious. You know, unbelievably like, I was like, hey Charlie, you mind if I take a look at your bookshelf? Right? He's just like, do whatever you want. Just unbelievably polite. Still like, biting intellect, ferocious intelligence. At 99? At 99. So we were talking earlier downstairs, where the scary thing about Charlie is...

• 6:06David Senra?

  I remember asking a question about Henry Kaiser, this guy that was super famous when Charlie was younger. He built like 100 companies, built the Hoover Dam. Like, he was as famous in his time as like Elon Musk is today, right? But no one knows who he is. And I was asking questions about Charlie in the book, and his recall is just insane. So the point where I asked him, I go, "How do you know all this, Charlie?" He goes, "I knew his partner." And then he starts telling stories about being, knowing, like, having a relationship with Henry Kaiser's business partner. And then all these three hours of just unbelievable stories. And then I go, "Charlie, like, how do you remember all this stuff? Like, do you write, like, do you take notes? Do you reread the books over and over again?" He's like, "Nope." And all I could think of was like, imagine. Wow. That guy's mind in 99 is still so sharp.

• 6:50David Senra?

  I had brought a gift for him, because he talks about Rockefeller all the time. I bought him this special edition, uh, centennial edition version of Henry Flagler's biography. Oh, Flagler, yes. So I live in Miami. The guy, Les Sanford, I think, is the author of that book. He is good friends with, there's only like one local bookshop in Miami called Books of Books. And so Les is a local author who's good friends with the owner of that bookstore. So they did a, you can't get this book anywhere else. It's a special edition book. Because Flagler moved to Florida later. After the Standard Oil thing, yeah. That, he's got a fascinating story, we talked about that, where he made, he was unbelievably wealthy because of Standard Oil. Yep. He's, you know, 50, 60, 70 years old when he's doing this.

• 7:35David Senra?

  And he's just like, "Oh, what am I gonna do now? I'll build an entire state." When he gets to Miami, Miami is little less than 500 people living in a swamp. Because you can't live there, there was no AC at the time. And so then he builds the world's first railroad over, connecting Florida to Keys. He just, essentially, like, you read that book and you're like, "Oh, humans have no limits other than the ones we put on ourselves." And so that's what Flagler does, he just stretches it. And he does some terrible things, too, where it's like, wanted to find a way to divorce his wife. So he literally moves to another state because he couldn't be divorced in New York. Bribes the government of Florida. They create the Flagler Law, which allows him to get a divorce. Then he does that like a few, I think, a few times. I think he's like in his 70s, he marries like a 30-year-old, like, it's not all good. But that guy's like, "Oh, your rules don't apply to me.

• 8:20David Senra?

  Like, I will build whatever I want." He built infrastructure, hotels, everything else.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  This is like one of my, the things that I keep learning from Founders Podcast, and I'm curious if you do it intentionally, or if you... Like try not to do it, but like every single time I'm like, oh, people aren't perfect. Like none of your heroes are perfect. And do you find yourself like, cause we, we run into it on acquired a lot. We're like, it's not as fun to tell stories about terrible people. And so you, you, you like, don't want to show someone's negative side as much because it doesn't like, it's just.

• 8:52David Senra?

  Well, we, we like, we fall in love with them too.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:54David Senra?

  When we're doing that.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  And you're like, wow, they're the most extraordinary person on this one axis to ever live. And we, we should talk about how they're a flawed person in many ways, but it's not fun to dwell on. Like you kind of want to like move through that and be like, yep, yep, they were flawed. Here's the next amazing thing that they did. Like, how do you handle that?

• 9:11David Senra?

  Like, you know how a normal biography is written, right? It's like way too much family history. Like, I want to know some family history. I don't want five generations back. Stop like, I don't want to know the origination, their last name. I don't need that. I want to know like.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  And you're like the most qualified person in the world to critique a biography writing style at this point. So.

• 9:26David Senra?

  So why we're reading it is like, everyone wants to know the climb, right? It's like, how did you, you guys, I just went through your entire, to get part of the prep for Charlie is listening to all of your Berkshire episodes. Right? Where you guys do a fantastic job on this, cause like the first two is like the young Charlie, the young Warren. So I would literally, and I've done this forever. It's like, I don't, when you think of Warren Buffett or Ben Franklin or George Washington, or anybody that's super famous. When we see them, it's like, oh, who's the Ben Franklin on the hundred dollar bill, right? Or who's Washington on the dollar bill? Or who's Buffett at the, the meeting in Omaha? It's like, no, no, that, that's the guy that is, is enjoying the fruits of the person that actually built the empire.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  That's.

• 10:02David Senra?

  I go, I go and stare at pictures like a freak at like of young Charlie Munger when he was like 38 or young Warren Buffett. Right? They, they were like us. They look like they were young people once.

• 10:12Speaker 02

  In, in our Berkshire series, the first, did we end the first episode without even getting to Berkshire yet? I think we might.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  You have a partnership.

• 10:19David Senra?

  You have to. You mentioned on the Walmart episode where it's like, everybody says, oh, Sam Walton didn't start Walmart till he was 44. Yeah, but he was doing 25 years of practice and learning and he wasn't just sitting on his ass.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  Starting a bunch of stuff that looked an awful lot like Walmart.

• 10:32David Senra?

  Yes, learning from that. And so the, the.

• 10:34Speaker 02

  Which is totally like, I mean, aside, but we have no agenda here. That is like. I think both an advantage that we have, all three of us, and like kind of a secret that we have, which is that like, we wanted, we did Walmart because we wanted to do Amazon. And so we were like, how do we do Amazon, right? We gotta do Walmart first. People want this, like this is the right way to study things.

• 10:55David Senra?

  I'm glad you brought that up because I think this is why people get a lot of value. And I don't want it to make us about, hey, this is an acquired founder show. The reason that some of the people in our audiences are the most successful people in the world. They're all reading biographies, they're all studying the history of business. I told you guys a few weeks ago, I was very lucky to have a two hour, one-on-one lunch with Sam Zell that I didn't think was possible. What I realized in that conversation is like, you don't make, you don't, Sam Zell sold his company for almost $40 billion, right? $38 billion, whatever it was. It's like, you don't build a company, sell for $40 billion, and then learn all this. It's like, he was doing this since he was, since he was young. We were talking in his autobiography, he talks about-

• 11:33Speaker 02

  I think my favorite episode of your podcast is the Kobe Bryant episode.

• 11:38David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 11:38Speaker 02

  Because like, this is what these guys are doing. They're like Kobe Bryant.

• 11:43David Senra?

  They're watching game tape.

• 11:43Speaker 02

  They're watching game tape. They're working on the fundamentals from the time they're 12 through the time they die. They don't stop.

• 11:50David Senra?

  I think that's what we're listening to acquired and founders is. Is you're watching game tape of history's greatest entrepreneurs. Sam did this when he was younger. But this ties together where Bill Gurley had a fantastic quote about this, a treat about this, when all that crypto was going crazy and like the run-up and people were getting rich. And he's like, one thing I don't like, and I'm paraphrasing because I wasn't expecting to talk about this. He's like, I don't like the, these younger people denigrating the people that came before them. And he's like, he made the point that none of the, none of history's greatest entrepreneurs and investors did that. They had the opposite perspective. All of them had idols. You just made the point, you can't understand Jeff Bezos until you study Sam Walton. You can't understand Sam Walton until you understand J.C. Penney and Sol Price.

• 12:29Speaker 01

  And even their contemporaries. Like, the point that Walton always made was, I don't think my competitors are stupid. I want to go shop my competitors and get all of their very best insights, and then bring them into my store.

• 12:40David Senra?

  Yeah, 100%. They're learning machines.

• 12:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:42David Senra?

  And so you get to Charlie's, going, tying this all back to this. You get to Charlie's bookshelf and it's just, biographies I've never even heard of. And I do this for a living. And over and over, I was like, what is this book? And then I started looking, I was like, oh, I'm just taking picture after picture after picture. I was like, I'm ordering every single one.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  So we're talking about this idea that like, that the way to get truth is to weave together the tapestry of all of history's stories of things that are adjacent to understand, like, how this opportunity to start some business came to be. And you always have to, like, all history is revisionist and all history is biased. And so I think one of the hardest things about making an acquired episode is figuring out, like, when we're looking at a source, like, someone giving an industry talk who works at a company, or like, a biographer who chose to dedicate, you know, two years of their life to writing this book after working at Newsweek and covering the sector forever, is like, trying to mentally account for and discount from whatever bias and perspective

• 13:39Speaker 01

  they're coming in with to create whatever the source material is that we're using to then incorporate into our version of, here's how this thing happened. Which is, that's like, I think it's the hardest part about what we do. And I'm curious if you ever think about that.

• 13:54David Senra?

  I think about it all the time, because people are like, oh, like, survivorship bias or revisionist history and everything else. It's like, here's the problem, like, we, humans don't see things as they are. We see them as we are. So like, we could have this super long conversation between the three of us right now, then go in the other room and write down, you know, what just occurred. And every single version is going to be different, because it's viewed through all of our experience, the way we think, the words we use. And so what I'm looking at is, like, when I'm reading about Sam Walton, right? It's just like, the story we both hit on all the podcasts, because I've done a bunch of podcasts on Sam too, where it's like, the guy's pissed off, he's just like, driving from store to store, and these like, mountain roads, taking forever, so he buys the plane, and he realizes, like, oh, this is a massive advantage, because I'm doing something my competitors aren't, right? I'm flying over, and you guys mentioned it too, which I thought was hilarious.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  Sideways.

• 14:37David Senra?

  And then he just lands, and he's like, who owns that? Let me land, and then he, you know, buys for action. So he's like, we're going to negotiate right now, I want to buy it from you. And so my point is, is like, okay, yes, that most likely occurred. But what is the idea behind that? It's do, you can have an advantage by doing something your competitors are not doing, right? And it just ties together what you're, what you just said, is like, they all learn from somebody else. When we're reading these books and listening to these podcasts, it's like, what's the idea I can use in my life? We're not building the next Walmart. There's no way we read Titan. That we could tell, did this actually happen? Right. I don't know, but I'm looking for the ideas behind it. Not, oh, I'm gonna verify for every single word in this book. That's ridiculous. Right.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  And the truth is always, it is always the case that the, a clean narrative is grafted onto a fact pattern. And it's like, okay, well, what I care about is the lessons I can learn from the clean narrative, not, does the fact pattern, if you had all the facts in totality, did it necessarily mean that it, you know, this was premeditated? It's like, whether it was premeditated or not, you know, the facts are the facts and like, maybe I can duplicate in a different realm.

• 15:40Speaker 02

  For what we do, I mean, I think on Acquire more than you, but especially because you will do multiple episodes of different books on the same people.

• 15:47David Senra?

  And multiple episodes on the same book.

• 15:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, and multiple episodes on the same book, right.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  Your format is better.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  We're doing a narrative weave, so like, you know.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  We're shooting the moon a little bit more in this respect. Like, your format lends itself to, so if anyone is listening, like, Founders is more about, hey, I just read this book and I want to tell you what I learned from this book. And it's always biography, and like, sometimes you'll do five different biographies on Edwin Land. And like, if Acquire was gonna do Polaroid, we would do Polaroid. The episode would be Polaroid. Maybe it would be like, Polaroid, part one and part two, or like, maybe at some point we'd have, we'd have like, someone on to like, talk about the story, you know, in addition to our one canonical episode, but like, we would be shooting the moon on like, let's make sure that we get the Polaroid story as right. It's almost like, how do we find the correct average of all of the other stories to create

• 16:38Speaker 01

  the canonical version?

• 16:40David Senra?

  I wasn't expecting to quote Bill Gurley two times early so far, but he, that-

• 16:45Speaker 02

  This is how you know this is gonna be a good episode.

• 16:46David Senra?

  That fantastic talk he gave, which to me is the best talk for entrepreneurs, investors on YouTube, it's called Running Down a Dream, How to Survive and Thrive in a Career You Love, right? And he says, he's like, listen, in the age of the internet, he's like, you don't have to be the smartest person, right? Charlie Munger, after talking to him, whatever mind that dude has, I don't have that, and I'm cool with that. Like, I could not imagine trying to compete against that guy 40 years ago. Like, he would destroy me, right? He's got a super mind that I don't have. But what Bill says is like, you may, like, you don't have to be the smartest person, but you can collect more, the most information, and he's, and he holds you to a high standard in that talk. Bill's like, listen- In the age of the internet, all the information you possibly need, right? Is right at your fingertips. You have no excuse not to do this. And so he gives the example of if you, you, you want to be a domain expert in whatever you're doing,

• 17:31David Senra?

  like within two years of intense study, if you're doing that and you're focused on it's like, you're going to get to the point where like you know more than maybe anybody else. And so that's my whole thing was like, when you talk to, you've never met a founder or an entrepreneur that's like kind of into entrepreneurship. It's like, no, it's our lives. So of course, the reason why so many of them listen to both of our shows, right? It's because they're building machines where they literally can turn knowledge into profit. Right? I've become close friends with the guy through the podcast. He's a young kid and I don't mean to call him a kid. He's not a kid, but he's a lot younger than I am and he's like 28 years old. And we were on the phone the other day because he had a very serious offer for a company he owns like 95% of. And they were gonna, they were gonna give him a hundred million dollars, right?

• 18:14David Senra?

  He winds up saying no to it, but the point is like, when you talk to him, um, you know, he's listened to all the episodes, read like 60 of the books. He'll text me a picture of like, he won't even tell me what the book. And I'm like, I'm pretty sure I read that. Like, he's like, oh yeah, it's from this episode. It's like, oh, why? What if he finds one idea in a book, one idea in a podcast, and it gives a 10% improvement on his company? It's a $10 million idea.

• 18:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, we were talking about this earlier, like this dinner that you have. It sounds like the Charlie is just like a very curiosity driven machine, but we know there, there's lots of folks that have regular dinners and have groups of people often geographically dispersed. Why do they do it? Why is it worth their time, their money, their effort? It's that they get one idea. The leverage that they can get on that is astronomical.

• 18:58David Senra?

  Charlie tells a story. He's like, yeah, I made $400 million from reading Barron's for 50 years. And you're like, what the, what are you talking about Charlie? And Charlie's like, well.

• 19:05Speaker 02

  How do you quantify that?

• 19:06David Senra?

  Because he does. So he goes, I read, uh, this isn't something he said at dinner, I've heard him say publicly. He's like, I read Barron's every, uh, all the time for 50 years. I found one idea that I can act on. I made $50 million on that deal. And then I took that 50 million and I gave it to Li Lu. Is that the?

• 19:22Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 19:22David Senra?

  I gave that 50, I gave that 50 million to Li Lu and Li Lu turned it into $400 million. That's how I made $400 million from reading Barron's.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 19:30David Senra?

  And listen, I'm not, and this is another thing where I feel like everybody's like, oh, this time is different. This is new. It's like human nature has never changed. It will never change. This time is not different. You're just experienced, the difference is if you don't study the history of the people that came before you, you're just ignorant and making mistakes that people already saw in the past. Learning from history is a form of leverage.

• 19:51David Senra?

  He has billions and billions of years of collective, like, human history. This guy spent 70 years, and there's thousands of them. And like Sam Walton's book, how many people spent 50 years in one industry, in the retail industry? And he distilled it down to the most important. And then you could read it in a week, and then you could listen to Acquire's episodes. You can listen to David's episodes on Sam, in addition to that.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  So the question is then, do you have 90% of Sam's wisdom? Or do you have 0.1% of Sam's wisdom?

• 20:22David Senra?

  There's no way you have 90%.

• 20:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:24David Senra?

  Because the time.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  The instincts.

• 20:28David Senra?

  I was just re-watching Peter Thiel's talk at Y Combinator. He says, "Competitions for losers."

• 20:33Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 20:34David Senra?

  And he goes, "One thing that we do in Silicon..."

• 20:35Speaker 01

  I haven't seen this one.

• 20:36David Senra?

  "One thing we do in Silicon Valley is we overrate, overvalue growth rates and undervalue durability." And he's like, "That doesn't make sense for a technology company, because all your profits, the vast majority of profits are 20 years in the future. And so if you're trying to optimize for growth, and that over-optimization can cause your company to go out of business, you're never going to collect that. You optimize for durability first, dummy." Like, that's to me, like, my interpretation of what he's saying, right? Yeah, so you're going to get, you know, 1% probably, maybe 5%.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  But that's still enormous leverage, because you read it in five hours, and he took 50 years to accumulate everything.

• 21:07Speaker 02

  And it's Sam Walton's wisdom.

• 21:08David Senra?

  And it's what you do with the idea.

• 21:09Speaker 02

  I know you've talked about this before, but like, what was the moment where you're like, "I'm going to start this podcast." Like, it's crazy, right, what you do. You talk to a microphone yourself every week.

• 21:17David Senra?

  Yeah. My friend...

• 21:20Speaker 02

  Not that I think you're crazy.

• 21:21David Senra?

  I definitely am.

• 21:22Speaker 02

  You are, but in a good way.

• 21:23David Senra?

  No, I definitely am nuts, for sure. And that's going to be, like, we could talk about, did you guys read Jeff Bezos's last shareholder letter before he...

• 21:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:32David Senra?

  The best lines he has is at the end, he's like, "Differentiation is survival." And so they think about that, like, how hard, like, they say, let's say, somebody says, "Damn, I love what Ben and David are doing. I'm gonna do the exact same thing." They can jump in and try to do that, right? But you have six years of experience, you have 600 hours out there.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  You have to counter position against us. Or address a different audience, or... Exactly.

• 21:53Speaker 02

  Which, by the way, they definitely should. Every time I talk to somebody who wants to, I, without, I'm always like, "You absolutely should do this."

• 22:00David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 22:00Speaker 02

  And you will, even if you never succeed in terms of any, like, numerical success, or like, you will succeed because you are learning, like...

• 22:08David Senra?

  So, being a nut job and completely crazy is, I think, makes you harder to compete with. And it's also, we're gonna go all over the map here, but it's impossible not to be that. Like, think about how seeped you guys are in the same information that I am, where it always says, "Oh, you're the sum of the first, of your five friends," or whatever, right? Well, it's like, it's also like, what you, you know, some of your podcasts you listen to, and the books you read.

• 22:30Speaker 01

  Oh, it's your five friends, including your parasocial relationships.

• 22:33David Senra?

  And so now, what happens is, like, you mentioned, dude, like, you only can read, like, one book about him, you'll go crazy. And so what happens is, when I'm really interested in somebody, I will, I listen to Bill Gurley. Again, I just take advice from people who are smarter than me. Bill said, "Go collect everybody, everything you can." Okay, good, I'll do that. This is, these are just simple ideas.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:51David Senra?

  And so I'll find somebody that's interesting, I'll read everything about him. And so with Charlie, I have, like, a little Charlie Munger on my shoulder. I have a little Steve Jobs, a little Edwin Land, a little David Ogilvy, Estee Lauder, Coco Chanel, all these people that have been heroes of mine, James Dyson. And so now, I'm presented with a situation, it's like, what would they do? And you have, if you read and spend, and absorb everything that's out there about these people, like, you'll have an idea of, like, how they would respond. Did you guys ever read Ken Cosiando's book, Creative Selection?

• 23:17Speaker 01

  Uh-uh.

• 23:17David Senra?

  About the, oh, that's shocking.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  He worked on the original human interface for the iPhone.

• 23:22David Senra?

  So, he made the keyboard for, when it was still, like, Operation Purple or something.

• 23:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:28David Senra?

  Uh, the keyboard, he made Safari before the iPhone. He has this excellent book that I've read, like, three times, called Creative Selection. I think the, the, how Apple designed products in the golden age of Steve Jobs, might be the subtitle. But he talked about that, where, because he demoed to Steve, right? And you're not gonna describe it to him, you're gonna demo, and you're gonna hand it to him. And so they iterate, you guys already know this, they iterate through a series of demos. And it's based on Steve's taste. Like, he is not, "Oh, let's talk about this." It's like, nope, do this, do this, that. And so Ken has a great line in the book, where he's like... Demoting for Steve is like asking questions to the Oracle Delphi, except the Oracle Delphi would like respond with a riddle. And he's like, no, no, Steve was unbelievably like crystal clear. You understood him. Out of every single person I've ever studied,

• 24:13David Senra?

  Steve Jobs is by far the clearest thinker I have ever come across. Like, I was just gifted at that. Charlie is like the Oracle, and it's crystal clear. You are not like, you are going to understand what he's, the idea he's trying to get into your brain, for sure. But my point being is like, all of the people that we study, they don't denigrate the past. They, Steve Jobs, the reason I'm so obsessed with Edwin Land. I read in a biography, when Steve was like 20, in his 20s, Edwin Land is in like 70s. He goes and meets Edwin Land, and he goes, "Visiting Edwin Land was like visiting a shrine." He's like, "He is my hero, more people should try to be like that." And then you guys made the point in that, you know, Jeff Bezos took a lot of ideas from Sam. Who took a bunch of ideas from Sony too?

• 24:58David Senra?

  Steve and Jeff. So you always find these people where you're like, "Oh, I thought this was a Steve Jobs idea." No.

• 25:04Speaker 02

  It's an Akio Morita idea.

• 25:05David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 25:06Speaker 02

  Or an Edwin Land idea.

• 25:07David Senra?

  Or an Edwin Land idea. Like, when we used to watch the presentations that Steve would give, where he's like, "Oh, we're building at the intersection of technology and liberal arts." He put it up on the screen.

• 25:16Speaker 02

  He ripped that off wholesale.

• 25:18David Senra?

  Edwin Land said that exact word. But that's the point. It's like, you're never going to find anybody gets to the top of their profession without doing the work, like studying the people that came before them, and learning from them, and admiring them.

• 25:28Speaker 01

  This is a good, like, sort of personal pivot. And it's like, I've never asked you in all the hours we've spent. It's crazy, this is the first time we've met in person.

• 25:36David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  Like, we spent hours and hours and hours on Zoom. How did you like decide that this is what you were going to do with your time on this planet? And like, how did, what led to this?

• 25:48David Senra?

  Okay, so, I...

• 25:52David Senra?

  You know our mutual friend Jeremy from Formulary with Tiny?

• 25:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:55David Senra?

  I just spent like a bunch of hours with him. He was in town. In one sentence, he like, he psychoanalyzed me better than anybody else ever has. He goes, "You didn't have any mentors growing up." So you like, you have, then you took it to like this extreme. And he said it more, much more eloquently than I am. But he's like, "You didn't have any mentors. So I view your career as like this psychopathic search for like mentors that can help you." You know, and so like to answer questions like, I don't want to go into too much detail here. But like, I've only had one habit my whole life, and that was reading. I was reading for as long as I can remember. My mom passed away from breast cancer a couple of years ago. And she, we didn't have like a lot of money, like, long story. But like, I was the first person, not only to graduate college, but like high school in my family. Like, I came from a family, like unfortunately, both sides of the family, like no education,

• 26:40David Senra?

  a lot of like, just bad habits. So I identify with a lot of what Charlie Munger says, because he essentially observes bad behavior and then tries to do the opposite, right? So I was just, let me give you an example. I was just up in Canada, actually at an event Andrew Wilkinson was hosting for a bunch of entrepreneurs. Me, Shane Parrish from The Knowledge Project, and Farnham Street was up there. Ben Wilson from How to Take Over the World. And we were doing this panel together. And Shane's the moderator, and we don't know what we're going to talk about beforehand. And so Shane asked the question, it's like, "Oh, what, um, what did you learn most from your upbringing?" Or something like that, right? And I go, "I learned not to do cocaine and to graduate high school." Like, so that kind of thing, right? And so there was just a bunch of anti-models. I thought about this as I was walking through the Tenderloin this morning in San Francisco.

• 27:24David Senra?

  And I was like, "I should do this walk with my daughter as the best." Like, "Hey, this is why you don't do drugs." Like, this is the perfect example of like, you would, you observe bad behavior and then you do the opposite. So, long story short, I've always been obsessed with reading. Like, one of the best things my wife, my, my mom ever did was, even if we didn't have money for books, she would take me to the bookstore and just sit there. Like, you know, bookstores are so cool because they just let you read. They don't, no one comes to her and is like, "Hey, you've been reading for an hour. Like, you gotta get out of here," you know? And just read and read and read.

• 27:54Speaker 02

  Was there anybody who like introduced you to reading and books? Or you just, like, there was just something about you?

• 27:59David Senra?

  Sounds like his mom. Yeah, but no, she wasn't a big reader. The only thing she read was the Bible.

• 28:05David Senra?

  There was no books in the house when I was younger, ever.

• 28:07Speaker 02

  So how did you be like?

• 28:09David Senra?

  I can't answer that.

• 28:10Speaker 02

  Mom take me to the bookstore.

• 28:10David Senra?

  I can't answer that. All I can say is like, my wife knows, has known me for 15 years and her thing, what she says is, she like likes my family and gets along with them, but she goes, "How did that come from that?" It sounds like you have a classic, like, you're the one who made it out story. Sam Hinky, our mutual friend, actually gave me the way to think about this. And it's called "The Founder of Your Family", right? And it's the person that like, and I used to call them, and it was a terrible name, but generational inflection points. Because you'd read this in the biography where you have like generation after generation of just not good things happening and then one person just says, "It stops now."

• 28:49Speaker 02

  That's what Rockefeller did.

• 28:50David Senra?

