Insights From History's Greatest Thinkers - David Senra

David Senra is a podcaster and a writer. Many of the most important insights you need to learn to improve your life have already been discovered in the past. Thankfully David spends all his time reading biographies of the greatest thinkers, founders, entrepreneurs and inventors from history and has synthesised those lessons so you can remember them too. Expect to learn how Steve Jobs came to think about time, what Kobe Bryant believed about the dangers of success making you soft, how the Rockefellers created their fortune, why crossing the Vanderbilts may result in you being very dead, whether anyone with extreme success managed to master a work-life balance, why you have to start reading Paul Graham's work, David's most recommended books and much more... Sponsors: Get $100 off plus an extra 15% discount on Qualia Mind at https://neurohacker.com/modernwisdom (use code MW15) Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 4.0 at https://manscaped.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get £150 discount on Eight Sleep products at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Check out David's Podcast - https://pod.link/founders Follow David on Twitter - https://twitter.com/FoundersPodcast Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #history #founders #startup - 00:00 Intro 00:35 The Mental Athleticism of E-Sports 05:40 Studying How Paul Graham Thinks 11:40 The Hardest Workers of All-Time 21:08 Optimising for Optionality 26:37 Most Common Traits of High Performers 35:14 Are the People David Studied Generally Happier? 43:55 Do the Ends Justify the Means of Success? 1:00:35 The Most Ruthless Entrepreneurs 1:16:57 Founders’ Ability to Deal with Discomfort 1:34:51 How to Retain Important Information Better 1:44:25 David’s 3 Recommended Books 1:47:12 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/ - 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.

• 0:00David Senra?

  He's writing the book as a cautionary tale, right? And he says, listen, if I could do it all over again, I would still try to get rich, but I would have instead of making, you know, hundreds of millions, maybe makes 10 million or 20 million, whatever the case is. But the most devastating part is if I could do it all over again, I wouldn't have missed my kids growing up and I would have had fun. What is the point of living in a 30,000 square foot house owning an NBA team? And you didn't even have fun. As he's trying to write this book, his co-author is interviewing his wife. And she says the most devastating thing, that if my family said this about me, I don't care if I have a billion dollars, I'm a failure. And she goes, I miss him, but it's not like he was here when he was alive anyways. When you read a book like that, you get to the end, it's like, I'm not going out like that.

• 0:35Chris Williamson?

  I last night was with one of the first esports performance coaches. So he is a mental performance coach that is employed by an esports organization to train their mental athletes, as they call them, to maximize their performance. And the stuff that they're, the stuff that they're doing with these kids is so cool. Taking across all of the stuff that we've seen from physical training now and porting it across into something which is actually, I think, the most mentally taxing sport that that exists. Yeah. Because you can move your avatar on the screen significantly quicker than you can move your body, which means that you're basically overclocking your brain. Your brain was meant to move limited by the pace of your body moving when it comes to reaction times.

• 1:20Chris Williamson?

  And what you're doing now is you've managed to overclock the physical world and you're now trying to catch up mentally. This guy was at Thanksgiving dinner, nerded out with this guy for like two and a half hours. It was brilliant.

• 1:31David Senra?

  That industry is very fascinating. Do you know Blake Robbins by chance?

• 1:34Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 1:34David Senra?

  Okay, Blake Robbins, he's a venture capitalist. He's over at Benchmark now, but he actually incubated 40 thieves, that, that esports team and the brand and everything else. But his focus and why he's been invited to take part in one of, maybe, you know, maybe the most prestigious or one of the most prestigious venture capital firms at a relatively young age, I think Blake's like late twenties, whatever the case is. He's obsessed with the edge of the internet and he has this great line that has actually taught me a lot, that everything is a game. And his point is, is like, if you look at gaming as an industry, it's bigger than music, movies and a bunch of other things combined. So I do think like, it doesn't surprise me that they, they're at the cutting edge. Of course, they're going to have some kind of performance coaches.

• 2:16David Senra?

  I think everybody does, like almost all the top performers have somebody that they actually want to bring in. In fact, I just reread, so I've done, I've probably done, I don't know, 10 or 12. Biography or episodes on Steve Jobs. And then not only do I do I reread, like I read every single book I could find about him. And then I would reread my favorite ones and then make episodes every new time because the words on the page don't change. But like everything that you've learned since the last time you read it has changed. Right. And then I would map out in the book.

• 2:47David Senra?

  All of the people that he was inspired by, because none of these ideas are new. And I I wound up mapping it out and I did like a little bonus episode called called Steve Jobs and his heroes. And he just traced, I've done 39 episodes on Steve Jobs and the people he actually mentions. Whether it's Da Vinci, Alexander Graham Bell, Edwin Land, the founders of HP. All these people that like influenced the way he thinks about his work and something Steve did on the second time he went to Apple. Right. The time where he created all that value. Because if you think about it, he's kicked out of Apple, spent 13 years in the wilderness, right? From like age 30 to 43 comes back. And essentially the way to think about it is like Apple's in terminal decline. It's almost bankrupt, right? It's running out of money. They pay $500 million for Next.

• 3:29David Senra?

  And you could think about it as like they paid half a billion dollars to rehire Steve Jobs. And they got the deal of a fucking lifetime. Right. Fast forward, you know, now what it were 20 years later. It's the most valuable company in the world worth like 2.4 trillion dollars. But what he realized was it was very helpful. And I actually heard a bunch of episodes you've referenced, me and you both share an admiration for Charlie Munger. He's like one of my personal heroes. And he says this, he's like, the role that he plays with Buffett, it's like, it's very useful to have somebody else to organize your thoughts with professionally. Right. That's the role that he plays with Buffett. So what Steve did is he hired this guy. And he didn't had no official role inside of Apple. So he'd fly down, he lived in Seattle, he'd fly down to Cupertino on Sunday night. I think he would spend from Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, all he would do is shadow Steve.

• 4:15David Senra?

  He could not say he had no authority inside of the company. He's just, he's with Steve all the time. And when they have a minute, they'll have lunch together or they pull him to the side, they have one on one conversations. And it's that same thing. It's like, you might not call it a coach, but it's somebody that is not a part of your company. Right. Doesn't technically work for you, but is very helpful to to bounce ideas off of and to like organize your thoughts. So whether you call it a coach, performance coach, you know, a friend, a confidant. I think that you see that idea over and over and over again.

• 4:42Chris Williamson?

  There's that story about Marcus Aurelius as he was walking through the streets of Rome. He would pay another guy as all of the the small folk were throwing flowers at him and saying, you're amazing. You're this sort of god emperor. We're so glad that you're here and the empire was flourishing. And there's this guy walking behind him just whispering in his ear, you are only a man. You are only a man. So you could imagine if you were able to bring somebody back down to earth like that, but also have that as a confidant, someone that you can bounce ideas off, just how powerful that would be. I've noticed since moving from having a business partner in my last company to now doing the podcast where it's me at the sort of top of the tree doing it on my own. I do miss being able to speak to someone and just go, dude, I've got this. I've got this idea. Am I being a dickhead? Like, is this? Is this a good idea? And you go, yeah,

• 5:24Chris Williamson?

  of course it is. Yeah, I knew it was. Thank you. I knew it was. I knew it was a good idea. I just needed someone to externalize, like to just blow off all of that extra kind of mental energy and just cut through the noise. One of the guys that I've heard you talk about a good bit, and I keep on hearing about him from people that I respect a lot, but I don't know much about him, is Paul Graham. What do I need to know about Paul Graham?

• 5:49David Senra?

  So Paul Graham, I just spent the last like three weeks inside of his mind because he's got, you can read all of his essays online for free at paulgram.com. And he's been writing for, you know, over two decades. In fact, I was talking to a friend of mine, my friend Patrick, who runs the Invest Like the Best podcast. And we were talking about that because, you know, every single, as far as like influential writing for technology startup founders, it's like Paul Graham's essays. And I'm talking about the last like, you know, 15, 20 years. It's like Paul Graham's essays, Jeff Bezos's shareholder letters, which are absolutely fantastic. I've read, you know, multiple times. And then Peter Thiel's book Zero to One. And so I read, I spent the last three weeks, I read, I did three separate episodes on Paul Graham's essays. And I was like, you know what, I'm going to reread Zero to One. I think this is the third time I read it. But in

• 6:33David Senra?

  the view of how is this relate to what Paul Graham, like how he thinks. And the thing that I think relates to what you and I do is he has this idea. In fact, the collection of his essays is you can buy the book. It's called Hackers and Painters. And he's like, at the very top levels, it's you. There's no like painting by numbers, right? A lot of the best things are, I hate to use this word art, because that's not the way I think about when I make a podcast. I think of like, it's a craft. And it's like, I'm actually making something. But it's, it's not science, and it's not art. There is like a form of taste to it, right? And so he's like, the best painters are that way. The best computer software, like the best programmers are that way because he's a programmer. He says like, the best musicians are that way.

• 7:16David Senra?

  I think podcasts are the exact same thing where there's this great, I just, I watched your, your appearance on Joe Rogan Experience, which is fantastic, by the way, you did a good job.

• 7:24Chris Williamson?

  Thank you.

• 7:25David Senra?

  And it was fascinating because Spotify, before they tried to do that deal with Rogan, this came out, the person that, I forgot her name, but the, the woman that was in charge of this is like, well, is there a way for us to say, like, can we replace Joe? There's nobody who has an audience his size, right? Uh, but can we replace him with like, maybe five that are similar and like, we'll kind of package it up and it like replaces them. And so they ran this test and like, no, we have to back up the truck and like, there's only one Joe Rogan. And so if you would even ask Joe, like, why is your podcast so popular, right? Or like, he's, it's, he's gonna have a hard way to describe him because he's like, I'm just being me. I'm following my natural interests. And one thing that I always say, and this relates to program too, is like, the most interesting people are the most interested.

• 8:07David Senra?

  Right? So like, I, like, I'm obsessed, my four interests happen to be entrepreneurship, reading, history and podcasts, right? And some people are always like, hey, what are your favorite podcasts? And they're surprised by one of my favorite podcasts is this podcast called Meat Eater. And this is a guy named Steve Rinella, right? It is an outdoor hunting podcast. I don't hunt, I have nothing against it, like, maybe I will one day, right? But the point was, is like, I've read all of Steve's books. He is deeply interested. He has dedicated his entire life to the outdoors and conservation and, and the, his way of life. And his, his, his level of detail that he's able to talk about and the passion is just infectious. So it's like, I'm not even into what you're into, but I just find the fact that you're so into it, interesting. So now I'm interested.

• 8:46Chris Williamson?

  Dude, my, my housemate Zach is the most infectious person when it comes to energy. So you know, the, uh, is it motocross? What's the thing that Colin McCray used to do? Rallycross, um, where these guys are flying down dirt tracks at 100 miles an hour and they've got the co-pilot with them. And there's people that go out to take photos and then they'll usually have a little bit of a crew with them. And there'll be these special spots along the track, presumably ones that are maybe a little bit more safe, not at the corner of bends on the outside of them and stuff like that. And these guys will have gone, it'll be the middle of the night, it'll be pissing cold, it'll be raining. And they'll stand there to see.

• 9:26Chris Williamson?

  And these dudes just like, and they'll look at each other, they'll lose their shit. And Zach likes to watch that to gas him up before a training session. Like, he just gets so infected by other people loving their shit. And this guy, the esports guy, last night, same thing, fucking loves his, loves his shit. Couldn't tell me anything about like Valorant or fucking Rocket League or League of Legends or any of this stuff. But he loves his craft and that gasped me up to hear him be so passionate, gasped me up.

• 9:53David Senra?

  So that ties into, what is the main theme across multiple decades? Cause they're like, Paul Graham starts out as a computer programmer, right? Starts this company called ViaWeb in the late 1990s, like two months or two years later sells it to Yahoo for like $50 million, right? Then he's like, well, now I got money for the first time in my life. What should I do? He's like, I should learn how to invest, starts this thing called Y Combinator, Y Combinator, you know, is the most prestigious startup school version of like, if there was a college entrepreneurship, which is impossible to ever have one, it would look a lot more like Y Combinator or anything else. That invest, invest in, you know, thousands of companies winds up becoming a billionaire off of this. And his entire theme relates to this is like, what do you, like, who are you as a person? What are you naturally interested in? Jeff Bezos has this great line where he's like, we don't pick our passions, they pick us.

• 10:37David Senra?

  Right? So Paul starts us like, who are you as a person? Like, what are you into? He's like, I'm really into painting. I'm really into computers. I like reading. He has like this deep historical knowledge of, you know, English history and everything else. And so he's like, you start with who you are, then like, what do you actually want to do? Like, how do you find an essay that changed my life that I recommend everybody reads is how to do what you love? And it's like, first of all, find out who you are, then find out like, what do you actually love to do? Find a way to do what you love, but make sure that it's valuable to other people. Right? And if, and if you're making something people want, whether it's a podcast, a software program, a service, whatever it is, and you, you really love to do it, you'll be really good at it. And if you're really good at it, you'll do it for a long period of time. And if you're really good at something, you do it for a long period of time, that's a, you have a high likelihood of getting wealthy.

• 11:21David Senra?

  And so that is the main theme. That is why I think it doesn't matter what, whether you're working inside of a company, whether you're an entrepreneur, whether you're a podcaster, it doesn't matter. It's like, I would read, I'd find Paul Graham's essays and read the ones, I find the ones that you like and then read them over and over again, because I think they're extremely powerful. His clarity of thought and the clarity of writing is second to none.

• 11:40Chris Williamson?

  There was a internal Apple meeting with Tim Cook and someone asked Tim about whether it should feel like hard work when you do something that you love. And one of my friends was at this internal meeting and he told me what Tim said in response. He said, "You'll have to work harder than you ever have before in your life, but the tools will feel light in your hands."

• 12:00David Senra?

  Yes.

• 12:01Chris Williamson?

  So fucking cool.

• 12:02David Senra?

