David Senra on the Founders Who Never Quit

David Senra joins Sourcery for a candid conversation about the founders he’s spent nearly a decade studying, and why time, not intelligence or hype, is the only filter that actually matters. As the creator of Founders, Senra has read and analyzed hundreds of biographies of history’s most consequential builders, looking for the recurring patterns behind people who don’t just succeed once, but keep going for decades. That work led directly to his new show, David Senra. What makes the format unusual is that these aren’t traditional interviews and they aren’t random guests, they’re conversations. And the people David sits down with are often longtime listeners of Founders, super-fans of the ideas, books, and lessons his audience already cares about, who apply those lessons at an extraordinary level. The result is a rare alignment where the guests and the audience share the same reference points. In this episode, Senra reflects on conversations with founders he’s spoken with directly, including Michael Dell, Brad Jacobs, James Dyson, Michael Ovitz, & Daniel Ek, alongside the long arc of figures he’s studied deeply on Founders such as Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs, & Walt Disney. Across all of them, the common thread is durability: staying in the same game long enough for compounding to work. Rather than focusing on startups, exits, or fundraising cycles, this conversation centers on why most founders disappear, their biggest & most common regrets, how self-sabotage ends more careers than competition, and why the best builders treat problems as puzzles instead of crises. It’s a discussion about building something you can stay with for life, & why the rarest outcome in business isn’t success, but longevity. David Senra: https://x.com/davidsenra Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊𝐒 YouTube: https://youtu.be/RVdwU711kP0 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒 • Brex https://brex.com/sourcery—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery • Turing https://turing.com/sourcery—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery • Deel https://www.deel.com/sourcery—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery • Public http://public.com/sourcery–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets https://public.com/generated-asset, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery https://public.com/sourcery Follow Sourcery for the latest updates! https://www.sourcery.vc/ Disclosure Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga http://public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

  In 2010, a friend of mine told me about a podcast. I was like, what is that? He's like, well, this show that you like, it's livestreamed, but if you miss the livestream, you can listen to it anytime you want. And he showed me the Apple directory. So I just started doing a solo history show where it's just talking about all the books I'm reading. And I didn't expect anybody to listen to it. I just did it because I felt compelled to. And then I started getting really weird messages. I was getting like 2,000-word essays about how this podcast is changing my life. And I was like, oh, I'm like, I hit on something here. I have zero energy to interview anybody. I have infinite energy to talk to smart, driven founders. I can do that every day for the rest of my life. He goes, dude, I just saw Brad Jacobs. Do you know who this is? And I was like, yeah, he sent me like his new book. And he goes, you know the founders guy?

• 0:43Speaker 00

  I love founders. And so he starts sending me messages that he's like, I'm addicted to your book reviews. I do this episode on Brad's first book, which is How to Make a Few Billion Dollars. That episode goes viral. Probably has a million people listen to it. I rang him at a birthday party and he walks up to me and he goes, I love you. And I go, why? He goes, you made me famous. I go, I definitely did not. Like, most people are rat poisoned. Charlie had no filter. He's like, most of humanity, they're not high-quality people and you should avoid them. So the main piece of advice that he gave us was...

• 1:11Speaker 01

  Hey, your job right now is very obvious. You need to build a seamless web of deserved trust with really high-quality people and talk to nobody else.

• 1:19Speaker 00

  Everybody knows that I was 35 when I met Buffett and Buffett was 28. What they didn't know is that there was a bunch of other of our friends and guys around us. We built a seamless web of deserved trust and we did deals together for decades. This is the year I'm gonna pull the trigger and I'm gonna do this new show. And we started recording in May, launched in September. I think it'll go back and be one of the best decisions I ever made in my life. I guess the important part is like, I wanna offer like an alternative to start, scale, sell. Because I've talked to so many founders that started, that scaled, that sold, and are unbelievably depressed or unhappy or realizing, that was my best idea. I have four decades of life ahead of me and I can't take that back. It's like, man, you're gonna get the money anyways. So there's other ways to do what you want to do. Like, just don't give up.

• 2:01Molly O'Shea?

  If you could define 2026 in one word, what would you want the word to be?

• 2:06Speaker 00

  It can't be one word, but I am very interested in seeing how far I can take this.

• 2:21Molly O'Shea?

  David Senra, welcome to Sorcery.

• 2:23Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:24Molly O'Shea?

  So you have a new show. It's called David Senra by David Senra by David Senra, featuring David Senra, but it's also produced by David Senra.

• 2:36Speaker 00

  Actually, it's produced by SciCom.

• 2:38Molly O'Shea?

  It's produced by SciCom.

• 2:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, SciCom Media. That's Andrew Huberman and Rob Moore's media company.

• 2:43Molly O'Shea?

  How'd that happen?

• 2:44Speaker 00

  Oh, that's a funny story. Rob Moore, who is Andrew Huberman's co-founder and a really close friend of mine, sent me a DM, I think, in 2022. And he's like, I've never sent anybody a DM in my life, or another podcast or DM in my life. I just discovered your podcast last week, which is Founder's Podcast. And I've never found anything like this. I would love to talk to you about it. And we wound up getting on the phone like a day later. And the first time we talked, we talked for like two hours. And he was just explaining like, how they built Andrew Huberman's podcast. You know, this guy was essentially an obscure professor at Stanford till he was like 45 years old. And at the time, Rob was in PR. And he was actually booking, trying to get Andrew booked on a bunch of podcasts because

• 3:28Speaker 00

  he was writing a book. And Andrew would go on other podcasts and perform so well. And he would be asked back over and over again. And so Rob had the ideas, like, why don't we start our own podcast? So anyways, at the time, they had built the biggest health podcast in the world. And they were looking for other people, this is his words, that are like Andrew in different domains. And we're like, he was essentially pitching me to be recruited onto the network. So to move founders from the independent show that it was, onto their network. And I was like, you're two weeks too late. This isn't public. But I have a verbal agreement with this guy named Patrick Chisholm, from us like the best. And he just signed me to Colossus. And so we just wound up being friends. And I'd fly out to Malibu to hang out with them. We talked podcasting. And then, once I knew

• 4:13Speaker 00

  I was going to launch another show, because I go around, as you already know this, but people listening don't. I'll go and probably collect more information on podcasting than almost anybody else in the world. So like, well, literally, like, I flew to Stockholm two or three times this year just to hang out with the people at Spotify, because I like them, they're friends, but also to learn a lot about podcasting. I just flew to New York to have breakfast with the head of podcast for Spotify, a guy named Roman, who lives in Berlin. I was like, next time you're in New York, just tell me. Literally just flew to New York just to have breakfast with them. Fly like all over the country just to spend like a, have breakfast, dinner, a day with any other podcasters. And it was obvious to me, they were by far and away the best team in podcasting in terms of like the product they put out, how they think about it, the quality of what they do, and then the business they built around it.

• 4:57Speaker 00

  And so when it's time to partner with somebody on the new show, I was like, oh, these are obviously the guys I want to work with.

• 5:01Molly O'Shea?

  And you were 400, you're 407 episodes into founders now?

• 5:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, so almost 10 years, 407 that are numbered. And then I did some really complicated things where I would like have bonus episodes and it's like, oh, it's not really the same, so don't number them. I think I have like 430, 425 episodes I've made. And then on the new show, I think we've just released episode seven.

• 5:25Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, so it's been a whole evolution. And when you released the new show, it was September 23rd, 2025. We're about three months out. Today is December 22nd, by the way, if you didn't know that.

• 5:38Speaker 00

  I didn't.

• 5:39Molly O'Shea?

  It's like three months.

• 5:40Speaker 00

  I don't know what date is.

• 5:41Molly O'Shea?

  Math. When you posted that, I quote tweeted it and I was like, "A new era of podcasts has just begun."

• 5:48Speaker 00

  That sounds like something you'd say.

• 5:50Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, well, I did say it.

• 5:55Molly O'Shea?

  And so, but I think, I thought that was really fascinating because it's like an entirely new format, but like you're doing something different than most podcasters had done before when they're trying to evolve their podcasts. Like, you've been really obsessed with it for a really long time. Can you just like talk about how you got into podcasts and then the evolution to today?

• 6:13Speaker 00

  I, I think, for me, I know some people use podcasting as entertainment. I just think they're one of the most like miraculous tools for education. So the way I think about what podcasting actually is, I think podcasting is the printing press for the spoken word. And so since, I don't have memories before, I had a love and obsession with reading. And so probably, I don't know, five, six years old, I just absolutely fell in love with reading. It's something, it's a daily habit of, like essentially an unbroken daily habit that I've had for decades. And it's essentially just taught myself everything that I wanted to know through books. And when I was younger, I realized, oh, like, I started getting obsessed with talk radio because podcasts weren't a thing at that time.

• 6:53Speaker 00

  And I was like, oh, this is just like another form of education. Like, if I'm not looking at a book, I can be listening to somebody else talk about a subject matter. And at the time, you'd have to like be in the car and it'd be like AM radio. And I didn't even care what the subject matter was. I was just so voracious for information. I was looking for, now looking back, I was just looking for useful information on how to build a great life. Because I didn't have, I wasn't raised in an environment where I had any mentors or saw any really good role models by any means. And so I think this is just me trying to like find, you know, a positive example and a role model. And so I'd listen to talk radio about politics, didn't even care about politics, sports, current affairs. There was like a, I was like a kid and I was listening to like a relationship advice show at night. I didn't have a relationship. I don't even think it was in puberty yet. I didn't know anything about this.

• 7:36Molly O'Shea?

  Was this Delilah?

• 7:37Speaker 00

  Yes. Do you know this?

• 7:40Molly O'Shea?

  Well, she's, she's like a legend.

• 7:42Speaker 00

  Yes, Delilah After Dark.

• 7:44Molly O'Shea?

  She's the only one.

• 7:45Speaker 00

  Embarrassing to even say that. But again, I was a kid. I didn't know any better. And, um, and so then I remember like, oh, now you can, I remember the shift from AM radio to being able to stream it in the browser. And then in 2010, a friend of mine told me about a podcast. I was like, what is that? He's like, well, this show that you like, it's live stream, but if you miss the live stream, you can listen to it anytime you want. And he showed me the Apple directory. And from 2010 until 2016, when I started my first podcast, I ran through thousands of episodes. And I'm like obsessed with history. So I'd learn a ton about history and religion and sports and business and all kinds of things. And to the point where I was just like, man, I love podcasting so much and I'm learning so much from it.

• 8:26Speaker 00

  And because I've been exposed to thousands of them, I was like, I think I could do this. Like, I think I can actually make something that's interesting and better than what's out there. And so I just started doing a solo history show where it's just talking about all the books that I'm, I'm reading. And I didn't expect anybody to listen to it. I just did it because I, I felt compelled to, like, I was just, I want to try to make something. And then really fast, I did not have a large audience, but I started getting really weird messages. So like, you know, you've read through. A bunch of your reviews on Apple Podcasts like hey normally it's like hey great show or whatever. I was getting like 2000 word essays about how this podcast is changing my life and I was like, oh, I'm like a hit on something here.

• 9:09Speaker 00

  And then it took several years after that to like figure out the business model and the format and like really narrow the focus on just entrepreneurs because I was reading a bunch of different books. But I just as soon as I started, uh, started in 2016 and then I kind of snapped in 2018. I was like, I'm going to do this for the rest of my life. And there was no business model back then. I was just like, I trust that if I work on something seven days a week and I focus and put all my energy to it, I will figure out the business model. And so from that day, that that epiphany I had in 2018, I have yet to miss like a single upload. Now, what was that six years later, seven years later?

• 9:46Molly O'Shea?

  This reminds me a lot of this really iconic figure. Have you heard of Marty Supreme?

• 9:53Speaker 00

  Yes. Yes, I have.

• 9:55Molly O'Shea?

  Would you say you're the Marty Supreme of podcasters?

• 9:58Speaker 00

  Would you?

• 9:59Molly O'Shea?

  No.

• 10:00Speaker 00

  No, would you say that I'm the Marty Supreme of podcasts?

• 10:02Molly O'Shea?

  I don't know. I haven't watched the movie.

• 10:05Speaker 00

  Which part? Are you talking about the trail? Like what part specifically jumped out at you?

• 10:08Molly O'Shea?

  You tell me.

• 10:10Speaker 00

  I think there's a part in the trailer.

