14 Patterns Behind the World’s Greatest Minds - David Senra

David Senra is the host of Founders podcast and an investor. What separates successful founders from everyone else? Luck and timing matter, but they’re not the whole story. The best founders share repeatable patterns in how they think, work, and handle pressure. You can’t control the hand you’re dealt, but you sure can control how you play it. Expect to learn the work habits behind the genius of Rick Rubin, the 3 different types of founders with 3 specific traits who find unparalleled success, the simple advice most founders abide by when building their ideas into companies, why making mistakes is actually a badge of honour, how to have an obscene level of focus and much more… - Get a free bottle of D3K2, an AG1 Welcome Kit, and more when you first subscribe at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom Get up to 20% off Timeline powered by Mitopure (now at a lower price) at https://timeline.com/modernwisdom Get 160+ lab tests for just $365 and save an extra $25 at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get ChatGPT to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster at ⁠https://chatgpt.com - 0:00 The Mindset Behind “Lazy Workaholics” 4:26 Why You Have to Bet on Yourself to Find Success 13:42 Feed Your Mind or Fall Behind 24:19 The Power of One Simple Idea 30:51 Failure is a Privilege of Progress 37:30 Why Listening Is the Real Advantage 41:14 Don’t Solve Problems, Avoid Them 47:37 Why You Should Create for Yourself First 50:08 Be Ruthless With Your Life 56:49 Are Entrepreneurs Bad At Relationships? 01:12:15 The One Biography Every Ambitious Person Should Read 01:19:13 Is Respect the End Goal? 01:27:11 Don’t Let Others Define Your Success 01:30:56 Where to Find David - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  I'm a lazy workaholic. I have to force myself to do it. My demeanor would be to do nothing. What's that mean?

• 0:06David Senra?

  Okay, this was shocking. So I've been a massive fan of Rick Rubin for probably decades. I grew up listening to rap. He founded one of the most important hip hop record labels in his dorm room when he was like 18 or 19. I think he's 63 now. And he's still making incredible music. So I've done a bunch of episodes about him. Going back like five, six years ago, for going back five, six years on my other podcast founders, right? So I read biographies about him. I read his book Creative Act. Have you read Creative Act?

• 0:34Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 0:35David Senra?

  Okay. And so then I had the opportunity to meet him and then record an episode with him. And I thought, you know, I've read his biography over and over again, watched every interview with him. I thought I kind of knew what to expect. And that was when he said, I'm a lazy workaholic. You can even watch the clip on the show where it's like, you're lying to me, Rick. Like, what are you talking about? Cause out of anybody in the world that gets paid to be themselves, you would say like Rick Rubin's got to be towards the top of that list, right? And I thought he was just completely obsessed with music. I thought he was just obsessed and absolutely loved his work. And his whole point is just like, no, I have to force myself to do it. Like, I like the act of creation. I like finishing the creation. But the five months of us doing thousands of takes, he goes, I don't like that.

• 1:20David Senra?

  I wake up every day and I'm like, oh my, it's not like, he said, the line he said, he goes, it's not like I wake up every day. And like, oh my God, I get to go to work today. He goes, oh no, I have to go to the studio. And what was, the reason I wanted to talk to you about that was because like, when you put that out, I got thousands of messages from people in all walks of life saying, this is exactly how I feel. Like, I love after I'm done working. I like some parts of it, but I feel that I have to force myself to do it. And Rick's hilarious because he's just like, you know, it's a beautiful day. We filmed at Shangri-La. His recording studio Malibu. And I think, I think I might've said, or he might've said, he's like, I'd rather just be, you know, out here butt naked in the sun. Instead of in the studio.

• 1:59Chris Williamson?

  There is a part of me that doesn't want to show up for anything and I have to overcome that every day.

• 2:04David Senra?

  Yeah, that's his, that's a direct quote from him, which is again, shocking considering, because you know, I understand if you're trying to do something, you do it for a year, maybe five years, maybe you can, you struggle through that for a few years. But this guy's been in the same industry, the same business, likely doing the same trade for four decades. And he says he's felt like that forever. He's like, now he just has a little bit more control over his life. He was telling me that like, the first 25 years of his career, it was essentially seven days a week, 16 hours a day in a dark recording studio.

• 2:35Chris Williamson?

  It's tough to do if it feels like a burden, if you have to make yourself do that. And you've got this tiny bit of enjoyment at the end, once you've shipped the product.

• 2:42David Senra?

  Part of, part of my, like, my heart sank a little because he is like somebody I admire and, you know, somebody almost like a hero of mine. And I feel the opposite. Like, I wake up, you know, and I was like, I cannot wait. Right now, the, the team, we took a two week break from the new show because the team was in Italy. One of the team members is getting married. And it was like close to depression. I was like, I miss not being able to podcast and have these conversations and like, just do the things that I'm doing every day. So it's completely opposite. It's how I felt is how I thought Rick would have felt. So it was like very surprising. You see somebody that is literally the best in the world at what he does. He maintains a singular position and he's telling you, no, it's a fucking struggle for me too.

• 3:16Chris Williamson?

  What's driven him to keep going if he dislikes the process that much?

• 3:19David Senra?

  He loves the magical act of creation. When something is not going well and they're, they're failing and they're failing and then failing and they're experimenting and experimenting. And then they just do one little tweak. It's like, oh, now we got it. He's like, he says he's addicted to that, that moment of creation of figuring it out. That's what he likes.

• 3:35Chris Williamson?

  High level problem solving. Basically, the context window that Rick Rubin has is bigger than anybody else's for music. And he's just able to take all of this stuff in and.

• 3:45David Senra?

  I think you just nailed it. And this is something very common with anybody that gets to the top of the profession. You're going to notice that they have this encyclopedic knowledge of history in their head. So he'll talk about, you know, oh, hey, we're struggling with, you know, we're working with Red Hot Chili Peppers. We took an idea that the Beatles did 30 years earlier. There's this great documentary about his recording studio called Shangri-La. I think it's a four part documentary. And if they're struggling, he's got this like massive library. And he'll just go in there. He's like, hey, we don't know what we're doing. He'll take one of the musicians he's working with. They'll just pick a random book off a shelf, open to a random page and read a paragraph. And then they'll just talk about the paragraph. Did that spawn any kind of thought? And so, yeah, he's got this incredible knowledge in his head.

• 4:26Chris Williamson?

  Chips on shoulders put chips in pockets.

• 4:28David Senra?

  So this is a quote from this venture capitalist named Josh Wolf. And I think about this maximum all the time. It reappears throughout entrepreneurship history. It still reappears for people building companies. Say, this comes from the founder of Apple 11, this guy named Adam. Adam is probably the best founder no one's ever heard of. He's running like a $170 billion market cap company. They're going to print something like $6 billion in cash this year and he's got 400 employees. And Adam hires, the, the context of this discussion we're having is that he won't, if you just have like this normal, you know, you, you grew up wealthy, you went to great prep schools, you got into Harvard easily. Like, he doesn't hire this kind of people. He looks for dysfunctional people to have something to prove. His number two is this guy named Raf.

• 5:11David Senra?

  And Raf has worked for Adam over half of his life. Raf is a high school dropout, started working for Adam when he was 17 years old. Got kicked out of his house, had to live inside of the office. There's pictures they've showed me where he like built bunk beds in the office. He's now the second largest shareholder in Apple 11. So the kids in his early 30s, the guys in his early 30s, and he's got, you know, five or $6 billion worth of Apple 11 stock, for example. And when you hear Adam and people like this talk about, hey, these are the people I want to hire. They have something to prove. They're very hungry. They tend to work a lot harder. They're a lot smarter. They're a lot scrappier. But then I think what's also interesting is they're also telling you about them. And so one thing that, that drove Adam to build his company, because like I said, it's, you know, $170 billion market cap company.

• 5:57David Senra?

  When he started the company, he tried to sell, he went around to all the top VCs in the world, tried to raise money. He's like, I will give you a quarter of my company. I will give you 25% of my company for a million dollars. And he's valued his own company at $4 million. Every single top VC in the world turned him down. Then they went and funded his competitors. And once they did that, he goes, then it was our company goal to drive those people out of business. And you go from, you know, saying, my company's worth $4 million to 15 years later, I took my company public. It's now, you know, almost 200, I think the, the top it went to is like 220 billion. And he thinks what they're trying to do is he thinks there's a path to like a trillion dollar company. And he wants to do that by essentially having this like island of misfit toys.

• 6:42David Senra?

  These people that were looked over by other people, they failed over and over again. They would not be hired by the big firms. It's a weird company with full of unusual business practices. You have to be an unusual person to thrive in that kind of environment. And he feels those are the best, the single best employees that you can find.

• 7:00Chris Williamson?

  What is it that you think drives somebody to keep going through that situation with that chip on their shoulder?

• 7:06David Senra?

  I mean, dude, me and you have hung out a bunch. We've had crazy conversations off, very personal conversations.

• 7:13David Senra?

  Some of which we should have recorded. We were talking before here. I mean, you have this. Like, you know, you grew up working class, it's like random part of the world.

• 7:23David Senra?

  I think I obviously have this too.

• 7:27David Senra?

  I don't.

• 7:29David Senra?

  I think like both you and I, and I think Adam fits into this, and I think Raf, who I just talked about. It's like, the, the feeling I had is like, man, I was just like born in the wrong spot. Like, this is not, this, this is not my peer group. This is not going to be the destiny of my life. Like, this is why me and you read so much, why we listen to podcasts, why we're like huge into, you know, self-education and self-improvement. It's just like, well, this is the station I was born into, but like I can, the, the world is very malleable. And if I go after something with like maximum effort and drive and intensity, like I can change the world around me. I remember the first time we recorded, I think you were still living in the UK. This is probably like four years ago.

• 8:02Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 8:02David Senra?

  And then you just gave me this tour of this crazy, insane studio you've built out. It's like, you did this exact thing yourself. It's like, I didn't like my life, so I'm going to use that chip on my shoulder as fuel to prove that I am not subject to these circumstances. I can actually influence this.

• 8:18Chris Williamson?

  There's a Kanye West clip. Have you seen this before? It's him on The Breakfast Club talking about 2013 versus 2023.

• 8:23David Senra?

  No, I'd love to see it though.

• 8:24Chris Williamson?

  Dude, it's not quite the edit that I wanted because a lot of the B-roll and stuff of all of the shit that he did. But this is, this is fucking spectacular.

• 8:33Speaker 02

  The interview from me from 10 years ago, everybody says, I love that interview. People didn't love it back then though, because I was speaking to the future. I'm 10 years ahead mentally and I'm trapped in today's time. And every now and then I crack you a smile for 2013. But I'm cracking you a frown for 2023. And I'm focused on what it's gonna be. Just mark my work as I'm Kanye West. You've seen my execution. Did I not become the biggest rock star on the planet? Did I not influence all musicians? Did I not go and get the exact girl that I wanted? Did I not start my family? Did I not ruffle the feathers of two presidents? Did I not get a chance to work with my idols?

• 9:17Speaker 02

  Did I not make Louis Vuitton? Did people not line up at the Yeezy store? Did I not make the college dropout? Late registration, graduation, 808s, blueprint one, blueprint three. Watch the throne, cool summer, and Yeezus if you like it or not.

• 9:33David Senra?

