Why Balance Is the Enemy of Greatness | David Senra

sometimes i think i should shut up and not say the things i say on podcast david senator david center the guy's name is david sen he's got a podcast called founders to even get on founder podcast you have to be so good at your job somebody wrote a book about that's an insane me high it's almost like it's an obsession it is una addictive i've known you now for i don't know four or five years i think you are crazier now anywhere i'm not balanced i don't think i can be balanced i don't think i want to be balanced i want to be the best in the world at what i do people like oh ten thousand hours i'm where you've past that like way past that so of course i've changed i'm not doing this to stay the same the difference between the world's greatest and pretty good it's not a little bit it's not twenty percent better it's like thousand times better and that is hard to grasp mediocrity is invisible until a passion shows up exposes it i become into for people that are casual and i don't even know why i'm like that i think i was lying to myself for a while that i don't need anybody else i wanted professional success to say i was born in the wrong environment and i will prove to you though i am not like the rest of these people it's almost like a revenge for being born are you a happy person i don't think you're happy i i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to all like a day's zone a so you have to look this guy el kip c you have to see what he looks like he looks more like a gaze than a human being because the thing about world class athletes and runners is you see them like when they're exerting themselves and like wearing they're like running gear or whatever and so they like yeah it looks amazing but then you seem real clothes and you're like oh my god that person is so much skin ear has so much less body fat than the average show how on earth are these two human beings both human beings like a normal person versus el and so so he runs barrel and i think like two zero one which just like four thirty six i think for the mild crazy fast and what we were saying was the difference between the world's greatest or the best ever was and pretty good you know it's not a little bit better it's not twenty percent better it's like ten times better or a hundred ten thousand or a thousand times better and that is hard to grasp do you agree yeah i mean you asked me you're like what don't i think we right before we start recording you saw thought i was doing like what are you thinking about i was like thinking about how this looks and he's just like but does that matter i was like everything matters like we're trying to be the best in the world at what we're doing so like we have to take everything very very seriously i think the only thing i'm obsessed with there's actually one of the best pieces of advice i ever got that i won't shut up about and i think about literally probably every day now is this idea of constant refinement of association that my friend jared kushner told me and jared is unbelievably honest there's a great line in i just finished we were talking upstairs i just finished reading bruce greens stan auto automatically and there's a great line he talks about his friendship that he has with jimmy iv and he's like you want jimmy in the room because he'll tell you the truth like everywhere around bruce's is kissing his ass and like jimmy just like this sucks or this is great he like trust his judgment and jared like that too where he's just like if he's your friend and he likes you he's very kind but he was like hey that what you're doing is not good in you this person is not good enough for you be careful with this and so this concert from your association is important because as you keep getting better at what you do you get access to people that are great at what they do too and there's a lot of commonality in them and then once you're exposed to that i always had this line that mediocrity is invisible until passion shows up pick and exposes it i become into for like people that are casual with the way they push their work are the the friends they choose to hang out with are just anything that is not them striving for and i don't even know why i'm like that it's just i have to be i want to be i have to be the best in the world at what i'm doing and so that like that or did you become like that because you've studied four hundred biographies of greatness that's a great question i don't know michael del has is great line in his where you know he at the time he's nineteen years old he's in his dorm room at the university of texas he's got a thousand dollars and he's like i'm gonna compete with ibm that is delusional ibm at the time is the most value valuable company in the world was the first company didn't even know i had to go back in and research this the first company to get to a hundred billion dollar market cap in history was ibm and you have this kid it's like i'm gonna compete head to head with them and the next line when he's talking about this is was a little full of myself at nineteen sure i was i think you have to be to do anything special so i always had this like deep just like delusional self confidence and like default optimism that like i focus on something i will figure it out i will figure out how to do this but i also think it's impossible like i've obviously changed i've been doing the other i've been doing founders i guess for almost ten years like i think i'm gonna feel like i don't know four hundred and seven of these books by far that's hundreds of thousands of pages that is people are like oh ten thousand hours i'm way past that so of course i've changed i'm not doing this to stay the same well i've known you now for i don't know four or five years and i've listened to you for longer than that i think you are crazier now than you were i think you are more obsessed now than you were and sometimes i think i should shut up and not say the things i say on podcast podcasts because i like i don't like having filter i don't like having two different sides of me it makes me fundamentally uncomfortable and so i then i'm like you know i'm not gonna hold back i'm just gonna say this i just did this when i went on tim ferris podcast and i talked about tim didn't tell me what we're gonna talk about other than he told my team he's like please tell david not to curse so much that's what i told you five years ago and i don't think they came from tim i think they came from tim's team and i think we did we we accomplished that goal but he started asking questions and i like hesitate for a half a second in my mind or half a minute i'm like man i should not say this stuff i don't this is gonna be bad and i just let it go and since then i was just on the phone i i wanna say who i was talking to but it's a founder of a public company he's relatively young wildly successful and he was just like hey i listened to your tim ferris interview and he's like i know exactly what you're talking about because like i went through that too and you hear that over and over again so here's your question like am i crazier is that the term that you use her like more intense i think i was lying to myself for a while and if you look at episode two twenty two of founders podcast says ed and in parenthesis it says my personal blueprint and genius i am not a genius like whatever he directed to his talents too he was gonna succeed because he's legitimate like i think fundamental like genius and what i liked about him was like he was like a real balanced person you would love him yeah because you are like this and i think you're truly like this we a lot of our conversations like this we're like she bounded his professional life he was very successful i'll give like a quick tl of his life he was the person invented like how to count cards in blackjack he was a math mathematician and he was out a g mathematician our professor for long time he wrote a book called beat the dealer which tells you how to count cards like the nineteen sixty to old millions of copies he started the first quantitative hedge fund of all time he was like one of the first investors in berkshire hour hathaway