• 10:14Speaker 00

  And I like posted some of this on my stories and in fact, I'm friends with Chris Williamson, who's one of the biggest podcasters in the world, and he responded to the story. That was hilarious. But uh, he, he said, you know, this guy's playing ping pong or whatever. And he's like, you're going to see, he's like, you don't understand this game fills stadiums overseas. You're going to see my face on a Wheaties box. And I cut, I clipped that and then I was like, this is exactly how I feel about podcasting. I think it's inevitable. And Chris just laughed and laughed and laughed. But there is one thing that I definitely identify with where he's like, he's talking to Gwyneth Paltrow, which I think might've been like his love interest in the movie. I haven't seen it yet either.

• 10:45Molly O'Shea?

  I think it's his mom.

• 10:47Speaker 00

  No, he was definitely hitting on her.

• 10:48Molly O'Shea?

  Really?

• 10:48Speaker 00

  Trying to get her, yeah.

• 10:50Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, I should watch the movie.

• 10:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's definitely not his mom. No, no, it's definitely not his mom because he's like, he calls her on the trailer. He's like, I've never, I saw you at the Plaza yesterday. I've never talked to a movie star before. And then he's like, do you have the Daily Mail in front of you? And, and he's like, look, I'm in the newspaper. And she's like, this is you? That, that didn't give me mom vibes. That gave me romantic vibes. But she's just like, do you make any money at this little thing? And, you know, your little ping pong thing. He's like, not yet. And she goes, what, what are you gonna do if this doesn't work out? He goes, that doesn't even enter my consciousness. And that's definitely how I felt. It was just like, I have a lot of self-confidence, self-belief. It's like, if I dedicate my attention to something, I will make that thing happen in the world. It just took a lot longer than I anticipated.

• 11:30Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah. And so, okay, going through the eras and why this is the new era of podcasting. You went from one format to another. You did a solo show and now you're interviewing other people. And specifically for this new show, it's funny, but you really focus on like the world's greatest entrepreneurs. And that really reduces down to mostly billionaires. And some would say you're also the billionaire whisperer. And so now you're studying and you're talking to these people one-on-one and you're having conversations. So how did you figure out who you wanted to interview and who have you interviewed so far for people that don't have context?

• 12:08Speaker 00

  I think one thing is, I, I don't think about what I'm doing as interviewing. Okay, I think about like having conversations. Like I, one of my favorite things to do, essentially I'd work all day during the day making founders podcasts. And then at night, I'm usually hanging out with founders. I don't really have any friends that aren't founders. And we have these incredible multi-hour conversations about business and life and love and all kinds of like deep topics, like deep human topics. And I was having these conversations because founders, essentially, I would argue, has probably the most valuable audience in the world in terms of the people that listen to it. And most of the first guests, like the, the reason we came out with such really like high-quality guests, they came from my existing audience. And I was able to build a relationship with them and I spent time with them. And so if I say, hey, do you wanna, I'm launching this new thing, will you do this with me?

• 12:54Speaker 00

  They were almost, I think every single person said yes. They were very, very receptive of it. But the, the genesis of this, there's two things that happened. The genesis of this was, I already mentioned Patrick O'Shaughnessy, who's played a huge role in my life. I just released an episode with him. I was actually on the phone with him on the drive over here. And he had been pushing me for a long time because a solo history podcast is not the optimal format for this medium of podcasting. When people think of podcasting, they think of exactly what's happening right now, one person talking to another. And I am also very competitive. And I think I'm really, really, I try to be really, I try to be the best in the world at what I do and everything that I do. And I put a lot of time and energy and resources into doing that.

• 13:36Speaker 00

  And I was like, well, I actually would like to compete at the highest levels. Like, Founders has, you know, it's millions of people listen to it, but it is still relatively niche because it's like this crazy guy sitting in a room reading 407 biographies or autobiographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs and essentially just ripping through idea after idea for 45 minutes to an hour, where two people talking is so much easier to listen to. You just feel like you're just sitting in there with them. And it's just, there's a reason that that is the optimal format of like the medium. And when I, Patrick was pushing me to do this, a bunch of people said, hey, man, you're having these crazy conversations and most of the people are at dinner with me or are at these events with me and they hear the conversations we have and like, I wish you would record this. And so, but I was being pushed in that direction.

• 14:21Speaker 00

  I was like, no, it's kind of a, like it's a distraction for what I want to do. And what I realized is like, well, it's only a distraction if like, if I can somehow make this effortless, which is pick the people that you're intensely interested in and then just like when you show up, you don't know, we don't know what we're going to talk about beforehand. Like, so when I go, the genesis of this is me and Patrick were in New York and this is the first time I was meeting Daniel Ek in person. We had exchanged messages, he's the founder of Spotify, he had told me he's a big fan of the podcast, he was, he's very nice to me. Patrick had known him for several years. He'd been on Patrick's show, I think several times at this point. So when I'm having dinner, we end up talking for four hours.

• 15:03Speaker 00

  And the dinner ends, I'm getting in the car with Patrick because we're going to go back to Greenwich, where Patrick lives, I'm spending the night at his house. And the first thing he says as soon as the door shuts, he's like, you've got to record these conversations. He's like, I've known Daniel for four years. He goes, first he said, I spoke 2% of the time, which is very Patrick-like. You spoke 49% of the time, Daniel spoke 49% of the time. He goes, you got more out of him in four hours than I have in four years. He's like, no one in the world can speak to the soul of the founder like you can. You have to start recording these conversations. And that was really the genesis of like, oh, wait, I can do this. It's not a distraction. I have this crazy network that comes from the podcast. I just need a team to do everything else besides I'm picking the person I want to talk to, and I'm having the conversation in the manner that I want to have it, exactly like I want to have it.

• 15:48Speaker 00

  And the reason I say it's important to distinguish between an interview and a conversation is like every... The world does not need another, let's interview entrepreneur podcasts. And that's not my, that's not what I'm there for. When people, when this first came out, and I was like, well, I can have a very differentiated conversation because everything that Daniel's telling me, or Michael Dell's telling me, or Brad Jacobs, or any of these people telling me, I run it through all this information that I've learned over the last 10 years about how high-shoots great entrepreneurs think. And so therefore, I can create a very differentiated podcast. And so when the first few episodes dropped, they're like, I don't get it. Why is this guy speaking so much? And it's like, because it's a conversation on interview. And this is the way, I have zero energy to interview anybody. I have infinite energy to talk to smart, driven founders.

• 16:31Speaker 00

  I can do that every day for the rest of my life.

• 16:34Molly O'Shea?

  What'd you think of the pushback on it?

• 16:35Speaker 00

  There's actually an interesting philosophical topic we could talk about here. In many cases, you see this in a lot of the biographies. And then if you just, you know, study public figures anyways, you realize that a lot of the things that their greatest strengths can also be their greatest weaknesses. And the closest I have to...

• 16:56Speaker 00

  I was very skeptical my entire life because I'm not a trusting person and I think there's a good reason why I was a trusting person. I keep, you know, I'm insular by nature. I don't let new people into my life easily. I keep everybody like at an arm's distance away. Once you break through that, like I am kind of like, my hard exterior is like kind of soft. You have a little bit of this too. I, I do think it's very beneficial for you to be able to organize your thoughts with another person that you trust, that they care about you, that they, they're not transaction with you, and that they want, they have your best interests at heart. And so, um, there's this guy named Sam Hinky who plays this role in my life. In addition to like, a lot of my close friends where I, I, like, I, there's a handful of guys, maybe five, that I do trust and I talk about like, almost everything that's, that I'm going in my life. But this is much more of

• 17:40Speaker 00

  like, I, I consider Sam like a, like an older brother. He, we're friends, but like, almost like a coach, even though he wouldn't, um, even though he wouldn't like categorize it like that. He's just like, we're friends. I think you do great work and like, I care about you and I want the best things for you. And he's worried that, you know, some of the things that got me to where I am now, if I don't change, they're gonna stop me from getting where I want to go. And so, his whole thing was, um, you've got to learn to like, trust people and like, let people in. And he obviously knows that I've done that slowly but surely. He's one of them. He knows a handful of people I actually trust with, with, you know, with my life. And this also applies to business. The, me and Patrick had a multi-year deal. No paper. It was, this is what I'm gonna do, this is

• 18:24Speaker 00

  what you're gonna do, and like, we're just gonna, like, we trust each other. Uh, same thing with Rob Moore and Andrew Huberman. Like, I, we trust each other. Like, I'm clearly am changing and like, letting more people in, in, in trusting. But, the answer to your question about like, the response back, uh, like, what did I do with that, that feedback? Hinky's point to me, Sam Hinky's point to me was, You know, a normal person, when they factor in like whose opinion actually matters to them. And so like Sam's case, it's just, you know, maybe 60% of the opinions of other people that are not his own that matter to him is like, you know, his family. And then, you know, maybe his closest friends, they each get like another 5%, you know, so maybe you're up to 70, 80%.

• 19:10Speaker 00

  Maybe his dad, maybe some other people. And then maybe you get to like 95%, maybe it's like 5% of the outside world's opinion matters in terms of like what he's doing and his conduct. And he's like, with you, 99% of the opinion that you value is your own.

• 19:29Speaker 00

  And so he's like, it got you to where you probably built, you know, one of the best, one of the best podcasts in the world because you just did it the way you wanted to do it and you trusted that. But if you don't change, you don't let the right people in, you're not going to learn enough to get, it's going to limit your, the ceiling of what you can accomplish. And so I'm still at probably 96%, but it didn't bother me at all. Like I know, one thing I do know is like I probably have collected more information on podcasting than anybody else in the world. And I trust my judgment and like, I want to build things how I want to build them. And I'm fine with some people loving it and some people hating it. That doesn't bother me at all.

• 20:06Molly O'Shea?

  What have been your biggest learnings since you started?

• 20:09Speaker 00

  One of the best pieces of advice that I've gotten over and over again is most people are not like taken out by competition. Most people sabotage themselves. And one thing I did not like, Founders was a very slow, it just like compounded slowly over a decade. And then it got into something that's like big and meaningful, but it felt the same day to day to me. This one was not like that at all. The launch, one, I had a public platform. So from day one, obviously people are going to be like paying attention to what's going on. The launch video goes viral. I released the Daniel Ek episode, which we'd recorded like months earlier by accident, the same week that he says, "I'm gonna step down from CEO of Spotify." And so like, what I'm saying is what I didn't like was the, like, I just got shot out of a cannon.

• 20:54Speaker 00

  And the mistake I made for the first few days after that is like, reading the comments and everything. And what I realized is like, hey, I need to essentially mute the world and just make the products that I wanna make. I am, Stephen King has this great thing in his autobiography where he's like, "I'm not just the, the writer, I'm the first reader." And so I listen to every single podcast before it goes out. And so like, I'm, not only did I make it, but I'm the first listener. And so I needed a way to just center myself where it's like, okay, Founders is just the books that I'm intensely interested in reading. And the new show David Center by David Center, produced by David Center, is just the, the people I'm intensely interested in speaking to. And what I happen to be most interested in is I'm not, you know, we, we, we're both like around a lot of like,

• 21:39Speaker 00

  the startups and, and VCs. I'm not interested in that at all. I am, in fact, my friend Justin Mares, who, you know, is one of my closest friends, he just made an announcement that he raised a bunch of money. And I told him, I was like, "Raising money is not an accomplishment, so I'm not gonna say congratulations. Building a durable business is an accomplishment." So like, hopefully he uses money to build a durable business, but like, congratulations is not the right term here. I'm only interested in people that do, that succeed at what they're doing for a very long time. One of my biggest fears is like, you can be successful for a year, for five years, even for 10 years. And I wanna be successful until I die. I don't want to lose what I'm doing.

• 22:19Speaker 00

  And so I am, I, I optimize and I prioritize for durability over every single thing else. And so if you look at the first few guests, like, first guest has been building Spotify for 20 years. Michael Dell's been an entrepreneur for 41 years. Todd Graves has been, uh, running Raising Canes for 30 years. Brad Jacobs has been an entrepreneur for 46 years. It just goes on and on and on. Michael Ovitz, you know, for half a century. These are the people I'm most interested in speaking to because they're so much further down the road. They make me look like a child, even though I've been doing what I've been doing at a high, at hopefully, a high level for 10 years. But they, this just happened, so, um, I, I forgot, I was talking to some young founder, and I don't normally talk to a bunch of young founders.

• 22:59Speaker 00

  And I was trying to explain to him, I was like, "You have, like, all your friends are essentially like in your 20s, and you're all like, doing startups." I was in New York last week and there's a guy I'm trying to get to do his first podcast ever. He is 71 years old. He just sold his company for $60 billion. He'd been working in the company since he was 20. The amount of information that he was able to convey to me in an hour would take like a 25-year-old startup founder decades. You just can't because you haven't seen enough life. You don't know enough yet. The smartest 25-year-old is like, is a lot dumber than this 71-year-old, you know, man with 50 years of entrepreneurial

• 23:41Speaker 00

  experience. And so what I would say is like, what I've learned from them is the power of, I had that, I highly suspected that going in, but the power of this deep knowledge you only get that if you're, if you do not interrupt the compounding and you just let time carry most of the weight.