  Think about if you ask anybody who's who has the most drive or who's like the hardest work you've ever seen. And then one name will pop up over and over again. It's Michael Jordan, right? And I read, not only did I read Michael's autobiography, Driven From Within, but I read this like 700 page biography, which changed my fucking life. And it's called Michael Jordan, The Life, I think by Roland Lazenby. And what was so fascinating is Michael even says, he's like, everybody talks about how my work ethic and how hard I how hard a worker I was. They didn't understand it was all play to me. Like me, I've heard you speak enough where me and you also share love for the the philosophy and the thinking of the Val Ravikant. In fact, our mutual friend, the way the way we connect is Eric

• 12:45David Senra?

  Jorgensen. And I at Eric's book, The Almanac of Val, it's like I give that away. I think I may have bought that more copies of that as like somebody to give away than almost any other book that I could think of. And especially for somebody that doesn't know what to do. They're like, man, I'm struggling. I don't know. Like what direction I take in life is like, read, read The Almanac of Val. And so Naval has this idea. It's like, find work that feels like play. That's also in Paul Graham's essays. And you see it again in Michael Jordan. So it's like, wait a minute, like, maybe Naval was influenced by Paul Graham, but Michael Jordan sure as hell wasn't. And yet he arrived at that same conclusion. He's just like, I'm the laziest. And you would see this in his childhood. They're like, man, we couldn't get this guy to clean the kitchen. He couldn't do his homework. But when it came to playing sports, baseball first and then basketball, you couldn't, he

• 13:30David Senra?

  would never get off the field. And then he realized, oh, where am I weak? Then he'd go find, he's like, oh, I need to lift weights, or I need to work on my dirt. Oh, I need to find a coach that can actually teach me. And he was just an absolute sponge, because it felt like play to him. And that's the whole thing. It's like, it's very difficult to get really world class. Go back to Joe Rogan. It's just like, what are his, what are the things that he's obsessed with? Right? Obsessed with and they all interconnect if you really think about it's like he was doing UFC commentary for free when it was nothing you know Uh I wish somebody would write a biography of Dana White because that's a fascinating story that needs to be told it's like you you you you buy this Company so that's almost going into business for $2 million you blow it up make it a worldwide sport sell it to ESPN for what $4 billion or something like that

• 14:12David Senra?

  Um and then you ask him were you ever gonna quit he's just like uh I love what I do I travel the world I stay at the best restaurants I eat it Uh I stay at the best hotels eat the best restaurants and watch the best fights in the world he's like I'm not even working like why like there is nothing to quit like this is there's nothing I'd rather do than this Um and so I think that that's like you picked up on like that's the key it's like If you really want to be great at something you have to do it for a long time and if you don't really love to do it you're not gonna do it for a long time

• 14:38Chris Williamson?

  There was this story I heard about Steffi Graf German tennis player like savant when she was still playing Uh and as a kid they did an assessment of motivation and of uh technical skill And some people were coming in high on one and low on the other and so on and so forth Steffi Graf came back as 10 out of 10 on both So what you have with this person is not only someone who has the raw talent to be able to beat you But they're gonna continue outworking you and to them it's not even gonna feel like work but it feels tried to talk about this now right like No one can beat you at being you it's very difficult to beat someone that's having fun like you know how many times do we need to drill this home but Perhaps one more time like it's an important lesson

• 15:19David Senra?

  I have something interesting to say about that because that this is something that I discovered because like fundamentally right um I should back up like For the podcast so far I've read you know close to 300 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs right Uh to even get on founders podcast you have to be so good at your job somebody wrote a fucking book about it Like that's an insanely high bar maybe the highest bar that you could possibly have right and so Every where everybody thinks it's like these people must know something we don't right it's like must be super complicated or something it's like no no it's like They identify the very the basics right they find they identify a handful of things that are important to them and they repeat them Decade after fucking decade Jeff Bezos is a great example of this right

• 16:02David Senra?

  Uh, you think about it like Jeff Bezos mastered uh what it means to run a high growth technology company on the internet before there were any playbooks, right? Like he essentially wrote the fucking playbook when he started in 97. How many people started uh an internet company 97? They're still going today. Like he wins by endurance. Let me actually show you something real quick because this is going to tie into it because I forget. But like this is, this is uh my lock screen, right? That is a cover of Ernest Shackleton. This is fantastic book written by Alfred Lansing called Endurance, right? And the reason I have Ernest motherfucking Shackleton looking at me every time I look up through my phone is because he had a family motto. His family motto was by endurance we conquer. And so something I've noticed from sitting in a fucking room by myself for four years, seven days a week,

• 16:45David Senra?

  reading every single day of my fucking life. I read a biography of an entrepreneur for hours. That's the first thing I do after I wake up, I I wake up, work out, and then I read for hours. As long as I do that for the rest of my life, I'll get whatever I want out of my life. Because then I package up what I learn and I put it on a podcast for other people to to benefit from, right? And so what I noticed about these people is just like Jeff, Jeff, go back to Jeff Bezos example. It's like um he has, they call him Jeffisms. He had, it's not like he needs to remember 25, 30 different things, right? It's a handful of principles that are very important that he's going to repeat over and over and over again for decades. So I don't, I I understand people say, oh, it's try to say, do what you love. Or it's try to say that you have to have endurance or try. It's like, no, these are the fundamentals. There's a great conversation that happens between.

• 17:30David Senra?

  So I've done, I don't know, uh, two podcasts on Michael Jordan. I've done like uh two or three on uh Kobe Bryant. I just read another 600 page biography of Kobe Bryant, right? That one of the last interviews Kobe did, right? This is so fucking important to understand because you see this in every single domain. One of the last interviews he did right before he died, he talks about that he was on the phone with Michael Jordan, right? And he's like, Michael, he's like, he's watching, uh, unfortunately, the daughter that passed away with him in in the um in the helicopter crash. He's like, man, I don't really like what their coaches are teaching me. He's like, they're teaching all these 12 year old kids, like all this fancy shit. He's like, you spin moves and all this other stuff. And he's like, I'm pretty sure I didn't learn this when I was, you know, when I was playing. So I was like, let me call Michael and see what he says, right?

• 18:11David Senra?

  So he called, he's calling up Michael. He's like, he's like, hey, man, um, you know, he explains the story. I think they're, they're teaching these kids way too much fancy stuff. They're not focusing on just mastering the fundamentals on a deep fucking level. And the way to do that is repetition over and over and over again for a long time. And he go, he's like, Michael, what do you think? He goes, he goes, he's like, uh, Michael, what were you learning? Uh, what were you doing in, uh, basketball? Uh, when you were 12 and Michael goes, dude, I was playing baseball. And then Kobe says, I'm pretty sure he's being interviewed by Alex Rodriguez, the famous bas- uh, baseball player. He goes, think about that. And his point being is like, the greatest basketball player to ever live hadn't even picked up a fucking ball yet. Your 12 year old does not need to know these spin moves and all this other fancy shit. Focus on the fundamentals and they do that for, on a deep fundamental level for decade after decade after decade.

• 18:55David Senra?

  I want to go back to this idea that you and I both share an admiration and love for Charlie Munger. He has this great thing. We saying, hey, master the big ideas in all these domains. So he has this thing, he says, like, they carry most of the freight, I think is the term he, uh, he, uh, uses. He inspired me to like, how can I, what am I learning from, you know, doing this rather unusual work that I do? It's like, my version is like, time carries most of the weight. I just heard, or I saw a tweet that you said where it's like, you've been doing this podcast 500 and some fucking episodes, right? First of all, you know, as, as, as I do, and we don't have to get into business podcasting because I'll never shut up about it because I'm completely obsessed. But like, everybody's like, oh, it's too late to start a podcast. There's millions of them.

• 19:33David Senra?

  And then you actually look at the data and it's just like, how many of them are producing, uh, how many of, basically how many of them are still producing to this day? Have done more than 10 episodes and haven't fucking quit. And it's like a couple hundred thousand. And so my whole point is like, imagine being able to go back on the internet when there's only a couple hundred thousand blogs or a couple hundred thousand websites. And you're telling me it's too fucking late? What are you talking about? That's insane because everybody quits at everything. And the reason I was so interested is like, not only do I respect Eric Jorgens' opinion a lot, and I find him extremely sharp and articulate person. But he's like, Chris is the real deal, but I can see that you're the real deal because it's like, this dude has done something 500 fucking times. How many people have done that? And then you had said something, he's like, I've been grinding away, trying to get really good at my craft. And I want to talk about this conversation that you had with, uh, somebody else I admire, George Mack.

• 20:17David Senra?

  Which I didn't know his name was George McGill until you said something. I haven't fallen on Twitter for years. Um, and we've been DMing and stuff because he listens to founders too, but another sharp guy. But um, but the, the, the point I was making is just like, you made the point, it's like, I've been grinding, grinding, grinding. And yet, this is something I also talk about on the podcast, is that you have to stay in the game long enough to get, to get lucky. Because there's an opportunity, right, that's gonna happen in your five, six, seven, that you cannot comprehend in your one, two, three. This is very similar to what Jaco said in your conversation. He's like, I don't have a five-year plan. Guess what? The way Jaco talks about the fact that he's optimized this for flexibility and optionality is how all of the best entrepreneurs that have ever lived, they talk the exact same way.

• 20:57Chris Williamson?

  You think that's the case? They have this sort of emergent outcome in life?

• 21:02David Senra?

  There is. I don't know about an emergent outcome, but they definitely optimize for optionality. So there's this guy, I don't want to lose the thread real quick. Let me, I'll tell you about Henry Singleton in a minute. But how, I like what you said. It's like, that one opportunity that you had to grind away for years and years and you never probably predicted it happen. But once that happens, I think you said you had more downloads in like, you know, a week or whatever than all the years combined.

• 21:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 21:23David Senra?

  That's a perfect fucking example of stay in the game long enough to get lucky. There's a million fucking examples like that in the history of entrepreneurship. You just have to go and read old books to find them. So let me go back to this optionality person. So what I'll do is when I find somebody that's very interesting to me, right? Um, I, what you'll be shocked is, is like how almost none of their ideas are unique to them, right? So like, I'm obsessed with Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. Uh, I read all of Warren Buffett's shareholder letters. Uh, I read all the biographies I could find about both Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. And when they say, hey, go study this person, and they do, because they're both obsessive readers, they, they're both biography nuts. Uh, Charlie Munger has probably read more biographies than me, but I'll think I'll catch him because I got 60 years, you know, he's got 60 years. So, but they, what's fascinating is like, you find all these great people buried in history.

• 22:08David Senra?

  And we could talk about why, don't, don't worry about your legacy and all that other stuff, because it's, a lot of it's fake. You would imagine how so few people actually go back and we could talk about, uh, some examples in the history of entrepreneurship. But what's fascinating is like, Charlie Munger is the, one of the wisest people alive, right? And he's like, hey, the smartest person I ever met was this guy named Henry Singleton. I'm like, what the fuck? And he's like, his returns were, uh, he's like utterly ridiculous. You know how Charlie talks. Then Warren Buffett's like, you guys need to go back and read about Henry Singleton. He built a conglomerate, very similar to Berkshire, but like 20 years earlier, right? And they're like, Warren says, hey, it's a crime that American business schools don't study this guy. So wait a minute, so let's pause right there. You have, how many people on the planet have studied more entrepreneurs and more businesses than Warren Buffett?

• 22:54David Senra?

  A tiny, he might, you know, have studied more than anybody else and this and he's telling you, yo, this is the guy. Go fucking pay attention to this guy. And then he says some shit like, hey, if you add up the top 100 business school graduates, NBA graduates ever, their record and then compile their record together, it'd still be inferior to Henry Singleton. So then you go and you read, there's not a lot of material on Singleton, but I read everything I could find. And I did a podcast on this book called The Outsiders, which is one of the very few books that profiles what made Singleton so interesting. And I absolutely flipped my shit because all the ideas that I thought were Buffett's, a lot of them came from Singleton. And to me, that's inspiring because it's like, I don't, I can, I can thrive and be wildly successful and I don't need one single original idea of my own. I

• 23:39David Senra?

  just need to master what, what some of the best people in history have already figured out for me. And then you could pick up the book and in, you know, 10, 15, 20 hours, you get the distillation of a career and lessons they had to figure out over 40, 50 years. That's absolutely insane. So Henry Singleton's like, listen, he has got this famous quote, he's like, you know, everybody has a lot of, especially in 1960s, 70s, there was this theory that you need like a five year plan, you need a 10 year plan, you need to have all these projections. He's like, the world is so much more complex than that. He's like, and we have so little control over outside things. So he's like, I like to steer the boat every day. He's like, my only plan, you know what his fucking plan was? Same plan as Jaco. I'm going to show up every day, go to work, and I'm going to steer the boat

• 24:23David Senra?

  a little bit like in one direction. And I'll go and I'll try something. And if it works, I'll do what Jaco said, I'll do more of it. Oh, it didn't work? I'll stop doing that. That's fine. And I love what he made, the point he made on your episode, which was fantastic, which was, hey, if you asked me six years ago, what my five year plan was, he's like, I didn't have a podcast. And then all the stuff, he's like, his podcast blows up. He sells all these books. Now they're returning to movies. He's got his manufacturing company. He's, yesterday, I came back just for this, by the way. I was out of town for Thanksgiving and I was like, sorry, I'm leaving. I have to go record with Chris tomorrow. And so all the way I had to do this, like four and a half hour drive yesterday, and I'm just slamming Jaco goes because all the Starbucks are closed on Thanksgiving Day.

• 25:02Chris Williamson?

  Jocko goes a legit man. I was really, really impressed with him.

• 25:05David Senra?

  The only things that are open are the wall was and Jocko has made a huge influence on my life and I'm not an interesting person. I'm a stress person like all day long. But I was like, fuck monster. You've never done anything for me. It's like Jocko has given me hundreds of hours of fantastic content. His, I, I don't read a lot of books that are not biographies, but his book Extreme Ownership is the best, to me, the best, single best book on leadership that I've ever read. And I was like, I'm loading up on Jocko goes. So just slamming them down as I went by. But yeah, so what I saw with Jocko, I saw even Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger saying the same thing. He's like, we don't have a master plan. He's like, we're gonna, the opportunities are gonna come in. A lot of them we can't predict. We're gonna say, do we want to pursue this opportunity or not?

