David Senra - The Focused Few - [Invest Like the Best, EP.422]

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/d6a0db5fcbec8afa

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Mm.
My guest today is David Senra.
David is the host of the Founders podcast and it dear friend.
This is our third time doing a dress like the best together, and we have conversations like this one all the time.
In today's episode, David distills wisdom from more than four hundred biographies of entrepreneurs into a single word, focus.
He reveals why exceptional builders like Todd Graves and James Dyson create billion dollar empires through obsessive dedication to simple ideas, whether perfecting chicken fingers or designing vacuum cleaners.
All while rejecting conventional growth timelines and investor pressures.
David challenges us all to find the one thing we pursue even without recognition or reward.
We discussed the concept of anti-business, raising capital as a founder, and decades long commitment.
Please enjoy this great discussion with David Senra.
If I think about founders.
And try to simplify what it is.
I would say that it's
An entrepreneur lives forty years and built something.
Uh biographer.
Spend.
four ish years researching them and writing something.
You spend like forty hours
reading the book and thinking about it and tying it to all the other lessons.
And then you spend forty minutes and so we spend forty minutes listening to your summary of that thing.
And if you think about that incredible amount of distillation, like that's a big reason it's so interesting and so valuable.
So I guess my first question is to distill it even more. Like if you think about the entire project, the entire corpus and we're forced
to distill it all, all your work and therefore all the work that came before it down to one thing.
what that one thing would be. Yeah, the one word would be focus.
Th the way I think about this is like I'm by the end of this year I've w would have studied
read over four hundred biographies of history screen's entrepreneurs, right? I'm like eight years into the project.
And if I was forced to distill that down to one word, it the word would be focus. And the reason I think that pops out is because the way I look at this, and I've told you this before.
Uh we've talked about this a bunch.
I feel that when I when you read a biography of somebody, or an autobiography is even a better example of this, I feel you get to have a one sided conversation with somebody.
And
Obviously, if I do a monologue podcast, I like to talk. And so I can't talk. So I'm just forced to sit there and listen.
And I feel that person is telling me, you know, the most important parts of their life, their forty, fifty, sixty year career. Then I go online, you know, and we live in this very modern uh uh environment. I open up Instagram, I look at TikTok, look at X, and it's like
Oh, the exact opposite of what this person did their whole career and what I've just spent forty hours doing.
Is this
It's like let's not focus on something for forty years or five decades or even forty hours. Let's focus on it for four seconds.
We were want to walk over here.
I mentioned the the point where I was like, Maybe the best thing for me to do because where I
do is like what I get joy is just literally like I like to spend about half my
Oh w the time they're awake alone.
And most of that is reading. I get a lot of joy out of that.
And then the way I feel after I read a good book or I even uh make an episode that I'm proud of.
And then the way I feel like when I go online, I'm like, Oh, these are like the complete opposite. They're the contrast and
One is feeds my soul, one is good for me, and one is the opposite. And so I told you I was like, maybe what I should do is just like not read online at all and just post all day long about the stuff I'm reading. Like use it as a tool instead of a giant distraction, where I think a lot of people like it's just completely destroying their ability to focus. And I think
It's related to maybe why you asked me the question. It's like
I'm very reluctant to like have an opinion on
Like when you listen to the podcast or when we have conversations or we're on the phone.
If something comes up it's like well
You know, Steve Jobs would say, Do this, or David Ogie did this, or Buffett looked at it this way, or Munger looked at it this way. It's not like David thinks you should do this.
'C I don't really have an opinion on what other people should do. I just think of like how I wanna run my life.
And now I'm thinking maybe I should actually like be a little bit more vocal.
About hey
It's kinda weird that the people that were literally the best at what they did in their life
We completely focused.
We're not in this huge rush. They obviously work very fast.
But they're not like they didn't have goals like what I'm seeing a lot online. It's like we're the fastest company ever to X revenue.
It's just like
They didn't talk that way.
Like
Sam Walton did not talk that way. Coco Chanel did not talk that way. Enzo Ferrari, they were they understood they found something they love to do and did it for an incredibly long time.
And so I I talked about this, where I get to meet a lot of great entrepreneurs.
And my favorite entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs I've been the most impressed with.
They're all over the age of seventy, like all of them. Everybody's like, Who's the young entrepreneur? I'm like, I don't even know any of their names, because I'm so focused on this person has spent five decades.
Thinking deeply about what they're doing.
And the stuff they can convey you uh with to you over like a dinner, a phone call, a conversation.
Um I just I don't find that anywhere else. And I think that's a a complete byproduct of the fact that they were able to focus on something for
Many, many decades, which is completely
Uh I would say opposite of mo life of human nature. I think that is why it's valuable, because it's so rare for people to be able to do that. Why does that interest you? Like why is the
fifty year version of a business story more interesting than a ten year version, which I'm picking ten'cause it's like
Tenure a decade's a long time.
Time is the best filter.
Time is the only filter that I trust. You know, most of the people I cover are dead.
Uh if they're not dead, they're
Their their career, they're at the end of the career, they're an older, wiser person and they're they're passing on these lessons, right?
Um and I remember
People I got a lot of pushback when FTX was taking off, and all these people were telling me.
You gotta do an episode on SPF. This guy's a genius. He's the fastest person to like a thirty five million dollar net worth or whatever the number was.
And so I was like, Oh like maybe I'm like missing something. Like that's maybe they're right.
And we gotta talk about Todd Graves in the the episode I just did'cause it I'm really proud of it. I think you know when people ask me to favorite episode now. Yeah, when people ask me who's my favorite living entrepreneur, they expect me to say like a tech entrepreneur. It's like no the guy that owns raising cane. So like what are you talking about?
Ninety percent of a business that he started in college.
He's been doing it for thirty years. The business is worth at least$10 million, is going at thirty percent a year, and he refuses to sell. What would be the opposite of that, right? The slow grind to
to really perfecting what you're doing before you try to like just scale it up. There's a great line, I think, in Nick Sleep's uh partnership, which I just did. And he's like, we just don't understand why we go to these companies that are losing money and they want to figure out how to get bigger and so lose more money. And he's not talking about like an Amazon where you actually have to do that. SPF, I'm like, Oh well maybe I'm
Wrong.
Like maybe these people are right. And the reason I thought about Todd Grace because there's so many people in his career, which we'll get to, that said, No, you're doing it wrong. And he's and when he was younger, he's like,
Damn, they're like experts, they're smarter, they're like
older than me, like and he he started to doubt himself for a little bit.
And he's like, wait a minute, no.
They didn't know what the fuck they were talking about.
And so
I was really resistant to the SPF thing, so I started listening to
Um all these podcasts on'em.
And then when he does podcast, he would like multitask.
Which my personal hero is
Charlie Munger.
I think he's the wisest person I've ever come across, the wisest person I've ever talked to. And what does he say? He's like you're you're gonna get half assed effort.
This is not an exact quote. Like if you multitask, he just he single tasks. Like I'm just focused on whatever's in front of me. He's this great uh quote that I put up that uh
Went viral.
Is like
Obvious. He's and he's like I didn't succeed in life because of intelligence, I succeeded because I had a long attention span.
And that's what I'm so interested in, to go back to your point. But then I so
I'm sure he's a nice guy. I'm not
Try and insult him.
But it's like
I've been on a bunch of podcasts. I've never played fucking video games. While I'm getting I remember Yeah, it's like this
It's so uh first of all, it's kinda disrespectful as like a human level. It's like you don't even deserve my full attention. You know, uh my phone's not here, like we're like just having this conversation.
But then so I thought, Okay, well maybe there's I interesting ideas here, and then he explains what he was doing, and then I heard him say something.
And immediately he said this. He's like, Well
I actually think
No one ever has to read a book.
And he talks about like he doesn't read books, w books are stupid, should just be a blog post. And I was like, Oh, there's no way I'm doing

Kid.
Right.

That for the last five thousand years of humanity.
You have all these people talking about how valuable it is to write down the lessons from the people that came before us and to pick up that book and read the lessons. Then this guy comes along and says, No, no, just disregard that mass.
Of humanity. That's not a valuable activity. I I'm sorry, I'm gonna take monger over SPF every day, and I'm so glad I didn't do the episode.
'Cause imagine if I had in the Founders back catalogue
And it's a guy that, you know
was essentially a fraud. If you think about the
That over seventy category of entrepreneur that you've learned so much from
What do they do most differently?
In contrast to the in a hurry fastest to a hundred million ARR