• 23:58Molly O'Shea?

  Sorcery is brought to you by Brex, the financial stack trusted by more than 30,000 companies, including one in three venture-backed startups in the US. Nearly 40% of startups fail because they run out of cash. Brex is literally built to help founders avoid that. Unlike traditional banks that let your money sit idle, chipping away at it with fees, Brex is designed to help you spend smarter and move faster. Their all-in-one solution combines checking, treasury, and FDIC protection into one powerful account. You can send and receive money globally at lightning speeds, get 20 times the standard FDIC coverage through their partner banks, and even high yield from day one. With same-day and even same-hour

• 24:40Molly O'Shea?

  liquidity, access your funds anytime. Companies like Scale AI, DoorDash, ServiceTitan, Hims, Anthropic, Flexport, Robinhood, and Plaid. Trust and use Brex. Start today at brex.com/sorcery. That's B-R-E-X.com/sorcery. So I was thinking about this. Because you're going after like such, I would say like a niche set of guests, I mean, I joke around, you're just interested in old people.

• 25:13Molly O'Shea?

  I'm interested in like, obviously, like, a lot of tech and like emerging companies. Like, we do a lot of their announcements, because it's it's really good hook for getting the longer story out of them and everything.

• 25:25Speaker 00

  I bet you're not doing, like, fundraising announcements next year, though.

• 25:28Molly O'Shea?

  I'm barely doing it now. Yeah.

• 25:31Speaker 00

  Because the value in the term, like, the value in that.

• 25:33Molly O'Shea?

  It was an amazing product market fit over the summer and, like, finding that conversion.

• 25:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, you did a good job using it to get to the next.

• 25:40Molly O'Shea?

  Really, really good. Graduated from that. I will only do it now if they've raised over a billion dollars. So, thank you to Zach Dell for your billion-dollar announcement, and same with SciQuantum.

• 25:51Speaker 00

  I love Zach. I spend a bunch of time with him, yeah.

• 25:54Molly O'Shea?

  It was, okay, so I, I'd obviously listened to the founders' episode on Michael Dell and then that podcast too, but in preparation for the Zach Dell interview, I, you know, I listened to that. And after our first interview, because he raised back-to-back funding, it was pretty insane. After our first interview, I was like, holy crap, that is his, that is his father's son, if that's the right term. They're definitely connected.

• 26:18Speaker 00

  Zach's going after it.

• 26:19Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, you will.

• 26:20Speaker 00

  He's trying to match and exceed his father.

• 26:22Molly O'Shea?

  Well, you can, you can totally tell the principles, like, the values, how wholesome he is, all of that kind of stuff. So, why did you choose Michael Dell as your second interview?

• 26:33Speaker 00

  I think Michael Dell's autobiography is, like, one of the best autobiographies written by a founder ever. He's also been unbelievably, like, generous to me. Like, he had sent me a DM, like, years ago, like, I don't know, 2023, before almost anybody knew who I was. And he's like, you, I think he said, like, you're, you're really good at this, your podcasts are A++ and I think there was, like, little trophy emojis. And then, um, when I went to meet him for the first time in Austin, this is before we recorded together, we spent, like, five hours talking. And, like, what is an hour of that guy's time worth? Like, it's inconceivable that he would be so generous with me. And then I brought the book along with me so he can see, like, I mean, he listens to podcasts, as you should know, but, like, the effort that I put into what I'm doing, like, this is not a game to me. Like, I'm trying to be the best in the world at what I'm doing.

• 27:18Speaker 00

  And for him to, like, I didn't even see that he signed it and went back to Malibu and, like, two days later, opened the book and he's just like, David, I think you're, you're a master at your craft. And he's, like, linked in that line before, he's, like, tweeted, he's just been unbelievably generous to me. In fact, he might not even know this, but I have this deep, multi-year partnership.

• 27:40Speaker 00

  And the way that came about-

• 27:42Molly O'Shea?

  Who knew that? Wow. Surprise.

• 27:45Speaker 00

  You're lucky I didn't wear a shirt. I have tattoos.

• 27:49Molly O'Shea?

  I don't know what that is, so it's okay.

• 27:52Speaker 00

  The way this came about, though, this was very interesting, is one of my very close friends is one of the founders. We were friends way before we worked together, and he called me one day, and he's just like, dude, I was at Michael Dell's house, he didn't know we were friends, and he couldn't stop talking about your podcast. He's like, I know ten to fifteen billionaires personally that listen to your podcast. We've got to find a way to work together. And this guy has a bunch of stuff going on, so we just went through the list because like, now I'm talking business podcasts, this might be like seventeen hours. But basically, for these kind of audiences, it's like you need a high LTV, high customer acquisition costs, and price discrimination. And so like, when you apply that to this list of companies, it was obvious like,

• 28:38Speaker 00

  it was the perfect fit. And then we, you know, we did this like, deep, deep partnership, and it hasn't, it could not have gone better than what has happened in the last like, year and a half. And, you know, we have a multi-year, like, I'm with them for years and years and years. They're the presenting sponsors of the new podcast. I was just in their office with Rob Moore, and Rob asked Eric Gleyman, the CEO, he's like, what's your podcast strategy? He just pointed at me, like, David, that's our podcast strategy. And so Dell's just been, I just can't believe like, somebody like that, one of the greatest entrepreneurs ever, you know, running, starting a company nineteen years, and he's sixty-one, still running it to this day. Unbelievably generous with me. And so I just DM'd him because I admire him. He's like, one of my heroes.

• 29:18Speaker 00

  Like, I don't feel like, I deeply admire what he did, and when I see like, the scope of what your life can be, I'm like, I want that. I want what he did. Like, this is incredible. I don't want to jump out, jump around. I don't want to start, scale, sell. Like, I want to do the same thing forever and be really good at it. And then we can talk about some of the lessons I learned from him. And so I just shot him a DM. I was like, would you do this? He's like, yeah. Immediately, he's like, let's do it. And then the crazy thing is, we flew with an entire crew, because to jumpstart this, like, these guys are so hard to schedule with. These masters of the universe kind of people. I was like, I will come to you at a moment's notice.

• 29:56Speaker 00

  And so we went up setting up in his office, in the conference room right next to his office in, I think it's Round Rock, right outside of Austin. And what I love about Michael, this is important too, is the only filter I trust is time. And I like people that have the same people around them for a long time. Because again, you can, we're in a, the game of startups and VC is just so dirty. There's so many liars and sociopaths and just very dangerous people that I've seen, you know, in the last decade. I do not like a lot of this behavior. And so I always look like, does this person have people around them for a very long time? And so I think Dell's head of comms has been there for like 26 years. His assistant has been there for 25

• 30:39Speaker 00

  years. I heard him Stephanie, she's so sweet. And I was sitting here talking to her before recording and she goes, I don't know who you are, but you're obviously very special to Michael. I go, why are you saying that? And she goes, he doesn't like attention. He does not, he could be being on a million podcasts every day if he wanted to. Anybody would want him on their podcast. Goes, he says no to all of these requests. And if he does say yes, he gives them 30 minutes. He goes, he blocked out two hours for you. And so again, like he's just, I'm deeply, I'm deeply proud that somebody like Michael would find value in my work. And then I just respect him. And so when I get to talk to him, you know, I get just essentially get to sit at the feet of like a master and just

• 31:21Speaker 00

  be like, you just, I just listen. I just shut up and listen the whole time.

• 31:25Molly O'Shea?

  Well, so what were the key lessons you learned from him?

• 31:28Speaker 00

  The beauty of like the infinite game. And so his whole thing, like, you know, at one point, he had more money than the market cap of his company. And it's just like, if you read his autobiography, it's like, how is one person this good at every single thing that they do? And so I think the most important thing from him is, well, let me give the advice he gave me when, before we recorded, this is like probably, I don't know, 60 days before we recorded. And I've told you this too, because like you're off to a fantastic start. Most people are not taken up by competition. Most people sabotage themselves. And so, you know, he was telling me story after story of all these people that, you know, were had. They were making 500 million a year in revenue and they were doing all this other things. It's like they just sabotaged themselves.

• 32:11Speaker 00

  And sometimes it's, you know, drugs, sometimes it's, uh, they go, they go to, uh, they go to sleep on a win and wake up with a loss. So like, oh, I can like chill now. I've made it. It's like, no, you've never made it. And so I think like, making sure you're not doing anything to sabotage yourself was one of the most important lessons. And then if you really talk to Michael, it's like, what motivates him? He is a very generative person. It's not, he is, he does not have a negative fuel source. He looks at everything like a giant puzzle. And it's just like, well, how do I build a new AI company? How do I reimagine? You know, this, this company is, I don't know, 60,000 or 100,000 employees. Like, how do I do this? How do I make it so that the company can survive this next technological revolution? Uh, we talked a lot about like, what happens when you start making money?

• 32:55Speaker 00

  Like, he's been making money since the 1980s, you know? So then it's like, oh, then I should probably learn about this investing thing. Like, what do I do? He starts this crazy merchant bank. He just, I think that's like one of the most important things. If you just, you can kind of step back. You're gonna have crazy problems in your, in any business. And he's just like, oh, that's not a problem. That's a puzzle. And I think reframing that in your mind, it's like, problems are inevitable. Like, just take a step back, like, oh, okay, well, problems are there to be solved. Like, we can figure out how to solve them. So what do we do next?

• 33:26Molly O'Shea?

  That reminds me a lot of your conversation, I said conversation, not interview, by the way, uh, with Brad Jacobs, because he is also all about embracing problems. By the way, amazing, like, he put you in his new book. What was that?

• 33:43Speaker 00

  Okay, so Brad Jacobs is a funny guy.

• 33:48Speaker 00

  Probably the most energetic person I've ever been around. He's 68 or 70 years old. So Brad Jacobs has started, I think, eight now, eight separate billion dollar companies. And he, for a long time, he was like my LinkedIn reply guy.

• 34:00Molly O'Shea?

  What?

• 34:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I gotta tell you the story. It was a hilarious story. So the first podcast he ever did, I think he was interviewed by Patrick Shonzie on Invest Like the Best, okay? And if you, they recorded in, Patrick's got a studio in New York and he's got a studio in Greenwich and obviously-

• 34:16Molly O'Shea?

  Shout out to Connecticut.

• 34:17Speaker 00

  Shout out Connecticut. And Brad lives in Greenwich and tries to avoid the city like a plague. So he recorded in the Greenwich studio. If you go upstairs in this like house, this office house that Patrick has, the entire upstairs attic is like, uh, like, looks like a library. And most of those books were covered on Founders. Or not most, but like half the books were covered on Founders. And so he has like references to Founders everywhere. And Patrick calls me after that happened and he goes, dude, I was just with Brad Jacobs. You know who this is? And I was like, yeah, he sent me like his, his new book yet. This is years ago. So this is in the book you're talking about, which we'll get to in a second. And he goes, you know the Founders guy? I love Founders. And so he starts sending me messages that he's like, I'm addicted to your, uh, your, your book. I think he calls them book reviews.

• 35:00Speaker 00

  I was like, that is kind of funny. I kind of do a book report for a living. Like what you do is like in elementary school, I do that for, for a living. And, um, so we start talking and he invites me to go to Breakfast's house. And I had this email newsletter that I sent inconsistently, but I should, where essentially what I do is take the top 10 sentences or paragraphs of every book that I read and just send, send that out, right? As like a, you know, here's these 10 ideas. And then if you want to listen to the episode, here's the episode. I get to Brad Jacobs' house and it was my personal website at the time that now has been updated. He printed out my, I've done this for, I don't know, a couple hundred books. He printed out my entire public website.

• 35:42Speaker 00

  And I get to his house. First of all, he's one of the craziest houses you've ever been to, as you can imagine. We're gonna have breakfast. It's me, Patrick, Brad's comms guy and Brad. And the table is like 40 feet long. And I was like, what is going on? Who is, who else is coming to this breakfast? And next to Brad, as he's like sipping his coffee, is my website. It's like this, it's like 12 inches thick, thick. And he's just going through and reading them. And I had met a couple of people that worked for Brad and they told me that they, he makes them do that at the office. He like prints them out and they have to like go through and read all of these. So I do this episode on Brad's first book, which is How to Make a Few Billion Dollars. That episode goes viral. Like it, probably has a million people listen to it.