  Rockefeller, I always think of Sam Bronfman, the guy that did Seagram's. Oh, yeah. And he's in Canada, growing up, like, they were so, their parents had lost so much money, they think they were Jewish and they had to like escape from persecution in Russia. I can't remember where they came from, but they go and they have to start all over and they're in Canada and like, there's no heating and like they're freezing and like, so he has this like psychopathic drive to change, but that stays with you forever. So like, once, you know, he builds this massive company and literally changes the trajectory of all of his descendants. And as his daughter's an adult and she tells a story in the book where Sam is sitting there in like a mansion,

• 29:32David Senra?

  by, next to a fire, like shivering, thinking about how embarrassing it was to have to go to school with tighter clothing. And I was just like, that guy's never gonna go back to that and he never loses it. So I've just always been a reader. That's the only thing I've ever, like, the only one unbroken habit I've always had. And so I just had this idea, like I was obsessed with podcasts forever. I was obsessed with audio before there was such a thing as a podcast. Like, I would listen to talk radio when I was a kid and at that time, you know, it's- It's not like, there's no on-demand anything. You would listen, sports talk radio, politics talk radio. It's embarrassing, there was like this woman that used to be on at night, people would write in like, advice for love, their love life. And I'd listen to that, just the idea of like, there's all this information.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  Oh man, I used to listen to Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell. Do you ever listen to this? It's when all the other radio programming sort of expires, and then you enter the like, 1:00 in the morning AM radio stuff. And it was like, you know, aliens and like tons of paranormal stuff. But it was like, if you listen, like, you know, the Cavs game ends, I'm from Cleveland. And so like, then you listen to like, the sports post-game, and then it goes into like, the politics hour. And if you still can't fall asleep, then you're into like, aliens. And it's like, four hours of that stuff.

• 30:40Speaker 02

  Do you have a radio in your bedroom?

• 30:42Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, I'd be able to, I don't, I imagine my parents probably came and turned it off, but like, would leave it on while I fell asleep every night.

• 30:48David Senra?

  And then remember, like, I remember, so you have the jump up from that, and then the AM radio stations would then start streaming to your browser, internet. It still wasn't on-demand, so if you're not listening at 3 o'clock or 12, like you miss it. And then once I saw-

• 31:00Speaker 01

  Wasn't this what Mark Cuban's company was?

• 31:02David Senra?

  His was like, broadcasting audio for sports games though, I think.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  I don't actually know, it's kind of funny, it's like an era of-

• 31:08David Senra?

  It's broadcast.com, right?

• 31:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it was competitive with RealPlayer, which also wasn't on-demand, that was just streamed radio.

• 31:16David Senra?

  No, the first on-demand was, the first time I saw this was like, this is insane. Like, especially for people that are like, you know, learning machines using Charlie's, where it's like, I can go to, even today, like they do, you can go to any podcast player, type in whatever you want to learn about, and then you can hear some where it's usually spent hundreds of hours, teaching you about this stuff.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  You can also find intellectual, high-quality content more easily now. Because all content, because there were a limited number of channels, and a limited number of time slots, everything had to be produced for the lowest common denominator. And now you can opt into your niche and find the highest-quality content in that niche. And like, the only way to do that before was books. Like, there wasn't an audio way to, there wasn't content. There wasn't niche audio content broadly available.

• 32:03Speaker 02

  And there aren't like, several million authors out there. But there's several million podcasters.

• 32:07David Senra?

  Well, you made a good, I think you were getting to a good point. It's like, because the business model didn't support that. And so now-

• 32:13Speaker 01

  And there was no distribution.

• 32:14David Senra?

  Yeah, and now with podcasting, it's like, you guys, you know, I'm sure, I think like 50, I don't ever look at analytics, but I think last time I looked, it was like 50% of my audience was in the United States, but then everywhere. And I, so I was doing, the early days of founders, I was just, I remember it all changed because I couldn't figure out the business model, so you would do like affiliate, you know, at that time, I remember when I first started-

• 32:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, you went through a bunch of business models.

• 32:35David Senra?

  Yeah, so when I first started, they were like, hey, you contact like the few podcast advertising networks there were back then, you know, because you guys started your show in 2016, right?

• 32:43Speaker 01

  15.

• 32:44David Senra?

  Okay, so I started in 2016. And you contact, and they're like, yeah, we can do ads for your show, you know, you need like 25,000 downloads an episode. And at the time, I'm like, I'll never get there. Like, obviously, we've skyrocketed past that, but like, that's impossible. It's like as many people as in a basketball arena.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  Oh, when you start visualizing the audience, it's like, oh, two and a half NFL stadiums show up for every acquired episode, like, that's an insane-

• 33:08David Senra?

  Yes. But do you guys think, so, do you guys think about that?

• 33:12Speaker 02

  Only in adding to the pressure in a good way, like, it's a good motivator.

• 33:18David Senra?

  I never think about it.

• 33:19Speaker 02

  Really?

• 33:19David Senra?

  You know what I think about it? How my show's set up is why I say, you and I, and I-

• 33:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  I like how you treat the audience as like the person you're-

• 33:25David Senra?

  It's one person. So like, one, and I've done this forever, it's like, I, it's funny, I remember, it's one of my friends that we were, met up one day, and I was like, man, I think I'm gonna try to make like, a business around the fact that I read so much. And he's like, and he called me like, a year, like, six months ago, a year ago, he's like, I can't believe you did that. He's just like, I thought you were, that was the dumbest thing I ever heard. But I just picture him, when I started, it's like, oh, the whole idea behind the show was like, what if you've got to meet up once a week with your friend that reads a lot, and he just tells you the stuff that he read that week? Like, interesting ideas.

• 33:56Speaker 02

  Did it even cross your mind to like, try and convince him to do the podcast with you, or somebody else, or you're always just like, no, I'm in it?

• 34:02David Senra?

  So, one thing, we don't have like, a bunch of prepared stuff, but one thing us three talked about, it's like, hey, why don't we talk about like, who was your influence on why you do what you do? And so, I feel the greatest podcaster of all time is Dan Carlin from Harkor History. That's like my, I think he's like, I can't believe what that guy does, right?

• 34:21Speaker 01

  You and him are like, the only successful monologue podcasters. Like, I think it's the hardest thing to do in this medium, and I can't, I mean, there's, everyone else either has a guest on or a co-host.

• 34:32David Senra?

  Yeah, well, there's another guy that was-

• 34:36David Senra?

  That, so I took Dan Carlin, I was like, I was obsessed with his, I've listened to all his episodes. For like years, you were talking about falling asleep, I did that too, but I fell asleep to Dan Carlin. So I'd over and over and over again, to now where I listen to him, I'm like, I, it's like, it's a-

• 34:50Speaker 01

  Pavlovian.

• 34:51David Senra?

  Yeah, I was like, no, don't wake, this is not nighttime, bro, wake up. But there was another one that a friend of mine put me on, so there's this comedian named Bill Burr. He does the Monday morning podcast, he used to do it every Monday, now he does it, I think, Monday and Thursdays, right? He is one of the first podcasters, when he was podcasting, his, his first episodes, at the time, he would do it, he would call into a number and record, right? And then that, there was a service that would transform that recording from your phone into an-

• 35:20Speaker 02

  An MP3.

• 35:20David Senra?

  An MP3 that you could-

• 35:21Speaker 02

  You could download and put on your iPod.

• 35:23David Senra?

  This is way before like, anything.

• 35:26Speaker 02

  It's so wild how things, I mean, you know, we're here now in this recording setup that we have here, you know, with thousands of dollars of gear and like-

• 35:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:34Speaker 02

  We start, I remember when we first started, I don't think you let me do this, but I was like, well, why don't we just talk at the computer? And like, set up QuickTime.

• 35:42Speaker 01

  Dude, when I listen back to our first few episodes, like Pixar, and I'm like, we, it sounds like we were just talking at the computer.

• 35:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, we basically were.

• 35:49David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  That's, that's when people are like, I have a lot of psychos that, they're like, I start on number one, I go all the way through, I was like, oh, like, please don't. If you're gonna, if you're gonna do like-

• 35:57David Senra?

  This is one of the things I wanted to talk about.

• 36:00Speaker 02

  I, I, I used to, um-

• 36:03Speaker 01

  Cause that way, at least by the time you get to one, you were like, you, you, you're a fan, but if you, if you start at one, you're like, oh, these guys just suck.

• 36:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  But like, that, it's almost like, um, there's great pleasure in hearing something that you think is excellent and fully baked and like, uh, especially when it's been long running, you're like, oh, this has always been immaculate and perfect. And then you get to go see some of the early work and you're like, oh, it's so, it's so rough.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  You want the early Charlie.

• 36:32Speaker 01

  I, I get the, I can see where the magic was, even though they didn't know yet, like the-

• 36:37David Senra?

  It's the same thing you see in the books that you're reading though. Like Sam Walton, when you tell the story where his, his landlord screws him over, and he goes, he goes, I'm not whipped, I, I found, I found this door, I'll, I'll do it again. Right?

• 36:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:49David Senra?

  And it's like- Yes, Walmart is a huge success. You guys made the point that there was a great point where it's like, you're never gonna think 25 years in the future when there's watermelons and donkey crap on the ground, that this is gonna be the richest family in the world, right?

• 37:01Speaker 01

  Right, and the most standardized form of retail.

• 37:04David Senra?

  Yeah, but, and so you see like, oh, he, that same guy that became the richest person in the world, that his now family has a rich family, whatever, it's like, he is imperfect too, just like I am. And so that is the only benefit of listening to an early acquired or early founders is like, oh, you see the improvement, just like in the books, you see the improvement.

• 37:20Speaker 02

  Well, it's fun too, like, I like going back and listening to some of your old episodes. I get to like, see your journey, you know, like, I'm proud of you. Like, the, uh, but I've been thinking about that, and I was thinking about ahead of our conversation here, like, I used to say all the time, people like, oh, I go back, I listen to their early episodes. I'm like, no, don't, it's so embarrassing. I actually think like, we always wanna be embarrassed by our last episode. We've just constantly kept like, every episode, like, we try and just notch it up.

• 37:47Speaker 01

  Cause we keep picturing the stadium, and we're like...

• 37:49Speaker 02

  That's, that's the like, that's why I think about the stadium, cause I think about the like, the pressure of like, we gotta do better next time than we did this time.

• 37:55Speaker 01

  And it's not just filled with like, you know, Seattle's NFL fans, it's filled with like, hundreds of thousands of the smartest people that, and this gets to like, the psyche, like, the deep insecurities that at least I have of like, I want to impress those people. I want those people to think I'm smart, and so I have to produce something unbelievably worthwhile of their time. And the minute that I don't, I'm like, literally walking out in front of an NFL stadium full of people that I want to impress. And like, I didn't used to have that pressure, but like, once we found content market fit for acquired, with like, people that I've always thought highly of, that, that is the driver now.

• 38:32Speaker 02

  There were a couple of years where we kinda drifted, there wasn't that pressure to keep amping the bar, and then...

• 38:37Speaker 01

  You're right, it's like the 2017 era.

• 38:40David Senra?

  I think you're never gonna be embarrassed about your, your latest episode at the time we're making this is LVMH. You're never gonna be embarrassed about that, that was excellent, and like, it doesn't mean you can't keep improving 10 years from now.

• 38:50Speaker 02

  No, like, I look back and I think like, uh, yes, that's certainly an episode, I don't know how you feel, but that like, I'm proud of. But I looked back, like, at the time, like, so we didn't know that was gonna be a super popular episode.

• 39:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was totally unpredictable. It's our, it's our, it's our, uh, because we haven't shared this publicly yet. It's our, our number one episode by a huge margin. Forty thousand more people have listened to that episode than the next highest, which was amazon.com. I probably could have told you, actually, I was like, David, no one's gonna listen to Amazon because everyone already knows this story, which was super wrong. But I either thought like, no one will listen to this one, or like, this will be our most successful episode. With LVMH, even after we recorded it, I was like, or after we edited it, because we had to, like, edit a lot of stuff. But I was like-

• 39:37Speaker 02

  This is funny, this is how much we didn't know.

• 39:39Speaker 01

  This is now good, but it's not like our best ever, but apparently-

• 39:41David Senra?

  Yeah, I think it might be my favorite episode of yours. And I heard from a ton of other people that how much they liked it.

• 39:46Speaker 02

  Well, thank you.

• 39:48David Senra?

  It's really good.

• 39:49Speaker 02

  But to the conversation, like, there's a bunch of stuff that we could have done better in that episode, like, a whole bunch.

• 39:55David Senra?

  So I do this all the time, where like, I'll go back and listen to old episodes because people are like, that's weird, you listen to a podcast. It's like, no, this is a tool.

• 40:01Speaker 01

  It's how you get better. Game footage.

• 40:02David Senra?

  No, we didn't even try to get better. It's like, I was like, oh, I haven't read that book in like, two years, I'll just listen to my episode on it. And it like, it's a tool for me, that's how I know it's good for other people, right? And so I was like, and then I'll listen to it, I'm like, oh wow, I forgot that, I need to keep that idea in my mind, etc. But I'll hear myself like, oh, you said that in two paragraphs, that could have been one paragraph, cut that part, that doesn't make sense. And so, yeah, I understand the improvement, but what I'm saying is your quality's already super high. Like, it can increase and get better, don't get me wrong, but like, you're never gonna be embarrassed. You're just like, oh, I could probably do it 20%, 30% better, which is still excellent from the, like, the level you're at.

• 40:35Speaker 01

  So the way that we edit is, our editor takes the first pass, and he's unbelievably good, and we're so lucky to have him. And then, he sends us a rough cut, I upload it to Descript, and then, we listen, like, and read while we're listening, word for word, sentence for sentence, and try to cut every unnecessary sentence. And, we end up pulling out 20-ish minutes of just fluff. It's just like, okay, we could have been tighter in that point, is there a way to get tighter in it without rerecording it? And I think that has dramatically contributed to episode quality, because by the time we ship it, neither of us feel that there are extraneous sentences.

• 41:11David Senra?

  So, I don't know if I'm, like, that-

• 41:14Speaker 02

  You're still a one man show, right?

• 41:16David Senra?

  I do everything. No one touches anything.

• 41:18Speaker 02

  Everything, soup to nuts.

• 41:20David Senra?

  I'm gonna answer your question, but I also think like we should, this is a perfect point to like, how we became friends and why, like, I'm putting this out on my feed and no one, no one, you're gonna be the first non-David Sander voices that I've ever heard on Founders, and I only agree to do it with you guys, is because like this goes back to like why, I wanna be surrounded with, first of all, people that have like interests, super smart people, but also people that have like positive sum thinking, right? Patrick O'Shaughnessy has this gigantic, successful show, Invest Like the Best, he's got Colossus Podcast Network, his fund is called Positive Sum, and that's how he acts. I joined his network, this is like months later, and they're like, hey, like, you know, we have editors, whatever, like, he has like this empire over there.

• 42:04David Senra?

  And resources, he's like, what do you want? And I was like, I just want you to amplify my audience and then connect me with first-rate advertisers. Cause like, I think Acquired is a luxury podcast, maybe not luxury, premium, we gotta go over the distinction there, not from LVMH, but like, we're saying, no, no, this is like, we're trying to set the bar here. But anyways, he's like, hey, do you want editors, you want any of this and stuff? I was like, no, I don't want, no one gets to touch my stuff. Like, people think, oh, like, do they tell you what books to read? And like, no, Patrick liked my show, and he's just like, why would I tell you? Like, just whatever you're doing, just do it to more people now. And so, to answer your question, no, like, I pick the books, I record them, I edit, I'm still a one-person show, I don't know if that'll happen forever,

• 42:46David Senra?

  but I do think the fact that it just, like, spends so much time with the material gets it in my brain. But the reason that, like, I wanna talk about like the role you guys played in that, where, we were getting on Zoom, and for, like, the background here is like, you know, we had known of each other, I talked to Ben a long time ago, cause he was running this private podcast, this is like years ago, and so anyways, we're like, you're...

• 43:08Speaker 02

  That's also funny to think back, like, all the dead ends that we went, like, we went down a ton of them, you went down a ton of them, you're about to talk about some of them, like, there's so many dead ends.

• 43:15David Senra?

  But they're in the books too.

• 43:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, but they're in the books.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  Merle, why don't we change the name of the show to Adapting?

• 43:20Speaker 02

  Oh my god, that was, that was a dead end.

• 43:23Speaker 01

  That was on me. Tell the story. Covid happened and we were like, no one wants to hear these like stories of like extreme capitalism. Like, we're like the X-Games of capitalism. And like, this is a moment where like, everyone is hurting, zero business. And like, this is in that, the stock market trough too, where you're just like, wow, like, you know, all businesses are gonna go under, no one's ever gonna have jobs again, this is, you know, this is scary. And so we were like, well, like, what stories should we tell? How about businesses that are adapting to make it through this tough time? And to like, show how serious we were about it, we changed the name of the show. It was like our three least listened to episodes, covering pretty amazing stories, but we just branded it wrong. Like, Canlis is like the most interesting restaurant story you could ever hear about.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  Yep, we did Intel. That's the only time we've ever done Intel. That's the only time we've done Intel. But because it was adapting, it was stupid. So stupid. But you, there's no way to do, like, learn, rather than screw up.

• 44:17David Senra?

  Do you wanna know the first name of founders?

• 44:20Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 44:20David Senra?

  You know, like, in your RSS feed, you can change the name, right? But you can't change the link, like, it'll still say.

• 44:25Speaker 01

  The URL, yeah.

• 44:26David Senra?

  So, you look at it from mine, and it's Autotelic, the worst name. Autotelic comes from this book called Flow. A-U-T-O-T-E-L-I-C, maybe? I don't know, I can't spell for, I can't spell, pronounce, I have no grammar, so. It'd be like, you read so much, I was like, I don't pay attention to any of that stuff.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  Is that the Mi-Hai?

• 44:42David Senra?

  Yes. The guy that Flow. Yes, it's, it is an activity that you do for the sake of itself. Going back to your question, it's like, why, like, I just love to read, I'm gonna do this if no one listens? Like, that's how I know I'm gonna win. Because it's like, people are like, oh, would you do it for free? It's like, I, no, no, I paid to do this.

• 44:58Speaker 01

  For like, a long time.

• 44:59David Senra?

  For a long time, like, I literally said I'm gonna quit, and I'm gonna, I have the savings, I have a wife and a baby, or a daughter to support, now I have a son, a wife, a daughter and a son. And I was like, I bet you, I just put trust in myself, it's just like, I'm going to, if I focus on this seven days a week, I'll figure out the business model. I know, like, I don't think I'll ever get rich from it. But I will at least pay my bills, right? And so like every month, I'm like, oh, less money there. And like, so I pay to do it. So the idea where like, uh, you know, again, people get, I think Steve Jobs talked about this, like the older he get, he said something like, the older he gets, the more he realizes why people do things matters. And so he's always asking those questions like, I always say is like, how do you know, uh, that you found what you love to do? And, uh, people are like, oh, cause like, I wouldn't sell my company.

• 45:44David Senra?

  It's like, okay, there's another level. It's like, how much would you have had to pay Steve Jobs to stop working at Apple? The answer is, he wouldn't take all the money in the world. How, how much would you have to pay Charlie Munger?

• 45:55Speaker 02

  A lot of people tried to stop Steve Jobs from working at Apple.

• 45:58David Senra?

  Yeah, but like, think about that, like, the idea is like, he's not doing it for money. He's in a different game. He's doing it for the sake of itself. And so I went through a bunch of different names, uh, history's greatest men, history's greatest, like history, all these, there's terrible names. And I just started narrowing it more and more and more to like founders. And I was like, oh, that's perfect. There is a question.

• 46:18Speaker 02

  Cause you weren't even like, you didn't, you weren't coming from the tech world. You weren't like, this wasn't content marketing.

• 46:22David Senra?

  No, no, there, no, it was just like, uh, the, the idea I had known about like Warren Buffett, Elon Musk and all these other people. And I remember you had Kevin Rose on your show a long time ago. So you guys remember his, he had, if he would have.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  Again, not that long ago, maybe a year, year and a half.

• 46:38David Senra?

  Yeah, yeah, it just time flies.

• 46:41Speaker 01

  Cause it was post, it was, he was, he was.

• 46:43Speaker 02

  It was during COVID.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  He, he was pretty much already fully web three by the time we.

• 46:48David Senra?

  So do you guys remember Foundation?

• 46:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course.

• 46:50David Senra?

  He's like one of the first high quality.

• 46:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:53David Senra?

  Like, imagine if he would have stuck with that show. Like, you know what I mean? Like, it would have been a monster.

• 46:57Speaker 01

  And it's like the, the only episodes that ever came out was like, here's me interviewing Elon Musk. Here's me interviewing Sam Altman. Here's me, and like these people, and also before they became like icons of our time.

• 47:08David Senra?

  That's it. Elon had the model, that was the only thing. He was just about to release the Model S.

• 47:12Speaker 01

  You have the Roadster.

• 47:13David Senra?

  No, no, they were in the factory, cause I watched it, I watched it all the time. They were in the factory building the Model S.

• 47:17Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 47:18David Senra?

  So it was, I don't know if you could buy it yet, but it was like coming or whatever. And Elon was way younger and like, you know. And then in 2015, Tim Ferriss, I was a big fan of his podcast. I'd read like, you know, Four Hour Work Week. I remember the way I discovered-

• 47:31Speaker 01

  Dude, Four Hour Body changed my life.

• 47:32David Senra?

  Did it?

• 47:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:33David Senra?

  With its low carb?

• 47:34Speaker 01

  Yep, slow carb diet.

• 47:35David Senra?

  I did that too.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  Slow carb diet, cold showers, like I did. And the funniest thing is like, this is like, this whole cold plunge thing that's like becoming a thing now, I'm like, was nobody like reading Tim Ferriss in 2011?

• 47:45David Senra?

  Oh, they were.

• 47:46Speaker 01

  Like, that was a huge part of- Yeah.

• 47:48David Senra?

  Well, it goes back- Only our demographic was. Yeah. Actually, that made me think of something. Let me interrupt this story, because I think it's really important. You're like, oh, is anyone gonna listen to our, like, no one's gonna listen to our Amazon episode, they already know it. And so this is something that like, and then it becomes the most successful-

• 48:02Speaker 01

  Are you gonna quote Ogilvy?

• 48:03David Senra?

  Yes.

• 48:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 48:05David Senra?

  100%.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  I've listened to enough founders to know.

• 48:07David Senra?

  Yeah, because it's like, this is so key that people don't understand. It's like, you're not advertising to Standing Army, you're advertising to Moving Parade. And so like, I will literally get on calls with like, media company founders that are like, selling ads or like, building companies. I'm like, oh yeah, you must have read Ogilvy. They're like, what? And I was like, these are not new lessons. Like, if, and again, this comes from the humility to realize, hey, Warren Buffett's smarter than me. So, if that dude in his shareholder letters is saying, uh, David Ogilvy's a genius, I'm like, wait a minute, this dude, how many businesses has Warren Buffett looked at at that point? How many founders and managers has he looked at and he's like, this dude's a genius? Yeah. This is not rocket science, guys. Just go and like, let's search David Ogilvy and Amazon. Five books? Good, order them all.

• 48:50David Senra?

  And these days, it's search David Ogilvy in your podcast player of choice, like- Um, that's, I went to-

• 48:55Speaker 01

  Wait, but explain the Standing Army versus-

• 48:58David Senra?

  So, you're not advertising to Standing Army, you're advertising to Moving Parade. But what happens is like, even when you put on the Sequoia episode, right? We went, me and David went on a hike in Stanford, and I was like, dude, you have this crazy back catalog. Every single day, you have more people following your podcast feed than you had the day before. I was like, and I, because I knew this, because I was a subscription podcast, right? Recount briefly your business model journey. So- I'll give you the shorter breakdown because like I went through so many of them. I just put a hard paywall, listen to the first 30 minutes. You want to listen to all of them, then you pay, right? And it

• 49:33Speaker 02

  This is when we had that chat that you were talking about.

• 49:35David Senra?

  We gotta go back to that.

• 49:36Speaker 02

  We were like, dude.

• 49:37David Senra?

  You're doing it wrong.

• 49:38Speaker 02

  You're doing it wrong.

• 49:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, because there's been times like this one where we're like, what the hell are you doing? But there's been other times where you come to us and you're like, do you know how good your Sequoia episodes were and like the fact that you have four times the audience that you have now? And none of the 75% of those people have ever heard the Sequoia episode? What are you doing?

• 49:53David Senra?

  And so you guys, we had this hike, this Ogilvy idea, remember? Not my idea. I don't like, everything has already been done, guys. Just speaking to the people listening, not you, you obviously know it's like, it's already been done. Just go see, hey, that person's smart. He learned from 40 year career. Like you're not gonna, the idea is not gonna pick up on idea you can use this silly. So I told David

• 50:12Speaker 02

  I was thinking about this.

• 50:15Speaker 02

  There are some cases where it's not true, but I think most truly like iconic world changing businesses and founders, they build, they stand on the shoulders of giants, but they have one or multiple things that is novel that they come up with.

• 50:31David Senra?

  It's the combination of these ideas, like Sam Walton taking Sol Price's ideas and his competitor's ideas and like, hey, what about, you guys are kind of ignoring these like 4,000 person communities. I'm pretty sure like the thesis behind Walmart is like, will they just drive for distances just to save money?

• 50:46Speaker 02

  Right.

• 50:46David Senra?

  The answer is yes.

• 50:48Speaker 02

  Right.

• 50:48David Senra?

  Five hours.

• 50:49Speaker 02

  Right. But that, like that isn't a novel idea.

• 50:52David Senra?

  Yeah, exactly. It's a very, it's, that's the whole thing.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  It's combining like one big novel idea with a bunch of other things that

• 50:59David Senra?

  You guys combined David Ogilvy's idea by republishing your Sequoia podcast. And then you text me, you're like, oh my God, like the downloads are crazy.

• 51:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:08David Senra?

  And because the vast majority, because you're not podcasting to a standing army, you're podcasting to a moving parade. And so I had known this because through my experimentation, I would take an old episode that I had done, do a preview, throw it up, and you'd get conversions every time because it was new to them. And that was like, so Ogilvy, I credit Ogilvy for that idea. That's an idea he got from Claude Hopkins and Albert Lasker, who were building advertising businesses 50 years before him.

• 51:33Speaker 01

  Is this scientific advertising?

• 51:35David Senra?

  Yes.

• 51:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. Also a good founder's episode.

• 51:37David Senra?

  Yeah, he's excellent. That, that, that, um, that book, Scientific Advertising, sold like eight or 10 million copies. They kept it in Albert Lasker, so Claude Hopkins worked for Albert Lasker. Albert Lasker thought that book was so good, he stored it in a vault. He wouldn't let, and he's like, he built.