Great, anything takes time.
Like a great business takes time.
You can be phenomenal. If you look at the early days of Amazon, obviously Jeff was really gifted, he's really smart.
He was doing a lot of smart things even before.
He started Amazon.
But if you look at how good he was and how great the business was a decade two, three decades in, I always say this quote and I think it's dead dead right. Uh
It's fascinating that everybody in technology has read Zero to One.
Right. It's if you're only gonna read one book.
Uh probably that would be the one I read. I think it's excellent.
But they miss the part of what he says in there, where he's like, Hey, uh, there's a big problem with technology companies is they optimize for growth at the expense of durability. But if you look at when do these giant companies, and he said tech companies, but you see this in all these companies, raisin case is another example, where like they actually make more money.
three, four, five, six decades into the future, all the real money is out there. So therefore, if you're optimizing for growth at the expensive durability, you're never going to get to the real rewards.
And the reason you do that is because growth
You can.
Track.
And durability you cannot.
And I just did this episode in Ken Griffin, and it was fascinating is he's founded Citadel, I think, thirty five years ago, and I think he founded Citadel Securities twenty three years ago. And he just said, We've had the most
The best financial years of our entire life in the last four years.
He's thirty years thirty years into that business is the the best time he's had. And he's you know, hopefully he keeps compounding that. So where does the durability come from? Like w like how do they
Those long stories, how do they earn the durability?
I I think what this really comes down to, I g like you're kinda hitting at this. I think this is why
Even though I'm not an investor, I do like your framing of like trying to back people.
That it's their life's work.
Um
I am very interested in people that have a mission.
And I don't know why.
It took me thirty two years to find my mission, f another five and a half to make it
Where I can actually support my family.
And then you know, now I realize like oh this is it. This is the thing I'm doing. Um
I wanna
tie into something I read yesterday, you guys actually made this great um profile on Neil
Yeah.
And what I would say is
There's a lot of good quotes in there. I feel like I should do like a miniature like episode bonus episode on that one. He gave this analogy of like, um
Of the helicopter.
It's like most people are like doing due diligence on a company or whatever and they're at like eight thousand feet and they maybe go they'll hover down to five thousand feet and they're like, Oh, we did our job. They're like, No, no. Neil lands the helicopter, then gets out of the helicopter, then goes underneath the helicopter, and then puts his hands in the dirt.
And
I read that. I don't think of
Any entrepreneur living, I think, Oh, that's Walt Disney, that's Steve Jobs, that's Estate Lauder, that's all the people that admire. That's
Todd Graves.
Uh it sounds like I heard stories uh I was just at this dinner uh last weekend for somebody that knows Ken.
And they asked what episode I'm working on. I was like, oh, we're working on episode Ken Griffin. And they were telling stories that were very similar at that, paying attention to even the the tiniest corner of the business you wouldn't even think he's paying attention to, but he's gonna sit there and talk to the person responsible for that for three straight hours to make sure it's being done. I just like people that take
What they're doing seriously. The feedback on the the Tigre episode i it's absolutely ripping, but
The the the the only negative feedback is like
I can't wait'cause he says in the the episode.
That he believes that God put him on earth.
To be good at chicken fingers.
To help people.
So he can make a lot of money and he does a lot of like charitable work. And people are like, you know, they they think they're smarter chicken figures. They think they're smarter than him. They' essentially what they're saying. It's like and have you built a ten billion dollar company?
Have you done that? Are you the best in your profession? Are you the top of your craft? It doesn't matter what the craft is.
At least he has a mission.
You may laugh at his mission, you think it's ridiculous, but one, I know he believes it for a fact.
Or he's a the world's greatest actor for three decades, right? And we can go through the the the level of commitment that he had to make that dream real.
Right?
Or like
And you can make fun of the fact that he's a mission, but it's like he's already ahead of most of humanity that that is alive today and has ever lived.
Most people don't have a mission. There's a great example of this in in Steve Jobs that he was heavily criticizing early of his career because he would make the inside of the computer that you couldn't even open up.
Beautiful.
And people, you're wasting your time.
It wasn't a waste of time to him.
The reason I like the Graves one so much
Is because it's chicken fingers, like the object of his obsession.
Is like this.
Sort of low status thing.
I think so many people would
love to build a fancy piece of technology or something very sexy as their lifelong mission or something. But in in many of my conversations with you,
The object of obsession is something very simple, like chicken fingers. And I just think chicken fingers is such a visceral thing. We've all eaten chicken fingers.
And a man like Todd has devoted himself to one thing.
I think you said on the episode he won't even make people wanted a sandwich and he just
Took his chicken fingers and put buns around it in the sandwich. Like he is singularly obsessed with
With this chicken finger dream.
And
I love the question now, what is your chicken finger dream?
And chicken finger is better than something else because of almost how absurd it is.
So
Tell tell us a little bit more about what you've learned.
From studying him.
I I it was probably my favorite episode of Founders ever.
And maybe it just hit me at the right time and I needed to hear that message right then and there to work on something for an absurdly long time, not think short term, whatever.
Um lots of common lessons, but what is it about? Why do you think this one is so especially this person and this business?
Which is so simple.
And so low brow.
So resonant with so many people.
I truly believe, like I'm obsessed and we we we've talked about this all the time, like you know, I I I get
Literally email so like why do you quote Munger in every single episode?
And she's just like,'Cause all I do was listen to this what I thought this brilliant guy
His advice and I just did it.
Like I always say learning is not memorizing information. Learning is changing your behavior.
And there's been a handful of times where I meet people, I read a book, I have a conversation where literally my behavior I that my behavior's change. The trajectory of my life has changed. He the way he was able to describe things to me, he's just like there's a bunch of examples where he's and he's like, you know, he knows everything about business history.
He had sixty years of experience and he would share f freely with everybody. And he's like occasionally we find scaling down.
And upping the intensity, you get an advantage.
That sounds like Todd Graves to me.
He's like, Oh, you have my competitors have ten things on the
On the menu, I have one. You can get three chicken fingers, four chicken fingers, six chicken fingers, any one chicken finger sandwich. Here's two buns and that's it.
And then find a simple idea and take it seriously as another mongerism. And then what he realized when he analyzed Costco, where he's like we f oftentimes in business we find the winning system goes ridiculously far.
That's the most important two words in this sentence. Ridiculously far
In maximizing and or minimizing one or a few variables.
Uh I think it was Ken Griffin talked about this. I've seen this with a bunch of investors. Um ra we talked about this with Richard Rainwater before.
Jay Pritzker was like this, Sam Zell was like this, because we'll tie this to investing. It's like if you bring them a a deal and there's like seven different things that have to go right, like the chance of every single one going right.
is very, very small.
And so like I love what Richard Rainwater would do, where it's like you bring me your idea on one piece of paper.
You write it on one piece of paper, explain to me in simple words, and then at the end just tell me how much of your own money you're putting in.
And then I'll decide if I'm gonna do this.

Deal makers, you know, investors of all time. You see it over and over again. Sam Zell told me when I got to meet him, it's also in his autobiography, he's like Jay Prisker was the
most brilliant financial mind I've ever come across. He was like an older brother to Sam. He was like twenty years older.
And his whole point was like I'd come to him when I was younger and bring him like okay, there's like six things we have to do. And Jay would look at it, he's like,
No.
One.
If you nail that, everything else will
Will uh everything else will either work out, it will either s live or die off of that. Think go back to win in the huge mania.
in you know with uh two thousand twenty, twenty one, all this huge tech uh bubble.
where CM Zo goes on C and B C is like
We work's going to zero.
Like nope, not gonna work. And it was like at all times high. Most of spending in like twenty billion dollars, what the case is. And he it was like asset price liability mismatch or whatever the word. He's like, nope, this guy in 1972 did this.
Failed.
82, this other guy did it. This is the company. Failed. Why? Because there's only one thing that's important and an app doesn't fucking solve that. You're not paying attention. And so when I look at Todd Graves, the reason I wanted to do the episode is one.
I I just saw a clip. This is what I mean about learning is not memorizing information, learning is your change of behavior. I talk to a lot of people and they're like, I love your podcast and some of them become friends with and I see the decisions they're making their
Uh this is like oh
You don't you're listening and you're just wasting your time'cause you're not actually applying the lessons.
Take what they did and what they said and see if that works in your business, and then actually change it. And so I saw.
A clip.
And it was a clip I think on TikTok.
Where Todd Graves is being interviewed.
On a comedians podcast, Dio Van.
And
He was talking about I've been a big believer
In always doing one thing and doing it better than anybody else. And then they kept cutting the clip.
And he talked about
He even got down to the minutiae.
Of
How simple was my menu?
If the
How easy can I make it to select what the customer wants? Okay, so that customer.
is now gonna take
five seconds to decide. I go to Reason Kings, I know exactly what I'm getting, right? As opposed to
Go to McDonald's or their another competitors. Now it's
Instead of a ten second order, it's
A forty second order. That may make not a big difference when you're having, you know, a hundred orders a day and you have one store.
He's got eight hundred now.
It makes a huge difference. And he just immediately understood. And so when I my this is how because I fucking brainwash myself about this, I don't think of Todd Graves when I hear that.
I'm like oh that's like Rockefeller going over to one of his employees who was s soldering
Uh closing up oil cans.
And says, How many drops of solder do you use?
And the guy's like forty.
Have you ever tried less?
Try thirty eight.
Okay, I tried thirty eight. It leaked. Okay, try thirty-nine.
Oh thirty nine works. So we were wasting one drop of solder, which might not make a shit of difference when the business is, you know, making a couple thousand. That business went up scaling 10, 20, 30 X.
Makes a huge difference. All of these people.
They're obsessed with their business. They're it they're in the details. Another thing that Todd Graves said that was very fascinating, he's like I had all these experts tell them.
A
Like you should delegate. And he has the funny sign. He goes, Delegate? What does that word even me? He goes, What kind of word is that? Right? Because he was literally being interviewed in one of the in one of the um
And one of the podcasts I use is a source material to make mine.
And
He's again, this this this happened, you know, in the last few months, maybe a year ago.
And he stops the interview to look at the
Instagram real.
'Cause they just had an event. I think they were like throwing a Superbowl party or something like that.
And he's like I'm gonna watch it.
Before it goes out, I don't think of Todd Graves, I think of Steve Jobs.
Every Wednesday having a three hour meeting
Ін апол ревінь ад гос ау.
Nothing went out of Apple.
Not a billboard in Missouri, not a
What's on their landing page without Steve looking at it. There's a guy that wrote the book called I think it's called Insanely Simple.
I think his name is Ken Siegel, if I'm if I'm correctly if I'm correct about that. He was running, he was work he was the ad executive.
uh for the the marketing company the ad company that Steve was using. And he said Steve would call me at midnight
And we'd have to talk for an hour about a single
Word.
That's obsession. That's loving what you do. That's taking what you do very seriously. I don't care if it's building computers, if it's making a podcast.
If it's making chicken fingers, I just love people that take what they do seriously. This idea of anything worth doing being worth doing for its own sake.
And my favorite maxim, you know, that I've stumbled across, I think originally from Kevin Kelly.
Uh the old
Editor of Wired magazine was that the reward for great work is more work.
And it seems like so much of the fastest to a hundred million of ARR type thing.
is that the target
is something that's not the work itself. It's some other thing.
And
that the healthy orientation that you're describing that Todd Graves has and all these other people have.
is actually just towards the work itself.
And you had this really interesting notion of
Almost anti business.
People. Ivan Schonard is the the founder of Patagonia comes most immediately to mind. I love that book of his Let My People Go Surfing.
Uh so talk a little bit more dig deeper on this idea of
Anything worth doing for its own sake.
The reward for great work is more work.
being anti business as a as an entrepreneur.