he meets warren buffett when they're both in the thirties and he gets them the car and he's like that guy's gonna be the richest person in the world one day so and he invented the world's first handheld wearable computer with claude shannon and who's the father of information there in another genius it's just like how did one guy do all of this like the force gum of like finance that's the great way to think about it and so but he was also like he came from real mess up family he got like weight lifting and fit like taking care of his health before there's was anything like body building and he said an hour the way he's figured this out and he was in college time he's like well the way i think about this and at every hour that i spent in the gym working on my health now is one less day in the hospital when i'm eighty or ninety he went on tim ferris show and you look at them and i show pictures so like how old do you think guys is look like always he's like sixty he's like ninety two or ninety or however world old he is so anyways his whole thing was like i wanna a balance life he would work you know nine to five thereabouts then he would spend time on his health his work his family and then he'd liked have fun and he was much more balanced life and then he also did something which was fascinating where once he made more money than he could ever spend in his lifetime he also didn't like to travel like you he has this beautiful house in newport california and he still every time travels was good this a downgrade like why did i leave my house once he started had enough money that he didn't need more money he stopped trading time for money and he had like you know these are like layoffs ups oh i can make thirty million dollars on you know investing this oil thing or whatever the case is he's just like whoa what's the point and so for a long time because by that time i'd read you know two hundred of these books and i was like oh he's like an outlier an outlier like most of these people are like just singular ob obsessed their work and so for a long time like i think i was lying to myself like yeah i wanna balance life and it's just like no i'm not balanced i don't think i can be balanced i don't think i want to be balanced i want to be the best in the world at what i do and again i'd narrowly define that i'm not trying to you know i think that the narrow definition is important and that's kind what i think about all the day that's what kind of drives me that is when i feel comfortable and maybe i'll change in the future but like i am fundamentally uncomfortable not working towards some kind of professional goal alright i read a ton i would say almost a book a week and the reason i read so much is because my philosophy towards reading is i wanna see what work for the winners that i love and what strategies they use and then i wanna see what mistakes were did they all make where were the common flaws that they all had and i just wanna to avoid that and so hubspot asked me to put together a list of the books that have changed my life so far in two thousand twenty five and i did that so i listed out seven books that made a meaningful difference in my life and i explained what the differences that they had on me or what actions i took because of the book and then also i listed out my very particular ways of reading because i'm pretty strategic about how i read and how i read so much and how i remember what i read and things like that and so i put this together in a very simple guide it's seven books that had a huge impact on my life and you can scan the qr code below if you wanna read it or there's a link you guys know what to do there's a link in the description just go ahead and click it and you'll see the guide that i made so it's the seven books that had a massive change in my life this year so far and then also how i'm able to read so much so check it out below so i read a lot i read one to four bucks a month mostly history you do more or the same how do you become sensitive enough when you read something to know that that is a point that is worth remembering because there's been so many times where i've read something and i will forget it right i'm reading like i've read i love the american revolution and then like i'll read reread books something i didn't even remember about this for that you do a really good job at recall you've done it many times here and you do a really good job bringing the point of the story that actually matter and i think this is an important lesson to learn of how do you be sensitive enough to see what is important and what isn't and then ted use that to change your life i like a big believer in intuition and just like at this like constant refinement of your own taste like i'm sure i did not have that skill in september two thousand sixteen when it started nearly to the degree that i have it now right before kobe bryant died he was asked this question about like what what he had sees in like steph curry that it makes him such a like formidable competitor and he's like there's like a calm he does kobe describing steph curry he's like there's like a calm about him and he's like and when you match this like calm and belief in what his skill set is with his intense desire and work ethic to practice and to get better like that is a very dangerous combination and what he was referring to was steph says people always ask me what i think about when i'm shooting and he goes absolutely nothing and so i don't overthink this i read the book if something it's all intuition it's dis lines is speaking to me this is jumping out to me i'm going to underline it and i'm going to jot down on notes exactly what came to my mind right now do not overthink this just like you know this stuff over because like we see steph hitting a crazy three pointer in the olympics like to win you know i why why wish i clip the other day we don't see the million other times he was alone shooting the three i always say the public praises people for what they practice in private the other thing about this taste what i realized is when i talk to a lot of other people are really great at what they do other entrepreneurs people that want to be great at what they do but aren't yet i was like the they're trying to figure like why am not breaking through is like because you don't you're not actually interested in this like you are lying to yourself i am intensely interested in this you guys ask my partner rob we go through this all the time with the new show about like hey let's get this person and like that person's like a big name and still give a shit and i'm like but this is the way i think about my work k like the only way i'm gonna do this for the rest of my life is if i'm doing it for the right reasons and so i cannot over complicate things mu has this line where you says something about like the hardest thing to do is to remember why you said i'll doing what you're doing it to keep things simple right and to do that for a very long time so the think about it is like founders is the books that i'm intensely interested in reading right not just the book i think is gonna be a lot of downloads there's been times where like i was read this book i read it i hate that guy and i throw the book across literally throw the book across the i was like i'm not i don't wanna send a a week in that guy's mind founders is the the books i'm intensely interested in wanting to read and enjoy reading and the new show david center is the people i'm intensely interested in having conversations with i was on the phone with somebody yesterday and i text her and i was like i want you to fly to malibu and i wanna do a show with you and she's like are you out of your mind are you crazy because she feels because of the guest list has been like kind of just below yeah she i was like and she sent me this funny meme where it's like where like big birds is sitting at like a table and like everybody else is like this just like a normal office and got big bird and she put like daniel and michael dell and all these other people have had and then her name on this i'm like that's not that's not i interested it i am intensely interested in people that have singular