• 51:54Speaker 01

  Because it was like the secrets of the industry, right? Like, don't publish this because we don't want this getting out.

• 51:58David Senra?

  I learned that because in Ogilvy in advertising, at the very end of the book, David's like, here, these are the six giants that I learned from. So I was like, okay, well, then I'm going to Google search. Who's, like, I'm going to read the book. This is not rocket science again. So then he's like, oh, Albert Lasker made more money than anybody, than anybody else in the history of the advertising business. I was like, hold up. What? How?

• 52:16Speaker 01

  Also, none of us know this guy's name.

• 52:18David Senra?

  Yeah. And so then, then you realize it's like, he says in the book, he's like, his estate outside of Chicago was so big, he had 40 full-time employees. I'm like, what? Like, what are you talking about? Like, make these words make sense in my mind. That doesn't make any sense to me. So you read Albert Lasker, and then he tells you about Claude Hopkins. He's like, yeah, the information was so good that like I stored that in my vault for 20 years. And then, once he sold his advertising, or I think he gave it away, like a token, like $100,000, you know, to the people working there. And then they released it, and Claude went off on his own and everything else. So, these are not like.

• 52:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. Okay, so you were doing the 30-minute hard cutoff when we.

• 52:53Speaker 01

  And so when it's so unsatisfying, it's like, I'm going to listen to 30 minutes of this episode, and then like, I'd have to get, someone's asking me to pay for the rest.

• 53:01Speaker 02

  Conversion, right?

• 53:01David Senra?

  The conversion rates were higher, but you guys said, this is where.

• 53:05Speaker 02

  You were at a local maximum.

• 53:06David Senra?

  This is where, like, you were very helpful, like, David, first of all, and you guys are nice, this is not the language you use. You're like, you idiot, like. But you guys are so nice. So it's like, dude, you're doing it wrong. Listen, for every one person, I think it was Ben that said this, like, for every one person that would buy a podcast, there's a thousand or a hundred that would listen to him for free, like, just.

• 53:24Speaker 01

  It's about 100.

• 53:25David Senra?

  Yeah, probably even more than that, you know? And so then you guys would show me, like, you open the kimono. You're like, this is, these are our downloads. This is who we advertise with. This is what we charge for advertising. You're just like.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  Well, the other, the other really key insight is, so after spending a bunch of time with originally Kimberly, then Glow, which Scott sold to Libsyn, and still what powers the acquired LP program, an interesting learning is most podcasts should generate about 50% of their revenue from direct monetization, some kind of membership program or paywalling their feed, and about half from advertising. And it should, the math should sort of work out where that's going to be the case. For the type of podcasts that we are, where you have lots of founders and CEOs and hedge fund managers and the sorts of people listening. You could never ask someone to pay you in membership what they are worth to the most valuable advertiser for that slot.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  And so the way it sort of works out is like you're massively hamstringing your monetization potential if you make it membership only because you'd have to be like, yes, please pay $2,000 to $5,000 a year in order to get access to this private thing versus if you were to take that same piece of content and open it up to advertisers.

• 54:36David Senra?

  You made the great, the good point earlier and we can elaborate on that, right? Why you're so psychotic about this sentence is needs to get out of here, like these two sentences, let's remove it because if you could factor in the average hourly rate of the people in your audience, it is unbelievable. So even I think if you make what a million dollars a year, and we know people obviously in our audiences make a lot more than that, but I think a million dollars a year is what 500 bucks an hour or something like that? I don't know the math, I'm not a good math person, but like, so you're asking if they listen to an hour long podcast of founders, like that's $500. Like you cannot waste these people's time. So I never answer your question when you're like, hey, how do you guys think about this? Do you re-edit or do you cut them out? I use the script as well. I actually think the way I listen to founders is obviously listening to it and listening and reading.

• 55:18David Senra?

  Like the super power of podcasts is you can listen to it when you're doing something else.

• 55:22Speaker 01

  But when you're editing.

• 55:23David Senra?

  But I think I'm going to put all my podcasts up on YouTube, not, I don't have any video, but I think I'm going to use the script. So if you, there is like, some people have success just putting up the audio on, like a static picture and you can listen to it on YouTube. But I also think I was like, well, if I'm going to do that, I might as well just have this and that's kind of cool if you want to use it, but don't have to.

• 55:41Speaker 01

  We did not find success doing that. Like this episode will be the first episode this year that's on YouTube because we basically said, if there's not interesting video, then it's not a video podcast and you can go find it in a podcast player.

• 55:50David Senra?

  I, it's, I'm using it just for search and I would use it. I'm never gonna, I don't think I'm ever going to do video anything because it's just like, it's so much simpler to do. Literally what I'm saying is like, I'm going to upload the MP3 to YouTube. Like, I'm not making a video just because it is, they're eventually gonna have, they're not stupid. They're eventually gonna have like the podcast player inside of YouTube. Like, they released this like 40-page document I read on their podcast goals on YouTube. Did I send it to you guys?

• 56:16Speaker 02

  No.

• 56:16David Senra?

  I'll send it to you guys. So, right now I have YouTube Premium, so you can listen to them in the background, like a podcast player.

• 56:21Speaker 02

  Which is great.

• 56:22David Senra?

  But they need to have podcast functionality, it's still like a video. So anyways, the way I do it is like, yes, I'm very aware that who's listening. I'm not ever gonna waste a lot of their time. And what I've found with the more practice I have for the podcast is I'm able to edit on the fly. Like, I don't have a script, right? So like, I'll go through the book, I highlight, then write down whatever pops in my mind. I don't like, just, first of all, the highlights, like, am I excited about that? Oh, that's interesting, highlight, just go off instinct, right? And then write down like something that, oh, that's like this, or that made me think of this, and I just write it down, right? Then I'll reread all these highlights the night before I record, so it's like the second time.

• 57:03Speaker 02

  You're doing this in physical books, right?

• 57:05David Senra?

  Physical books, yeah.

• 57:05Speaker 02

  But you're putting your notes into Readwise?

• 57:08David Senra?

  That happens after.

• 57:09Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 57:10David Senra?

  That happens after, so the fifth time, every single book I do, I think I read the highlights five times. And the fifth time is me actually taking pictures of the physical book and putting it in Readwise. So Jeff Bezos, I was thinking about this yesterday, because I'm also slightly obsessed with Jeff Bezos.

• 57:24Speaker 02

  You're slightly obsessed with a lot of founders.

• 57:27David Senra?

  That's why we were like, you're like, we're sitting in chairs, like, dude, I'm gonna be forward.

• 57:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, we were setting up the camera angles before.

• 57:34David Senra?

  Because you know what I love, like...

• 57:36Speaker 02

  We're like, we gotta move David's chair back here a little bit.

• 57:39David Senra?

  Do you ever, have you ever watched the old Jeff Bezos interviews? When he's like, first starting Amazon, he's like skinny and balding.

• 57:45Speaker 01

  The one that's like in that field outside the conference?

• 57:48David Senra?

  Yes, I think this is the one, he's like sitting, like, you see grasping him, I don't know if he's in a field. So, but he like leans forward, and he's like, we're gonna be the most customer-obsessed company ever.

• 57:56Speaker 02

  And he's got that look on his face.

• 57:58David Senra?

  That's how I am about founders, I'm like...

• 58:00Speaker 02

  You're like, that dude's a psycho.

• 58:02David Senra?

  But Jeff says something that he is. But Jeff says something in Invent and Wander, which is an excellent book. Because it's all of his shareholder letters and transcripts of his speeches.

• 58:10Speaker 02

  Walter Isaacson did that, right?

• 58:12David Senra?

  Yep. And all of his transcripts of his speeches. And he goes, "Do you really want to live in a world or to compete against somebody that's as good as you?" Like, I certainly wouldn't. That's what he states. And he's like, if you read his shareholder letters and listen to him talk, he's like, he's constantly looking for unfair advantages.

• 58:29Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 58:29David Senra?

  And I think part of the fact that I have now over 20,000 highlights from hundreds of books, and I still have like 50 or 60 or maybe 80 books I haven't put in there yet that are in my library. So it's like, that's, my Readwise account is an unfair advantage. Because anytime somebody's talking, it's like, I can immediately, "Oh, you said something?" I search for that term and it pulls up. And it's like, oh, and then I see my highlight and I see my note. It takes so long. Like, so long to do that, but it's worth the extra five or 10 hours a week.

• 58:55Speaker 02

  And that's integrated into your process of making.

• 58:57David Senra?

  Yes, because I'm reading something, "Hmm, I remember, no, I know I've seen this before. I can't remember it." Type in that term and it pulls up every single instant.

• 59:04Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 59:04David Senra?

  Instance of it.

• 59:05Speaker 02

  Take a brain outside your brain.

• 59:06David Senra?

  It's an unfair advantage that I have with me all the time. And what I'll do is, like, whenever I'm, like, waiting for an Uber today, right? Just pull up Readwise. And Readwise has the highlights feed. And I'll show you guys what it looks like. It looks a lot like a Twitter feed, right? Completely random. So I'm not choosing this. And instead of me reading Twitter all day, which is not a good use of your time, it's this highlight from The Dodge Brothers. I haven't read that book, you know, that was like episode, you know, probably in like the 115th. Billy Duran, who's the founder of GM. Sam Colt.

• 59:41Speaker 01

  And so are these ones that other people have liked a lot, so therefore?

• 59:44David Senra?

  No.

• 59:44Speaker 02

  It's just repopulating your own.

• 59:46David Senra?

  Yes. So it's my form of practice.

• 59:48Speaker 02

  So you've got, like, a healthy Twitter.

• 59:53Speaker 02

  There on your phone. So is that what like, how many times a day? Like, how often are you just pulling up Readwise and?

• 59:59David Senra?

  Almost every day. And if I'm not doing it on Readwise, I'll go to like my bookshelves. So what will happen is you can pull a book off my shelf. And I'm thinking about this for like my kids. Long after I'm gone, my kids can like, what was my dad into? You know, and they can go back and see, oh, and when he was 35 or 38, this is the podcast he made. Let me go find that book. And then they can pull off the shelf like, oh, this is the line. He thought was interesting. Oh, wow, you see dad's handwriting here. And like, so I use this for myself where I can pick up a book and quote unquote, read it, reread it in 30 minutes by rereading my highlights and notes. And now I'm like, it's back in, back like in front of mine. And then what happens is like, you can do this anytime. Like people are like, oh, I'm running late for lunch. Like, I'll just do this or I'll answer DMs or I'll, I always have stuff to do with me.

• 1:00:43David Senra?

  But I use it as a form of practice. The reason I said this is like, it sounds stupid. People think it's maybe, maybe they think it's silly. I don't know. But I read this book, it's episode 212 of Founders. It's called Michael Jordan and Life. It's a 600 page biography. And in that book.

• 1:00:55Speaker 02

  You just have like this encyclopedia knowledge too of the numbers of your episodes, which I'm so impressed by.

• 1:01:01David Senra?

  I don't, it's only because I reference that all the time. So when if you look up something over and over again.

• 1:01:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:06David Senra?

  It's repetition. Everything in life is repetition. Sam Walton's career is repetition. You know, like, it's like, I just think you're trying to, this is what I asked Charlie. Like, he, one of the most interesting things he said, he's like, one of the best things that ever happened to me is I got rich later in life. You know, like he saw the time and how difficult it was. Like, he was talking about like, imagine you being like a super famous or rich when you're like 21 or 25 and how disorienting. He's like, I was a full grown man, like with the life experience of the wife and kids.

• 1:01:34Speaker 02

  He had a child who died.

• 1:01:35David Senra?

  Yeah, I did not, I did not mention that. Yeah.

• 1:01:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:38David Senra?

  But like, he had all like, you know, full life of experience and therefore also. The main problem that happens is people don't know. They're like, "I was the son of a poor man. Now I'm rich and my kids live an unbelievable amount of wealth and privilege. How do I deal with that?" That comes up in the books for hundreds of years. The answer is, no one knows, right? And so with Charlie, though, the benefit is, he didn't have a famous last name or a lot of wealth. His kids were like grown.

• 1:02:03Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:02:03David Senra?

  They wouldn't have to deal with that when you're five or seven or 10. He also gave me some advice that was fascinating.

• 1:02:09Speaker 02

  You do that, like, you gotta pay that bill eventually, though. Like, his grandkids have to.

• 1:02:13David Senra?

  Well, so how do you deal with this, though, right? Like, he's a multi-billionaire. Like, that's an insane.

• 1:02:18Speaker 02

  Right, this is a five-generation problem. Not only is he a multi-billionaire, he's like, people like us talk for hours about him. He's like a celebrity.

• 1:02:25David Senra?

  So I just read this fantastic book. I like reading obscure books because, go back to what Jeff Bezos said, differentiation is survival. So like, I'll find like weird books. Like, me and Sam were in this weird, I was searching for books for you guys yesterday. I couldn't find any. I will order them and bring some to you because I always bring books. And I was really, we went to three different bookstores. I'm not kidding.

• 1:02:42Speaker 02

  You brought energy drinks instead.

• 1:02:44David Senra?

  But no, we literally, like, bless Sam and his patience with me. And like, drove me all around Menlo Park and Palo Alto yesterday going to bookstores. Like, I was literally looking for you guys.

• 1:02:53Speaker 02

  What a, what a drink. Like, you had specific books in mind.

• 1:02:55David Senra?

  No, no, no, I like going to used bookstores. And then like, I think of how I, my, my interpretation of you guys in my mind. And I, I just know if this book is good for that person. Like, the Charlie, or the Henry Flagler book, I knew that was good for Charlie Munger because of what he said. So I don't know what's gonna happen. Now, I do have two books picked out for you guys, which I'll send you, but they're not, they're like newer books. But anyways.

• 1:03:14Speaker 02

  But that sounds like a great day, driving around with Sam Pinky and going to bookstores. Like, what, what better day could you spend? Also, the peninsula is like beautiful, so like.

• 1:03:23David Senra?

  Yeah, and like, you know, Sam's unbelievably intelligent and like, she's got a weird alien brain. And so I always tell him, our mutual friend, Mitchell Baldrich, that all three of us know, says, uh, Sam has a giga-brain. I think he's, I think, I think it's.

• 1:03:36Speaker 02

  I've heard him say that before.

• 1:03:37David Senra?

  I think it's what he said, his description of it. But I like obscure books. I read this book that's very hard to find, it's like 300 bucks. It's called The Invisible Billionaire, Daniel Ludwig. Was the richest person in the world in the 80s and no one knew who he was. He paid a public relations firm to keep his name out of the papers, okay?

• 1:03:55Speaker 02

  Do what your competitors don't.

• 1:03:57David Senra?

  Yeah, so he's just like, I don't want to be known. And a lot of his was like, it's like shipping and oil and refining and mining and all that other stuff. But the author makes the point in the book, like, how different a million and a billion is. Going back to Charlie Munger, right? And he goes, a stack of, a million dollars and a stack of hundred dollar bills is like forty inches, you know? A billion dollars and a stack of hundred dollar bills would be tall, would be three times taller than the Empire State Building.

• 1:04:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:22David Senra?

  And so like, for us, like, oh, that guy's kind of rich. It's like, no, the billionaire and millionaires are not in the same category. It's so disorienting.

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  I, this is also a thing where like, the English language has done us a disservice by naming two things that are a thousand times different. Very similar words.

• 1:04:38David Senra?

  It sounds similar.

• 1:04:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, so they're not similar at all.

• 1:04:41David Senra?

  Well, a lot of people are asking, like, think about all the wealthy people that Charlie talks to. And they're asked, like, okay, what do I do with like this wealth with my kids? And it's like, you know, if you give your kids a bunch of money, is it going to demotivate them? And Charlie goes, of course it's going to. So he's like, but he's like, you know, it's like, again, like, this should be obvious to you. So he says, I don't try to steer his kids or his grandkids into what they should do for a living. Which is Charlie Munger's, one of his best pieces of advice that I took to heart. It's like, follow your natural drift.

• 1:05:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:10David Senra?

  Like, how I pick books. There's been like fifteen or twenty that I've read completely, or half, and it's like, I don't like this book, I'm not making an episode about it. I go to my bookshelf, and I have like probably eighty or a hundred books I haven't read yet. Most come from the audience. And I was like, what am I most excited to learn about now? And that's how I pick it, right? So following natural drift.

• 1:05:26Speaker 02

  Which is also more or less how we pick episodes, too. We have a little bit more planning, because now like there's such long lead times, but it's kind of like, what's interesting to us right now?

• 1:05:36David Senra?

  Hundred percent. So he's like, you know, don't try to steer them too much. And he's like, he definitely feels that some of them are going to be less motivated because they're born rich. But he said this was the most surprising thing. But he goes, you have to give them the money anyways, or they're going to hate you for it. And I was like, that's like, because my answer before this, I've read so many like, family dynasty stories, and I'm not saying I'm trying to build a dynasty.

• 1:05:59Speaker 02

  Well, they decide, we're not gonna give them money.

• 1:06:00David Senra?

  Oh, no, they did, and it ruined them. Like, did you guys, you guys haven't done an episode on TCI, John Malone.

• 1:06:07Speaker 01

  Not yet.

• 1:06:07David Senra?

  Cable Cowboy.

• 1:06:07Speaker 01

  That's like, that will happen this year.

• 1:06:10Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 1:06:10David Senra?

  So, you know why? That was one of the books that was recommended the most. They're like, you gotta do Cable Cowboy, you gotta do Cable Cowboy, you gotta do Cable Cowboy.

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  We both have read the book, it's awesome.

• 1:06:20David Senra?

  It's excellent. And there's, so you know the story I'm about to tell you, where the crazy thing is like, I'm always thinking about, I didn't understand this before, dedicating my life to studying history, right? Where it's like, oh wow, the decisions I'm making now can reverberate through the generations. That's a crazy thing, where Bob Magnus, which is the founder of TCI, this, you know, he doesn't have any monies, and rural Texas wants to do this, jump into this new industry, cable, right? Full of cowboys, like literal cowboys. And he doesn't have money, so his dad gives him a $2,500 loan. So, Bob takes that $2,500 loan, and then, let's say 40 years later, Bob dies, and he's gotta pass on his money, right? That was created from the company he created, to his two kids.

• 1:07:04David Senra?

  And he winds up giving them, I think, I don't know the numbers, I wanna say like 200 million each, two sons. So, think about that one decision, I think I talked about in the episode, and if I didn't, it's a big mess up on my part. And I stopped in that part of the book.

• 1:07:16Speaker 02

  I'm pretty sure you did.

• 1:07:17David Senra?

  I was like, hold on. Think about that, like, what if his dad didn't give him the 2,500?

• 1:07:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're talking about that.

• 1:07:23David Senra?

  Yeah, so his $2,500 turns into 400 million, let's say 200 million each for his grandsons. Changed his grandson's lives.

• 1:07:30Speaker 01

  Right, see, that means, rule of thumb, you take like, I don't know, you probably have three more generations after that, of wealth guaranteed.

• 1:07:36David Senra?

  That wealth is gone, because I think it went up their nose. Like, that was the, so you-

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  It's pretty hard in one generation to-

• 1:07:43David Senra?

  I don't know, like, the point was, is like, they, that wasn't good for them, because they were not motivated, they did a bunch of drugs, I think they went to jail, like, that kinda stuff. And you see that so much, so my thought was like, oh, like, get them a little bit, but not enough that they don't have to work, whatever, and Charlie's like, they're gonna hate ya.

• 1:08:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:01David Senra?

  And like, what's the point?

• 1:08:02Speaker 02

  That's such a good insight.

• 1:08:03David Senra?

  It's just like, human nature. This is my biggest takeaway from Charlie, and I think the biggest benefit that people that listen to Founders and Acquired, and then hopefully read a bunch of the books, and do studying on their own, are gonna realize, this is like, Charlie, I said it at the top of my notes, and this is the first thing, it's just like- It's comforting, the conversation with Charlie was comforting, the same way that people tell me listening to founders is comforting, is like Charlie has an almost complete indifference to problems. Troubles from time to time should be expected. This is inescapable, so why would you let it bother you? And the difference, and if you think about, that's the main takeaway from this three hour dinner I had with him, right? And if you think about, how does he avoid this? He avoids it by, great things have less problems. You're never going to escape problems, but if you're around great people, like they're not going to throw up,

• 1:08:48David Senra?

  just like a great business doesn't throw up big problem after big problem after big problem. Your wife, your kids, your friends, your coworkers. His whole thing is aim for the highest quality you can get. And then that's going to solve 99% of your problems. And then when you have the problem, the inevitable problems are still going to come. Okay, you just deal with it. He talked about like when he lost the money on Alibaba, he brought that up, you know, that people try to make fun of him for or whatever. It's like, you guys are missing the point, like you're not going to escape, get through life without making mistakes. The founder of IKEA has this great quote where he says, "Making mistakes is the privilege of the active. Only those asleep make no mistakes."

• 1:09:24Speaker 02

  It's a version of the man in the marina, man in the arena.

• 1:09:27David Senra?

  Yeah, the Teddy Roosevelt.

• 1:09:29Speaker 01

  So, okay, so what do you think is the ideal way to handle it if at 35, someone becomes very wealthy? And so when their kids' memory starts around age three, so for their entire kid's memorable lifetime, they've grown up in wealth and privilege, like how does one handle that?

• 1:09:46David Senra?

  I have no idea. I have no idea. Like I don't, the, me even giving you an answer to that is like, there's this guy named Charles Kettering or Kettering. I don't know how to pronounce his name. I read his biography, I think it's episode 127 or something like that. So he invented the electric starter, he founded AC Delco, that gets acquired by GM. He is the head of research and development at GM when GM is the most valuable company and most, like the cutting edge of technology company in the world at the time. There's a story from his wife and his daughter in that book, saying, hey, when he dies, there's only one, there's only going to be three words on his, on his tombstone. "I don't know." Because that's what he would say over and over and over again.

• 1:10:29David Senra?

  And one, there's a, he's having this conversation, same thing. He was the son of a poor man, he is now a rich man, his kids are rich. He's talking to other people that had the same experience, his peers, like, what do you do? And the answer that they came up with? I don't know.

• 1:10:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:43David Senra?

  Because it's so dependent on who the person is.

• 1:10:45Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:10:45David Senra?

  Maybe you give them money going to Bob Magnus's grandsons. Maybe they're, you know, they're like Warren Buffett's kids where like they, they run foundations and they want to give the money away and I don't think they're coke addicts. I don't know, but like you don't, it's just dependent on the person. So if there was a simple, if there was a correct answer, I think some of these guys, some of these guys and guys would have figured it out.

• 1:11:03Speaker 02

  Well, that's the thing about humans, right? Like every person is different.

• 1:11:06David Senra?

  Yeah. Yeah, so it's, I have no idea. Really, and that's the biggest thing where I think this is one of the lessons I learned from the podcast where, you know, you mentioned this at the beginning, Ben, where most of these people are just so, they're like best in class in this one dimension in the world. And of course, to get that, they had to, to be poor, they had to, they couldn't optimize all of the areas of the life at what they did for like their work, right? You know, Sam Walton is one of the rare guys where he gets to the end, he knows he's dying because he's got cancer all over his body when he's writing that book.

• 1:11:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:40David Senra?

  And he's like, listen, if I could do everything again, he's like, yeah, I missed some of my kids' childhood, they worked in the stores and he took them with him, but he's like, I'd do it again. I was like, I had to do this, I had to get after it, I had to improve. A lot of them, you know, get to the end of their life and like, oh, I regret. The founder of IKEA has the best words on this. He said, you know, I had three sons growing up. He started IKEA when he was like 17, worked on it until he was like 80 something. And he's like, I sacrificed my three sons' childhoods, I regret it. He goes, anybody that has kids knows that childhood does not allow itself to be reconquered. And so like, we were hanging out today, we were going to do a recording, go to dinner, and I was, my plan was I was, I want to see my son. He's like, and my daughter. It's like, I'm going to take the red eye. And then I realized like, yeah, but I want to spend time with David and Ben, so I'm leaving

• 1:12:24David Senra?

  early tomorrow morning, but it's like, I'm doing this as fast as possible. And if I had to, I'd like fly back and forth because like, your kids are, think about like the relationship you guys have with your parents, are they still alive?

• 1:12:34Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:12:34David Senra?

  Yep. Okay. So you get to talk to them, see them, but you have your whole life, right?

• 1:12:38Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:12:39David Senra?

  When your kids are small, there's like this tiny window when they're like two to five to six where you're everything to them.

• 1:12:45Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. You and I have talked about it, I absolutely feel this way.

• 1:12:48David Senra?

  Even my 10 year old daughter, like right now, she wants to spend time with me, like it was the cutest thing ever. I was leaving, going to LA to see Charlie and then coming up to San Francisco to see you guys. And she texts me, she goes, uh, I'm wearing your sweater. Cause like, it makes me feel close to you, like while you're gone, you know what I mean? But if you ask her, do you want to spend movie night with dad and mom? Or you want to go play Roblox with your friends?

• 1:13:11Speaker 02

  For sure the latter.

• 1:13:12David Senra?

  They're friends, and she loves me, don't get me wrong, but like, their friends are way, they're really important to them.

• 1:13:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:18David Senra?

  Where like, every day I miss, my son's about to turn three, it's like, I'm not gonna get back that day. And there's only like, a thousand of those days.

• 1:13:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:26David Senra?

  And my wife won't have any more kids, even though I was like, I want a bunch of kids. Like, what's that? I was like, I want a bunch, and she's like, no way, I say, hey, I don't have to get pregnant, so that's fine.

• 1:13:36Speaker 02

  Something that Buffett and Munger did with the Graham Group, that like, was way ahead of its time, that now anybody can do, is they formed their social networks outside of geographic barriers.

• 1:13:47David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:47Speaker 02

  And they found their like, most compatible, most like-minded, highest level of talent, you know, peers.

• 1:13:54David Senra?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:13:55Speaker 02

  And then they just like, got on planes and got to go see them. You know, and like, that was really hard to do back in the day. And now anybody can do it, it's kind of like the Bill Gurley, you know, you have no excuse not to do that.

