#122 Inside the Minds of the Most Successful Founders | David Senra - BigDeal

Introduction Most of the greatest entrepreneurs, you actually would not want them as an employee. I was. Speaker 2 Literally going to bring this up. Steve was in his centre. He was 19 years old, show up barefoot, and he only wanted to work at night. Everybody's telling Nolan Bushnell get rid of this guy. He's like, no, I want to capture the upside, and because the upside's so extreme, I'm willing to deal with the downside. Speaker 1 The guy that I have on today, David Sundra, has become a friend. There is nobody in the world, I'm convinced, that knows more about the world's greatest founders. So if you want to see inside Jeff Bezos's head and inside of founders that don't even exist anymore but have shaped our world, you're going to want to listen to this episode. Speaker 2 Keep your freedom. You can control what you work on. If you love it, you'll do it all the time. If you do it all the time, you'll get really good at it and money will come as a result. Speaker 1 Yeah, obsession is kind of contagious, isn't it? Speaker 2 I would say passion is infectious. The Lonely Founder Life: Why Entrepreneurs Need Founder Friends You have me peaked. I want to hear this Mr. Beast story. Speaker 2 Oh, so this is the funniest ever, he goes. I want to run an ad where it says Mr. Beast wants founder friends. Stop it. A lot of people don't understand the founder life. It is kind of lonely and only other entrepreneurs and other founders kind of understand that. Speaker 1 Like to cut people from your life that do not want to win? Speaker 2 Yeah, I was literally thinking about this this morning. Marriages and Relationships of History's Greatest Entrepreneurs I was curious for you, you've talked a little bit about relationships of famous founders and entrepreneurs, like what have you found are the marriages or relationships like by the greatest entrepreneurs? Speaker 2 Marriages, yeah, terrible. They're terrible. I mean, there's very few people because you tend to be obsessed. Like I also think like it's important to note. So these the people that appear on founders podcast, right? They they were so good at their jobs that somebody wrote a book about their life. This is like the tiniest percentage of any humans that have ever existed. So of course they're like outliers are outliers. And what I would say is most people over optimize their professional life to the detriment of their personal life. And there's a great documentary on this called The Defiant Ones, which is one of my favorites. It's probably my second favorite documentary besides Select the Last Dance if you're like an obsessive person. And I probably would watch the Defined Ones at least 10 times. Jimmy Ivine, who many people would be surprised. So like, you know, of all the people you want to meet, who would you want to meet? And in my top three, Jimmy Ivine was in there. It was James Dyson, Jeff Bezos and Jimmy Ivine. And Dyson and Jeff Bezos makes perfect sense for somebody that, you know, studies of history, history's great entrepreneurs were like Jim Ivine. Why? So you just got to watch the defined ones because it's a great documentary. People think it's a documentary on the the part, the relationship and partnership between Doctor Dre and Jim Ivine. No, it's a documentary on entrepreneurship. They're just very entrepreneurial. And in that documentary, they interviewed Jimmy's ex-wife and they interview Doctor Dre's wife, who then has they've since been divorced after that. And, you know, they, they both talk openly, both of the, the women talk about openly about how difficult it is to be married to people like this. And I think they can describe it better than anybody else because it's from the, the spouse's perspective. But it, you know, it essentially comes from, you have usually highly disagreeable people, very driven people, obsessed people have a hard time, you know, taking a break or dedicating. And you can have a relationship if you're not, you know, spending time with the other person and making them a priority. Is Entrepreneurship a Trauma Response? Yeah. Do you think that that entrepreneurship is a trauma response in some ways, Like it's like PTSD and so you become an entrepreneur? Speaker 2 I actually have a lot of people, you know, 'cause when you think about these, these life stories, there's usually some kind of like unhappiness, usually an issue with like their parents, like a relationship with the father that is a big instigator. Maybe they grow up in poverty. I would just say that I don't think it's prerequisite for extreme success. It's just that most humans grow up in bad environments. And so I think you just, it's literally just a bigger sample size there. You can, you know, grow up with, in a loving household and still have extreme success. I don't know if it's a trauma response. I do think I, I have a different view of this. Like I, I hope I just talked to Toby Luke of Shopify about this. He says something interesting because I, I had a long form conversation with him for the new show and he said on at the very end, he's like, oh, me and you have the same job. Our job is to create more entrepreneurs. And I never thought about that 'cause he was a fan of both founders of the podcast, founders too. And I would like to help entrepreneurs surface useful information for them. But I don't know if you can create more of them his maybe he could. I just think that there is something almost innate in it. It's like a personality. I don't think you choose to be an entrepreneur. I think like there's just a great line from Jeff Bezos where he says we don't choose our passion, so our passion choose us. That's how I kind of think about it. So I think even if they that entrepreneur type didn't even have trauma, they still would do what they're doing. Like I'm an unmanageable person. There's no way I could ever work for somebody. I'd get fired. Like I just can't not say what's on my mind. I like to me and you were both control freaks. It's very obvious. We talked about this for. Speaker 1 Recording, I like to say. Speaker 2 Yeah, exactly. I want to, you know, pick who, what I work on, who I work with, how I work. These are just things that are incompatible with, you know, with being, being an employee. So I didn't think there was an option, you know, whether I had trauma in my childhood or not. Speaker 1 Yeah, I kind of think, I don't know if it's a story you tell yourself when you're an entrepreneur, but I do think I at least am unemployable now. You would and probably, it seems to me like most of the greatest entrepreneurs, you actually would not want them as an employee. They might be incredible, but you might not. But I'm curious because you have a story. I think it's, I think you're the one that I heard it from. It was about Steve Jobs and the founder of Atari. Hiring for Spikes: The Steve Jobs Employee Philosophy I swear to God that was on my mind. Just really, I was literally going to bring. Speaker 1 This up? OK, tell us a story. Speaker 2 So there's, there's an interesting thing that I'm very interested in these ideas that people that didn't know each other, lived at different times, worked in different industries, and in many cases, you know, were in different parts of the world, arrived at similar conclusions. And this idea that I've now heard from a bunch of living entrepreneurs. So Daniel Ack, founder, Spotify told me this Kareem, founder of ramp told me this, that they hire for spikes. And their point was that, you know, big corporations, the advantage that you have is like a as as a founder, like companies, like big corporations kind of like managed to the middle. So they want you to look a certain way, act a certain way. There's just a lot, there's a lot more like structure around them where if you're founder LED company, you have the authority that like, you know, a non founding CEO probably lacks. And so their whole thing is just like, I'm not, I don't judge you by your worst idea. I judge you by your best. And usually if you want the most talented designer in the world or the most talented program in the world or the most talented X of anything in the world, they're going to be unusual people with very distinct personalities. And a lot of their personality types will usually lead to like bad behavior. And so like, one example of this is like one of the best designers that Spotify ever had. And this is the early days of Spotify. It's like he was bipolar and also an alcoholic, but also the world's best designer. And if the CEO and the founder didn't sit next to him, why he designed, if Daniel got up to go take a call or something else, they'd lose track of this guy for days. He would just like take off running. So he literally people were telling Daniel, like, what are you doing? You're the founder of this company. Your CEO is like, you can't just sit and babysit this guy. It's like he's so talented. Yes, I do. It's a it's a very high leverage, you know, thing I'm doing right now as opposed. And they knew it wouldn't last. He's not, he's not somebody he's going to work with you for 20 years. And this is not new. He's like these, you'll see these characters in these books. And so I didn't know this until I read, I think, I think I've done like 15 episodes of Steve Judd, but now. But one of the funniest things was Nolan Bushnell. A lot of people don't realize that in that time in Silicon Valley, this was probably 40 years ago. Very common for founders. First company raises money, bring in professional management. There was very few of these like founders in their 20s left to run their companies. And Nolan was one of the first ones and he was like 27 and he thought Steve, both Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were very talented, but Steve was an eccentric. He what would show up to the office barefoot. He was 19 years old, show up barefoot, refused to shower, would only, I think at the time was only eating like a fruit diet. Like he just had a very extreme personality type. And then he only wanted to work at night, and he insisted that he could sleep in the office. And everybody's telling Nolan Bush, I was like, what the hell is wrong with you? Like, get rid of this guy. He's like, no, I, I he's like, I want to capture the upside. And I'm willing because the upside's so extreme. I'm willing to deal with the downside. And so he's like, OK, we just kept we, we kind of secluded Steve away from the rest of the general population. And we let him work at night and just, you know, tell people to hold their nose because he had such an offensive body out here and he slept at the office. And he wind up being very like that would wind up being a good trade that that Nolan did. Speaker 1 Yeah, I think I saw somewhere it was a video on Divas and hiring Divas one way or the other. It might have been Steve Jobs too. And I thought about it because we had one of my best engineers. He's brilliant. And I won't say who he is, but he is building one of our products. And anyway, he he's not, doesn't have very high EQ. So his engagements with other people are either extremely passive or like psychopathic. So I have to have a chat with him every so often the other day. So I'm like, hey, man, we got to you got to push on this team. You got to push harder. And he and he's like, no, I'm pushing and I'm like, I need you to have some big energy. Get in there. I want you to tell him what to do. Like you are in charge. You go well, that translation to turned into him walking into a room full of like 80% women and going Cody told me I had to put my on the table. I was like my life. So the women came to me and they're like, this was odd behavior. I'm like, listen, that's probably my fault. I'll I'll correspond with him. But you know, we're not you know, we're not doing anything about it because he's so good. So I do, I do relate to this idea of Divas or really high performers sometimes being somebody that you have to keep, sometimes somebody you have to get rid of. You know, there was another one that you talked about that I really liked, which is I'm obsessed with George Lucas. I just love that he's a, a world builder plus has been transcendent for decades. And he was supposedly like really difficult to work with. And I loved the, the, you know, some of your, your stories that you've told about him. But I was wondering, like he not only was really difficult, but came up with wild ideas and worked with really spiky people. George Lucas and the Power of Unapologetic Self-Investment Do you have a favorite story from George Lucas? Or do you have something that you think George Lucas would teach people that most people don't realize? Speaker 2 There's a great biography of George Lucas called George Lucas the Life. It's written by Brian J Jones, who's also a prolific biographer. He has a bunch of biographies I like, but it says the most important line in that book is that George Lucas unapologetically invested in what he believed in most himself. And he was another control freak and one of the biggest bets he did. So he he did this movie called American Graffiti and he didn't have any leverage at the time because he was still rather unknown director. Again, another thing that was very rare is to have directors in their early 20's. The director that kind of blaze the path for all these guys was guy named Francis Ford Coppola, who was running major big budget, major movies in he was like in his late 20s. He's probably 20, around 27 as well. And so Steven Spielberg saw this, George Lucas saw this, Brian De Palma saw this, all these these directors that were, and film makers that were friends with each other. And I think Coppola is like, you know, maybe half a decade older, maybe a decade older. And so he played a huge role. But at the time that he's making American Graffiti, which is one of the best returns on investments. I think the movie, he did the movie for like $1,000,000 if I remember. And he made like 57 million at the box office. But because he didn't have creative control they and he wanted final cut on his movie because it wasn't just a movie. It's very personal to him. They they cut like 4 minutes from the movie and he said it's like cutting off fingers. It was so painful for him. And that led him to once he had now I think he made like 4 to $5,000,000 on that movie, which a ton of money back then. And then they gave him, he wrestled on the next project for creative control over Star Wars. And then he wanted ownership of the merchandise rights. And I think the merchandise rates were the most important thing. I forgot the other thing that he argued. It was like a very simple contract. But I think just the idea of like, I believe myself, I'm willing to take less money up front, you know, because a lot of directors are just like, no, just pay me $10 million and you keep all the money in the back end. He's like, I don't, I don't care about the money. I care about the control. And if you're talented and you maintain control, you wind up with the money anyways. That was, I think, one of the most important lessons from from George Lucas. Speaker 1 Yeah, You know what? You've also talked a lot about, which I'm curious, and you almost only talk entrepreneurs that have had massive longevity. And you have some great quotes on longevity, too. How you know history's greatest entrepreneurs think in decades? There was another one I really liked. We're talking about personal standards. Longevity