• 25:41Chris Williamson?

  And why, why I think that's reassuring to people is that I, I struggled. I was one of those people that didn't have a very good plan. If you say, what do you want written on your obituary? Wh- wh- where would you like to see yourself in 25 years? That's something I've always struggled with. And yet, because I came from a productivity efficiency background, at least when I first started the show, that was one of the things I was obsessed with. I always felt like, I don't know, a little bit of a fraud because I didn't have that as it was laid out. And I think that you're right. Understanding principles and allowing things to be directed from there each day, one step at a time, permits you to have enough optionality to take advantage of good opportunities when they come to you. But it is important to have the principles. I think without an understanding of what it is that I need to be doing,

• 26:24Chris Williamson?

  consistency, enthusiasm, discipline, ensuring that I fall, I, I continue doing the good stuff. Whatever the things are that facilitate your performance, those need to continue, but you don't necessarily need to have the plan all the way out. So when it comes to looking at all of the guys and girls that you've studied from history, what are the most common threads in terms of personality types, the ways that they show up that all of the high performers have had?

• 26:50David Senra?

  So it's not, it's funny because I've been approached by a couple of publishers and like, hey, why don't you write a book on like the top 10 traits? I'm like, fuck you. Like it, if you think about it, like the world is much more complex than that. And what we're doing, right? Like a podcast is a business. It's a form of entrepreneurship, like entrepreneurship done at the highest levels. Yields the greatest financial results in the world, right? There is no formula possible. So the way I look at it is same way where like when I just reread this the 600 page biography of Kobe Bryant. Like you would go to his house at like 17 years old and like you'd open the closet and it'd be VHS tapes of Michael Jordan, of all these Magic Johnson, all these other people. His girlfriend, his high school girlfriend in that book is gives its interview.

• 27:34David Senra?

  And she's like, what was it like to date Kobe Bryant in high school? She's like, well, a lot of Saturday nights at his house, watching tapes of Michael Jordan. Right? So the way I think about it is like reading biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs is one, all of history's greatest entrepreneurs did this. The more biographies you read, right? The more you realize people live lives so remarkable that somebody wrote a book about them, all read biographies. Like it is, you can read other things and you should read other things, but I don't think you can have a complete human life without reading biographies consistently. You know, the way I always say is like, if I like people like, how should I use founders podcast? Cause now there's like 400, over 400 hours and like I add to it constantly. It's like, listen to an episode, find one book that you like, read one biography a month, right? This is like the minimum like requirement in my opinion.

• 28:18David Senra?

  Read one biography a month and then listen to two episodes a week. That means after a year, you would have downloaded key insights and lessons from 100 different history's greatest entrepreneurs every year. And then you've got to go deeper because my episodes are only an hour, maybe 90 minutes. It's like these books take me for every one hour of audio that I create, I'm reading at least 20 hours. Like this is not a fucking game to me. Like I take this dead, dead seriously, just like history's greatest entrepreneurs do. So one thing I would say like one trait to like that a lot of them have is the importance of practice. And so there's this maxim that I repeat over and over again, that the public praises people for what they practice in private. The public praises people for what they practice in private. I repeat that to me over and over again. And I mentioned earlier, I was like, how, why this guy say that reading a biography of Michael Jordan changed his life? Like what the hell does it like? That sounds silly to me.

• 29:03David Senra?

  Like, how could that possibly be true? And there's this one story in there that I thought was so fucking remarkable because it talks about the difference even at the highest level. So to get into the NBA, there's like what 400 NBA players total, right? Out of millions of kids that want to do it and maybe have tempted to do it. Then you get to like the all star and maybe you have, you know, 24, now the 400 down to 24. Then in 1992, Jordan is invited to play on the dream team in the Olympics, right? He, uh, so now you have 12. Like you can't get higher than where he's at. And he was thinking about not doing it. Cause he's like, I've been in the playoffs. We were winning championships. He's winning every single award he could possibly have. He's at the top of his game. But he's like, I'm going to do it even though my body's beat up. Because these are the best basketball players in the world. Right? And I want to see their practice habits.

• 29:49David Senra?

  So the main, the reason I say that business, that book changed my life is because Jordan says he'd rather miss a game than miss practice. And so he gets there and I get goosebumps. I already have goosebumps because I know where the story's gonna end. And he gets there and he sees the practice habits of the other people in the dream team, which they are at the top of their class, of their profession. But he's winning more championships than them. He's had, his accolades are just better than he's, he's the very top. And he said something that fucking changed my life. And he said that they were deceiving themselves about what the game required. And so that from there, how I apply it to my work is like, I'm going to work on the podcast seven days a week. I'm going to read biographies for hours and hours every morning. When I'm done, I store all of my highlights and my notes in this app called Readwise.

• 30:32David Senra?

  I have over 20,000 highlights and notes from all the books I read. And so what's my second half of my day is fucking practice. Which is now rereading. It's not good enough that I read a book a year and a half ago. That's not fucking good enough, dude. You're asking people to spend an hour and a half of their time with you in their ear. So I have to make sure that I am not only like, I have to live this stuff every single day. I was just invited to speak at a company. It's a private investment company. It's 93 years old. The CEO of the company is a founder. They have $250 billion of assets under management. And the CEO, me and him got on Zoom beforehand. They're having a company offsite with like 40 to 60 other partners. And he's like, hey, do we want an outline or whatever the case is? I go, I'm perpetually prepared. I promise you, I will show up. You can ask me whatever the fuck you want and I will know it backwards and forwards. And he's like, why?

• 31:16David Senra?

  And I explained my, like, I go, I got this idea from Michael Jordan. And then I'm not fucking playing basketball over here. I'm making podcasts and reading books. But the principle is the same thing. So let me tie this to one of history's greatest adventures. Sam Walton, right? If you think about how fucking crazy Sam Walton's story is. That dude started out in retail when he was like in his early twenties, right? Doesn't hit it for like 25 years. He was like 44 when he founded Walmart, right? But he wasn't like lollygagging. He was like working at different forms of retail. He was just having to go through that experimentation. The time carries most weight thing, right? And so. He had this idea for Walmart. He was under finance and his idea was, hey, all the big retailers in the big cities. I'm gonna see if I can build these stores that are far out in rural America, right in towns of 8,000, 10,000, 15,000 people, right?

• 32:01David Senra?

  I'm gonna pick cheap real estate and I'm only gonna compute on price. His, the thesis behind Walmart, which if you think about this, the thesis was proved correct. As a result, this have his thesis being proven correct, he generated one of the largest fortunes the world has ever seen. His fucking kids are still like, if you combine all of Walmart's kids, like, uh, like his descendants into, he split it up, right? But if it was like one person, they'd be the richest, one of the, if not the richest person in the world, right? Um, and that idea came from this, this is like, well, I think there's an opportunity here that no one else is pursuing. I have an hypothesis, let me test it. He didn't have money. He goes to, uh, it was a, this thing called Ben Franklin stores, which is, I, I might be getting the name of the company wrong, but it was essentially like, uh, uh, early franchise,

• 32:45David Senra?

  uh, uh, headquarters that would franchise, uh, you could buy retail franchises from them and Sam was running one of those. And he pitched him on the deal and they're like, no, no, we don't want to do this. That was a Friday. The next day, the guy that told him no, goes to his local Kmart, right? Just to go shopping for whatever, cause Kmart is a giant company. And he hears this voice, he's like, what the fuck? Why is that voice sound so familiar? And it's Sam Walton in there, in Kmart with his notebook, which he would go, Sam Walton went in more, his version of practice is going in more retail stores than anybody in history. His kids talk about this. He's like, it doesn't matter if we're in Europe on vacation, we're anywhere, any vacation. He's like, we have to stop and dad has to look at his stores every day. And so this guy that had just turned him down from one of the best opportunities, which turns into Walmart, right?

• 33:25David Senra?

  So he fucked this up. He just said no to the best opportunity of his life, sees Sam Walton talking. He's like, okay, how do you guys do inventory? Okay. Why is this priced this way? Taking notes on a Saturday morning. That's his version of professional practice. And I saw somebody tweet about this and, um, they're like, imagine competing with Sam Walton. And so the way I look at it is like when you're reading these biographies, when you're picking up these ideas, you might read a 400-page book, or you might listen to an hour and a half of my podcast to pick out one or two ideas. But those ideas will stick with you forever. And then you can figure out how that applies to your actual craft. No one, goes back to the Henry Singleton thing. You mentioned something I wanted to jump on where it's just like, none of this works if you don't work yourself in a position to trust your own judgment.

• 34:07David Senra?

  As a podcaster, as an entrepreneur, as an investor, who obviously, these are the people I make my podcast for primarily, right? If you can't trust your own judgment, you were just saying you used to have a business partner, now you're top of heap. It's what you'll also see Paul Graham talks about, it's like founders talk, they realize like other founders outside their company, and Paul talks about this, they have a more of an understanding of what they're going through than their employees. They can't talk to their employees without that. You also have, you and I have a gift where the easiest way to make friends is to have a podcast, and then you listen to other people's podcasts, and now you're friends. So like you can talk to other people. So those are just some of the ideas. I don't want to keep rambling, but those are just some of the ideas that appear over and over again. It's like the importance of practice. It's like the unbelievable amount of dedication. Jaco said that on his podcast. It's like, how many,

• 34:52David Senra?

  I heard him say something on an Instagram Live one time that just made me laugh. And you know, he's like looking at his phone, like reading the questions, and they're like, how many hours a week do you work? He goes, all of them.

• 35:04David Senra?

  It's that kind of thing, because even if they're not physically, even if Sam Walton's not physically working at his business, he's thinking about it. That is a form of work.

• 35:12Chris Williamson?

  So that to me is obsession. And obsession's not necessarily a bad thing. I would have said, one of the most common threads that I've seen amongst high performers that I've had on the show is obsession. You could argue that that might be compulsion by a different lens. Do you think on average that the people that you've studied from history were happier than the average person?

• 35:35David Senra?

  That's a great question. I think for a large percentage of them, happiness is besides the point. So this is, we can-

• 35:41Chris Williamson?

  That's not the question, though.

• 35:43David Senra?

  Go ahead, good, say it again.

• 35:44Chris Williamson?

  The question is, on average, do you think the people that you studied from history were happier than the average person?

• 35:55David Senra?

  Yes. This is the reason why, even if they're not over. First of all, I think you were talking about this with Ryan Holiday, which is like, there is no evolutionary point to be satisfied or to be happy. There are like a finish line, which I think is a big mistake. People are always like the hedonic treadmill. It's like people are always chasing after something. They get it and they don't understand why they're not content. So it's like something I don't even worry about anymore. I just do what I want to do every day. And it's like, I know I'm always gonna, a 10 or 20% of my life is always gonna be discontent somehow. You know, as a driven person trying to build a business, like if you're content, you wouldn't do anything. The reason I would say they might be happier, though, is because a lot of people think entrepreneurs are motivated by money, right? And the money, obviously, you know, Jeff Bezos likes, probably likes his $200 billion. Probably feels really good, right?

• 36:41David Senra?

  But it's very clear, it's like they're motivated by control and independence. They want control on how they spend their time. Like, business building is world building, right? You're able to build a world within your world. Like in your, in your and I case, right? We get to choose what we're gonna do when we wake up tomorrow. You get to choose who you speak to. You get to choose, you have complete control over people around you. I have friends, man, that even if they like their job, they hate some of their coworkers. Imagine how unnatural that is from an evolutionary perspective, to spend half of your waking time around people you dislike or don't trust. Like, so, and to that degree, I think because they have control and they, and Sam Walton's case is like, I had fun. You know, that's, that was, he, one of my favorite quotes of his is like, most people don't enjoy what they do. Like, I really enjoyed it.

• 37:25David Senra?

  And he wrote those words when he knew he was dying of cancer. He had cancer all over his body. He knew he was dying. And he's looking back, he's like, no, I, there's very few things that would change. The ending of Phil Knight's, founder of Nike, his, he has a fantastic

• 37:37David Senra?

  autobiography about a shoe dog, what was crazy is, that talks about like, he, he has this dream, right? Of, he has this goal he wants to do, this idea he wants to do. And then that book, every chapter is a year, goes in chronological order, and then ends with the IPO of Nike. And the crazy thing is, this guy overnight, you know, now he's worth 175 million dollars overnight. He's like, this is amazing. And then he gets seen in the book, he's like, what do I wish? He goes, oh my God, I wish I could do it again.

• 38:04David Senra?

  Like, I wish I could go back and literally redo this. And now he's writing those words as a 70 year old man. He knows like, there is no time for that. That's not going to happen. Um, so yeah, they may be happier than the average person because they have more autonomy and control over what they're doing. But these are not like, I don't even know if they're, it's possible for many of them to be quote unquote, happy.

• 38:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So the common, like the answer that I would usually give when people ask about high performers, I had, uh, the performance coach, Michael Gervais, who was the guy that looked after Felix Baumgartner's psychological training for him to jump from the edge of space.

• 38:40David Senra?

  Oh, God.

• 38:41Chris Williamson?