• 1:14:04David Senra?

  You also, but here's the thing, what people get wrong, is they're like, oh, I want to meet this guy. You have to do the work necessary to make them worth your time, right? Which is like, the unfair advantage that the three people sitting in this room have, is that it doesn't matter. That's why, like, in the last six weeks, I've gone to lunch or dinner with multiple billionaires, it's like, and the people that like, you get to talk to, and also stuff, it's just like, this dude is crazy. He's read 300 biographies of entrepreneurs, there's no way I'm gonna have dinner with him and not pick up one idea.

• 1:14:30Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:14:30David Senra?

  Like, and then now I've built this machine where like, oh, that's an interesting idea, I'll just plug it into this business. And like, it's not a financial transaction by any means, but there's no, the reason, it's not that like, Charlie was the first person I met, that I was actually nervous about. And it's, the reason I'm not nervous is because I know I've done the work. Like, you can't put me in a room with anybody on the planet, and I'm not gonna be able to tell them at least one interesting thing. Doesn't mean I'll be the most, the best dinner they've ever had in their life, that's not what I'm saying. It's just like, they're gonna hear something that's like, oh, that's interesting, and that goes through their own brain. And it's only because I've spent six years, and same with you guys, it's like, oh, you should feel comfortable, like you guys mentioned earlier, it's like, Your audience feels like, you know, two football fields and like, oh, it's a little bit of like,

• 1:15:13David Senra?

  you didn't use the word insecurity, but like, you know, a little like nervousness, I want these people to like, like me.

• 1:15:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:18Speaker 02

  It's like a fear pushing you from behind.

• 1:15:20David Senra?

  But you know, like, you've most likely read, you're, you know more about the subject than they do.

• 1:15:26Speaker 01

  Sure, I do, but I need to make something worthy of their time.

• 1:15:29David Senra?

  Yes, that is admirable.

• 1:15:30Speaker 01

  It's like, who cares? I could spend all the time in the world and fail to synthesize the narrative and the takeaways, and all of a sudden then I've just, you know, then I failed them. Regardless of how much work I did, the product wasn't good. And so that's, that's the thing.

• 1:15:45David Senra?

  It's hard to not have the product be good because you did the work, I guess is my point.

• 1:15:49Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I think we now have a process that means that when you and I put in the work, the product is good. But it took a long time to, to arrive at that. It's almost like, you know, this is another Sam Hinkie thing. Trust the process.

• 1:16:09David Senra?

  Yep. The, I guess the point I was making there, though, is like, because you guys do so much preparation, and like, it's now your life's work, like, it's just so much, it's gonna be so hard not to add value to the people in your lives. Whether it's like, friends that never show up on a podcast, or friends that like, you don't have a business relationship with. It's like, and like, you're just gonna add value because what you do is so rare. Like, Naval Ravikant has this, he's influenced my thinking a lot, too. And he has this thing in, in the Amanac Naval by our friend Eric Jorgensen. And he's just like, if you read an hour a day, that puts you in the point 0001% of humans. And I'm like, that can't be true.

• 1:16:52Speaker 01

  No, that's the dirty secret of acquired and founders, is that people don't read books. So if you just read them, and then tell people what's in the books, you're gonna 100x the market for books.

• 1:17:02David Senra?

  And I couldn't believe that. I was having dinner with the same friend that was telling me, like, I told him, say, oh, I'll try to build a business around like, my reading. This is like, a couple of months ago. And he's like, you vastly overestimate how much people read. He goes, how much do you, how many books a year do you think the average person reads? I was like, I don't know, 12?

• 1:17:16Speaker 02

  It's like, point 5.

• 1:17:17David Senra?

  Zero.

• 1:17:18Speaker 01

  I remember asking a book publisher, and he said, America reads a book a year.

• 1:17:21David Senra?

  Well, he quoted some other study. I said 12. He's like... No, not 12. He's like, it's zero. They average is zero. Yeah. It's crazy. And yeah, to your point, I've become friends with a bunch of writers, some of them I met through the podcast. And they've been telling me, like, teaching me about the publishing industry and just breaking down. Like 98% of books ever published sell less than 5,000 copies. It's parallel everything.

• 1:17:47Speaker 01

  The book business is the venture business, which is so interesting to me how the advanced model works. It's like quite similar to a seed financing. I mean, they, they put out, you know, $50,000 for an advance on your book, which is, you know, covers your cost of living while you're writing it. And like, they kind of don't care about recouping it because.

• 1:18:06David Senra?

  No, it's even worse.

• 1:18:07Speaker 01

  The whole business is about, do I, did I sign up, you know, James Clear this year?

• 1:18:13David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:13Speaker 01

  And like, you know, when you have Michelle Obama on your hands and you have to pay for it, but you don't know when you have a James Clear on your hands.

• 1:18:19David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:19Speaker 01

  And when that becomes the book that America reads this year, you better make sure it's in your publishing house and not one of the other three big or four big, whatever it is, publishing houses.

• 1:18:28David Senra?

  Seed funding is better because their advances are recoupable.

• 1:18:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:18:32David Senra?

  So it's like, I was having this long conversation.

• 1:18:34Speaker 01

  It's the most preferred stock.

• 1:18:36David Senra?

  Yeah, we were, we were talking before.

• 1:18:37Speaker 01

  It's participating preferred.

• 1:18:38David Senra?

  We were talking before we started recording, I was like, man, Jimmy Sony would be great to do a sessions with just because he's got this historical knowledge of PayPal. PayPal being so important to like Silicon Valley history. And he, we were talking about this and he's like, no, like I have to pay that back through sales. I'm like, oh. Cause the thing is, going back to like, you guys listen to Gamecraft, Blake Robbins?

• 1:18:56Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Every episode.

• 1:18:58David Senra?

  Yep. So excellent, like unbelievably good. And what I loved about it is how they focused on the business model innovations and how one decision by some random group of programmers in the 1980s affected a business model decision 10 years later, whatever. And I was talking to Jimmy about this, I go, the books are fantastic. They, they're the best products in the world. You can, there's a great quote in Poor Charlie's Almanack, which says that there's ideas worth billions in a $30 history book. For Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett, that is literally true, right? And what I don't understand is like, you guys have such a high value product and you haven't innovated on the business model at all. Yeah. And so I was telling Jimmy, I was like, do you know the deal? Like, like you just, you think about this as like an entrepreneur. Like you're not a writer, you're an entrepreneur and your product just happens to be a book, but you can make money off that any kind of way you want. Like you can just get creative. I go.

• 1:19:44David Senra?

  People think it's crazy where I'm like, I'm trying to be the Jay-Z of podcasts. And people are like, what the hell is wrong with you? And I did like that. Have you done episodes on Jay-Z? That episode I did on Jay-Z's autography is one of my most popular. People listen to it two, three, four, five times. I love Jay-Z and I love you, so I can't believe I haven't listened to that. Jay-Z is, has the founder mentality and he had it since he was a kid. 100%. And you just see everything his whole career. And people look at him like, oh, like, this is another thing about intelligence manifests itself in vastly different ways. It's not always like credentialed, in many cases it's not, right? But like Jay-Z is a straight up genius if you listen to him and what he did. And he looked at, he's like, yeah, he says it from the get-go. He's like, I thought I told you characters, I'm not a rapper. He's like, I'm a businessman and rap just happens to be my product. And so I'm going to think about it like that. I go, Jimmy, you should do that. I go, why don't you just find a deal like Jimmy, like Jay-Z did with Samsung?

• 1:20:29David Senra?

  He's like, what are you talking about? Well, that's like true founders, entrepreneurs, whatever, you know, founders in your case, the title you want to put on them, they care about ownership. Like they own their work. And you realize that you could, the business model matters, which is why I brought up Gamecraft. So what Jay-Z did, this is years ago, this is his Magna Carta Holy Grail, probably came out 2013. So he goes, he goes, um, you know, I could, I record this, this, this album and then I could sell like normal, you know, stream it and then sell it for $10. You want the physical copy, et cetera, et cetera. He goes, he goes, what if I just want my money guaranteed? So he goes to Samsung and says, Samsung, you're launching this new app, uh, this new phone and you have your own app on it. I'm going to sell you, I will sell you a million copies, $5 each. You give me $5 million guaranteed from album. I'm still going to own it.

• 1:21:14David Senra?

  So he gets a streaming, right? He goes, and so what I'll do is like, you pay me $5 million, the first million people that get access to my album are going to be Samsung, they have whatever phone was coming out. You download it for free if you have this device. And so it's advertising to the Samsung and it's guaranteed money to him. I go, dude, you're writing about technology founders. It was like, there's these venture capital funds that have $80 billion of assets under management. It's just like, hey, will you pay me a million dollars to write this book? And then you say, hey, this book is now presented by whatever firm. This is why me and you have, us two have talked about this privately. You guys already know this was like, there's been like, something like 15 acquisition or investment offers for founders, I said no to every single one. A lot of them are like this, where it's like, oh, well, you have the attention of people that are valuable.

• 1:21:56David Senra?

  You just said, the worst thing that can happen to a venture firm is they miss the hit of that, so they have to expand, like, they have to make sure they catch that, right?

• 1:22:03Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:22:04David Senra?

  So it's like, hey, we'll pay for founders or whatever, give you X amount of money, pay you to do it, you do exactly what you do, the only difference is, essentially, they're trying to buy up our inventory forever. It's like, hey, founders is presented by X company, if you're gonna raise money, email here, you know? And the response I have when I get these pitches is like, if I did that, that means I'm not actually learning the lessons in the books.

• 1:22:25Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 1:22:25David Senra?

  Which is like, you never give up control. It's like, no.

• 1:22:28Speaker 01

  Ooh, that's interesting. Let's dive into like, a deal structure on that. So like, what if they weren't, what if you weren't giving up control, and what if you weren't giving up economics forever, you're just doing a period of time buyout of your, all your ad inventory?

• 1:22:43David Senra?

  This is the intelligent thing. This is what Tegus is doing with Invest Like the Best. And this is why, like, it's crazy to me, when I talk to people and they don't understand this. I had a conversation with a founder, and he's like, it's really weird, I'm not gonna say who it was, he's like, it's really weird that this company is running ads on that podcast every single episode forever. And I'm like, oh. And I go, oh, see.

• 1:23:05Speaker 02

  Standing, moving parade, not standing army.

• 1:23:07David Senra?

  I go, David Ogilvy ran the same exact ad in the same magazine for 30 years, and it was still effective.

• 1:23:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:23:14David Senra?

  And so I went, I was like, this is, I go, what do you think Coca-Cola's been doing for 100, this is not new ideas!

• 1:23:18Speaker 02

  Either Coca-Cola is really dumb, or...

• 1:23:20David Senra?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 1:23:22Speaker 02

  And I don't think they're dumb.

• 1:23:23Speaker 01

  Apple has the Prime billboard in every major city in America to advertise whatever the latest iPhone is.

• 1:23:29Speaker 02

  Forever.

• 1:23:30David Senra?

  Forever. So I talked to Michael Elnek, who's the co-founder of Tegus. And he's an, you got, oh yeah, we all knew each other.

• 1:23:37Speaker 02

  Great dude.

• 1:23:37David Senra?

  And we talked about this, like, and this is another example, because this somewhat affects our business, because when there's like, a decline in overall economics, like, ad markets usually shrink a little bit, and ad rates come down, and it's like, oh, you're doing exactly what investors do.

• 1:23:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:23:53David Senra?

  Like, what do Charlie and Buffett do when there's a crash? They don't deploy, deploy! You read Izzy Sharp's fantastic autobiography, the founder of Four Seasons, right? And he says this, he goes, he's building what didn't exist at the time, the only chain of five-star hotels at the time. And he says, I grow, and this is every founder does. It's Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Clay Frick. When they have recessions, that's when they grow. So what he would do is his competitors would pull back on advertising. He would spend more. And he says, he claims, I think in the book, he increases market share by like 25 or 28% using this over and over again because human nature is, oh crap, things are small and they cut. This is what Ogilvy said. Ogilvy's like, if you need advertising to sell your product, it's not a marketing expense. It's a production cost.

• 1:24:36David Senra?

  It's a, it's a, it's actual cost of manufacturing your product. And so what, what Teague's, Michael Elnik did that was such a genius move was first of all, he knew something was working, right? And he scaled up through podcast ads. And he knew it was effective. And then he's like, oh, okay. Well, like now you have this, the, all these people in the tech industry, their stocks creating, everybody's like running in the street. What does he do? He goes like, oh.

• 1:25:02Speaker 01

  There's probably available inventory.

• 1:25:03David Senra?

  And so he goes, hey, Colossus Network, I'd like to buy up every single ad inventory for 2023 on every single one of your shows. That's how you know that that likelihood that guy's going to win. Like, I don't know the details of his business. It's private and everything else. It's like, that's the right decision, the same decision. That's what Ogilvy would have done. That's what Buffett and Munger do when they put money in. Like, that is, that's what Coca-Cola does. It doesn't matter the economic climate. You ever get to see less Apple billboards? You can see less Coca-Cola? No.

• 1:25:32Speaker 02

  It's interesting to think about this in the venture business, right? Like, which obviously, as we record this here in mid-March, you know, 2023, there's a lot going on in the venture business.

• 1:25:44Speaker 01

  It's so dynamic right now that I feel like we don't know the last two iterations of what have happened because we've been recording and I haven't checked my phone. Like, that's how fast the world is moving right now.

• 1:25:54Speaker 02

  Things are happening very quickly as we speak. But I think a consequence of that, to your point about like you should advertise heavier during recessions, I think different, customer differentiation among venture firms is just declining rapidly, right? Like, like what is?

• 1:26:11Speaker 01

  Well, no, it was until interest rates went up, but now that.

• 1:26:17Speaker 02

  No, but even like, I think, I think, I think both the up and the down cycle is, both I think are commoditizing.

• 1:26:22Speaker 01

  I totally disagree with this. I think when, when commodity, when capital was a commodity and money was free, it was extremely hard to differentiate yourself as a venture firm or any financial firm. But like.

• 1:26:36Speaker 01

  It should be easier than ever to differentiate yourself because the thing-

• 1:26:41Speaker 02

  Okay, so how do you differentiate yourself right now?

• 1:26:44David Senra?

  You guys are doing it.

• 1:26:45Speaker 01

  You can, I mean, well, one of them, like, let's abstract away, like, speaking to the acquired audience as one of them, or as a gigantic means of differentiation-

• 1:26:54Speaker 02

  Well, let's just say you're XYZ average venture firm out there.

• 1:26:57Speaker 01

  Having money and writing the checks.

• 1:26:59Speaker 02

  Right, but, yes, having money, right, but like-

• 1:27:03Speaker 01

  A year from now, it's like, six to 12 months from now, that's gonna be differentiating.

• 1:27:07David Senra?

  So I have a thought on this. One, I don't know anything about venture investing. Two, I don't know anything about investing, period. Like, I get to talk to super smart investors, and I'm sure the questions are like, "Hold on, you had to find that for me," and I'm sure they're like, "This kid's an idiot."

• 1:27:20David Senra?

  But, when you guys were talking a little bit about, like, your business and, like, the venture game in general, is, I just think of, like, what, one of my favorite things that I heard Jeff Bezos say, is, you know, for years, people were like, "Hey, when are you gonna do physical retail? When are you gonna do physical retail? When are you gonna do physical retail?" And he said something that was crazy. He's like, "Physical retailing is an ancient business." And I love that term. He's like, "It's an ancient business, so I'm not gonna do it until I know, like, I can, it's so hard to improve on an ancient industry. It has to be completely differentiated." You mentioned, I heard you on one of your podcasts where you're like, you went to the Amazon Go store just as, like, pure curiosity. It's not like you needed something. And so, you guys have probably read that story too, where it's like, at one time, they were gonna

• 1:28:02David Senra?

  do, like, meat and, like, all this other stuff that you'd have to, like, talk to somebody. He's like, "No, you have to redo this. This doesn't make sense. The key, the differentiation here, is that you walk in, you walk out. Not walk in, talk to some guy, like, he's like, cutting salami for you. You gotta get that out of there." And so, I've had this thought, because I've read a bunch of biographies on investors too, and, like, investing is an ancient business. Like, and we're just doing it in different ways now. And so, I was like, well, if you wanted to invest, right, let's say you wanted to invest in private companies, which people have been doing forever, I always think of, like- Like, where did JP Morgan get his deal flow? And you know, like, you've read through the history. It's like, people think, "Oh, that was JP Morgan Bank."

• 1:28:46David Senra?

  Like, no, no, there's no retail bank. Like, you're not going in there. There's no ad, like, a sign on the doors. Like, here's JP Morgan Company. It was a relationship-based. It's like, you got in if you knew somebody, right? I read this biography that's incredible. I highly recommend people read it. It's episode 103 of Founders. It is "The Richest Woman in America," Hetty Green. I can't remember the subtitle.

• 1:29:05Speaker 01

  I love how he denies that he knows every number of every episode, and then busts out three more.

• 1:29:09David Senra?

  It's only because I, like, reference this all the time. So Hetty Green, right?

• 1:29:14Speaker 02

  It's only because you reference every episode all the time.

• 1:29:17David Senra?

  One day, it's just gonna be a recording of just all the episode numbers.

• 1:29:20Speaker 02

  You are an algorithm. You are your Readwise app.

• 1:29:24David Senra?

  That's how I get it. So, um, Hetty Green, though, was so wealthy that she bailed out the city of New York. Like, that book has unbelievable stories.

• 1:29:32Speaker 01

  What? I've never heard this person's name when they bailed out the city of New York?

• 1:29:35David Senra?

  Yes, her family. So, the richest, when she was alive, the richest, uh, city in the world per capita was, like, New Bedford, Massachusetts.

• 1:29:42Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, whaling.

• 1:29:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, whaling.

• 1:29:43David Senra?

  Bingo. So, her family made so much whaling. And the way they looked at the family fortune is, "I am a steward of this money. My job is to make it grow so that the next generation has more." And then, she's like the third generation of these whaling. And then, whaling, like, it died out, I think, the generation before her. So, they had to figure out how to make money. The technology stocks of her day, railroads. Like, she made a ton of money in railroads. And then, she'd buy land, uh, like, real estate in New York and everything else. But anyways, my point being, and I had this conversation with Patrick one day. I was like, "Think about it." Like, that was an ancient, investing's an ancient business. So, like, you wouldn't do what Hetty Green did. Like, where'd she get her deal from? Uh, people knew her. They knew she was wealthy. They knew that she was the first person to go to in financial panics.

• 1:30:28David Senra?

  They called financial panics what we call recessions and depressions now. And it was like, you know, every three years back then.

• 1:30:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:33David Senra?

  Um, and so, what she would do is she had a desk in Chemical Bank in Manhattan. So, the advantage there is geography. Physical location, you're at the center of finance in America. You need to be here. You build a reputation. So, literally, there are stories in the book where there'd be a line of people in financial crashes waiting for, at her desk. It's like, "Okay, I'll save you my railroad stocks, pennies on the dollar." Cornelius Vanderbilt did the same thing. She invested with him and a bunch of other people, right? And I was like, "But what would you do today?" Like you're an, you're, you want an edge. Everything we're talking about is like, you need an edge, right? You can't play, Ed Thorp has the great, the great quote in his book. He's like, I've been a money manager for 50 years. One thing I know is you, the sheerest way to get rich is only play games and make investments where you have an edge.

• 1:31:13Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:31:14David Senra?

  Right?

• 1:31:14Speaker 02

  Which is another way of saying, do something your competitors don't, aren't, or can't.

• 1:31:18David Senra?

  Or Edwin Land. So Edwin Land plays a huge role in my life. Founder of Polaroid, Steve Joe's hero, because he said, I have a personal model. It may not fit anybody else. Don't do anything someone else can do. And so I was like, okay, I don't think anybody else could do founders the way I do it. So I'm just going to do this, right? So my point being is like, how would you do it today? Well, you would, it would look very much like what I think you guys are building. And I'm not an investor, so I don't know anything about your, your world. But it's just like, I'd spend my time reading and learning about business history. Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett did that. Every single investor you guys have probably read about does that all the time. They read constantly, right? I would share what I know. That's going to build my network of other people. Those people are eventually going to sell me deals. Then I have this huge advantage that you couldn't even do 10 years ago, or 15 years ago. Cause there's no such thing as a podcast, right?

• 1:32:01David Senra?

  It's like, now I could record all the stuff I'm learning, right?

• 1:32:04Speaker 01

  Which we should say, like, there have been iterations of this. Like, this is how Union Square Ventures became Union Square Ventures. Our Foundry Group became Foundry Group.

• 1:32:12David Senra?

  Because blogging.

• 1:32:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. Blogging and then Brad and Jason writing the book on venture deals. I mean, it's like.

• 1:32:18David Senra?

  Venture Hacks with Naval and Rivi. I have two other examples. It's just like, it's not even venture. Like, what is the most successful content marketing of all time?

• 1:32:28Speaker 01

  Michelin?

• 1:32:29David Senra?

  No, Berkshire shareholders.

• 1:32:31Speaker 02

  No, totally, of course.

• 1:32:31David Senra?

  Berkshire shareholders, because this is how you know he's a genius. It is the greatest act of salesmanship because you never even see the sale happening. It's like, hey, and they spend, you know, you guys have probably done this research, how much time they spend on those letters. It's like half a year, seven, eight months for every letter. This is not like, oh, I just jot it down what I learned this year. And the crazy thing is like, he's.

• 1:32:51Speaker 02

  Old Uncle Warren.

• 1:32:52David Senra?

  How many people have, this is something Charlie taught, oh, so this is a great, great thing that, that this came up here.

• 1:32:58Speaker 02

  Did you talk about the letters with him?

• 1:32:59David Senra?

  No, I asked him about like. So I was explaining to him, I was like, Charlie, I'm literally in the middle of like, reading about you when you were like around my age. So every time I read a book, I'm like, okay, I first of all, I know what year they're born. So every time as I go through the books, I'm like, how old are they? And I write down, okay, he's 24 here, he's 30. I want to know what they were doing in and around my age. And so I was like, Charlie, I'm thinking about you guys. Like you just started, like your fun starts when you're like 41 or something like that. I don't remember what it was, right? And, um, and I was like, then like 50, like you start out, you're trying to figure things out. You could see them kind of figuring out, making the mistakes. You guys did an excellent job on your episode, like talking about what they learned from, getting to like, get away from the Ben Graham, like get to one, excellence. Great businesses are rare. We should be in there. And then just let time do all the work. And I was like, and now like, you guys put

• 1:33:43David Senra?

  up the greatest investment record the world's ever seen. It's like, are you surprised? He goes, of course. He's like, of course I'm surprised. Like, how could you not be? Like, we want to be successful and we were like, had, we were ambitious and driven, but there's no way you could say, hey, I'm going to be worth, what's Berkshire's market cap right now? I don't know. Like, 500 billion? Yeah, whatever it is. But he said, um, but the, the, the reason that popped in my mind, um, when like, when I was asking him, uh, like these, these questions, let me actually get the exact note, because I don't want to mess up, um, the way he said it, because his lines were just excellent. Um, and so he goes, he's surprised how successful him and Warren turned out, but how

• 1:34:26David Senra?

  could you not be surprised? And then he said something was fascinating. He goes, I think we get too much credit. And I was like, whoa, that's interesting. Like, why do you think that, Charlie? And he's like, uh, it's very, he goes, it's, he, I find it odd to be so wealthy and loved. That's not, these are not exact words. These are my interpretation of his words. Let me just be clear here. I find it so odd that to be wealthy and loved. That's not a usual human reaction. And then my note tied to why I think the Berkshire letters are the greatest content marketing of all time. He goes, and I go, I wonder if this is because they spent so much time teaching others. So what is, when you also acquired, you guys are teaching, right? Berkshire, I'm going to go to Paul Graham too. Berkshire, they're teaching, like, you could just not read a book and just read Berkshire's letters and you're going to get a fantastic education, right? And then in there is like, oh, by the way, we'd like to be the buyers of

• 1:35:11David Senra?

  choice. So if you happen, if you happen to know of this business, Like this business that you want to get your hands on, like, you know, and you care about it, and he does this excellent product differentiation, call me.

• 1:35:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:35:22David Senra?

  The greatest content marketer. What is, like, how much money do they make off of that? And obviously.

• 1:35:27Speaker 02

  And I think this is probably, I don't even know if it's on the list of things that they care about, but like, it's also marketing for their businesses, like.

• 1:35:34David Senra?

  Totally.

• 1:35:34Speaker 02

  I have GEICO car insurance because it's a Berkshire Hathaway company.

• 1:35:38David Senra?

  This is how we talk. I'm drinking.

• 1:35:39Speaker 01

  I feel an extra kinship for Brooks Running Shoes, for sure.

• 1:35:42Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I'm wearing Brooks right now.

• 1:35:43David Senra?

  Okay, so I.

• 1:35:44Speaker 02

  I'm wearing our running shoes.

• 1:35:45Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 1:35:46David Senra?

  I changed out. I was in a polo hoodie right before I came over. I watched a documentary on Ralph Lauren. I just did a podcast.

• 1:35:51Speaker 01

  I just listened to your episode.

• 1:35:52David Senra?

  Yeah, I think it's episode 288. I wonder if I'm right.

• 1:35:55Speaker 02

  There it is. There it is again.

• 1:35:56David Senra?

  Let's see if I'm right, though. Let's see if I'm right. I could be wrong. I could be full of crap. It's 288. Okay. So, but before that, I had watched a documentary on him, like, years ago, and I found out that he did the, I always go to Ben for the proper pronunciation. Like, we'll do the same podcast. I will, I say, like, Akio Morita. And then he's like, Akio Morita. I'm like, alright. I go with Ben. I go with Ben on that.

• 1:36:18Speaker 01

  You get the, I will give you the correct American pronunciation of something. And it's unclear if it's actually right or not.

• 1:36:23David Senra?