Over Everything: Building Companies That Last Decades I'm curious, what have you seen it takes to last as an entrepreneur? Like so many people flame out. What do you want to do if you want to succeed for the long term and not be a footnote in history? Speaker 2 I don't think I'm glad you picked up on that because it is one of the most important things for me. Like I'm terrified of being successful for a year or five. I almost think like being successful and losing it is, is worse than never being successful. So, you know, somebody runs a company and looks like success on paper for a year or five years. Like it's like, that's not interesting listening to me. So for the new show, if you look at we can go through like the first 3 guests, first guests, I pick them on purpose for this exact I, we both share this, this love and admiration for Charlie Munger. You and I do. And he thought durable durability was a first rate virtue. I mean, it's just like you build a company to last. Let's just make a bag of money and then disappear onto an island. I'm not interested in that. And so when I thought about the, the people I wanted to talk to and this is who I this, this haunts me, my dreams. So I had a nightmare the other night. I'm literally arguing with people because they're like, why don't you interview more startup founders? And I was like, I want people that have done that are not just promoting something because a lot of the entrepreneurship industry. So she people that you're consuming this content, It's all, you know, usually tied to some kind of like VC back company. They're just they're promoting, they're talking about stuff they may do in the future and a small percentage of them will do what they're saying in the future. Somebody else can do that. I'm want you to to be able to point to a body of work and be like, this is what I did and this is what I learned by doing this. And I want to surface those ideas. And so like Daniel at 1st guest on the new show, Daniel at worked on Spotify for 20 years. Second guess, let me see if I can go through this by memory. Second guess, Michael Dell, he started Dell. He's 19, he's 61 and he's still doing it. Speaker 1 Dude, tell him that line that Michael Dell has about how many days of the week he works. Speaker 2 Oh, so I have that on my wall. So this is hilarious because I actually DM Michael Dell because he's been very nice to me and he he like tweets and posts on LinkedIn about founders that he thinks it's like a useful tool for the world. And I really appreciate it. And then I get to spend time with him and I think he's the GOAT. He's just one of the most kind but fascinating people to talk to because of again, we're starting company 19. This is how crazy is. I'll get to that statement one, one second. I highly recommend everybody read his autobiography or listen to it because he actually reads the autobiography. But there's a crazy line in there where I didn't even know that IBM at the time was the most valuable company in the world. It was the first company in history to hit $100 billion market cap, which I also didn't know. And he goes, I'm I'm in the University of Texas dorm room. I have $1000. And he's telling us he's trying to convince his parents to let him like work on his company and drop out of school. And he's like, I mean, with this $1000, I'm going to take on the biggest, the most valuable company in the world, which is IBM. It's such a wild statement. And then to go on and, and to succeed and to, to navigate all these different technological, you know, revolutions that he successfully endured. He built a durable company. And you know, somebody like that that has 41 years of entrepreneurial experience, like you just sit there and talk to him. Zach Dale is a friend and he's building this great company called He Is A. Speaker 1 Smart dude, which is not always the case for billionaires kids. Speaker 2 Yeah, well, he's going after it. Zach's. Speaker 1 That's what company or that energy company has is incredible. Speaker 2 Yeah, but he, he says he goes, you know, the Bloomberg Terminal, He's like, I have dad terminal. So he's like, I call my dad's like I have an issue with my supply chain. Well, guess what? Michael's seen everything he like, he's so helpful as like as like, you know, a thought partner on this. I think it's just like insanely valuable. But I was, this is also why I wanted to start the new show because I resisted for a long time. I was like, no, no, no. It's like I can't start another podcast. It's like a loss of focus. Just going to focus on reading biographies of and just doing 1 episode a week and that's it. But then when you put something out like that, guess what? Anybody that lived a life so remarkable that somebody wrote a book about it in every biography, you'll realize almost everyone, they were reading biographies when they were younger and they were trying to figure out. So this is again a line from Charlie Munger where it's like learning from history is a form of leverage. Why did Munger read hundreds of biographies? Why did Buffett read hundreds of biographies? Why did Elon read hundreds of biographies? Why did Jeff Bezos like Steve Jobs? This just over and over again. It's obviously one of the highest value things you can do. So I was like, let me just focus on that because I think it's good for the world and other people getting value of it. Some of the best entrepreneurs in the world obviously listen to it. Michael Dell was one of them. But then what was happening is as a result of this work, I got to get to know these people, have conversations with them. And then I'm learning so much in the conversations too. Just, it's like being able to prompt a book instead of me being just reading the book and I can wait. Wait, what do you mean by that? Follow up? Explain that a little bit more. And so it's like, oh, I should just record these conversations and then other people can benefit from them, not just me. And I also thought because I had this like catalog, this encyclopedic knowledge of history of entrepreneurship, I could create something truly differentiated where if like Michael Dole sitting across from me and he says something about, oh, wait, that's just like Bezos said this in his shareholder letter. And like this guy named Daniel Ludwig said this and Rockefeller said this. And so it's almost like tying it all together, like this giant weave. And I knew that because God bless him. But there was this guy, he runs a great podcast, but he had he had Michael Dona's podcast one time and he goes, so when you're starting Dell, how many hours did you work a week? And Michaels so polite and so kind and he's a great person. And he just looked at him like, and he goes, he literally, I think pauses all of them so good. Because like, you know, if you started a company, you know what the answer to that question is? Like it's like, Oh no, I clocked out at 5:00. I have $1000 going against $100 billion company. 5:00 Guys, see you tomorrow. Like, come on, you know that the answer is. So I just thought, OK, I think I understand these people on a very, you know, fundamental level. And that could maybe, hopefully, make the conversations interesting. Do You Have to Be Obsessed to Win? Do you think you have to be obsessed to win? Like if you want to be one of the greatest, do you have to be obsessed? Speaker 2 Is there anybody I've talked to that wasn't obsessed so we can go back through the, the, the guest list? So 20 years, Daniel Ack obsessed. He couldn't work on anything. He just stepped down because his natural state is to work on multiple companies at one time. And we should talk about founder archetypes because we're going on this project together, which you might find interesting. And really the importance of like knowing yourself. And then you're not going to be successful unless you can build a company. It's a reflection of you, you know, essentially like an echo or shadow of the founder. So Daniels had to be obsessive. Spotify wouldn't have worked. Michael Dell still obsessed this day. He's obsessed with puzzles and he just looks at like reinventing, constantly reinventing. His company is like a giant puzzle. So he's been doing it for 40 years. Brad Jacobs has 43 years of experience as an entrepreneur. He started 8 separate billion dollar companies. You should get him on here. He's a fascinating character, one of those. Speaker 1 He. He. Speaker 2 Changed. He changed my life. The Inner Monologue Shift: From Negative to Positive Fuel We should talk about inner monologues too, because I had a very negative inner monologue. And Brad. I spent a bunch of time with Brad and he's the one who just like this is stupid. Like he used to have an inner monologue, a very negative inner monologue, very self critical, talks about this in his book called How to make a few Billion Dollars, which I recommend reading. And you know, I knew this for a long time, but just something with the conversation with him just finally clicked where I'm like, my fuel source now is not like I, you know, fixing the wrongs that happened, like being born, you know, not with money or whatever. It's like, no, I just love what I do and should be a more positive fuel source. And like, me talking to myself this way is stupid. It's not. So it served me when I was younger. It doesn't serve me anymore. So you should change. That's a direct. Drastic change my life as a direct result of Brad Jacobs book and then talking to him. So 43. He's 4344 years of experiences and entrepreneur. Brad Jacobs will tell you he's obsessed still. He just loves deals. He like dances. He's just giddy like a little school girl. I think he's 68 or 69 years old. He still wakes up every day fired up where he's like dude, there's 8 days in a week I'd work 8. He's just I can't. He can't help himself. The 4th 1 was Todd Graves. OK, yeah, obsessed. The guy is worth $20 billion and all he does is sell chicken fingers. That's. Speaker 1 Insane. Speaker 2 But he just sells chicken fingers better than anybody else in the world. And also. Speaker 1 Didn't he do a boating? He was like fishing and that was the I. Speaker 2 Can I can tell you stories from him so. Speaker 1 You found, I mean, not that you found him. He was obviously very, very successful, but nobody was really bound down at the altar of Todd Graves before you found this. Speaker 2 Guy, because you, you astutely picked up what I'm actually interested in. It's like, I like people that are obsessed and do things for a long time. That's very simple. And I don't care what that is. It could be a tech company. It could be, you know, you're, you're creating hardware software. You can sell chicken fingers, could be real estate. I just they, they nerd out and they think about things in such a deep way where then you talk to them or you read about them. It makes you like, oh, I can take what I'm doing seriously. Go back to Charlie Munger, which mean you will talk about over and over again. I think one of the most important things I ever heard Charlie Munger say, which is like a he's like often times we find that the winning system in business goes ridiculously. This is the word he used ridiculously far minimizing and are maximizing one or a few variables. There's an extension to that idea, which I think it's almost like a way to describe that idea in a simpler terms is find. Find a simple idea and take it seriously. Todd Graves has not changed his menu and he started business. He's 23. He's 53 now. He's not changed the menu in 30 years. And what did he do? He came out to the West Coast, saw the success of In and Out. It's like, look how we're in LA right now. I'll probably go to In and Out after this because I haven't eaten anything today. I've just had coffee over and all day long. And he's like, well, a simple menu stripped down, very simple menu worked in cheeseburgers. Why wouldn't work for chicken fingers? And his original idea was like, I'm going to sell chicken fingers to drunk college students outside of LSU. Turns out a lot of people like fried chicken. I like fried chicken too. And I'm not a drunk college student. And then he just didn't interrupt the compounding. But I didn't find him. I saw a clip, he went on Theo Von. And this is the thing that once you again have this, I think everybody listening should just find people who admire and it's read their life story. And then in those books, they will talk about the people they admire and then go read their life story and just keep following that chain back and back and back. I think it's a very fascinating and a good use of your time. So I wouldn't have understood this clip I saw if I, you know, maybe the first year I started founders podcast, but I was in like the 7th year. I'd run like 300 these things. I have an idea of how the entrepreneurs, these entrepreneurs think and it's a one minute clip on TikTok or something. And he was talking about the fact that the simpler the menu is, it it relates to even how fast he can turn over in the drive through. And I was like, oh, so this guy understands how one decision impacts everything else and that you should limit the amount of details and then make every detail perfect. That's how I describe what Todd Graves has done. And then you don't interrupt the compounding and you're worth $20 billion selling go to Todd Raising Cane's. Why is a simple menu matter, right? Because when he has one restaurant and he's saving 15 or 20 seconds in order because the menu simple you, you put it Raising Cane's. This is your options. You can have three chicken fingers, 4 chicken fingers, 6 chicken fingers. When they told him you need a chicken sandwich, she's like, OK, I'm putting chicken fingers in between two slices of bun. There's there's your God damn chicken sandwich. That's literally what he does. It's hilarious and it works. But the point was you just show up there. It's like, do I'm on 3-4 or six. That's a 5 second decision When you have one sword, doesn't matter. He's got 915. I think he's getting another hundred this year. He's growing faster than you're 30 than he ever has. That makes a huge difference and for him. You can see that you can clock that in a clip. Oh, this guy knows his business where the opposite of that is a lot of these like fake promoting startup founders that are just lying to to get to their next round, which I'm not interested in all at all. You. Speaker 1 Know what's fascinating about the world's greatest founders like Steve Jobs? Steve Jobs didn't just control the product, AKA the iPhone or the MacBook, and the computers that you're on every day. He controlled the distribution. He controlled the back end of it. You know what I mean? Well, the App Store, right? He knew that he wanted to control the way that apps got delivered to you. He wanted to actually be the entire marketplace. You want to distribute your product, but you want to make sure that you also own the distribution network. So what can you own instead? Your newsletter. That is why I'm obsessed with this company called Beehive. So much so that I invested in it. I have a newsletter that now goes out to 1,000,000 people and I get to control if they get my information or not. And so with Beehive, you have a founding team that is obsessed on one thing, how to get your clients to read your things. How do you get to have better open rates? How do you get to get more subscribers? How do you get better design? How do you get ads placed in there so you can get paid to even go and