Continue to pull at the same thread. You can change the name of a podcast. I can log into my podcast host and change founders to whatever I want.
Whatever. You can't change the URL slug for the RSS feed for the first name you picked.
And the first name I picked for founders was telling you from day one in back in 2016, the name of the podcast was called Autotelic.
Autotelic.
The definition of that is an activity done for the sake of itself. I was telling you from the rip.
I don't care if nobody listens. I need to do this.
I I got some advice the other day and they're like
Th this reminded me of Ted Graves, Henry Ford has the exact same thing about, you know, experts, people outside of your business try to give you advice. And this is why I like retwitter. I'm like, these people like
I sorry, I'm not gonna read that tweet. I'd rather I'll just listen to what Steve Jobs said. I
Probably he probably has better advice than this random fucking guy on Twitter.
And so so somebody goes, Hey, I have a great idea for you.
Uh you ever thought about
H hiring other people to read the books for you?
Oh
Ha ha ha.
I I like the
That's not what I'm doing it for. I'm not taking the easy way.
The heart I love what Jerry Seinfeld said.
The hard way is the right way. And so I told them a story. And this is the line that this is the my response to this.
And this is a line that I say. It's like you don't work all your life.
To do what you love.
To not do it.
And all I know is that person doesn't have a mission. They don't have a love. They're not and that's that's fine. I don't most people never do.
But I don't go around giving advice to people about what they should be doing. It's the it's the weird thing where the source of this advice comes from. And I remember reading about Charles Schultz, the guy I was a fucking kid.
And I'd read
Charlie Brown and Peanuts. Every Christmas we'd watch Charlie Brown's uh Christmas.
Yeah, so I think it came out in the nineteen sixties. And so I was like, Oh, I'm gonna read his biography.
And then you read it and it's like crazy. It's like the guy ran, you know, I I'm gonna these are approximately right. He ran
The
uh the comic ship for like f let's say forty or fifty years.
He drew.
True.

penciled everything, drew in everything, every single strip.
over fifty years, I think it was seventeen thousand different individual ones that he did.
Uh he had already had one planned, so when he dies, this is the last no one can ever take it over. When I die, this is what you put out.
Like when I die, this is the last one that's ever published. And people would go through it, if I remember correctly, living somewhere in California, to come tour studio. At the time he's an old much older man, he's like sixty seven years old, and they're like
Well who's doing this? He's like
What do you mean he's doing this?
Me.
And they were they couldn't w these people with twenty three couldn't wrap their head like, Well, could you hire somebody else to do it so then you could take a like vacation or you could take some time off? And that was his line. He's like
He couldn't understand why they were asking him that and he's like
But
You don't work your entire life to do what you love, to not do it.
That's why I think thinking a long time, you know, most of this is trial and error. Some people find what they love to do really early. Like I think of Kobe Bryant, the episodes are done on him. He's twelve years old. He would tell you, I'm gonna be the best basketball player of all time.
No one finds what they love to do at twelve. I'm working this Michael Dell episode right now. You could see from twelve years old, the guy was a money maker, is obsessed with computers. I he there's a part in the story that's great where he takes apart uh an IBM.
And he has this realization, he says, Wait a minute, I B M selling the computer.
But they don't make any of the components. And like you just see is like a little kid's like Hmm, there might be an opportunity here that he's gonna pursue later on. And then he gets in trouble in class because he's he's not paying attention to class, he's just reading computer magazines. He's telling you.
What his life what his life is going to be.
You just have to listen and every single person.
has something like that. They just don't fucking listen.
They don't listen to themselves. What does it feel like when you find it?
Because you said earlier you're thirty two
before you kinda stumbled on it and then five years after that, was it like actually the full time thing that you could do?

What what was the change in feeling?
Of what does it feel like to do the thing that you love to you?
Unbelievable relief.
Like
a weight off your shoulders that like
You can't describe it.
Um
And then from there, that doesn't mean like oh now I wake up, you know that's like I'm kind of a tortured person. Like so there was a clip of me on another podcast, I just went out and the person's like, You know the podcast is good if the
I'm like.
That's as bet as good as I can look. Okay,'cause that's like my sleep score on my eight sleep right now is like sixty. Like it's not I'm not doing well because I am completely obsessed with what I'm doing.
And I you know what's weird? Like people keep telling me.
Like you shouldn't be obsessed with this like low status thing. I was like I you're wrong. I I don't know I don't yeah, but I don't even hear it.
I know exactly where I am.
And I know exactly what I want to do.
And we talk about this, we have mutual friends that like they're kind of up so obsessed.
To their detriment about like what will somebody else think of me, or like if I do X, well like
I'm worried about the public perception or what my friends will think. I don't think about that at all.