  So, he did the same thing that Akio did, you know, like, they were struggling in the early days of Sony. They get this huge order, like, we're gonna take 100,000 units or whatever it is, but take off Sony and put on our name. And Akio's like, we have no money.

• 1:36:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:36:35David Senra?

  But he refused to do that, because like, I'm not building your company, I'm building mine. I love that, like, that entrepreneurial, like, bullheaded tendency. Same thing with Ralph. Ralph was broke. Him and his wife are living in a house, an apartment with a train running over on top of them. They're sleeping on a mattress, and he's making ties. And Bloomingdale's like, well, take them. We love them. Take that name off, you're gonna be our house brand.

• 1:36:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:36:56David Senra?

  And he packs up his ties. He's like, I'm not here to build your brand, I'm here to build mine. Like, that, so, the.

• 1:37:02Speaker 01

  Which is funny, because later in life, like, he would make so much money on just licensing out his brand. He's like, I don't even make any of the products. I literally just license the brand.

• 1:37:10David Senra?

  Hearing that made me buy more polo clothes. Hearing your affinity for GEICO makes you buy GEICO. The advertisers you have and acquired, because they love you, your, your audience, if you, I know you guys vet them, and like, like, you have a ton of people that want to advertise that you don't let. It's like, your relation, that goodwill that you're building up, the goodwill that Buffett built up. Another, the second maybe most.

• 1:37:33Speaker 01

  And by the way, there's a litmus test for that. It's, does the acquired Brit, like, I want. To only work with sponsors that I want to so full-throatedly endorse that I feel the acquired brand gets stronger by working with them.

• 1:37:47David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:47Speaker 01

  And like, if you can actually just keep doing that durably, I think that is like an amazing way to build a brand. And, you know, we try, it doesn't always work, and sometimes we just don't sell ad slots because we're like, well, the bar's here.

• 1:38:02David Senra?

  Long-term. Like, okay, I miss a week on advertising. Doesn't matter, I'm doing this for... When we get on the phone, the first time we talk, "Do you guys love podcasting?" "I love podcasting." "You're gonna do it forever?" "We're gonna do it forever." We say the same shit. It's like, one week, you know, we could do this for another 40 years. So, the same thing, it's like, the same goodwill that you're talking about. It's why I'm drinking... I don't even drink energy drinks, right? But, like, the format for founders-

• 1:38:23Speaker 01

  You showed up with five Jaco goes.

• 1:38:25David Senra?

  This is, this is the only energy drink I found, and I only found it because I was driving home on Thanksgiving, and all the coffee shops are closed, and I heard Jaco's podcast, and I know he has this, and he says, he's in a wall was, and I was like, wait, there's a wall wall on the turnpike. I was like, I can just go there, like, they're there, and I bought them, and then I was wired for the whole drive home. I was like, oh, they work, man, this is fantastic. But the point there is like, it's not like when I went to the energy drink aisle, I was like, oh, maybe I'll do Rockstar or Monsters. Like, no, they didn't make a podcast that I love. Jaco made a podcast I love.

• 1:38:56Speaker 01

  You were not evaluating energy drinks at that point, and you're-

• 1:38:59David Senra?

  The format for our founders I got from Jaco. I found his podcast because he was on Tim Ferriss's. His podcast at the very beginning was just him reading books for an hour, hour and a half, saying, "Oh, I like this section."

• 1:39:08Speaker 01

  I didn't know that.

• 1:39:08David Senra?

  Yeah, and he does it for autobiographies for military people. I was like, oh, I should do this for autobiographies, for biographies of founders and everything else. So, it's a combination of ideas. The second best version, and you guys know this more than me because it's your world and I don't know anything, I had spent three weeks reading Paul Graham's essays. Paul Graham's essays changed my life, the reason-

• 1:39:28Speaker 01

  Also, content marketing-

• 1:39:29David Senra?

  Totally changed my life. So, we're gonna get there. The full- The reason to finally jump and dedicate my life to founders came, my wife was sleeping in bed next to me, I'm up late at night. I read Paul Graham's essay, "How to Do What You Love." I talk about this on

• 1:39:44Speaker 01

  Oh, it's such a good one.

• 1:39:45David Senra?

  Episode 275, 76, and 77, those are right, I know that for sure, are the three Paul Graham episodes I did. I talk about this snap, how he changed my, that episode changed my life, or that essay changed my life in 275. So then I'm, so I spent three weeks going through every single one of his essays. So something in his new essays, LAC, that they had before, he used to have this bright orange box at the top. It says, "Do you want to start a startup?"

• 1:40:09Speaker 01

  Oh, "Apply to Y Combinator."

• 1:40:10David Senra?

  "Apply to Y Combinator."

• 1:40:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:12David Senra?

  And so, I was like, think about, so, again, it's not like you went, I thought about this, like, what is the founder's version of Y Combinator? What is the acquired version of Y Combinator, right? You have to be very careful, like, who you partner with and what you're doing. So I was like, what is the orange box, right? It's not like you go to Paul Graham's and he's got like 10 banner ads. He's just like, no.

• 1:40:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, he worked for Yahoo, he knows that doesn't work.

• 1:40:34David Senra?

  Your attention is here. And it's like, he didn't know that starting Y Combinator. You can go back and read his essays about it, watch his interviews. He had no clue, just like Charlie told me, he's like, "No, I did not expect to build one of those valuable companies."

• 1:40:47Speaker 01

  It was called the Summer Founders Program, you know, it wasn't even...

• 1:40:49David Senra?

  That's the best thing about learning about the company and founder history. It's like, they didn't, there's no way when you could interview Sam Walton when he's, his shoes, the bottom of his shoes has watermelon and donkey crap. He's not gonna be like, "Hey, guys, I'm the richest man in the world."

• 1:41:04Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 1:41:04David Senra?

  And so, I love this idea of, hey, all of these discussions about the business benefit, all comes from, it's the byproduct of educating people, sharing people. That's why people love Charlie and Warren, why all three of us love them. How much have us three learned from them?

• 1:41:22Speaker 01

  Right, so much.

• 1:41:23David Senra?

  It's like, to the point where like-

• 1:41:24Speaker 01

  It's such a good point.

• 1:41:25David Senra?

  I wanted to cry when I met him.

• 1:41:26Speaker 01

  Because of their content marketing. I mean, it sounds trite, but like-

• 1:41:29David Senra?

  His lessons changed my life. They're gonna change the trajectory of my kids' lives.

• 1:41:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:34David Senra?

  Like, that is, and, you know, he probably hears that a million times a day, but it doesn't matter. It's like, I got a chance to tell him that. That's it.

• 1:41:40Speaker 01

  It is crazy, he educated America on investing while still managing to do it better than anyone else.

• 1:41:48David Senra?

  There were some funny things about that, too, where he says, like, you know, they get, he says something like, "Well, you know," they're completely, he says, "You both, in your episode, you talk about Snowball. Snowball has that quote from Buffett in there. He talks about, it's really important to have an inner scorecard or an outer scorecard. Inner scorecard is his dad. It's like, "I'm doing this because I know it's good." Outer scorecard is like, "I'm doing this. What are other people going to think about me?" Newsflash, no one's thinking about you. They think about themselves. So, outer scorecard people cannot have, like, it's almost really hard to have a happy life having an outer scorecard. I like Charlie's description of that better. He says, like, I think it was Andrew that asked him the question, maybe Chris, asked him questions, like, "Were you driven to succeed, like, to impress your dad or your mom?"

• 1:42:31David Senra?

  It was a great question. He goes, "No." He goes, "I had an inner clock." And I've always had, he goes, "I have an inner clock and I always had an inner clock. I did this because I wanted to do it." And like, that's, and he goes, and they're like, "Do you think Buffett's like that?" He goes, "Buffett has an inner clock, too."

• 1:42:43Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:42:44David Senra?

  And it's just like, this idea where they did it their way, regardless, they don't care what other people think. He said this about the fact that they keep some of their wholly-owned businesses and like, "Oh, the profits are less," or they kind of just let them run out, and like, they'll just keep the cash. And then people are like, "Oh, you should invest the cash." And he's just like, "No, because we're opportunists. We're individual opportunity-driven," is the line that he has about that.

• 1:43:09Speaker 01

  Right. You were going somewhere, David, earlier with the discussion of being a professional investor and how it's less differentiated than it's ever been before.

• 1:43:20Speaker 02

  Well, where I was going with it was, I bet, look at the reaction on Twitter and elsewhere, and I think in, you know, much of the country, to what's happened with the Silicon Valley Bank situation. Not that this is a current events podcast, but like...

• 1:43:38David Senra?

  It's also, by the time this comes out, gonna be two weeks.

• 1:43:40Speaker 02

  It's gonna be old news, right?

• 1:43:41David Senra?

  Hopefully, things will just be calm and settled down, and there'll be no more impending crises.

• 1:43:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 1:43:46David Senra?

  But another one's coming eventually, like, just like Charlie says, you're gonna have another unintended problem a year from now.

• 1:43:52Speaker 02

  Yep. I think you are right, Ben, that just having capital to invest will be differentiating going forward. However, I think the aggregate brand and reputation of the venture industry has taken a massive hit.

• 1:44:04David Senra?

  Totally.

• 1:44:04Speaker 02

  Massive hit over the last... Several years.

• 1:44:08Speaker 01

  And you're not holding up SVB.

• 1:44:09Speaker 02

  And it just keeps going down.

• 1:44:10Speaker 01

  SVB is revealing to how other people think of Silicon Valley.

• 1:44:15Speaker 02

  What I'm specifically referring to is VCs' behavior and reactions on Twitter over the past week, but that's just emblematic of the direction things have been going for years now. And part of it's related to tech in general, but I think there's a specific like,

• 1:44:33Speaker 02

  maybe hatred is strong, but brand decline of the venture capital industry.

• 1:44:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree with that. Tie it to differentiation among venture firms.

• 1:44:43Speaker 02

  So yes, while as the market goes down, having capital will be differentiating and like the number of participants will go down in the industry and whatnot. But how do you stand out in this market as like, if in aggregate, your industry is thought less of and people don't want to work with you?

• 1:45:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:45:03Speaker 02

  How do you turn that tide?

• 1:45:05Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah. If the next Sam Walton has the opportunity to raise venture capital dollars and he's like, you know what, I think I would rather just figure it out another way and not build in that ecosystem.

• 1:45:16Speaker 02

  I think there are a lot of people out there right now who want to start businesses. They're like, I'm not going to raise venture capital because F that and I don't need to. And it was a lie that I needed to.

• 1:45:29David Senra?

  Right. Can I tell you from the founder's perspective? Cause I talked to a ton of founders.

• 1:45:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:32David Senra?

  I'm going to go down, I think, hopefully, we'll see, talking to more founders than any non VC, right? I get offers all the time like, hey, you want to invest in my company? I've said no to all of them. Like just because I'm just, I was like, dude, I'm focused on founders. Like I don't care about anything with my podcast. And so we have these conversations and it's just like, what VCs don't understand is like, how much founders hate them.

• 1:45:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:45:55David Senra?

  They like, they hate them and it's not they hate the good ones. They love the good ones. Right? Like, I'm not going to say some of the brands that I've turned about, they're like, oh no. Like we've raised money from a bunch of people. They're good. They don't mess with us. But if we ask a question or we need something, they jump on it, you know? And the problem is, it's not like, it's a natural distribution of any industry. Like, there's going to be crappy founders and great founders. There's going to be crappy investors and great investors. And so I really think it ties back to the principle that Buffett and Munger built their business on. It's like only associating themselves with the best people and the best companies. And that solves so much other problems. So, yeah, my issue is like, there's a lot of VCs in my audience too. And they're nice people, don't get me wrong, right?

• 1:46:38David Senra?

  Some of them I've talked to, it was just like, "Who gave you money to invest? Like, what is going on here?" But what I don't like is like, the best ones, like, this is what I like about Patrick, right? If you talk to the people that Patrick has invested in, he doesn't like, "Here's a list of 10 things I took 2 minutes to think about." He's asking questions. He does exactly what he does on his show. He asks questions. Yep. And if you need something, like, "I'll do whatever I can," because he's got a good network and help. No, but he's certainly not, he's like, "If I have to tell the founder what to do, then why did I invest in it?" Like, that doesn't make any sense. So what happens is like, I'll get these emails, like, "I love your show, etc., etc." He was like, "10 ideas for you." And it's just like, you read them, it's like, "You hired like an assistant or a researcher, or maybe you wrote this yourself. You thought about this for 30 minutes." I think about this all day, every day.

• 1:47:22David Senra?

  I've thought about this every day for years, man. Like, that's not helpful. Like, what are you doing? Like, you're just making, I have a lower opinion of you because like, this is a dumb idea. And the only way about that is like, do you know who Bryce Roberts is? Yeah. Okay, so, he has, this is, again, I've never raised venture capital, I've never made a venture capital investment, but I talked to a ton of founders, and he has the greatest description. He's like, "What is the product that founders are buying from VCs?" It's not money, because everybody's got money. Like, that's a, like- Well, you used to have money. Or, yeah, I guess, but still, like, there's- In aggregate, though, like, there's still a lot of people that have money. There's still going to be investments made in markets. Compared to venture in the 70s, yes. He said two words: improved odds. That is the best, from a founder's perspective, that is the best description.

• 1:48:07David Senra?

  It's like, if I take investment from you as opposed to this other guy over here, this other girl over there, like, who is going to be founders, all they care about is, can you help my company succeed? Is it more likely that my company succeeds? I'm dedicating my life to this, man. This is not a game. Like, can you make my company succeed? And sometimes you can do the money, sometimes you can do the network. There's other people sitting right across from me that could probably help with distribution. That is actually a value add. Like, that is the difference. Like, if I was going to be a venture capitalist, and God knows I would not be, right? I would just start a podcast. And then I would do it for, and I would do it for six years, and I would get really valuable. And then, my inbox is full of people. I don't have deal flow. This is what Patrick is doing. Yeah, it comes inbound. I have a friend, Chris, Chris Powers.

• 1:48:49David Senra?

  He syndicates real estate investment. You know, rich people like to invest in real estate. There's all these tax benefits. And he's got, he says, David, even with like, and this guy's done like, I think, he's got either a billion or $2 billion of industrial class real estate under management, you know? And he's like, even, he's like, David, I just was interviewing and doing my podcast. Again, same thing, educational, interviewing people operating in the real estate industry and interviewing founders. And just doing it because he liked to do it, he wanted to talk to the sort of people, happened to press record, put it out there, never really promoted it, you know, got, he's like, even with my small audience. He goes, I've raised, he goes, it changes the dynamic from, hey, I'm Chris, I'm setting an outbound. Hey, I'm Chris, this is what I do. This is like, can we talk? Can we set up a meeting to, oh, Chris, love your podcast.

• 1:49:34David Senra?

  How can I get $5 million in your fund? It reverses it. Because, you know, they're like, oh, they get to know you as a person. This is what I don't like also. It shortcuts the relationship. But it, you just said, it's a relationship, right? Which I think there's too much of this like, calendar, like Tetris, that, no offense, that venture capitalists play. Because they try to do it with me, where our founders do this too, where they're like, hey, love your show, love to get to talk to you, can we talk? And I reply back, yeah, let's set something up. Then I get like, then they're like, I'm like routed to the assistant? And then it's like, oh, you know. How about six weeks from now, on, you know, Thursday? You know, Joe Smo has 30 minutes, three weeks from now. And I've done this like, once or twice, and now my response is. That's no way to build a relationship. Here's my phone number.

• 1:50:18David Senra?

  Just text or call me when you're free. I'm not a 30-minute block in your calendar. And dude, we have, the inbound that Allstree get, it's like, I'm already almost hitting a limit to how many deep relationships I can build. So I'd rather, instead of talking to a million people, I'm not a fester. Instead of talking to a million people for 15 minutes, I'd rather talk to five or 10 people over and over and over and over again. That's what Charlie and-

• 1:50:38Speaker 02

  You and I have talked a lot about this. And like, you've rubbed off on me a lot on this. Like, I have changed my mindset and my daily behavior hugely because of our conversations.

• 1:50:48David Senra?

  Charlie and Warren. It's like, they build relationships. They found people they like, admired, and trust. They repeat like, admire, and trust over and over again in the letters and their talks. And then they just did business with them forever.

• 1:50:58Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:50:58David Senra?

  It's not this wide but shallow. And that's where you get the bad behavior. And anybody that's high-quality can see through it and it's not going to work with you. And you're only going to succeed, like you guys, if your business is Powerball, you're only going to succeed if you get the very best ones.

• 1:51:11Speaker 02

  It's interesting, though, like, the, man, just like so much in life, like Warren and Charlie, really, like, they're just so often right. And if you think about, like, if you buy the premise that the aggregate opinion of the venture capital industry has declined a lot-

• 1:51:28David Senra?

  It's meaningfully worse, yeah.

• 1:51:29Speaker 02

  -and will may continue to decline, whether it does or doesn't. It's meaningfully worse than it used to be. What have Warren and Charlie done? And to your point about the best content marketing ever, what is what they do? It's a combination of a hedge fund and a private equity firm. What is the aggregate opinion, public opinion of hedge funds-

• 1:51:45David Senra?

  Right.

• 1:51:45Speaker 02

  -managers and private equity firms over the last 50 years? Nothing but down. What is the aggregate opinion of Berkshire? Nothing but up, you know? It's amazing.

• 1:51:54David Senra?

  This is one advantage that I have, the fact that I'm not an investor. So I don't have to keep up on, like, to some degree, venture capitalists have to, like, know what's going on, right? And I close myself off. Like, I was having dinner with Sam and his wife, and they were asking, like, his wife was asking me, like, hey, do you know about this person? Oh, no. Do you know about this? And Sam's like, he's got a very limited, like- He said, I say, he's like, you can ask about like books, but this dude's not watching TV. He's not doing any other stuff, right?

• 1:52:18Speaker 02

  We keep him in a, you know, hut out back.

• 1:52:22David Senra?

  And the, and the good thing about that, though, is somebody actually, um, so essentially the way I use like Twitter or any social media is like, I put out little snippets from my podcast.

• 1:52:31Speaker 02

  You put out a lot on Twitter.

• 1:52:33David Senra?

  In text, though, for him, right?

• 1:52:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. Which has been really working for you.

• 1:52:37David Senra?

  I was like, I'm gonna read something that has a million, over a million views in 24 hours. Because everything's going on and because I just had dinner with Charlie. So I'm gonna read this and then I'll go back to.

• 1:52:45Speaker 02

  This is an amazing tweet, by the way.

• 1:52:47David Senra?

  So I go, Charlie Munger tells a story about human nature. Now, I didn't put this because of the bank run. Like, I was just thinking, I was like, oh, this is, I was rereading my highlights.

• 1:52:55Speaker 02

  You didn't post this, like, with regards to the bank run?

• 1:52:58David Senra?

  No, no. I remember I reread my highlights every day.

• 1:53:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:53:01David Senra?

  And so when I reread my highlights, what my Twitter is, is like, when I reread highlights, like, oh, that's a good one. I just put it on Twitter.

• 1:53:05Speaker 02

  Oh, my God, then you had, like, just the greatest timing in history.

• 1:53:08David Senra?

  Yeah, exactly. Well, like, it wasn't intentionally, I knew it was going on, but it never said, oh, let me, I need an SVB tweet. Like, I don't have any money in SVB, like, whatever. So it goes, Charlie Munger tells a story about human nature. And then this is all Charlie speaking. One of my favorite stories is about the little boy in Texas. The teacher asked the class, if there are nine sheep in a pen and one jumps out, how many are left? And everybody got the answer right, meaning eight, right? Except this little boy who said, none of them are left. And the teacher said, you don't understand arithmetic. And the little boy said, no, teacher, you don't understand sheep. And so.

• 1:53:40Speaker 02

  So effing good. How, okay, you were in the room with Charlie for several hours. How did, like, in natural conversation, are they just pulling out these, like, parables and these fables, like, you know?

• 1:53:52David Senra?

  Let me, I'm gonna ask that question. The best response to this tweet, I didn't even, I missed it myself. He goes, was the child Charlie himself? And I'm like, oh, my God, that's exactly what he would have done. He would have been the kid.

• 1:54:05Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 1:54:05David Senra?

  He would have been the kid. So the reason I think it's so powerful, like the storytelling ability you guys have, how I try to break down things to aphorisms. You ask like, why is this guy on my phone? Right? I only think in stories. I think people only learn through stories and then one-liners. Right? That's why, why is Charlie, David Ogilvy? That idea, it's like, he says it in a creative way.

• 1:54:24Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:54:24David Senra?

  And you remember for Charlie Munger says, hey, if you don't learn probability, you're gonna go through life with a, as a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.

• 1:54:30Speaker 02

  So good.

• 1:54:31David Senra?

  So you laugh and then you think about it.

• 1:54:33Speaker 02

  I know.

• 1:54:33David Senra?

  Oh, what is it? Oh, like, I'm gonna get my ass kicked. Like, so that's the way, um, this is here because it's Ernest Shackleton. His family motto was by endurance we conquer. So we're in the podcast business. You know, people are like, you can't do podcasts. There's like 2 million of them. It's like, dude, there's like 70 or 80% of them that have quit.

• 1:54:50Speaker 01

  98%.

• 1:54:51David Senra?

  In the business podcast right now. Me and Patrick were just talking about this. I just saw him in person in Miami and we were talking and I showed him this. It's like, dude, for podcasts like me and Patrick's and yours,

• 1:55:04David Senra?

  business categorize in business, have at least 10 episodes and I think release at least once a week. You guys, I think, are release schedules less than that, right? Two weeks?

• 1:55:12Speaker 01

  Every two or three.

• 1:55:13David Senra?

  So those three categories is like.

• 1:55:15Speaker 02

  But in terms of minutes of content per week, we're the same as everybody else.

• 1:55:19David Senra?

  But like, that was one thing, like they release once a week, right?

• 1:55:24David Senra?

  18,000. And the business category is the second most popular podcast, like the second most populated podcast category.

• 1:55:31Speaker 01

  Behind.

• 1:55:31David Senra?

  And I go.

• 1:55:32Speaker 01

  Do you know the first?

• 1:55:32David Senra?

  Spirituality.

• 1:55:33Speaker 01

  Faith.

• 1:55:33David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:34Speaker 02

  Oh, true crime has fallen off then.

• 1:55:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:37David Senra?

  No, so this is, I'm gonna start, so there's a thing about that where I heard somebody said, they're like, founders is like church for entrepreneurs. And I might start dropping podcasts on Sunday and. No, no, I'm not kidding. And if I do video, I swear to God, I went and looked. I looked at pulpits. I was like, I'm not gonna get.

• 1:55:57Speaker 02

  Come on.

• 1:55:58David Senra?

  I swear to God. I swear to God.

• 1:55:59Speaker 02

  You went crucifix shopping.

• 1:56:01David Senra?

  I'm not gonna get a desk. Like, think about, I, my mom was like fundamentalist Christian and stuff. And like, I had to go to church my whole life. And it's just like, this is pretty crazy. Like, like, not in a bad way. I don't mean that the majority. It was like, they're learning from the same book every week, over and over again. The stories you could tell are limitless. It's one book. I could do the same thing. I have access to all the books in the world. Like, I can do that. So I do think there's an element of.

• 1:56:23Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 1:56:24Speaker 01

  Five years from now, people are gonna be like, this is the moment where David started the cult.

• 1:56:29David Senra?

  It's right here on video.

• 1:56:32David Senra?

  We're documenting. Cults are the best businesses, though.

• 1:56:34Speaker 01

  100%.

• 1:56:35David Senra?

  If you listen to my episode In-N-Out, episode 244. Oh, yeah. There's no way I got that right, by the way.

• 1:56:40Speaker 01

  Oh, now we gotta know.

• 1:56:41David Senra?

  I did that.

• 1:56:43Speaker 01

  You keep talking. I'll look up if you got this right.

• 1:56:44David Senra?

  I did that episode because...

• 1:56:50David Senra?

  It's 244.

• 1:56:51Speaker 01

  Of course. Is it? Oh, my God.

• 1:56:54David Senra?

  I read that book because the best businesses in the world are cults. That's what Trader Joe's, he wrote his autobiography, he said that. Trader Joe's was a cult for the overeducated and underpaid.

• 1:57:02Speaker 01

  Right. And it's not to say that, like, cults are amazing businesses. That's not what you're saying. You're saying the very best businesses.

• 1:57:09David Senra?

  Are cheerful. Develop a cult. In-N-Out calls them, they use this terminology in their business. Cheerful cult. It's a positive cult. I'm not talking about Jonestown. Let's get together and freaking drink mass suicide. No, no, I'm talking things that, hopefully you're building a product that's good for the world.

• 1:57:23Speaker 01

  We had Gary Tan on back in the day, and he was talking about Palantir at the very beginning. And he was like, oh, Palantir was a cult. That's why it worked.

• 1:57:30David Senra?

  Well, this idea also influenced me is Zero to One, Peter Thiel's book. It's like, you know, he says that, it's like the best businesses, like startups look like cults.

• 1:57:39Speaker 01

  You have to inspire emotion in people. Otherwise, it's like, you can't stand out in the world. And you certainly can't have repeat behavior and in a sea of choices for someone to keep choosing you over and over and over again. Just like, it's like how founders have to be weird. Like, nothing interesting was created by ordinary people.

• 1:57:57David Senra?

  But I have to be intentional about this. I'm glad you said, oh, this is where we get in on camera and on recording that David is sort of as cults. It's like, podcast, no, I go crazy. Like, people start talking about me, a bunch of them say, David's too obsessive podcast.

• 1:58:13David Senra?

  And I'm like, I'm glad they say that because, like, even now. You're like, thank you. That's a compliment. No, it's like, I see an opportunity that other people don't, which is the same thing in the book. So I think podcasts in general are just fun to make, and I'm obsessed with it. But they're also going to be wonderful businesses because they're prone to be cheerful cults. And how do you know that you have a cult? You just Google and see if the people have tattooed themselves with the brand. How many people are walking around with a Joe Rogan's face on his tattoo? Or a Joe Rogan face tattoo on their skin? A ton of them, right?