distribute your ideas to other people? That's why I'm obsessed with Beehive. And if you already have a newsletter, you should move to this platform. If you don't have a newsletter, you need to get one. And I've got a discount code for you on it today. If you go to beehive.com BEHII v.com and use code Cody 30 for 30% off, I am going to hook you up. So just like Jobs, you own the distribution, not just the product. One makes me think of like Ray from McDonald's too. But the other day I was at this place called Papa Bagels. Have you ever been to it? No, I can't stop going. Speaker 2 Back I'm trying to limit my my carbs. Speaker 1 Yeah, this is not good for you. Don't go there. Don't go there if you want a six. Speaker 2 Pack I'm on camera a lot this year. Speaker 1 But the part that I find fascinating is the exact same thing. You can have three mini bagels, 6 mini bagels, or maybe you can have 12. Those are the only options. The line is always around the corner. It's this big. It's the tiniest little center that you can imagine. They give you like kind of an astronomically large three types of cream cheese. You could pick between each type of cream cheese and the it's watching. It is a master class in business because the line is incredibly long. The bagel options are all the same. It's all open, so you can see the bagels being made simultaneously. By the time you order, they've already pulled up your bag, even in a line of hundreds of people with your name on it. The bagels are hot the second that you get them. They're just small enough where like you want to order a few more than you probably need. So they're not the large ones, $15.75 for three bagels and a cream cheese. The margin must be incredible on it. And you see these people run through the business and I just watch that and think, everybody's like, Oh my God, aren't these bagels amazing? I'm like, that's the least interesting part about this business. And so it is so fascinating when you can see an entrepreneur who understands that, like, every business is a widget business in some way. If you can get excited about chicken fingers or bagels or whatever, you can win. Speaker 2 And I think the bagels are probably amazing because it's not people like, oh, to be a master of something. It's 10,000 hours. No, it's 10,000 iterations. And the amount of iterations they they had gone through to, to finally perfect their product. And then the whole thing is they don't stop. So you go back to this. So like Todd Gray's did it for 30 years. That dude you talk about obsessing. I told him I was having, I was so excited. So like, I'm obsessed with podcasts. People think I love breeding and I definitely do. But what I realize is like my real obsession is podcasting. And So what happens is when I have these conversations now, I'm usually like, I don't do drugs. We were talking about this right before we start recording. And I've never done ecstasy or any kind of psychedelics, but I would have to imagine this is what it feels like to do ecstasy because I'm so wired and like high as a kite on excitement because you just you absorb their energy and enthusiasm for their business and it translates to you. And I was telling Todd I was like, dude, I need help sleeping. And a friend of mine recommended this like non addictive sleeping medication and he's like, what is that? I go, why he goes, I need it too. I he's like, I slept 3 hours last night. I go, why'd you sleep 3 hours? Because I couldn't wait to wake up and get inside of a store. He calls his his restaurant stores and that's what he does. He travels around and like he literally 30% he'll like you go to for some reason can't. He's working the drive through his, his business card says fry fryer, cook, cashier, CEO. He does all the jobs. The 5th guest, Michael Ovitz, who now like I, I text and talk to all the time and he was, he's been entrepreneur for 40 years. He ran CA for like 30 years. Obsessive, like the guy almost killed himself. He was working so much. I won't go through the whole list. 6th guest, James Dyson, he's been running Dyson for 45 years, obsessed. Same thing like this. Like we just went through this whole list. They either did it for at least was 2 decades to four to five decades. And when you sit down with these wise or older entrepreneurs and you listen, hopefully listen to the podcast, they could just tell you things. They they just know so much more. In many cases, they have more entrepreneurial experience than I've Been alive 100. Speaker 1 Percent. Speaker 2 Yeah, I just get a lot of energy and and. Speaker 1 Yesterday I had Jeremy Zimmer on the podcast, you know, the Co founder of UTA and it was fascinating because I was going down the rabbit hole on him and you know, he had this line about Michael Ovitz because obviously him Aria man, Emmanuel Zimmer, we're all like they were fierce competitors. And I and I was asking him, I'm like, you know, I asked him, do you think competitors are good for you? Like do you kind of hate them but you're glad they exist because you make them better. And he was like, yes, but he's like when we started UTA Michael Ovitz, he had his foot on our fucking neck. He wanted to to murder our business. He goes now we have a lot of respect for for each other. But it is also fascinating when you go to these founders and you get to speak or or listen to people who have built multi billion dollar enterprises that are lasting. You understand that like all the little decisions that you have, that's just a Tuesday for them. And so like, it's kind of interesting. You can see the compounding effect of like how you can handle pain as you go forward. So that's also why I like your pod. Speaker 2 One of the greatest maximus from a history entrepreneurship is excellence is the capacity to take pain. And you just see so never going to actually came from the biography of the founder of Four Seasons. That's where I first saw that line. But I would say with Ovitz, I would highly recommend reading his autobiography. I think it's one of the most important entrepreneur autobiographies ever written. It's called who is Michael Ovitz because he talks about the regrets that he has and stuff that he would do differently. And I really think people should avoid as much as you can working in like these zero sum environments where in his case, like if he lost, somebody's going to be Tom Cruise's agent or this other actor's agent and only one of us can win. And I think, and I've talked talk to Michael about this in private, like I think almost if he took his exact same skill set because he essentially the what is an agent Asian is a salesperson. He was like the world's greatest agent. So it's like world's greatest salesperson and literally just moved it to the East Coast and just worked it because he was running the fund. And he's been like, he's one of the greatest fundraisers I've ever seen. And he's got all these crazy connections and I just think 1:00 not that he he made enough money. He's got he's a multi billionaire. He's fine over there. He would have made more money, but I think he would have been, he just wouldn't have been universally hated because, you know, he he essentially monopolized the entertainment issue. I think he had something like 80% market share with all of the directors, the actors. I forgot the exact number. It's it's in the book. But I think it's a he just did a service to the future generation of entrepreneurs. Like, hey, that was actually a mistake. You know, burning through relationships with all kinds of people was a mistake. It's something I definitely learn from. Like I, I am pretty obsessive with my work, but I actually think my relationships now, my deep true friendships are more important to me, either equal to or more important than my work. And that is like a relatively new revelation for me. I thought it was an introvert. I thought, you know, I was like a lone wolf. I thought I didn't need anybody. And I realized, Oh no, I just had like low quality people around me. And like, if you can surround yourself with high quality people, hold yourself to high standards and then they also hold you to high standards. It's like one of the greatest things about being alive. So this point, we're like, I will literally take time away from work to make to deepen an existing relationship and friendship. And I think that's the stuff. I mean, I talked to John Mackey for the new show too. For another 45 years, we worked on Whole Foods. And after we recorded, I wish we got this on recording, but we didn't. And he goes, he's 72. He goes, David, when you're my age, you're not going to be thinking about the five thousandth Whole Foods store. And he's very proud of building Whole Foods. You're not going to be thinking about the 5000 Whole Foods store. You're going to be thinking about the relationship you have with the people you love. And I'm like, OK, well, he's got 35 something, 30 something years on me. What's the point of me having these conversations? I'm not going to change my behavior. If I just like, oh, great, I'm collecting information and not changing anything, then what is this? This is a waste of time. Speaker 1 I wonder, though, if some of this is, like, the right guidance for the right season. For instance, if Michael Ovitz and Jeremy Zimmer and Ari Emanuel didn't have their feet on the perverbial neck of some of their competitors early on, would they be who they are today? Like, do you have to be one way when you're young? And then as you get older, you become the wise elder, and that's when you stop going to attack the, you know, other parties and instead kind of go together with them. Speaker 2 The interesting thing, and I'm I'm somewhat skeptical of people that say they would do things differently. I wonder if they would right? Speaker 1 Or does it just sound better? Speaker 2 Maybe you you're valuing different things when you're in your 70s and 80s than you did when you're 25 or 35. You know, so you have to figure that out like what is actually important to you? And this is a lot of this when we like, I'm spending a lot of time thinking about like different founder archetypes, something me and Daniel Eck are trying to figure. And it was his idea just because he, what he, what he realized was for him, he is, he's like all the new entrepreneurs. If you talk to young entrepreneurs, like who do they want to be? Like everyone wants to be Elon. And before that they wanted to be Steve Jobs. And so Daniel was the same way. And he's just like, but he, he tried to like this like imitation. He's like, but wait, I'm not like this. And his, if you look at the actual structure, Spotify, it's much more like, almost like a team as opposed to like just one visionary genius. And what Daniel's realizing. And it's been very helpful because he definitely shapes my thinking on a lot of things is he's like, I just think I'm a better player than coach or, excuse me, better coach than player. And Steve's a player. Elon's a player, he says, but I'm not like that. So then that doesn't mean you can't build a successful company, but you have to know who you are. And Daniel spent decades trying to figure out who he is. And I think that's why I'm very skeptical. Like in Sam Walton's autobiography, which, again, if no one's read, you should read that immediately. You know, he's like, yeah, I missed out on a lot of my, you know, essentially Walmart with his entire life. He worked like a dog all the time. You know, he did have this weird balance where he would take off in the middle of the day. He'd work on Walmart seven days a week, but he'd take like an hour to play tennis or an hour to go hunt with his dogs in the middle of the day. But then you'll be right back on it. But, you know, you miss out on some of your kids, childhood time with his wife and everything else. And he's dying of cancer. When he's writing, when he's writing that book, he knows he doesn't have much time left. And he's like, but if I'm being honest, I wouldn't really do much different. I would still do exactly what I did. And so yeah, that's a great way you were like inside that your your question was actually getting to, which is just like, do they actually mean it? If they could replay it, would they do it? They might replay it as a 70 or 80 year old man. Would they replay that 35 super aggressive, still trying to prove themselves? I don't know. I I doubt that they would. Keep Your Circle Small: The Sam Zell Approach to Relationships Do you think that you also have to surround yourself only with other people who want to win like you do? Like, is that old saying you're the average of the five people you spend time with the Jim Rohn ISM? Like, is that true? And have you seen what the history is? Great, greatest entrepreneurs? Do you need to cut people from your life that do not want to win? Speaker 2 This is something it's funny. I was literally thinking about this this morning. There's a line in Brad Jacobs new book which is hilarious called How to Make a Few more Billion dollars. So good, it's. Speaker 1 So good, I aspire to write that book, don't you? Speaker 2 OK, so I didn't grow up with any money, right? My parents, I was, my parents never even graduate high school, much less college, right? As the first person in my family graduate high school, which is a crazy thing to look back on. And I thought I was unhappy when I was younger because I didn't have money. And you start to make money and then you're like, why am I still unhappy? And so I am much more focused on inputs than anything else. And I think a lot of like there's this great book. Have you read Bill Walsh's book? The score will take care of itself. So I think there's a lot of wisdom in that book where it's like, just do the best job you possibly can with the opportunity right, right in front of you. This is something recurs in a lot of the biographies that opportunity handled well leads to more opportunity. And we were talking earlier before we recorded that. One of my closest friends is Patrick O'Shaughnessy from He's investor, but he's more well known because he has this great podcast called Invest Like the Best. And his whole thing with me talks about this whole time. He almost thinks like I'm a little retarded. Yesterday he goes, you're going to retard Max into becoming a billionaire because he's like you don't you have no like long term plan. You just wake up every day and you you like don't look for forms of leverage. You literally just obsess over making trying to make a good podcast. And then you do the next thing the next the same thing the next day and the next day you've been doing it for 10 years and like, look where it's getting you. And I'm just like, I, I just do what I like to do. I don't care. So if you tell me, oh, I'll never be able to write a book like how to make a billion dollars. I never became a billionaire, but I got to do what I love to do. Like I think the best definition, we're kind of like dancing around here is like, how do you define success? And if five years from now, what does your life look like? I'm like, I have no idea. I was like, hopefully I'm doing this because I like doing this. And I just try to design a good 24 hours that I like and then do it again and do it again and again. I want to add value to other people's lives and I think me making these podcasts, hopefully that has information, educational and inspiring information to help you build your business. And if I just do that over and over again, then the score