careers they are doing what they do in a way that is completely natural authentic to them and they they're kinda of have like a inner scorecard so like they're willing to make decisions that may not make sense to you but make sense to them have you read the inner game of tennis no but everybody tells me so listen to so i think it's a i think your guy's name is tim gallo the idea is that he wrote it in the nineteen sixties or maybe seventies he was a tennis instructor and so he was like trying to get his students to be better tennis players and he developed this idea of self one and self too self one is a a critic and so when you would hit a ball you'd say shit that was horrible i gotta move my hand this way i gotta do this self too is someone who doesn't listen to the brain but listens to the body and you'd be like well i practice this a thousand times just like steph curry like i don't need to criticize myself and said gonna be objective and i'm gonna be like let's try moving our hand just a little bit this way and let's just see what happens that one that didn't that hit i would just did that didn't achieve the desired outcome what would happen if i just do this and you just kinda feel it and so the idea here is that you listen to your your body more than your brain and it's very similar to what you're saying of like being simple and being falling following intuition and in fact this book i think bill gates is the most recent person to write the forward of the book it's it was launched in the seventies and they've rep published it and it's now it's like a business cult classic and the idea here is exactly what you're describing which is like you you keep things very simple you practice a lot and you don't criticize yourself and you don't like think too hard about what we'll do well the criticism i mean you have talked about this a lot like in private like we both we're likely driven to fix and to achieve financial success and a lot of times that doesn't come from a positive place yeah the way that i see it a lot of times is basically i to build businesses because i feel like i have i'm not good enough and also i try to fix myself because you have to fix your personality in order to build a great company mine is not that i don't think i'm good enough there is like i this is gonna be weird one of my favorite movies is movie called tombstone so it's like one of my favorite and i watched it when i was kid over and over again and there's like a line where doc holiday white are legitimately true friends and wyatt earth is about to go and have a a abdul like a life and death tool he's gotta meet this guy named johnny ringo and he's like we both have guns one of us is gonna survive and the other person is going to die this is about to happen to me and he's talking to doc holiday about like what drives johnny ringo to do what he does and the the the the performance by val is incredible and he's just like people like that have a giant hole in their heart then no matter what they do they can't fill and so then why i asked a follow questions like what does he want and he goes revenge revenge for what for revenge for being born and i think what drives me if you get into like how i think about it is like i wanted professional success to say i was born in the wrong environment and i will prove to you like i am not like the rest of these people i know i knew i that which i was like six like i felt very different for a long time and i was like and i'm going to i'm gonna do this for myself but you're also going to see that i'm not going to wind up like these people there is a it's almost like a revenge for being born in the environment that i was that like drives now the self criticism you could be myself criticism for a long time and you see this a lot of high performers is like constantly negative like overt overly negative and what i've now changed to is it's like that drove me right to work all the time to try to find a craft that you can be really good at that has already happened so that was useful for back then is it still useful to this day and this is where brad jacobs like who is i think the third person on the new show i i've thought i've talked to him about this a lot you know like guys this is the the benefit of meeting these people know he has more years of experiences on entrepreneur career then i've been alive the amount of information they can transfer to you in a hour long conversation fifteen minute conversation in a sentence is not you don't you're not capable of doing unless you have this like hard earned wisdom from experience and i'm reading his second book right now which i don't even think it's out and so much of it is about him ref framing negative thoughts into positive ways and the way he does this because his he realized that when i was just negative beating myself up i was not as effective i thought that was a tool and it wasn't a tool and so what i'm basically what i've been thinking about a lot lately is just like man that served me back that that negative inter monologue it doesn't serve me now i would say like learning is not memorizing information learning changing your behavior yeah but that's the the hard part because in general people don't change you know rubber green has great called human and he's like in general assume most people won't change yeah most people i'm not trying to be most people yeah but you're but where you still have that in us where like you have to fight inertia and that's and that's quite hard yeah we we were talking upstairs this bruce because you're a bruce greens fan and his auto i would highly were recommend people go watch this movie called deliver me from nowhere i think it is i thought it was gonna be a bio of bruce greens that's not what it was it was about a guy that had an unbelievably tumultuous childhood that funneled that pain into an unbelievable work ethic to get him what he thought he wanted most in the world which is being a rockstar star and then right after he hits that after you know years and years of struggle he cl himself into deep depression and what he realizes is like he can't form he's so his childhood was so messed up it did not give him the ability to form stable loving relationships with women and what he desperately wanted was i he wanted a stable relationship he wanted to have kids because he wanted to raise his kids and break the chain that his parents did to him and yet what he would do he would freak out he'd like he fallen love with a woman whatever of the case was and then he'd like something's wrong with her she can't if she loves me i am un unbelievable yeah so therefore i'm going to hurt this person he would run away and then he start dating somebody else and he would go through this over and over and over again right until the point where like he he has to go on up seeing a therapist he finds he basically is like hey my life is going to be miserable i'm going to be world famous i'm going to be wealthy i'm gonna have a job i love and i'm going to be depressed and miserable and the the crazy thing about the book the book is six hundred pages long half the time you're like this guy is the first half of the book is about his love for his work his work ethic as you you think you see where it's going and then this curve all happens in his life where he's like life is more important than work what bruce was figuring out is that every human wants like relationships whether it's a romantic relationship or a true friend or something somebody understands you that you feel like do you can like do life together and i now have like my friend group is crazy because of like how high quality they are in all the domains like all areas of their life and that was like oh my god it's not that i was like didn't like didn't wanna let people in or i didn't like other humans it's like i didn't have access to this before and so like almost every single one of my new friends have come from the podcast and in some cases they've become like best friends people that i've spent years getting to know and like spend hours and hours talking to and so that's where was like oh like this is actually really important to me relationships are really important me in a