• 36:25Speaker 00

  And if you're in PE, everybody knew who Brad Jakus was. But my audience is like entrepreneurs and business owners and investors all over. So then he becomes like, I ran into him at a birthday party, my friend Rick's birthday party in Miami a few months later. And he walks up to me and goes, I love you. And I go, why? He goes, you made me famous. I go, I definitely did not. Like, your book, first of all, great title. Second of all, you're a wild man. Like, you're this crazy character. Like, you're that, you're so differentiated, you can't help but notice them. Even if you don't like them, you're just like, you're gonna pay attention to that guy. And so then, when I had breakfast with him, he's like, yeah, everybody says I should write another book. But I only had one book in me. And I seen him a few months later, he was like, I wrote another book. So I was like, all right, send me an early copy, like, I wanna read this.

• 37:10Speaker 00

  So he sends it to me, but he doesn't tell me what he puts in it. And this is, we'd already recorded an episode of the new show. So I saw him a bunch of times. I just saw, I was at this event at the Four Seasons of Miami Beach, like, a few weeks ago. Like, I see him kind of frequently. And I'm going through the book to make an episode of Founders on it. And I'm just like, reading, he's talking about sources of capital, right? Because the first two chapters is all about what you just said. It's like, he was, he had a very unhealthy mind, and he found the tools necessary to transform an unhealthy mind into a healthy mind. Because like, if you have an unhealthy mind, it's going, you're not gonna reach your potential. And you can't build a great company if you're so messed up in the head and you're stressed and you, you can't handle what's going on. So he's like, well, I need tools so I can have, I can operate from a place of like, abundance and love.

• 37:55Speaker 00

  And he's like, really into like, meditation, everything else. And so I'm reading, then, the rest of the book is how to do rollups, how to do acquisitions. And he's done 500 different acquisitions in his lifetime. He's raised, I don't know, 50 billion of capital. Like, I mean, his resume is freaking incredible. And he gets the sources of capital, and then he talks about the fact that I like being a public company. I think these companies are staying private too long. There's all these other benefits of being a public company. And then we get to the point where he's just like, his new company started as a public company. And he's like, two, I'm reading the book, not knowing this is about to happen. And he goes, and then I found a different source of capital, which was two of the top 20

• 38:40Speaker 00

  Shareholders in the new company came because David Senra profiled me on his founders podcast. And I'm like, what?

• 38:49Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 38:50Speaker 00

  So he had told me that in private, but the best, John, our mutual friend, John Coogan, said that was the best podcast endorsement of all time. So when I went to record with him in his house in Greenwich, I, we, we traveled like a five camera setup. It was like, we have an army that comes with us. And these are just like, these aren't business guys. These are just like camera guys and like podcast guys. And he goes, uh, he goes, I love David. I raised 750 million dollars out of his audience and I didn't even have to pay him a fee. And he laughed, he like slapped his knee and laughed. And I don't know anything about investment banking, so I call a friend of mine, he's like, oh yeah, that, like, that saved him quite a bit of money. Um, and so that's what he's talking about. It's like one of my, two people didn't know who he was. They heard my episode on his first book.

• 39:35Speaker 00

  One put in 400 million, one put in 350 million and then joined his board. And they told Brad how they learned about him. And so then he put in the book.

• 39:44Molly O'Shea?

  Damn.

• 39:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:47Molly O'Shea?

  And I have to ask for a fee next time.

• 39:49Speaker 00

  No, never. No, because I just want to be friends. I don't, I don't need anything.

• 39:52Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 39:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:53Molly O'Shea?

  Well, I have like two tracks in my mind right now that I'm like spinning off of, of this. One, the fact that he is like so obsessed with founders and that is like a common theme that I hear through these conversations that you're having on the new show. One of them was with Michael Ovitz and like, I think the first time you met, you were on the phone or you were with Patrick or someone like that and like.

• 40:16Speaker 00

  Do you want me to tell you a story?

• 40:16Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, tell me the story.

• 40:18Speaker 00

  So, uh, there's actually an interesting, Ovitz has got, has given me really good advice too, that I think is really important. We'll come back to it, but like you need people in your life that tell you the truth. Because if you think about Ovitz. I mean, when he was, he was, he was in contact with like 200 people a day when he was, when he was building CAA. He's probably talked to thousands of people over his lifetime. Spent a bunch of time with maybe, I don't know, 500, 800, probably even more than that on like the dinner level or like a few hour level. And, you know, he's basically got three friends. And one of them is one of my closest friends, this guy named Rick Gerson. And I asked Ovid, I guess I'll tell you that story first before I go to how I, how I met him.

• 41:01Speaker 00

  And I was like, you know, I always wanna know why people choose who like, Ovid's is a legend. Well, you know, an absolute legend, like, how do you choose who you're gonna let into your life? Who you're gonna get access to, who you're gonna see over and over again? It's not just like, oh, yeah, we had lunch one time. It's like, no, you've built a friendship with this guy over two decades, like, what is it about? And so I was asking about this and, you know, obviously, some level of intelligence, like, well, Rick's really smart. He's really serious, but he's like, he's one of the few people in my life that'll tell me the truth. And what Ovid's was saying is like, it, it could, some people are so hypersensitive to criticism. That if you tell them something negative, right?

• 41:43Speaker 00

  They might push you out of their life, they might discount it, where he's like, I know he'll tell me the truth and he wants the best for me. He's not saying it to like hurt my feelings, to insult me, like, we're way past that. And he thinks it's really important, so, uh, me and Rick go to the same spot.

• 42:00Speaker 00

  And we have breakfast all the time together. And his phone was on the table and we're just sitting there talking about the stuff we talk about, which is, you know, entrepreneurship, investing, reading books, like the same stuff that, history. We're two giant nerds and we just read all the time, so these are the basis of our conversations. And I had known who Ovid's was, I, I did an episode on, he's like episode like 55 or something, like, you're talking about eight years ago, I read. I think Michael Ovitz's is, uh, Who Is Michael Ovitz's Autobiography is one of the most important entrepreneur autobiographies I've ever read because, or ever written. Because he puts in all the bad stuff, all the regrets, all the mistakes he made, all the, the, the way he destroyed relationships.

• 42:41Speaker 00

  Just, it's very valuable, you essentially read that book and you have a guy that has four decades of experience, it's very wise, saying, hey, I did this, this idea worked out really good. I did that, don't do that, that caused a lot of pain and I kinda sabotaged myself there, so. Phone's on the table, it rings and it says Michael Ovitz. I'm like, oh shit. I was like, I know who that guy is. And I don't even know if I knew they were friends at that point. And he picks it up on speakerphone and Rick's like, hey, I'm actually sitting here with a good friend of mine. You might know who he is. His name's David Center. He does this podcast called Founders. Pause. I listened to four of them yesterday. That's the first time I ever heard Obits' voice. And like, I listened to four of them yesterday. He was in like St. Bart's and he really meant it. Cause a lot of people, me and you have gone through this before. We've talked about the past.

• 43:27Speaker 00

  You meet people who are always like, I love your podcast. I'm like, yeah, I'm sure you do.

• 43:30Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, I just saw a clip.

• 43:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, some of them definitely don't listen. Some of them do, but like, everybody wants to flower to you. So it's like, okay, well, thank you. No, he's just like rattling off like stories from the episodes. He's talking about Cornelius Vanderbilt and all this other stuff. And, um, and so then we just became friends. Uh, we've had like, he's again, somebody that has taken an interest in me because he gets value out of my work. And just gives me guidance, even if I don't listen to what he says in many cases, like sometimes the one time he got upset. Where like, he's like, I invited you to dinner. Cause I have, he didn't say, but basically like had a plan for my life. And I'm like, oh, okay. Like, do I have any input here?

• 44:12Speaker 00

  And he lays it out. Now, to his credit, this is right before I didn't, I was already working on this show, but I didn't announce it. And to his credit, he had correctly identified the weaknesses in my previous business model, how to take it to the next level. He had repped Charlie Rose, which he didn't even know was my basis for what I'm doing. Like I was gonna do this generation's Charlie Rose. He lays it out for 20 minutes. Exactly what I should do, which almost verbatim with the plan I came up with. And I was like, Michael, it's pretty impressive. I'm already doing this. And I explained it to him and he goes, oh, so I didn't, you didn't, you didn't need this dinner. I was like, dude, stop. Like, I just wanna hang out. Um, and then the thing about him is I just wanna keep him as a friend. Cause he, he's like offered to like help me and rap. I'm like, Michael, you're a shark.

• 44:57Speaker 00

  You forgot I read your book. I know who you are. And the reason he's taken an interest in me is because he's like, I know all the other podcasters. He goes, there's nobody like you and me and you are the same. And that is like, that's really nice. And that's exactly why we will not be working together.

• 45:13Molly O'Shea?

  What do you think is the biggest mistake of most podcasters?

• 45:17Speaker 00

  They don't actually love it. So the, the reason goes back to like, I go around and collecting like all the information on, on podcasters is like, one, this is a market, a, an industry full of second rate talent. It started out as excessively low status and you've, me and you've had a bunch of conversations on podcasting and I think.

• 45:39Molly O'Shea?

  I know I'm nervous to talk to you because I feel like you're going to tell everyone.

• 45:43Speaker 00

  What do you mean?

• 45:43Molly O'Shea?

  I feel you, you go around collecting information. I'm, I'm coming from the VC world. Everyone is like really transactional.

• 45:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, but this is another, okay, so there's a couple of mistakes people make here. Uh, there's some podcasters that view podcasting as like zero sum or like fix sum or whatever the term is.

• 46:01Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 46:01Speaker 00

  It's the most positive something in the world.

• 46:03Molly O'Shea?

  Totally.

• 46:03Speaker 00

  We're not, I'm more competitive than any other podcast on the planet and I don't treat any other podcasters as, as competition. It's like you're, you're, you're not thinking about this clearly and, and when you do that, other podcasters know and then they stop talking to you because you're a weirdo.

• 46:15Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 46:16Speaker 00

  And so the, the analogy I have there is like, it's much more, I would prefer us to all be like filmmakers. And so like if, I've done a bunch of, um, episodes on, on filmmakers like George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, Christopher Nolan, Jim Cameron. What is so fascinating is so many of them bef- got their start together. They spent a lot of time together. They were sharing ideas together. So like, I think the day that, um, Star Wars came out, George Lucas was like driving around with Steven Spielberg. And I think it was the same thing like the day Jaws came out, they were together and they would, they would preview each other's movies. And essentially they just shared information because if you go watch Jaws one day and that doesn't affect George Lucas because you can go watch Star Wars the next day.

• 46:59Speaker 00

  If you listen to one of Molly O'Shea's podcasts today and then later on you listen to mine, like you're not taking anything from me. So what are you guys doing? And I just think it's a lot smarter. I ju- I just went, um, I was off the grid for like two days with like six of the biggest podcasters in the world. And nobody was weird. Like, we were talking about revenue, ads, how much you're spending for equipment, how you're thinking about this, what your frequency is. And like, at the end of those conversations, everybody gets better. It doesn't make a difference. So, one, one of the thing, the earned secret that I had was, I went into this because I loved it. And Pete, that, a lot of really talented people didn't because they saw it as low status. I don't even think about the outside world. So, I didn't even, like, I know, I'm

• 47:43Speaker 00

  not autistic, but

• 47:45Molly O'Shea?

  I wasn't saying you were.

• 47:47Speaker 00

  I saw your face. But like, I just was so obsessed with what I'm doing and loved it that I didn't, I just thought, okay, if I love this thing, I can transfer my love and passion infection, infectious, uh, passion for this, to like, everybody else. And the secret that I think you've discovered, as I like, share more information with you, is just like, oh, it's like, the reverse. It's like, the highest status thing you could do because I get access to people that, the startup founder raised a hundred million dollars, couldn't, they wouldn't even talk to them.

• 48:14Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 48:15Speaker 00

  Like, I get access to the craziest people in the world because they benefit from my work. And it's not like, a transactional relationship. Like, they invite you to their house, you go on vacation, you have intense conversations with them, you literally become friends with them because you have the same interests and they, they're, like, you, you make yourself easy to understand. So, I think, one is, most talented people don't go into because, from the outside, it looks low status. I, I would like to encourage that, uh, miss, like, that mistaken, uh, belief as much as I can. Two, uh, the people that do do it, their second-rate talent, second-rate work ethic, and three, they all quit. And so, I think, when I think about you, you're one of, I don't know, you're easily in the top

• 48:59Speaker 00

  ten of like, the hardest-working podcasters that I know. Like, and you're in it, I think you just said, uh, you tweeted, like, you're four months into this, full-time?

• 49:07Molly O'Shea?

  Full-time, yeah.

• 49:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, so like,

• 49:09Molly O'Shea?