The reason that uh
Like people are surprised with some of the people that I want to meet that are still living.
And so I I have like you know uh
A list of the same.
And in the top three that list is a guy named Jimmy Iveen. We mean you share a love for that Defiant Ones. Defiant Ones documentary.
Uh Blast Dance, Defiant Once. Like those are the best documentaries. I watch them over and over again.
And Jimmy Ivine has this great line. He's just like
When you're running after something.
He goes the he they do this great editing job where it shows horses on a race track.
And it and it goes back and forth between that and Jimmy. And Jimmy's like, You know why they put fucking blinders on those horses? And uh he goes he goes,'Cause if they look left or right, they'll miss a step.
And humans should have that too. When you're chasing after something, don't look left, don't look right.
Go.
And that's why it's like I wake up every day. We talked about this when we did that live show in New York City. It was obvious if you read the books that the great entrepreneurs, once they find what they have
They love to do.
No
To zero introspection.
Now they think deeply about their business, but they wake up every morning, they're not wondering what should I do today? They know exactly what they're doing.
And to find that to for me to know I'm gonna wake up and do this.
For as long as I have a voice, I have eyes, like hopefully I have life.
Like that's an unbelievable belief. Now, because it's your mission and because I'm also super competitive and kinda a little crazy. Uh our mutual friend Daniel Eck has the greatest the greatest line, he told me. He's just like one of the reasons I like you so much is because you're like uh an LLM.
train on history's greatest entrepreneurs with the temperature turned up. Yeah, obviously like some people are not gonna like that and that's fine. Then you you kinda torture the I did this episode on Jensen Wong, and he has a great thing where he doesn't like to fire people. He's like, I'd rather to torture them into greatness. And then you realize when you
How he goes about his life, he actually tortured himself into greatness.
Yeah, even though we're not going to be able
This isn't
recent few years, they tell a great story.
Blowout quarter.
Mm.
Companies doing incredible.
And he he he walks into the meeting and goes.
Every morning I wake up, look myself in the mirror, and say why do you suck so much?
We've heard that a few times from
Some exceptional people.
They're all like this. Say one click more about this anti business you call the anti business billionaires, so that it would get lots of views on
Um Instagram or whatever. I'm that's not why I did it though.
'Cause that's what I believe them to be. I like
I I appreciate you thought it was clickbaity. I'm not trying to clickbait anybody. Although although Todd Graves and his ten billion dollar chicken finger dream is probably a good episode I don't know. What I mean by anti b and it should really should be anti-business as usual billionaires.
Okay. So the the and again.
I my own business. I don't care if people say
I wanna wake up and all I'm gonna do is take a pile of money and make it into bigger pile of money and they love it, cool.
I have no opinion what you're doing.
The the people I most admire.
The people that
I'm trying to powder myself off of
Із Півслак Тихав со терсо обсест.
About the product quality.
Right. What and there's three people in that video. It's Ivan Chenard.
James Dyson and Steve Jobs.
Right.
One guy's making outdoor equipment, one guy's making high technology, and one guy's making fucking vacuum cleaners. Okay, but there's the exact same approach where it's like the the reason this company exists and and and
Jobs has said this multiple times.
Where the the only reason to start a company is'cause the product.
And then like you so the company needs to assemble all the resources, but the product is it we exist to make the product. And then of course you he he talks about profitability a lot because the profits allow you to keep making the product.
Everything stop starts from the product. So everything I do, the reason I still do every single social media post, the reason I answer all my emails, the reason I don't have an assistant, the reason I don't have an editor.
Is because I'm trying to make the world's best product.
I feel my podcast is a handmade
Artisanal.
But it just happen it happens to be like technology and and
infinite leverage. You know, the same amount of work is gonna go into it if w if one person listens or ten million people listen.
And I'm trying to build.
What drives me and I think annoys most of the people that are around me because
I can be like pretty fucking stubborn about this.
Is that I want to make
The best
Podc the best product in the world.
Based on
What I like
For the best people in the world.
The very first time we talked, you kinda and this is when I had like
Think like three thousand people listening.
Back then. And you kinda nailed it on our first talk. You're like oh you you built it like you're gonna win by default, you built this pooling mechanism in the founder ecosystem, like
By the time people try to do it now, they're gonna try to cat they'll never be able to catch you. But
I it's really important to me as a competitive person that I build the best product for the best people in the world.
I am not interested.
I've told this story before. I know Mr. Beast, Jimmy's he's he's been very nice to me. He tweets about the podcast, that's very nice. He's invited me to go uh to like his headquarters and he's like you can use our studio record here. We'll help you with the script. Jim uses no script. Uh we'll give you data analytics people. I don't even know how many fucking people listen to the podcast. I don't look at analytics. I build what I want for me.
So
The reason I have to edit it is because when this is done.
I listen to it. It's the s it's the Stephen King thing. I am not just
The writer.
I'm the first reader. That's what Stephen King said.
Quentin Tarantino says when I people like when you make a movie, do you have an audience of mine? He's like, Yeah, me. I'm making it for me. What is your own measure of good or great for your own product?
Yeah.
That I like it.
But but why? Like what what is it about whatever that episode was, or the Todd Graves episode, or like if I stack ranked their fifty most recent episodes based on the quality, your own perception of their quality.
What's different about number one versus number forty?
Like what's more true in number one than number forty.
Like what is the measure of goodness?
I I've been thinking about this recently.
And um it it it it applies specifically to the fact that I'm covering people that build companies.
And what I realized is like
I've never been around impressive people in my entire life, right? We talked about this the very first time I was on your podcast.
No one in my family even graduated high school, much as college.
So it's like I never saw examples of
Great people. And then you add to the fact that my father, like I'm the son of a Cuban immigrant. I grew up
Meeting people that risk their lives and came over here on a raft.
And it's like kinda weird. Hey.
Like you you have like we both have kids. We love them more than life itself. Like I would die for my kids. Everybody would die for their kids. And it's like
Things were so bad in your country that you risked your fourteen year old son's life and put him on a boat.
Like, how bad does that to be? And I'm like, Well let's go to
the Miami Beach. How many people how many Americans are getting on a raft and going it's a one way trip.
So that tells you something is very special.
about where we live and very, very bad about where they're coming from.
And what I realized is like not being not being an educated family, parents never having money.
Like being terrified growing up terrified being a loser. It's like entrepreneurship's a f miracle.
Capitalism is a miracle where I meet some of these other people where they're like they might be the son or the grandson of somebody really wealthy, and you'll find like a weird
high correlation for like s almost like socialistic
Uh
Like perspectives. And I was like, this is so crazy to me. Just like my wife's from Columbia. Like, no one, no one in South America is like that that made it to America is like, no, I want to go back there. Like you don't even understand what you have. And so now what I what I realized about this is like one of the reasons I'm so passionate about is, yeah, I like to read.
I m the most unbroken hobby I've ever had. Yeah, I legitimately think podcasts are miracles. You we were at this uh conference together and you said something really funny. You walk over and every time I'm at another table. And I'm
I'm like most of the people listen to the podcast, but if not, I would grab their phone and you saw me installing it and you hit you had a quip. You're like, I wish I could find a way to make money for David's ability to turn every conversation back to podcasting. It's like 14 really successful capital allocators and me. I don't even know what the hell I was doing there. The the the root cause is like I really believe entrepreneurship is.
a miracle the fact that anybody could say, Hey, I have an idea that makes somebody else's life better. Because that's the best that's that's all business is. Business is just an idea that makes somebody else's life better. No one can stop me from doing it to delivering value to other people.
And then if I deliver the more value
I deliver to the higher number of people.
That January twelfth.
What?
Imagine going back to you know I might do this episode on Genghis Khan. Like
The eleven hundreds and saying like you could be the richest person in the world and you could you invented a button and you know, it they press that button and anything is delivered to that. Or like all any other or like Sam Walton, I told the story, I was in my ch Marine on a friend's boat.
And I was like
That boat's huge. Who owns that boat? And I look it up and it's like
Sam Walton's
Nice.
And I'm like, this guy, uh I had like this this great experience. I'm looking at this giant boat. It's probably I don't know, three hundred million dollars, some crazy number like that. And I'm like
And it came from your uncle just realizing, hey
Uh if I just
Deliver every day low prices. Again, another simple idea taken very seriously.
Uh every day low prices. No one's gonna beat us on pricing.
So how do you work backwards from that idea? There's all kinds of technologies to the logistics, there's
Challenge all the stuff is very difficult. The idea is simple, but the information is very difficult. And look what you can generate.
And people shit on Walmart.
I had to shop at Walmart when I grew up.
Like I'm not shopping there now, but like it did a service for my family.
And for millions of people like they destroyed main street businesses like we couldn't afford
To not shop a mark.
It's an a miracle that he gave. And what's a the bypark of that?
By making
I don't know, how many people you think shop Walmart? Billions by now?
That's a lot. Billions. Everyone at some point. Yeah.
He deserves that money.
Good, I'm glad you got that money.
I mean he he wrote a lot in his books about
the relationship between simplicity and mastery. Yeah. And that's I mean, that's the theme of our conversation. Like it shows up over and over and over and over again. That conference you're referencing with the capital allocators
You know you said, I don't know why I'm there.
Well, I know why you were there. Like I wanted you to go because I had a theory which was correct, which is that
The people there were gonna be more interested in you and your project.
Then
You know, the next guy's like
latest great investment.
And I think
The reason for that is that everyone recognizes a truth in this basic message of
the power of finding one's mission and then pursuing it.
Forever.
And
I I would just love to hear you riff a little bit on what that has taken.
For for you in the last
I guess we met in twenty twenty two, so call it three and a half, four years ago, something like that.
in that period of time, which is when this thing has really taken off
What are your drops of, you know, glue or like what what are the things that you've
done had to do to make this thing better.
Because I just want to keep bringing this point to life that like once you find the thing
What kinds of things does it then take to
Make the thing great.
So what have those things been for the last
You know, four years. I don't even know if I can um
I have a good answer to that question. Uh other than there is something that I think is
And two other lines from Munger. Again, I go back to him where it's like he says intense interest in any subject is
uh necessary for like to master it. He has a better line at I'm messing that up.
And then he says follow your natural drift. You know, we talk about this all the time. We're
When I describe you to other people, I'm like, Well, you have to understand Patrick is doing a Vest Like the Best episodes all day long, every day.
Like ten times a day, he just doesn't record them.
He's just naturally curious.
He will he just want he's curious around other people in the way that I am, frankly, not. I'm interested in books. I don't I can't like deal with, you know, people. It's why I work alone.
Uh in general. Like obviously I have a handful of very close people.
I just think I I don't know why. There's a great line.
So I just did this Kenny Griffin episode and
I made the point in the episode I think it's really important.
Is like I'm not interested in
Timely. I'm interested in timeless. And so there's no book on Ken.
There's a bunch of great stories spread throughout the internet that I use, the source material, and then I listened to every single thing I could find, all these talks. And most of the interviews he does is like, what do people want to know? What do you think about the market? What do you think about this president? But I did find where like he had this hour long talk at Yale, highly recommend listening to it. Where it's like more like almost like an oral biography, like more timeless principles.
And then
I transcribed that and then you know, I listened to h I don't know, thirty other hours of him talking and it
Maybe only made like
five or ten other notes, something small, but something he said is very fascinating.
He's like
For reasons I don't quite understand.
Since I was in the third grade.
I've been obsessed.
With the stock market.
How does it work?
How do you make money?
What are these problems you can solve?
And that line.
For reasons I don't understand. I truly believe that Jeff Bezos nailed it when he said, You don't pick your passions, your passions choose you. You don't choose your passions, your passions choose you.
I was not m like, you know, at five years old wondering like what's a good hobby for for self-development in my future. I maybe I should read. I just read. I re I told you the first time we talked.
Like my mom before she died, said I would read the back of cereal boxes.
I just I have no idea. And so all I do is like I'm just
Intensely interested.
In everything.
Then I'm
I'm learning. And then I like the craftsmanship. I heard um
There's a idea that Ken has that again, I think is an entire reason that Founders is valuable as a podcast.
He says you really you you want to know what's going on in your business, you want to sell your competitors, but you really should be grabbing ideas from other businesses far afield from your industry. And he told a story about a way to mitigate his risk.
And he got an idea from
Saudi Ramco.
Saudi Ramco and Citadel very different businesses, right? What was the idea?
Okay, so I'll I'll explain this.
Make sure I don't forget that'cause I'm in I'm in the middle of the weave. Um so he w they were uh he used the term I think they were like they were like B a B player in risk. They weren't doing well in risk.
And he was still in Chicago at the time, and he goes and visits Saudi Ramco and he sees this giant
screen on a wall in their headquarters there. And it's like thirty feet long, 10 feet wide. And it has all the most important data. Not like a hundred things, but like
Where the ships are, how many oil b the barrels of oil we're producing, like the handful of metrics and then just
Look at it all day. Yeah, they're destallation. Exactly. What's gonna happen? Like you look at it all day.
Like then you're gonna improve it.
Right. And he's like, Oh, what if we took all the important risk metrics and put on a giant wall in our headquarters?
And he said it took them from like you know a B player to like one of the best in their field. And his whole advice was like, you really need to be taking ideas that are far afield.
Of
Like your own industry, and you know, this is what you do when you read a book. Like, I'm not gonna build Walmart, I'm not gonna build Ferrari, I'm not building Apple.
I'm building my podcast, but there's all these ideas that I can take from them. So as I've expose myself to that, I just find like little ideas that I can use in the craftsmanship of the product. And one of the main ideas goes back to your question about the anti-billion anti-business billionaires.
The reason I say and I do this same book over and over again. So I've done an episode twenty five, episode two hundred, episode three hundred, and it'll be episode four hundred. It's James Dyson's aut first autobiography called Against the Odds.
He it took him fourteen years, five thousand one hundred twenty seven prototypes, until he got
A uh the hi the first the world's first cyclonic vacuum cleaner that he owned a hundred percent of that was up to his standards.
And so all I'm trying to figure out is just like
Can I make something that I would listen to? I don't know any other way. And so last week I actually had to republish an old episode, which is still a great episode.
But the reason was because I read a book.
Where I found the person I did not like, and I don't want to spend any time in his li in his mind, so I'm not gonna make an episode on him because not only did I have to finish reading the book, which I threw across the fucking room, but
Then I have to spend another, you know, probably this one together, is the one I think. Yes. And then I spent another thirty uh then I have to spend another thirty hours making the podcast. And it's just like I don't I don't want to be like this person. I'm looking for role models because I didn't have any when I grew up.
And then I read a fabulous book that me and you both read, uh Pappy Land by Ray Thompson.
Excellent writing. Unbelievable.
But
I don't know, I couldn't figure out how to make an episode on it'cause it's really like it's it's about a family business. It's really about a family. And it's really about the relationship between a father and son. Like and I'm very interested in that relationship. I think it's the most powerful relationship in the world, which I got heckled at one of our live shows when I said that. Um Why'd you get heckled?
I don't remember. They were just like'cause I said it was the most it it's it's not discounting the the relationship between a father and a daughter, or mother and daughter. It's just like it's clearly something that pops up in these biographies over and over again.
All the time. And he and Wright has great times on his great writing about, you know, relationship that the grandson had with the the father and the father with the it was just a lot of family dynamics.
Excellent book.
But I was like
This isn't good enough?
The book was, but I can't make anything good enough.
So I'm not putting anything out.
Nothing.
I'm not going to put out something I wouldn't listen to. One of my favorite things that happens with you is someone will say something that just bothers you.
And
Sets you off and get you going on.
this stream of lessons that we're talking about today that you've learned that you've shared with people.
What other things that you see people do bother you the most?
In business.
You have a great line on this. Like you talk to way more people than I do.
And I'll ask you about like, oh, is this person this person reach out?
And you're like oh.
No, he's a casual. Again, I don't care what people do.
Because they're I know I'cause I study fucking people's lives for a living. Like so much of what shapes you is like
happens when you're so young and you can't even describe why you're interested in what you're interested in.
But I think the only thing that bothers me
Is like
There's a great line.
Uh that I I mentioned the Ovitz episode that
Mm.
Mediocrity mediocrity is invisible until passion shows up and exposes it.
And so much of the people that you meet, so
So many of the products that you deal with, so many of the people.
It's just like they're casual, they have a casual affectation about them.
That I find personally disgusting.
And I'm not again I it's not like around judging people. It's gonna make me sound like a terrible human being. It's just like it's a way for me to filter.