  I love that. It's funny you bring that up because have you seen the documentary on Netflix where this guy's poor? He's living in a shitty apartment in Newark, New Jersey at the time. And he has a filmmaker follow him around as he's trying to sell his beats in New York City. Have you seen this? It's in terms of like.

• 9:50Chris Williamson?

  The biggest bet on himself.

• 9:51David Senra?

  The hero's journey. In fact, I transcribed, I think the first two episodes of that documentary, you could skip the, the third episode. Is like the perfect illustration of this idea, like that we talked about last time I was on the show, belief comes before ability. And you see like, he's, he's walking to the train and he's practicing his Grammy acceptance speech. He's never even wrapped a bar. He does not have a signal, a single out. It was so good that I was transcribing those two episodes and I was going to make it into a founders episode. And then he did that like huge anti-Semitic rant. I was like, oh, I'm just gonna.

• 10:24Chris Williamson?

  We'll shell out for a while. We'll wait till he comes back around. Yeah, you're right, dude. I mean, this is the, the topic that's probably the most likely thing that I write my book about will be the lonely chapter. And it's moving from a place where you don't belong to one where you feel like you do. And it's.

• 10:42Chris Williamson?

  You're so developed that you no longer fit in with your old set of friends, but you're not yet sufficiently developed that you build the new ones. And you're stuck in this messy middle and you're thinking, well, the Rocky montage is three and a half minutes in the movies, but it's been four years for me. And what the fuck's going on? You've got all of this doubt and it's tainted by uncertainty about what the future holds for you and everybody that's around you doesn't understand what you're doing or doubts what you're doing or actively stops you from doing the thing that you're doing. And it's a selection criteria. Very few people are born into an environment that is supportive for rapid change and growth because people don't like that. It feels like chaos. It feels like uncertainty. And if you make a lot of changes, it throws into quite harsh contrast all of the ways that I'm not changing. If you grow a lot, that means that my lack of growth is potentially on me.

• 11:27Chris Williamson?

  It's the same reason that in the black pill and the incel community ascending, as in being liked by women is one of the, you become outcast if that happens because you're not a true cell, you're a fake cell.

• 11:41Chris Williamson?

  One of the reasons for that is if you can get laid or if you can get a phone number from a girl, maybe I can too. And hope with disappointment is way more painful than apathy with acceptance. And yeah, chips on shoulders, put chips in pockets.

• 11:56David Senra?

  Do you like, it's funny, you never know where you're going to resonate with. And I think that out of all the, think about how many short form videos we've probably consumed in our lives, like, I don't know, tens of thousands. And there's like this one minute, maybe 30 second clip of Shia LaBeouf. I don't even, I don't even know if I'm pronouncing his name, the actor, Shia, whatever his name is. And he said something where it was just like, when me, you and George were talking right before we started recording, you'll, you'll feel this like when you read, you know, somebody else's like story or book, you're like, oh, I feel like I'm reading about myself. Like this is exactly how I feel. And he was talking about, he's another person that chips on shoulders, put chips in pockets. He was talking about, he's like, hey, I don't care what you think. He was, he's like, because, he goes, I grew up in an environment where there's like no support.

• 12:37David Senra?

  So what the defense mechanism and the tool that he used was, he's like, I had to convince myself that my opinion about what I was doing in my life was the most important opinion. And he literally, and he would cut everybody else out of his life that gave him like counter evidence that, hey, you're not going to make it as an actor. Go back and watch the documentary on Kanye. There's just like, there was nobody around him that he was, he was not going to keep you in your life if you said, hey, just be a producer. There's, that was a great Kanye clip that you played, one that I watch all the time. It's a minute long. It's called Kanye West bazzing out. This is before he put out his first album and he's, the clip starts, he's like hitting his hands. He goes, don't compare me to any other producer rapper. Cause at the time there was other people that started in production and didn't start a rap.

• 13:22David Senra?

  And he went over and over again, he goes, hey, he goes, you understand, at one point my beats were whack dog. He goes, I taught myself how to make hot beats. These are, this is his words now. He goes, and it's the same thing with rapping. He goes, I don't know how to rap. I'm going to teach myself how to do it. That growth mindset. And he goes, and the clip ends and the great thing goes, and I have a leg up because I hear my beats first.

• 13:43Chris Williamson?

  The mind is a powerful place and what you feed it can affect you in a powerful way.

• 13:47David Senra?

  Okay. So that is a line from another rapper, this guy named NF, who's one of my favorite rappers. And that reappears throughout, not only the books I read, like all these books on history, successful entrepreneurs that I've read for my other podcasts, but when I start sitting down and talking to, you know, some of the best entrepreneurs in the world, like I do for the new show, this came from Toby Luque, founder of Shopify. And it was the most surprising conversation I may have ever had in my entire life. Okay. Cause you go in, like, if you've never met somebody before, you're going to, there's going to be some kind of like typecast, right? It's like, you got this German engineer who built a $200 billion company and this, one of the most successful technology platforms that have ever been created.

• 14:25David Senra?

  And he started as a, by himself with a single laptop in his wife's childhood bedroom because he had no money. And they literally had to be supported by his wife's family at the time. And so you think this guy's German engineer, he's going to be super analytical. And then you talk to him and he's all about intuition and vibes, for lack of a better word. And his whole thing was just like, well, the way you view yourself is very important and you should know that you can change the way you view yourself. And what you tell yourself, the inner monologue that you have is very important. And so for a long time, he told himself that I'm afraid, I'm afraid of public speaking. I'm afraid of it. I'm bad at it. That's just who I am. And what he would do, again, this sounds like willy fu fu nonsense, but it actually works. He's like, every day for 10 minutes, for I think a week or two, or however long it

• 15:10David Senra?

  took, he would sit there and write a hundred times. I love public speaking. I love public speaking. I love pub, there's nothing else to that. Just the same positive affirmation. And he was brain, literally brainwashing himself to now he's phenomenal on podcasts. He can, he can give a presentation in front of his thousands of employees. He can go on stage. He loves public speaking. He literally changed his brain. And so I think this is really important on, not only like the people you keep around you. We just touched on, it's like, dude, I don't have any money in my life. That's like pessimistic or negative. Like these kinds of people are like, they're cut out root and stem. My information diet is like, I read old books and I talk to smart, interesting people. The way that I choose who I talk to is like the conversation we had, how do I feel after I just had an hour, two hour conversation, Chris?

• 15:55David Senra?

  Fucking alive, excited, like.

• 15:57Chris Williamson?

  You had George's idea about sofa friends and treadmill friends?

• 16:00David Senra?

  You should, yeah, repeat it though.

• 16:01Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah. Just that after some people, you feel like you need to go and lie down on a sofa and stare at the ceiling for a while. And after spending time with other people, you feel like you want to go and run on a treadmill. The post content clarity or post nut clarity, the equivalent of after you watch a piece of content on the internet from a creator that keeps on popping up in your feed or that maybe you've subscribed to for a while or not so long of a while. How do you feel after that? Do you want to go outside and ring your mom? Do you feel like you can achieve more? Do you feel like the world is against you or for you? Do you, are you bitter and looking for enemies? Or are you positive sum and thinking about abundance?

• 16:35David Senra?

  And again, I think people are just way too cavalier on what they put in their minds. So like, I'm just going to sit down on X and I'm just going to, the algorithm is going to push whatever it wants into my brain and I'm going to sit there and receive it. That's crazy to me. It's like you're influenced by everything. You should be very, the mind is a powerful place, what you feed it affects you in a powerful way. You're just like, you don't put shit in your body if you care about your health and the way you look. Like, why wouldn't you do that same thing for your mind?

• 16:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Someone once described modern wisdom as spirulina for your soul in a sea of fast food for your amygdala. And I was like, yeah, that's quite nice.

• 17:05David Senra?

  But, okay. So this ties to, I think, a large theme of the discussion that we can have today and a lot of discussions we had in the past. It's like, man, you get one life. You get one life, you have to do some, I do think work for most humans is like a source of meaning, at least for you and I. It's like, I feel really freaking good about the podcasts I make and the information I put out there and like what I'm putting out there. And to play on this other end where it's just like, you're just like junk food for the mind. It's like, you, this is your one shot at life and this is what you did. You have to feel good when you hear stuff like that.

• 17:33Chris Williamson?

  I really think if people could, if people could go to the end just for a moment, if they could speedrun two alternate universes forward, one where they did the equivalent of selling their soul and getting all of the success, but not resonating with what it was that they did, or speedrunning it in a way that meant that the success came, but it came without effort and without personal sacrifice and without like investment of yourself. And the other one where you had 50% or 10% of the success, but it was spoken truly from you. Like I, I've been around enough people who have done something that resonates and that they love, who are way less successful than others that have got bigger platforms, but the people that have got bigger platforms are way more miserable, way more miserable because they don't, they don't feel it.

• 18:18Chris Williamson?

  Like you don't want to be, you don't want to achieve success. You want the feeling that being successful gives you. And you can get the first without getting the second, if you're not careful. You can achieve success and not feel it, especially if you do something that you don't really care about.

• 18:34David Senra?

  I would, I would say though, like the benefit to tie, to tie this together is like the benefit of reading old books is like, I just finished rereading this biography of Joseph Pulitzer from the Pulitzer Prize. And he built one of the most successful media businesses and he was doing it around this time in the civil war. That's how he got to America. He was a very poor, he was a Hungarian immigrant. By the time he's 17 years old, his father and seven out of his eight siblings have died and from like disease. And so he has to come fight in the civil war because he has no money. And there was a bunch of wealthy American businessmen that were trying to, to cede the Union Army. And they figured, hey, we'll get a bunch of European men, say, we'll pay for your passage over here. And if you survive, you'll get X amount of money. You can, you start a new life in America. That's how Pulitzer got to start.

• 19:15David Senra?

  Now he built, uh, his media at the time was, he had two of the most successful newspapers in the world, including the most successful newspaper in the world. Now the negative part of his and where he kind of laundered his reputation by ceding the Pulitzer Prize and the Pulitzer School of Journalism is that he also is credited with the invention of yellow journalism. All yellow journalism is now is like exactly what we see when we open up Instagram or X. It's just sensationalism, violence, sex, things that just speed, that for hundreds of years, thousands of years have piqued human interest. So not that it's good for you, it's just that you're interested in it.

• 19:48Chris Williamson?

  It's compelling.

• 19:49David Senra?

  So if you read this book, cause I always get shipped because people are always like, hey, like you don't, I don't know anything about current affairs. Like I don't pay attention to news. I don't read newspapers. I don't look at any of that stuff. And so I'll get a lot of stuff about this. And my thing is like, if you just read Joseph Pulitzer's biography and William Randolph Hearst, who copied his career off Pulitzer, like I did, and you'll see the connection of like, why am I doing this? Like do that first and then say, you should, you know, redline this negative information about something's happening 3,000 miles away or 5,000 miles away over and over again for your brain.

• 20:18Chris Williamson?

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• 21:26David Senra?

  No.

• 21:28Chris Williamson?

  Do you know where it's from?

• 21:29David Senra?

  Cuba.

• 21:30Chris Williamson?

  It's the last factory that's still hand rolling cigars in El Titan de Bronz, Calle Ocho, in the little Havana in Miami. And that's the same street that your grandfather walked down.

• 21:43David Senra?