  Crazy.

• 49:09Speaker 00

  It's obvious what you should be doing. It's like, just keep doing what you're doing and don't sabotage yourself and don't stop. And part of that is, goes back to the Brad Jacobs thing, is when you're finished, like, keeping You're gonna, as you keep getting, I was just on the phone with Andrew Huberman about this this morning. Cause I'm going through this huge inflection point and like, people run into me and know me now, not even from Founders. They don't even know what Founders is, is from the new show. And having somebody like Andrew in my corner, like I say, hey, I've just, I've been through what you're gonna go through. Like here's the pitfalls you have to avoid and here's like what to expect and like just be careful with this. So your biggest thing is like managing as a way higher profile. And your stuff is, can be real spiky. That Karp thing took over the entire internet. And so your thing is like-

• 49:53Molly O'Shea?

  Until Bill Ackman tweeted, can I meet you? Or may I meet you?

• 49:58Speaker 00

  Yes, there you go.

• 49:58Molly O'Shea?

  That ruined my spike.

• 50:00Speaker 00

  But your, your thing is like really obvious is I, I do think you realize how great a job this is. And your biggest thing is just like, what I always say, you're just laying bricks. Like, don't try to think what's gonna happen next year. It doesn't matter. It's like, what's, what can I do today? And we make another podcast? Cool. I'm gonna lay another brick. Then I'll record another review, lay another brick. I'll get better at, you know, my lighting, my cameras, the way I promote my podcasts and do everything else. And that's all you have to do. You just don't interrupt the compounding. Like your path is so clear. Me and Patrick were just talking about this on, on the way over here. Cause he was asking what I was doing. I was like, I'm gonna do Molly's show.

• 50:35Molly O'Shea?

  Did he ask if you were gonna walk around?

• 50:38Speaker 00

  No, but he did think that was like, again, you, you, you did something that was differentiated. And I did tell him, I was like, now I think everybody's calling her like, give me the Karp.

• 50:47Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, can I have this Karp special, please? I'd like a walking tour.

• 50:51Speaker 00

  But remember, you sent me an early copy of the Karp episode.

• 50:55Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 50:56Speaker 00

  And I watched it and I was like, that's your best episode. This thing's gonna rip. Do you remember this conversation?

• 51:01Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 51:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. It was obvious. I was like, oh, this is like very interesting. It's gonna help with retention. Like, and it's fascinating.

• 51:06Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, between that and the clips and then the viral things off of that. Eliana over there, who's amazing, the Palantir team is just amazing. They think we probably easily reached 50 million impressions from that two week period. So it's probably more now, but it's just in crazy. And by the way, a good differentiation between all of this is like, and everything that you're saying about creation is more on the artistry of it. I'm not trying to create things to go viral. That's a cool like aftereffect of just a natural, authentic personality. I have a weird personality. And sometimes I'm like super sarcastic. And then I pretend I don't know that Jack Altman is related to Sam Altman and it goes viral.

• 51:44Speaker 00

  This is, um, you did that like birthday tweet?

• 51:49Speaker 00

  Where you were talking about like you you've been working like so hard at building sorcery that you you barely like paid attention to your own birthday. Do you remember this?

• 51:57Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, yeah, I forgot. Yeah.

• 51:59Speaker 00

  And then I remember reading it and obviously like we were having conversations about your podcast. And I think like you correctly identified like the most important part, which is some of the I think a basis of some of the conversations we had, just like podcast goes back to your previous question, what are the mistakes that podcasts make? Like, they don't think about differentiation. You're a founder. Your podcast just happens to be a podcast, or excuse me, your product just happens to be a podcast. I don't understand why more podcasters don't think like founders. And so if you just say, hey, I'm an entrepreneur, I'm building this business, I love it, this is my product. What would any, what standard advice would anybody give you? It's like you needed some form of differentiation. So what is differentiation for a podcaster?

• 52:41Speaker 00

  Being who you actually are. You are like a goofy, funny, like awkward person. I don't, you know, I'm saying this in like a nice way. And I told you that. And it's in that tweet where it's just like, show more of yourself.

• 52:52Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 52:52Speaker 00

  Like you're gonna, you're gonna be a public figure. You have to have the confidence to be like, okay, this is who I am. This is actually, I was having private conversations with a bunch of other like high profile founders recently around this. Like, there's some founders that do excellent job in having like cult-like followings, which I think the best podcasts are definitely. I founders has a cult-like following. And part of that is you have to show your authentic self. So like Elon, tons of people hate him, but tons of people love him because of his authentic self. Karp, tons of people hate him, tons of people love him, but he's who he is all the time. He says crazy, you know, stuff. Dana White does a really good job at this.

• 53:37Speaker 00

  And I think podcasters should be the same way. It's like, man, I'm not for everybody. This isn't, you're not, there's no value in building like a very vanilla audience. They have to be there for you. And so I think the one form of differentiation for a podcast is just like be who you are. And you can therefore make your job easier because you can be who you are forever. But if you're playing some kind of role, like you have some kind of mask, then That you're gonna slip up one day and like and then people like, oh, she wasn't who I thought she was.

• 54:03Molly O'Shea?

  And then some of, I mean, I don't want to comment too much on other podcasts, but some of them have just like negative bends to themselves because they see other things and they're like, I don't want to do that. And here's what I'm doing because I'm going to get into da- dangerous territory if I go further on that.

• 54:17Speaker 00

  I I would, I would ignore, I I I pay like, I would ignore.

• 54:24Speaker 00

  I thi- I think it, it's like Weekend has a line where he's like, the competition, don't even listen.

• 54:28Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 54:29Speaker 00

  Like, same thing.

• 54:30Molly O'Shea?

  Competition is for losers, Peter Thiel.

• 54:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know, but like, I I think, yeah, there are some podcasters that are just like paying attention to every little thing everybody else does. Like, I want to know how you're building your business, how you look at it, like, your, the the the philosophy behind what you're doing, just like a founder. Like, I want to know like why you're doing what you're doing and how you're doing it. I think it's very fascinating, but I don't care what other podcasts are doing. I'm just gonna do it the exact same way that I want to do it.

• 54:54Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, speaking of business, you mentioned you want to build a show like Charlie Rose. What does that mean?

• 55:03Speaker 00

  So, I always think about this, goes back to differentiation. So, let's back up. I think episode number six of the new show was James Dyson. That was one of the best days of my entire life. Because James Dyson, his first, out of all, all the four hundred and plus biographies of entrepreneurs I read, his first autobiography called Against the Odds is by far my number one recommendation. Everybody's like, give me like a top ten list. I was like, no, I don't have a top ten. Listen to all of them over and over again. But if you want one, go find this hard to find book and read it over and over again. I've read it, I don't know, at least five times. I read his second autobiography at least twice. I read his History of Great Inventions, this encyclopedia that he wrote. I've lost, watched all his interviews. He gave me the motivation to not quit.

• 55:44Speaker 00

  When I was going through a very difficult time, five and a half years of struggle before I built the podcast into something that was like sustainable and then it grew from there. He did fourteen years of struggle. And the whole time I was like, this guy did five, fourteen years of struggle, five thousand one hundred twenty seven prototypes. He is failing his entire life and he didn't give up. I can like persevere through this. And so, it was very important. He was the number one person in the world that I wanted to be and he couldn't have been better. So sweet and witty and impressive. He owns one of the, he was a hundred, he's seventy years old. He owns one of the hundred. He owns a hundred percent of one of the most valuable companies in the world and he doesn't give, he doesn't care about money. First of all, he's like made way more money he'll ever spend in lifetimes. He just cares about building the best products possible.

• 56:27Speaker 00

  And so his mantra is differentiation and retention of total control. And that's exactly what I try to do with founders is like I own all of it. I turned down crazy acquisition offers, crazy investment offers, like nope, it's differentiated and retain control. And so when I think of podcasts, if I'm gonna start a new podcast, I wanna like look at the podcast landscape and I wanna see what, where's the white space? I don't, I'm not gonna do anything else that somebody else is doing. And this is like, we have mutual friends in John and Jordy, TPBN, and they will tell you.

• 57:00Molly O'Shea?

  What is it called? It's TB.

• 57:01Speaker 00

  T, I always say it wrong. T B P N. They say I say T P B N.

• 57:07Molly O'Shea?

  T B B B.

• 57:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, whatever. Tech, whatever. I don't even know what the acronym is for. John and Jordy Show. So I'd been, I thought John Coogan was a generational media talent and I've.

• 57:16Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, he's exceptional.

• 57:18Speaker 00

  And I've told him this for years. We've been working, trying, like I've been trying to help him now that he needs my help, trying to find the right format. Cause when I found him and he was doing documentaries, I was like, dude, your documentaries are incredible. You're, he did this video called The History of Silicon Valley. And I had read at least by this time forty books on that topic. And I learned stuff in that video I didn't know. So that was like, oh, this guy's serious. Cause I go through every kind of creator, I hate that word, but every kind of podcaster documentary is like, I didn't know. It's, they're so bad that the good ones, you can't help but notice them. And so I was like, dude, you should move to podcasting because documentaries take too long. The business model sucks. You have no idea the kind of business that you can build over here.

• 58:00Speaker 00

  And you know, he, not many people know this. He did this podcast. I won't even say the name because I don't want people looking it up. Cause I don't think he's proud of it. It was like, almost like a modern version of founders. Solo show, deep dives on an individual. I flew, flew with him to Greenwich, tried to convince Patrick to sign up. Patrick said, no. I was like, you're crazy. We gotta sign this guy. And then, um, and then he just went through a couple of different variations. And he, one time he asked me to do a show with him and it was gonna be a show covering like tech news. I was like, I don't even, I don't care about tech news at all. I don't pay attention to what's going on in the world. I read history and I make podcasts. Like I'm the wrong person for this.

• 58:39Speaker 00

  And so the white space there was like, I was, and he knew this too. I was like, somebody should build a Pat McAfee of business. You can take an idea that's working somewhere else and just apply it to a different niche. And I was like, it's, you know, you live stream it. Um, you have a co-host, you can do call-ins. Essentially, if you look at what TPBN evolved into, it looks a lot like the Pat McAfee of business and no one knew how lucrative these shows could get. Uh, Pat McAfee's presenting sponsor for one year. Uh, they paid thirty million, so a single company for a single ad slot for a single year to a single podcaster paid thirty million dollars. So it's like, okay, well, that's just one. How much money do you think that show makes? He's like, he's got fifteen hours of content that he's making every week. You can have, the thing's gonna print cash.

• 59:24Speaker 00

  And so that was differentiated. And so it comes out and obviously did what it did. You have somebody super talented, super differentiated, so someone that takes it very, very seriously, doesn't do anything else. And I'm not, you know, I, I am surprised at how big it got, but I'm not surprised that they were successful. And so I was like, well, what, what, what else is missing? And forever, like Charlie Rose, younger people know who he is, but everybody, like, he was the place where the elite people in the world went to have intelligent conversations. And their conversations usually were an hour long, five days a week. And so my idea was just like, where are all the elite people in the world capable of having intelligent conversation multiple times a week? That is what I'm going to. Right now, we're doing twice a month.

• 1:00:09Speaker 00

  Then we're working up to one a week and then wanna do multiple times a week. And I was like, all I have to do is like, this isn't rocket science, David. Just build this generation's Charlie Rose. Now, the difference is, he was much more of an interviewer, where I have, I think, a very unique data set in my head that can allow me to produce something completely differentiated. So it's like, and I, interview's not interesting to me, like I just told you. It's like, but having conversations with these elite people and learning from them is very, like, I don't do drugs, but the way I feel after I have these conversations, it's like I'm, I'm high on life. I can't sleep. After these conversations, because these people fill me with such energy. And I'm just learning so much in such a short amount of time.

• 1:00:54Speaker 00

  And so, yeah, the idea was like, okay, well, who else could make Charlie Rose? It's not there. We agree it's not there, right? Okay, so it's not there. So who else could make it? And it's like, probably had to be an existing podcaster. And so you go through like, who's a business podcaster? You just, there's not that many that actually people pay attention to. It's like, oh, no one, by the time, I'll be so far ahead by the time no one will be able to catch me.

• 1:01:15Molly O'Shea?

  So what's the business model behind that?