  Had him on the show. Uh, and Felix was, Felix was struggling. He had claustrophobia when he got inside of this suit and there was pressure. Michael was brought in to coach him back out of that. And I asked Michael, on average, do you think that the highest performers in the world are happier or more miserable? Uh, and his opinion was that they're more miserable. And the reason that he gave was that a lot of people that are high performers are driven by a sense of insufficiency, that they're looking to achieve success in the outside world to fill a void, which is inside of them. And that is a common thread that I've seen with people that I have spoken to, that I've worked with, I've been around. Um, but I'm also perfectly open to hearing from you, someone that's been exposed to tens of thousands of hours of intimate

• 39:24Chris Williamson?

  connection with some of the most smart and successful people from history, that that might not be the case. Um, I do think a lot about whether people are sacrificing the thing that they want in order to achieve the thing which is supposed to get the thing they want. So for instance, a lot of people would consider that being successful might make them happy. And in order to be successful, they will sacrifice happiness in the short term. And you go, okay, so you have an equation here where if all that you do is remove success from both sides, i.e. the strive, what you're left with is just happiness. And it's that story about the fisherman, the guy that goes down to the fisherman, and he says, you could build this up into a business. And then if you built the business so big, all that you would be able to do would be a fish all day. And he goes, well, that's what I do right now. And I do wonder how many people,

• 40:07Chris Williamson?

  uh, the fishermen, uh, sorry, are the businessmen going to see the fishermen, looking at him and saying, look, there is, there is a void inside of me that can be filled by success in the outside world, and the success will ultimately lead to happiness. The problem is that we look at the modern world through such a narrow band, a narrow domain of competence. You saw this with, uh, who's the dude that did Fire Festival?

• 40:27David Senra?

  Oh, the one that went to jail?

• 40:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, him, that guy. Anyway, the only reason that people don't like that guy, and it's a hilarious story, is because the event didn't succeed. If he'd had different weather, if he'd had different beds, if he'd managed to get the tents to look even remotely okay, he would have been hailed as the greatest event promoter of the last few decades, right? It would have been the greatest thing since Woodstock. The only difference is that he didn't get the outcome that he expected. Well, hang on a second. People aren't pointing the finger at him because he didn't get the outcome when it failed. They're pointing at him for these unethical business practices in the lead up to it. So what that suggests is that the ends always justify the means to people. Do you understand where I'm coming from here?

• 41:11David Senra?

  I do.

• 41:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, really, really interesting that I always think about that Fire Festival guy, whose name I can't remember. And

• 41:19David Senra?

  I would say one thing that is a little different with the people that I study is a lot of people have like a means to an end, right? So the great benefit, like one of my favorite things like that I get to do is like profession is like, so I spend a lot of my time having one sided conversations with dead entrepreneurs because I prefer to study dead entrepreneurs. I really don't focus on entrepreneurs now, but then that those lessons attract people building modern day founders. And so then I get to meet them through the podcast and become friends with them. And the ones that are the most successful are as like, there's no means like for me, it's like podcasting is not a means to an end. It is the end. The idea that like anybody in the world, like there's podcasting and open protocol. It essentially gives you the ability to have an on demand radio show, right?

• 42:03David Senra?

  About anything that you want, that anybody can access, you could talk about whatever you want, and that anybody can access all over the world like that. There's nothing better to me. Like this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. And that idea, it's like there I always say is like, they're going to have to pry the microphone from my cold, dead hands. You're out of your fucking mind if you think I'm like, I'm never going to stop doing this. And what the people that I admire the most is like, they found what they wanted to do. Sam Walton, I just mentioned him, right? Another one of my entrepreneurial heroes, Enzo Ferrari. Okay, everybody knows Ferrari, the brand, right? Very few people know Enzo, the actual person. Now, as an individual person, don't like him at all. He was misogynistic, uh, didn't really only didn't care any about about anybody but himself and his son. And then his son winds up passing away, unfortunately, right?

• 42:48David Senra?

  But I admire his dedication. He's one of history's greatest obsessives. He worked on building his business Ferrari. He worked 12 days a week, seven days. I'm not saying to do this, by the way, I'm just saying like he was completely obsessed. He had. He, this is what he chose to do for his life. And as a result, anytime you see a brand that has been around for a long time, that usually stands for high quality. Whether it's like Ferrari, uh, the, the founding engineer of Rolls Royce, same thing, uh, Apple, you always have, you could, uh, Estee Lauder, Coco Chanel, you trade, Sam Walton, you trace it back to like this one obsessive founder, right?

• 43:22Chris Williamson?

  It's obsession, man.

• 43:23David Senra?

  That was, there was, yeah, that was doing things not for, it was, it was like, yes, they wanted to get wealthy and they all got wealthy. But they made way, they, they went decades after. They kept working decades after they needed money. And in case like Coco Chanel, Coco Chanel worked, she died when she was like 87. She was working on her last, she was still working on her latest, like, uh, like her latest fashion show, her latest fashion line, the year thing, I forgot what they call. Uh, Estee Lauder worked on her company till she died. Sam Walton worked on his company till she died. Uh, uh, Steve Jobs, same thing.

• 43:54Chris Williamson?

  Is there something sad about that, though, that a lot of these people have got families? You know, they could have spent more time with their kids. They could have spent more time connecting with the people that they care about. This is my concern with unfettered, complete blue sky ambition and ruthlessness that it, I worry that it sets a trend for people to believe that they need to go searching outside of simple lives, simple lives in order to achieve something that they, that will fulfill them when what it is that they're looking for is right in front of them. Like, these people are unbelievably ambitious. They're very obsessed. And what that leads them to do is to engineer a life which allows them to manifest that obsession.

• 44:36Chris Williamson?

  And it may be one of the greatest things for this particular person to go and do. Enzo Ferrari may have been built to create cars, probably was. But would his life in retrospect have been better had he have spent more time with his kids? Would his kids' lives have been better had he had spent more time with his children? I don't know if he had kids. My point being, like, Looking at it through the lens of how do I maximize impact in the world, whether it be legacy, whether it be growth, whether it be money, and it's often not just the cash, as you've said, it's people continue after that. And you go, okay, well, like, what are you doing this for? You're doing this in pursuit of the pursuit itself. Cool. Great.

• 45:15Chris Williamson?

  Is that all that there is to life is a bigger question?

• 45:19David Senra?

  So out of every single person that I have ever studied, they have all over optimized their professional life at the detriment of their personal life by far. There is one lone exception to this. It is episode 222. It's this guy named Ed Thorp. He is, the title on the fucking podcast I made is my blueprint for life. Right? And he's got a fantastic autobiography. I recommend everybody read it. It's called A Man For All Markets. Nassim Taleb wrote the foreword, and you can actually read the foreword for free on Nassim's website, which is fantastic. And he outlines why Ed Thorp is so unique. Now, I have to preface this, Ed Thorp is a genius, way smarter than I am by far, way smarter than I'll ever be. I could read 10,000 books,

• 46:00David Senra?

  I'll never be as smart as that guy, right? So what Ed Thorp realized is like when enough was enough. So he identified a handful of things that were really important to him. He's like, I want to get wealthy, right? I want to have work that's intellectually stimulating. I want to be a good father. I want to be a good husband, and I want to take care of my health, and I want to have fun. I want to treat life like the adventure it is. There, Tim Ferriss is this fantastic, he's still alive, right? You can go, Tim Ferriss did a two-part interview with Ed Thorp recently. You can listen to it, but I recommend seeing it on YouTube because, let's start with the health thing, which I know you're into as well, right? I sent that video to a ton of people. I was like, tell me how old you think that guy in that video is. And everybody's like, I don't know, 65? I was like, he's 90. He's 90. And so what the genius in Ed Thorp is like, he had a few

• 46:45David Senra?

  simple systems and simple rules to guide his entire life. So he got into physical fitness when he was a really young man. I think he was in college, right? Which is extremely rare, you know, 60 something, 70 years ago. And what he realized is like, Every hour I spend in the working out is one less day I'll spend in the hospital at the end of my life. And he dedicated himself to eating healthy, to taking care of of his physical fitness, and that's why he looks the way he does. He has actually a simple system I I use in that book where he gets up every morning, obviously go to the bathroom, and then he weighs himself. And the reason he does that is like it's impossible for me to get like it. He has tight food feedback loops for everything. He's just like, you're gonna know when, oh, it's like I lost a couple of pounds, I can eat a little bit more today, or oh, I can have that dessert or whatever. It's like a very simple feedback loop, right?

• 47:29David Senra?

  He was the inventor of the first quantitative hedge fund. Okay. Uh, he, he would turn down after he got independently wealthy, and it was all like, uh, something that he found intellectually stimulating. He had unbelievable amounts of business opportunities that come through the door. And his whole point is like, even if I'm not a billionaire, I have hundreds of millions of dollars. I have this giant house in Newport Beach, California, right? Uh, I have more money than I'll ever spend. Why would I take time away from my raising my sons, uh, spending time with my wife, uh, having fun to go chase more money? Something's wrong with me if I'm doing that. Now, if I happen to be intellectually stimulated and I find when I'm doing fun, then I'll go do that. But it was like invest in oil tankers or stuff like this. Like, I don't give a shit about any of that.

• 48:13David Senra?

  Um, he writes the book after his wife dies of cancer, and he talks about it, he's like, they were married for 50 years. He's like, we spent, he goes, I went home every day and had lunch with my wife. He's like, I worked 40 hours a week, right? Like, he was not a compulsive workaholic like a Steve Jobs or an Enzo Ferrari or Jeff Bezos, whatever the case is. Uh, he has great relationships with his sons, and he might have a daughter too, and now their kids, where, uh, the founder of IKEA, right, which is a fascinating story, it's called, his name's Ingvar Kamprad, he started IKEA when he was like 14, worked on it until he was like 87, right? And he has a line in his autobiography that fucking gives me the chills. And this is something, I have two kids, so I'm not fucking this up. And he says, uh, he goes, I sacrificed the relationship with my three sons. I missed my three sons growing up to build IKEA. He's like, don't do this.

• 48:58David Senra?

  And he says a line, he goes, childhood does not allow itself to be reconquered. That is a very common mistake at the end of a lot of these autobiographies and biographies. It's like, I didn't, I miss my kid's childhood and you can't get that back and I fucked it, fucked that up, right? Um, let me go back to Adorp and then I want to tell you about this guy Larry Miller, who wrote a book that I think everybody should read, it's called Driven, an autobiography. He was the richest entrepreneur in Utah, had a 30,000 square foot looking, uh, 30,000 square foot house overlooking Utah, owned 93 different companies. He's writing the book as he's dying and he's like, my life is a cautionary tale. I didn't have fun, I didn't take care of my health. He owned the Utah Jazz, go look up Larry Miller, Utah Jazz. You see this obese man sitting there on, in one of those, you know, scooters or whatever, like the, that people can't walk. Like a little rascal. Yeah, like, so I'm, I'm going to run down what he said too, because I think that that's

• 49:43David Senra?

  valuable, even if people don't read the book. Let's go back to, uh, Adorp. So then he, he builds this wonderful business, right? He meets, he, he has, he lives with a life adventure. He winds up having dinner, or, uh, he has dinner, they're both in their late 30s, with a 38-year-old Warren Buffett. Right? He has dinner, leaves the dinner, they wanted to be friends. He leaves the dinner, turns to his wife and she, he goes, he's going to be the richest man in America one day. Imagine being able, like, everybody sees Warren Buffett now, it's like this old guy, you know, kind of chubby or whatever, eating fucking Diet Coke and McDonald's and stuff. But like, I always like, what I always do is like, when I'm studying somebody, it's like, I'll write in a book, it's like, I want to know when were they born? And then as I work my way through the book, I look at the years, like, how was that person? What were they thinking when they were 25? I'm in my late 30s, like, what were they, what were they doing when they were my age?

• 50:26David Senra?

  It's like, we, we know the older version of them, but it's the younger version that built their empire. It's like, what did that person look like? You can see what Warren looked like when he was, he had hair, he had glasses, he dressed nicely, he looked, he was like a sharp-looking dude. Charlie Munger 2. Um, he winds up being the first LP in Citadel, which is like one of the largest funds in the world. So my point is like, the guy had all these interesting, uh, he built the world's first wearable computer with Claude Shannon, the father of information theory. Uh, he, uh, Adorp invented card counting for blackjack, when you know, ones and zeros and all that stuff. He, he's the one that invented that system, writes a book in the 1960s called Beat the Dealer, sells millions of copies. This is my blueprint, because it's like, yeah, uh, he was smart as hell, he made a lot of money, but he was good, he was a good friend, he was a good father, he was a good,

• 51:11David Senra?

  uh, husband, he took care of his health, and then he had fun. You wouldn't believe how many of these people get to the end of their life and it's like, oh shit. I didn't make any time for fun. And that's not how I think it was like, D. Hawk is the founder of Visa, he just passed away, he's ninety, I think he was ninety-three years old. A very wise person, he, he turned his back. He, he, uh, he created Visa, ran it for like fifteen years, and he's like, I don't want to do this anymore. I don't give a shit about money. He would wake up in the morning, at five in the morning, write, he was obsessed with reading and writing, like almost all these people are. And would write a thousand words, then he'd go out and spend the, his day working the land. Physically restoring the health of the land he bought, it was somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. So he said something was fantastic, he's like, life is a magical odyssey to be experienced.

• 51:53David Senra?

  And that's where, um, I, I don't, I hope people realize, like, when you read these books. Yes, you celebrate their accomplishments, but the reason that you need to read biographies of your business books is the human element. They get to the end and they'll tell you, don't do this.

• 52:09Chris Williamson?

  What's the price that they paid for that?

• 52:11David Senra?

  Yes, and so we go to Larry Miller, Driven, uh, it's called Driven, an autobiography by Larry Miller, right? And this guy, you know, raised in fucked up situation. His, like, he'd get in a fight with his mom, and his mom didn't know how to deal with him, so she'd call the cops. She put her son in jail over and over and over again. Then eventually kicks him out, right? And so he's got no education, no skill set. He is working in, as, in a parts department of a car dealership. I think he's like twenty-five or maybe thirty years old, and he just fucking snaps. And he's like, he had a fanatical desire to achieve something. And so then he just starts working literally. He's like, if my eyes are open, I'm working, right? Winds up building over the next thirty years, doesn't take care of his health as all.

• 52:51David Senra?