way that i didn't understand and maybe i was like lying to myself about this and so that was like a a huge learning for me and then the reason i bring this up for the bruce thing is because he's messing up at something he deeply desires yet he's smart enough to realize hey what are the tools that i need to fix this because if i don't fix this i'm gonna have another thirty years or in his case forty years of my life where i'm going to be miserable so it's like changed his behavior that means he learned you're not learning if you didn't change your behavior today's episode is brought to you by hubspot did you know that most businesses only use twenty percent of their data that's like reading a book but then tearing out four fifth of the pages point is you miss a lot and unless you're using hubspot the customer platform that gives you access to the data you need to grow your business the insights that are trapped in emails call logs transcripts all that unstructured data makes all the difference because when you know more you grow more and so if you wanna read the whole book instead of just reading part of it visit hubspot dot com you know what's it's crazy i when i every i'm in your podcast i have envy of the people not because of their success but because like particularly like bruce but there's a lot of people who found their passion very early on in life and i don't know if that's luck what it is but i think that that's like the all whenever i listen to founders and i and now the david show i think like how crazy is it like we were talking about music i i whenever i go to concerts and like if it's a band that i've love for years held green day for years billy joe will play a song that he wrote when he was fifteen and i'm like how fortunate are you that you were able to create stuff at the age of fifteen that's still relevant to you in your fifties or sixties and so i get like like one of the my favorite one of my favorite ones you've done i didn't like this guy but what's the lizard sonic guy's name oh yeah do so basically for for the elicit this guy like started like a sung conglomerate at this a monopoly and it's eighty or hundred billion dollar company and try to pass it on to his sons and trying to make get a family down to seat but there's a ton of like bad shit that he's done in his life with family and and he seems like a pretty like angry generally angry he's was like an orphan yeah like this is what i mean he had a lot of darkness but he never dealt with it where i just gave you an example bruce is was like no i'm not going he double it at the end i think at the end of the episode you're like he was like the thing that i wish i did differently was how i treated my children yeah but on the episode i said i don't believe him right and that's what you said but what i do envy of him and many of the people is that they found their passion early i i could see it that but like i was thirty two when i found like early do i really yes bruce was fifteen kobe o'brien was like a learning but you the leonardo i think leonardo do was what seventeen yeah thirty two weeks yeah but the fact that you find it in the first place this is why i you asked like what are you doing why are you taking like you didn't say like why you taking everything seriously it's like that is what i'm i understand how rare it is for somebody to be able to make a living doing something that they love to do this is why i hate like we talked about the fact that we don't really read twitter that much to you and i i hate like when i see people just like engagement farming and they're like the worst piece of advice you could ever have is like work on what you're passionate about and they're like instead i'd like start a trash hauling business and i'm just like no man like it's the best thing in the world and it's excessively rare and if you find it you should do everything in your possible impossible to like hold on to it and to not mess it up is a piece of advice i got from from michael dell and he told me he was like tell me crazy stories this is before we record the podcast together we spent five hours talking and he told me he's just like most entrepreneurs sabotage themselves right you're not taken out by like a competitor like you you you do something where like you're having success and then like you i always say like you the worst thing you could do is like you go to sleep on a win you wake up with a loss right jimmy iv one of the things i learned from jimmy he he's in this documentary just wanna hear doctor is called the defiant ones he also had this like crazy fifty year career is like the importance of actually having a full life with crazy experiences and so like he did this up episode rick rubin two years ago just did another episode of reference rooms podcast i i think it was two thousand twenty it was the best single podcast episode i listened to in two thousand twenty three and it's just like i want that i i now you wanna be really great at what i but i was like i want to have a a very full life so jimmy was kind enough when he did a founders episode on on him he said like a thousand people texted it to him and he invited me to his house and one of the pieces of ice again he's seventy two maybe seventy five only it's pray seventy two guy has more knowledge you know practical knowledge is pinky than i have in my entire body and he's like most people cannot handle success and the advice that he's been around super talented people and these some people people who were legit geniuses and they destroy their lives i'm not interested in me it's successful for a year for five years for ten years i wanna i don't wanna i wanna be this to decide i'm gonna stop doing this and so his whole thing was there's like basically four things that he sees for ways that people do this the most ruin their success they they are successful they're talented and they destroy themselves yeah what are the the the first one was drugs pills or hair heroin and all this stuff i don't do any drugs that's like can having me you see the eddie murphy documentary no we keeps telling me about oh it was so good dude and one of the main things was you know he was famous since he was sixteen he was on snl i think when he was eighteen and you know did all those these movies is was twenty one he was like i've never done drugs and he's like that's one of the main one of the main reasons why i am what am so his he's gonna be number three on this list which we'll get to in a minute about what could destroy you and he he wasn't destroyed by it but he has a he's addicted to something else which would we get to number two alcohol like just like could destroy your life you know i had winter to dinner last night with a friend and like i had a go glass of soccer like but i didn't get drunk it was like fine right three women they just like they attract the wrong kind of women they fall in love with the wrong kind of women they let the wrong women in around them like they're like the what's the pet patriots coach bill v yes you see what it's he's doing now do he's saying like a twenty year old oh yeah man she calls the shots okay that well it's exactly what we can describing no in case it gets a lot darker there's like just it can distract you there's just you you have to you want high quality people around you in every single domain friends high quality people people who work with high quality people the people you date you want high quality people like you just want high quality people it's like what's it's the most important decision you make in your life is the people that you let around you which i see people are way too casual about this and i could be really really ruthless in this domain and then the fourth one is mega man on the reason i say eddie murphy because like he's like dated every single person and he's got like ten kids i think he's got a bunch of different baby mama again he's still living his life he wants to do but he clearly likes that number three so number four is just mega you start to think that you're successful because of you and not the work that you put in and you start to believe you you have like you're like a god and like everybody should you know praise