• 1:01:17Speaker 00

  I mean, media, you need frequency. And so like, there, founders is a crazy business. People understood, like, the business behind it. But I, I'm always going to be constrained because to make an episode of founders, I have to read an entire book. It's fifty-two, fifty-two books a year is still a lot. Maybe I could make seventy, but I can't do two hundred and fifty, I can't do two hundred. Where conversations, I could have a different conversation every night. And people are going to find it interesting. Even if we record, and I think we're going to get better on the editing. But let's say record for two and a half hours with almost anybody on the planet that's an interesting entrepreneur. There's going to be an hour, an hour of interesting stuff in there for sure. So it's just a frequency. And then what we're understanding, and this is where I think we have this advantage as business podcasters,

• 1:02:02Speaker 00

  which is the, the business that you've built around your show, is when you have a high value audience, right? You're not going on number on screen, go up. That's, that's how no other podcasters do it. Where if you're selling on a CP basis, it makes a difference. So I will make more, proportionally more money if I have two million people than if I have one point five million. In business podcasting, it's who does that number represent? Michael Dell, listening to your podcast, is worth a mil, ten million normal Americans. Like, so what, most of the companies that come to us is like, do you want these kind of people to know that you exist? And then what happens is it helps with recruiting, it helps with customers. It helps Brad Jacobs pulled seven hundred fifty million dollars out of my audience.

• 1:02:46Speaker 00

  Helps with enterprise value, because your audience is full of people that want to do deals. They want to find new, great products to buy. They want to They want to discover new talented founders that they didn't understand. They're looking for investment opportunities. There's all kinds of interesting unintended positive externalities that happen just getting in front of these people. And so like when I have these and I do like multi-year partnerships with most of my partners. It's just like, it's never like, oh, I'm going to guarantee you X impressions. It's like, when these people know that you exist, good stuff's going to happen and they get it right away.

• 1:03:19Molly O'Shea?

  Turing is training the next generation of AI with tasks that require real expertise and real world judgment. That's why companies like Nvidia, Anthropic, Salesforce and Gemini partner with Turing. Turing builds realistic reinforcement learning environments and data systems based on real operational traces. The kind of infrastructure Frontier Labs need to train superintelligence. Visit turing.com/soucer. It's amazing how many people have done deals off of the episodes I've done too. Like it's just, you would not expect it.

• 1:03:55Speaker 00

  I would expect and listening might not expect that.

• 1:03:57Molly O'Shea?

  No, the people, the audience wouldn't. We have some incredibly powerful people. It's just amazing. Is it true one of your guests tickled you?

• 1:04:10Speaker 00

  No comment.

• 1:04:11Molly O'Shea?

  No comment. And so, damn, he found, he found the button.

• 1:04:20Molly O'Shea?

  We have a secret founders button. No comment. Okay. So you do something people rarely do nowadays. You read physical books. How long does it take you to read those books? And is it true you use a sword to highlight them? I'm sorry, a ruler?

• 1:04:38Speaker 00

  Yes, it is true that I use a ruler. There's a great line where I think it was the one of Steve Jobs biography where it's like, "A great product is better than it has to be." And I think about that line all the time. And what that means is like, Sometimes the customer, you're gonna put so much effort into things that they may not even notice, but they can feel it. Yeah. It's like a, you evoke emotion. And Steve Jobs was famous for this because like he would insist that the inside of a computer which you couldn't even open up had to be beautiful. And they're like, Steve, no one's gonna see this. He's like, yeah, but I'm going to see it. And Walt Disney was like this, and you'll see a lot of the same reoccurring patterns throughout history. They're just so obsessed with the quality of the product that they're making, that they just can't help themselves. Because it's offensive to them that it goes out any other way.

• 1:05:21Speaker 00

  And so, it'd be a lot more efficient. I'm kind of anti-efficiency when it comes to my work, because I do think there is almost like, this, this sounds willy-fu-fu, but like, there is a spiritual connection I have to what I'm doing. I deeply love it. It reminds me much more of like, being like a, this is Founders now. When I'm recording with other people, it's different. I feel like, like a, like a solo songwriter. Like, just because I'm making it, Founders is made by one person. Like, I pick the books, I read the books, I record, I edit, I hand-edit the transcripts. This is like ridiculous. Everybody tells me, you should not be spending time doing this. And I feel like I'm better, the product is better because I, I pay attention to all

• 1:06:02Speaker 00

  these like little details and spend a lot of time, I spend a lot of time doing them. And so, it would be much more efficient if I just read Kindle. Because then all my notes and highlights are there, I'm not doing arts and crafts over here, so like, I sit down with a book. This is what it looks like. It's like I'm doing an arts and crafts project. I sit down with a physical book, pen, ruler, not a sword, post-it notes, and scissors. And that is how I make them. They, I should have brought one today. I didn't even think to do this. And it takes a long time. And then I have to transfer them. So this goes back to, a great product is better than it has to be. So then, I lucked out in doing something all the way back in 2018, that now is paying unbelievable dividends today, is I decided to put every single one of my notes and highlights

• 1:06:47Speaker 00

  into this giant searchable database called Readwise. And so, now I have, I mean, there's I think 30,000 highlights and notes in this database that I can search. So I'll be reading something today, and I'm like, oh, this sounds like something Walt Disney did. Let me go search and find it. And then I partnered with Readwise, and they built this other tool, just for me. Other people can access to it now, but it started out just for me. Where all my notes, highlights and transcripts for every single episode. And I have an AI assistant that's just trained on just that. And so I'm clearing this all the time as I'm making new episodes. So to compete goes with like competitions for losers. Say, I'm going to do exactly what David does on founders. Okay, well, I'm 407 books ahead. I'm gonna keep doing this every day. So that means like if you're gonna, you're never gonna catch me.

• 1:07:32Speaker 00

  But even that, then you have to like, I'm doing all like, I'm creating all these tools and all this technology and all these different ways to do it. It's like, if you don't have access to that either, it's just gonna be very, it's gonna be nearly impossible to be able to at least duplicate what I'm doing. So they, I read like 25 pages an hour. Like, I'm not a speed reader.

• 1:07:53Speaker 00

  And I'm reading with the intention to understand it so well that I can turn around and teach it to somebody else. And the teaching actually makes me learn better because there's so many times where I'm talk, like speaking out loud about something I thought I knew. And I'm like, well, you just had to make any sense. You don't even understand what you're talking about. So you gotta stop, pause, go back. And then like, even like this morning, I was like rereading past highlights. So like, that's my form of practice. Like an NBA player will, you know, Steph Curry's putting up 500 threes a day in practice. I'm rereading past highlights to remind myself, I'll listen to past episodes all the time. To be like, could you, we forget that we forget. I'm like, I read the book, I made the episode, I listened to the episode before it came out. It's been two years, I forgot half, more than half the stuff in there.

• 1:08:36Speaker 00

  And so it goes back to like, what is your organizing principle? It's like, well, I want to be the best in the world at what I do. I think there's a great line, did you ever read the Almanac on the Wall?

• 1:08:45Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:45Speaker 00

  Ravikant? Okay, so there's a great line in that book where he says, in the age of infinite leverage, being at the extreme of your art is really important. And I changed that to being at the extreme of your craft. Because power laws all the way down. And if, if, if all the people in the world say, hey, I'm gonna learn from history's greatest entrepreneurs. I want to be the default choice. And if you are, I think I am the default choice, but if you are the default choice, you get 99, you get, why are you laughing?

• 1:09:12Molly O'Shea?

  I'm not laughing.

• 1:09:13Speaker 00

  Okay, you get, you get all the rewards. He's not, so there's a great example of this. Where um, there's a skater named Tony Hawk, who's by far the most famous.

• 1:09:24Speaker 00

  He's by far the most famous skateboarder and I was listening to him on a podcast one time. And you know, he got paid to perform, he had his, uh, he had his own skateboard company, he had all these deals that he was endorsed by. And he said like, something like ninety percent of his wealth came from the video game. Tony Hawk Pro Skater or whatever it's called.

• 1:09:44Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:44Speaker 00

  And you know, it's hundreds of millions of dollars flowed to him as a result of that. And it made me think, I was like, oh, how much did the second? Like most famous or second most well-known skateboarder make in his video game? And the answer to that question is, who the hell is the second most famous skateboarder? Now, I'm sure in the world of skateboarding, you might know, but the general population, the answer is, I don't know. That's, it's very important to be at the extreme of your craft, so I'm looking for any of these like little edges that I can keep doing in compound over a long period of time.

• 1:10:14Molly O'Shea?

  A couple of things. One, I learned from Charlotte that that learning, um, that learning style of like reading something and reciting with someone else is like, is like, is key to absorption and understanding. And I think she was, she, she's in high school. So she is like reading Macbeth and like the, these different history books and I was just in Poland and I was visiting her. And I was like, well, I would love to, like, I love, I'm a nerd, like, I would be happy to, like, assist you in, in learning these subjects, it would be really fun. Um, and two, in your Dyson interview, this was a hilarious, you, there are some funny moments in some of these things.

• 1:10:55Molly O'Shea?

  One is in the Brad Jacobs one where you're like, you're like explaining him and then you're like, actually, you know what, I'm gonna stop. You can explain. And then, then in this, um, in this, uh, Dyson one, you're like, you, you're like going through the interview and then at the end of the interview, you're like, you know, I can't help but notice this, but like your, your hands are huge.

• 1:11:14Speaker 00

  I said that on-

• 1:11:15Molly O'Shea?

  Thick hands.

• 1:11:17Speaker 00

  I forgot about that.

• 1:11:18Molly O'Shea?

  And it goes to the physicality of like, like making things and why you take so much time and practice and the physicality of like, printing out, um, even your transcripts for founders and like reading them and like fixing them and all that kind of thing. And then with the books and like reading and underlining and using swords and like all this weird stuff that you do. But like, yeah, it's, it's, it's pretty interesting.

• 1:11:40Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:11:41Molly O'Shea?

  You're welcome. I don't know if that's a compliment.

• 1:11:43Speaker 00

  Was that a question? Thank you. You said it's interesting. Good. I'm trying to make interesting things that people want to listen to and hopefully learn from.

• 1:11:50Molly O'Shea?

  Some of you may not have heard this yet, but our sponsor Public just launched something called Generated Assets, and it brings AI into investing in a way I've honestly never seen before. Here's how it works. You type in an idea like AI-powered supply chain companies with positive free cash flow, or defense tech companies growing revenue over 25% year over year. Public's AI then dispatches a swarm of agents that scan every single US stock, evaluates them, and instantly builds a custom index around your thesis. What really stands out is how clearly it explains why each stock is included. And before you invest, you can even backtest your idea against the S and P 500, so you're making decisions with real context, not just guessing. And beyond Generated Assets, Public lets you invest in stocks, bonds, options, crypto, all in one place.

• 1:12:35Molly O'Shea?

  They'll even give you an uncapped 1% match when you transfer your investments over from another platform. If you want to build a portfolio that actually reflects your thesis, visit public.com/sorcery. Paid for by Public Investing. Full disclosures in the description. You've picked a particular niche to go after to interview. So you're going after, you know, like, there's only like 2,000 to 3,000 billionaires out there, like really, really successful people who've made it to that mark. One of the challenges with podcasts is scheduling, and so you're niching down even further because you like old people. And so like, how do you plan on like scheduling all these?

• 1:13:16Molly O'Shea?

  I'm sure you have a list of people that are in queue, so how do you manage all of that? And who's up next?

• 1:13:24Speaker 00

  So I have, like I said, I think the best-

• 1:13:26Molly O'Shea?

  Especially if you want to like increase the cadence.

• 1:13:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, okay, so I think I have the best team in podcasting. And so like Rob Moore is the one and the team are the ones taking care of all this. So like, hey, how do we get this person? Assuming I can't like access them myself. And actually, like, you were helpful in this domain because I don't even think- About, again, I'm just like focused on the work. I don't think about the, the external world's, world's interpretation. And you had like said this on like offhand comment one time. You're like, yeah, like, he obviously knows who you are. I'm like, why would he know who I am? Because I don't think of like what I'm doing and I, I forget that like millions and millions of people listen to founders every year. And now the new show is like, we're gonna add millions and millions more. And so what I realized is like, oh, if I like,

• 1:14:11Speaker 00

  wanna get to somebody and I just say, if I like DM them, there's highly likely, I could just start with the people that follow me on Twitter. In terms of like almost all the top founders do. And so, one way to do this is like, you can obviously go through their, their PR, their comms people, which Rob's a, a, an expert at. But I've just like,

• 1:14:29Speaker 00

  like, I know somebody who knows them. And I'm like, hey, can you just ask that guy if he like knows who I am and tell him I wanna talk? And so far I've done this, I don't know, like six times. And these are like public company CEOs too. It's like, turns out every single time they're like a fan of the podcast. And so it's just frequency. It's like realizing that was the biggest mistake we made, was moving way too slow on the queue. It's like, let's record one person and then we'll move on to the next person. It's like, no, we need to be talking like 50 people at a time. And then I'm ready to go whenever. I have an idea of what I wanted to talk to them about anyways. And then they'll just drop in when like their schedule allows. And in many cases, like we've had to reschedule three, four, or five times. Like stuff just always comes on. So yeah, I, I think the biggest thing I have to, to take care of next year

• 1:15:11Speaker 00

  is just vastly increasing in like the top of the funnel to make sure that I have the people I want. Second thing, they're not all gonna be old. Okay. Geriatric. Two, they're not all gonna be billionaires. Like, I don't, there, there, there's a multi-billionaire right now that has asked to get on the podcast. And I started researching guy. I thought he was a little creepy and I said, no. So it's like, I'm not just, I'm not impressed just because you have a lot of money. I, again, if you go back to what we said at the beginning of the conversation, founders is the books that I'm intensely interested in reading. And sometimes they're deviate. They're not founders at all. Like I did this episode on Haruki Murakami or a bunch on Winston Churchill or like there's lessons we can take away from them, but they're not the typical founder. I was just super interested in reading about them. Turns out if I'm interested, the audience is too.