  Uh, he's, they said if you lived in Utah, it'd be impossible not to, uh, it was impossible for an average Utah citizen to not spend money on one of his businesses. So he owned car dealerships and movie theaters and the Utah Jazz and all this stuff, right? Didn't take care of his health, didn't know his kids, didn't know his wife. Gets to the end of his life, it's like they're having to cut off his fingers and his hands because of his poor circulation. He's like obese, really disgusting. He's writing the book as a cautionary tale, right? And he says, listen, if I could do it all over again, I would have like stopped, you know, I would, I would still try to get rich, but I would have, you know, maybe instead of making, you know, hundreds of millions, maybe makes 10 million or 20 million, whatever the case is. But the most devastating part is like, if I could do it all over again, I wouldn't have missed my, my kids growing up and I would have had fun.

• 53:36David Senra?

  And I'm like, what is the point of living in a 30,000 square foot house owning a fucking NBA team? And you didn't even have fun. Then the co-author, he dies in the middle of the book, right? As he's trying to write this book, his co-author is interviewing his wife, and she says the most devastating thing, that if my family said about this me, about me, I don't care if I have a billion dollars, I'm a fucking failure. And she goes, I miss him, but it's not like he was here when he was alive anyways.

• 54:05Chris Williamson?

  Dude.

• 54:07David Senra?

  Yeah. So that's the power, when you read a book like that, you get to the end, it's like, I'm not going out like that. You, you either, you either have the, but let's go back to our mutual love for, for Charlie Munger. He says, it's like, he quotes Cicero, where he's like a man that doesn't know what took place before him, is like, goes through life like a baby. He's like, if you don't learn, if you, if you are only capable of learning through your own experience, which most of humans are, right? It's very hard to learn through the experience of other people. It's like, you're gonna have a rough go at life. You will not have a great life.

• 54:36Chris Williamson?

  What you will probably be able to do would be learn from the experience of other people that are similar to your sort of age cohort, right? Like, you're gonna be around most of your friends, oh, what did you do? Oh, I tried this thing with my business. I tried this new strategy for getting up early in the morning. I went to bed and took this supplement, did whatever. You don't get to do what people who have got to the end of life and then subjectively looked back and told you, this is what I would have done if in retrospect, I had lived a life worth living. That's what you're optimizing for. I think there's a like a really, really strong case to be made that a good life is one which in retrospect, you're glad that you lived. There is some elements of that that you miss off, particularly the hedonic stuff. Like you don't, you don't embrace more hedonic pleasure in retrospect.

• 55:21Chris Williamson?

  And yet it does provide you pleasure in the moment, and that's a little bit of a paradox. Or maybe a dichotomy to be managed rather than a paradox to be solved, as Homo says. But I think that especially if you're the sort of person that's listening to this show, that listens to your show. You're going to be a bit more ruminative. You're going to do introspection. You're going to consider, why am I here? Am I adding value? You need to optimize your life to be one which in retrospect you feel good about. Because not only will that probably be things that are good for you, both in the moment and in future. But in the future, it's like a gift that you give yourself. You get to accumulate all of these senses and feelings of goodwill and of achievement in a holistic, organic, ecological view.

• 56:04Chris Williamson?

  It's wholesale, right? It's everything. It's not just this narrow domain. It's everything. And that's why it's so important to be able to have a clear view of your life, because I wonder how many of these people, maybe some of them in the autobiographies, are still retreating to their own inner citadel, which is, I am happy that I achieved this much. I am happy that the business did all of these things. Because the temptation to open up the lid of looking at what they maybe missed would be so catastrophic. Especially as you're perhaps a bit more frail at the end of your life, would destroy them.

• 56:37David Senra?

  I'm glad you brought that up because one of my favorite ideas that I've ever come across from any book. And it ties to the last part of your sentence there was Jeff Bezos has this thing called the regret minimization framework. Which is like this nerdy way to just to describe, how can you get to the end of your life with the least amount of regrets possible, right? And so he is in, people like don't like, they know like, I think it should be obvious that Jeff's like super smart, but he's like genius level smart. And so even way before he started Amazon, he's working for this quantitative hedge fund in New York City called D E Shaw.

• 57:11David Senra?

  Yeah, I think I can't remember if the guy, the founder is D Shaw, the actual fund is D Shaw. But anyways, it's run by this like quantitative brilliant billionaire, right? Jeff is making a ton of money. He's got this beautiful apartment in Manhattan. And he sees, he's doing research for something. He sees how fast the internet is growing. It's like the mid 19, there's like 95, 96. He's like, oh my God. He's like, things just don't grow this fast. Like this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. I want to take part of this. And so he can't get this idea out of his mind. And but all the external thing is like, no, Jeff, you're already successful. Like, like if you can't leave now, what about your bonus? And so he's like, he goes to his boss and they go for a long walk in in Central Park for like two or three hours because his boss is trying to talk him out of not quitting.

• 57:52David Senra?

  Because in the code name for what turns into Amazon inside the hedge fund was called the everything store. Like that is why the biography by Brad Stone is called the everything store. And so Jeff, Jeff's like, I think I want to take a risk, quit a job while I can still do this. And like try to play a role in what I feel is going to be a life, like an earth changing time, which is like the birth of the internet, which obviously has changed our entire life. The idea of me and you even connecting could not have happened without the internet, right? And so they take the long walk. He's like, and his boss is like, you know, you stay here. You're going to be rich. You have this big bonus. And he's like, I'm going to go home and sleep on this. And he says, he's like, I struggled with this decision until I figured out the regret minimization framework. He's like 27 and 28 year old Jeff Bezos is not capable of making this decision.

• 58:35David Senra?

  This is this decision, but 80 year old Jeff Bezos is capable of making this decision. So he tried to view his life looking back. And he's like, when you're on your deathbed in your 80s or hopefully 90s or whatever it is, you're surrounded by the ones you love, you're going to be telling yourself the story of your life. And that person is not going to say, they're not going to give two shits that you that you quit your job and you don't get your quarterly bonus. Right? But what they would give a shit is like you had a chance to play a role in the birth of the internet, right? The way Jeff thinks about internet is the way I think about podcasting. And I think like you also as well, it's like, like we're at the very beginning of industry. We have a role to play here. Like, this is amazing. I don't want to do anything else but focus on this. And so he goes, once you make, once you look at it in that, in that, once I looked at it in that framework,

• 59:20David Senra?

  he's like, the decision is easy. He's like, jump, try to do it. If you try and fail, 80 year old you is like, good, at least you got off your ass. You took a goddamn risk for once in your life. Good. Try again, but 80 year old, he's like, oh, you were comfortable, like you were young and smart and had, he had no kids at the time. He wasn't even married yet. I think, I think they eventually got married because she, she, Mackenzie went up quitting and driving cross country with him. Now, how does that tie with what you just said? Because that makes sense, right? But then what happens? He, he starts up with his wife. His wife knew him before he was Jeff Bezos of Amazon. She helps him build the company. That's why she got this huge divorce settlement. But now you fast forward, he's one of the richest people in the world. He's an empire builder, complete like alpha nerd, right?

• 1:00:05David Senra?

  Genius guy. Then he lets his family fall apart. Now, you and I will never know, like maybe he's like, hey, I don't care. I just want to sleep around. I can get the best women in the world, whatever. Maybe that is what makes him happy. I don't know. But I would, I would love to, in like these quiet moments, does he regret destroying his marriage or not?

• 1:00:24Chris Williamson?

  That would be a great question to ask. The price that people pay to achieve the things that everybody else desires is a question that endlessly fascinates me. I'm always thinking about it. I'm always thinking about it. Let's go to the other end of the scale. So we've spoken there about some examples of people that have tried to create more holistic views of success. Who are some of the most ruthless, ambitious, just stone cold killers that you've studied?

• 1:00:56David Senra?

  Steve Jobs, to me, is the greatest entrepreneur to ever do it. And like, a lot of this is subjective, like, but if you had a Mount Rushmore of history's greatest entrepreneurs, he's got to be, he's like, you can't have four other people on there that's not him, right? And the sad part about the fact that he was, um, I just liked, like, the quality of his thinking, the clarity of his thinking, the fact that he started the company. The first sale Apple ever made was made barefoot. Like, he walks into the bite shop in Palo Alto, or maybe Menlo Park, I can't remember exactly where it was. And he makes Apple's first sale. He doesn't have shoes on. He doesn't take baths. He was completely like an inner scorecard person. There's this idea that I learned from, um, reading, uh, this book called The Snowball, which is like a most well-known biography of Warren Buffett.

• 1:01:40David Senra?

  And he talks about, he's like, it's very hard to have a happy life if you, if you have an outer scorecard as opposed to an inner scorecard. So what does that mean? And he compares his growing up, he had a real bad relationship with his mom, who was all outer scorecard. And yet his dad was his hero, was all inner scorecard. And what inner scorecard means is like, you're doing what you want to do based on how you feel about it. Right? Not his mom would make decisions. Should I do, if I do this, what will other people think? And so I also like the writing of Tim Urban from Wait But Why? And he really helped crystallize this. He has this post called like The Mammoth or something like that. But essentially it just proves it's like the idea that other people are thinking about you is a myth. People think about themselves and he has these little stick drawings and it's like in our mind, it's like we're in the center and all these people are looking and pointing at us, right? And then he goes, this is what you think and this is what happens.

• 1:02:25David Senra?

  Like you're still in the center, but everybody's like looking at their phone or they're worried about other stuff, right? And so to me, it's a very, very freeing. And so he said his dad made decisions based on how he truly thought. He didn't care what the outside world thought, which I think is extremely, um, like I, I think like is extremely important. Uh, and I think it is a skill to develop. And his, his, his, it destroyed like his relationship with his mom. The fact that she wanted to him to make decisions based on like, what will other people think? He's like, he didn't even want to go to college, which was crazy at the time because his dad was a congressman and everything. And he's already owning businesses. He owned like a farm. He had a bunch of stocks. This is like a young Warren Buffett. He's like, uh, he's like read a hundred books on investing. He's like, what, what else am I going to learn?

• 1:03:08David Senra?

  And so he, they wound up making him go to, uh, uh, go to school, whatever case is. But what I like about Steve is like Steve is all in a scorecard. He's like, he had one obsession. I'm going to make insanely great products. That is a term that he says insanely great products. He says it when he was like 20, says it when he's 30, 40, says it right before he dies. That's how he describes the iPad, the way before he dies. And so what I respect about him is it's like, how the hell do you make great world-class products in the seventies, the eighties, the nineties, two thousands, and then 2010, right before he died, right? Um, but what's sad is I respect him for what he did professionally. But he says in this, uh, this biography that he's working on as he knows he's dying with Walter Isaacson. And at the end, I recommend, even if you haven't, even if you don't want to read the whole book, because it's giant,

• 1:03:51David Senra?

  read the last page, last chapter, or maybe last two chapters where he describes his legacy. So it's like why he did what he did. And then he describes why he's spending his, some of his final days working on a book. And he said something that was devastating to me. He's just like, I wasn't around much and I want my kids to know why I did this.

• 1:04:10David Senra?

  And so like that's completely, he's, his ruthlessness was not, hey, I'm gonna be the richest person in the cemetery. He doesn't give two shits about that. He's like, I'm gonna make world-class products, right? And I'm gonna spend all of my time and energy on my world-class products. And as a result, he's like, where's that time coming from? Time is coming from taking care of his health, spending time with his wife and his kids. Maybe he spent time with his wife. That part I don't know, but like, he definitely missed out on, you know, some part of his, his kid's life.

• 1:04:36Chris Williamson?

  You looked at the Vanderbilts as well, right? Especially some of the, some of the super early ones. I thought about them when it came to ruthlessness.

• 1:04:44David Senra?

  Okay, so this is fantastic. So what I love about, what I think is inspiring about the history of entrepreneurship, studying it, is like, there was a Steve Jobs before Steve Jobs, right? His name was Edwin Land. He was the founder of Polaroid. When you, when you hear Steve describe all of his ideas, like, hey, I'm gonna build a, a technology company at the, at the intersection of technology and liberal arts. Steve would use that, he put a sign with those, the intersection on all of his Apple, uh, product releases, right? That's not his idea. That he literally took that from Edwin Land. He talked about, this guy's my hero. Edwin Land was 70 when, when, um, Steve Jobs met him. Steve was in his twenties. He talked about how important Edwin Land was in 1980. And as he's dying, he's still talking about the fact that Edwin Land was his hero. Now, you brought up the

• 1:05:27David Senra?

  Vanderbilts. Everybody's like, I get a lot of questions, like, okay, there's a Steve Jobs before Steve Jobs, there was a Warren Buffett before Warren Buffett. That's really reassuring, right? There's Elon Musk before Elon Musk, right?

• 1:05:39David Senra?

  The, the equivalent to Cornelius Vanderbilt, when you get back in like the robber baron era, right? And I'm about to reread this book, because it's so fucking crazy. There is no modern-day entrepreneurial equivalent of a Cornelius Vanderbilt, okay? Who I would compare him with is Vladimir Putin, okay? Why do I say that? Because if you could have converted all of Vanderbilt's assets at the time of his death to cash, he would have controlled one out of every 20 American dollars in circulation. That is fucking crazy. Bezos, everybody at the top of the list is knowing on a relative basis on how much currency was actually was at the time. No one's fucking close to that, right? He had sovereign level, state level wealth, just like Putin controls. It's like, oh, it's like, it's not my money. Okay, you're controlling everybody.

• 1:06:24David Senra?

  But also because like, you know, maybe Microsoft, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs might fight it out. Uh, Bill Gates and the founder of Google, they might sue each other. They might argue, they may say bad things about each other, right? Uh, if you mess with Cornelius Vanderbilt on a business level, he would try to fucking kill you. That is not hyperbolic. He literally did. There's this great book called Tycoon's War. And it's about this guy, I think his name's William Walker. And William Walker was also a very social person, like by the time he was like 18 or 20, he graduated, uh, he had his like master's degree, law degree and, and uh, it was a doctor. Like, you know, one of these crazy geniuses winds up taking over a part of Mexico when he was like in his early twenties, like they were like, the people just lived crazier lives back then.

• 1:07:06David Senra?