you and you just completely become dis associated from reality and this is why i say like it's very dangerous especially to like do numbers driven thing like i talked to founders all the time i'm like oh like tell me what your company like i just wanna be the first you know i wanna build a trillion dollar company i wanna be the first the fastest company to a hundred million arr i'm like you know like no of none of issues crazy that's no no issue great much for you out that that's bullshit because when i talk to ramp the ramp founders are amazing they're like the best the best they said our goal is to get to a billion dollar in valuation much that was not their primary goal their primary goal they said that's what the goal i mean he here's he's like i think it'd be cool if we could do that oh that's different that's no different i'm saying you the reason for your existence the reason what you're doing these people are telling me i'm only starting this company so i can hit a certain financial number that's completely different that's not what he said yeah yeah that's not what they i was wasn't i there with you that i recorded with them and and he he repeats this all the time it's like that's like a a a cool thing who's like i thought it'd be cool if we get to a billion in no evaluation i don't i don't know if i heard that episode but like there's he said it a bunch okay their experience with par beforehand was giving the insight into the founding story of ramp so that's a long story but my point being is like a hugely skeptical if you're there's still kinda external metric that i will only be happy if i hit that metric or that is the reason that i'm doing this where mind is just like i want to make things that are proud of that i think are good in like i could put out and there like good into the world and i don't confuse like when we were just upstairs and you're like that guy sitting next to us so like i don't confuse with somebody saying hey i like what you do like that's the perfect way to say you like what i do you might like me as a person if we knew each other we probably get along before have the same interest but never confuse that they don't like you it's the work and if once you stop putting in the work everything else goes away that is how the meg they just think like i'm so talented i just show up i just everything i touched turns to gold i don't have to practice i don't have to put any effort and everything's gonna work out and then they also you know treat people essentially not as people if you had to teach someone who is nineteen how to find their life's work based off of talking of reading about four people and not talking to dozens of sick hundreds of successful entrepreneurs what would you say is the the exercises that they should do my problem is i think at that age i wouldn't take in anybody's advice and i think i'm only now the last few years like been open to letting other people like mold my mind what would you say the fact that they're asking the question like there's just a great line where it's like twenty one year old kid comes up to mo art it's like i wanna know how to write symphony and she says you're too young and the guy that was asking most other the question it's just like yeah but you wrote sin when you were fourteen it's like yeah but i didn't go around asking people how to do it there's something in there where you feel somebody else has the answer that doesn't mean you shouldn't ask vice be very clear here i don't think i there's anything magical i would have to say that would put them on the other path you you need to spend a lot of time thinking about what you actually you believe a lot of people just lie to themselves take over and over and over again and his long conversation last night and the conversation started was like what's the lie that you're telling yourself and we went back and forth with me and this other person for a while about this my lie i'll just tell you right now which again i'm before sharing too much publicly this is like that i don't need anybody else that's a lot you to think that not that's alive and telling myself for a very long time which again has happened and i learned that because of the experience of i'm having the the relationships i have like realizing that like you're you're doing that because it's a defense mechanism not because it's actually true and so for this would be like take the time like what you actually want and that's very hard to to be truthful about and the one way that i found it is just like i just follow like i have un uncomfortable curiosity about things i cannot tell you why i like to read and so like when i first started my first podcast i was like oh like it'd be cool if i could like build a business in a life where i just get to read all the time which sounds ridiculous but it actually worked and then you just follow this and then now to the point where like we recorded this conversation with todd graves who's one of the one of the people i wanted to meet the most which people sounds crazy even and i'm like he's like what did he it's like he sells chicken fingers and they're like what why do you wanna mean i was like because he grind himself first of all he's been doing his business for thirty years started out built the first store by hand he had no money went to crazy risk to find a financing because of no venture capital and no one would give money he had to like risk his life on a on a boat sailing off fishing off alaska he worked as a boiler maker he was like highly leveraged and almost went out of business he did all these crazy things because he just found he had this chicken finger dream that's what he calls it and he's like i have to do the chicken finger dream i can't explain why it again he's not external looking for external violation i'm going to do this everybody's like an idiot eight you can't do that it hasn't changed his menu in thirty years so we fly a bad rouge the conversation is incredible we record for two out two two hours two and half hours two hours and then we spend another two and a half hours one on one together after was he any different because he's people and he also listens to podcast so he understand who i am like it's just very this is what i'm like i don't i don't make media i'm building relationships she might be a top ten person i've listened to on your podcast yeah he he's incredible and so this is the point about following the curiosity going back to the nineteen year old i go back to the airport and i call sam hi and he picks up and i go i'm in big trouble and he goes what's going on i go i am already wildly addicted to having these conversations he go i i have never done ecstasy but this is how i feel right now i am like i am wired i am like high as a kite because i had this guy again he's got three decades of experience he had nine hundred and fifteen stores the company's worth over twenty billion dollars ounce ninety percent it he's growing faster and near thirty than it ever has in this history he still has trouble sleeping because he can't wait to wake up and get back to work for the next day and so you just get like you get this download of information and energy from him dad like just made me a fork who would be on your board of advisors would he be on one of them how many people do i get six i have to name them yeah living her dead either let me do dead just because that would give me some time to think about living and i think like i i don't know if i wanna answer that and honestly but i i would have to dead you know rockefeller fell built the greatest company ever created i would i think is one of the few ty cocoon of in terms of like un impeach character and like amazing success i think he's the best debatable and un impeach camp derek okay impeach not the right way word because he screwed up a he did lie on the record of bunch of times but in general i think he was a he's a ethical honest person got a little hands towards the end of his life let's just put it that way i remember i collected he was a hundred i collect scare rock biographies i have made my own there's i have one at my house having that episode it's seventeen hundred pages long it's in a big binder he