will take care of like the score will take care of itself. And my, I guess my answer to the question is like to what is a success in general? Could be 5 years from now or forever. It's like, by the way, I legitimately think about this and I think a lot of histories greatest entrepreneurs did you won't find many of them that are obsessed over I have to hit a certain net worth or I had to hit certain market cap. I almost never hear that mine. I would just echo with Steve Jobs answer to this question was when they're like, how do you define success? He's like, did I make something I'm proud of? And I think that's like really, really important. But going back to this, this there's a line in the new book How to make a few billion dollars by Brad Jacobs, where he says, or how to make a few more billion dollars, I should say, where he says that the the people you have around you is the most important thing in your life, right? And he says it more eloquently that, but that's the general like think he's talking about. And one thing that you observe when you're reading about great history, great entrepreneurs, you get to talk to some of the the greatest entrepreneurs is how small their circles are and how like they're very slow to add new people. They almost go to great lengths to vet the people they have around them, which is another fascinating thing we think about. It's almost a very clannish, it's almost like very human to be like leery of other people, especially when you become a lot of these people are well known. They're multi, multi billionaires. Everybody all day long wants something from them like invest in my thing or become my customer, or they wanted like use them for something. But I would say keeping your circles, the advice I've been given and you kind of observe it also is like, keep your circle really, really small. Make sure everybody's a high quality individual, Not just like it can't just be that they want to win because there's a lot of people that are winning with, you know, sacrificing all sense of ethics and morals. You know what, those people around you, what did Buffett and Monger say? You can't do a good deal with a bad person. But I would say, yeah, they most, they have very high bars for who they surround themselves with because you are going to, you know, imitate and mimic and just be influenced by the people around you. And then the line as far as professionally, it's like, I like the Steve Jobs line where he's like, you need to be a yardstick for quality. Most people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected. Not like once in a while. It's like, no, our standard default is excellence. And I think this ties to a lot of what you and I've been talking about where we touched on, it's like it's really hard to be excellent in 50 different things. And So what I would say a lot of these people have in common is like they focus on one or two or basically no bigger than a handful of things to be really excellent at. Speaker 1 I keep thinking about how a computer in the hands of somebody like Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak or Michael Dell has the potential to unleash the most powerful products and companies the world has ever seen. But if you had that same computer in the wrong hands, well, that's where things go sideways. You know in 2024 alone there were 6 mega breaches incidents where over 100 million records of everyday people were actually stolen. If you think you're safe, I don't know. I think you got to think about it. Google yourself, see what comes up next. It's fascinating. It's your address, usually your relatives, your phone number. That info can easily be collected and sold by data brokers whose entire job is turning your life into a product. When I saw how much of my personal data was floating around online, I freaked out. That's what Incogni helps with. They find the sites that collect and sell your personal information and remove it for you automatically. No emailing sketchy websites or chasing one down. And if there's something specific you really want gone, Incogni also offers these custom removals for extra coverage. So think of your data like loose change scattered across the Internet. Incogni tracks it down and cleans it up. And it doesn't matter if you're a public figure or not, Everyone should protect their privacy. So go to incogni.com/bigdeal and get protected. Personal Standards and the Yardstick for Quality But you have a quote I like actually, which is the Greats had incredibly high personal standards. And it's such like, it's a simple line. It's not that it's incredibly eloquent, but if you don't have, if you don't hold the standard, I've never seen a world in which a founder holds a standard that is less than what the company gives back. Yeah, I. Speaker 2 Think that would probably be impossible. Speaker 1 It's impossible. And so if you know that you are the highest standard in the company, then you have this moral imperative to make sure that you are holding it as high as humanly possible. In fact, I think it probably was from you too. But there was something I was listening to about Steve Jobs and how he would talk about about how your job as ACEO is to give your employees unreasonable amounts of confidence and push them to be great. And I think about that often. Like our job is to push our people past the level in which they think that they are capable of. And if you can't do that, then you probably shouldn't be in charge. And I think that's true. Or like like Jensen Wong, who talks about like, I will pressure you into greatness, torture, torture you that. Speaker 2 Will torture you into greatness. Speaker 1 Right. I think that's from you too. You did an episode on too. Yeah. His belief was that that's how he became great, right? Speaker 2 Well, what you realize is like when you read that, he's like, I don't like to give up on people. I'd rather torture them into greatness is the exact line from his biography. The book is called The NVIDIA Way. I think it's written by take him, if I remember correctly. And then you realize you, as you read more about him, you're like, oh, he tortured. He did that to himself first. He tortured himself into greatness first. What I would say is about being the ultimate authority figure. I think I find it very useful to take these ideas because we're limited to like how much you can remember. So I try to distill the basic idea down to like a maxim or aphorism, and then you contextually apply it to like your situation. But the way I would think about this is Sydney Harman, This engineer, founder of Harman Kardon, says that the founder is the guardian of the company's soul. Speaker 1 What a lie. Speaker 2 Yeah, And so I think like you're the one that hold that sets the standards. I would say some people might be listening to this and like, oh, but I heard Steve Jobs was a jerk. One of the most important things you can read the the the person I work with Steve Jobs the longest was not anybody Apple. It was actually Ed Camel, the founder of Pixar. And Ed Camel's got this great autobiography, but also really almost like a Bible on how to make great creative work called Creativity, Inc, which talks about how he started Pixar and his life story and how they approach things. There's a 20 or 30, maybe 20 page afterward in the book called the Steve we knew. And, you know, he's like, I worked with this guy for, I don't know, I forgot 26 on 26 consecutive years. And he talked about the maturation and how much Steve changed when he first met him to when, you know, I think it was 20 surprise, maybe 30 years old when he met him. And then Steve was in his 50s when he died. And I think that's one of the most important things to to learn and to read is like, yeah, that that Steve. Steve was obviously very aggressive and he could be called an asshole or a jerk. Not saying he wasn't even later on, but he learned how to manage and to deal with excessively talented people. And he changed over time. And that afterward, which, you know, could read in 1/2 hour. I think it's really important to understand how he truly was, not how he's depicted, you know, in, in some of these stories. Speaker 1 Have you met a lot of incredible founders or have you covered a lot of incredible founders that you would call nice is like the first word to describe them. Speaker 2 My initial answer would be no, but that's probably not true. So my personal hero is there's three people I wanted to meet, right? And accidentally unexpected, they met all three of them last year, it was James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, and Angie Mafine. I spent I don't know how many hours talking to Dyson. The episode I did on the new show, David Center, that episode is episode number 6. I don't think we're label number numbering them. That was one of the best days of my life because that guy's book changed my entire life. We can go into more detail about that if you want. And it's somebody I read about. I read his first autobiography at least five times. I read a second autobiography at least twice. I read his history talk about how so many people are great where they do have this love. And he says he's obsessed with the past and studying history. He wrote an encyclopedia. He considers himself an inventor, not an entrepreneur. He just became an inventor so he can so he can continue to. He became an entrepreneur so he can continue an event. Bezos thinks about the same way. But he wrote, James Dyson wrote a book on, it's called A History of Great Inventions. He literally kind of like, I don't know, there's like 100 or 200 inventions in there. He tells the story of these things. Read that book and he was unbelievably kind and generous and witty. And you know, to the point where there's a picture I think I post online where I was like afterwards, this is kind of embarrassing. But he, you know, he did play a big role in my life is like, I got to give you a hug, dude. Like you literally changed my life. Like you encouraged me. You didn't even know who I was. And your book encouraged me not to give up when I went through 5 1/2 years of doing the podcast and no one gave a shit. Like, no, he was like nobody listening. I should have quit year one, year 2, year three-year 4. And just reading that book early and just rereading, it's like this guy's struggle for 14 years, go 5127 prototypes. His kids grow up thinking that your dad's a loser because all they see is him failing. And that guy didn't give up. I can I can figure things out is very, very motivating for me. He was unbelievably kind. Now, how much of this is like, they're just being nice to me because we're doing a we're making a podcast together. I don't know, Bezos, I talked to him for three straight hours. Sam Zell's Life Philosophy: Freedom, Focus, and the One True Luxury Unbelievable. Now there's a crazy, obviously, when you build one of the most, if not one of the most impressive companies of all time. And it's all kinds of stories when he's 30 and starting Amazon that he's obviously he wanted to name it Relentless. He owns relentless.com. What is that kind of personality type? And he's pushing, but you know, very, very kind. Jimmy, same thing. Jimmy Ivine, like, I mean, they're rough around the edges for sure, but I wouldn't say I don't know. Nice. I think they're just like mission that I guess my favorite, some of my favorite entrepreneurs and and if you think about your work in this way, it can help you not quit. It's like, what is your actual mission? And no, I would not call them nice. I would say that they're driven. I wouldn't say they're assholes, though. I do think like I just finished reading, rereading Snowball 700 page biography of Warren Buffett. I'm actually not going to do another episode on it. I think I can do a better job with his shareholder letter. So I'm going to read all them as instead. This happens quite frequently where I read like hundreds and hundreds of pages. Don't use it. But I, I think they had this like no asshole rule that even if they could make money, they didn't want people around them like that. I would not consider them nice. No, I think in many cases they, they are extreme personality types and that their mission comes in front of everything else. I don't think you have to be that way. You know, I'm trying. I have a mission. My mission is like, I want to catalog how history has, how history's greatest entrepreneurs thought and then push that forward to the next generation. So you can say, hey, that idea, I can use that in my business or I can use that idea. And I don't think I have to be an asshole to do that. And I'd prefer not to be. And I think as I age, I think being kind, which is not come natural to me and did not come from like my family, super hot headed and kind of mean to each other. And so you kind of learn like, I don't want to be that way. Speaker 1 No, I don't think that's necessary. But I do think, I mean, I don't aspire for people to call me nice, perhaps kind. But you know, when I think about our mission, it can turn and thinking the entire purpose of this crazy game we're playing is to be for entrepreneurs because it's miserable. It's a miserable game that we've chosen to play often. You know, it's it's hard running a business. It is very hard when it's a Friday night and you can't afford payroll and nobody else can handle it but you. And you don't even tell your spouse because they probably couldn't handle that stress and would tell you to go and do something else. And so I'm not there to be nice to anybody. I think our mission is I want to be there to say the things out loud that nobody else will tell you that I wish somebody had told me. And maybe I'm right and maybe I'm wrong, but at least you have somebody else that kind of tells you the truth. And we get to learn from all the data of the other entrepreneurs. So I. Speaker 2 I guess what I would say is like the trait they have is their uncompromising. And so if you're uncompromising, it's going to be very hard to be described as nice. Speaker 1 Yeah. Do you think that entrepreneurs who go into greatness, do they ever start with the exit in mind? Are they ever like, well, I want to sell my company for this or I want my company to be worth a billion dollars? Start, Scale, Sell Is a Trap: Find Your Last Business This is the disturbing things about talking to young founders because there was never any kind of like entrepreneur like ecosystem, right? Like there is now. And there's like all these like weird incentives behind it actually try to convince. I've been trying to what I'm interested in is like, I think about a lot about differentiation. And so there's some world class entrepreneurs that don't do any podcast at all. And I've tried to meet with them and try to convince them to do my new show and explain why. And a lot of this is because a lot of the content that entrepreneurs are actually consuming or actually created by investors. And so you could have incentive alignment with them, but in many cases, your incentives are misaligned. And we should just think about that. And what's disturbing about that is how much of it is about start scale. So, and as we just discussed, like I'm interested in like create the people that created something that made somebody else's life better so that the best limit we can step back. What is a business? The best definition of the, the best answer to that question, What is a business? I actually heard from Richard Branson and he says all