  Oh, that's funny.

• 21:45Chris Williamson?

  When he arrived in Miami with nothing.

• 21:46David Senra?

  That's incredible.

• 21:49David Senra?

  Yeah, that's incredible. There's a, I guess, like, it goes back to chips on shoulders, pitch chips in pockets. It's like, I think one of the, I have this weird interest, right? Like, you know this, I have basically four interests. It's history, podcasts, reading, and entrepreneurship. And the entrepreneurship thing is really, really important to me because, like you said, like, my grandfather was a poor, uneducated person in Cuba. He was 38 years old. He had a newborn son, which is my father. He had two jobs. He was a butcher, and he worked in a shoe factory, and Castro takes over. And somehow, a man who had no education, did not speak English, and had no resources realized what was happening and realized, I have to get me and my family out of this country right away. And he comes to America, he's an immigrant to America, and rebuilds his life. Now, he made a bunch

• 22:33David Senra?

  of bad decisions once he got here, too, that I've learned from and avoided. Like, I didn't ever go to prison like he went to prison. But that one decision, I'm always fascinated by this, because like, that one decision of a man that I don't remember meeting, because he died when I was really, really young, so I have no memory of him, it's like, literally changed the trajectory of my life. And one of the most important things about growing up in South Florida, as the son of a Cuban immigrant, is I would constantly, nine, seven, 10 years old, meet people that came over here on rafts. I was like, this is such a weird thing. It's like, that's a one-way trip. Where are the Americans going to the end of Miami Beach and putting their kid on a raft and hoping to get to Cuba? So I kind of inherently understood that I was born in such a very special environment. No control of, I didn't make that decision. His decision changed the trajectory of my life. And I

• 23:14David Senra?

  do think, one thing I'm trying to do with the new show is like, hey, I'm very pro-capitalistic. I'm not, I'm against crony capitalism. I like people that build products and make other people's lives better, and then spread those products and services to more people. And as a result, they can generate wealth for themselves, for their employees, for shareholders of public companies. Like John Mackey, founder of Whole Foods, I've spent a bunch of time with him. We've become friends. He was one of my first guests on my new show. And his whole thing, he grew up in, he was a hitchhiking hippie, dropping acid in Austin, where we are today, right? And he's just like, hey, I think that Safeway is poisoning us. I'm gonna make a Whole Foods grocery store, right? And then do that for decades. Fast forward two decades of him just having that idea. It's like, I just want a place

• 23:56David Senra?

  for people to shop to get healthy food. And as a result of the appreciation of his stock, he was telling stories on the podcast. He's like, these are normal people. They were stocking shelves, they were checking you out, they were bagging your groceries, and they got stock options. And because Whole Foods was successful, and they played a role in that, they were able to send their kid to college. They never thought they'd be able to pay for college. They were to buy a house. Those things should be celebrated. We should be given a platform for people to tell these freaking stories.

• 24:18Chris Williamson?

  Find a simple idea and take it seriously.

• 24:21David Senra?

  Oh, God. So you even, I think, have made fun of me, the fact I won't stop talking with this guy named Todd Graves.

• 24:27Chris Williamson?

  Chicken guy.

• 24:28David Senra?

  Okay. I have some fun, I have some hilarious stories. I don't even know if some of these I can't tell on the podcast, because now me and Todd have become friends. So Todd Graves, I think the episode I did on him was like Todd Graves and his $20 billion chicken finger dream. So this is gonna take a while, but this is worth it. So Todd Graves has this idea, his initial idea is, I'm gonna remake what In-N-Out did for cheeseburgers, I'm gonna do for chicken finger meals, right? He's like, I'm gonna have a super simple menu, like, you go to Raising Canes, you have basically an option. Do you want three chicken fingers? Four chicken fingers? Or six chicken fingers? People are, oh, you should make a chicken finger sandwich. Okay, that's fine. I'll take two pieces of bread and tip my chicken

• 25:10David Senra?

  fingers on it. There's your chicken finger sandwich. It's the, he's been running this business for 30 years. The menu has not changed in 30 years. He's like, oh, In-N-Out is successful in California, why can't I be successful in, he started in Louisiana, in Baton Rouge, and LSU was his first, was his first restaurant. Just selling one item, but doing it better than anybody else. Just like In-N-Out tries to be the best hamburger, you know, than anybody else, when Harry Snyder founded the company. And that idea of find a simple idea and take it seriously is a maxim from Charlie Munger, who's a hero of mine, who I talked about the last time I was on your show. And what you'll, what Charlie spent six decades, seven decades studying is he wanted to study extreme business success. And what he realized is like, oh, what we find in business, and I would say in life,

• 25:54David Senra?

  because me and you were doing this with podcasting, is the winning system oftentimes goes ridiculously far minimizing or maximizing one or a few variables. All the people that we've talked about, all the people I've had on my show, all the successful entrepreneurs that you'll talk to are studied, it's like, you realize, they have very simple businesses, even if what they're doing is super complex. Like, what's more complex about shooting a rocket and landing it? But if you read about Elon, he's like, all he talks about is simplifying, taking the idea very seriously, deleting, reducing complexity. So Todd Graves, his whole thing was like, well, I'm gonna sell, his original idea was, I'm gonna sell chicken fingers better than anybody else, and I'm gonna do it to drunk college kids. That's

• 26:38David Senra?

  what he thought was the total addressable market that he had. And then he realized, so he thought, I'm gonna be able to sell to you when you're out drinking. But he was also open during the day. He starts getting busy during the day. And because he just focused on doing one thing and doing it better than anybody else, is if you wanted the best chicken fingers, you're just gonna go to him. And so even when he breaks down, like, he's got like, three or four moving parts on the menu. It's like, chicken fingers, it's the coleslaw, it's Texas toast, it's the fries. There's nothing else. And then he doesn't separate himself from the customer. So like, you could draw, he's got 900, when I talked to him a few months ago on my show, he had 915 stores, all owned, no franchises, by the way. He was growing faster in year 30 than he'd ever in his history. So he's adding like, another 100.

• 27:19Chris Williamson?

  How old did he say?

• 27:19David Senra?

  52. No, no, he's 53 now, because he started the company when he was 23 years old. And you can drive into a Raising Canes and place an order, and everyone, and Todd Graves is the one giving you the order. He, his business card says, fry cook, cashier, CEO. So sometimes he's handing you the order out of the drive-thru, sometimes he's in the, like, literally dumping the chicken into the oil and doing it, because there's no separation between him and his customer. And his idea was just like, well, it's served in boxes, right? He goes, as long as that box that I give the customer is the best box they ever get, they'll just keep coming back and back and back. And because he'll never sell the company, the reason I say it's a $20 billion chicken finger dream, is because he owns over 90% of the

• 28:00David Senra?

  company. It's valued at least $20 billion. He's rejected multiple, multiple billions of dollars in acquisition offers. He says, I can't sell it, because he believes, this is gonna sound crazy, but he truly believes that, that God put him on this earth to be good at chicken fingers. And he's building this business so he can build a lot of wealth, and then help people. And so he does a ton of charity work, supports a lot of people. And that's what he does with his money.

• 28:22Chris Williamson?

  One of my favorite stories about billion-dollar ideas, Joe Hudson, his daughter came bouncing down the stairs after he'd been talking about businesses for a while over the last week. He was a VC for a good while, raised, I think, maybe $100 million over his career. And his daughter came bouncing down the stairs, and she said, I finally got it. I've got my billion-dollar idea. He says, oh, my God, it's an idea that you think is worth a billion dollars. She says, no, no, that's, what? I didn't think that's what it was. No, I've got an idea that I wouldn't sell for a billion dollars. Isn't that cool?

• 28:56David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 28:57Chris Williamson?

  It's such a better way to frame a billion-dollar idea.

• 29:00David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 29:00Chris Williamson?

  What is something that you would do, that you could build, that you wouldn't sell if somebody offered you a billion dollars?

• 29:06David Senra?

  I get a lot of shit for this, because obviously, a lot of entrepreneurs listen to both my shows. And listen, it's none of my business what you do. I'm not concerned with what other people do for their lives. I don't give advice. I just like, build the life that I want to build. But I'm not interested in like, start, scale, sell. And in some cases, like, I've had good friends of mine, so they know it's a joke. They'll call me like, hey, I sold my company. I'm like, oh, sorry to hear that. Because it's like, the whole point, in my opinion, is like, you want to get to your last company. You want to get to the idea that you want to, what did I say when I was on your show last time? That if you love what you do, your exercise should be death. Like, I just got done saying, I get sad when I don't podcast. It sounds fucking ridiculous to a lot of people. But like, I took two weeks off of not having these conversations. My life is deficient.

• 29:47Chris Williamson?

  Some people do grow. Some people have phases and periods. I loved running nightclubs for a while. Not gonna love running nightclubs forever. And that was time, there was a time and a place for that to happen. Everybody goes through periods. Now, some people manage to land on the thing, which is an infinite game for them, and also fits their personality across time as they age and mature and change.

• 30:08David Senra?

  But I would say, and that's the key, all of the experiences that you had, you couldn't, I think you used the word speedrun all the time. You couldn't speedrun that. You have to go, I was 32 years old before I found my path. It was another five and a half years before I was able to pay my bills. Like, some people, Kobe Bryant founded at 13. Could you imagine how crazy that is? Like, finding your life's work that early? I read this, a bunch of biographies on the founder of Cadillac, Kenley Leland. He founded Cadillac when he was 60. He founded Lincoln Motors when he was 70. Took him 60 years to find his path. That's the point. It's like, there's not like, a time you have to do it by, but all these experiences should, in my opinion, should be getting you to the thing where it's just like, it's not about a dollar amount. It's not about an acquisition. It's not about a sale. It's like, you literally, I love this so much, you couldn't pay me to stop.

• 30:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. The loudest boos come from the cheapest seats. Making mistakes is the privilege of the active.

• 30:55David Senra?

  So I had this incredible conversation with Dana White. And I've been a massive fan of the UFC for a decade. But even a, maybe even a bigger fan of Dana, to the point where like, I'll watch the press conferences, his press conferences that he does, they're usually like, 20, 30 minutes long, after fights of the fights I didn't even get to see. He's just a phenomenal communicator. And one of the things I most admire about him and his life stories, one, I think it's very important, like, the way he is on camera, when you're watching press conferences or on a podcast, he is exactly, there is no difference between the person you're seeing and the person, and interacting with him in private, which is really, I think, really admirable and fascinating, personally fascinating

• 31:36David Senra?

  to me. But what you realize about him is, man, he's like, you know, he built the largest combat organization in the world, and he's got tens of millions, maybe 100 million followers throughout all of the different platforms. And he just gets so much shit about the way he's running his business. And so you sit down with him, and the loudest boos come from the cheapest seats, that's from this guy named Russ, who you had on your podcast.

• 31:58Chris Williamson?

  I love Russ.

• 31:59David Senra?

  That episode was excellent, by the way. I love Russ, too. I actually just talked about him a bunch on this episode I just did with Steve Stow, because Steve Stow's done a bunch of phenomenal interviews with Russ as well. But what you realize about, like, Dana, and really anybody, it's like, if you're gonna do something in the world, it's like, Dana could put on a fight, like the fight he just did at the White House. That card was incredible, right?

• 32:20David Senra?