• 1:15:56Speaker 00

  And then the new show is just who I'm intensely interested in speaking to. And yeah, in many cases, they're gonna be doing what they've been doing for a long time. That doesn't automatically make them old. But I am interested in like people that have a singular career. And if they don't haven't developed a singular career yet, they just there's something about them. That is very unique to them. I that I'm interested in talking to them, so it's just like. Not a net worth thing, not even a how long I've been doing. I originally thought, okay, maybe I'll talk to you should be doing it at least like 10 years. And I think most of the people I will talk to have been doing it for at least 10 years. Cause again, I'm not into startups, I'm into building a durable business. Creating a startup, raising a bunch of money and going in a business is not an accomplishment.

• 1:16:40Speaker 00

  And that is the vast majority of these people like go back, I used to take notes on all the podcasts I listened to. And I had like this huge, uh, started as an Evernote notebook, then it was a Substack. And you go back and just go back and pick all the same startup, there's a lot of the same startup podcasts. 2020, 2021, 2022. Make a list of the guests. And I, this is how I realized I was wasting my goddamn time. Um, make a list of the guests and then see how many are still in business. It was shocking. They're all gone. I'm not interested in hearing some startup founder espouse how great they are when they're already dead and they don't even know it. So I do think keeping some kind of time as a filter.

• 1:17:21Speaker 00

  I'm gonna do, but it's just come down to like, I find this person interesting or I, I want to know how that person thinks. And I think we could have a very, very interesting conversation, but no, there, there, there will be several guests. Under 50.

• 1:17:34Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, well, something that's worked for me is making a sorcery top 100 list. It's not top and it was not ordered in any particular.

• 1:17:43Speaker 00

  I know, me and you both know it wasn't in the right order.

• 1:17:46Molly O'Shea?

  Why?

• 1:17:47Speaker 00

  66. We that you put me as six, what, what, what did you, what was the title, top 100?

• 1:17:53Molly O'Shea?

  A sorcery, the 100 guest list, something like that.

• 1:17:57Speaker 00

  Top guests you want list?

• 1:17:58Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, it was really, it took me like. You know, I originally it was like 50 people and then I was like, oh no.

• 1:18:08Speaker 00

  So I wasn't even gonna be on the list if I'm 66? You had to add to, you had to add another hundred or another fifty?

• 1:18:16Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, maybe, I think so.

• 1:18:18Speaker 00

  Okay, you know, you and I both know that is not true.

• 1:18:21Molly O'Shea?

  And then I had to add two more on top of that because I completely forgot. Eh, never mind, but anyways.

• 1:18:27Speaker 00

  Okay, so first of all, I don't wanna clarify the record. That was a lie, you know that, me and I both know, I'm not six, the top sixty-six.

• 1:18:36Molly O'Shea?

  Well, you made, you, you're not top sixties. You have made it within the top ten, by the way.

• 1:18:42Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:18:42Molly O'Shea?

  Of that list.

• 1:18:43Speaker 00

  I will accept one B to Ivanka Trump's one A.

• 1:18:47Molly O'Shea?

  That's Alex Karp.

• 1:18:49Speaker 00

  Okay, okay, okay.

• 1:18:50Molly O'Shea?

  You can be one C.

• 1:18:51Speaker 00

  No, I will accept two.

• 1:18:53Molly O'Shea?

  Two?

• 1:18:53Speaker 00

  To Ivanka's one A.

• 1:18:55Molly O'Shea?

  That's.

• 1:18:56Speaker 00

  Karp, one B.

• 1:18:57Molly O'Shea?

  Elon Musk.

• 1:18:59Speaker 00

  It doesn't matter, so then I'm two B, I don't care, I'm not going lower than two B.

• 1:19:02Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 1:19:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, and honestly, the only one, the only, the Karp thing is just because I, I do think your episode with him was really excellent. But I, I, I retract.

• 1:19:10Molly O'Shea?

  That was incredible, yeah.

• 1:19:12Speaker 00

  I retract my statement, I'm one B, behind Ivanka.

• 1:19:15Molly O'Shea?

  What?

• 1:19:16Speaker 00

  Ivanka's the only one I'm taking a backseat to.

• 1:19:18Molly O'Shea?

  Ivanka's good.

• 1:19:19Speaker 00

  She's the best.

• 1:19:20Molly O'Shea?

  She's really good.

• 1:19:21Speaker 00

  She is one of the sweetest people I know. Uh, one of my favorite people by far, unbelievably well-read.

• 1:19:27Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:28Speaker 00

  Like, a kind soul. Um, she's legitimately one of my favorite people I get to spend time with, she's, she's incredible, she's gonna do the new show too.

• 1:19:38Molly O'Shea?

  Can you put in a good word?

• 1:19:41Speaker 00

  We'll see how the rest of this interview goes.

• 1:19:42Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, god, okay. Anyways, on that subject.

• 1:19:47Speaker 00

  Were you going somewhere with the top hundred list, or were you done there?

• 1:19:50Molly O'Shea?

  No, no, that, I mean, that was, I was just a suggestion.

• 1:19:54Speaker 00

  What I told you when I saw that list is really excellent advice that I got from Daniel Ek. Which was, he's like, you're really easy to understand, he was talking to me. It's like, you're really easy to understand, so therefore you're really easy to help. And I think one of the smartest things you did was making yourself very easy, like, you're very legible online. Where it's like, I'm going to organize this list, I'm going to publish it on my Twitter feed, and immediately, you booked Karp, but what, seven days later?

• 1:20:20Molly O'Shea?

  No, less than three, like, I got a call that day, like, hey, I think we got something, and then by the third day was scheduled.

• 1:20:26Speaker 00

  So there you go.

• 1:20:27Molly O'Shea?

  Insane.

• 1:20:28Speaker 00

  I think if you can do more of those things to make you. Easy to understand and therefore easy to help is like really smart.

• 1:20:36Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, the the tricky thing with that, though, is doing it in a tasteful way. I'm not exploitive.

• 1:20:40Speaker 00

  How would it be exploitive?

• 1:20:42Molly O'Shea?

  Well, I just, I also to drive off of serendipity a bit, actually building relationships with people and going the warm connection way. I'm like over capacity right now, even with the Andorl episode. That was fucking awesome. I thought I was just gonna interview one of them. I heard back and no, all four founders are gonna be in town on Monday. You're gonna do an episode with. I'm like, in what capacity has anybody interviewed all four founders and gotten a tour at Andorl? Like, it's insane. And like Palmer was on my list. Trey Stevens was on my list twice.

• 1:21:17Speaker 00

  Oh, there you go.

• 1:21:18Molly O'Shea?

  I didn't mean to. I meant, I totally meant that. Uh, but yeah.

• 1:21:22Speaker 00

  Is the universe helping you?

• 1:21:23Molly O'Shea?

  The universe helping me. But yeah, I I um, I'm like over capacity for for a bit, which is like fantastic. And so I'm just gonna be at the whims of.

• 1:21:32Speaker 00

  What does overcapacity mean? Just because you've recorded so many episodes?

• 1:21:35Molly O'Shea?

  I have so many in the back and so many in the backlog. I like I'm running through editors. I'm burning them out. And like, it's just.

• 1:21:45Speaker 00

  Wait, how are you burning out your editors? Are you like a hard taskmaster?

• 1:21:48Molly O'Shea?

  Hmm, I don't know. Am I, Brett?

• 1:21:54Molly O'Shea?

  No comment. Hit the button.

• 1:21:58Molly O'Shea?

  One of the things I like to talk about, so one of our sponsors is Brex, and they're all about performance. Spending smarter, moving faster, intelligent AF finance. You've probably heard of them. They're very, very popular.

• 1:22:12Speaker 00

  They've definitely heard of me.

• 1:22:17Molly O'Shea?

  And so one of on on the topic of performance, I think a lot of performance comes down to like who you surround yourself with. You're you think very critically of this. And so I'd be curious of your answer, but. I think it it comes down to who you surround yourself with, who you admire most, and like who's a mentor to you. So I'm curious for you, like, who are those people for you?

• 1:22:40Speaker 00

  I think that your entire life is who you surround yourself with, is by far, not only from like, okay, so the the people, the first people you recruit are obviously like who your company turns out to be. And so that's why, there's a great book called In the Company of Giants, which is published in 1987 by two Stanford MBA students. And they wind up, as a result, they just happened to be in Silicon Valley at the time, during this huge, you know, the first internet boom, and they interview 16 technology company founders. Also interesting to see how many of those technology company founders wind up disappearing. Okay, then this whole theme of like trying to dominate for decades. But one of them, you know, they got Michael Dell's in there, Bill Gates is in there, but Steve Jobs is in there. And, you know, being MBA students, they didn't know any better. We're like, hey, Steve, like, you're running your company. So obviously, like, you don't have any time

• 1:23:21Speaker 00

  to recruit now. And he's like, what? It's like, are you crazy? It's the most important thing that I do. And he gave this great, and he's like, it's very important at the very, very beginning of your company, but it continues to be important. So he's like, when you're picking your co-founder, like, you should choose wisely. Why? Because it's 50% of your company at the time. And then employee number 10, still super important. It's 10% of your company. And so there's a great line where Steve would say that the person he learned more from management than anybody else was Ed Catmull, founder of Pixar. And Ed Catmull talks about this, like, he would go around giving talks, he's like, hey, what's more important? People or ideas? And he said, people always got this question wrong. It's so weird to me. It's like, they said, ideas are more important. He's like, no, it's obviously people, because ideas come from people. And so he has this great line to illustrate this. He's like, hey, if you give a mediocre idea, if you give a

• 1:24:05Speaker 00

  great idea to a mediocre team, they'll screw it up. But if you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they'll either fix it, or they'll throw it out and come up with something new. And Brad Jacobs, you'll just see this over and over again. It's like, the quality of people around you is your entire life. The best piece of advice that I was ever given came from, one of the best piece of advice I was, I was given, came from Jared Kushner. Uh, who's a good friend. I actually talked to him like a few hours ago. And this is also what I I've told you one of the first times we talked.

• 1:24:37Molly O'Shea?

  That that's Ivanka's husband, right?

• 1:24:39Speaker 00

  That is correct.

• 1:24:40Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 1:24:40Speaker 00

  It's constant refinement of association. And Jared's one of these people where it's like, he will tell you the truth. If he likes you. Well, first of all, he wouldn't spend time with you if he didn't like you, but like, he he says stuff to me that if people hear that, they're like, damn, like, that might even be rude. It's like, no, no, like, he's a very direct person. But he's saying that because he wants, I know he wants like my best interests and like he wants me to do well. He's he said, he's like benefited hugely from uh, from your podcast. So like, his whole thing is like, he's seen me in environments where he's like, these people are not good enough for you. He's just like, you're like, you have built one of, this is what he told me. He's like, I know all the elite people in the world. They all listen to your podcasts. And he he's like pushed me on a lot of different things. And in a very like direct, but like truthful manner. And I think it's really, really important.

• 1:25:25Speaker 00

  And so, the other day, I'll tell you one of like my close friends and mentors, because really, I I don't really have a mentor. I guess Hinky would be the closest, but like, it's more like a coach. And since like my very close friends that are like the people that I actually pay attention to and like, I'm pretty ruthless with getting access, like I you're, I'm not on the scene. You you you can't access me. You can't just like, call me up or get in touch with me or anything like that. Like, I am deliberately like evasive when it comes to that. Because I don't, I already have as many friends I could handle. And I'm sure because of our jobs, you you're gonna meet interesting people and I might be able to add one great friend that's gonna, every year, two or something like that. But it's like, even if I added none, I'd be fine. And so one of my closest friends

• 1:26:10Speaker 00

  is, you know, legit genius. I won't say his name. He doesn't like to be talked about publicly. You'll find nothing about him online. But everybody that needs to know in tech knows who he is and he's highly, highly respected. And we were on the phone the other day. And this is again, somebody I know has my best interest and like, we have a legitimate friendship. And he knew that I was about to spend time, or that I was spending time with another somewhat high-profile person.