• 1:58:41Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:58:42David Senra?

  Yes. Uh, how many people have tattoos of the Apple, Apple logo?

• 1:58:46Speaker 01

  There's an insane number with Mario. We learned this in the Nintendo research.

• 1:58:50David Senra?

  Mario, Tesla, In-N-Out, there's a ton of... Dude, I like... Cheeseburgers are my favorite meal. I'm not tattooing an In-N-Out logo on my arm, dude. You take another level. And you see this over and over and over again. And so when I analyze businesses, I'm not just doing this, like... It's not a game to me. I was like, oh, can I use these ideas in building my business? And like, Warren Buffett says the greatest thing, and this is, I think, speaks to why you guys are so like, "Hey, we know how big our audience is and we're gonna take this seriously." Seriously, Warren goes, "A brand is a promise." That's the best description of a brand. It's just like... I talked about the fact that I stayed in this hotel brand, I'm not gonna say what it is. In Austin, I loved it. I stayed in Santa Monica, I loved it. I found out they had one in San Francisco. I didn't check the reviews.

• 1:59:32Speaker 01

  You came here and they broke their promise.

• 1:59:33Speaker 02

  I told you to stay with us.

• 1:59:34David Senra?

  Yes, and that's the biggest thing. A brand was a promise. I know this is gonna be excellent. The hotel's fine, it is in like... It's in the Tenderloin. It's like...

• 1:59:44Speaker 02

  Not a place you wanna stay.

• 1:59:45David Senra?

  No, I... Like, if I wasn't traveling alone, there's no way I'd let my wife...

• 1:59:48Speaker 02

  This is the major misconception about San Francisco. Many people who don't live here think that it's, you know, an absolute hellhole and wasteland. A specific part of it is, but like, there are other... And unfortunately, that part is mostly where the hotels are.

• 2:00:04David Senra?

  Yeah, which is not good for the city. Cause I'm like, I'm not ever staying... I'm staying with you, or I'd stay in, uh... Like, I'd stay out in Silicon Valley. Like, I've stayed at the Rosewood, which is really nice.

• 2:00:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, that is not the Tenderloin.

• 2:00:15Speaker 01

  The most expensive hotel, which is like, good.

• 2:00:17David Senra?

  I didn't pay for it, so...

• 2:00:18Speaker 01

  No one ever does. That's the whole business model.

• 2:00:21David Senra?

  I didn't know how much it was. It was really nice, though. Thank you. I gotta thank that person. Yeah, so, like, again, I don't mean it in like a... But I am very intentional of like, "Hey, I'm not gonna break my promise." "I want you to know," and you guys do the same thing. It's like, if I press play on an acquired episode... This is why I like, um, Dan Carlin, is, you know, I read one book an episode. He reads like 30. He only does two a year, or one in a...

• 2:00:43Speaker 02

  Maybe one a year.

• 2:00:44David Senra?

  But like, I know there's no way I'm gonna press play.

• 2:00:46Speaker 02

  It's gonna be good.

• 2:00:47David Senra?

  And he didn't do the work necessary.

• 2:00:49Speaker 02

  That's what we feel. We all feel. I mean, you... In our own ways, we all definitely feel that about what we're doing.

• 2:00:55Speaker 01

  Can I get some feedback? Like, how can we make acquired better? Or have you ever had moments where you paused an episode and were like, "Oh, I want to talk to Ben and David about this right now because I have some feedback."

• 2:01:06Speaker 02

  No. You probably just texted us if you did.

• 2:01:09David Senra?

  No, but first of all...

• 2:01:12Speaker 01

  Or the model, not necessarily just the content, but like...

• 2:01:15David Senra?

  No, what you guys said on your Benchmark Dinner episode, I think, was like, you know, there's a few podcasters, I was having this conversation with Sam yesterday, there's a few podcasters that like, they know what they're doing. And they know by what their position in the market is, like how they're thinking about it, and I'm not going to say who, but you guys hit it. What makes you special? It's the Edwin Land thing. Don't do anything somebody else can do. Right? Where you said, like, your marquee thing is these super... Blake made the funny, Blake Robbins said the funny thing on Twitter I saw. I loved it. He's like, "Only a choir could say, 'All right, let's bring this home,' and so an hour and a half left." That's your brand. People know it.

• 2:01:52Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 2:01:52David Senra?

  Yeah. And I think what you're doing here with the sessions is a way to also, it's like, you can't increase the amount of episodes that you can do because they take so much work to do. But you also have a way to surface all this information that you guys have that's valuable to other people in different formats.

• 2:02:07Speaker 02

  We were talking about this a little bit before, which I hate saying, we were talking about this before we were recording. Why didn't we just record? But you were also thinking about potentially doing something similar.

• 2:02:20David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:21Speaker 02

  And there's like...

• 2:02:22David Senra?

  Not now, but years from now.

• 2:02:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. But for the core episodes, we spend so much time preparing. But then for stuff like this, we don't prepare at all because our whole career is preparing.

• 2:02:35Speaker 01

  Does this make sense? What is the right number and format of sessions? Because this is the second session. We're still figuring sessions out. In your dream world, as an acquired listener, what do sessions look like?

• 2:02:50David Senra?

  I mean, your sessions should be, replace your interviews. Anything that's a non-acquired, like, long deep time, just make them a session. There's enough people interviewing... Founders and investors.

• 2:02:58Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 2:02:58David Senra?

  But we need more conversations. So if I ever did, people are like, if you ever do an interview show, I was like, first of all, I wouldn't do an interview show. Because like, interview is a skill. It looks easy. Like, I always tell, I tell Patrick, Patrick, you're world-class at this, dude. Like, you have, you wield.

• 2:03:12Speaker 02

  He's done it every week and now twice a week for eight, nine years.

• 2:03:16David Senra?

  And he's just, it's for, I like to read, he likes to ask questions, so therefore our formats match the personality, right?

• 2:03:21Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:03:21David Senra?

  And so what I tell him is like, I've been on the other side of it. It's like, you can tell, it's not, he doesn't have a list of questions in front of him, because you can tell, his good question just came off a response of what, like, a lot of people like, and it's fine, but like, the Tyler Cowen thing, where he just like, he has his questions, and you just said something interesting, he's not gonna follow up, and he's gonna go on the next question.

• 2:03:39Speaker 01

  It feels very odd, because you're like, are you guys not having a conversation?

• 2:03:43David Senra?

  No, they're not.

• 2:03:43Speaker 01

  There's, that guy like, left you an opening, and how did you not take that opening?

• 2:03:47David Senra?

  They're not, but Tyler, you have to do, let's tie this to Jay-Z and J. Cole, and to answer a question also about like, I'm glad you guys are so much nicer, where you're like, do you have any feedback? Because like, I can't stand feedback. We're like, not in the sense of, like, I told you, I text you guys this one time, where like, one guy was like, hey, I don't like that you reference, like, the superpower of the show is that I tie, it's not like, the episode on Ralph Lauren is gonna tell you how Ralph thinks like Andrew Carnegie, and Rockefeller, and Bezos, and it's like.

• 2:04:15Speaker 02

  You literally know all your episode numbers by heart.

• 2:04:17David Senra?

  And like, so, to me, it's just one large conversation on history of, on history of greatest entrepreneurs. That's, that's how it is. To me, it just happens to be separated. And so this, I text you, and this guy's like, um, could you save that for at the end, and just do it like, as carve out like acquired? And I was like, go listen to acquired! No, I'm not going to.

• 2:04:33Speaker 01

  I have a singular vision for how this is gonna go, and that's why I own and control and operate the entire thing.

• 2:04:40David Senra?

  It's even further than that. It's like, I'm not putting on a show. Like, there's a lot, I loved Anthony Bourdain when he was alive, I read his books, he had a huge influence on me, like, anytime I traveled to a place that he went to, I'd go and watch it.

• 2:04:52Speaker 02

  Have you done an episode on him?

• 2:04:53David Senra?

  Yeah, 219. There's no way that's right, there's no way.

• 2:04:56Speaker 01

  Keep going.

• 2:04:57David Senra?

  There's no way that's right.

• 2:04:57Speaker 01

  Fact-checkers.

• 2:04:58David Senra?

  Uh, it's called, uh, the Oral Biography. It's, that format should be done more, where his assistant, um, had interviewed, his assistant and friend had interviewed a bunch of people that actually knew Tony and were there in his last days. And then she used, organized that interview into, uh, this biography called, uh, Bourdain, the Definitive Oral Biography, I think. And, is it 219?

• 2:05:20Speaker 01

  It's 219.

• 2:05:22David Senra?

  And so, um, and so like, where was I going with that? That I went on a digression, but, oh, so there's a line in the book that I love. It says, "The line between Tony and the show is nonexistent."

• 2:05:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:05:32David Senra?

  Right? That's why people like, I hear a lot of people talk about podcasting. It's like, oh, you don't actually know what the superpower of podcasting is. Right? Where it's like, to me, podcast, one of the superpowers of podcasting is it's authenticity scaled. Right? If, when I meet with founders, I listen to founders, and we have a three hour dinner, they all, they all say the same thing. They're like, this is like a three hour episode of Founders.

• 2:05:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:05:51David Senra?

  It's like the same person there.

• 2:05:53Speaker 01

  Well, and I think that that is a thing that, that you did really well, and we sort of accidentally did well, but I realized over time, uh, why that makes both of the things we've built as durable as they are. A lot of people play characters on the internet and... Which in other mediums is... Plays really well. Is an easy trap to fall into. And like, it's a way to catapult growth. If you adopt a polarizing character, you can get a bunch of followers. There's, there's like, there's a lot of dividends that pay to it, but it's exhausting to maintain over time, and it has a conflict where when people meet you in real life, they're like, oh, weird. And, and so like, when you actually are just yourself, it's gonna probably grow more

• 2:06:36Speaker 01

  slowly because I'm not like, as polarizing, like, it would be horrifying to live as a, a polarizing character that you play on the internet in real life also. And so, you have this more like, slow, organic growth path. But like, it is, there is this cool byproduct now where like, I sit down with someone and they're like, yep, exactly the same as I expected.

• 2:06:58David Senra?

  This is why I said, have Blake Robbins on here, because he gave me the dynamic, that spectrum that he talks about. Blake is a super smart person in general, but he's like, the way you think about this is there's a spectrum. This is not my idea, this is Blake's spectrum. Because on one end of the spectrum, he's like, how much do people, time do people spend with you? Right? He's like, on one end of the spectrum, you have these like, 30 second TikTokers that dance, right? And then all the way on the other end of the spectrum, as you move down, they spend more time with you. All the way down to the spectrum, you have the Twitch streamers, right? Which he helped incubate, um, 100 Thieves, 40 Thieves, 100 Thieves, where they're spending like, 40 hours or 50 hours a week with you, right?

• 2:07:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:07:33David Senra?

  He goes, David, you're like, one, you're not, they don't spend 40 hours with you, but you're one...

• 2:07:38Speaker 01

  One click.

• 2:07:39David Senra?

  One click to the left.

• 2:07:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:40David Senra?

  And they're gonna wind up spending... 10, 20, 100, 200 hours with you. And you keep moving down and like, let's say you do 10 minute YouTube videos, you know? It's like, the deeper you go down there, it's why when, I think the guy's name is Nate Shot. When like, 100 Thieves has a new product and he announces it, you'll see a line down the block. Cause hundreds of thousands of people have spent all their time with them. And so it's like, oh, Nate Shot has something, so I'll come down here. And you see this over and over again. And then Blake says, you could have like a TikTok that has, TikToker that has like 10 million followers, yet they can't even get 3,000 people to show up somewhere.

• 2:08:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:08:14David Senra?

  And so I think that is like the way to think about it.

• 2:08:16Speaker 01

  So that's algorithmic throttling too. TikTok, it is almost a zero signal if somebody follows you.

• 2:08:22David Senra?

  It's all views.

• 2:08:23Speaker 01

  It doesn't, it doesn't actually matter. Or YouTube, it's like, oh, they subscribe to your channel? Like, maybe that'll come up in one of the top eight videos that shows up at the top of the screen of like what they should watch next, but like, maybe not.

• 2:08:34David Senra?

  So my point in all that is if they're spending a lot of time with you, and I love, this is my flip of what Charlie Munger says, that you need to learn the big ideas in the main domains, like physics, psychology, because they carry the most freight. I flipped that to time carries the most weight. As long as what we're doing, you said, we're not playing characters. We are passionately interested in this. We're not going to quit. Then we do this over a long period of time. You'll get what you deserve. You'll get the audience you deserve. You'll get the business opportunities and everything else. It's like, time carries the most weight. I know I'm not going to quit. You're going to have to pry the microphone from my cold dead hand. And I'm just going to let the chips fall where they are. And that doesn't mean I'm like lollygagging here. Like, I'm on it seven days a week. I'm going to try to work myself in a position.

• 2:09:16David Senra?

  So it's something I learned from, from Steve Jobs when he came back to Apple, right? And he's like, people hear that, that, that speech he gives, which is fantastic. He's like, we're in shorts. And he's like, and it's like, I don't even know if he's in the polo, the turtleneck yet. But he mentions like what they're going to do. And everybody focused on the fact that he's like, we're going to, you know, there's no sex in the products anymore. And we're going to do the four quadrant thing. A lot of people in the technology industry particularly know that speech and like, yeah, let's, let's cut the fat and like, put all of our A players, fire the B and C players, put all of our A players in these four products that we're going to make, right?

• 2:09:48Speaker 01

  Mobile or desktop, laptop, high end.

• 2:09:52David Senra?

  Yep. Consumer and pro for both laptop and desktop. Those are the four categories, right? They missed what he said earlier, when he talks about Nike. He's just like, marketing. He's like, Apple sucks at marketing. We have to be a great marketing company. And so he said something where I read the quote and then my reinterpretation of this, right? And people don't know that. It's in Ken's, no, it's in this book called insanely simple. I think that guy's name is Ken Segal. And he's like, he was an ad guy at a company for Apple. And he's like. TWBA Chiat Day. It was the ad agency. So he goes, and every Wednesday. Actions express priority. So there's another maxim, right? He's like, I don't care what people say, I care like what they do. So when people ask me, like first people that you talk to the founders like, hey, like, what would you do about this? I never answer is like, well, David Sandler would do this.

• 2:10:37David Senra?

  I'd say, hey, well, Charlie Munger would tell you this, or Steve Jobs would do this, or like, hey, I heard a story about here. Cause like, my opinion is useless. It's you know, my opinion on business building and how I build my business. Doesn't matter what I say. It's like, what is he, how's he approaching founders? Like, why is he making these decisions? That's the important part, right? And so Steve showed you, told you that marketing was important to his actions. Cause every Wednesday at like three o'clock, or I forgot the time, they had like a three hour meeting. He would approve, have to approve every single piece of advertising and marketing that went out for Apple. There's not a billboard in Kentucky that went out without him saying, yes, it's going to go out. Right? And so in that speech, when you actually listen to what he's saying, he's like, listen, I feel that the products we're making in Apple make people's lives better. I want, he says this line, he goes, I want everybody in the world to own an Apple device.

• 2:11:21David Senra?

  We know that it's not going to happen because it's so expensive. But he goes, and to do that, we have to get really good at marketing. So my interpretation of that on the podcast, what I said is like, if you feel your product can improve people's lives, I think you guys already know, because you get thousands of messages, just like I do, that yes, listening to acquire, listening to founders will improve people's lives and work. Right? Then you have a moral obligation to get good at marketing. Well, that, all that means is not get good at marketing so our ad rates are going to go up, or that we can be celebrities during that. It's no, so these, this, these messages for all these of history's greatest entrepreneurs that are dead, that they don't, these ideas don't die with them. And then therefore acquired founders can gather these ideas and push them down the generations. So that's why I mean, it's like, I'm not dilly-dallying.

• 2:12:06David Senra?

  Yes, I'm going to let time carry all the weight, but I'm going to do everything I can so more people at least know. And if you try founders say, oh, this sucks or whatever, whatever, I'm cool with that. But I just want you to have the opportunity to know it exists. And me and you have had these, also we've had these conversations where it's like, guys, I'm telling you right now, I've said this to you, there's millions of people that would benefit from listening to acquire, they just don't know it exists yet. So we got to come up and find ways to make sure that people know it exists because they will love it and it will make their lives better.

• 2:12:33Speaker 02

  Amen. I think there's also, this may be an area, I'm curious what you think about this, where our shows and approaches are a little different. I'm also curious what you Ben think about this. A lot of these stories are just incredible stories, too, that are just like worth, I think, worth telling just for the sake of the story.

• 2:12:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's interesting how sometimes I'm like, I'm not sure that we came up with a lesson that I would advise a founder to follow, but I know this was very entertaining and as true as we possibly can make it.

• 2:13:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:13:13Speaker 01

  And so, like, I think-

• 2:13:14David Senra?

  Every single episode I've listened to, there's lessons in there that I-

• 2:13:17Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, no, I'm not saying there's not lessons, of course there are. But like, sometimes we'll do an episode, like, I always feel this way about the most recent episode, but we just finished making the Nintendo episode, and I was like, can I, like, if you put the best fiction writers in the world-

• 2:13:31Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 2:13:31Speaker 02

  -together, and you said, "Come up with the best, like, corporate-ish story that you could imagine," you couldn't write something this good.

• 2:13:39Speaker 01

  I guess the thing I was referring to is a little bit the survivorship bias, where, like, someone did something that I would not recommend anyone do, and it still worked, but it made for a great story. It's like Morris Chang in TSMC. It's like, he invented the notion of a fabless semiconductor company before there was any demand for that. And then it turned out that his timing was exactly right, that like, within a couple of years, a whole ton of, you know, fabless companies spun up and wanted to use his foundry. But like, he created a solution in search of a problem. And like, no founder should do that, but my god, did he pull a rabbit out of a hat. There's a good number of acquired episodes where I'm like, we should be crisper, I think,

• 2:14:19Speaker 01

  about pointing out where like, I don't, this was inadvisable, but amazing that it worked.

• 2:14:25David Senra?

  I think that goes back to the game tape analysis, where we talked about Kobe Bryant, Jordan did this too, where it's like, I read this like 600-page biography of Kobe, and in the biography, they interview his high school girlfriend. And they're like, "What was it like to date Kobe Bryant in high school?"

• 2:14:41Speaker 02

  I'm surprised he had a girlfriend in high school, right?

• 2:14:43David Senra?

  Well, not for very long. It's like, "What's it like to date Kobe Bryant in high school?" She's like, "Well, our dates consisted of me going to his house and watching tapes of Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson." It's just like, we're not leaving, I'm not taking you out to dinner, like, we're literally gonna watch this thing. And so, I think the game tape analysis of that is just like, it is helpful to realize that a lot of this stuff, it's impossible to plan in advance. It's the, one of the great, I mean, Steve Jobs has a ton of great quotes, one of the best ones is like, he's like, the commencement, it's impossible, you're only gonna connect the dots looking backwards. So you have to put something, faith in something, you can call it karma, religion, God, intuition, but you have to do something. I just did

• 2:15:25David Senra?

  a, reread Ray Kroc's autobiography, the guy from McDonald's. Again, and it hit me, yeah, I've been thinking about the Steve Jobs quote too, and this is why it's so invaluable to reread your past highlights.

• 2:15:36Speaker 02

  You mentioned this in the McDonald's episode.

• 2:15:38David Senra?

  If you think about this, like, he's a perfect illustration of what Steve observed 50 years after Ray dies, for god's sake. He's just like, he goes from selling paper cups, paper cups leads into selling multi-mixers, which are like, make milkshakes. Multi-mixers goes, like, why the hell are you have eight, why does these McDonald brothers out in San Bernardino have eight of my machines? Like, people, he'd have a hard time selling one. That goes to the franchise system, which he didn't even do well, then he meets Harry Sombra, and then Harry Sombra's like, dummy, you don't even know the business you're in, you're not gonna, he's like, you don't build an empire off a 1.4% cut of a 15 cent hamburger. You build an empire by owning the land upon which that hamburger is cooked. Those five things. There's no, he's selling, he's sold.

• 2:16:17Speaker 02

  From paper cups to real estate.

• 2:16:18David Senra?

  He sold paper cups for 17 years. But he just like, hey, I have to go with my gut, to the point where he got divorced over this. His wife was like, you can't do this, Harry, and he's like, you have to trust my instincts.

• 2:16:29Speaker 02

  That's one thing, to what Ben said way back in the beginning of the conversation, that you're really good at highlighting Ray Kroc, like, he was a terrible person.

• 2:16:38David Senra?

  And he didn't try to hide it. Most people in autobiographies are trying to hide it. He's literally like, thank you very much, June Martino, my first employee, for missing every single one of your kids' birthdays. You're gonna get some stock at McDonald's, it's gonna get you rich, but 20 years later, I'm gonna fire you.

• 2:16:57David Senra?

  And he didn't, you didn't have to put that story in there. He put the, he chose to put that. That's crazy dude. I said on the podcast, I was like, listen, it's interesting, like, I'm glad he persisted. Interesting ideas for business, but like, not only do I would never want to do business with this guy. I wouldn't even want to be his friend. Yeah. Like, I wouldn't want to do business with Steve Jobs, but I want to be his friend. Yeah, oh yeah, he'd be a very interesting person to be friends with.

• 2:17:18Speaker 01

  I feel like the opposite.

• 2:17:20David Senra?

  What's that?

• 2:17:20Speaker 01

  Like, I'd want to do business with Steve because you could create incredible things together, but I'm not sure you'd want to be friends.

• 2:17:27David Senra?

  I think the difference is from like a founder's perspective, like, there is no working with Steve Jobs. It's working for. You hear the stories of how even treated like his subcontractor, or not, like the owners of the companies that contracted, it's like, these guys are empire builders. Like, they're literally building worlds. They're not used to being like, they're... Charlie was talking about this, because you know, he loves like, Lee Lu. The new guy, the BYD guy, Duwan, I don't know his name, something like that. Those guys, he loves Lee Kuan Yew from Singapore. Yep. And what you realize is like, it's like, these are founder types, but can't be... Like, founders are benevolent dictators, or in some cases, they're dictators of their own company.

• 2:18:11David Senra?

  And like, some people call Lee Kuan Yew, you know, a dictator, it's like, oh, like, can't do that in America, even if that would be beneficial. But, um, all of them, there's no working with them. They're like, they're gonna be in complete control of the situation, like, even being in the room with them. Like, they're, I'm not saying they'd be rude or mean, but like, you're a subordinate to them. Because everything is, Ray Kroc, everything is, he says in the book, perfection's difficult, I'm demanding perfection at McDonald's, I will constantly keep expanding this empire till I die, if you get in my way, I will run you over. He's like, he says in the movie, he's like, if my competitor was drowning, I'd walk over and put a hose in his mouth. And he goes, and he was, on the other end of the call, it was McDonald Brothers, because they're fighting over this, and he goes, would you do the same?

• 2:18:56David Senra?

  And the state of thing is, it's like, you're gonna have to compete on my level, or else I will literally destroy you. Yep. What, so...

• 2:19:05Speaker 02

  Warren and Charlie are so interesting, right? I'm trying to decide if they are the complete opposite of that, or if they actually are like that, just in their own ways.

• 2:19:15David Senra?

  Every single person has some kind of like their public persona is for that level, right? It's not like a podcast where they're gonna listen to Joe Rogan for 1,600 episodes. Like, you know who Joe is, you can't hide. He's doing three hour shows, three days a week for 15 years. You have probably a good idea who he is. You see flashes of like, you know, imperfection, like we all have. I don't think you just, you don't get to that level without having, he's got sharp, they all got sharp elbows. Like, you ever heard, read stories about how Warren negotiates? It's like, 1250 bid. What about 14? 1250 bid. What about 13? 1250 bid.

• 2:19:49Speaker 01

  Well, it's because he's already, he's spent 10 years analyzing your business, and he knows exactly the price that he's gonna buy it for. And so now, he's telling you the price he's gonna buy it for.

• 2:19:57David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:58Speaker 01

  This wasn't like a new consideration that popped up. And he's like, oh, look at this, a business. It's like, no, at the scale he's operating at, like, he knows all the businesses. Yeah.

• 2:20:07David Senra?

  And this is from Jim Clayton's autobiography, where he buys Clayton Homes.

• 2:20:12Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:20:13David Senra?

  And he even said, like, he wanted to sell Buffett, he idolized Buffett. And he talks about like, he wasn't insulting him by any means, but he's like, Warren wants the microphone. And if you're in an area where Warren doesn't have the microphone, he is not interested. And I've heard that about Warren a lot, you know? It's just like, they're world builders. Like, he runs everything. You think you're gonna go from being poor to having $200 billion and not distort your perception of the world?

• 2:20:36Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:20:37David Senra?

  It's impossible.

• 2:20:39Speaker 01

  Say more about Warren wanting the microphone. What does that mean?

• 2:20:42David Senra?

  Like, literally in person. Like, they would do, I think they were doing, Jim Clayton was at either like an event to talk to the employees, or whatever the case was. Like, he, like, Jim wanted to have input. And he's like, Warren would not allow it. Like, he monopolized this. And I've heard that about Warren. Like, same thing, where like, you're gonna-

• 2:20:58Speaker 02

  There's gotta be an element of him that, you know, loves the shareholder meetings.

• 2:21:03David Senra?

  Oh.

• 2:21:03Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 2:21:03Speaker 01

  Well, he didn't need to do that.

• 2:21:05Speaker 02

  He didn't need to do that.

• 2:21:05Speaker 01

  He created an event around how he loves it.

• 2:21:07Speaker 02

  He loves having a billion people come.

• 2:21:09David Senra?

  Yeah, you know how he loves it, because he's still doing it.

• 2:21:11Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 2:21:12David Senra?

  Like, he doesn't have to do anything in the world that he doesn't want to do.

• 2:21:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:21:16David Senra?

  And that's how you know he loves it. Like, they're beyond, I told you, we talked about earlier how like- Just how disorienting must be to like have, and I would love to know this feeling, don't get me wrong, like have a $200 billion net worth. It's like you're living life on like god mode.

• 2:21:30Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:21:32David Senra?