  Five fights, I think it's the only time in UFC history it was five knockouts. There's still people complaining. It's still, you should have done XYZ, you shouldn't have done this, you should have done that. It's like, and his whole thing is he just like cuts all that stuff out. And the, the second part of that quote where it's like making mistakes is a privilege, privilege of the active. He on the episode and in other interviews, he'll talk over and over again. It's like, oh yeah, like I fucked that up or I made this mistake. It's like, if you're going to do anything, it's reframing the mistake is not always something to avoid. It's like, yeah, that means I'm trying.

• 32:50Chris Williamson?

  It's very high trust. It's one of the best things that you can do as an employee. If you mess up, own it as quickly as possible. Yeah, I fucked it. It's when someone starts to hedge and control. Even when Dana got pinned for that situation with him and his wife in the nightclub. Immediately he just took it on the chin. And I think that you can tell a lot about somebody by what happens when they're backed into a corner socially like that. He just owned it. It's like, yeah.

• 33:14David Senra?

  So he, so after we recorded, so he's got this insane setup in his office I should talk about. So he's got his office, right? Which is, has like all these crazy art and like, like little pieces from his, his career.

• 33:26Chris Williamson?

  Memorabilia and shit.

• 33:27David Senra?

  Memorabilia and these crazy quotes on his, uh, his walls, which I'll get to in one second. Then the other side, he's got this insane, like professional, uh, like professional, um, sports team level gym that only he and his friends work out in. And then the other side we record, he's got a bar because he loves smoking cigars, drinking whiskey. And then he has entrepreneurs come in every day. I think he took like, I forgot what the number, like over a hundred meetings, maybe 200 meetings last year of entrepreneurs coming in. And he loves entrepreneurship more than he loves fighting.

• 33:55Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 33:55David Senra?

  And he just like gives them advice. Sometimes he does investments. He just like wants to bullshit and like hang out with people building companies. He's just like obsessed with that. But, uh, so we spent a bunch of time afterwards and he's showing me throughout his office and he goes, you might've heard about this little dust up I had with my wife. I'm like, yeah, I'm familiar. And so he goes, after that happened, I put that on the wall. And right when you're walking out of his office, it says, uh, may God have mercy on my enemies. Cause we won't, or I won't.

• 34:20Chris Williamson?

  There's a clip that I just sent to Jared. It's my favorite Dana clip.

• 34:24Speaker 03

  You can bet against me, bet against me. Tell me it's not going to happen. Tell me it's going to fail. I love it. I love every minute of it.

• 34:32David Senra?

  Okay. So there's a reason on the, you, me and you were talking about the episode I did with Dana before this. And I kept bringing up Todd Graves because like when I sit across from somebody, I have this thing where it's like natural pattern matching. So like Dana's talking, I'm like, oh, that's kind of like, like Rockefeller did, or Henry Ford did, or like, and I kept getting Todd Graves vibes. Because Todd Graves said the exact same thing where he's just like, I need people to tell me that I'm going to fail. And he's like, I just use it as fuel and energy that I love people telling me they can't, that I can't do like what I want to do. And Dana's the same way. Dana has another great quote, uh, that I was watching when I was prepping for the episode where he's just like, uh, he goes, I'm the world's best friend. And if you want to be friends, we can do that. But if you want to be enemies, I can do that too.

• 35:11Chris Williamson?

  Wow. Fuck, that's good.

• 35:14David Senra?

  Yeah. He's really, really good. I could talk, I mean, I told him, I was like, listen, I'm just going to drive, if you're cool with you, I'm going to drop in with this film crew every like six months. Cause I could talk to him an hour over and over again. The guy never runs out of stories. The funniest thing that's ever been said on my podcast came from Dana White. It really pisses him off because if you think about how much struggle went into, to, to building UFC into what it is today. It's like, they bought it almost bankrupt for $2 million. They dumped another $40 million into it. This goes back to what we were just talking about. I like, you love it so much that they couldn't pay you to stop. They lost money for like seven years. He wasn't making any money. And he tells this great story of his partner, uh, one of the Fertitta brothers. It's the first year they get into the black meetings, they're making profit. They're writing out like all the revenue on the board.

• 35:58David Senra?

  And Dana's like, what does that say? And he goes, it says you're going to make a million dollars this year. It's like, wow, that's incredible. Dana's a multi billionaire now, like multi, multi billionaire now. But he was just happy just to make a million dollars after seven years of failing. He's like, if I just do that, I could do this forever.

• 36:14Chris Williamson?

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• 36:55Chris Williamson?

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• 37:34David Senra?

  Okay. So this is shocking because if people know that's a quote from Michael Jordan. So if you've ever seen The Last Dance, people think, oh, Michael's this like tyrant. He's this dictator. He thinks he knows better than anybody else. And there's this great book called Michael Jordan, The Life. It's like 700 pages long. It's by this guy named Roland Lasbey. And I've read that book twice. It fundamentally changed my life. And in that, that, I found that quote in that book. And we realized like, no, no, Michael's a sponge. And all he wants is useful information that's going to help him accomplish his goals. And so a lot of this, this applies to business. It was like, I went to Ed Catmull's house to record a podcast. Ed Catmull is the founder of Pixar, right? Pixar has made, they invented the, the first computer animated film.

• 38:19David Senra?

  They make some of the best films for families and for kids and for even adults that watch it. And he worked with Steve Jobs longer than anybody else. He worked with Steve for 24 consecutive years. And he speaks a lot about it. It's like the, the, the way he's, Steve is described, Steve Jobs is described in the media compared to the person I knew. It's not the same person. So he always tells these stories and adds this, this color. And he goes, hey, uh, Pixar was a public company for 10 years before Disney acquired it for like $7.6 billion. In that 10 year period, this is Ed telling me a story now. Steve fired two members of the board of directors from Pixar. Well, most people don't know is why he fired them. And so I asked Steve why he fired him. He goes, well, they, those two people, they never disagree with me. And so therefore they never disagree with me.

• 39:03David Senra?

  They're not adding any value to the company. It's like, successful people listen, those that don't listen, don't last long. What Steve understood, what Michael Jordan understands, what all these people get to the top of the profession understand. It's like, there's no upside in being wrong. And so it doesn't matter if you give me, you, you're the reason I started doing video podcasts. You remember having this conversation years ago, you're like, you, we don't have to like.

• 39:24Chris Williamson?

  You're retarded. You're not doing video.

• 39:25David Senra?

  Exactly. So it's like, I could have been like, oh, like what is Chris now? Well, he's got the eighth biggest podcast in the world. Maybe he knows some shit. Maybe I should benefit from the fact that I get access to him and we're friends and he can give me advice. Cause you're not doing it to like criticize me like, hey, you could be doing better here.

• 39:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 39:38David Senra?

  You held me accountable. It's like, you can, you should be doing this. You can be doing a better job here.

• 39:43Chris Williamson?

  I think people get confused a lot of the time when it comes to taking feedback, taking criticism. And they assume that, uh, you know, committing yourself to one thing, being on this path, disregarding the chip on the shoulder. They incorrectly pattern match, or they, they ignore advice and think that it's self belief. And that's pretty dangerous because you're just stuck in local maxima there. Like you're never going to reach outside of that. And, uh, yeah, I, I think an awful lot about

• 40:15Chris Williamson?

  looking for humans who are able to update their worldview, like, um, strong opinions loosely held, uh, as opposed to loose opinions strongly held, which is what most people have. They haven't really arrived there with conviction and vigor. They've just kind of tumbled backward. They've, uh, sliding, not deciding into whatever their worldview is.

• 40:34David Senra?

  There's, there's actually an interesting story, um, in one of these books I read where, uh, Charlie Munger, when he was trying to convince you of something, he would first state the best counter argument. And would that tell Jews after, you know, he's very verbose and he would talk for like 30, 40 minutes before he's going to let you talk. I had dinner with him and I'd say he spoke 99% of the time, which is good. He was, has all the information. What the hell am I going to say? But, uh, what I thought was interesting is like, what does that imply? It means he thought about this so much that he could start with the best counter argument. And then essentially rebut that counter argument and say why he believes something different. And I think that's like an excessively valuable skill. I've never even heard of anybody else doing that.

• 41:14Chris Williamson?

  Wise people don't solve problems, they avoid them.

• 41:16David Senra?

  No, wisdom is prevention. That is lit, so that's a Munger quote, wisdom is prevention. And, uh, he had a, this is the experience of when I went and had dinner with him. And, um, this, what you realize is like, you know, anybody, if you live long enough, I think he has another quote where he's like, if you live long enough, bad shit's going to happen to you. It's like inevitable. And you read his early life and it's like, he had the worst possible thing that could happen. He was going through divorce, his nine year old son, uh, had leukemia before it was curable. And so his nine year old son's like literally wasting away. And he is like, watch his son die slowly. And he would leave the hospital and like walk around the streets of Pasadena, just bawling, crying his eyes out. He was like probably 35, maybe 38 years old when this is, this is happening.

• 41:57David Senra?

  And yet you spend time when you realize like, he is just like, nothing can face him. He's like, problems are inevitable. And his whole thing was like, well, it's, you're not smart because you solve problems. You're smart or you're wise because you avoid them. And so the advice that he gave us was like, if you just focus on being around really, really great people, like a handful of really great friends. You know, and you don't need many, there's probably a limit to how many you could have, maybe four, five, really like people you're going to do life with for your entire life. You know, they love you, they're high quality people, they're not shitty people. He has this, other side of this is another Charlie Munger quote. He says, most, he's like, uh, most people are rat poison. He's like, there's a lot of just evil and low quality people out there. You should avoid them. So you build relationships with great people, people that you love and you can do life with.

• 42:42David Senra?

  And then you find great work. And once you find the great work, you stay in that great work. You don't jump around, like you do that for the rest of your life. And by surrounding yourself with great people and having work that you feel is great and beneficial to the world, that avoids, that eliminates most of the problems that are under your control. And then life will still throw up problems that are outside of your control. Your kid gets sick, you get cancer, whatever the case is. But the, the, the smart thing is to, is not to solve the problems. Smart thing is to prevent them from occurring ever.

• 43:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, there's a, an insight that it's far easier to date somebody who compensates for your shortcomings than it is to fix them. That you are the sort of person that likes to go to bed early. And you've decided to get into a relationship with someone that wants to go out partying until three in the morning. Maybe your nine PM bedtime is a personal failing because you feel like you need to have more control over your life than you actually do. Maybe it would be beneficial for you to work through that in some way and loosen up and you could go to bed at 11 o'clock and 12 o'clock or something like that. Or you could just get into a relationship with somebody who.

• 43:44Chris Williamson?

  Compensates for your shortcomings and he's like, actually, do you know what it is? I'm not going to make you feel insecure about that thing. I want to go to bed at nine o'clock too. So many of the situations that we end up having to, we have basically a frustration budget in life every single day. And it gets sapped out of you by all of the different interactions. Let's say,

• 44:04Chris Williamson?

  you're going to dinner and your friend that you're hanging out with is just like really annoying. And every single time you go for dinner, you're super annoyed by them. And then the next morning you wake up and you've got to deal with some real things at work that you can't get away from, or that's part of a mission. You're like, I have less in the tank to be able to deal with this issue because of the situation I went through last night, or because of the fact I had to stay up till three in the morning. Cause the girl wanted to go and watch some fucking DJ in some nightclub or whatever. And now I'm tired and I didn't even want to go. But I did it because you know, I'm going to compromise. It's really important to compromise.