businesses is an idea that makes somebody else's life better. And so there's a ton of tech companies right now and things are being invented all the time. Is that making people's life better? No, you're making a shit ton of money, which, OK, now you're rich, that's great. But you know, what you're doing is not good for the world and you don't care. And so my whole thing is like, I'm interested in people that made a product that makes somebody else's life better. And it could be Spotify's maybe the best app on my phone besides one of the AI assistants, right? Made my life better. So I'm glad that that the team there makes all, you know, they're worth all the money. They're worth going to racing canes. I can't eat every day because I don't want to be fat. But like that 15 minutes of eating some great fried chicken that just made my life a little bit better. You see what I mean here? It doesn't matter the scale. Could be an app. It could be, I think Spotify's worth, I don't know, $100 billion today. Or it could be this guy making chicken fingers in a box and then just doing it forever and not doing it for, you know, to make a lot of money to start, scale, sell. But when I talk to young entrepreneurs, it's like a lot of them start out with that thing where it's like, well, I can get acquired by this company and I can make this money. Complexity Is the Killer: The Sam Walton Bureaucracy Battle And I'm just like, you get to choose the game you want to play, and that's great. And guess what? If you didn't start out with money and then you created wealth for yourself, your family and your employees, that's admirable too. It's just not the game I'm interested in. That game I'm interested in is like, you couldn't pay me to stop. What I'm interested in is like, what is the business? What is your not your first business? What is your last business? The business that you want to work on forever. Speaker 1 Yeah, it's so funny. Somebody was asking me the other day, I can't remember. I did a podcast this week. Oh, and she said, why haven't you taken investors? She had taken investors, whatever. And I said, because you got to pull this thing out of my cold, dead fingers like I now will. I always have to be in front of the, the, you know, TV or whatever it is we're doing here. Like, no, I actually don't care about fame at all. I find it a really useful tool to do the things we want to do in the world. It's just a different type of leverage. But you have to pull it out of my cold, dead fingers. I like, I love this game. Do I love it all day every day? Of course not. But I think, and I think that's where people get confused that that idea of like passion versus like, I don't know what you would call it relentlessness or whatever, where you find that thing that you're just so obsessed with the game, you can't stop. And my passions are different. I like smutty fairy books. That's a passion. Speaker 2 What is a smutty fairy book? Speaker 1 You're really outside the zeitgeist of women, huh? Now this is Do you know what the best selling books are of all time? Speaker 2 50 OK, so this was hilarious. So you. Speaker 1 Probably, of course. Speaker 2 You like 50 Shades of grey, no? Is that what you mean? Speaker 1 No, it's not a fantasy. There's no fairies. Insight, David. Speaker 2 OK, I didn't. We should smutty. I didn't know if it was like this turned sexual. I didn't know what was. Speaker 1 Going on here, well, they are sexual. It's actually a giant asset class. I should figure out how to invest in this thing. But obviously you know, the OG's we've got like Harry Potter, not not sexual, but fantasy, but there's this huge ecosystem so in. Speaker 2 50 Shades of Grey meets Harry Potter. Speaker 1 Literally, literally. And so they're everywhere. And it is the it's the number one selling book category. Speaker 2 This was crazy because obviously love books. I read mostly old books, but I think it was a. Speaker 1 Have you ever read Akatar? No, A court of sworded roses? The YouTube comments on this are going to be hysterical. Guys. Let's find where David lives and send him so. Speaker 2 Don't, don't do that. Please don't do that. No. Maybe I should do an episode on one of these. But the no, the funny point, I think it was Morgan Hassel that told me this. Our mutual friend Morgan Hassel, who just sold 10 million cop who's now just hit 10 million copies sold of psychology money. Yeah, couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. I absolutely love him and I'm pretty sure he's told me this. He's like, do you know what the best selling book of the 2000s were? Maybe 2000 tens that decade? I have no idea. He goes 50 Shades of Grey. I was like, okay, I haven't read it. Speaker 1 Yeah, highlight it before that, I don't. Speaker 2 Know it gets worse, maybe better. Speaker 1 Depending on if you're into this. Speaker 2 He goes, What was the second best selling book of that decade? I don't know. He goes the sequel to 50 Shades of Grey. I'm like, damn, there's a lot of pent up demand for this. He goes, what was the 3rd best selling book of the decade? I go, there's no way. Was there a not a what's what the trilogy? Yeah, he's like the third version of 50 Shades of Grey. Yeah, it was a interesting fact. Speaker 1 That well, now we have more of a fragmented industry. There's a lot, but there are, you know, there's this woman, Sarah J Max. And she was like, basically came from nowhere to write this series of books that are just proliferating among women. Speaker 2 How do we get there from start scale so? Speaker 1 Yeah, I don't know. Speaker 2 So. Speaker 1 Natural progression. Speaker 2 Yeah. So to go back to that, it's like finding out why people are doing what they're doing, I think is actually really important. So that I ask that and usually one of the things that we want to try to map out like the founder archetypes for and this is Daniel's idea, which I think is really smart. He's like people think about like founder market fit. And he actually thinks the more interesting idea is founder problem fit. And knowing your archetype and then knowing other archetypes of other entrepreneurs that came before you that match your archetype would be very useful. So you're make sure you're attacking the right problem and so. Speaker 1 What do you mean by archetypes? Have you flushed that out yet? Where? Speaker 2 You so I need to name them, but like, think about, think about like all the different. This is not a science. Obviously, this is just a rough framework to to figure things out. But if you think about all these like personality assessments, like Enneagram is very popular. You know the Enneagram, so it's very popular. Speaker 1 16 personalities. We use a lot of those for hiring. Speaker 2 Yeah, it's a lot of companies do this and there's culture index, there's all these other tools that that companies use. The Enneagram is very popular with like a lot of my founder friends and just not only to know like what type they are, but also who like their partners could be or who they'd work well together. And it's just again, it's not like, oh, I'm an 8 and you're a three and this does well together. So I only look for threes or whatever the number case is. It's just like, OK, well, there's all there's like whatever archetype Steve Jobs is is different from the archetype of a Daniel Eck. So how are they different? What are the kind of characteristics? Who do they work well together? And then you now have 400 entrepreneurs that you've studied intensely and can we match them all? Admit there might be 5 archetypes, there might be 10, we're not actually sure. But I think the important part here is that they don't go back to your original question. It's like it's not you know I will. Some people do do this because they just want to make billions of dollars. I have a lot of friends that work in like New York in PE and I find them refreshing. It's not my game, but because their whole thing is like I. Speaker 1 Have never heard anybody call somebody in PE refreshing before they're. Speaker 2 Like, they have funny ways they think about like VC gets all the attention, PE gets all the money. This is just, it's such a huge industry. And they're like, listen, the fact that VC's tell you that their customers are founders, he goes, they're goddamn liars. The LP's are our customers because they give us money. The founders not giving us money. And he goes, I exist to make my LP's richer. And that's what I mean. It's not my game, but I like that they're not lying and they know what they're doing. Speaker 1 That's honest. Speaker 2 That's what I mean about that. So that is their game. Their problem is take a big pile of money and making it to a bigger pile of money. I am not the right founder for that because I don't give a shit about that. So I like this idea of founder problem fit right. I have this weird. I stumbled onto the problem that I'm solving, which is everybody's focused on, you know, what today's founders are saying or experiencing or their opinions, where it's like we have two hundreds or maybe 300 years of the market economy and you have hundreds, maybe thousands. You have thousands of really good entrepreneurs that lived their whole lives, ran all kinds of experiments, learned a bunch of stuff, and then people put down their main ideas in a book. Maybe somebody should go and dig through these books, find good ideas, and then push down the generation. That's just a weird problem that fit me because I'm an introvert and I'd prefer to sit in a room by myself. Read. Speaker 1 I mean, do you know, I was talking to Tony Robbins the other day. The amount of money they make, you know, he owns part of disk profile. I don't know what that is. It's kind of like 16 personalities, except think about like a, a more flushed out version that really helps you if you're a hiring manager for the most part. Simplify to Amplify: Raising Cane's, Papa Bagels, and the Power of One Thing And then they have like corporate licensing or whatever. And so we use that in a lot of our companies because if I'm like, listen, you could have a janitor who's like an exceptional fucking janitor. They're so good at their job, but they could potentially move all the way up to senior leadership if you understand that that person is meant for more. But if your company doesn't know how to find them or source them, you have all this hidden talent inside your business. And one of the things that keeps me up at night is thinking about the people who work for me. One, if they're not like working enough and doing things to add value to the company, I don't like that. But also if I'm not doing enough to help them add value to the company and thus make more money in their life and all that. So anyway, it's a big business, so it would be super interesting if you had that for founders and entrepreneurs because I do think we're all mimetic. You wouldn't monetize it. No, come on. No, I. Speaker 2 Think like, OK, so we should talk about this because again, I think most people think first of all starting another business. Like my whole thing is find a simple idea and take it very seriously. Which is the Charlie Market quote. Speaker 1 You could just invest in it till Daniel have an operator. No, no investing either. Speaker 2 Very little like. Speaker 1 This is stressful for me. I can't believe Patrick probably and Morgan just yell at you all the time about this. Yeah. Speaker 2 Morgan doesn't. Because Morgan. Speaker 1 Doesn't invest in. Speaker 2 Anything. What does he? What do you think all his money is in indexes? Speaker 1 I know I felt so pathetic listening to him because he's like I'd be like tell me about 1 unhinged things you bought and he's like I did buy a house once. I'm like fucking never mind. New question. Speaker 2 The the renovations on his on the the the household estate. Speaker 1 OK, OK, OK, OK. Speaker 2 Which again, probably is good for marital bliss 100%. So maybe that's not an expense one, I think open sourcing this is more important to the degree that other people find a value. And also like, I'm very, very, I mean, it took me, there was probably 3 or 4 years of people around me, very close friends. Just like you should start another podcast talking to founders, you idiot. Do it, do it, do it. And I said, no, no, no. It's like, you know, it's like water on a rock. That's like, you want me to do something, you have to suggest it. And it's, I'm going to say no. And it's going to take you years to break me down. And then I'm going to come to you like I have this great idea and it'll be your idea. This is. This is not even a. Speaker 1 Joke. That's like how husbands and wives. Speaker 2 Work. This has happened to so many people in my life. They now know it's like inception. They're like, if I want David to do something, I need to put in the idea now. Speaker 1 Whispered his iPhone. Speaker 2 It really works. There's a great line in, in I think 1 of Buffett's shareholder letters, which I'm rereading right now, where he says loss of focus is what worries Charlie and me the most. And so I think me starting another business that's outside of my life's mission, which is founders, and then my new obsession and passion, which is talking to entrepreneurs in the new show. I'm full, I work seven days a week. I don't have any time like I'm not doing anything else. And I, I think this is a misconception where or at least hopefully I can like to the degree that I have any influence on this. It's like people think entrepreneurs are obsessed with money. I would argue they're obsessed with control and that if you're talented and you're working on a valuable product or a problem and you solve the problem for the people and you maintain control, you wind up with the money. But the very first person that I met that was renowned from the podcast was Sam Zell. Episode 269 of Founders is the autobiography. Speaker 1 You know, he's my favorite investor of all time. Speaker 2 And he wouldn't call himself an investor. So we'll talk about this. So I'm almost positive it's episode 269. It's the autobiography of Sam Zell, which is incredible. People should read it. It's called Am I Being Subtle? I think it's the title. And I put that out and he listened to it and he thought it was he liked it so much. He has to meet me. And I love the fact that somebody in their 80s was starting to listen to podcasts because he's what is he at the fundamental? He's a learner. He's a learning machine. And so I had a 2 hour lunch with him before he died. And then we were scheduled to have dinner. I was going to do, I was going to have a dinner with him in Miami and he wanted to have dinner. And then me do an episode called I Had Dinner with Sam Zell and talk about the the stories. And then the day that I think the day before the dinner, it was cancelled. They said Sam's not flying down from Chicago. He he's sick. I thought he like COVID or something. 