  It's insane. Like I was watching this video. I don't know if it's true, but it's like Jeff Bezos's private jet has its own private jet.

• 2:21:38Speaker 01

  Well, his new yacht has a chase yacht.

• 2:21:41David Senra?

  Yeah, so his yacht has a yacht.

• 2:21:42Speaker 01

  I think it's like a guest yacht. Like I think it's so that, I mean, he now owns the biggest yacht in the world and there's a yacht that will sail behind it.

• 2:21:49Speaker 02

  I would say this may be, I don't know, maybe we'll become so successful someday that I will regret my words on this, but I gotta imagine having a yacht is actually not like additive to your life.

• 2:22:01Speaker 01

  Oh, so this stuff on Ralph Lauren thing. Yeah, so I'm, I think it was Ralph Lauren, sold his yacht and it's now a charter yacht because he was like, this thing was more work than any of the businesses I've ever run.

• 2:22:14David Senra?

  One of the most interesting ideas I've heard, and it comes from our mutual friend Jeremy, who I think we mentioned earlier in the podcast, hopefully we did, give him credit. I actually had, was talking to him and David Perrell. And I'm pretty sure Jeremy said this, not David, but

• 2:22:30David Senra?

  he's like, I would actually make the argument, because everybody's like, oh, like, what does Charlie talk about, call the Berkshire Jet, the indefensible?

• 2:22:36Speaker 02

  The indefensible, yeah, yeah, right, right.

• 2:22:38Speaker 01

  And then wasn't there a second one, the indefensible two? Before they bought net jets and now it's like, we should be on net.

• 2:22:43David Senra?

  So you look, you look at, you look at like those, like how could you possibly spend, like, you know, these yachts cost $25,000 an hour to operate and fuel or some crazy number that planes are the same, like, you know, how expensive they are. And Jeremy makes the point, Jeremy knows because he's been buying businesses forever and he's exposed to like great wealth, people, you know, unbelievable amount of wealth. He goes, he makes the argument that they're actually underpriced assets. And I was like, ooh, tell me more. He's like.

• 2:23:08Speaker 02

  That's not what I would expect to hear.

• 2:23:10David Senra?

  Yeah, so I'm going to tell you this book that just proved his point. I actually got a text him to tell him this. So he's like, they use it not for, it's, you know, like yachting, sitting there sunbathing, right? He's like, they're using it for like customers and potential. And so I had heard this, I'll tell you about how this relates to Invisible Billionaire. So I had heard this, because again, I've never raised money. I don't pay attention to the venture industry. I don't know anything about it. I just have a bunch of founder friends and founders tell founders everything. And so I'll have these discussions where they're like, they describe the courting process that they get from some of these well-known, super famous people. And it's like, Well, the process you just described to me sounds like an old, rich dude that wants to sleep with a young woman. What would you do, right?

• 2:23:53Speaker 02

  We actually didn't put it in the episode, but there's a bunch of this in Nintendo history. Because Warner Brothers bought Atari, and so Warner Brothers was running Atari as Nintendo was kind of like...

• 2:24:04Speaker 01

  And this is how they courted Nolan.

• 2:24:06Speaker 02

  That's how they courted, yeah. So that's how Warner Brothers courted Atari and Nolan, and then how they tried to court Nintendo, was the private jets, the... What was it? It was Clint Eastwood?

• 2:24:16Speaker 01

  They put Clint Eastwood on the private jet with Atari flying coast to coast.

• 2:24:19David Senra?

  So what did I tell you? History doesn't repeat, human nature does. These founder dudes are running technology companies now, and they're like, "Yeah, oh yeah, I'm not gonna name who." They're like, "Oh yeah, he picked us up in Manhattan in his private helicopter, and we landed at his Hampton estate." Do you think he got the deal? He got the deal. This guy said, "Hey, what are you doing? It's Friday night. What are you doing Saturday morning? Okay, come on my private jet. I'm gonna take you to California with me." "Here, you want to stay with your girlfriend at this mansion that I'm not using in XYZ." So Jeremy was explaining this to me.

• 2:24:52Speaker 02

  It's like the equivalent of a luxury suite at a sports arena. Like, it's for getting deals done.

• 2:24:58David Senra?

  But they're operating at a different level, where it's like, "Oh, these influence." And some founders, the smart ones, don't let... Like Sam Walton, you know, he's like, "Don't give us... Don't give me a frickin' gift."

• 2:25:10Speaker 02

  Right, right. That's why everything in Bentonville is like, "You can't come in here and like woo me."

• 2:25:14David Senra?

  Because they know it works. If you give a Walmart salesperson like a bottle of gin or something, it's gonna influence them, where he's just like, "I want your price." You guys did a great job in your episodes. Like, "Tell me your lowest price, and then I'm gonna go to your..." It better be your low price, because I'm going to this guy, and if you tell me a dollar, he sells me 98 cents. Don't waste my time. You're not gonna hear from me again.

• 2:25:32Speaker 01

  I have an obligation to the customer to do this, to find the lowest price for them.

• 2:25:36David Senra?

  Yeah, because everything, his entire thing, the low-cost structure thing, that's a Walton thing, that's a Sol Price thing, that's a Jeff Bezos thing, that's a Rockefeller thing. That's the most common theme in the history of entrepreneurship. Every single thing. Jeff is like, "We're gonna have a low-cost structure. We're gonna have a low-cost structure. We're gonna be efficient, we're gonna be efficient." Somewhere along the line, 25 years later, now the startup, the technology startups is like, "We can just spread money all the time, because there's no interest rate." Like, there's just money coming back.

• 2:26:00Speaker 01

  He built Amazon in a pretty different time than founders today. The business laws of physics were different. There were interest rates versus when there weren't.

• 2:26:10Speaker 02

  Well, he started when there were. None.

• 2:26:12Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 2:26:13Speaker 02

  And then the environment changed as he was building it.

• 2:26:16Speaker 01

  Yep. But like, you know, that while it would have been stupid for Amazon to spend $100 million on something, on like crazy marketing activities in 1997, like you could imagine that in 2018, if all of your competitors had raised a billion dollars and were, you know, trying to chase market share as fast as possible, you either have to exit that market because you're going to lose or play that game on the field.

• 2:26:44David Senra?

  Or find, and even better, find a different way, like be more resourceful.

• 2:26:48Speaker 01

  But like, be more resourceful, it's like, it's, it's easy to say, but like, hiring all, when all your competitors are hiring all the best engineers by throwing a million dollars a year at them, like, you're just not going to be able to build a good product if you don't try to play that game also.

• 2:27:03David Senra?

  Yeah, for sure. But like, the whole thing, like when Peter Thiel says this in his book, Paul Graham says it, it's just like startups don't have the advantage, right? Of you're not going to outspend Microsoft or Netflix. So you gotta find underdeveloped talent, right? You gotta find these people that if they were the credentialed, or if they were the well-knowns, then they're gonna go take, you're gonna work for me $80,000 and some stock options, or go make a million dollars a year at Netflix. Like, they're gonna, so that's the whole thing. It's like, you're not gonna win unless you are capable of finding underdeveloped talent. Silicon Valley used to be able to build high-growth and profitable startups.

• 2:27:36Speaker 02

  Well, the rule used to be you couldn't go public until you had over $100 million in revenue and you were profitable. Like, if you didn't hit both, check both those boxes, you weren't gonna IPO.

• 2:27:45Speaker 01

  And in 2021, of all the companies that went public, it had to be single-digit percentage that were profitable.

• 2:27:50Speaker 02

  Or any of them. Yeah, I don't know.

• 2:27:53Speaker 01

  It's crazy. The game just changes.

• 2:27:55David Senra?

  Well, to your point, if you have free money, you know, the money supply, grass like expands, it's raining down, that's going to build. Did you listen to Doug Leone on, I know you guys had him on your show, but did you hear him on Invest Like the Best?

• 2:28:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was great.

• 2:28:06David Senra?

  Like, he said, he's like, this, he was telling crazy stories. I loved everything about that guy. I loved him when I heard him on your podcast too. It was like that tough love. This is what I'm into, right?

• 2:28:15Speaker 02

  He still has, I think maybe my favorite quote of all, favorite quote said live on an acquired podcast of, "You could burn cigarettes in our arms and we wouldn't flinch."

• 2:28:25David Senra?

  And then he has a great line, he's like, "I want you to know, we were killers. We weren't killers to make the most money, we were killers to get the job done." But he made the point, and you know, very few people probably know more about the venture industry than that guy, right? I would imagine he's up there. And he's like, "Of course." Like, you have money raining down, he didn't use those words, he's like, "It just creates bad habits."

• 2:28:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. It is crazy how many things in my life I falsely attributed to something that were not just interest rates. Like, so many things, the answer is just like, "Oh, it is that way because we live in a zero-interest rate environment." And the human brain likes to tell stories, and at the end of the day, it's like, "Things are the way they are because of mean reversion and what the current interest rate climate is."

• 2:29:10David Senra?

  I wish, I'm gonna pull up something, like, this is what I mean, goes back to Buffett, like, if you just, we should have, I wish I knew this, I had read this, I didn't remember it, though. This is Warren Buffett on interest rates, right? He says-

• 2:29:23Speaker 02

  Oh, is this from-

• 2:29:24Speaker 01

  Laws of Gravity.

• 2:29:24Speaker 02

  The log in Snowball?

• 2:29:26David Senra?

  No, this is from his shareholder letters, and he said it in 84, 88, something like this.

• 2:29:32Speaker 02

  I think the intro to Snowball, I think the scene that opened, the vignette that opens it, is Sun Valley right before the bubble burst, the tech bubble burst.

• 2:29:40David Senra?

  Oh, no, this is like, decade and a half before.

• 2:29:42Speaker 02

  Oh, okay, okay.

• 2:29:42David Senra?

  This is why it's like, so, it's like, god, like, you could have made such better decisions, I could have made such better decisions, if you had just known this, and he had known it for 40 years before it happened. I posted this on Twitter, and I opened up the next day, I'm like, "Why does this have two and a half million views?" It's like Elon replied, he goes, "Yep." I was like, "Oh, okay." I was like, "What the, like, what the, like, damn, you people really like interest rates."

• 2:30:07Speaker 01

  Paul Graham replies on steroids.

• 2:30:10David Senra?

  So I go, "Warren Buffett on interest rates," and the headline is, "They power everything in the economic universe." So that was what Elon was responding up to, and this is Warren, writing in the 80s. "The value of every," to your, exactly what you're saying, "The value of every business, the value of a farm, an apartment house, or any other economic asset is 100% sensitive to interest rates. That's because all you're doing when you're investing is transferring money to someone now in exchange for a stream of money which you expect to come back in the future. And the higher the interest rates are, the less that present value will be." Interest, this is fantastic. Interest rates are to asset prices, prices, sort of like gravity is to an apple. Yeah. When interest rates are low, there is little gravitational pull on asset prices. We just lived through this, right? Total. When interest, when interest. Textbook.

• 2:30:54David Senra?

  Yeah, when interest rates are low, there is little gravitational pull on asset prices. Interest rates power everything in the economic universe. Because I found that because all this, this, remember this inflation went crazy like a year or two ago, whatever. And I was like, okay, every time that happens, all I do is I have, um, you can buy the Kindle version of Buffett shareholder letters for like $2. I know, it's crazy. And I search it for like interest rates, inflation. And I just go and I read, okay, this is what.

• 2:31:20Speaker 01

  You made a billion dollars off that $2 purchase.

• 2:31:22David Senra?

  There you go. And so like you'll say, okay, this is what he said inflation, and then you see what year he said it. And it's just like, and that's where I found that. I go, what did he say about interest rates? Boom, 1980, whatever. And he just laid out.

• 2:31:34Speaker 01

  It's so funny because what he, what he also did right there is for every college finance sophomore that's having to go through a class to do DCFs and they're like, I don't understand this. This is complicated. Like he just explained conceptually a discounted cash flow model there in a way that was like unbelievably digestible. He's so good at that.

• 2:31:53David Senra?

  The clarity of thought. Because he wants the microphone. But now, but also like he just educated you in a way that makes more sense and is interesting and you're entertained by. And you might build a business off that and then you might want to sell one day or whatever the case is. It's like the, this is where I've spending a lot more time of like really trying to work on storytelling ability and concision. Right? Yeah. The, the value is in the compression and the dissolation. Right? If you could listen to like an audiobook for 25 hours, but if I can give you the best idea or one idea that changes your life and I could do it, you know, every week or whatever, like in a couple of minutes, like that is going, that, some of that value is going to be brought back to me. And all that comes from is.

• 2:32:34David Senra?

  What I realized is all my heroes have like, what they have in common is like the unbelievable clarity of thought. Like Steve Jobs, Charlie, like you're not gonna be like, oh, what does that mean? They take unbelievably complex things, like you're not advertising to a standing army, you're advertising to a moving parade. Make it in a memorable way, and then you carry that maxim with you forever.

• 2:32:53Speaker 01

  How do you get better at that? You said you were working on it.

• 2:32:55David Senra?

  Reps, just straight up reps, like thinking about it and then hearing yourself back. So the advantage I have of that edit is, you could say something and like, oh, that was so good. And then you hear it back and sometimes it's even better or many times it's worse. It's like, oh, I lost, I was, I know what I'm saying, but you missed this part that doesn't make any sense. And so normally I have to cut it. I don't think I've ever re, I don't think I've ever re-recorded something.

• 2:33:21Speaker 01

  We only did that for one episode ever. It's really hard to do.

• 2:33:24David Senra?

  What, re-record?

• 2:33:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. Do you know which episode we did it for?

• 2:33:27David Senra?

  No.

• 2:33:28Speaker 01

  It was recent.

• 2:33:30Speaker 01

  NFL, David and I got on and re-recorded 40 minutes of material over maybe 15 different parts of the episode.

• 2:33:38Speaker 02

  The original recording of that episode was really rough.

• 2:33:41Speaker 01

  The NFL episode was too long, it, when we started, it took way too long to get to the interesting part, the Pete Rozell era. And so we had this like massively bloated beginning and then we had a story arc that didn't cleanly resolve. And we had a bunch of concepts where we didn't nail the explanation. And so we went in, we cut like half of the first epoch of the story. We recorded new bits to like create nice rising action and resolution on the Rozell era. And then we recorded another like, like 10 areas where we were just like, this wasn't said super tight. And I'm, I'm really curious if people noticed because we had to like, we basically had to voice act. Like we had to listen to the way that we sort of came into that segment, get that in our head.

• 2:34:25Speaker 02

  This was your, your theater background, like coming in.

• 2:34:28Speaker 01

  And then like pick it up from there, but yeah.

• 2:34:30David Senra?

  Your editing is so good. We've talked about like back catalog sponsorship and you told me what you're doing was like Zoom info. And I've been listening to your back catalog and it's like, dude, it's like, it sounds like it was there the day you did it. It is perfect. And I know because we talk about this, that that ad was not there, but it sounds like it's there.

• 2:34:47Speaker 01

  That's the goal.

• 2:34:48David Senra?

  The NFL episode is what I meant. I was like, it's a crazy story, but even there is like a lesson where like you guys, I texted this to you. Like totally changed the way I think about things, or maybe we were talking on Zoom about this. Where it's like, I never even thought of that. The NFL is like the largest media company.

• 2:35:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:35:01Speaker 01

  I hadn't either. And the funny thing is, that's like, that was a David Rosenthal insight that like, the NFL is the single largest media property by value. And the funny thing is, if you go look at the, because we did this for the Nintendo episode, you go look at the largest media properties. They list Mario, they list Pokemon. And they, and then, and I think if you sort, the, the list includes like video games and movies. And so there's like the MCU in there and there's Star Wars in there. But like, they don't think, the NFL is way bigger than all of those.

• 2:35:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:35:34Speaker 01

  But it's not on the list because people don't think of it as like a media property.

• 2:35:38Speaker 02

  I love looking for stuff like that, both to do episodes on and as, um, for investing too, is like, what is something that is just so like in the air that people don't even realize what it is?

• 2:35:49Speaker 01

  Or what's a comparison we can make that is super eye opening, but people haven't thought to compare those two things before?

• 2:35:56Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:35:57David Senra?

  Which is why I tie things into past, because it's like, oh, this.

• 2:36:01Speaker 02

  Episode 244.

• 2:36:02David Senra?

  The idea, no, but the idea behind this is like, we've seen this before.

• 2:36:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:36:06David Senra?

  I reread like the show notes on like the Johnny Ive episode I did. Johnny said something was great and he said, uh, he goes, one of Steve's talents was identifying markets full of second rate products. And so like, he would like, oh, there's the opportunity here. And we're both, we're all podcast addicts, right? And the reason that we get along.

• 2:36:26Speaker 02

  And it's a market full of second rate products.

• 2:36:28David Senra?

  And because you know how hard it is to do.

• 2:36:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:36:30David Senra?

  And when you go and listen to other business podcasts and like, I had a friend, um, his friend has a podcast and he's like, hey, these three guys, they have large social media followings, but it does not translate to episodes, which people don't understand.

• 2:36:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, rarely will.

• 2:36:44David Senra?

  Yeah. And they're like, would you listen to their episode and give it feedback? Right? And we went like, so I was like, yeah, I'll listen to it. And I go, um, It's three guys sitting around talking whatever happens to pop through their mind. What did you expect to happen?

• 2:37:01Speaker 01

  Which is kind of what's happening here.

• 2:37:03Speaker 02

  I was thinking the same thing. I was like, we need to self-.

• 2:37:05Speaker 01

  To all listeners, we apologize if this episode lacks craft.

• 2:37:08David Senra?

  There's zero chance that people aren't, do people interested in entrepreneurship and investing are not finding this interesting? Because the prep for this is not three guys that have a million other things to do. It's three guys that do this all the time.

• 2:37:22Speaker 02

  Spent the last eight years doing this.

• 2:37:23David Senra?

  Over and over again, that's going to come up naturally in a conversation that you can, like, oh, I didn't know about this. Maybe there's a bunch of people probably like, I didn't know who Everland was. I didn't know Ogilvy. I never thought about the NFL as a largest media company. Like, so, no, but their problem thing is like, there's no value proposition.

• 2:37:39Speaker 02

  This is actually something that ties into much of what we've talked about over the last couple of hours. People are going to do what they want to do. And if people can do what they want to do and are given unfettered freedom to run at it, they can do great things. If people are forced to do things that they don't want to do, they're not going to make great things. Or either forced to or choose, put themselves in a situation for whatever reason where they're doing something they don't want to be doing. They're not going to be very good at it.

• 2:38:06Speaker 01

  I think that's one of the reasons why we find ourselves so attracted to episodes that highlight craft. Is because that's sort of like how we think about acquired. Like if LVMH, Benchmark, it's like, people who do few things but do them exceptionally well are just so entrancing to study.

• 2:38:24David Senra?

  I think this goes back to what you were just saying, like, and I want to go to the crafting. It's like Charlie, again, has these simple ideas. Like, most of the problems are that you're just not intensely interested in what you're working on.

• 2:38:32Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:38:33David Senra?

  And he's like, I don't care how smart you are. And Charlie's smarter than almost everybody else. He goes, I was not successful until I moved myself into a position where I worked on something I was intentionally interested in. That just, these like small rules carry most of the weight. It's like, how bad do you actually want it? And if you're not willing to do those things, then there's nothing wrong with that. Like, entrepreneurship is for a very small percentage. I'm not one of these people that thinks everybody can be an entrepreneur. I would like to see more of them. But there's no safety net. It's like, no one's telling you what to do. No one had to tell you guys, hey, you should buy microphones and do a bunch of research and pick a name.

• 2:39:04Speaker 02

  We didn't buy microphones to start.

• 2:39:06Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, but like, yeah. I think the most interesting thing is that like... I think we've talked about this concept before on air is that if someone's going to advise you on starting a podcast, they would say, do a 30 to 40 minute episode and like do it weekly, you know, so there's and you release it at the same time all the time, have a guest. So that way that person promotes it to you. And we're like, okay, well, we do the opposite of all of those things. And I think it's like my, the conclusion I've come to is advice is an average and, and reality is a distribution and averages suck because they hide the distribution. You kind of want to know the shape of the distribution and you kind of want to know

• 2:39:48Speaker 01

  like things that apply to your specific data point, not like the average thing. And I think like advice is always an average that hides the distribution. And if you know that you're actually an outlier in some way, then you have to sort of like selectively follow advice because it may not apply to you.

• 2:40:07David Senra?

  Charlie told me a fantastic story about this where he's just like, he was singing the praises of BYD that they're kicking ass. Like he told me like the, not just me, I mean, with a group of people.

• 2:40:17Speaker 01

  They make batteries for cars.

• 2:40:20David Senra?

  Yeah, but he started out like, like doing like knockoff cell phones in Korea or something. And then like he, he, I forgot the guy's founder's name and I apologize, but like he was telling me the life story, but he was saying that the founder, that Charlie and Lee Lu, Lu Lee.

• 2:40:37Speaker 01

  Lee Lu.

• 2:40:37David Senra?

  Lee Lu gave the founder advice and he ignored it. And he was right. He's like, don't go into electric cars or whatever it was that he did. He's like, and he, you know, selling, I think he said like two billion car, like, I forgot what, 2 million cars. Not, there's no way he sold 2 billion cars in a year. So like, he's like, sold 2 million cars. China is a big market. Yeah. So he's just like, and he did it. And he gets all the credit because Lee and me told him not to do it. And he's just like, same to your point. It's game tape. It's just like, when Kobe is watching this particular, particular play of Michael Jordan, that may never appear in his life. And maybe that the move he did wasn't the right move for what Kobe did, but maybe it influences his other thing. It's just like, the life is

• 2:41:18David Senra?

  complex and messy. And like, you can think you're really smart and until you have a two and a half year old and they ask you, why is that the way? And you answer the question. And then their follow up question is going to be why? And eventually you're going to get to 11 where like, I don't know. Yeah. Like, I don't know why. Everything ends in, I don't know. It's like, I don't know. And so like, of course, there's no certainty. Like, that's why if you have, if you crave certainty, you've got to get a job. But there wasn't even Facebook when I was in college because I had to work full time. I went at night, but my college did not have Facebook. It was just coming out, so we had MySpace. And my MySpace, you could put a quote, right? Like at the header.

• 2:41:55Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 2:41:56David Senra?

  And I've always thought like this for my entire life. It was like, there's no security in life, only opportunity. And I think that's what you do. So investors and entrepreneurs are going for opportunity at the expense of security. And if you need security, you can get a job. But we see like, everybody said, go into tech, go into tech, go into tech. Look, you made all this money.

• 2:42:12Speaker 01

  I think this is a super mispriced thing. I think people who crave security, which I get, like, all humans crave some level of security, miss, sort of mispriced security because no jobs are as secure as we think they are. But they definitely cap your upside. And, and people, it's like, is founding a company or going into business for yourself as an entrepreneur extremely risky? Yes, it is. But is it actually that much riskier than a job where you could get laid off? Or the sector could go through a downfall? Or like, there are a lot of things about having a job that are not nearly as secure as people think they are.

• 2:42:49David Senra?

  Steve Wozniak and Jobs, they're like, worst case scenario, if this doesn't work, let's go get jobs. We're broke anyways.

• 2:42:55Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:42:55David Senra?

  Let's just try. And he like sells his van for like 50, Steve sells his van for like $1,500. Like, oh, I'm just all in on Apple. Like, that's, that, to me, that's like, again, I think a lot of this is like, people are asked, it's like, it's entrepreneurship. Like, Nate, it can be taught, can there be a school of entrepreneurship? And I was like, well, ask Charlie Munger if he taught a business class. What did he say? He's like, I would just teach the history of, what you guys do. He's like, I would teach you the history of 100 companies. And I would talk about what went right and what went wrong. There's no security, there's no, he's not saying, yeah, take my class. And on the other end, you get this degree that guarantees business success. That doesn't exist.

• 2:43:31Speaker 02

  Well, that's what's cool. Like, they have been teaching entrepreneurship for the last 50 years.

• 2:43:38David Senra?

  So I was in, so I went to UCF, which is this like diploma mill, essentially. And they, I was in the pilot entrepreneurship program, right? The very first year. And it's a two-year program.

• 2:43:51David Senra?

  Take us back to that. Yeah. Were you thinking about? What was your relationship to entrepreneurship before starting the Founder's Podcast? So like, I have never been on a job review. I've only had two jobs in my life. Like, I was, but I was like, there was no entrepreneurship, there was no entrepreneurship like community, there was no entrepreneurship industry, right? So like, my first business was, this is a long story, but like, um, I had been accustomed, I was talking about this yesterday. By the time I was 17, I had been accustomed to working full-time and going to school. Right? So like, people were like, "Oh, you work a lot on founders." It's like, I don't have to go to school, I can like, do this all the time. You work in half-time, as far as you're concerned.

• 2:44:28David Senra?

  There's a long story here, like, that would take me like 30 minutes, but like,

• 2:44:33David Senra?

  like, my dad sat me down when I was like 15. He's like, "Listen, you don't have to pay rent, but like, I don't have any money for you. So like, if you want something, you gotta go get it." Right? And the good thing about my dad, he's a Cuban immigrant, uh, not educated, but like, the best piece of advice that he ever gave me and my brother, um, was a maxim. He's like, "Don't half-ass things." Right? So he does it in like a blue collar, he's a truck driver, like, you know, that kind of thing. Where he's like, he prides himself on the fact that like, uh, like, he'll work 72 hours straight. Right? But he never made a lot of money and never had an education, like, his mom wasn't good and whatever. And they had to escape Castro's Cuba. My dad was born in Cuba. Wow. So it's like, imagine like, I talked about this on, um, cause you know Patrick's at the end of Invest Like, every Invest Like, Invest episode. Yeah, I think it was your episode with him.

• 2:45:16David Senra?

  Yeah, he's like, he's like, uh, "What's the nicest thing everybody, somebody ever did to you?" Or, "For you, did to you." "For you." And I was like, "Man, like, something that, it was a decision that happened way before I was born." And like, my grandfather is in Cuba in 1959, um, 1958. And he, again, not an educated man. He, uh, worked as a butcher and worked in a factory that made shoes. Uh, he's married and he's got a baby. That baby is my dad. And Castro comes to power. And he doesn't have a lot of money, doesn't speak English. And yet, he had some kind of insight that...