• 44:34Chris Williamson?

  Wisdom is prevention, like just avoiding problems altogether where you can. Like problems are inevitable and they're going to come and smash you in the face.

• 44:44Chris Williamson?

  Choosing, but there's no nobility in meaningless suffering. There's nobility in meaningful suffering, but there is no nobility in meaningless suffering.

• 44:53David Senra?

  And I would say like, there's a great quote in Spanish that I'll translate. It's like, this person will drown in a cup of water. And this is what I mean, like the first part of that is before you, you find your life's work and, and like, hopefully you're doing something that makes the lives of other people's, other people's lives better. It's like, you have to ruthlessly edit who gets access to you. Like the first episode I ever did of the new show was Daniel Ak, founder of Spotify. Right? And if, everybody always asked me like, oh, if you had a, if you could have like a personal board of directors from all the people you've read about, all the dead entrepreneurs, who would you be? And I have an answer for that. And then like, what about for a living? Like who would your personal board of directors be? I was like, I'd only need one. And it's like, Daniel, the advice, the reason he was the first guest

• 45:36David Senra?

  is because the relationship we were able to build and the friendship we were able to build is like, he's like the wisest, one of the wisest people I know. I call him Swedish Buddha. He's like, he built one of the greatest apps and technology companies in the history of the world. Right? And did an unbelievable, had to endure unbelievable struggle to do so. But he's just very wise and he, he, almost all of our conversations, I was just with him a few months ago. We were racing cars outside of Stockholm. And we stayed up late one night and he just, the whole thing was just like, I still have notes from the conversation here. It's just like, he's like, man, you just have to ruthlessly edit who's around you. It's like, you're just like we said, like the mind is powerful place where you feed affection in a powerful way. He's like, especially you, you have a huge platform. I can't imagine what your fricking text messages or inbox look like.

• 46:18David Senra?

  Cause you could, yeah, you coming on your show could literally change some people's lives. And so the problem is they're going to give, they're going to act in a way to you that's not their real self. And so Daniel's point about this was just like, you know, if you, if you feel you're developing a friendship with somebody, have other people you trust, then go and spend time with this person because the way they act with you might be different from them. But I'm telling you, all these people, and I've built a lot of friendships with a lot of guests I've had on my show. The amount of times they have told me, it's just like, everything comes down to the quality of people that you have around you. Your life is your relationships. That's another great maxim. Your life is your relationships. If you have a bunch of shitty people around you, like you're going to have a shitty life. They're going to cause drama unneedlessly because they, they will drown in a cup of water.

• 47:01Chris Williamson?

  And then wisdom is, wisdom is avoidance. Wisdom is prevention.

• 47:04David Senra?

  You, you have, I've cut a couple of these people out of my life and you know, way less than I have to now because I've been so like, I have a very small circle. I would say I just talk, my natural tendency is not to have a thousand shallow relationships. It's just talk to the same half a dozen people over and over and over again. And when I'm doing that, I can be by myself. I'm very comfortable reading a book, making a solo podcast. Like I don't give a shit. I don't need to go out and like constantly socialize and expose myself to like the vagaries of others, people like, like corrosive and destructive behavior. I'm not interested in that.

• 47:37Chris Williamson?

  Create according to your own taste, not for applause, critics, algorithms or market demand.

• 47:43David Senra?

  This is Rick Rubin. Like you and I, we just talked about this. We just both read his book Creative Act. And towards the end of that book, he has this thing called like the house on the mountain test. And here's the great thing about reading books about people and then getting to talk to them. Like you get, you get to go deeper. And I want to tell you a story about James Dyson. We can get there in a little bit. I think it's really important about this. But what Rick Rubin's point was just like, you're North Star in whatever you're doing. He, the metaphor he uses, he goes, let's say you bought a house, it's on a mountain. It's so, so remote, no one is ever going to see it but you. He goes, do not put in your best effort to decorate it and to design it just like you would want it done. Like you're the only person that ever see it. No one's ever going to visit. What do you do?

• 48:26David Senra?

  And the answer to that question, that is your revealed preference. That is what you actually want to do. And so when you look at Rick Rubin's career is what does he do? He just makes the music that he wants to listen to. He is not, he says over and over again, don't think about the audience. Don't think about the customer. Don't think about the end user. Like you're probably not unique. Me and him talked about this. You're not that unique. So if Rick Rubin likes this song by Johnny Cash that with a guitar and just, you know, and just this guy's voice, what's the chance that he's the only person in the world that likes that? Probably 10 million people that like the same kind of music Rick Rubin likes. Just like me and you, we talked about this before we started recording.

• 49:05David Senra?

  We make the podcasts that we want to listen to. We both are obsessed with podcasts. They've made our lives benefit, they've benefited our lives immensely. I've learned more from reading in podcasts than I ever did in school. Like I'm just making the stuff that I'd want to listen to. I listen to them before they come out. Could you imagine like your life is making a podcast? And you have to listen to it before it goes out and you don't like it? This doesn't make any sense. So I think that, that the idea of like the metaphor of you're designing a house on a mountain, no one else is going to see it. You should design your life that way too. There's parts of your life that you share with other people, but there's huge swaths of it that only you know. You should design those, those parts of your life, same exact way as the parts that other people see.

• 49:46Chris Williamson?

  A rule of thumb for anybody that makes things on the internet, would you consume your own content? If not, don't post it.

• 49:53David Senra?

  I was with you one time and you asked somebody and there was a 30 second pause.

• 49:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. And after 30 seconds.

• 50:01David Senra?

  You know the answer.

• 50:03Chris Williamson?

  Wow. And like dude, if it takes more than five seconds, the answer is fucking no.

• 50:07David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 50:08Chris Williamson?

  Raid your own life. Create a grand theft life.

• 50:10David Senra?

  Okay. So you told me before, I missed this episode of yours, but you just did this like round table. What do you call these round table episodes?

• 50:17Chris Williamson?

  Rabbit hole.

• 50:17David Senra?

  Rabbit hole with Tim Urban.

• 50:19Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 50:19David Senra?

  Tim Urban, like, I don't know, 10 years ago, wrote this crazy essay on Elon and SpaceX and Tesla. He kind of predicted a lot of the shit that's occurred in the last decade. And he had this thing called grand theft life. And what he realized, realized about Elon was like, his ability to step outside of himself. So me and you are going through life all the time and we're kind of like, right now I'm looking at you. My view is a lot better than yours is, right? Like you're a lot more handsome than I am. But like, this is my experience and you're kind of get like siloed into like, this is, I'm just experiencing it as it happens. Right? And this started because Toby Luque, I'll go back to Elon in a second. I sat down with Toby Luque, founder of Shopify, which again is probably my favorite conversation I've had on the podcast so far.

• 51:03David Senra?

  And he has this idea, again, when he says this, he's running a $200 billion company. And he goes, I like to take the view that a core, I'm a corporate raider. I did not start Shopify. I do not run Shopify. I have now extracted it from the owners and now I'm the new owner. And the previous management was crazy. And then I go through and look at every single other thing that I would change. Why do you need to step aside? Because like, if you're just going through your day to day, there's so many problems he's not seeing. You have to step back in Tim Urban's grand theft life essay that he was writing on Elon. It's like, you see that Elon does that. Me and you were talking about this before where it's like, okay, if you look at yourself as if you're playing grand theft auto, like your character, you play grand theft auto.

• 51:45David Senra?

  My, my, uh, my character needs money. So I, my character goes, does jobs. Now he has more money. My character is stamina. He's running from the cops. He needs better cardio. So I take him to the gym. You just literally say, like from the outside, me and you, I hope you don't cut this from the podcast. We had, we were in Hawaii together. We had many, many late night conversations about issues with women that me and you were both having, that I swear to God, if there was a, there was a casual observer, right? Just listening, they were just like, Chris, David, this is, these are simple solutions. You just can't see them. Cause we were in a, like I could see what was wrong with yours and you could see what was wrong with mine. So this idea of just stepping out your side. And I love the idea that again, putting into entrepreneurial terms, like some guy is now

• 52:29David Senra?

  taking over my business or taking over my life. What would he change?

• 52:32Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 52:32David Senra?

  It, you need a pause and you need a way to step back and go through this like right now.

• 52:37Chris Williamson?

  George has got this idea where he talks about, imagine that there was an evil version of you, a man with a mustache. What would he do to beat you? What would another version of you, with the mustache do to beat you? Or that question of if you had 10 times the agency, what would you do? But with that situation, it's like, you know, where your shortcomings, where your biggest shortcomings lie. There's going to be this person. Okay. They would be way more decisive. They wouldn't, they would need less certainty in order to reach conviction. Because I know that I, I spend too much time vacillating and flip flopping back and forth and I, I don't commit so quickly. And I know that the version of me with a mustache, he would arrive at the outcome way quicker.

• 53:23Chris Williamson?

  Because he wouldn't be doing the flip flopping. Or he would be more cutthroat when it comes to, um, not giving people third and fourth and sixth and seventh chances. Because I keep doing that and it keeps on burning me. That's what he would do. And then you just go, okay.

• 53:40Chris Williamson?

  Just, just do that.

• 53:41David Senra?

  What, what would your answer to that for your own life be right now?

• 53:44Chris Williamson?

  The decisiveness thing I think is probably not far off.

• 53:50Chris Williamson?

  My required level of certainty in order to make big decisions. It's quite a high bar and that's led to me making very few mistakes. Like I haven't made, every business that I've started has succeeded. Almost all of the projects that I get involved in are very good, but it also, if you're not failing, it's probably an indication that you're not moving quickly enough. Because you could move a little, the headroom for moving more quickly is probably still quite high. And you would still end up with a pretty good hit rate. So something like that. How about you?

• 54:24David Senra?

  I think especially the last year, the biggest mistake, you get distracted, especially because like, there was like a slow build to Founders Podcast. It never like, it's like, I was like a frog in boiling water. Cause it took five and a half years to break through another like, it was like eight before it was like any substantial thing.

• 54:41Chris Williamson?

  Three, three and a half, four for us.

• 54:42David Senra?

  Yeah. So like you, it was, that was great. It was actually like, in hindsight, I wouldn't change anything. Cause this was like, oh, I'm still the same person. I don't feel any different. Yeah. Where the new one, because I had an existing audience and it kind of like, so it was like disorienting how fast my life changed. And then this is, it goes back to Daniel Eck and why he'd be like my, uh, you know, my sole person on a living board of directors is, uh, he's just like, just stay away from the circus. That's the advice that he would give me over and over again.

• 55:09Chris Williamson?

  So the evil version of you that's trying to beat you with a mustache would just get less distracted. He'd be more simple.

• 55:16David Senra?

  And this is what I've gone back to doing where Daniel's advice is just like, uh, we just had this phenomenal dinner in New York. And then, uh, he was driving me to a friend's house and he's just like, your life is very simple, man. And he's just like, he's like, if you just sit in a room and make podcasts and don't do anything else. You know, obviously spend time with your friends, take care of your health, but like, you don't have to go to fucking dinners. You don't have to go to conferences. He had this conference called.

• 55:36Chris Williamson?