And my favorite people to spend time with
Like they're all they all work in vastly different things, but they take what they do so seriously. And it's not a selfish thing.
They're making something.
That they feel
Make somebody else's life better.
Um so the the only thing I can think of is like
I don't like the you know casualness.
And then I I I'm not a fan.
personally of like the over financialization of
business. I think a lot of people aren't starting companies. They're creating financial instruments, which is fine.
But I think you're gonna realize like just these kind of people just don't have enough experience and they haven't read enough biographies or realize like
You think what you want is money.
But what you really want is meaning.
You're gonna get the money and then you're gonna be like, Why am I so unhappy?
Because you're human and this happens over and over again. That doesn't mean people don't like money and that obviously solves all the benefits, but you're gonna feel a lot better. If you think about the reasons that people sell a business.
Typically it's it's either because they have a chance to make a a tremendous amount of money.
Or some amount of money.
Or it's because they're tired of the thing, of the business, therefore of the product of the whole endeavor.
Why do you think that the money thing
has become I I would think about it as like a false idol or something, like it has become
The unit of
Interest of obsession of show, of status, of all this kind of stuff. What's your theory for why this seems to have inflected like
So crazily in the last
couple of years. Well now we have like a a giant mirror into everybody else's life we never had like this way. Like think of it like the w one good thing about decentralization of media is like there's no gatekeepers. That's also the bad thing in the sense of like now there's a somebody just put me onto uh
Crazy rich Asians of TikTok.
And
It is some of the most important things. Oh we should I'll send you some clips.
And it's some of the most disgusting behavior. Like one lady uh is I guess her parents own she lives in California, but her parents own one of the largest like cloud computing companies in China.
Another one is like
Some giant maybe even like
uh government collusion in Singapore or something like that. But it's like all all the all the videos all the videos are just straight consumption. It's look what I got. Me and my and they do this this thing where it's like me and my mom went shopping today and we spent twenty five thousand at Van Clef and then we bought a Herme thing and we did this and it's just like
This is disgusting behavior.
Because you're you shouldn't take pride in what you consume.
That doesn't take skill or talent.
You should take pride in what you built.
That is the most selfish thing you could possibly do. And I'm not a g like, dude.
Like
I'm building
The goal here is to you know, to change the trajectory of my entire
Family tree, I'm going to build generational wealth, not so my kids can do that shit.
That'll never happen.
But
To try to teach it was like man, the the wealth came because you made somebody else's life better. You dedicated it's a it's a selfless act, even if you love it.
And
This idea that like
We are
Mm.
So I understand that. It's like so but then young people see that and they're like oh
That I need to figure out how to make money. And I was like this, like I was
so embarrassed when I was younger that I had to like how much I had to work or like I didn't have a car or like all this other stuff that happened. I remember being deeply, deeply embarrassed and then it switching from embarrassment to like
Almost uh
Like relentless self belief that like I am better than that.
person like I I remember going th there was this kid that lived close to like went to the same school as me.
It was a public high school.
But I remember the crazy story I heard where like
I think it it and again, this was like it's funny when you think of wealth, but like his dad owned like I don't know, like a hundred dominoes or something. But I just remember they used to take a helicopter to lunch.
And I'm like, what?
And I remember him bragging about the car. His done like a hundred and twenty thousand dollar car. He'd park in front of the the country club, which obviously I would never even
be able to get into the country club. And I remember flipping and I was like, I'm
better than that kid. Like I'm smarter than him, I work harder, like I'm gonna fuck him up.
And it turned into like this competitive like I will prove to you
That like
You was handed to you, I will get myself.
Um and there was like some kind of weird drive behind that.
But so when I see people like that where it's just like you're glorify the wrong thing.
Well, like if you think about there's this great talk that Steve Jobs gave when he came back to Apple and he's talking about
Apple spends all this money on marketing, you would never know it. It sucks. All your marketing sucks.
What is the best example of marketing? And he talked about Nike and he's like, What does Nike do? He doesn't want to talk about like the shoe is has a bunch of it's six bubbles or whatever. They they glorify great athletes. They glorify great achievement.
And so that's why he did the crazy ones at
And so
I think that's like to some degree what I'm trying to do is like the reason I I make these clips on the anti business billionaires, the reason I t spend so much time talking about these people and the craftsmanship and talk about this guy that is literally a craftsmanship with his chicken fingers.