• 1:26:40Speaker 00

  And he's just like, all I want you to consider, and again, like, they're not, no one's like, you need to do X, Y, Z. They talk in stories, or you have to kind of read between the lines. And so he's like, I would just consider like, why that guy like leaves like a trail of like chaos and discontent and broken relationships everywhere he goes. Like, why is his co-founders of his first company hate him? Why are co-founders of this company hate him? Like, why is this person saying these things about him? And he's like, you should just see like who he has around him that's been around him for a long time that talks positively, positively around him. And they're both super successful financially, but my friend has all these wonderful relationships

• 1:27:22Speaker 00

  and people who do almost anything for him. And I'm probably one of them. And this guy doesn't. And his whole point was just like, man, we're doing this. They're both billionaires. He's just like, we're doing this. It's like, because we like the game and it's fun and like, we love it. But at the end, like, he said this line that was great. He's like, but your life is your relationships. He's like, this guy doesn't have any. Like, what does that tell you? It doesn't matter how much money he has. And I've met some super successful people. It's like, where are your friends, dude? Like, where are your friends? It's like unbelievably sad. So, I, I think part of it is just because we are memetic by nature. Like, you are going to pick up on the habits of your friends that are around you. And you have to be very, so many, no one

• 1:28:02Speaker 00

  does this, by the way. Ninety-nine percent of humans do not, they're, they, they give shitty people access to them. When I think of like, if I could only have one mentor that was dead, it'd be Charlie Munger, who I was good enough to, incredible, I got to go to his house and have dinner with him for three hours before he died. And his line on this is like, the advice that he gave, I was there with two other entrepreneurs. And his whole thing is like, most people are rat poison. Charlie had no filter. Like, he's like, most of humanity, you know, they, they're, they're not high quality people and you should avoid them. So the main piece of advice that he gave us was

• 1:28:40Speaker 00

  I would, I would, um, I, I, I, I distilled it into this maxim called go for great. Because his whole thing was like, hey, your job right now is very obvious. You need to be, build a seamless web of deserved trust with really high quality people and talk to nobody else. He goes, everybody knows that I was thirty five when I met Buffett and Buffett was twenty eight. What they didn't know is that there was a bunch of other of our friends and guys around us. We built a seamless of deserved trust and we did deals together for decades. And he's like, at that time, he's like, most of them are dead, you know, because Charlie's ninety nine. I think Buffett was like ninety two or ninety one, ninety one at that point. And so he's, the go for great thing was, problems are inevitable.

• 1:29:23Speaker 00

  Okay, you live long enough, bad shit is gonna happen to you. That's a direct quote from, from Charlie. So he's like, your job in life is to get, he goes, is to, uh, build relationships with great people. He says, wisdom is prevention, right? Great people don't solve problems, they avoid them. High quality people, and I, I've seen this in my life, they avoid them. Most of them, wisdom is prevention, it's one of the best maxims. So, high quality, build a relationship with high quality people and then get into a good business and stay there. He was very adamant about that other part, stay in the good business, stop jumping around. He goes, if you surround yourself with high quality people and you, uh, good businesses, obviously, they have way fewer problems than bad businesses. Or great businesses, rather.

• 1:30:08Speaker 00

  Uh, great businesses have very, uh, a lot less problems. So he's like, your job is like, if you get, surround yourself with great people and you get in a good, great business, stay there. He's like, that, that avoids most of the problems you're gonna have in life. And like, that is your job, go for great, surround yourself with great people and just be in one great business. That's all you need to build wealth for generations. Um, and so I, I think about that like all the time where I do think I already am in a great business. I will continue to like build this into a great business. I think that the, one of the best things to launch off media is more media. Um, like I just did with launching the new show off of, uh, off of founders. And then just being insanely, having insanely high bar for, for who I spend time with.

• 1:30:52Speaker 00

  Um, but I would say like, most of them, they're not even like.

• 1:30:58Speaker 00

  Like, I could, I could name names, mo- people, most people wouldn't even like, really like, know who they are. They're just like, really good, high quality, smart, good people, that, that have some kind of body of work that they can point to, and that's how we became friends to begin with.

• 1:31:13Molly O'Shea?

  That's a good answer.

• 1:31:16Speaker 00

  Maybe I picked the right profession.

• 1:31:18Molly O'Shea?

  I don't know. We'll, we'll follow up on that, uh, in three more months. You'll be six months into this new job. Founders, ship faster on Deal. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone, anywhere, and get visas handled fast, so you stay focused on scaling. Deal takes care of onboarding, HR, IT, EOR, benefits, and compliance, so your team can grow without borders. It's why more than 37,000 fast-growing companies trust Deal to move fast. Visit D E E L dot com slash sorcery. That's D E E L dot com slash S O U R C E R Y. As we enter 2026, and we leave 2025, first, how would you define 2025 for you?

• 1:32:03Speaker 00

  Best year of my life.

• 1:32:04Molly O'Shea?

  Why?

• 1:32:06Speaker 00

  It, I just cannot believe, like, first of all, the, the thing about podcasts, again, I know we keep going back to this, this topic.

• 1:32:14Speaker 00

  What, what a lot of people don't understand about podcasts, is they're unique experience generators. And so, the amount of things that I was able to do, the people I was able to meet this year, the, the places I went, the amount of activities that I got to do, is like, you couldn't buy access to them. There's no tickets, there's nothing. It's like, you, you were, you had to be invited into this, by really high-quality people, because they respect you, and they respect, like, your body of work. And so, does he, I, I don't look back a lot. In fact, I just had lunch with a friend of mine in New York, and that's exactly what she told me. She's just like, "You don't seem to, like, take inventory of, like, your life, or how unusual it is." Because it's just like, "Oh, I did that, next podcast." And I do think

• 1:32:54Speaker 00

  there's value to just focusing on today, and then doing the same, trying to, like, push the ball forward, or lay bricks the next day. But I probably should get better at, you know, at least, like, documenting. Like, go back in my camera roll, I'm like, "Oh my God, I forgot I did that." I definitely need to get better at that, but like the relationships I've built, the experiences I got to have. And then just founders just absolutely, it was already crazy last year, but it's like just absolutely ripped. And then the new show, like I could not have, we literally couldn't have had a better start than what we did. And then you know some of the stuff because we go back and forth on podcasts, but like I can't name like some of the people I got to spend. Literally like, there's like three people in the world, my top three list.

• 1:33:36Speaker 00

  And I got to spend one-on-one time with all three of them this year and only one I've recorded a podcast with so far. And it's just like, how did this happen? Like sometimes I'm sitting there, I'm like, who is this person sitting across, like this is insane. And then for them all to be in many cases, fans of what I'm doing. It's like, you didn't even know I had a top three list. How is that possible? And to spend time with them and to learn from them. It's just been absolutely crazy. And then I really do like think I just, I'm so glad I made a decision. It's like, hey, this is a year I'm going to pull the trigger and I'm going to do this new show. And we started recording in May, launched in September. And I think it was one of the, I think it'll go back and be one of the best decisions I ever made in my life.

• 1:34:18Molly O'Shea?

  If you could define 2026 in one word, what would you want the word to be?

• 1:34:24Speaker 00

  It can't be one word, but I am very interested in seeing how far I can take this. And I just said, I spent a bunch of days with six of the biggest podcasters in the world. I was talking to Patrick on the, um, the drive over here. And his whole thing was like, I'm so glad that you do what you do. In the sense that you go around, you like collect all this information, you just such, you don't think about anything but podcasting. And he's like, cause I'm not interested in it at all. I like one podcaster. He's like, I like you. He's like, I don't actually like podcasters is what he was telling me. And he's like, and if you weren't doing what you're doing, I'd feel like FOMO. Like, I, what's going on in the world? But I could just like call you and you could just like data dump on like what's going on with me. And I text this like two Saturdays morning, it was like seven in the morning.

• 1:35:09Speaker 00

  And I text two members of the team of the new podcast. And I was just like, we're gonna like, take this as far as it goes. Like, I don't know where we can go. I just know no one else is gonna take it farther than us. And so, the way I would describe it is like, I don't want to get to the, definitely not the end of my life, but certainly not the end of next year, without knowing, like, I wanna push it to the limit. And I don't mean to break, I don't mean to like, I mean, like, I wanna see what I'm actually capable of. And I think that's the biggest thing, where like, I don't have any doubt that I found my life's work. I know that for sure. So I don't have to take, there's no introspection there, like, like, but I want to do this as best as I possibly can, to the point where like,

• 1:35:53Speaker 00

  I didn't leave anything, whereas like, or I didn't like, half-ass it. Or, yeah, I just, I wanna push it to the limit. Me and John and Jordy text screenshots of that song, Push It To The Limit, from the Scarface, it was in their launch video. Remember when they did a helicopter and everything? Push It To The Limit, that song? And I think that is just, we just texted back and forth, cuz it's like, that is just the anthem. I think they're, like, if you saw their interview they just did, like, they're very much in line with this as well. It's just like, let me see how far I can take this. I'm very interested. And I really hope,

• 1:36:29Speaker 00

  yeah, I just wanna avoid anything that doesn't allow me to do that.

• 1:36:36Speaker 00

  That, that would be, like, Push It To The Limit would be my answer.

• 1:36:40Molly O'Shea?

  What would you hope the biggest takeaway from your listeners would be with this new show?

• 1:36:46Speaker 00

  I think, really, man, like, just, I, I think a lot of the media that entrepreneurs are consuming, it's just like, it goes against their incentives. There's this really, really well-known founder. So, there's a, there's a bunch of people that don't do, really do any podcasts. I've been trying to convince to do podcasts, and that is really hard. And I had dinner with one, by far the most intense person I've ever been around.

• 1:37:13Speaker 00

  And I was like, man, he's got all this stuff like in the dinner. Like you just couldn't believe the stories he has like the company building knowledge that's in his head that he just doesn't share with anybody. It's insane to me and I was trying to be like, hey, this is an act of service for the next generation of founders. I go, dude, they're all listening. All the content that entrepreneurs are listening to are made by VCs. And he interrupted me. He goes, real entrepreneurs don't listen to VCs. Is this Travis Kalanick? I don't know who it is. So the, um, but the, the, I guess the important part is like, I want to offer like an alternative to start, scale, sell. Because I've talked to so many founders that started, that scaled, that sold and are unbelievably

• 1:37:56Speaker 00

  depressed or unhappy or realizing that was my best idea. I'll never have an idea that that's good. I have three and a half decades of life, four decades of life ahead of me. Yeah. And I can't take that back. It's like, man, you're going to get the money anyways. So there's other ways to do what you want to do. Like just don't give up. So like, I, again, I think the alternative is like, can I present an alternative path? Where it's like more like Michael Dell. This is an infinite game. This is a giant puzzle. You can constantly reinvent yourself and reinvent your company over and over and over again. And you're going to be so much more satisfied when you're 60 or 70 than you did that you made a hundred million dollars when you were 35 or whatever the case is. It's like, a lot of people have money.

• 1:38:39Speaker 00

  Like it may be a small percentage of the population, but a lot of people are rich. How many people can say they built something that's truly great? A much smaller percentage of the population. That's what you want. I think Jeff Bezos said it the best. He's like, you want to build a body of work and a company that you're proud to tell your grandchildren about. And your grandchildren are not going to care that grandpa 40 years ago sold a company and now just sits in a rocking chair and does nothing. Grandpa probably won't even live because retirement is fatal. Like you need to do something. Um, so yeah, I think the alternative is just like, hey, why don't we like try to build durable companies and like stick with them and like do it forever. Like what else are we going to do?

• 1:39:19Molly O'Shea?

  It's funny you mention Michael Dell. Like, the first thing I thought of was the past couple conversations I've had with Zach and the fact that they're literally setting out to build a multi-generational company. Same thing.

• 1:39:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, I wonder where he got that idea from.

• 1:39:34Molly O'Shea?

  I can't imagine. I don't know. I should ask.

• 1:39:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:39:38Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, David. Well, thank you. This was awesome.

• 1:39:40Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:39:41Molly O'Shea?

  Cool.

• 1:39:45Molly O'Shea?

  Hey, it's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter, sorcery.vc, where we deliver a once-a-week top deals and tech headlines email and also go deeper on our podcast interviews. Subscribe to Sorcery today. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen. Link in description to sign up.