  Just sit in a room and make podcasts, says the guy that owns Spotify. Do you think that might have been a somewhat of a.

• 55:43David Senra?

  No, cause he's, he just stepped down. I promise you, it's not like, it's not, no, no, no. Cause like my, my shows are always going to be somewhat niche. Like your show will always be 10 times bigger than anything I do, because I'm just narrowly focused on entrepreneurship. But what, the advice is, because I remember texting him, I was like, hey, are you, uh, you going to Brilliant Minds, which was his conference? And I don't think he was there this year. He goes, he goes, no, and neither should you. And that's when he just, hey, he goes, just stay away from circus.

• 56:10Chris Williamson?

  But this is similar to if you do everything, you will win.

• 56:12David Senra?

  No, that's, okay. So we can get to that in one second. So let me finish this, cause I think, I like that you asked a question. It's like really helpful for me to now kind of do Grand Theft Life and now step back and say what I would do. So I was like, I have work that I really like to do. I really like to read books. I really like to make podcasts. You know, I like one on one conversations, maybe one on two. I can't do like group stuff. I'm very introverted. It makes me very uncomfortable. I think like, and then I've got to figure out like, the dating part, the girl part, but other than that, like, I think the distraction is.

• 56:49Chris Williamson?

  We talked about something to do with this last time, that so many of history's greatest entrepreneurs have been totally shit with women. Like they're just pussy hounds or they're unable to hold a relationship together. But I don't know whether, to give them their due, I wonder whether part of it is less they're bad with women and more the traits that make you a very successful elite level entrepreneur, the kind that you study, probably give you some traits that make it difficult to be in a relationship with you.

• 57:24David Senra?

  So I wasn't expecting to talk about this, but there, I have some interesting ideas. So there's this great book that was written by Arnold Schwarzenegger's girlfriend. He had, he lived with his girl when he was 21 to 26. So he was still well, like, again, he's dominated this weird niche of bodybuilding, but he's not the Arnold that he's been becoming, but he's the same person. So you see it's coming. And it's 300 pages of her just be like, why is this guy not acting normal? It's like, cause it's Arnold. He's one of the most driven people in the world. I could have solved that for you in 10 seconds. Right? And the end result, when I made the episode on that book was like a successful entrepreneur, anybody chasing after somebody, you need a supportive spouse or no spouse at all. Right? And that, and that's the key there.

• 58:04David Senra?

  What I would also say is, uh, I've been talking to this guy. He considers himself like a consultant to some of the most famous people in the world. Right? And what I find interesting is like, he can essentially pattern match across, let's say a hundred of the most famous people in the world. And these are like mainstream celebrities. This is not like me and you. Right? And he talked about, but in some of these people also happen to be captains of industry, because Elon's one of the most famous people on the planet. He's not one of his people he talks to, but, and he goes, the problem that these people have is when you're really successful like that, you, you have an expansive personality. That's the word that he used expansive personality, which means the more you succeed, the more you want to succeed. Napoleon said this in French and you could, uh, translates into appetite comes with eating.

• 58:48David Senra?

  Usually you eat and you're full. These kinds of people, the more they eat, the more they want to eat. So his point is like, these people also have usually bad relationships because there's a ton of infidelity. Right? Because it's just like, they're expansive and in every element of their life, they're, they're increasing their skills. They're, maybe their movie is getting better, bigger. Maybe their business is getting better, they're expanding. But in this very narrow, but very important part of your life, which is like your romantic side, you're expected to not have those same personality traits. Now I don't have that issue. I can stay with one person at a time.

• 59:23David Senra?

  The, the issue that you have is like, whether it's a very close friend, a business partner, a spouse. These are all very similar relationships. Like they, they look, they're very deep partnerships. And so you have to be, take your eye, be very careful to make sure you're picking the right person. And especially you, because you're handsome, rich, super famous. Like you have, I've seen some of your dams. Okay? Like you have, um,

• 59:49David Senra?

  I hope we cut in that laugh over there. Yeah. Make sure you add that in. Like you have so many people trying to get to you that want something from you. That doesn't mean they're good for you. And that's where you have to be careful. That's where you have to be somewhat paranoid.

• 1:00:03Chris Williamson?

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• 1:00:47Chris Williamson?

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• 1:01:13David Senra?

  You know, the advice I've gotten from some of the, you know, the most successful people in the world about this, they're just like, make sure that she's a good person. That's it. They just have to be a good person, but good people are few and far between. And what I mean by good is like, not selfish, not doing this just because of what's good, what they get out of it. And willing to, and in many cases, dude, Jimmy Iovine, okay? Jimmy Iovine, we gotta talk about this, cause this guy's the best. So when people used to ask me, hey, you know, who, who, uh, did you want to meet? You haven't met. Jimmy Iovine, I'd have a list and Jimmy Iovine would be in top three. And people like, that doesn't make any sense. Most people don't know who Jimmy Iovine is, but one of my favorite documentaries is this documentary called The Defiant Ones. Have you seen this? No. You've got to watch it tonight. So it's a four part documentary.

• 1:01:55David Senra?

  It's technically supposed to be about the relationship, the working partnership between Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre. That's been going on for decades. It is really one of the best documentaries about entrepreneurship and these kind of wild personality types. Dr. Dre is a wild boy. He is a, he was a probably highly likely a child prodigy, the best in the world he does. Jimmy, same thing. He, he was in the music business for five decades and has succeeded in from engineer to producer, to record label executive, to building a business that's selling and selling it for $3 billion to Apple. And so I, Jimmy was on my show. We live close to each other. He's nice enough that I get to hang out with him and like talk to him on the phone and hang out with him all the time now. And it's, what's fascinating is when you talk to these older guys that are, I think Jimmy's probably 70 years old by now.

• 1:02:38David Senra?

  He's got more knowledge about life in his pinky than I do in my entire body. Like he just lived through, he's just seen everything. And his biggest thing was, he's like, if you want to be successful, he's like, you probably don't want to be successful for a year, for five years. You want to do it for a long period of time. And he's like, I've been around some of the most gifted, talented people in the world. He's worked with everybody from John Lennon to Bruce Springsteen to Tom Petty, to Dr. Dre, to Eminem, to literally everybody. And out of the ones, he's like, most people, the advice he gave me is like, most people cannot handle success.

• 1:03:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:10David Senra?

  You're not destroyed by, by a competitor. There's not going to be another Chris Williamson coming in here and outcompeting you in podcasting. You're going to do, if you're going to fail, you're going to do it yourself. And what Jimmy said, he's like, they fall into four buckets, which I thought was interesting. Number one, drugs. I don't do drugs. Not going to be an issue. Like I avoid them. Alcohol, second one. I don't really drink. Number three, uh, megalomania. Cause remember he's in the music industry. He's like, listen, you start out, I mean Kanye, I think he'd be, I'm a huge fan of his first four albums. I think this is what happened, in my opinion, what happened to him. It's like, and Jimmy was saying, it's like really hard that like you get on stage every night and there's 80,000 people telling you, screaming your name and telling you how great you are.

• 1:03:53David Senra?

  The problem is to come off that stage and then still be dad or husband or friend. Yeah.

• 1:03:59Chris Williamson?

  Take the trash out.

• 1:04:00David Senra?

  Yeah. And, and you not think, and then what happens is the reason he calls it megalomania is because they loved you because the work you put in. The megalomania thinks now you're thinking you're some, you're not even human. You're like some kind of like God. So therefore I don't, I just show up and it happens and they, they stop putting the work, then it shows up on the work. And then there's just like the death spiral. And then the fourth thing was women. And Jimmy Iovine has been very, uh, he was like very open about this. It's in the documentary where he, his dad was his best friend, like best friend, talks every day. Jimmy was dating a Playboy playmate and his dad died suddenly unexpectedly. They did not see it coming. And right after his dad died, he decided to get married.

• 1:04:42David Senra?

  And he says in the documentary, we've talked in longer detail privately, but you know, it's just like. I married the wrong person. He's very beneficial of how all the kids and he's got a great relationship with his adult kids. Now he talks to his kids every single day. But he's just like that, the wrong woman in your life, the wrong man in a woman's life can literally destroy you. And so I think that, I think this is like, we could, we should have an entire podcast next time I come here, where we just talk about the stuff we've talked about privately.

• 1:05:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, fuck me.

• 1:05:11David Senra?

  But it is, it's, it's a very hard part of your life because I do consider it almost like a drug. Like, well, these people don't start out, hey, I'm gonna get addicted to pills or heroin or alcohol. And they're smart and successful. It's arrogant to think that wouldn't happen to us. So that's why I think it's so important to like, talk about it.

• 1:05:25Chris Williamson?

  Agreed, agreed. Yeah. I had this line from earlier this year, what you are praised for in public, you will pay for in private. And a lot of the time, the single mindedness, the resilience, the motivation, the permanent growth mindset, the attention to detail, the unwillingness to compromise, the hypervigilance, the anxiety, dedication, all of these things. In the business world, it's called reliability, consistency, non-quickness.

• 1:06:00Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic in the boardroom can often make you a forgotten person around your kitchen table. I had Andy Stumpf, Navy SEAL on the podcast. And he said, I built my entire identity around being a guy that doesn't quit. So that made me an amazing SEAL team member. Also made me stay in a marriage for a decade longer than I should have done.

• 1:06:20David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:21Chris Williamson?

  I don't quit, not the sort of guy that quits. There are certain domains in which the things that you do publicly aren't meant to be applied. And a lot of those are the ones that happen privately. And then when public and private begins to sort of mesh and blend together, that's what we get with modern social media, right? That you can't see the distinction between the two.

• 1:06:42David Senra?

  And, and the problem is, you're like, you're constantly comparing like your relationship to other people's ideal relationship, which is very destructive. And what I would say about this is like, you talk about being hyper rational. I think you approach your business, I fucking know a lot about your business, like you're very rational. I actually don't think we should, and I don't want to and will not do in like your romantic life. I think you have to like, you should be a little bit irrational. It is, it is definitely like a, a more irrational, emotional thing. That's why I think the advice that I keep getting over and over again is just like, make sure the person that you're letting into your life, the one that you have a serious relationship with right now, is just a good person, that they actually care about you, that they actually want good things for you. Because it's not gonna work if you try to approach it with like a rational mind.

• 1:07:26David Senra?

  It is default irrational. And what I would say, this is something like, um, so we have a good friend, Senra LaRocca.

• 1:07:35Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:07:35David Senra?

  And one of the conversations I had with her was just like, what are you lying to yourself about?

• 1:07:41Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:07:42David Senra?

  And this could be an entire discussion at dinner, because everybody's lying to themselves about something. And what I didn't understand about myself, especially until I started the new show, because I was just, I was sitting in a room by myself for a decade, like talking to myself, like no one was around. And I always thought like, I didn't need anybody and like, I'm a loner and like, you know, other people aren't that important to me. And I realized like, no, that's a lie. Like, I had just a lot of low quality people around me. But like, if I could have access and develop relationships and friendships with high quality people, that is my drug of choice. Like, I remember when I went to record with Todd Graves, we flew into Baton Rouge and recorded in the very first Raising Cane's that he built with his own hands. He built it with his hands. It's insane.

• 1:08:25David Senra?