• 2:45:54David Senra?

  I need to get out of here, right? And he goes to a country, picks up, loses everything. Not that you had a lot anyways. Goes to country, knows nobody, doesn't speak the language. When I sat down, the first thing me and Sam Zell talked about, and I think helped bond us, to the point where at the end, he said he liked my energy and everything. So hopefully he liked me, I don't know. Was, in his story, I was like, because I had obviously read his autobiography. And one of the first things me and Sam talked about was, Sam, I understand and empathize with your story because Sam's story is his dad, being Jewish, getting the last train out of Poland before the Nazis bomb it. Literally, the last train out.

• 2:46:36David Senra?

  Eighteen members of his family, his dad went around to saying, we gotta get out of here, this is not good. They're like, no, we're gonna stay. They're all dead. Sam, Sam's dad and his mom have a daughter. They get to America. His mom's pregnant. Sam is born in America. And so in that book, Sam's dad's always telling him, you don't understand how lucky you are to be born here. And I was like, I understand that mentality because I grew up meeting, Cubans have this thing called Noche Ovuna, which is, they don't celebrate, my wife's Colombian, so I married into a Colombian family, they do this too. They don't celebrate Christmas on Christmas Day. They do it the night before. It's like Christmas Eve. And so I grew up, you know, for as long as I can remember, I was like, eight, seven,

• 2:47:19David Senra?

  10, 10 years old, meeting people that came over on rafts. And you would see these things. I've seen these in person, right? It's just like, think about how great, how bad it has to be. It's like 50 miles, right? 90 miles, right? I'm gonna go over to the study the University of Miami just did on this. 90 miles.

• 2:47:41David Senra?

  You're, you're a parent, hopefully you might be a parent one day, like, you love your kids way more than you love yourself. Oh, yeah. There's people that came, hundreds of thousands of people went to the edge of the island and put their kids on a raft. Just hopes that they get to America. And so the problem is, is like, you don't make the announcement to the, everybody's like, "Hey, tomorrow, we're leaving on a raft, could you get caught?" Right, right, right. Prisoned, or killed, or whatever case is. And so the University of Miami did this study, was like, "Well, how many people did this? We know hundreds of thousands survived." Right. And they estimate that like, half, at least, I think it's something like, half a million people perished, never got there. There's a, the conversation with, um, there's this UFC fighter named Jorge Masvidal, who lives in Miami, he's a Cuban guy. And his dad was one of the ones that escaped.

• 2:48:26David Senra?

  He went on a, their raft was a, made out of a, like a truck tire. Like, you know, like, think of like, a size of like, a bulldozer tire, right? Wow. It's his uncle and two 14-year-old boys. They get off path, right? They run out, their water wound up being like, uh, contaminated, so you can't drink, you'll die. How do they propel it anyway? Like, how do you make sure it gets to Florida? Uh, so, you have like, they, some have oars, and some have like, like, see that blanket over there? Like, you try to make a, uh... A sail? A sail out of like, a blanket, or, you know, there, some of these are unbelievably in, in, like, they're a lot of ingenuity, it's like... Yeah. For uneducated, they don't have the internet, like, they don't, it's unbelievable. And so, there, in his case, they, I know they had oars, I think they had a, um, a sail.

• 2:49:11David Senra?

  They get close enough to the Bahamas, they, they haven't drank water for like, three or four days, or something. A pigeon lands on the oar. They wind up killing the pigeon, opening it apart and drinking the blood. That's the only thing that's saved. And so now his, so he gets to America, eventually gets to go from the Bahamas to America. Now, his son is like, you know, makes millions and millions of dollars. Like, as a professional fighter, and a celebrity, and, and, and all this other stuff. So, anyways, long story short, uh, the one thing, like, I, my dad's still alive, I told you, my mom passed away. Um, but like, I really think, like, my dad, for just, like, he did not baby me at all, he's just like, "You gotta, like, figure out how to get a job." Yeah. And so I worked at, um, back then, this, this is something that Paul Graham made the point of, right?

• 2:49:56David Senra?

  He's like, dude, when I was a kid, the only jobs available were you like, you know, scoop ice cream or something. And like, you've probably met them. I met some 17-year-old founders, a bunch of founders. You talk to them, they're on their second company. I'm like, what? They're like, oh yeah, when I was like ninth grade, I like did this like Gmail plugin. Yeah, right. It's like I made forty thousand. I had this SaaS tool. Yeah, I made forty thousand dollars a month. And like, I'm making so much money, my parents let me drop out of high school so I can do this business. I'm like, I worked at a car wash, dude. I made four dollars and sixty-five cents an hour, you know? So anyways, long story short, I would go to school year-round, right? Because I had figured this out where it's like, oh, if you, most people went to summer school, they were forced to. I went to public school my whole life, right?

• 2:50:40David Senra?

  And so like, people would go to public school, they would be forced to because you failed something else. But if you elected to do that, in six weeks, you get a full semester's credit. And there's two six-week terms. Yeah, like mini-masters. So I always, even when I was in college, I did this. I would go to school year-round, right? And so in high school, I went to school so much that by the time I got to my last two years of high school, I was in this program called OJT, which is on-the-job training. So instead of having six periods, you leave after the fourth period, and you'd have to have a job, and you would get two, your other credits through your employer. So your employer would have to like, fill out paperwork, like, is David, you know, cleaning cars? And like, oh, there's a baby that came in and threw up. He did a good job with that. It was disgusting. But the benefit of that was being able to work full-time, oh, full-time. Yep.

• 2:51:25David Senra?

  Make enough money where I could like, buy, I bought like, a new car with my own money, like, all that other stuff. And so like, then I realized, like, oh, like, I think I was making like, four hundred or five hundred dollars a week in high school, which is freaking really good. This is like, late 90s, early 2000s. And then I was, got promoted to being a detailer. That's like, you have a client list. And then you start developing relationships. It's like every other business, like. Right. And they're like, hey, I love what you do. Would you do this at my house? Or would you do it on my boat that you don't do? Or like, whatever. And so my first business was just detailing cars and boats and taking all this other stuff. Where it's like, okay, I spent an hour waxing this guy's car. I might make twenty bucks. I do it at his house, I make a hundred and fifty dollars.

• 2:52:10David Senra?

  And so like I've always just had that like and again, there was not like this is the story you guys read in the books and the history stories. It's like there's no master plan here.

• 2:52:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:52:19David Senra?

  It's like, hey, I need to make money.

• 2:52:21Speaker 02

  See opportunity.

• 2:52:22David Senra?

  All of my other friends were working at McDonald's Chick-fil-A where you just said something like they cap.

• 2:52:27Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:52:28David Senra?

  You're I never had a capped upside.

• 2:52:29Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:52:30David Senra?

  Um, and then so I did all these other businesses. I started in college because I thought I was going to be a lawyer. And this is so silly because everybody, all my friends that are lawyers hate it.

• 2:52:39Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:52:39David Senra?

  I dodged a bullet there.

• 2:52:40Speaker 02

  Well, this is that. That's the dream. Like the immigrant dream is for like the kids to become lawyers and doctors.

• 2:52:46David Senra?

  Well, my parents, not my parents. So my parents never said the word college to me once. Not one time because they're both high school dropouts. So like, um, they, they never like, I was one of the only kids in high school. Never have a, a, a curfew. Like my parents knew I was independent and left me. They gave me, that's the best thing they get. It's like, oh, David can take care of himself.

• 2:53:08Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:53:08David Senra?

  They thought, my mom told me, she's like, I just thought you were a lot smarter than everybody else in our family. So like

• 2:53:14Speaker 02

  We trusted you to make the right decision.

• 2:53:16David Senra?

  Well, it's also driven too, but she, um, because you have to understand like being smart in this family is not like being like the, the bar is low in the sense that like they're, they're both coming from multiple generations of people that did not prioritize education or self improvement. So that's why I'm so like ferocious in this because I didn't see that, you know? And so, um, the, the, this, this demonstrated when my mom was dying of cancer. So like, you know, HIPAA has this thing where like they're not going to share paperwork or information unless like it gets permission from the person. And like my mom could choose whoever she wanted to. She could have chose her husband, right? They had a bad relationship. They should have got, they got divorced and then remarried. They should have stayed divorced, but whatever. And she, you see that with actions. We said that actions is a priority. She's like, we're in there.

• 2:54:01David Senra?

  And she's like, who do you want the paperwork? Like, who do you want us to communicate? She's like, David, not her other kids, not her husband, not her sister, not. And she trusted me implicitly. And so I essentially like did a major college. So I just kept this routine. I was like, people are like, oh, they're like, what do you want to do for a living? And like, I remember watching TV when I was younger. I was like, well, I want to be rich. And you think when you're younger, you don't even think like, who's rich on TV? Like, I liked Fresh Prince of Bel Air. I was like, you could be a judge or a doctor. And I was like, oh, I can't see blood. Like, that freaks me out. So I go be an attorney. So I went to school and I worked full time. And I was trying to do hustle, anything I could do. And so the idea was like, okay, I'm just going to go undergrad for business because I'm interested in business anyways.

• 2:54:45David Senra?

  And but I'm only doing that till I get, till I go to law school, right? And this point of the story was not to go on this deviation, but I was in the entrepreneurship program, the pilot one, right? Because I was already interested in trying to make money in any way possible. And this is how bad the entrepreneurship was. And this is why I'm kind of jealous of these young kids where now you actually have an entrepreneurship industry. And there's stuff you could learn from. The head, the main, the, what is it called? Like, the main subject, Entrepreneurship 101, right? The curriculum. Yeah, but there's all these other classes. But Entrepreneurship 101 is run the teacher, right? What is her credentials? Her dad started a, an AC company in Florida. You're going to make a lot of money.

• 2:55:27David Senra?

  And he died on the job because he got electrocuted to death. Oh, God. And she inherited the company and then she ran it. And so she's the teacher. And so like, the curriculum was terrible. It was terrible. The best thing, and this relates to what all we do for a living now, which I could have never predicted, is there was a guy that, this is kind of like Charlie Munger says, you should read, if you want to learn about incentives in a really difficult business, read Les Schwab's autobiography, which I did because Charlie told me to. I did it like episode a long time ago. And he's like, this guy made a ton of money in a really hard business, which is like tires and like oil changes and stuff like that. And so the guy was coming into the class. He was going to donate like three or $5 million to have a building named after him. And he had one prerequisite.

• 2:56:12David Senra?

  He goes, I want to talk to your entrepreneurship students before I give you this money. And I learned more in one hour from that dude than I did in two years on entrepreneurship. Because he would talk for like 20 minutes and then he's like, open up your questions. Yeah. And I lit him up with question after question after question. And I remember to this day, just like the simple way, this is like, you know, he was building his business in the probably the 80s and 90s. And he's like, How did you know where to expand? And he's like, we would pull the car registration data from the DMVs, right? And we would know how many car owners there were in this specific radius. And we'd have to hit like, let's say we need 40,000 car owners in a three mile radius. There's, are there any other stores? Put a store right there. And they did that over and over and over and over again.

• 2:56:56Speaker 02

  That's awesome.

• 2:56:56David Senra?

  Yeah, and so like, he had ideas like that. And just like, again, you learn through experience. Like, that guy could teach us way more because he actually did this compared to.

• 2:57:08Speaker 02

  I think probably all three of us have a like unintended impact of college entrepreneurship programs on us. You definitely do.

• 2:57:17Speaker 01

  I have a minor in entrepreneurship.

• 2:57:18David Senra?

  Yeah. Really?

• 2:57:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, from Ohio State. Similarly, only ever went to public school.

• 2:57:22David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:23Speaker 01

  I was a little different, like I was really into computers. Like, when I was 10, my dad and I found a PC on the side of the road. And he was like, do you want to install Linux? And I was like, what's Linux? And like, taught me to use a terminal. Like, I was really lucky to have a dad who's an engineer. And so I went to college for computer science, but.

• 2:57:41Speaker 02

  Wait, wait, wait, back up. You found a PC on the side of the road?

• 2:57:47Speaker 02

  And you were like, let's install Linux.

• 2:57:49Speaker 01

  And my dad's like, I'm willing to bet that thing is just old. Like, he's like, because we're looking at the, you know, you're like, at that point, you could open computers. So we're like, looking at it, he kind of like, puts it apart, it looks inside, he's like, it's got all the pieces. Like, this is just an old computer that someone's throwing away.

• 2:58:06Speaker 02

  That's amazing. All right, keep going.

• 2:58:08David Senra?

  So you majored in computer science?

• 2:58:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I like went in thinking like, I want to have some kind of like, I want to do business and tech. But I didn't know what that meant. And so I found my way to a club called the Business Builders Club. And they were like, oh, there's like a real, like an actual minor that you can take. And so sort of like through student organizations, found my way to actually doing something in the College of Business, which like. I go back and forth on whether undergraduate business stuff is useful. Because on the one hand. But it got you plugged into your network. All your buddies. It's all about people. You guys have all done amazing things. We just came back from my bachelor party and half the crew is the Business Builders Club Ohio State friends that I made there.

• 2:58:46David Senra?

  The content sucks, but the relationships are everything.

• 2:58:48Speaker 01

  But the relationship, that's. And it's not, the stuff you're learning is actually super important, but you don't have the context for why yet. It's like you're working on a DCF model and you're like, I don't, this is useless to me. Or you're like, learning about depreciation and amortization. You're like, this is awful because I have nothing. Whereas my physics classes were awesome. Like there's labs, like I can touch and feel the things and understand mechanical advantage and how the free body diagram works. But in these business concepts are like super abstract and it's, they weren't useful to me then. But like I went and took a Coursera class last year, two years ago on accounting. Because I was just like, okay, like I want to actually understand accounting. In part because we talk about it on Acquired all the time.

• 2:59:33Speaker 01

  And David understands this stuff more than I do and I hate it. But like, it is so much more useful when you understand where the rubber meets the road in the real world.

• 2:59:42David Senra?

  Like, it would just be beneficial to just like go out and try to sell something. Like, you know, like in, like get real world experience. Like what did Charlie, I just reread, have you guys read The Tao of Charlie Munger? No.

• 2:59:53Speaker 01

  I've heard it's good.

• 2:59:54David Senra?

  Okay. I looked at it for the episode or not. I own, I own the hardcover, the Kindle and the audiobook. That should tell you like, it's worth it.

• 3:00:03Speaker 01

  By the way, I own the audiobook and the Kindle of almost every book that I own.

• 3:00:06David Senra?

  I, including the hardcover too?

• 3:00:09Speaker 01

  No. I don't own them.

• 3:00:10David Senra?

  You're not a hardcover person. Because you can also switch.

• 3:00:14Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 3:00:14David Senra?

  That's the whisper sync or whatever it's called.

• 3:00:16Speaker 01

  And all the time, I actually hate that they sync and they, because it like, my common workflow in doing acquired research is I listen to the book. And then I'll take some notes in Apple Notes of like, like half quotes where I'm like, I gotta look this up later. And then I go back in the Kindle and I search for the actual quote and like pull out the data to be able to use it in the episodes.

• 3:00:36David Senra?

  I think listening to the audiobook before reading the book is very helpful. It gives you a basic overview. It's like making a Wikipedia page before you read the biography. It's not enough detail, but like you have, okay. Like watching a movie for the second or third time, you know how it ends and it gives you, you pick up on things you missed the first time. In the tale of Charlie Munger, though, Charlie was talking about this where he's just like, I learned about business at the Buffett grocery store, right? From the cash register. It's like, cause that money is the lifeblood of all, I think the quote in the book is like, money's the lifeblood of all businesses. And that's where the cash, that's where the money was at this point. And it's like, you just learn, and he says, like, you learn the importance of like showing up on time. How to work with people you don't like, like how to service, like take care of your customers. Like, these are things that are all like universally applicable. That there, it's another form of education.

• 3:01:20David Senra?

  Like, that's the biggest, the key of experience and why it's so important. It's the most valuable form of education, cause it's education of life.

• 3:01:28Speaker 02

  Yep, yeah.

• 3:01:29David Senra?

  Like, I love to read, like more than almost anybody else. Like, you guys obviously love to read. There's, there's just so much things you can't learn from books. So it's just like, it's not enough.

• 3:01:38Speaker 02

  David, what was your college entrepreneurship? Well, it's funny, it's more thematic than an actual impact, but I can't remember if I've talked about this before. Princeton had then just one entrepreneurship class. It was like one class in the Department of Electrical Engineering. I was not an electrical engineer, but people knew about this cause like, oh, this is cool. And I, so senior year, I had already, the recruiting happened in the fall. So I was already like had my job, investment banking job that I was gonna go do.

• 3:02:06Speaker 02

  A whole nother kit of worms. But I was like, oh, you know, I'll take this class. It's supposed to be good. I'm gonna go work on Wall Street. I should learn about high-tech entrepreneurship was the name of the class. And it was like all, you know, guest lecture, it was, it was case best, case method. And Ed Shaw, the professor would have guests come in. One of the guests, either the last or like the second to last class was Tim Ferriss.

• 3:02:31David Senra?

  What?

• 3:02:32Speaker 02

  Before he published the four hour work.

• 3:02:34David Senra?

  No way. He gave, he, he asked Buffett a question.

• 3:02:39Speaker 02

  At the annual meeting.

• 3:02:43Speaker 02

  Oh, he, he totally hustled this. He like traded on that name for like years before he made it as Tim Ferriss. Cause he just went in for one class? It was one class. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was one, one day of one course. And that was like this case study class. And I think he had taken the class when he was at Princeton. And Ed, the professor like liked him and kind of took a shine to him. So you and I then are guest lecturers at Columbia? Oh, yeah, totally. Yeah, oh yeah, we're, yeah, we're guest lecturers everywhere. So he came in and so he was working on the book. But it was like done, but like was about to get published. And so he came in and the whole like class was like basically telling his story and then like showing the book. I remember in my notes, like for the class, I titled them, I have them still somewhere on my, on an old computer. The title was Supplement Guy.

• 3:03:31Speaker 01

  Do What Chillove.

• 3:03:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:03:32Speaker 01

  That is the moral of the story.

• 3:03:34Speaker 02

  Oh my God. And then, oh man, afterwards, talking about missed opportunities. He was, he's like, he's older than me, but he's not that much older. He's only been out for a couple of years. So, class ends and he was like, hey guys, anybody want to hang out? Like, I'm gonna go, you know, I'm gonna go like hang at Terrace. Like, if you want to come. Princeton has eating clubs and they do have fraternities, but like, one of them is Terrace. And Jenny was actually in Terrace. And, you know, it was like, basically, I'm gonna go like hang out and have a good time with anybody who wants to come along. And I was like, nah.

• 3:04:08Speaker 01

  Now I'll see you on the podcast circuit later.

• 3:04:10David Senra?

  Exactly. I love how this just was uncovered in random conversation, right? It was just like, computer science, investment banking, law.

• 3:04:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:04:18David Senra?

  No, but like-

• 3:04:19Speaker 02

  No common denominator.

• 3:04:21David Senra?

  No, and like, and look where-

• 3:04:22Speaker 01

  I use theater more than I use computer science. Like, that was what I, yeah.

• 3:04:25David Senra?

  I, like, the idea of like, from venture capitalists and podcasters, right? I went and my daughter asked me to go speak at, at Career Day.

• 3:04:36Speaker 02

  Oh, hell yeah.

• 3:04:37David Senra?

  And, this is last year, so she would have been-

• 3:04:39Speaker 02

  That's like the greatest thing.

• 3:04:40David Senra?

  She would have been in fourth grade, right?

• 3:04:41Speaker 02

  I can't wait.

• 3:04:42David Senra?

  And so she's like, well daddy, like you have a weird job. Like, will you come in? Yeah, she's like, will you come in and like give a talk? And so you mentioned earlier, like entrepreneurs are like odd ducks and like crazy people. They don't like, they don't, like, they see rules. It's like, oh, that's just words written down on paper. Like, I'll just do my own thing. So I show up, and I was like, yeah, I'll do anything for you. Like, whatever you want. And so I show up and there's two, each class at the school she has has two teachers, right? And so they're like, oh, well, we didn't, hi, Mr. Center, we didn't get your email. Did you get like, did you bring like a thumb drive? I'm like, what was I supposed to email and why would I have a thumb drive? And they're like, your PowerPoint presentation. And I go-

• 3:05:19Speaker 02

  Have you ever made a PowerPoint presentation in your life?

• 3:05:21David Senra?

  Never. And I go, no, but this is right, I go, they're nine. Why would I make a PowerPoint presentation?

• 3:05:28David Senra?

  And so I go there and I was like, I was like, listen, I'm fine. Like I'll wing like, I got this. Like they're like, you're gonna wing it. They didn't use the word wing it, but I forgot what it was. So. You're like, no, really? I got this. I show up, right? And they're all like sitting on the floor and there's like 39 year olds like. Are you like, stand up? No, no, no, no, never. And so. I wanna see some energy. And I was like, I talked for two minutes, right? I have 30 minute slot. I go, uh, I talked for two minutes. I was like, listen, don't listen to your parents. Don't listen, don't listen to your teachers. I go, follow whatever you're intensely. I just gave Charlie Munger's advice. I go, what are you interested in? Keep following that, even if it doesn't, you don't, there's not

• 3:06:07David Senra?

  an obvious career path. It's, and I used the word, I go, it's highly likely that the job that you're gonna have has not yet been invented. I was like, there was no such thing as a podcaster. Like I couldn't go to school for podcasting. Or whatever. And like, so that was like the two minute summary. And I said a little bit more than that. I go, okay. Now what questions do you have for me? And so I spent the next 28 minutes. I told them the importance of reading. I was like, listen, your friends are all gonna be in these stupid apps. I was like, you're gonna have no attention span. Learn how to read and read whatever you're interested in. Meanwhile, your daughter's probably like, oh my god. So I'll tell you the funny thing. So then 28 minutes and then they're telling me about books they love. They're like, oh, I like Harry Potter and I like this and I like travel. And we had like the greatest time, right? So I come back, I see, there's like nine in the morning, I leave.

• 3:06:53David Senra?

  And I, my daughter gets out, you know, later on in the day and she goes, daddy, thank you very much. My friends thought your talk was the best. I was like, oh, that's like interesting. Like that's, I'm glad they liked it. I go, well, let me ask you a question. Who came after me? And they're like, oh, it was like, you know, John's mom or something. I was like, oh, what does John's mom do? She's like, uh, I go, well, first of all, does she do a PowerPoint? She goes, yes, everybody did a PowerPoint. And I go, what does John's mom do? She goes, oh, she's a corporate attorney. I'm like, so you, like, they're nine years old.

• 3:07:24Speaker 01

  And also, that's like the alternate future for you. Like it was like.

• 3:07:29David Senra?

  You would have had a PowerPoint.

• 3:07:30Speaker 01

  It was like Bizarro David going after you.

• 3:07:33David Senra?

  It'd be interesting, like what you would, uh, yeah, but then again, I was, I was living in Florida and like the law there is not a lot, like you'd have to move to like DC. Like the law there is like. Insurance, like, so I'm at the San Francisco Airport, right? Which is way nicer than Miami International Airport, by the way.

• 3:07:50Speaker 02

  I've never been to Miami.

• 3:07:51David Senra?

  Oh, it's like Third World, man.

• 3:07:52Speaker 02

  Really?

• 3:07:52David Senra?

  It's like the ceilings are low. They have the new, they built like this new part, but SFO was way nicer than mine. And I see this billboard of, it says, "The world's, or America's largest personal injury attorney." That guy was in Orlando. I was going to go in Orlando at the time. His name's John Morgan. He was famous back then, and now he has. So like that, I probably work for him. Like, I'm like, chasing ambulances or whatever. No disrespect, like, whatever you gotta do to pay your bills, like, I have no problem with that. But, um, yeah, I just thought it was funny. I was like, you also have to think independently. Like, they're nine years old. Like, they don't wanna sit through. I don't even wanna sit through a PowerPoint.

• 3:08:26Speaker 02

  Nobody wants to sit through a PowerPoint.

• 3:08:28David Senra?

  No, I should try to, like, I would've just brought a video game console or something. I was like, "That's my video games." You know?

• 3:08:34Speaker 02

  That's a viable career.

• 3:08:35David Senra?

  Hey, Blake and Mitch. Blake Robbins and Mitch Lasky made the point in one of their GameCraft episodes I never even thought of. They're like, "You know how hard it is? How few pure software companies are that do over, that sell over a billion dollars a year in software? And how many game companies?" They said on the podcast, like, "There's so many video game companies that make so much money."

• 3:08:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:08:59David Senra?

  I think they say this is bigger than, um, the video game industry's bigger than music, movies, and books combined, or whatever.

• 3:09:05Speaker 02

  And it has been since the 90s.

• 3:09:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the, that was the interesting thing we uncovered on the Nintendo episode. Is that stat gets bandied around, bantered? Bandied?

• 3:09:13Speaker 02

  Bandied.

• 3:09:13Speaker 01

  Bandied around a lot right now, which is, it's very interesting, because like, the video game market has done this. But, uh, the video game market has basically always been larger than TV and movies combined, but has never gotten attention, or like, been thought of as a legitimate entertainment form.

• 3:09:32Speaker 02

  It's been out there for 30 years that people haven't paid attention to.

• 3:09:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. All right, I'm afraid of these memory cards filling up. Um, this has been wonderful.

• 3:09:38David Senra?

  Yep, thanks for having me, guys.

• 3:09:40Speaker 01

  Listeners, thank you.

• 3:09:41Speaker 02

  We almost never say this, but I think we gotta do this again.

• 3:09:43Speaker 01

  Let's do it again.

• 3:09:44David Senra?

  I'll be here next week. No.

• 3:09:47David Senra?

  Thanks, guys.

• 3:09:48Speaker 02

  We'll see you next time.

• 3:09:49David Senra?

  All right, bye.