  Anyways, William Wa- uh, Walker also overthrew the government, I think it was Nicaragua. And he becomes president of Nicaragua, right? And uh, at the time Vanderbilt had, he was, he was uh, building these new businesses where the gold rush was going on. And so a lot of people on the East Coast wanted to find a way to get to the West Coast. And so you'd either go through like the Panama Canal or you go around like the, the, uh, South America. And so Vanderbilt figured out a way to cut through Central America through like ships, then donkeys and then trains and also other crazy shit. But it saved like a ton of time. So he was making a lot of money doing this. Some of his ships during this project just happened to be in the waters of Nicaragua, right? So William Walker's like, hey, uh, I own this country now.

• 1:07:51David Senra?

  Those ships are technically mine. And so he made the drastic machete mistake of confiscating property that came from Cornelius Vanderbilt. Cornelius Vanderbilt was like a uneducated, like maybe sixth grade education, maybe not even that, right? He came up on the docks in his first business, like they literally would solve business disputes with fists. He would beat the shit out of other people who would compete with it. This is a hard dude, growing up in an unbelievably tough environment. Now he's one of the wealthiest people in the world and you just picked a fight. There's a line in the book that says, William Walker wasn't afraid. He's like, William Walker wasn't afraid of other people. Uh, he wasn't like other people who was afraid of Cornelius Vanderbilt when he should have been. So Cornelius is like, okay, you took my stuff. That's my stuff. I'm not gonna sue you.

• 1:08:34David Senra?

  He has this famous quote. He's like, I'm not gonna sue you. The law's too, too, moves too slow. I'll just ruin you. And so he goes to the Secretary of State of America. He's like, hey, we gotta kill this guy. I want you to send troops down there. They're like, no, no, we're gonna do that. Then he goes to Britain. Same, same thing. Like, at the highest levels of government, which is a funny story. I can tell you about Henry Flagler, which is John D. Rockefeller, but how like, this is a great line from Will Durant and Will and Area Durant, who've spent their entire life studying hu- human history. And in this book called Lessons of History, they say a great line where it's like, in every age, governments have been corrupt and men have been dishonest. It doesn't matter what time period. It's always, and the, the government corruption and the collusion with a lot of rich entrepreneurs is, is constant as well. Still happens to this day.

• 1:09:15David Senra?

  So anyways, long story short, he hires private mercenaries, uh, some soldiers from Americans, the soldiers from, uh, uh, Britain, to go after, to get this guy. They wind up overflowing, throwing him, uh, his temporary government, taking him out to the beach, blindfolding him and killing him. That's the Vanderbilts. That's the, the level of the robber barons. Like, there is a violent aspect of it, but there's also a, they just think way larger. They were not into competition. All this was a comp, they like combination. So let me give you an example. You know the, the brand Moat, Moet Chandon? The champagne? Well, well, thank you. Um, so they go, the, the owners of that company, they go to JP Morgan.

• 1:09:56David Senra?

  And they're like, there's a problem with somebody in another competitor in the industry, right? And so JP Morgan, maybe you say, okay, maybe I need to buy the competitor because they're, they're decreasing my profits or whatever. Champagne can only be called champagne if it's manufactured in that specific region of France, right? I think that's where it is. JP Morgan's, uh, response is just buy up the whole region. The level of, of, that these guys thought at is just like, you know, now it's like, oh, I gotta buy out my competitor. It's like, no, JP's like, I'm just gonna own everything. Every single business that's in this region is now mine. It's like that kind of level of grandiosity that you just don't really see anymore.

• 1:10:32Chris Williamson?

  That's ruthless. I suppose, I wonder how much business has been nerfed a little bit. It's certainly revenge of the nerds is something that people throw around a lot at the moment. But the business world is optimized for people that have got very, very high IQs, high conscientiousness, low agreeableness, and all that they do is obsess over one thing for a very, very long period of time. And that's where your competitive advantage comes from. There's this meme that I absolutely love. It's this sort of broad guy, maybe late twenties, and he stood at the front of a Bed Bath & Beyond, and he's like, pretty big sort of built dude, and he's got this kind of crap shirt and tie on that you would have if you worked at a Bed Bath & Beyond. And there's a thought bubble coming out of his head that says, 5,000 years ago, I would have been a proud warrior.

• 1:11:15David Senra?

  Okay, I'm so, I'm so glad you said this. So, one of the craziest books I ever read was this book called Hard Drive, Bill Gates and the Building of the Microsoft Empire, right? And the reason it's a fantastic book, because it only, it covers the first 35 years of Bill Gates' life, right? Up until the Microsoft IPO. And to me, you know, Bill Gates now is like, everybody thinks of him as like the philanthropist, you know, he's like, that's like his big thing, and he wants you to, you know, humor Larry and spend all time doing whatever weird shit that he does, right? But again, I just mentioned earlier, it's like, I'm not interested in that version of Bill Gates. I want to know who built his giant fucking empire and his giant wealth. And that dude was psychotic, complete psychopath, didn't take one single day off in his twenties,

• 1:11:59David Senra?

  literally only thought about selling more software. Microsoft was the first software company in the existence that sold a billion dollars worth of software in a year. Now that millions of companies are, tons of companies that do that. But I made the point in the podcast that I made about that, where I realized I'd also have been a big fan of Dan Carlin, who I think is like the world's greatest podcaster, his Wrath of the Khan series I've listened to over and over again. I've read a bunch of books on Genghis Khan. Even though I pronounce it incorrectly. And I made the point, like, I've started studying, like, I had just been finished reading about Genghis and Bill Gates, and I'm like, oh, this is the same personality type. Like, if he was alive 8,000 years ago, he'd be on horseback trying to chop your fucking head off, because that's how you built wealth back then.

• 1:12:40Chris Williamson?

  You think Bill Gates has got Genghis Khan energy?

• 1:12:43David Senra?

  No, but like, even like Napoleon, like a diminutive, like, person that knows how to control other people. I called Bill Gates in that podcast, it's Genghis Khan in a Mr. Rogers costume. He dresses like Genghis, he dresses like Mr. Rogers, you think he's like his fucking little weird nerd, but he's completely ruthless. There's two stories I want to tell you about Bill Gates that are in that book, where he's having a dispute, when he's 21 years old, right? He is writing software for this guy in New Mexico, they're about to move, they're about to move, which turns into Microsoft, into Seattle. He's like, I want to break away from this agreement that I have with this guy, where I'm only writing software for his hobbyist computer. He's like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna write software

• 1:13:27David Senra?

  for every computer in the world. And so Bill Gates, like, I have to fight this guy if I'm gonna be able to do that. And obviously, he needed to win that, because that was one step in his eventual monopoly. And so, this guy's much older than Bill Gates, he's like in his mid-30s, but he's realized, like, this guy, Bill Gates, is fucking savage. Like, this is unbelievable. And so, while this lawsuit is going through, his company, the guy that Bill Gates is fighting, is sold to this company called Pertec. And Pertec's, like, I'm not worried, I'm gonna do this acquisition, I'm not worried about this lawsuit, because I looked at this guy, it's like, what's this 21-year-old shaggy fucking kid gonna do? Like, we're gonna destroy him. And the guy's name is Ed Roberts, and Ed Roberts warned him, he's like, no, no, no, I've been dealing with Bill Gates for a few years. He goes, he said it was like FDR saying he could handle Stalin. It's just like, you have no

• 1:14:10David Senra?

  idea what's about to happen to you. And sure enough, Bill Gates winds up running them over, winning the lawsuit, and they were just completely unprepared for his level of ruthlessness and genius. There's another example, where Bill Gates had encyclopedic knowledge about every single other software company in the computer industry, he could tell you who the CEO is, what their revenue was last year, what their projects are working on, right? And his whole thing is what got him in trouble with the US Department of Justice, because he's, you know, some of the stuff wind up in emails and in documentation, it's just like- I you didn't we didn't when he lost like let's say Microsoft's competing with a for a hundred thousand dollar contract and another company he's like if that other company wins he would tell his employees it's like you didn't lose me a hundred thousand you lost me two hundred thousand and he'd go fucking ape shit because he's like

• 1:14:51David Senra?

  we lost a hundred thousand and they gained a hundred thousand so that's a two hundred thousand dollar loss so his whole thing is like I want to destroy every single person in my industry because I want a monopoly and so there was this guy named Philippe Khan I think is his name and you know he he knew Bill Gates was gunning for him but he didn't have any idea like to the degree that they were actually like targeting him because a lot of stuff is secret so Philippe goes to a computer conference right sees Bill Gates in the corner sitting in a chair by himself looking at something so Philippe goes over because you know they may be competing they may be enemies but they still like talk to each other he goes over and he discovers that Bill Gates is sitting there staring at a picture of him

• 1:15:31David Senra?

  that's how he was completely obsessed like I look imagine how freaky would that be if you had a competitor you go over and he's looking at your face just like thinking about how he could fucking destroy you so the reason I say it's the same personality type is because now wealth is in many cases like positive sum right like uh you create a new podcast that podcast brings in revenue you're not taking that money from anybody else you're adding something to the world back in gang as cons time and and really went before the invention of the market economy it's like no it's like it was land it was resources it was uh I'm obsessed with uh this uh studying like the the history of the American West right uh like Empire of the Summer Moon and like uh on all these books of like the Comanches and everything else is like why were the Comanches so rich because the way they did wealth was horses well where did they get horses they went and went to where you were

• 1:16:17David Senra?

  killed you took your horses your women and everything else like so what we considered wealth was like finite and you had to unfortunately like and for most of human history is like we were just it was zero sum game like there could only be one winner so that same personality that Vanderbilt type that JP Morgan type Bezos he's clearly an empire builder clearly it just so happens he's born at a time where he can do it without I shouldn't even say taking away from other people because he's destroyed a bunch of other companies just like Rockefeller did but you know what I mean like he can add something to the world and not have to kill you for the wealth

• 1:16:46Chris Williamson?

  yes without having to kill a bunch of people perhaps or at least directly kill a bunch of people god does the uh second order effects of whatever Bezos has done with Amazon probably dig fairly deep you mentioned uh Jocko earlier on

• 1:16:59David Senra?

  yeah

• 1:16:59Chris Williamson?

  one of his big things is dealing with discomfort and doing hard things what have you learned from founders about the ability to deal with discomfort

• 1:17:06David Senra?

  My, there's a bunch of maxims. So I, um, the reason I think I'm so into Charlie Munger and the Val Rabin is like they, I think you're very limited. Like people can remember certain things, like to transfer lessons throughout human history. It's like a story, we remember things in stories, right? And we remember things in maxim. So I try to break things down to the aphorism and maxim level. The, my favorite maxim that I've read in any of these fucking books throughout the history of entrepreneurship came from the founder of Four Seasons, this guy named Isidore Sharp. And he said, excellence is the capacity to take pain. Like, in every single story, there is none, you're not going to find, and this is why I think it's so important for people to understand, like, the founder's journey sounds a lot like the hero's journey. It's like, nothing's new under the sun, right?

• 1:17:49David Senra?

  And so, he wrote this fantastic book called, uh, Four Seasons, My Business Philosophy. It's his autobiography. And he starts out, he's just working in construction with his dad. Like, it's an absolutely fantastic book. And he has this idea of like, building the world's first collection of five-star only hotel chain, right? Guy's still alive, winds up, he actually, this is gonna be funny, he sold his business to some guy, one of like the kings of Saudi Arabia, and Bill Gates. So tied to the Bill Gates empire building thing. Like, this guy, you don't have enough money, Bill? Like, why are you buying the Four Seasons, Bill? What the hell is wrong with you? These guys are relentless. Elon just talked about the fact that he, he heard that, um, Bill Gates had like a $500 million short position on Tesla like a few years ago. It's like, what is wrong with you, Bill?

• 1:18:34David Senra?

  Like, this is why I say, like, he'd be on horseback, because Genghis didn't stop, he just like, I'll just, you know, I'll just, I'll just keep going till I get to Europe, till like, I hit the other sea. Um, so anyways, uh, Izzy has this thing where it's just like, he, he transitions from be, working construction and like, building maybe individual houses to like, his first business, whatever the case is. That book talks about like, the amount of emotional stress that you're gonna be under. His wife has a great thing in the book where she'd wake up at like, 3:00 in the morning, and she'd find her husband with like, his arms behind his head, just looking up at the ceiling, trying to like, deal with, like, fuck, I have this big problem. I don't, where am I gonna get the money? How are we gonna do this? And so he realizes, like, it's supposed to be difficult. Jeff Bezos has another great line, he's like,

• 1:19:18David Senra?

  We're trying to create something special, something we can tell our grandpa, something we can be proud of, that we can tell our grandchildren about. Those things are not meant to be easy. Anything that comes easy is almost worthless. So that's where I resonate with Jaco. Jaco's my alarm clock, dude. Like, I wake up every morning and Jaco's like, "Get to the gym." Because you can buy his, uh, he's got a spoken word, uh, album on iTunes called, uh, Psychological Warfare. And I was playing it in the car with my wife the other day, because, uh, I work seven days a week, but the reason I do that is because like, I have a balance of spending time with my family, taking care of my health, and working, and I can't fit that Monday through Friday, or else I won't have, like, there'll be some days where all I do is work. So I find it better to spread out over seven days, and then you can actually balance everything, like the Adorp thing. Um, but I was playing

• 1:20:02David Senra?

  and I was like, Jaco has a singer who's like, "This is an everyday thing." Like, he has, he's like, "There's no Monday." He's just, or there's no Saturday, he's just a hilarious person. Um, but to answer your question, there's no book that I've ever read where it's like, "Oh, this person had an idea to build a business, they started doing a business, it went great, end of story." It's like, "Oh, I want to do this. I take one step forward, three steps back. Oh damn, that hurt." In fact, have you seen this, um, the greatest illustration of this comes in like the first few minutes. There's this documentary on HBO, you know who Tony Hawk is, the professional skater?

• 1:20:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:36David Senra?

  Have you seen the documentary yet?