  And I remember calling a good friend of mine, he's kind of like, he's like an older brother, like a mentor, like a coach. And I called him and I was like, I'm in trouble. And he goes, why? I go, because I'm already addicted to doing this. I feel like I'm high as a kite right now. I've never done ecstasy, never done MDMA. I have to imagine, this is what it feels like. I want to do this all the time.

• 1:08:47David Senra?

  And so I guess like, what I didn't understand, what I was lying about myself was like, that relationships weren't important to me, where the truth is, they're more important than anything else. So I'm sorry to monologue to you, but I think, let me just get this out real quick, if you don't mind.

• 1:09:03David Senra?

  I desperately did not want to be a loser. And that's why I'm a workaholic and I've worked full time since I was 15 years old, because I saw up and down my family tree, I was just fucking terrified of winding up just like them. And this is the chips on shoulders, but chips on pockets, like, I, I, I'm not a strategic person. I genuinely just throw a lot of hours and effort. I don't think I have any strategy.

• 1:09:24David Senra?

  And so I thought forever, like my, my work is how I protect myself, because it's, it gives me my independence. It allows me to build a world that I can control, because I didn't have control when I was younger. It allows me to take care of family members and other people to help. And it's like, it's my thing. It's the only, it's more important, if you were asking, it's like more important than anything in my life. And I realized that that's a lie. Like, if you ask what's the most important thing in my life now, it is my relationships. It's building and maintaining and deepening the relationships I have with people that are very high quality, that I love with everything. And now right underneath that, my work's like bumping up against it, but this is still my number one priority. And I think also, you'll see, for people like you, you're super driven, just like I

• 1:10:05David Senra?

  am, you for, you forego some professional success if you want like a deep romantic relationship. And I would say, that's what like, makes life worth living. You should do that. You should make the irrational choice.

• 1:10:19Chris Williamson?

  How do you square that circle with the single mindedness that most great people have?

• 1:10:23David Senra?

  I don't think you can. I think like, there's an ebb and flow, like if you look at a snapshot of like my own life, right? Where undoubtedly, I think I would be even more, I would be more successful if you didn't take out those huge chunks of time to build these relationships, both romantic and friendship wise. But that's not the kind of life I want to live. Now, I've met people like that. I know, some of these people have been on my show. You get around them and, and you literally like, where's all your friends, dude? They're not, that's not important to them. That's not what they're going for. They're, they're, they're playing a different game. What I'm saying is like, that's not for me. Like, I want, I'm not saying a balanced life, because I'm definitely not balanced, but like, relationships are more important than my work. That's just how I feel.

• 1:11:06Chris Williamson?

  Far fewer people than think it are introverts. Like, you're probably not an introvert, your friends just suck.

• 1:11:13David Senra?

  That's a, that's a great way to think about it.

• 1:11:14Chris Williamson?

  And if you had better friends, you'd want to hang around them. There's like, everybody has been at a dinner table and adored the conversation and not wanted it to end.

• 1:11:22David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:23Chris Williamson?

  Okay, well, what, what happened there? Did you change for the evening? No, I was just around people that resonate. I was around people who I usually don't resonate with, but for some reason, they were really on form that night. Well, you can just get friends that are kind of on form all the time. And you can also hang around with people who are never on form.

• 1:11:40David Senra?

  I, I've had friends of mine tell me this, it goes back to where we're saying, the mind is a powerful place, which affects you in a powerful way. They're like, man, you gotta be real careful about the way you describe yourself. And I think around this, I kept saying, I'm introverted, I'm like, I want to be alone, all this other stuff. And like, this is like, that's not how you are. To your point, I think it's more of like an energy thing. Like, the conversations we have, I leave George Mack's treadmill.

• 1:12:02Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:12:03David Senra?

  If you put me in a big party with a bunch of strangers, I'm like, there's no energy and I gotta run away. So it's more like, am I getting energy from this? Or am I very uncomfortable and is it draining my energy?

• 1:12:13Chris Williamson?

  If you go to sleep on a win, you'll wake up with a loss.

• 1:12:17David Senra?

  So this is actually a con and regretter quote, uh, that he said, um, I'm pretty sure it's in the documentary called Notorious, which again, he did the whole Kanye thing, where he's like, poor kid in Ireland, he's like in collections, not paying his credit card bill, I think he's working part time as a plumber, and somehow he had the foresight to, to have a camera crew follow him around, document his life. Because he was just so convinced that he was gonna be the champion one day, he was gonna be one of the most successful professional fighters of all time. And it's interesting that some of these people don't take their own advice, because they, they get to Daniel X point, they entertain the circus, they go to the events, they start buying, you know, loving the, the material rewards, the drugs, the women, all the stuff that comes with, you know, success. And one of my personal heroes, this is a guy named James Dyson.

• 1:13:02David Senra?

  One of the best days of my life happened, I think it was last, maybe October, maybe November, in New York City, I got to spend a few hours with James Dyson, I did an episode with him. And the reason this was so important for me, people are like, the vacuum cleaner guy? Like, what the hell is he talking about? It's like, no, no. Out of every single biography and autobiography I've ever read in my life, and I think as of today, it's like 425 or something like that, because it correlates with the, the founders episodes I've done. If I, if you only read one book, it'd be his first autobiography, which is called Against the Odds, an autobiography by James Dyson. Because it's not about, today, you fast forward, he's 78 years old, he owns 100% of one of the most successful private companies in the world, he wouldn't sell it. I had a friend that tried to buy it.

• 1:13:44David Senra?

  He, he guessed, my friend that tried to buy it, that if James would sell, it'd fetch between 60 to 80 billion. James has no outside shareholders, that's 100% of it. My friend put a flyer out to him, saying, we want to buy your company. He paraphrased the response that came back from Dyson, which was, fuck you, this is a family heirloom. It's not about the money. He's, he's an engineer, he's a designer, he's obsessed with the work that he's doing. So it's, that book is not about this, it's not the 78 year old James Dyson, it is the Dyson in his 30s and mid 40s, that is just failing for a decade and a half, over and over and over again. 5,126 failed prototypes, the 5,127th one is the one that worked. It's the James Dyson that's going to bed, because he's working in a carriage house, which I guess is like a garage in England? What is a carriage house?

• 1:14:29Chris Williamson?

  No idea.

• 1:14:30David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:30Chris Williamson?

  Never heard that.

• 1:14:30David Senra?

  I had to look it up. Well, I thought, it's in the UK, so I figured you know. So it's like a detached little workshop outside of your main house. I think it's in Bath, England, where he might, where he is, where he's failing all day long, walks inside, passes his little, his kids, gets into bed, cries himself to sleep. Then his kid is four, sees him failing. His kid is seven, dad's still failing. His kid is a teenager, dad is still a failure. And so the reason this was so important to me is because I knew I wanted a podcast, I knew I loved it more than anything else. I have this irrational love of podcasting that people make fun of me for, and I'm fine with. But I was having no success. It was not that like, I wasn't making any money, it was, it was costing me money to do this. My, my savings went down every month and I, for some reason, wouldn't quit.

• 1:15:12David Senra?

  And one of the reasons I don't think I quit is because, episode 25, the, the very first time I read James Dyson's book, is I read this book and I'm like, well, this guy struggled for 14 years. Like, I can give it a go for a year, wind up being five and a half, I didn't think it'd take that long. But like, just knowing that story and rereading that book over and over and over again, it just, I was able to relate to him, it was like, he didn't give up, why do I have to give up? Like, you know how good you're gonna feel if you get to the other side of this? And I did have a lot of faith that I would get to the other side of it. And so.

• 1:15:40David Senra?

  When you meet James Dyson, though, like I read his first autobiography at least five times. I've read the highlights from that book hundreds of times. This is not a joke. So I'm not exaggerating. I read his second biography, which he wrote when he was in the seventies, twice. I read, he has, he wrote an encyclopedia when he was like 45 or 50 about he's obsessed with inventions. It's called A History of Great Inventions. It literally like somebody printed out a Wikipedia page of like 200 inventions with hand-scrawled notes. There's a picture of Mean James going through the book, me showing him, like me annotating every single thing. And so be able to sit with him, I thought I understood him completely. And there was still, this is why it's so powerful to be able to talk to these people. First of all, he sits across from you and you realize that he's built,

• 1:16:21David Senra?

  he doesn't, he's not a, he's not a absentee executive. He does the work. He's, and he's on the, the manufacturing line. He's in the engineering meetings. He's in the design meetings. You sit across from him. He's a very thin guy. His fingers are probably twice as wide as mine are. Why? Because he's been working with his hands. It's like, if, look at your biceps, like your, how many curls did you do to get those biceps? How many, like him tinkering with his hands that he get, he's got massive fingers. They don't fit the rest of his body because it's like a lifetime of tinkering. It's incredible. But then the reason I say if you go to sleep on a wind, you wake up with a loss is like, most people that have success, they're like, I fucking made it. Look at me. I'm the best.

• 1:17:04David Senra?

  And they forget it's the work that got them there, not them. It's tied to the megalomelia thing. Where Dyson's not like that at all. I didn't understand his organizing principle. And so this is what he said. He said, okay, I pick up a product, right? I look at it. I think about, how can I make it better? I make it better. I put it back down. Short while later, pick it back up. How can I make it better? I make it a little bit better. Put it back down. And he went through this over and over again. I think he used a coffee cup in the, in the episode. It's been, you know, six months. I don't remember. And he goes, and I just didn't, I just did that for 45 years and never stopped. That's the anecdote to, anecdote, I don't know if that's the right word, to going to sleep on a wind. He never slept on a wind because he likes the, the activity itself. He just, he has an engineering

• 1:17:46David Senra?

  mind. Everything around him, he says it doesn't torment him. But he'd see this table. He's like, I think I could shave off a little bit there. I could fix that. I could do that. That's how his brain just works. And he just loves it. It's like a giant puzzle to him. And that's, I think that's the way to do it. It's just like, man, if you just love the activity for the sake of itself, and you never stop improving it, like you're not going to fall prey to the failures and disasters of like a Kanye or a Conor McGregor or any of these other people you see.

• 1:18:10Chris Williamson?

  Fascinating that that was a quote from Conor McGregor, somebody that's had one of the biggest fall offs in history.

• 1:18:14David Senra?

  Yeah, unfortunately. Yeah.

• 1:18:15Chris Williamson?

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• 1:18:56Chris Williamson?

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• 1:19:11Chris Williamson?

  A check out. Yeah, I, I've kind of been obsessed thinking about the difference between what it feels like to have fallen off and what it feels like to have never made it.

• 1:19:21David Senra?

  I would rather never make it. I am, this is another thing where you're surprised. Like I've talked to Michael Dell about this, Daniel Ek about this, Todd Graves, Wright Jacobs, like all these, every single person I just mentioned is worth 10, Michael Dell's worth like $200 billion. And he's just like, it's not the love of success, it's the fear of failure. It's like, for me, that is my worst nightmare. That like, I, I do mean that, like I would rather never make it than make it, right? And then lose it. And so this is why, I, I wanted to say something earlier that you, you just prompted this thought. It's like, it's weird because like I'll meet with like young entrepreneurs a lot, right? And I feel like the middle child because I'm not in my twenties anymore, but I'm not 70, you know? And so I'm in both of these worlds. And the advice I give to these like

• 1:20:05David Senra?