3 weeks later he's dead. Yeah, he from cancer and so, but he was spending his last. I probably hung, I probably saw him six months, 8 months before he died. He was flying all over the world at his expense, just sharing everything he learned with entrepreneurs, having lunch, dinner with entrepreneurs, talking to event, talking at conferences and events for entrepreneurs. And you know, that guy was as liquid as a day as long his company was very, very interesting where it's like technically a family office, but it was his own money and he made all the decisions and never was going to spend the money to begin with. He told me I didn't know he was sick with cancer. He obviously didn't share that with me that he's going to be doing deals until he died. Guess what? He did deals until the day he died, the day before I saw him or the day after, the day before I saw him. I think he just bought, he calls them family businesses. He's like, I just bought, I forgot the number. It's like 75% of his company for 300 million and they still run things on a fax machine. Like he just loved doing deals, loved it. But he had a bunch of pieces of advice, which I would summarize. The main piece of advice, and we're going to type back to the money was let me see if I can remember this correctly. His whole thing. And he was, he was not subtle at all. So he was kind of like, he was very nice to me, but he wasn't like, I have a suggestion for you, Dave. He's like, do this, do this. I'm like, OK, I'm going to listen to you. So he says go for freedom. He's like, if you keep your freedom, you can control what you work on. If you control what you work on, you can work on what you love. If you love it, you'll do it all the time. If you do it all the time, you'll get really good at it and money will come as a result. So again, goes back to your question, do they start with I want a billion dollar exit? I want certain amount of ARR, I want a certain market cap? No, this whole thing is just like, I like doing deals and I do them all the time. I did them for 60 years and turns out I'm really good at doing deals. But the money part was fascinating because he's like, listen, he goes, I know all the rich guys. This is exactly what he says. Because I know all the rich guys and he goes, they're all guys and he goes, you would be surprised at how many of them are miserable. He's like, what's the point of having all this money if you're not having fun? And he goes and he ties this to your financial decisions. He's like the things that you own, eventually own you. And he, there was a bunch of funny parts because he was hilarious. He was just like, you saw him on CNBC. This is exactly how he is. I love people like this where there isn't like there's no separation between their public and their private persona. And he goes, you know, I have all the money in the world. He goes, I have my place in Chicago and my compound in Malibu. That's the word he used. Remember he's like 82, maybe 81 when maybe 8081 when I met him and he wanted me to see his Malibu house and he hands me his phone. So I think I'm going to look at pictures that he took on his iPhone of his Malibu house. No, he Google image search Sam Zell Malibu that's. Speaker 1 Incredible. Speaker 2 And so he goes, I take, he goes. I spend 38 weekends a year at my place in Malibu. I have my place in Chicago and he goes everything else I rent, he goes, I don't own anything else, he goes, I own a jet which I'll get to in a minute. He goes, I have my 2 houses and my jet and he goes after I think shortly after Thanksgiving. And then up until like Christmas he would take him is like whole extended family. It sounded like there was like 30 people on this trip, 40 people on the trip to this like small village in France. And he said something funny. He goes, I could buy the whole village and he goes, I don't, I rent it because I only think about it when I need it. And then when I leave, it's somebody else's problem. He's like just eliminate. You don't want to be thinking about these things. And he goes, David, this is the funny part here he goes, there's only one true luxury in life. He goes try to get to private jet money because literally he goes, these guys drive themselves crazy. He goes the difference between a $10 million house, this is what he said there was a $10 million house and a 30 million house is like negligible. He goes, they waste their time doing things they don't like to buy slightly nicer versions of the same shit. He's like, there's only one true luxury get to the jet. The jet actually makes a difference. And he said he uses his jet or uses jet. Like I think an average like 3. If you did the math over the entire year, he would average like 3 hours a day. Founder Problem Fit: Know Your Archetype So he really used his jet. Speaker 1 You know what I loved about him? I loved the Zell's Angels. I loved like, there's this other guy who used to work with George Soros back in the day, like back when he was just investing in things and hedge fund land and he wrote a book called The Venture Capitalist, An Investment biker. Oh, my God, I'm forgetting his name, which is so embarrassing. It was actually, I didn't even have a podcast. I I made-up a podcast like a billion years ago, like before they were called maybe. I don't even know. Yeah, I guess it would have been 15 years ago just to have a phone call with this guy who wrote these two books. He was in China at the time, Jim Rogers. And Jim Rogers at the time was like one of the best hedge fund managers of all time, him and George. That was like in the first couple years of the Quantum Fund, I believe. And they had absolutely crushed it. But he left it all to go adventure in the world, invest and tell stories about it. He had like this this yellow Mercedes that he put these huge tires on and travelled all the way through Africa on his like top down Mercedes. This is like back in the day and made investments all over the world and all over Latin America. And I ran a business before in Latin America. So I just found that so weird. And what I love about a lot of these people, Sam Zell included, is they're weird. Like he had a motorcycle club basically like this kind of old, I don't know, it looks pretty stodgy guy running around on a motorcycle when he was a billionaire by by that. Speaker 2 Like going on like motorcycle trips and like Mongolia and stuff like and dangerous, yes, somewhat dangerous, smoking weed on the side of the road. He would like he would talked about that. He has some funny lines. I mean, he said some stuff. I don't even know if it's true. He's like, you know, I invented business casual. I was like, I don't, I didn't know that, but OK. Like, like, yeah, I was the first person. He was just funny. But he wasn't. I didn't mean an arrogant way. He was just so likable. And I think there's this another thing, the value. This is why I think I would avoid assholes and go back to the do the people have to be assholes? And some of those, I'm sure I'm going to have some assholes on the new show, like I'm interviewing or not even interviewing. I think about really having conversations with some of these people. But as far as like building relationships with, it's like I just like likable people. Like I like nice people. Obviously, you know, obviously had an ego, but he wasn't saying these things in like an arrogant way. He was just likable. And I think there's so many, especially in the tech industry where they're just, they're personality deficient and it's just, there's a benefit, a life benefit of just one being a good conversationalist, like a good hang and just being easy to be around and being likable. And one of the ways I think to do that is to be intensely interested in a subject. Like I don't not particularly passionate about chicken fingers, but I like the Todd Graves is and hearing him talk about like he even broke it down, like what stage of rigor mortis that the chicken has to be in. You wouldn't even give me interest in that. But I'm interested in that. He was interested in it. And therefore he is fascinating to me. And I think the big the biggest way to be likeable and to be like somebody that people want to be around, It's just like you have to be intensely interested in something because the most interesting people are the most interested. They're like passionate about weird things. I just heard Alex Honnold, the guy from Free Solo, say you're like, what do you think about fame? He's like, I think it's just a means to an end. It's a way for me to climb all the time and not have a job. And that documentary is fascinating. Like, I don't want to live in a van. I don't want to do the hand workouts he does and eat with a spatula and all the stuff he does. But he's just so into it that you just can't help. Like, you gravitate towards people like that. And Zeal was the same way. Speaker 1 Yeah, obsession is kind of contagious, isn't it? Like if you're obsessed with something, you can make anybody else get a little bit of that obsession. Speaker 2 I would say passion is infectious. And I think this is what I mentioned earlier. I don't do any drugs. I don't do ecstasy. I don't, I would never would. But this is the way I feel after talking to any of them. Michael Dell, James Dyson, you're just like, wow. Like you took whatever passion you have for your business and you gave it to me and now that charged me up to like go and apply that to whatever I'm working on. This is beautiful. Like virtuous, you know, flywheel or cycle. Speaker 1 One of my favorite mentors said a line to me that was hard for me to hear, which is that like, your business is more likely to die because of you and the complex things that you do as opposed to external forces and the things they do to you. And so he's like, complexity is the great killer of all things. And and then he's like, the problem is, is that through life, everything gets more complex. You know, as you get older, you have more stuff, you have responsibilities, you have aging, you have all these things. So life like kind of never gets simpler. It always gets more complex. And you have a guy on your podcast where you covered someone on your podcast, Rick Rubin, who talks. I want to talk about how he doesn't call himself a producer. He calls himself some something else. Yeah. And to tell that story, because it's one that I think we all have to internalize a little bit more, you don't necessarily have to do less, you have to do more better. Speaker 2 There's something that you said that this is how, again, reading all these books kind of works like how my mind works now where the, the advice that you were given echoes this advice. This guy named David Packard, who was founder of HP and HP again, is this big old Saji company. By the time it was the, it was the, it was the influencer who influenced the influencers. So like all Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, all these other people who went on build a great technology companies in the 70s and 80s. Look to these guys before them, right? Just like the founders of Intel look to the IT was one of the first energy companies, Silicon Valley 1950s or something like that. And he has a straight line that most more businesses dive indigestion than starvation. Like they just try to do too much that they essentially sabotage themselves. This is also advice that that Michael Dell gave I think on the podcast, maybe in private, but he's like most founders just sabotage themselves. Like you're not taken out by competition. You just can't handle your success or you took your foot off the gas or you just did something that you have. You honestly sabotage yourself as opposed to like being taken out by a superior product from a competitor. So Rick Rubin's point was just like we want, he has this thing called a ruthless edit, which I love. He's like, OK, we're working on album albums 10/12/15 songs. We made 50. Now we're going to pick the five that we absolutely cannot live without. And so you force yourself, you design within constraints, which a lot of the histories greatest founders do. They found it very valuable to design within constraints. And these are the five now before we had any other ones. It has to at least match the quality of this. So what's number six? It takes a long time and it's really hard to get to 10. And maybe you have to throw out the other 45 songs and you haven't done enough. So now you have to do more. And this is just very, very common where it's like less is more, but to get less, you have to do more. And one thing that I love that is tied to the bagel place you mentioned and Raising Cane. So we talked about this. Or even look at like the Apple 2, like the first very successful product that Steve Jobs commercial successful product that Steve Jobs and Apple made where it's like you just have to do one thing really, really great, just one thing. And that's usually because you made something easier for other people. And there is this weird paradox in humanity where we I think we abhor complexity and we crave simplicity, but we make everything that's simple complex over time. And so knowing that you, there's a great line from from Sam Walton's autobiography that's about this. Walton's is telling a story in autobiography, but really it's a metaphor where all of the products are getting shipped from the Walmart distribution centers into the stores. And then he found that many of them were mispriced. So then they start this thing where now this is other layer of these people that go around with these like scanning devices and making sure verifying that the price in the system is what the price says here. And his whole point was just like, we're adding layers of complexity when we should just, he's like, you have to beat bureaucracy back across the line. It's going to creep and you beat it back. It's going to creep and then you beat it back. He goes, the solution is not scanners. The solution is doing it right the first time. But we can't help ourselves. We made it more complex. And so he looked for these kind of weird decisions that people make where it's like the solution is just doing it right, not over complicating it, which is again, I think more in line with like human nature. We just love to complicate things, even if we abhor complexity. Speaker 1 Yeah. Well, and I think the other part is when you have more complex things, you feel like you've accomplished more. And so, you know, I see it a lot of time in our companies. It's like, well, I hit all these 47 activities today. It's like, yeah, but you didn't do the one thing that really fucking mattered that needed to be done more than anything else because it was harder than doing those 47 things. Because sometimes to put that one thing on the list doesn't feel as good as doing the 47. Speaker 2 Larry Ellis. There's like 3 good biographies of Larry Ellis, and at least two of them he's fighting with his assistant because she's like, there's 1000 things we have to do. He goes, no, there's four and I'm only going to focus on these four and ignore every single thing else because all the value if I can solve these 4 problems, these 3 problems with these two problems, this one problem, that's actually what I'm doing this best of talking can be ignored. But the, the reason I tied it to like the, the bagel shop that you, you mentioned earlier and Todd Graves, his simple product and Rick Rubin, Rick Rubin's point was just like, if you look at the work that he did where he says, I'm not a producer, I'm a reducer. You came in with his body of work. There's in the essence this course a lot of value. You overcomplicate it. You need somebody else with other guys. See, hey, we can cut, cut away everything else and make it to like what is the thing that we cannot delete that we have to have? And This is why a lot of the stuff that was produced or reduced by Rick Rubin 30 years ago you can listen to today. So sounds good because he goes, he goes, hey, 50 years ago, a guy with a good voice strumming a guitar and singing sounds good. So if it sounded good 50 years ago, if