• 1:20:37Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 1:20:38David Senra?

  I think you'll like it, especially because I think you're gonna find a parallel with the, the, the journey you've been on in building your podcast, where it shows Tony practicing, trying to do the, the 920, to invent that new, uh, move in skating, right? And it starts out, and he goes up on the ramp and falls down. He's like, "Oh," gets back up, then tries again, falls down, gets back up. Then he falls down again, now he stays down a little longer. Now he's like breathing heavy, he's like, "Oh, oh," breathing, he's like, "Do I want to do this?" Like, gets back up. This goes on for like three or four or five minutes, to one point where like he falls and yelps in physical pain. He's like, "Ah," like he broke a fucking rib or something, right? He's down for a long time, gets back up. And I watched that, and by the time I saw that, I had read like, you know, 250

• 1:21:20David Senra?

  biographies. I'm like, "Oh, that's what's in the books." It's, "You're gonna be experiencing pain, most people quit. Why do I have a Shackleton on my phone? By endurance we conquer." It is supposed to be painful going into that. So the number one book recommendation I have... Is James Dyson has two autobiographies, right? He just wrote a new, another one that was published. That's not, that's a fact. I read that book too. It's, it's great. That's not the book. His first autobiography that came out at the time, Dyson only had, it was still only in the UK. And he only had one product, which was his Cyclone Vacuum. Now he's built this empire, like one of the most valuable private, private company in the world. Right? But it, the reason I recommend that book is because it's 14 years of pain and struggle.

• 1:22:06David Senra?

  And this weird guy that refuses to quit. He opens up the bag on the Hoover Junior Vacuum Cleaner, doesn't understand why the suction doesn't work. When he's like 32, maybe? And by the time he is holding in his hand, a vacuum cleaner he owns completely, that is up to his standards, that he can now start selling. He's like 44, 45. It's 14 years of struggling. And that entire book, you can read it in a weekend. First of all, he's funny. There's a lot of good ideas on how to build a business in there. But the value to me is like, how many times he goes from his carriage house into, after an entire day of, he built 5,127 prototypes before he got it right. Who the fuck would do that? Who would do 500 podcasts before they get a monster break? Right?

• 1:22:51David Senra?

  It's the same fucking thing over and over again. And so, but he's like, listen, I could say that, it's easy to say determination is important. Persistence is important. It's another thing to go into your house, covered in suit, crying your fucking eyes out as an adult man with a wife and two kids to support. With now a second fucking mortgage on my house that is tied to my business. And if I fail, we don't have a fucking house. That is a different level of pain tolerance. And what happens? He sticks to it. There's been plenty of people that did that and failed. You have to be aware of survivor's surprise. But what happens now you fast forward, right? He has this great thing, um. Now you fast forward and he owns 100% of Dyson. It makes somewhere between reportedly 2 to 3 to 4 billion dollars of profit.

• 1:23:34Chris Williamson?

  Is it private?

• 1:23:35David Senra?

  Private. So he owns 100% of it.

• 1:23:37Chris Williamson?

  Fuck off. Dyson's still private. Jesus Christ.

• 1:23:40David Senra?

  And you know this because it's from the UK where he had this invention called the ball barrel, where he's like, fuck, this is way earlier in his career. It's also a story in the book where instead of like having a wheel, it's a ball and it actually doesn't get stuck when you're doing gardening and stuff. And he goes and does the photo shoot at some giant, you know, you guys have these estates and mansions and I don't even know, they're not even fucking mansions. They're estates in the UK or whatever. And he's like, 20 years ago, I rented, like I paid to take pictures of this product that I made here. And he goes, now I just bought this shit. This is mine now. Like, but again, that, like, he suffered through 14 years. How many people would absolutely quit? And this is like why it's important.

• 1:24:24Chris Williamson?

  I know that you've spoken to the guys that work with Jack Butcher on his podcast. I don't think Jack was there and Jack's got that super, super famous graph, which is you are here. Right. And it's

• 1:24:34David Senra?

  The best.

• 1:24:34Chris Williamson?

  Talking about that, that famous illustration that had been around for years and years of these two guys digging. And they're both digging along together, trying to get toward diamonds. And one of them gives up just before he's about to hit the diamonds and the other guy's still enthusiastic. Survivorship bias is an interesting thing. Reason being that it is limited by the people that didn't give up. Or it's, it's the, it's always in reference to the people that decided not to give up. Right. The survivors are the ones that do that. And for all of the people that, the Michael Jordans of the world, there's that story of him saying, what do you want to be when you grow up? And he's 11 years old or something and he says, I want to be an NBA star. And the career advisor to 11 year old.

• 1:25:13David Senra?

  It's Kobe.

• 1:25:14Chris Williamson?

  Kobe, Kobe says, you can't do this. Like this is, maybe you should pick something else. Maybe you should be more realistic. That's a one in a million shot. And he says, I'm going to be that one in a million. Right?

• 1:25:24Chris Williamson?

  The people who do not make it to that stage are the ones that can't dig into consistency. Like you don't know if consistency will get you there, but you can be guaranteed that if you are not consistent, you will not get there.

• 1:25:38David Senra?

  Yes.

• 1:25:39Chris Williamson?

  Survivorship bias is an easy get out of jail free card for a lot of people to use when they see success that seems improbable. And they are concerned that that sets a bad standard for people moving forward. But you don't know.

• 1:25:54Chris Williamson?

  What the point is that almost everybody else gets to at which everybody wants to quit. Right. There's this stat you mentioned earlier on about podcasting. Ninety percent of podcasts don't make it past episode three. And of the 10% that do, 90% don't make it past episode 20. So by making 21 podcast episodes, you're in the top percentile of all podcasters ever in history. That's all it takes. So what does that tell you? Well, it tells you that there is a degree of discomfort or something. There is some sort of challenge that is faced by almost everybody or by everybody that a very, very small number of people can get over. So is it survivorship bias to look at shows that are successful and say, well, you know, that's highly improbable. And you go, well, is it?

• 1:26:39Chris Williamson?

  Or is it just that there is a particular hurdle which tactically you need to get past? And once you do, you're broken out into this unbelievably vast, open space with relatively few competitors. I think it's a quote that I learned from you about your mediocrity is my opportunity.

• 1:26:58David Senra?

  Yeah. This is the way like, I fucking hate when people bring that up because a lot of people respond to like some post. Like if I, if I say, hey, most of all my social media channels are just like repurposing highlights. It's like, I don't have a lot of opinion. My opinion is irrelevant. It's like, hey, this Michael Jordan said this about this, you might find it valuable. Right. The founder of Dunkin' Donuts said this, you might find it valuable. Like that's all, it's all educational content. Even if they never listen to the podcast, my goal with all my social media channels is like, oh, you'll learn something. And hopefully you check out my podcast. If you don't, that's cool. I'm fine with you just learning like these little, like me repurposing these 20,000 highlights I have. And a lot of this stuff is just like survivorship bias. And I like, I don't want to paint with a broad brush because obviously it's a real thing. It's just like, to me, that's like a loser mentality. Right. It's like, I'm going to figure this out no matter what.

• 1:27:43David Senra?

  And I'll either fucking die or like, I'm going to do this or I'm going to die trying. Like I have found something I love so much and that I will reverse engineer, just like what Dyson did. Dyson's like, okay, it's like, you take these things in little steps. You're not a fucking idiot, dude. Like there's more opportunity out there than anybody could possibly imagine. So Dyson's like, well, why don't vacuum, why do bags get clogged? This is fucking weird. She's like, well, maybe I'll figure out like, and he was working on something else. He realized, oh, I can use a cyclone. And he's like, well, how do I make cyclone? I don't know how to make cyclone. So then I'll figure out how to make cyclone. Then, once I solve that, okay, now, how do I sell my vacuum cleaner? Do I license it? He went on licensing. Oh, the licensing doesn't work. Oh, maybe I have to do it myself. Do I need a partner? Okay, I take on partner. Partnership didn't work. Okay, I'll do it myself. It's like, break things down to smaller components and then just figure it out. For like me and you, it's very simple. It's like,

• 1:28:28David Senra?

  all of our time is broken down into, we make the podcast. And then all of the other time is like, we just have to make people aware of its existence. And then the podcast will convert them themselves. When people find founders, like, what the fuck is going on here? Why is this fucking guy with this giant head, reading all these biographies? It's like, then they start listening. Then they listen to one, then they listen to two, then they listen to forty. And by the time they get to thirty, forty, fifty episodes, it is impossible for them to not tell other people about it. And guess what? The best market for a new startup is a group of like-minded people concentrated together that no one else is serving. Well, guess what? What? You're a founder. I'm a founder. Who do you know? You know, a ton of other fucking entrepreneurs and founders. And so if you find something like, hey, this is valuable for my work, or I learned something from Christmas podcast, you don't shut up about it.

• 1:29:11David Senra?

  Just like if I see a great movie or a great CD or CD, now I'm showing my age, a great track on Spotify or whatever. It's like, I send it to our funny TikTok. It's natural to share people. So it's like, for us, it's very simple. It's like, I'm going to stay in the game. I'm going to try to like, you go back. I thought your early podcasts are still great. But I guarantee if you go back to like episode one hundred, you're probably like, oh, you're like, I'm so much better because I do the same thing. I'll get messages about like, I listened to episode fifty last time. Like, Please don't. Please, please, please don't. But they don't, you know what I mean? But that's also a good thing that Paul Graham talks about. It's like, the great thing about painting is the painters leave like a progression. So you can see the gradual refinement over time. And very few other domains show that, right? But podcasting does. Go watch. I was listening to Joe Rogan.

• 1:29:55David Senra?

  My friend Eric put me on to Joe Rogan back in like two thousand and ten because he was into UFC. He's like, come over to my house and watch this, this podcast. And I was like, what the fuck is a podcast? And then it'd be Joe sitting on his couch, his white couch with Brian Redban, and there'd be like, snow and shit. Like, it was on Ustream. It wasn't, I didn't, like, we were not listening on Apple Podcasts. I mean, this is probably two thousand and nine, actually. But my point is like, then go see, compare Joe episode two, or, you know, fifty with episode two thousand. And this is, I'm gonna go back to Survivorship Virus and I want to talk about something else real quick that just popped up. I just finished rereading Peter Thiel Zero to One. And his whole thing is like, he has a definitive worldview. He's like, you're not a fucking lottery ticket.

• 1:30:37David Senra?

  You have control and mastery over the world. You have to go out and like, you can have, if you plan and strive to things, you can actually change the world, which is all entrepreneurs understand. Steve Jobs said the same thing. He's like, once you realize that everything around you was built by people no smarter than you, like, and you can make your own things that other people interact with, you can literally change and poke the world, and something changed on the other side, you'll never be the same. But there's people, what I realized, like, there's so many people that don't believe that. They think life is something that happens to them. And so what Peter Thiel says in that book, he quotes this Emerson quote, "Shallow men believe in luck, strong men believe in cause and effect." Yes, you have to stay in the game long enough to get lucky. But you know how you get lucky? By preparing all the time, by showing up every day for fucking years.

• 1:31:20David Senra?

  My podcast, Just Like Yours, has grown unbelievably. Like, the rate of growth in 2022 has been fucking crazy. But what people didn't see is like, me sitting in a room by myself for four years, every day before that. That's why I love what Kanye said on his, and I'm not talking about what the fuck he, how he is now or anything else, right? But on his first, on his first album, he says, he's like, "Lock yourself in a room for, make five beats a day, every day for three summers. I deserve to do these numbers." He's also saying, he's like, "I've been making beats since I was 12. You didn't know who the fuck I was till I sold my beat to Jay-Z when I was 24." You didn't see the 12 years. The time that you're hanging out with friends, you're going to parties, it's like, I'm making beats and I'm rapping on beats.

• 1:32:02David Senra?

  There's a fantastic, if you want to talk about the founder's journey, the hero's journey, let's call it the founder's journey. The first two episodes of Genius, which is the Kanye West documentary on Netflix, skip the third episode, it's useless. But those first two, he had the wherewithal to be followed around when he was 20, 21, 22, 23, by a fucking camera crew, as he's trying to break into the industry. That shit that you see in those first, and I play it on my computer over and over again, because I feel like I'm in that same spot. It's like, I've been, I was in my, I was in my, this fucking booth that you see me in, this soundproof booth, reading every day. I was making five beats a day for three summers. It's like, now I just broke in. Now see what I'm gonna do with this. I'm not, I'm gonna put my foot on the gas, I'm gonna take every opportunity I can. I'm gonna keep working as much as I possibly can.

• 1:32:42David Senra?

  And, I, because I believe in cause and effect. I'm going to do the work necessary, so I become lucky. And I don't give a shit about, oh, this, this podcaster, you know, did it for a year or two and then quit. That's irrelevant to me because I'm not quitting. A family friend of mine, um, my, my brother in law's best friend, right? They're like, hey, I know David's into podcasting. I started my own podcast. I'd love to be able to like pick his brain about it. And, uh, because he's a family friend, I was like, yeah, I'll talk to you, whatever. He's like a nice guy. So I went to talk to him and he's telling me about like, he started this podcast and he's like, oh, man, I, I did some episodes and then I stopped. And he was talking about weird stuff where he'd like have all his guests travel to like a professional recording studio. Right? It's like, first of all, you don't need that, like, like just, you need reps, reps, reps. Arnold Schwarzenegger's thing is like, everything is reps, right?

• 1:33:28David Senra?

  And then I talked to him and we were talking for a while and then I found out, wait a minute. This is like, I don't know, maybe 10, 15 minutes of the conversation, I can't remember. But I was like, how many episodes have you done? He's like, six.

• 1:33:38David Senra?

  I was like, call me back when you hit a hundred. Click. The fuck are we talking about? I literally told him, I was like, we have nothing to talk about. You've done six. The, the, the arrogance, and he's not an arrogant kid, the arrogance that you think you could do something six times and be good at it.

• 1:33:52Chris Williamson?

  Why hasn't the world delivered me what I deserve?