  25ers, I go, you should go and spend some time with like a 65-year-old, 70-year-old. Like try to get an afternoon with Jimmy Iovine, who's in his seventies, who's seen everything in the world, or James Dyson, who's seen everything in the world. Like, we, we have this guest list that we want, we want to get, and it's in reverse chronological order by age, because some of these guys, like I got to sit down with Charlie Munger, never got to record a podcast with him. Now it's, the opportunity's gone. Same thing, got to sit down with Sam Zell, never got to record a podcast with him. They have all this knowledge. And all you have to do is just like sit down and they'll, they, they're already down the path that you're, that you want to go on. And they'll say, hey, watch for that pitfall there. What, don't, don't turn right when this, this is gonna happen to you. Because you realize like everything that happens to us is not us. If somebody else was sitting in your position, they'd be getting those DMs too. Like they just would. It's not you.

• 1:20:50David Senra?

  It's the position that you're holding. And I, yeah, I think it's like super important. People say I have a fetish for old people. I don't have a fetish for old people. Just like, I, I want to avoid the failure, the, the success and then the decline in failure that you see so over and over and over again.

• 1:21:10Chris Williamson?

  There's this interview in 1999. Eminem said, I ain't in this for the money. I'm in here for the respect. If I had a trillion dollars and I fell off, I'd be the most miserable person in the world. He grew up in poverty, but he favored status over money.

• 1:21:26David Senra?

  He stayed, he favored skillset. So what, he, he has a line that I think fits into how I view my own work. And he says, a plaque and platinum status is whack if I'm not the baddest. And what he, what he was saying at that point in, this is 2003, when I think the Eminem show came out, 2002 maybe. And his whole point is at that time is like every rapper had the same goal. I want to go platinum because then you get a plaque. So that's a plaque and platinum status is whack if not the baddest. His contemporaries, his peers were like, I'm good because I sold a million records. It means people, I'm popular and it means I'm making a lot of money. And his thing is like, I want to be the best. I don't want to be the biggest. I want to be the best. And this is why you and I have talked about the craft of podcasting so much. And about like, we, we had a 30-minute discussion

• 1:22:09David Senra?

  with George before we started recording about like, how do you pick guests? How do you think about things? Like, we were obsessed with this stuff. It's like, I want to make something that I could point to, like I could tell my, Jeff Bezos has this great line. He's just like, we're trying to build something that we can tell our grandkids about, and such things are not meant to be easy. So in his case, like, he should be very proud of building Amazon. It's one of the best companies ever created, right? I am very, very proud of some of the things that I have made. And I have a daughter. So my daughter's 14 now. I just, I recorded this episode with Mr. Beast, which won't be out for several months. But she was a huge fan, so she got to come with me and meet him. And Mr. Beast is a massive fan of my first podcast founders. His Spotify rap, he'll screenshot and send

• 1:22:52David Senra?

  it to me. It's like founders is number one on there. And for her, I'm very proud that somebody she admires is saying, hey, your dad's work is like really valuable to me. And she came with me to record with Todd Graves. She loves Raising Canes. And she knows, Spotify, like her favorite app is Spotify. And my friend runs to her favorite brand, Mad Happy. And all these people are telling her, like, your dad's work is really important to my life. You should be proud of him. That's like, that's worth more than money. It's worth more than a million dollars or 10 million that you'd get if you sold 10 million or a million records.

• 1:23:23Chris Williamson?

  I do think it's more addicting, and it's certainly more fulfilling to be admired by people that you admire. And it's one thing to just seek status. It's another thing to seek money. But to seek status and respect in the eyes of people who you have judged to be worthy of admiration.

• 1:23:40David Senra?

  Inside and I would say outside your industry for sure, and even more important inside.

• 1:23:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Because they have the highest amount of taste.

• 1:23:46David Senra?

  I think you opened the last episode we did together. You're like, did you hear my Q and A where I said you're the podcaster's podcaster?

• 1:23:52Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 1:23:52David Senra?

  It's like, I, and I do this to this day. I go around and collect more data on podcasting, podcasting anybody else. I, and we share it. We like, we don't hold anything. And in one case, I remember my friends David and Ben, who did the acquired podcast. I was on a walk with David, I don't know, like, three months ago in San Francisco. He's actually taking me to the airport because we're just good friends. And I had found an idea from Rob Moore and Andrew Huberman that I gave to them in terms of like, you have a skew, you have an asset in your podcast that you're not currently monetizing, and it's very valuable to advertisers, and this is what they might pay. And I told David this idea. And on the walk, he's like, hey, by the way, thanks for that idea. We're gonna make $3 million from that idea this year. And it's just like.

• 1:24:31Chris Williamson?

  I stole the same thing from Rogan back in the last year.

• 1:24:33David Senra?

  Yeah, exactly. So like, the point is like, it's all positive sum with us. It's like, I consider, the, the historical analogy for, for me and you is like the filmmakers, right? If you study the early days when George Lucas and Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola and Brian De Palma, and all these guys were in their twenties, they were friends, they hung out, they traded secrets, they watched each other's movies, they gave themselves feedback. Because at the end of the day, if you go watch Steven Spielberg's Jaws today and George Lucas's Star Wars tomorrow, what did Steven Spielberg lose? Nothing. What did George Lucas lose? Nothing. It's like all positive sum.

• 1:25:07Chris Williamson?

  Kind of is pointless doing the big journey thing if you don't get to share it with people. And if people are in tangential industries or even in the same sort of an industry, just being able to see the impact that you've had on somebody that you respect and admire and know that, hey, like that idea, that was the reason that David paid so much attention to video. That was a little, that was just like a little, a little contribution. Isn't that nice?

• 1:25:29David Senra?

  Our, our mutual friend, John Coogan, right? Just, they just had this phenomenal acquisition with TPN. But well before even that, I've been working with John and like talking about podcasting with John for years before he even started TPN. And he was one of the first viewers of the new show. And he's just like, why are you guys only shooting on three cameras? Why don't you shoot five? And he explained why. And then me and Rob made the change immediately.

• 1:25:51Chris Williamson?

  You should try seven.

• 1:25:52David Senra?

  There you go. But we made, but we made the change immediately. And then we're all in a group chat together and Rob had mentioned, you know, we, we had a good shot and I think John was like, hey, this shot looks good or whatever. You know, cause again, it's, it's both, hey, you could approve here, but this is also dope. Like, I like this. And Rob's like, yeah, you're the one that told us to do that.

• 1:26:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, thank you. Jerry, can you pull up on the main TV? Can you just throw the profile shot of me up so that David can look at why you need seven? I'm going to explain to you, I'm going to commit you to two more, two more cameras. So, uh, we've always had medium tight and then the wide. It's like kind of classic. I guess if you've only got three, you're going wide, medium, medium. But this shot where you go very side on.

• 1:26:31David Senra?

  It's beautiful.

• 1:26:32Chris Williamson?

  Is really, really nice. And what you can do, you can reverse frame it. We haven't done it here, but if you move, in fact, I can do it, I can do it by doing this. So if I go like that there, you actually end up with a complete opposite framing. And, uh, that's used in documentaries typically when there's going to be a pivot in the story.

• 1:26:50David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:51Chris Williamson?

  So someone's talking, someone's talking, someone's talking. And then there is a, a moment where things are going to take a turn for the worst or something. It's the, it's the, uh, the minor chord that somebody plays on the guitar and you're like, oh, something's about to happen. Uh, it just feels very intimate. So that's why you need seven. Um, season eight winner of the biggest loser was this dude called Danny. Just to round out the difference between having never made it and having fallen off. I was watching the documentary about the biggest loser. Uh, accusations of it being predatory and bullying and, and dangerous. And people were getting fucking cardiac arrests and being helly lifted out of there, probably a big helicopter, I guess.

• 1:27:30Chris Williamson?

  And, uh, he said, uh, there is an extra special shame when you feel being a failure. There is an extra special shame you feel being a failure after you've been a success. And, um, yeah, I mean, the, there is a huge, huge ick that people have. And this is going back to what you said, that some people are just not built for success. Lewis Capaldi is like my canonical example of this, and I'm so glad that he actually managed to fix his issue and come out the other side of it. But he had all of the singing ability to be this billions and billions and billions of record sales artist. And he didn't have the constitution for a long time to be able to handle the attention.

• 1:28:10Chris Williamson?

  And so many people think that the problem, the reason that they're not famous and they're not where they want to be is because they don't have enough talent to be in the camp of people who has enough talent, but lacks the constitution to be able to handle the side effects of being that talented. It just has to be like, whoa, it's going to be very uncomfortable.

• 1:28:31David Senra?

  I want to like, awesome, like, I think we should say something about like, I don't think success, like, I think you should have an internal scorecard, not an outer scorecard. So what I mean by that is like, some people let society or other people define what, that they are successful. So what I mean by that is like, not that I have less downloads in the future. I don't even know how many downloads I get. I don't care. It's what I, the definition of success that I use, I actually got from Steve Jobs, which was like, did I make something I'm proud of?

• 1:29:03David Senra?

  That's, that's it. As long as I keep making things I'm proud of, or if I, the alternative of this is like, you know how much time it takes to make a great episode, the amount of prep that you have to do. And for my other podcasts, like I have to read an entire book. The danger there is that I give into the circus, give into the distractions and say, oh, I used to put in 30 hours of reading. I can do like six, or I can read like the Cliff's Notes version and still be as good. That is to me is like, when I consider myself a failure is like, I'm not, I'm no longer making things that I'm proud of. Now you have to make things that you're proud of. And also the other side of it is like, you have to get it to in front of people and there's smart and dumb ways to do that. But like, so there is another element of it.

• 1:29:43Chris Williamson?

  It doesn't make sense to be the super cool underground band that nobody actually listens to. Oh, it's because they don't get it. They're not sophisticated enough. I think eventually you need to listen to the market. You're like, you can be as proud as you want of the thing that you do, but your opinion in terms of taste might not be on the money.

• 1:29:59David Senra?

  You, there's a great line from David Ogilvy, who is one of the greatest advertising agency founders in history. And he says, you can't save souls in an empty church. And if you feel that modern wisdom is good for people, then you have a moral obligation to get it to as many people as possible, if you truly do that, which I think you do. I truly believe that people that are interested in building a business, creating a product, changing their lives in some manner, which is what on all, the, the word entrepreneurship, it's French for has ideas, entrepreneur is has ideas and does them. So that's why I consider a podcaster an entrepreneur, a filmmaker an entrepreneur, a person building Amazon entrepreneur. It's all the same thing to me. Uh, athlete, an entrepreneur. So somebody has an idea that they want to see shape, take shape and actually exist in the world.

• 1:30:41David Senra?

  Um, and so I, I would say like, if you believe that the work that you're doing is good for the world, then I would consider a moral obligation to get it to as many people as possible.

• 1:30:54Chris Williamson?

  David Senra, ladies and gentlemen, dude, you rule. I appreciate the heck out of you. Why should people go to keep up to date with everything you do?

• 1:31:00David Senra?

  Just search David Senra in whatever podcast player or YouTube that you're listening, subscribe and listen.

• 1:31:04Chris Williamson?

  Join us, the podcast is podcast and listen to founders as well. All right. Goodbye, my beauties.

• 1:31:09David Senra?

  Bye.

• 1:31:10Chris Williamson?

  Dude, yes, yes, we did it again. So good.

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