I to to some degree like I want to celebrate these people
Saying hey I'm gonna dedicate my life
To building the best possible product.
I can, and to make somebody else's life better.
And I'll talk all day long about that.
And not about the fact that you know
I'm building a yacht or I'm doing all this other stuff. Like you you can have all these things, but like what are you actually proud of? You're not proud of your consumption? Well, you probably anybody can go to the store and buy that.
Not everybody can build a truly great product. Why are
the people that are doing it that way.
so much better at marketing than like
If you read a marketing book and, you know, tried to go market your product or had some
marketing person at your company in charge of how the world hears about you. I'm thinking about the Red Bull founder, Estee Lauder, like this seems to Steve Jobs, of course, this shows up over and over again that
Not only is the ability to create an incredible product, God, I love that line of mediocrity is invisible until passion shows up to exposes it.
Um
Such a oh I won't forget that one.
But the same thing seems to happen. So that's the product side. The same thing seems to happen from all these same people on the marketing side.
W what what is the flame there that's behind that? Like why what have you learned about that side of of business studying all these people?
Where they're not only responsible for the product, but also for how the world
engages with it and hears about it.
Uh again, I'd go back to those three, Ivan Chenard.
James Dyson and Steve Jobs, I think they have all these lessons in that.
Ivan Schnard calls it nonfiction marketing.
He's like, If you have a shit product
Like you have to like dress it up, you have to put you have to have a mascot, you have to hire these expensive
uh advertising companies
Uh, you know, he you have to make up all the stuff. It's all fiction.
But if you just in his thing, he didn't even want to be a billion.
He just like, hey, I'm going to you again, he built the product for himself.
He was a mountaineer. He was uh he spends all his time outdoors. He fishes, he mountain uh he skis, he uh climb mountains, he does all these super risky sports.
All the gear I'm using sucks.
I'm gonna make the gear that I use and guess what? If I make the best gear, then everybody's like where'd you get that? Oh that's good too and it it takes best friend. Yeah, exactly. And it that'll compound again if you don't sell after five years or four years or do anything that that
puts in jeopardy the durability of your company.
And so s I I think about James Dyson, it's this great line and I'll uh like paraphrase.
But
How he wants to spend his time, he wants to invent. He wants to be as close as possible to the design of the product, the manufacturing of the product, he will be on the line of the product, even in his seventies, right? But
What he realized is like
After he's done making the product, he's the one that went around the world.
And sold the product because he's like the creator.
is the only person that can explain what went into the process of the thinking behind it.
And then with his full heart, he said something like that. With the full heart.
And s and complete belief in what he's saying.
Foist it upon other people.
At a high price.
'Cause he knows, hey, yeah, this you can go and buy a vacuum cleaner for four forty bucks or six hundred. Guess what? My house, I have a Dyson. It's the best vacuum.
It just is.
And
I'm asking you to pay ten X for what you can get.
You know, anywhere else. Why? And I can tell you what went into it.
the blood, sweat, and tears. My kinda reject this like
Purely rational.
Like the way people like they they they try to analyze business in a rational way, which is weird to me because humans are nothing but irrational.
And they give money for reasons they can't describe.
And some of this like, why would somebody pay, you know?
I I love this this thing that uh you see with like Enzo Ferrari. You guys did a great post about this when you did a Ferrari episode and it showed like the race track, the test track, and they're like
There's a test track.
And then
Literally.
And Zofur's house.
He built the racetrack around his house, right? And so it's like why do people come from all over the world to meet this guy?
Right, and to buy a com buy a car.
That you know.
It's a hundred times, ten times, twenty, thirty times more expensive than just another car that could go fast. There's a story behind it.
Um, and I think that's where like you see the people that love the product so much
They put so much of their life's energy into it.
So then they can explain very clearly
why it's valuable. The reason I'm not trying to be like obnoxious when I ask people if they listen to the podcast, and if they don't, I tell them to take out their phone. I heard this great thing and this is another idea I got from Paul Graham.
We said in the early days of Stripe, they called the collison insulation.
Where they're like, Oh, the other Y C companies like, I'd love to use Stripe and they'd be like, Oh, great, give me your laptop. And they would install it right then.
And so I saw that idea.
Great idea. I'm gonna do the center insulation.
And so I've done this over and over. I don't even know. I probably installed it.
No, five not joking like five hundred times.
Like oh this is gonna be best day you've ever had. You're gonna look back on this day.
Unbelievable what this podcast is gonna do for your career. Here, follow right there. Like I think the James Cameron episode's the best episode I've ever done.
Maybe the Red Bull episode, maybe the chicken fingered episode, but like I can tell you that with a straight face and not feel shameful.
or shameless or whatever the the term is there about doing that because I believe in it.
It took a lot of fucking work to make that.
And I know the lessons are good because that guy told you they're good.
What is it about the Red Bull?
story
Um it's so unique. It's so different.
So

You you know me well, though, I'm getting hot.
Um
So you know me well enough, it's just like
I'm not like somebody could offer me like come run my company or like pay me more money. Like there's just no way I would do that.
Like I'm not doing there's other ulterior motives for it. And one
Like
If you're really smart.
you can find a way to build a good business is almost anything. It's not what you do, it's how you do it. With Deatrice Metches, it's like
His whole thing one one the story's cra crazy because at the time I did that episode there's no biographies in English. So like this is also what drives me insane. And everything you should be thinking about differentiation. The reason I started a solo podcast.
Right, on history podcast.
Thousand sixteen is because in two thousand sixteen I thought there was way too many
There I can't go interview entrepreneurs. Everybody's already doing that, right? And there's obviously something at interstate is always room for great, right? But I didn't I have this natural
inclination I've had my entire life to like go in the other direction that other people are doing. So I knew it was differentiated.
And
The what I what I love about the the episodes I love the most is like there's not even a book about it. You have to like make the content for the episode. So I had to translate or a friend of mine translated
That biography from German.
So first of all it's like
Oh, good. Like how many people have done an episode on this guy based on his book? Well if you haven't spoken.
None. Right? So and then you you realize the story is just like, you know
He was working for a bunch of CPG companies, traveling to Asia. He's jet logged all the time.
He uh
Finding the Red Bull, which but it's in a different language. It's like fifteen cents or whatever the case is. He's like, Oh this this this works. And there's really no like energy drink category. So he helps create the category and then masters the category and then realizes you you have a lot of like
You really need to raise the price. And then even the way he looked at things, where he's like, Oh, we're a marketing conglomerate, so we're gonna outsource everything else but marketing. It's like everybody's talking about content to commerce and all this other stuff today. It's like this is not nothing is new.
You just haven't read enough history. Like you wanna look at the best content in commerce?
Right there.
And then
What does he do? He optimizes for he did not want to have a board directors. He did not want to be in the public stock market. He didn't want to be answerable to anybody. The guy, I mean the guy wasn't married. Like you just look at it
People will give you hints about what's important to them.
Look, read between the lines.
And you clearly see he doesn't like people telling him what to do. He has a ton of fun. He's also crazy. He likes to like even well to his seventies, he was like taking risky sports, mountain biking. He had he was like flying his own planes, racing his own cars. He was like the Red Bull. Like the the the brand of Red Bull was him.
And then you get to the point where him and his partner, they each own forty nine percent of the company, they pit five hundred thousand dollars in each, then they had a small bank loan and every single thing from the growth from there.
was out of profits. How many people it's such you can bootstrap if me if somebody gave
If me and you have a business right now, right? You're gonna put in half a million, I'll put in half a million, we're gonna get a small bank loan.
You know hard it would be the unlikely outcome that you and I build a business that's worth forty or fifty or sixty billion dollars.
You know how hard that is? How the hell did he do that? There's a great line by Charlie Munger. Well he says one of my favorite ways to uh one of my favorite ways to knowledge is finding an extreme example and asking what the hell happened here.
You know, and in you're like in my case it's like people.
It's like
What?

Austrian guy.
that owns Red Bull that is turning down
His he he turned on multiple offers where he would make twenty billion for his forty nine percent. He's paying himself five hundred to eight hundred million a year.
Uh
He's
So private.
That
He buys the magazine that's trying to write a story about him. Like there's a guy that is trying to write an unauthorized biography of him, goes to his mom's house, Dietrich finds the guy and says, If you don't leave my mom alone, I'm gonna break I'm gonna pay a Russian guy to break your knees, your kneecaps. It's like what is happening here? Who is this person?
And I think that's really important because all it does is like completely pops off the top of your head about what is possible in life.
The reason I'm obsessed with these maniacs on emissions, these super driven people, these the opposite of casual people is'cause it's like they stretch what I believe is possible. Let me give you a perfect example. There's um
I there's this recurring theme on the podcast, it's in all these biographies, and I uh the shorthand I have for this is how bad do you want it?
And I just came across

An example of this with Ken Griffin. The reason did the Ken Griffin episode, even though there's not a biography on him.
I think there's one that's like crappy and it's like two stars on Amazon. So you know, there's people writing it's probably like Chat GPT wrote it or something. Or the old version of Chat GPT. The new version actually the Deep Research can write. Deep research, hey, I use Deep Research every day. It's really good. He he talks about when he was thirty three years old and Ron Bose up.
John Arnold tells a story on Twitter.
And it goes viral on Twitter.
And that's how I found it. That's what sparked me because I keep hearing about Can and I was like
Once that I was like
This is a founders guy, have to do it. And Enron blows up spectacular in 2001. The day it blows up.
Uh can charters.
Uh uh Gulf Stream Jet sends like sixteen people down to Houston.
Interviews every single person.
In
The Enron energy like the commodity business, everyone finds out how they made money, what their competitors were, what worked, what didn't work, right? Then he finds the head trainer, which is John Arnold.
And John Arnold's like uh
Ken's assistant calls.
Uh, Ken wants to talk to you, would you talk to him? It's like, listen, I'm not open for a job right now. I'm trying to close the books.
But I I respect what Ken has built, so I will talk to him.
Okay. I'm headed to Aspen for an event.
Right now.
When I'm back in Houston tell Ken I will take his phone call.
Hangs up.
Sistent calls back a few minutes later. Ken is willing to fly
to where you are. If he flies to Aspen today.
Will you meet with them?
He said, Yeah.
How bad do you want it? And Ken's point that he makes that's I don't think that's in the the the Twitter post, but he tells that same story in the the conversation I would Yale. He goes, I hired all the best people at Enron, and since then we've made about thirty billion dollars trading commodities. How bad do you want it?
Most people like Oh I'll wait till next week.
I'll catch you a couple days. He's like, I'm coming today.
Thirty three years old.
You always see.
The true interest is revealed early.
He was doing stuff like that when when long term capital management blew up in ninety eight, he was thirty years old.
He went and visited those guys. Why what do you want to know?
You guys didn't lose control.