was a weirdo when he was like ninety and he was like giving people nickel a shit that's yep that's fine great he undeniable one of the best businesses ever created charlie mu told me to my face that he thinks rockefeller created the best business in history yeah okay mu would have to be on it because he's dead unfortunately now i think he's the wisest person i've ever studied if i can only like emulate learn from one person to be him edwin land found who's founder polaroid patron saint at founder podcast he was steve jobs hero his whole thing he's got a lot of things that lot of personal models he he invented the instant photography the entire industry then mono the industry it's like one of the last great american technology companies that were never like his patents were never what did he die i've i've never heard of him the nineties he met when he was in his seventies steve jobs met edwin land when steve was like twenty five edwin lane was like seventy two i think and he said steve jobs said that spending time with it was like visiting a shrine this is hell a lot i get to meet like crazy people in the world right i actually had lunch with a friend yesterday and she told me something fascinating she just like you need to like take a minute to think about what's going on in your life and the fact that that you have this ridiculously sick life because of the people you have like access to you have ever write this up down like a journal no this is like i think i've would i i think one of the reasons i wanted to do the bruce episodes because i think i'm also i like run from my past i don't like thinking about it like there's just all kinds of other stuff going on and so i spent time him yesterday with a seventy one year old guy it looks like he's gonna do his first ever podcast interview with me he just sold his company for sixty billion dollars and in an hour he transferred like more knowledge to me than i would weeks speaking like a young star founder this is like it's just unbelievable of that so edwin land i felt did this exact same thing for steep jobs and steve jobs like would such a copy he pat an apple off off of off of polo and a lot of people don't understand that like to the point where we're like you can go and walk back and watch steve's product demonstrations and the table and chairs that are on that same thing the exact same ones that i went land polaroid you're not you this is people don't actually see if you don't have if you're if you're not studying history you don't have this like basis of historical knowledge you head you actually don't know you're looking at like i saw something different when i saw that video then somebody didn't study history does it's like very very valuable and this is like we're wasting time doing dumb shit like watching short form videos all day you being obsessed with the news following acts like this stuff is garbage this is like read books and talk to really amazing people and try to like apply what you're learning from both to experience to be a better human and then the better human human you're other better humans will then open up to you and then this is like this virtuous cycle you have three more so rockefeller mu land obviously steve jobs steve jobs built you know most successful consumer product for all time i will say but i atlanta took two ideas from him he he had a per his personal motto is don't do anything someone else can do i think that's different demands differentiation when you listen to my podcast they are very weird founder there's not like you can read books and have a solo podcast you're not gonna make it like that it's a very weird thing even the way i'm doing the new show was like this guy interview weird i'm not interviewing a goddamn person i am having conversations what you're hearing on the show is exactly what you would hear if we weren't recording this this is the stuff i have the idea these all these guys this been on the show we besides dice this so far list listen to stuff fuck i you think first of all a lot of the early listeners for the new show come from founders right and some of mess i get they're like yeah but like you're like talking too much and like you interrupt and you do all this other stuff like you should do it the way this guy does we just did four hundred episodes of people that build lives in phenomenal careers by being differentiated and now you're like no no they'll be differentiated go do it like this other guy the differentiation i have compared to other podcast that wanna talk to excessively successful people business is they have a red four hundred biographies about greatest entrepreneurs like i have i spent time with daniel ak all the time i just saw michael dough again last week i promise you they don't want me to not talk that is not what they want they listen to the show and so this idea for every land it's like don't do anything someone else could do that is a very very simple sentence and a very profound insight if you actually apply it most people are so scared to be different because your recall so good i wasn't born with that it's work it's ten years of reading and then re reread and then like building my own database and then like i've done all kinds of crazy shit that know other their podcast do because you know like i talked to other podcast protesters and i ask all kinds of questions it's like i was like you were blessed with phenomenal memory no i forget everything all the time i don't forget something and if i read it fifteen times i was up in your room and i took a photo of your book you had the brad jacobs of booked yeah i was i just wanna see what he's under underlying i was i just wanna see like his thinking you underlined so much stuff get something many notes in there yeah so but this is because again like i also love what i and if you love what you do you're going to do things there for not for financial reasons you do it because you want it to be great like i'm am killing myself over this edit right now the the the episode that i'm working right now is probably four days late and it's i still don't have it and like i feel i'm uncomfortable right now but i know that's a good feeling because like when i get on the other side that this happened i did this episode called how elon works i think it's the most downloaded episode of founders by far and i remember talking to a friend because i was working in malibu and i was like it's just not ready like that i can't like i am struggling like i if it's was supposed to be out on sunday it's not coming out but the the thing that i realized like no one's gonna remember if it came out four or five days late they're gonna remember if it was great or not and spending that extra time and being confused is like a good signal it means that a care and then i'm trying and i will find my path like my way there so i think that's really important so let's go back to the other thing about edwin i'm real quick he also has this great line they said this is where i said i was lying to myself about wanting a balanced life he says there's a rule they i don't teach you at harvard which he knows because he jumped at a harvard twice he goes the rules they don't shoot you harvard that anything worth of doing is worth doing to excess i can't home myself like i have to take things as far as they can go that's why i can't do many things so i essentially can just do podcast podcasts i could take her health i could do podcast podcasts and i could build relationships that is essentially all my twenty four hours a day that's all i have i can't do anything else so edwin land steve jobs rockefeller mu two other dead people i don't think i need the other two i like fewer deeper fewer deeper relationships i kinda i tend to talk to like the same people over and over again you know being public figures you could talk to a thousand people a year if you wanted to i find that like i want people i want genuinely know people who they authenticity are i want them to know who am and then like i wanna skip all the bullshit and i wanna get right to like the actual stuff that we wanna talk about i wanna talk about the your relationships you have with women i wanna talk about like the guilt that