it sounds good today, highly likely it'll sound good 50 years from now. Same thing with a piano. A piano in a beautiful woman's voice sounded good 50 years ago, sounds good today, will sound good 50 years from now. And I think what what's happening is like when you hit on this essence, the reason people respond to it is because like, you essentially made the decision for them, right? You eliminate everything that didn't have to be there. You only have the essential. It's the same reason what why he talks about in that book. I would recommend listening to a song called Hurt by Johnny Cash, which was a cover. I think Trent Reznor from 9 Inch Nails is the first person to do it. He was like 21 when he wrote the article or wrote the the song Sorry. And then Johnny Cash like 70 when he's singing it and you listen to that. Johnny's been dead for years and it still sounds good today. And the song is probably, I don't know, 15 years old or something like that. It still sounds good today just like the the going and eat like eating at Raisin canes or the bagel place you mentioned earlier just like you had a good experience there, right. These things have been going on in in Raisin canes case 30 decades or 30 years. He didn't interrupt the compounding that would you see there You're like, Oh my God, the guys were $20 billion says 915 stores. But he's like he just didn't time carried all the weight time did all the the work. He just did the same thing every day and waited for the world to catch up. And if you build something that's great, then what do humans do? You can't keep things that are great to yourself. When you see a great movie, listen to a great podcast, you know, meet a great friend, go to a great restaurant, it's impossible to not tell other people about it. It's just what happens. And the problem is this I kind of ties this will tie back to almost everything we were talking about today, which is like, that's why it's so detrimental. And you see the success in most entrepreneurs lives happened multiple decades in because they didn't interrupt the compound. You had to wait for time to do most of the work. And that's why the start scale sell doesn't work unless you just care about money and you get the money and then you go, you know, do something to sit on the beach or whatever the case is. But my point is the people that were obsessed, you have to do something. Let's say somebody comes and buys everything from you tomorrow for whatever. What are you going to do the next day? You're going to start something else. You're not the the personality type that can build a very valuable company is not the kind that can sit around and do nothing. Speaker 1 It's also, I think, incredibly difficult to simplify things. You know, often I'm, I'm sure you found this too, but you're taking, I don't know, a 700 page book like Snowball and trying to synthesize it into one episode. That is actually quite a complex thing to do. You have a lot of decisions you have to make. You have to pull the OR soul out of it or the lessons that you want out of it. And I think, you know, I think sometimes about the stuff we do on the Internet, like we'll try to, you know, explain acquisitions in some way, shape or form in a really simplistic way, which is actually incredibly difficult to do. Even the vernacular in finance is tribal knowledge, a lot of nouns and and vowels in in the words that don't need to be there. And so making something about even a word like acquisitions, which some people have a hard time spelling and simplifying it is actually quite difficult. And so, you know, we talk about that a lot when we invest is I think I stole it from Warren Buffett back in the day where it might have been Zell. I think it was Zell. Zell basically said, if I can't, like one of his employees came in with like a big folder on one of the deals that he wanted to do. And, and was like, here's the brief on doing this deal. And he was like, tell it to me in a couple sentences. He's like, I can't, he's like, then write it on a page. He's like, I can't do that. And he's like, if we can't understand the deal in a page, we shouldn't do the deal If the only way to explain it is through a folder. And I think about that now, you know, it's like, well. Speaker 2 Zell learned that from Jay Pritzer. So my friend, I mentioned earlier, my friend Rick was mentored by Sam Zell for 25 years and Sam took an interest in him when Rick was like in his 20s. And what he would say is like I was in my 20s and a nobody and Zell just decided he liked me. And so he took me all around the world and we would like work on deals together, but they also Rick would try to. I think there there's one of this great line in this book I just read by Kevin Kelly called excellent advice for living wisdom. I wish I'd known earlier. And he's just one of the most counterintuitive rules of the universe is the more you give, the more you get. And so Rick built a relationship with Sam by giving by trying to here's this undervalued company in Egypt. We might want to look at or look at this deal over here and basically just being doing an active service right. But what would happen is Rick would bring him a deal and go, hey, here's exactly what you're saying. Here's the 10 things that we have to solve or whatever. And Zell would look at it like #5 that's the only thing. If we solve #5 everything else falls in in line. And Zell talks about this in his autobiography that he was mentored by Jay Presser, who was one of the best dealmakers, right? Living probably a decade, maybe 2 decades older than Sam Zell at the time. And Sam would do exactly what Sam would do to Jay, what Rick was doing to Sam, which is I'd come bring him a deal and Jay would just look at it. It's like there's only one important thing here is you have a list of seven things. It's not 7. It's just this one thing. And if we take care of this one thing, everything else will fall in line. So it's that simplification. This why I said it's not 10,000 hours, it's 10,000 iterations because how many deals by the time you, you can't do that when it's your first deal, your second deal, your 5th deal. Jay had probably looked at 10,000 deals by that time, 5000 deals by that. He just understood it in a way, what we call intuition is really just like the the sum of your experiences and and your subconscious kind of explaining to you, you can't even. This is what I learned from Rick Rubin too, when you just mentioned really hard to take a 700 page biography and to still it down to its essence in an hour long podcast. And people always just like, well, how do you do it? And he's just like, it's a skill because I've done it for 10 years and go listen to episode 125102550. They're probably suck compared to what I can do now because I didn't understand that. Like I had to take time to train my intuition to do this. Rick Rubin will tell you the exact same thing where he's constantly critiquing the stuff he produced and created when he was, he started his record label, he started producing when he was in his dorm room. He's in his 60s now, still doing it. He's like, I didn't have enough training on my intuition. And you'll see this in all kinds of different domains. I'm reading Rodger Federer's biography called The Master right now. It's excellent book. And one of the things that he really annoys him is that everybody talks about how effortless his game looks. It's so smooth. It's beautiful. He's like, yeah, you know how long it took me to make it look smooth and beautiful that it was a born with his ability to play. Another great example of this is that I empathize with and I think Rick Rubin does and I would say Steve Jobs does, is people ask Steph Curry what he thinks about when he's shooting and he goes absolutely nothing. It's just I've shot this, this this exact shot 100,000 times. And so me thinking it, thinking about it would make it worse. There's a great story in Johnny Ives biography which is really good and I think it's episode 178 of Founders and he talks about the difference, the contrast between the way Google's run and and Steve Jobs are in Apple. And you know when Google would do 200 AB tests on what color this button should be and they were making remember the IMAX, the old school IMAX where like it had a big like this is when computers were big and fat and thick. Speaker 1 It was like orange. Speaker 2 Or and they had a handle and then they decided they were going to make them all different colors. And he Johnny says that the there was no like focus group. They didn't AB test anything. He says. Steve came down to the design center and me and Steve looked at the colors and in 30 minutes we picked every single color. 30 minutes just taste and those are the colors are shipped. That was Steve's intuition for 30 years. Is not sure by the time he got to that point. To be able to trust, you shouldn't be trusting your judgement, trusting your tuition when you you have to prove to yourself that you should trust it. And Steve did the work necessary to trust his intuition and trust his judgement. I think you're going to see that in a lot of fields. Music, entrepreneurship, sports, you just see it over and over again. Speaker 1 I think a lot about what skills will matter in the future with how fast technology is changing, with what's happening in the world right now with AI. And it does seem like this idea of taste seems tantamount. What are you thinking about? What's going on right now in the world of AI? What do you think the greatest entrepreneurs are thinking? Does this matter? Is this always just the same thing? Is there always just some new industrial or, or technological revolution? And, and there's opportunity in every market and we need to not be defeatist about it. Like how do you think about this? Speaker 2 If you agree that the best definition or great definition of a business is what Richard Branson said, that all the businesses and idea that make somebody else's life better, there is always infinite ways to make somebody else's life better. So there is therefore there's always infinite opportunities in my opinion. With that said, I do think you do not ignore technological phenomenon and technological revolutions. We're obviously going through one now. AI, Electricity, and Thin Horizontal Enabling Layers I think you should use like, So what I do is like, I just forced myself to learn and to build these into my workflow now. So I'm sure there's going to be AI generated podcast that can do exactly what I do 100%. Like I, I would imagine that's going to happen relatively soon. If it's not, you know, this year, next year, five years from now. And so like just to use the tools of technology because all technology is my best, my favorite definition of technology is from Peter Thiel in his book Zero to 1. It's just a technology is a better way to do something. And so I'm just using them to be better, making a podcast and hopefully that podcast and that information in the podcast make somebody else's life better. See how it connects. Now, I think the mistake when you're looking back, history is like the only thing constant is change and technology is never going to stop. And I think the smartest ones took advantage of it. So like, think about one of my favorite times in industries to studies. I've done like 13 different episodes on the the early American automobile founders. So Henry Ford, Billy Durant, founder of GM, Henry Leland, the founder of Cadillac, the Dodge brothers, all the way down to some component makers like Albert Champion who made the spark plugs. They were used Alfred Sloan who made the ball bearings of all these companies. It's just a very fascinating. It's like they're all knew each other. They were all in one spot. And this was just happening in Detroit in 1900. If you were young, mechanically inclined man that wore interested in that industry, you got to get your ass to Detroit right away. And one of the most fascinating things I realized was Billy Durant had a complete there's multiple ways to succeed, right. So Henry Ford had one idea. He's like, I want to make the car for the everyman. He had literally one idea his entire career and he didn't know how to do it yet. He's like cars are luxury items. They're hand built. They're $6000 when you know, we're making not even a dollar an hour. Like I'm never going to afford to do 1. I want to mass produce. I want to invent the mass production of the automobile so then I can any, any the worker making the automobile can actually afford the automobile, which was never the people making the cars could not even afford the cars. That was just one idea. He was wildly successful, one of the richest people on the planet. As a result of that idea. Billy Durant also succeeded. He got kicked out of GM twice, but that's a story for another day. And his idea is like, I'm just going to make a car conglomerate and I'm going to buy all the the early brands, put them together in General Motors, you know, General Motors today. But the fast thing about Billy Durant is what was he working on before he worked in the car industry? He essentially built one of the most successful carriage companies. So he was making carriages that horses horse drawn carriages. He just took the idea that was working for horse drawn carriages realizing, uh oh, my business is in trouble with this, these cars running around. Maybe I should just take the same skill set ideas and apply to this new domain. So the future is always going to be unpredictable. I love people going around. It's like, you know, this is where not that far from from New Year's and everybody's like, here's my predictions for what 2026? I just laughed because this is like all I do is all day long is read. If you read history, you just have very smart people making all these kind of predictions about the future that don't come true. Oh yeah. Humans don't really have great, you know, predictive ability, generalized predictive ability. You can identify a trend or an an interesting idea in an industry that you're paying attention to and then build a business around that inside. I'm not saying you can't do that. That's what Billy Durant just did, but I don't I have the answer question is like I I want to learn these tools because I'm interested in technology. I'm interested in finding tools that make my business better, right. And then I'm just going to do the best job with the opportunities in front of me. And I'm going to do that every single day. And the score will take care of itself. I'll get what I, I, you know, deserve out of life. But I, there's just impossible to know what's happening. I do think this is like, I think reading right now, like about the Industrial revolution 1800s. I think reading about the early compute industry would be interesting. There'd be analogies there. I talked to Bezos about this. Bezos's analogy for this because he's all like all he thinks about is AI all day long now is he calls it these thin horizontal enabling layers and he thinks AI is more akin to electricity than it is to anything else. The Internet was a thin horizontal enabling layer. Electricity was a thin horizontal enabling layer. AI is a thin horizontal enabling layer. And he goes, once you new thin horizontal enabling layer is invented, it goes everywhere like electricity. Like they weren't thinking they're going to install electricity. They're thinking, I want lighting. And guess what, if it's useful for that, how many other inventions have now that now