over ninety percent of your equity. How the hell did you keep it after like thirty percent, forty percent, fifty percent?
How is that possible? And then what happened? That was in nineteen ninety eight, he was thirty. In two thousand eight.
When he was forty, he lost fifty percent of his equity. And he says, What I learned from those conversations, I used ten years later to keep Citadel in business. I asked sort of the marketing version of this question, like the nonfiction marketing, like if you believe so deeply in the thing.
it actually becomes easier to to sell the six hundred dollar vacuum versus the forty dollar one. What about on the talent side?
I know you've learned a lot from Brad Jacobs and other people about
the power of hiring the very best people. Everybody says that. Like the best people do it. But they don't do it. So like why don't they do it? What do foun true founders in your in in in your sense of the word
Do differently and it's the same question I asked about marketing, but for talent. Yeah, there's a the great line. I I did this clip in this video called Overpay for Talent because you can't really overpay for talent.
Um and Brad Jacobs in his book, you know, he talks about that over and over again. We me and you went to his house and he talked about he told us like numbers he was paying for talent, like, you know, it it would shock you. Uh Mr. V's video editors, like this twenty two year old, the main kid or twenty two or twenty four year old kid, like if you knew what he paid him, like
You see this over and over again.
Why? Because I the example in in the video is like well
You know.
Did Apple really need next? No, they needed to see jobs. So they paid five hundred they paid half a billion dollars to rehire the guy they shouldn't that they needed.
And he produced, you know, whatever return on that money. Like he they got a deal on getting him back.
Um the reason I think people don't do it is one, I don't think
Everything we describe and I do I think there's like a limit.
So like
The actual application
I guess the the these ideas you can scale down and scale up, but like
There's just not that many talented people in every
Field.
And they they're really hard to find. They take a long term to to to usually convince.
They're usually really, really expensive.
And in many cases.
They're working for themselves. So like they're not like there's not like an abundance of people, but this just happened with um me and you talked about this. Your new editor in chief.
Just wrote that new
Made a at peace.
And how did you find him? You found he wrote
The best
Palmer Lucky and Palmer Lucky's The best profile, period. Yeah, and the and the best and Palmer Lucky's like a he's got a lot of coverage. He does great interviews and everything. He's wildly entertaining, and yet this guy wrote the best piece on him. Jeremy So it's very simple. Jeremy Stern. Thank you.
It's very simple. It's like oh
This is what
Munger told our mutual friend Brent.
He's like how do you find COs? I just find somebody who did a great job at
being a CEO and said do that. But for me
And then Brett's like what about higher for potential and Munger's like
I don't do that.
I don't do that. I just find the great guy and tell him to come over here.
So you just did this, you're like, Hey, that guy's really good. What's the chance that he's only able to write one good
Possible.
Yeah.
Like you don't get that good.
Without there's a skill there.
You know?
And so um
I have gone through I realized I wasn't even taking my own advice because I would use like
All these people when you there's like inside baseball this, like when you see all these podcasts that have all these clips, they're outsourced farms. Yeah, they're they're like they're like all the the pitch is like it's so cheap. And I even use some that my friends recommended and I'm like
These are terrible.
And
I found a guy and we met him together.
And he is really young and really get to his name is Maxim.
Uh he is, in my opinion, one of the best short form editors in the world. Shout out Blake Robbins for
For connecting us. It took me a while, a few months to do this. Only works because he's obsessed with the podcast.
And he was like in the audience and he's predisposed and he's already listening to it anyways.
And I was like
Do that for me.
And then he tells me the price. And the price is like six times.
Six X what other people pay.
And I said.
Done.
Where do I send the wire?
Because
The clips are coming out and
The person that doing your video right now, all these people we meet, they're like these are the best podcast clips.
And then we mean you've talked like
What's the management? There is no management.
Like I I bought your taste.
It's like I know already know you're great because I watch your videos and like this is incredible. It's like hiring Tarantino and be like, I have some feedback for you. No, you should shut up. That's Tarantino. This happens to me where like I get email and the the subject line feedback on the podcast.
Don't even read it. Right in the garbage. You link me to a podcast that you have made.
that is even in the in w like even in the same category
And then I will listen.
But again, you think I'm making it for you, I'm making it for me.
The act of publishing it makes it an act of service, but I made it for me first.
So I can't do what you want me to do'cause I'm not making it for you.
I'm making it for me. I have to be satisfied.
First.
The answer to your question is like one
Even me who
Every single episode is like overpay for talent, find the best people, never ever forget the dynamic range of humans.
You know, uh Steve Jobs says, you know, i the best person is not a hundred times better, or not twice as good. They're a hundred times and thousand times better, which is obviously true. Think about the g the best investors. Like, you know, in that profile you did on Neil Mata.
Like, I don't know, how many other investors in the world are better than him?
It's not ten thousand. Whatever the number is, it's a small number, especially if you you
Say the same age group.
Now what five, two, one? I don't know, but that's the and that's so hard to actually find the person. In this case, it came because somebody else that's really good at spotting talent told me and you about this guy.
And maybe I I probably wouldn't have found him if it wasn't for that.
So these things take a lot of time and then um what I would say is just like
If you're not
You have to act uh actually ask yourself. And I I think having a um I have a
Basic intolerance.
For
Casualness.
For mediocrity.
For
not being completely obsessed with what you're doing.
And so that weeds out most of humanity anyways. And then what I do is like I have this great maximum where it's like
You should limit you should limit the amount of details and then make every detail perfect.
And so for me it's like I don't need a bunch, I don't need anybody to edit, I don't need anybody to make it. The only thing I can't do is I'll never be a video editor like him.
So I can't it's not like I have to go out and hire. I don't want to put myself in a position where my business only works if I find like the fifteen best people in the world.
That's not the game I'm playing. I I love the answers on product, on marketing, and on talent. Maybe the last one is on
Capital.
Is there anything that you've seen the people that you've studied do different or special especially well?
When it comes to attracting the right sources and partnerships with on the capital side specifically, raising money, doing clever deals.
Clever financing.
Is there is there any dimension there that's worth exploring?
This is where I'm starting to get in trouble too.
I talk I have I I literally have no friends that aren't entrepreneurs.
But it just can't talk to anybody that's not an entrepreneur. What I always tell them, they're like, Yeah, I started this company and it's like software company.
And they're like, All right, I gotta go and like raise a bunch of money. I was like
You should take a look at like what Larry Ellison did.
Steve Jobs.
And Bill Gates. You listen to the podcast, right? You told me you listen to those episodes. What did they do?
They raise money?
No, they sold the product. They started selling the product before the product was made.
Well maybe you should go out and see if you can get like other ways to do this.
Um, it's shocking to me how the default is I must go out.
And
convince other people that are not my customers to give me money. And sometimes you have to. Like there's nothing I'm not against, I'm not anti raising money. I'm anti wastefulness.
And
He's like, Listen, man, a lot of these P guys come in and they try to buy you out and everything else is just like, why do you think they want your equity?
Because it's very valuable.
So doesn't mean you can't change
you know, exchange money for equity. Sometimes you have to do it, but you should be very, very careful. And he came up with like think about this. This is what how bad do you want it? And I'm I'm doing the Michael Dell episode. I'm almost positive.
Michael Dell, his initial starter capital for Dell?
Was
A thousand dollars.
I I have to double check'cause I've already listened to the book three times, I've read it, I'm going through it again, so I could my memory. And I'm pretty sure when he went public, he owned like seventy percent of Dell.
It's not my opinion.
I would just go, How does Larry Ellison own so much Warcall?
Like where did the funding come from Microsoft? What about Apple?
Like what did they do?
Like they obviously raise money, they go public, do all this other stuff.
Think about that.
And do you have to do that? This is a really important decision. You should not be casual about what you're doing.
So
Todd Graves.
Chicken finger, right? How many people you're gonna criticize this guy for being put on this earth by God to
Make the world's best chicken fingers and I love them. Fried chicken outside of like I like fried chicken. Like I like it. I don't know what to tell you. I try not to eat it'cause I get fat immediately, but I like fried chicken.
I've eaten a lot of fried chicken. I like his fried chicken. I think it's the best.
So
What did he do?
He's like, listen, I went to a bank. He goes, I it was a the idea for Reason Keynes was a
uh uh paper and business school at L S U.
Uh and he got the
First grade in class.
Which is funny because FedEx, Fred Smith.
Got us. Yeah.
Bad grade.
So night.
Nike, bad grade. Maybe we shouldn't have professors
Judging business plans.
Maybe this is kinda stupid, right?
So
Todd Greggs goes, I bought, he goes to Office Depot, buys a briefcase, you know, the like the little shitty one with like the the zero zero zero like I put the brief So I I buy a$99 suit, I buy a briefcase, I put the I put the the the business school paper that I got a bad grade on in the in the briefcase, and I go down to the bank and they're like
Dude, we're not you're not in a pos you're not in a position to
uh loan you money and one of the reasons was you have no experience. They told him you should work in the industry for ten years, even though he'd already worked through it in college. But you want to just make chicken fingers where your industry is going in the opposite direction.
And they s this is where I got really pissed off in the episode. I was induced into a state of rage. They said
Todd, obviously this is not gonna work out because look what McDonald's is doing. They're going after variety. There's salads, there's all this other stuff on the menu, there's milkshakes, you just have chicken fingers. Like what is wrong with you? And my point was like that shame on that.