you have being on the road all time and the fact that your dad i wanna talk about the stuff that you lied to everybody else about like this is the stuff the only stuff mentioned i cannot have like superficial conversations like i remember one time this guy reach out he was a billionaire and he's like i'd love to talk to was like sure and then he's like a sit i got like looped in with his assistant don't even have an assistance i do everything myself so like besides i guess the new show and i have a whole squad that you see but i remember getting the calendar invite and it was like thirty minutes i'm like like not gonna get started in thirty minutes like and i was like this isn't gonna work like tell me when you have like more time like but i'm not gonna talk you for thirty minutes alright let's take quick break because i gotta tell you a story let me tell you about the first time i tried to run payroll for my team i was using a traditional bank and you know the type it's got a jan interface it's built like a two thousand and two tax form and it was open only during business hours and i hit send in froze they flagged the transaction they locked my account they put me on hold for forty five minutes and then they told me i gotta visit my local branch and that was the day i started looking for a new banking solution after asking a few founders what they were using i found out about mercury and so now my payroll is two clicks i can wire money i can pay invoices i can reimburse the team all from one clean dashboard that's why i use it for all of my companies and so do two hundred thousand other startup founders and so if you're looking at to level up your banking head to mercury dot com and apply in minutes mercury is a financial technology company not a bank bank the services are provided through choice financial group call them m a and evolve bank trust members fdic what do you think would be the the biggest regret of the of all the people that you've talked to what would be the top three biggest regrets that they've had i i this is where it's like with these kind of people i don't necessarily believe them that their regrets like so sam walton he's writing his auto automotive as he's he knows he's dying he's got cancel all of his bodies in in immense pain he took out some of it took so the last time he ever had in life and he's such a distilled but he learned from his like fifty sixty year career and i think it's one of the best books easily top five you know entrepreneur book of all time and it's like such a gift to future generation entrepreneurs that he did that with his last time and he he said that you know he missed out a lot of stuff like he was working all the time he's like a fairly he calls himself a fairly overactive fellow yeah well that's a that's that's one way to put it to sam but like that you're you're just a conqueror you're you're an insane person in a good way he's trying to do something you know that he thought was was good and he's like you know if i had to be honest though like yeah i missed out on seeing you know parts of my kids lives like i was working a lot but he's like if i did it all again i would do it the exact same way and i think a lot of people feel that way and it gets to in their life and then they're like there i think it's just natural natural to be nostalgic and to think oh what i would would i changed but like even buffett says in in snowball whatever he did to draw to to like push his wife away his first wife i would go back he says i would go back and like do it differently maybe i don't know like i think he did exactly what he wanted to do maybe in that case he's he's right we was like i was like truly in love with this woman and i messed that up i could see that being like a true regret i think a lot of these people have a hard time assessing like their own regrets accurately this is great book how to get rich have you with that one felix dennis episode one twenty nine yes what of my favorite books of all time because his writing is really good it's the best he's i compare him i he's like a if mick ja and richard branson had a baby his writing is the best and it's one of the very few books that's tactical and written by a billionaire and so he he the reason it's a good book because he was dying he was a dying of cancer i think he died when he was sixty or something and he said if i could live life all over again i would accumulate fifty million dollars as fast as i can hopefully by the age of thirty five and i know it's been the rest of my life riding poetry yes and the reason i believe him is he spent the last ten years of his life retired writing books and poetry and his film philanthropic issue or thing was planting force he loved love trees he's very strange he also like said in the he's like i've spent a hundred million dollars on horrors crack a cocaine cocaine over a decade i was gonna bring that up where like this is this is it was he he he was a crack he was a crack was crack he was a a crack head right around here actually in this neighborhood i believe him because he got to five hundred to eight hundred million like he got way yeah but this is like in the year two thousand and two so like even more yeah yeah and so you read that book and again this is why like i spent so much time with these older people because there's like a certain like you don't know yourself as well when you're younger you're still on the rise and so you're incentivized to like put on a show it's such like you're not being truthful and you can't let the world actually see how you like what you believe about certain things and especially in like this entrepreneurial because ecosystem of your end like mostly these powder are just straight up lying so they can raise more money like it's really gross and disgusting this is my whole thing i am fundamentally if i am like being if i'm being dishonest about something or if or have like different sides of me i don't like that i need to reconcile that way so much more value out of listening from old people than i have ring twitter or whatever it might be because they're willing to tell you the truth well and it's also because once you get past a certain level and that level honestly is pretty small but like once you get past a certain level the analogy that i heard recently was really good it was like i'm no i'm i'm i'm the captain of a boat and i'm not trying to fix the engine but steer the shit and so i don't want i don't necessarily need tactics right now i just need tell me how to live like a good life and a good life is a variety of things but like i need to know about what the definition of a life worth living is not how to make money or whatever i don't know whatever the tactics are and so i've gotten so much more value so my friend know ke got this channel on youtube where he interviews like eighty year olds and mostly like entrepreneurs i've gotten so much more value out of that you see this if you can't interview them you at least you can pick up like felix dennis book where how many people are gonna be honest about that is a crazy thing to admit to that i spent ten million year for ten years a hundred million dollars on prostitutes and coke didn't died he his prostitute girlfriend was living with him well this again like i'm sure i can't imagine the the std this guy has or had and doing coke and drinking in nightclubs close because you're like nightclubs close i think i remember correctly yeah like in the eighties is like you don't wanna do that like what are you doing like it's going to shorten your life and some people wanna dig there's a great line in bush auto where he's like one some people's five years is worth more than other people's fifty you know also so like some people just have to burn bright and like they're going to that that is like their destiny that's what they're going to do i want to like have a very interesting life and i want to succeed decade after decade after decade when you make it any money in the first five years back then so there's a long story but like there was the podcast advertising is not like how it is now which is like way more advanced and like you can sell your own deals independently on so at that time