plug into electricity that we could have never possibly predicted. Same thing with the Internet. You know, the origins of the Internet. What, what did they think it was going to be used for? And then they could not have possibly predicted all the different, the millions, hundreds of millions of different inventions and things that you could do on top of that. And so he, his belief is that AI is going to be the exact same way where it's like the intelligent intelligence as a service is going to go everywhere and you're going to invent countless other ways. There's no way to, to predict all the way all the different inventions that humans are going to use, utilize this tool for and it won't be. I talked a lot of some of these AI, they think it's like the last invention. It's like it's not the last invention. Like humans are going to invent assuming we're around or going to constantly invent more and more things. Speaker 1 Do you ever sometimes take a pause and just think, Holy shit, what is my life that I get to talk to Elon Musk, all my heroes, all these people consistently? Speaker 2 No, I here's the thing. Mute the World and Build Your Own: The Daily Design Philosophy I think thinking like that, I had this, this maxim I got from Conor McGregor. Have you ever seen this documentary? It's on Netflix. It's called Notorious. Oh, it's incredible. I'll tell you the maxim first, and I'll tell you like some of the lessons that he didn't even adhere to himself, which is like, if you go to sleep on a wing, you wake up with a loss. And the document is incredible because you know, he's literally living at home, has no money, and he's working as a plumber's assistant or something. He's somehow had the foresight to have a a a camera crew follow around what at this point was just like kind of like a loser, right, chasing a dream, but nothing to point. He had this. There's another maximum belief comes before ability, which I hate when people are like, Oh, you shouldn't have so much self belief. He tells us entrepreneurs like generate evidence and then have belief. And I'm like, well, I've read 400 of these books and none of these people did that. They believed in themselves way before everywhere around them, selling their they couldn't do what they're doing. Speaker 1 All the data actually says you're right. Speaker 2 Exactly. Belief comes before ability, not after. I think it's, it's very important. But what's fascinating is like, you know, there's one thing where he's like in his mom's kitchen and there's like the, the, the Ireland's like he's like cashing welfare checks. And I think he's in collections on some credit card bills. And he's just like, I'm going to be the champion of the world. He's saying all this other the crazy stuff. But what he realized is just like the value comes from the work and doing the work everyday. And that's why I said if you go to sleep on a when you wake up with a loss. And then he made hundreds of $1,000,000 not judging anybody else. Supposedly he's got a very fierce drug habit, which kind of looks some might might be the case to me. And so I don't it goes back to the this quote treat that I just quote treated Andrew Huberman where it's like mute the world and build your own. I just wake up everyday like I really do think Patrick's party, right that I am don't have like this master plan. I don't even seek points of leverage. I do all these things that I I don't seek efficiency. I like no one else works on the podcast. Like they're like, why don't you hire an editor? Why don't you hire a researcher? It's just like I like doing it. There's a great line from Charles Schulz, who's the the founder of the guy that did Peanuts remember and grew up reading Charlie Brown and and Snoopy. And he was still, he penciled every single comic strip. He wrote the stories, he did everything. He had this like thing in his will about like what happens to Peanuts after he dies. He wouldn't let anybody else continue it on. And then you have to publish. This is the last one I ever want to publish. Like he thought a lot about this, but he would give tours of like his studio and I think it was like in his 70s. Then They're like, why don't you just like write a bunch of them? They were first like, why are you still doing this is the question. And then they're like, why don't you like batch them? And then, you know, take time off. And his answer to this was great. It's like he didn't understand the questions, like, why are you still doing this? He goes, you don't work all your life to do what you love to do, to not do it. And so my whole thing is like, I really do mute the world. OK, I'll tell you an embarrassing story. This is this is embarrassing to me. So every once in a while, some of my friends have companies and they like just want me like sit in on like meetings, like board meetings and stuff. And I'm not any boards. I have no interest in doing that. I am interested in fiercely interested in entrepreneurship and how they think about building businesses. And I look at this is like a way to learn. And so I was doing this the other day with two close friends of mine and they were talking about acquiring a business in New York. OK. And I was paying attention, but then they kept saying this name over and over again. And they kept saying Maduro, Maduro, Maduro. And again, I don't read the news, OK? And again, because we were talking about New York, I was like, why do you guys keep bringing this up? And they're like, dude, did you not see? This is going to be real embarrassing. They're like, Trump kidnapped Maduro. I thought they meant because we're talking about his business in New York. I thought they meant Mandami. I'm like he he kidnapped the New York the the mayor of New York City. Like, how do I not hear about this? Like, no, you idiot, the president of Venezuela as if that was any, you know, anything else or normal. Yeah. I was like, I didn't know. Like I didn't. I don't look at the news. I didn't know this. Now that's embarrassing, but my point being is it's like, listen, the big stuff will get to me. The Power of Simple Obsession If there's a war, if there's a pandemic, I'll hear about that. That will come down to me. But no, I, I think the worst thing I could ever do is think about who I get to meet or who's listening to the podcast. It's just like, hey, this is my, this is my retard maxing with Patrick, to use Patrick's term. It's like I design. I only think in 24 hours, literally. So it's like, what do I like to do? I like to wake up, work out, I like to read, then I'll have lunch, then I'll read. I'll reread past highlights. Do that multiple days a week at night as you go to dinner with founder. All my friends are entrepreneurs, you know? Do calls throughout the day. Like, not like meeting calls, like friendship calls with other smart people is another form of education. Once or twice a week I sit down with a founder that I'm intensely interested in talking to. Record another podcast and I just that's it. And then I'm like, oh, that day was pretty cool. I like that day. I'm going to do that day again tomorrow and then I'll do it again the next day. I don't even know what today is. I assume it's a weekday, could be Sunday. Don't know because my schedule looks the same all the time. It's also very difficult for some relationships in my life. But like this is so no, I never think about anything. I just think about like podcast to me is like, oh, these are miracles. I've learned so much from listening to podcast. They're great tools for education. I hope I'm building something that makes somebody else's life better. If it's fascinating to me, if it's fascinating to me, I'm not. There's probably 10 million David's out there. Me and you have, we've never met before today. We have almost the exact same interest. There's 10 million Cody and David's out there and they'll probably like this podcast too. That's it. There's nothing. There's no other grand plan. It's just like, oh, this is great. I like to learn all the time. And then I sit down and share what I learned. Speaker 1 Well, I think it's so cool. I mean, I think what keeps me up at night with this is Can you imagine what a tragedy it would be if there's going to be millions of people that listen to this across all the social channels, right? That's millions of people's hours. That's that's years in like a human collective life. And what if it sucked? What if it was not valuable to them? Like that is a tragedy to do to people who have a very finite thing called time. And so I just want to thank you for being here. This is so useful. I am a huge fan of both of your podcasts. They're not easy to make. So thank you for making them. It's David Sundra is the new podcast. Founders podcast is the long standing podcast and I will say also you increasingly do incredible shorts now on Instagram too for the attention deprived that need the 62nd spots and that is Founders podcast on Instagram. Speaker 2 Instagram, yeah, Instagram is the the biggest channel there. Oh, so there's a real quick story there too, where like I believe in like tiny teams, such a mission driven, concentrated on like focus. This is like my framework for entrepreneurship. So pick a mission, be really concentrated on like your resources, time, money, energy, attention, all to that mission. Tiny teams of just a players. Because again, all I'm doing is reading the books and taking ideas from the books and applying it to my own business, which is, you know, hopefully the what the podcast served for other people as well. And Steve Jobs like a tiny team of a players can run circles around giant team of B&C players. So my shorts which I like to literally is 1 genius kid living in France. Speaker 1 Dude, they're it's, they're all the same too. Speaker 2 I don't manage him. He was obsessed. I met him through. Speaker 1 This guy, let me guess, he's also white? He's like sub 30. He's probably like 2627. Speaker 2 He's he's in his early 20s. Yeah, but but the funny. Speaker 1 Part and a little like slightly autistic and really obsessed with the game of video. Speaker 2 No, well, he is. He is an obsessive person. But I met him through Blake Robbins, who Blake Robbins is Sylvester. He used to be a benchmark. Now he's his own fond. But I think his Twitter bio says he like hangs out on the edge of the Internet and he finds like weirdly talented people. And he's like, hey, will you meet this kid? He's in from Europe, he's in New York. He's upset. He's obsessed with what a single podcast and it's yours. And I was just talking to the kid because I thought he was talented. So you should move to America. He was doing all this other way to make money that he wasn't passionate about. And I was like, just how much do you need? Like what if you just made these shorts for me, right? How much you need named his price. I was like, Don didn't even negotiate with him. And now I'm helping him because he's going to be one of the greatest film makers to think he like mastered short form. Now he's making short movies. Then he wants to make like he wants to be like Christopher Nolan and Steven Spielberg. And I was like, listen, I'll to the degree that I can help you in any way, like you've been so helpful to me. Like if I can make an introduction for you, if I could, I'd invest in you. And they don't even like investing. Like I'll do whatever you can because you're so talented. Like I just think about things in terms of people. But this also applies to like the reason that you want high quality people around you is I don't need to manage him. He makes them, he sends them to me. This is, this is our workflow. I literally, and then he was like, I don't manage them at all. He sends them to me. I, I watch him like I'd watch that. And if I watch, if I like it, I posted the channels and if I don't, I don't post it. And he's made, I don't know, like 200 and I probably haven't posted, I don't know, 5. Like I, I have a big backlog and you need to post, but I'm talking about ones I didn't like. That's it. How much time did it take? I just identify a great person and name, say name your price and he named his price and that's it. It just makes my my life a lot easier so. Speaker 1 Well, this was an incredible podcast. And also I have to give you one more compliment, which is do you know what we obsess on about you and your podcast, your ad rates? You're the fucking bet. And I like never thought I would like an ad read. But like whatever ramp is paying you, they need to increase it because literally do we not? I literally go, if this isn't David Senrel level ad read, I'm not fucking reading it. Give me a new version. Then we go like 3 or 4 versions on it. We have our own. It's not like copying your style, but meaning like the intent of it. Like you can just tell. And I think other people do this too, but I'm always like, is it coming? I think he's going to talk about savings. Then you sneak me and it's not, not it. And then then it's it. Speaker 2 Well, and again, this goes back to like the importance of concentration, focus, because to me, it's like anything you hear on the podcast, whether it's an intro, an ad, read, anything, a single word, it has to make sense. And so I appreciate you saying that, but like it's just like, hey, since I don't work anything else, I can spend a lot of time. So every single ad is custom to that actual episode and I'll reference what's going on in the episode. They take a long time to make, but why would you do that? Like I love what I do. I want I would want to listen again. This goes back to Stephen King where he says I'm not only the writer, I'm the first reader I listen to. I edit the podcast. So I listen to every single I'm the person that makes it, but also the first listener. Why would I put into things that I don't stuff I don't want to hear. And to me, some of podcast ads are so jarring. I'm like, oh, this is like we were in this like beautiful flow of this conversation. It's just like, and then it's almost like the DJ, like stop the music. Speaker 1 100% that's how ours were. But then because I listen to and, and it's funny because I'll have new team members come and they'll say, well, why do you, why do you review every piece of content that goes out across country? And thinking I do, I have a very, it's like a workflow. I review every, from every tweet to every e-mail to every whatever. And they'll be like, well somebody else could do that. And that horrifies me because it has my name and face on it and it's somebody elses time. But your ads are incredible and you've made me think about ads differently. Speaker 2 This is again, this is not a new idea. This is a beautiful thing. I literally have no original ideas and I don't people like you shouldn't say that out loud. Why? Like the every single person I read about is smarter than me. I don't feel bad about that. I'm they are smart of me. That idea come the fact that I check everything and you check everything. That was Steve Jobs. It was a great book. I highly recommend everybody read. It's called Insanely Simple. It was the obsession that drove Apple's success. I think the guy's name is like Ken Siegel. He was Steve's ad guy and he said every Wednesday, I think at 3:00, he had a marketing meeting. I could be wrong on the dates, but basically said it didn't matter if it was a billboard in Times Square or one in rural Missouri. Nothing went out without Steve personally okaying every single piece of Apple marketing. So what? You do when you care.