Again, nothing we're doing is new.
Go back to nineteen forty eight.
Look up this guy named Harry Snyder.
who founded this company called In and Out.
All Todd Graves did, if you look at what he did, he's like, Oh, I'll just do In N Out, but for chicken fingers. It's the exact same story.
Except.
He started earlier and is now
Uh, I think when when Harry Snyder passed away he only had like seventeen restaurants and and you know, Todd Stone charger's company's got eight hundred and something.
And so like
The uh that part like really uh frustrated me'cause it's like
There's already historical equivalent of
This
succeeding beyond like your wallest streams. In and out probably wasn't an LSU, the guy didn't know, maybe there was no internet back then, whatever the case is. Like th I'm not like being overly harsh on this. So then what's Todd left to do? You're not gonna loan me any money.
What do I do? I guess I'll just give up.
That's what most people just stop.
Right there. Oh, okay, I will work for ten years. These guys are right. I'm some young stupid college kid.
They're they're in fancy suits and a nice office, like they know what they're talking about.
So then what does he do? He's like, Okay.
Uh these oil companies.
Higher boilmakers.
And
What happens is
If a refinery goes down
Every day that thing is down, that's very expensive for them. So boilermakers come through and they either like update the equipment or fix the equipment. And so if you're willing to work ninety five hour weeks in grotesque environments in physical f labor,
You can make so much money working a hundred hours a week for like five weeks at a time. Then he meets it so he makes a ton of money, takes up a couple of thous tens of thousands of dollars doing that. Then one of the boilermakers named Wild Bill, who's also one of his investors, which I love, he got the money from
Make saving money from boilermaking, right?
Then he got
Uh then they tell him hey, you can go up
And
Do commercial fishing in Alaska.
At the time Todd is doing this.
I'm like much younger watching Deadliest Catch. He was on like the show is being filmed when he's doing this. And so yeah, you may fall overboard and die, but if you don't
You're gonna make, you know, fifty grand in in two months as a twenty year old kid. And he lived in a tent.
He lived in a tent, he ate nothing but ramen noodles. He risked his life
Right?
On the boat. He went to the boilermaker.
Then he comes back.
The boilermakers give him a little bit of money. Like you keep talking about chicken fingers, you're fucking crazy. I will give you a little bit of money. Then he he had a bookie. He guess what? My bookie has a lot of cash. His a cash business. This guy doesn't have a bank account. So then he invested.
And that's how he got the money to do his first store.
And then from there he's like, Okay, well, how do I do store two, store three, store four? The first twenty eight stores after this was financed in a very unique way, which he says, This worked out for me. Do not do what I'm about to tell you to do. They're all geographically concentrated in Louisiana.
Right.
He called them angel investors. They're not angel investors. So he goes So I I I I have two chickens finger stores. I'm gonna open the third. I don't have any money.
Right? Banks are still not giving me money.
Right?
But these things start cash flowing right away. So I go to you. I go dude
Give me two hundred grand.
I'll give you a one page contract.
Personally liable.
Not the company personally liable.
And I will pay guarantee a fifteen percent return.
on this two hundred grand.
And you say
Okay.
You don't
You give me the two hundred grand.
I put the 200 grand in the bank. The bank now will lend me like oh you have$200,000 of equity. I'll lend you$800 grand on top of that million dollar, whatever the number is on top of that.
And I start the store.
And what happens? Well, day one, there's gonna be some people buying chicken. So cash flow happens right away.
I pay my rent thirty days later, I pay payroll two days uh two weeks later, and I pay all my supplies net you know, net thirty or net sixty. And so it works as long as people come in and start buying chicken fingers. And so he's like, I was rolling. I was

He gets the
All the way up to twenty eight stores doing this.
Leverage to the
Yeah, exactly.
Leverage to the hilts.
And then Hurricane Katrina comes to and goes Woop.
There goes all of your restaurants.
And so then he's like, Oh my God, I'm going to lose everything.
And then what happens?
He turns the the pandemic, he does this and this is what great entrepreneurs and investors do. They took you they find
Opportunity and catastrophe.
Right.
And so
He's like, listen guys.
We have to open up.
One, you guys want a paycheck, right? Two
No every single other restaurant in Louisiana is closed, so people need to eat.
Uh three, if we don't, I'm done. There's nothing left like I I I need to make money. He winds up being the first restaurant to open after Hurricane Katrina. He had like a n he had like ninety days.
Something like sixty to ninety days to himself.
So what happens? You live in Louisiana, maybe you never tried racing case.
Guess what?
Now you try it now. Oh, this is really good. And now
You're a fan and you tell other people and it keeps compounding. Same thing with the pandemic. What happened? All the restaurants are closed.
But the government said food is essential, right? An essential business, but it has to be in the drive thru.
He went from doing something like
I don't know, let's say two billion or let's say a billion dollars a year in two thousand twenty to like five in by and like two thousand twenty four.
Yeah, so to taking taking you know something that's terrible and turning it into an actual opportunity.
So that's like pretty creative way to finance something. And his whole point is just like yeah, or you could go
How bad do you want it? How bad do you want it?
And just think through what you're doing because his whole point was he saw a bunch of other people, they they raised money, and we know people that this has happened to.
They don't have control.
And his his thing was he was not optimizing for money. He was if it's your dream
The first thing the most important thing is survival.
It's to make sure that they can't take your company away from you.
Steve Jobs.
People
Founders talk about this all now, like this is something new.
Steve Jobs said in like the eighties, victory in our industry is spelled survival.
You go back and talk about like people think like
He was
Unbelievable he was pay he said his line it says something like you pay attention to the nickels'cause the nickels turn into quarters.
And he says when in when he's like at the beginning of Apple, we paid attention to all of our costs, we watched what we were doing, we we bought intelligently. He would call up his suppliers and haggle the hell out of them and obviously he's the b probably the best husband ever lived. And then when he started next, he's like oh
I didn't do anymore.
'Cause I'm rich and I don't need to and have Ross Perot wr writing fat checks and I'm on I'm famous and he stopped doing it.
He's like, we gotta get back to the basics. We have to be very creative and and very pay attention to this. We started our conversation talking about focus.
To conclude it, can you just define
After all this study, what
The the word founder.
means too.
That's a good question. I don't know if I ever thought about it. Um the way I
So my definition for entrepreneur has always been like somebody has ideas and does them.
And I think what I the reason I'm interested, um
We we have this thing called like uh shorthand called like founder mentality.
And
There's the reason I I I profile not only just like founders, but investors and athletes and filmmakers and people like Napoleon and Churchill.
Um is because
What they did is like they saw something missing in the world. It could be leadership and like you think about Vincent Churchill post World War or during World War Two.
It could be, you know
non profit
It could be a product, it could be a company, it could be a service, and they're like this thing should exist.
And like, I'm going to make it.
Come to life.
And the way I'm going to do this is like I'm going to direct my energy on
creating this thing from nothing.
and making it real. And I I I still think like
Again.
I you know this'cause like
You have small kids.
And
Especially when they're really small.
They're they have a different kind of intelligence.
Where
Everything to them was a wonder. And so they're constantly like, Why is that? Why is that? My son's in this this age right now. Just why, why, why, why, why.
And sometimes it can get frustrating, but it's also like
Kinda brilliant. It's like on the mid whip meme, it's like all the way to the left, but like really actually brilliant.
And I I don't think I ever get over.
The fact that you can t have an idea that
you don't even know where it comes from. Maybe it comes from your subconscious, maybe it comes from a dream, maybe it comes from God, whatever you call it.
And that idea just starts as an idea.
Oh.
And then
that goes from your mind into real life.
And the the version of this is like it's a little disorienting.
To this day.
Where
I just sat in a room by myself reading.
And then I spoke into a microphone not knowing it was gonna happen and like that made something real.
That act of creation.
And it's the thing I'm most proud of, the fact that like I I was talking to a friend of mine, we went on a walk uh right before I flew up here to to meet you.
And I was like
I think the thing I'm most proud of in my life is like I grinded for five and a half years with like no visible like uh progress, and I didn't give up.
And like I don't know if I'd do that today.
I don't know if I would do that today.
And I look back, I'm like, I you were making a lot of stupid decisions along this way, but like that is a really good decision.
That you just something told you.
You can't explain.
You didn't predict that like just keep going.
Like you will figure it out. You have the self of belief.
Keep going.
It's a wonderful closing thought.
Uh so cool to think about everything you've done the last
I guess eight years now, nine years now. I love how you close your thing by saying, you know, four hundred books down, a thousand to go, there's always a thousand to go.
Wonderful closing sentiment. Thanks for doing this with me.
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