• 1:33:55David Senra?

  It's crazy and this is a nice, smart kid, right? I'm not like insulting him, but I was like, bro, do fucking hundred and then we'll talk.

• 1:34:02Chris Williamson?

  I think the reason, the, the reason that people have those points of view is because they don't see behind the scenes, what's going on. You know, you look at the Rogan with the several hundred million dollar Spotify deal and all of the plays and all of the accolades and all that stuff. And you think, well, yeah, like I know he's done for a long time, but like now surely there's a way to shortcut that. I can get to where he is or somewhere close to that in a, in less time. Uh, and there are people, you know, there are people that have had, uh, shortcuts to achieving that. You know, Brendan Schaub is someone that gets accused of being one of the people that kind of got a Q jump because of how much time he got on, uh, exposure he got from Rogan. You think, well, maybe, but is that really going to be your growth strategy? To hope to be plucked out of obscurity?

• 1:34:46Chris Williamson?

  I'm, I'm not convinced that that's going to be a replicable way to do things. So one thing that a lot of people have probably got in their minds is, uh, trying to understand your progressive summarization, uh, technique. You're reading a lot of books, your recall is good. High level, what is the process that you think is best for people to go through? If they want to retain the important things from the books that they read?

• 1:35:13David Senra?

  So I think this actually ties together. Um, so Jerry Seinfeld has this great interview with Harvard Business Review and they're like, hey, you know, you kind of micromanaged everything and, uh, you know, could you have like, maybe instead of doing a show for nine years, you could have done it for a lot longer. You didn't get burned out. Like maybe you would have, you should have hired McKinsey to help you. And he's like, who's McKinsey? And I go, it's a consultant firm. He's like, are they funny? And he's like, no, they're not funny. He's like, then I don't need them. He's like, the hard way is the right way. He's like, I'm, I go, I use, him and Larry wrote every single word. They picked every, all the actors, they did everything, right? He's like, that's the only way I know how to, to work. Right? And so my process is very similar to that. The way I related to Joe Rogan is like,

• 1:35:55David Senra?

  if you think about Joe Rogan's built, uh, an empire with his fucking mouth, with his mouth and everything he does, it looks easy. People go, oh, it's just like three hours of, you know, shooting the shit with your friends. It's not easy, as you, as you know, right? And if you think it was like everything that he's interested in, like it's all these forms of practice. It's like, he's obsessed with the UFC and he's been a commentator for 20 years. That's his mouth. He's had to be like, he's using, he's, he's learning how to, to break down what he's seeing and make it interesting for the listener, uh, and the, and the viewer, right? He's obsessed with comedy. He's been doing comedy for 30 fucking years. Same thing. How many reps has that guy put in on the microphone to make it look easy when he goes in front of now 25,000 people? Right? Same thing with this podcast. Night, episode 1900

• 1:36:37David Senra?

  looks easy because you didn't see the decade before. So I believe in the hard way. So this is, uh, our mutual friend, Eric Jorgensen. We have a lot of funny conversations because he just cannot believe. He's like, so who, who edits your podcast? I do. Why the hell? He's like, everything I do, no one touches.

• 1:36:52Chris Williamson?

  I'm really glad, I'm really glad that you brought up Jorgensen because I was at the bachelor party a couple of months ago and obviously he's Mr. Leverage, right? He's Mr. Scale. He's Mr. Mr. Outsourced. And I think that both me and you have strategies when it comes to the way that we do our project. That makes him feel nauseous, frankly.

• 1:37:11David Senra?

  Yes. And so his whole thing, he's like, David, you should only be fine. Listen, Eric's super smart. The reason I like him is because not only is he a good writer, but what is rare is how articulate he is. Well, you've probably interviewed a bunch of writers, like, like, you know, like, it's a, he has, he's able to be articulate and write really well, which I think he's like, we're just gonna see, this guy's gonna blow up. I think his idea, what he's doing with all these versions of the almanac and everything, like, that guy's gonna sell a fuck ton of books.

• 1:37:37Chris Williamson?

  I wish I could invest in him. If I could invest in him, I would, yeah.

• 1:37:40David Senra?

  Yeah. And so, he, he heard, um, I've told him this too, where, okay, so my process is crazy, but there's a reason for it. So, um, one of the things I love is that I have an unfair advantage. Kanye said, like, oh, I have an unfair advantage because like, I hear my beats first, right? And my unfair advantage is like, I read the books first. And all I do is like, I'm having one-sided conversations with history, great entrepreneurs, and all they do is tell me their best ideas. And then I can apply them to podcasting and, and put them through like, my view of the world and like, my own unique spin on things, right? And so one thing I learned is like, it gave me more confidence that my way is the way that's right for me. It's Mozart was obviously very gifted, starts, you know, creating music when he's like, three years old, dies relatively young, but his, he was

• 1:38:23David Senra?

  like psychopathic, just like Michael Jordan was in, in his form of practice. And he would practice more, it's funny, it's like, you think of A players, but like, there's a difference between like, the top 1% and then like, the top 0.1%, right? And Mozart's clearly at the top 0.1%, which is almost a different world from the top 1%. And so he practiced way more than anybody else. And as a result, he had physical attributes that his competitors lacked. And it's like, he had insane, uh, left-hand strength from playing certain instruments. And then what happens is there's these trends in music, back then, just like trends now, where there was this instrument, I think it's called like a viola. It's not a violin, it's like, something called like a viola, right? Becomes extremely popular. And what

• 1:39:05David Senra?

  he realized, he had like, a decade or two decades of, of practice where his left hand is so, so much stronger, and therefore capable of making music with this instrument, that his competitors that did not put in that time in practice, lacked. And so by the time they're like, hey, I wanna jump on this trend. Okay, well, you're 10 years behind and you're never gonna, you can't, you couldn't catch Mozart. So my version is that of that is I read the books, right? Um, I read physical books. If I did Kindle, it'd be so much faster, but I have a love affair with like, there's a romance to physical books for me. It's the first books I read when I was, you know, five or six years old. So I had, I sit down with a book, uh, with a pen, a ruler, post-it notes and scissors. It's like I'm fucking doing arts and crafts over here. And I just, I read the book. I, I start reading the page. I read in chronological order.

• 1:39:51David Senra?

  Um, and then whatever, I don't think about it. It's like all instinct. What jumps out? What like sometimes I'll highlight almost everything on page. Sometime I'll go fucking 20 pages with nothing. It's what speaks to me and then I highlight it. And then I write down on a post-it note, what comes to mind first? It could be like an interpretation of that. Oh, that made me think of this thing. So that's another thing. Like I don't think of, um, I know we have to, we have to, um, separate things into episodes, but to me it's like founders is one giant 400 hour conversation on the history of entrepreneurship that I'm just going to keep adding to. Like when I do an episode on, I just, I'm doing an episode, uh, the book I was reading this morning is, is called, uh,

• 1:40:30David Senra?

  What I Learned Before I Sold to Warren Buffett. This guy built up this giant, uh, diamond and jewelry business and then sold it to Warren Buffett in the 1990s. I, that episode, it comes out, it's not just gonna be on that. It's gonna be on how he thinks this relates to what Steve Jobs said, or this other person said here, or whatever the case is. So I read, go through the book, make my highlights, right? Then, uh, the night before I sit down to record, I reread all the highlights again, not the whole book, but literally reread the mind highlights and the, the notes. So it's the second time I've read them, right? Then I sit down in the morning, me and you were talking about before we started recording. Uh, I like to record my, my brain is so much dumber in the afternoon. It's remarkable. It's remarkable how dumb I am, but in the morning, it's the feels where I'm philanthropist, I sit down and go through.

• 1:41:12David Senra?

  And the way I, the, the podcast is set up is like, hey, what if you could meet up with your friend who reads a lot? And once a week, he just tells you the shit he learned this week. So I talk, you've heard the podcast, like I talk directly to the person. There is no fourth wall. It's like, I picture literally a fucking friend sitting in front of me and we just talk just like that. So now that's the third time through. Then I edit all the podcasts myself and there's not a lot of editing. It's like, uh, it's just like, maybe I'll get up to go to the bathroom or like, oh, that part's boring. And the second part's, I'll just cut that out. Um, but it's very straightforward because it's like, there's no production. It's just me, one human talking to another. So that's the fourth time I've heard the, the highlights. Then I take out this app called Readwise.

• 1:41:49David Senra?

  And I take pictures on the iOS app of you could take pictures of a page of a book and it'll automatically read like turn that text like do the text recognition. You have to like fix a few things, but I put all those highlights into Readwise and I type in my notes. So that's the fifth fucking time. By the time I'm done with the book, I've read my highlights five times. And then my second half of the day, which today I haven't done, uh, because we're recording the afternoon is I'll spend a few hours just rereading. Like, uh, the iOS app on Readwise has this thing, uh, you pull it up, it's called Highlights, uh, Highlights Feed. It looks like, I'll show it to you, the camera, I don't know if it's gonna pull up, but it looks like a Twitter feed, but instead of tweets, it's

• 1:42:33David Senra?

  my highlights from past books and my notes on the book. Um, and then what I'll do is I'll use that. I got this idea from Michael Bloomberg, actually, because he repurposed the information that his, the unique information that his business collected, uh, which is selling the subscriptions of the financial data and then repurposed that information into media form, uh, into media content and his media empire. And then that would then fuel subscriptions to his, you know, his $25,000 seat, whatever thing. So that's when people see tweets, uh, or stuff on LinkedIn. That's all coming from my Readwise app. Then I'll film myself in this booth that you're looking at right now, reading those highlights and put them on TikTok and stuff like that. And so it all funnels back to, and again, it's a form of practice. So now by the time I'll, I'll probably record maybe Sunday morning, maybe Monday morning, depends on how long it takes me to read the book.

• 1:43:18David Senra?

  But by the time I sit down, everything I'm about to say is informed by the book I read, but also all my practice that I've done the previous six or seven days. Um, and so my whole thing is like, I'm terrified of wasting anybody's time. And so that level of preparation, one, I think is extremely rare, especially in the entrepreneur domain. I don't think, I don't, I'm not, don't, I'm not saying this is an arrogant thing. It's like, I release a podcast every week. I did 66 last, last year, actually. I don't think anybody else is building a podcast exclusively focused on founders that does more preparation than I do, that releases as fast as I do. And so I'm obsessed with just building the Warren Buffett thing, building that moat. The longer this goes on, the more difficult I am going to be to compete in the future, because I think of these, it's not, it's an obsession.

• 1:44:01David Senra?

  That happens to be a podcast, or a session disguised as a podcast that happens to be a business. And so being smart is like, how do I, again, you know this because you have 560 fucking episodes. It's like, it's gonna be very hard for you to replicate what you've been building up and all this shit that you're learning that then informs the conversations you have in the future. With somebody saying, hey, I'm gonna, you know, I like what Chris does, I'm gonna jump in and try to compete head to head with them. Good fucking luck, buddy.

• 1:44:24Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I'm really impressed with what you're doing. I think it's great. I think that teaching people through stories, especially stories from history. Some of my favorite modes of learning, Ryan Holiday, Robert Greene, you know, these guys have made absolute monster careers out of being

• 1:44:40Chris Williamson?

  historians masquerading as philosophers. And it's a very cool way to approach it. So let's wind this one up. Before you go, three books that you most often gift to people.

• 1:44:57David Senra?

  Well, okay, so the most often that I gift to people would be

• 1:45:03David Senra?

  Against the Odds, an autobiography by James Dyson. It is, was published, you know, 20 something years ago. It is now hard to find. It's out of print. It is somewhat expensive. I have a friend that just bought it and he paid a hundred dollars. It's fucking worth a hundred dollars. It's worth way more than that. Those are hard to find. I give Eric Jorgensen's The Omniknight of All away a lot. There's a fantastic book called The River of Doubt, which is a biography on Teddy Roosevelt, but it focuses on him, his life after he lost the last presidential election. Teddy's one of my personal heroes as well, his approach to life. In fact, I'm about to do, I've just bought Edmund Morris's three-part biography of Teddy Roosevelt.

• 1:45:43David Senra?

  It's 3,000 pages I have to read on Teddy, which I'm looking forward to. But anyways, this River of Doubt, it's about the capacity to take pain, endurance, treating life like the adventure it is. He goes and it's like, hey, I need to, like, anytime he went to something rough in life, he looked for, his motto was get action. And he's like, I need to, the physical emotional pain I have is only alleviated through physical action. Right? And so he's like, I'm gonna go down to the Amazon and I'm going to map out a tributary of this river that no one's ever completed. And he almost dies. It's just, the writing is absolutely fantastic. Two other books, I know yes or three, but one of the best books, if you can find it. I don't give this as a gift a lot because it's hard to find. Estee Lauder wrote one of the best autobiographies that you can ever find. A complete obsessive.

• 1:46:28David Senra?

  Her, I'm using her playbook a lot in The Way I'm Building Founders. And like, she's just obsessed over customers, did things that did not scale. She writes the book. She dies, the company is still a private family company. And now it's, you know, doing like $18 billion of revenue. It's called A Success Story by Estee Lauder. Really hard to find, but you can read it in a weekend, full of just useful information. Um, and then I, I would add, uh, one other book. You have to read a biography of Steve Jobs, in my opinion. I've read everyone that's available. The best one, if you only had to read one, it's called Becoming Steve Jobs. The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart to a Visionary Leader. I think is the turn, the, the title. And that's a shorter version. You get a, a full sense of who he is in like 300 pages.

• 1:47:11Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I love it. Where should people go if they want to check out the stuff you do?

• 1:47:14David Senra?

  Founders Podcast by David Sandler and any podcast player. That's basically it. I put my entire, all of my life energy into that one vehicle. And I'd be thrilled if you guys try to, uh, test it out.

• 1:47:25Chris Williamson?

  Dude, thank you.

• 1:47:26David Senra?

  No, thank you. I'm super happy that, that I got a chance to meet you and to be connected. So I really appreciate it. Yeah, no problem.