there was like these they call them podcast networks but then i'm i guess they're not there wasn't a network podcast they would just sell ads for you and so i just remember we're reaching out to one of them and they're like we would love to to like sell ads for years so like you need fifty thousand downloads per episode what did you have fifteen hundred the number they they said i was like fifty thousand i like it it seemed like such like i will never have that like i it just didn't i couldn't compute to i didn't know what had but a couple thousand or whatever the the number was back then and so then you would like try to do like you could do like affiliate deals like remember audible scaled on podcast podcasts people don't understand that the size of businesses you can build on the back of podcast it's to this day and now i don't even talk about this public anymore because like i think this take them model like my business has made a lot of money via podcasting because i promoted my company hampton on there and there's just a million examples that people don't even know like i've collect all these cases hardest part is that it like podcast podcasts are like the most challenging to grow but they're the most sticky i think of all the mediums oprah understood that the the the intensity of a pair of a legitimate para social relationship back in the eighties way before like nothing we're doing is you had built in distribution right you hooked up at the network and that was and there was only sixty channels i did an episode on that that might be three thirty two i might be wrong on that episode but the the key there and like let me just tell you her insight and i'll tell you what she figured out how to monetize it such a a huge way her key insight was you know she would have like brad pitt on her show like these a list celebrities and she's like oh i have something different because the way my audience responds to like a movie store is not the way they respond to me and so like they're like brad oh my god you're your hand i love your movie right like oprah it's nice to see you and already oprah come over for lunch come over for dinner when people walk up to me on the street they like get right into it like i think they know you look in many cases as they do they know like what i'm into and like what i'm you know intensely interested in and then oprah thing just to close that real quick first also i think people have vastly underestimate the importance of frequency which is like another thesis i'm about to try to prove here whereas she's in your house one hour a day five days a week her the intensity of the success of her business and the intensity of the the perishable we much more diminished if she was doing it once week think that's very important second thing they should realize is that the at the time this is all you know television the most the most profitable show on tv at this time was local news right because it's like cost nothing to make and you can sell advertisers like i wanna sell my car in charlotte more targeted that huge target you know and what she realized realizes is like if you have oprah coming into being the lead in from four to five to your five o'clock news right she's gonna bump up your rating your nielsen rating but i i forgot what the number is let's say three and for every one nielsen rating your local news would make like another five million a year so let's say you don't have oprah you just lost on fifteen million dollars so if you if oprah says oh i'll sign with you you have to pay me five of that i'm making up the numbers you have to pay me five of that fifteen you're gonna say yeah so what i i couldn't figure out how to sell enough ads i'll close this real quick because i've talked about this on the podcast too i had found this socialist podcast called chap trap that was selling they did not run ads because they were not capitalists right so they thought it was you know immoral and they were using patreon at the time to sell subscriptions to podcast and the patreon api is public and there a website called graph patreon and they were the top of the list and i found this and they had twenty five thousand people or twenty let's call twenty thousand people paying them at least five dollars a month and i'm like oh there's a business model right there and their business model simple you can listen to every other episode for free if you want the other episode you're not getting you had to pay five bucks a month and so i was like well this is like information for business people for business would of course pay for this and there's actually a story here and so but i sold it too cheap it was like a hundred dollars a year ten dollars a month and then i ground to like a grind to like a couple thousands so it's was like you're making like dentist money or something like that was the way i think about it but then i ain't twenty four a grand ain't dentist money no you're making hundreds of thousands severe you you i think you said two thousand a month you got no no annual subscribers had like a couple thousand like okay three thousand four thousand something like that so that'd be like four hundred grand or whatever the number the number is right but then let me then i also problem like you idiot i'm trying to send this he's like your biggest asset you have is your back catalog and you have a big giant do not enter sign in front of your biggest asset he's like i've been trying to send it to people and it's so good that i you had to buy gift descriptions and so he's like i feel like nine hundred dollars this a week sending your episode to my nine friends i have to pay a hundred dollars every wanna send somebody's a friend my friend sam i hi you he was spending like two to three thousand or four thousand a year because like this is too good was just buying it for everybody he's the one that told patrick about it which has obviously changed my life from there and so then here's another thing which i didn't understand that podcasts are not all all is not that it appears from the outside this is a and a lesson from rockefeller where he realizes that one of his advantages was that not everybody there's posted rates on how much it's gonna cost to to ship a barrel oil over the railroad that posted rate is a lie yes so you gets rebate yes for the foundation of his empire and so what i realized and i remember hi he calls me one day and he goes hey where are you i go i'm in the hampton he's like what are you doing there i go this guy dm me and we talked on the phone and i really liked him and he has his giant house in hampton he's like will you come speak to my company off site and sam like he's paying you for that and i go yeah of course he goes how much and i go x amount and he goes and i he's paying me x amount and then he put me in this crazy house or this crazy hotel we're like the room service is like a three star michelin the restaurant downstairs there's only one restaurant like i'm room service like a michelin star restaurant and then i go to check it even though i'm not paying for it and i see he's paying and i it's like three thousand dollars a night or something like that and so i was like ads this place is incredible it's beautiful and you know and we just went over like basic numbers and sam goes you have got to stop selling things he goes you have one of the most price insensitive audiences in the world you cannot sell something for a hundred dollars a year just like they would have paid ten thousand because like it's relative to their wealth and so like this just happened when you you said the book that you saw upstairs in that book brad jacobs who now become a friend of mine sent me an early copy of the book he did not tell me i mean that book he just said here's the book tell me if you like it i'm reading the book and it says at the end for his new company i not not even man i think it's on a page seventy six if i remember correctly he's like most of the investors in my new company which is now multi multi billion dollar company are repeat investors however two of my top twenty shareholders did not know who i was they discovered me because i was profile on david's sun founders podcast and i'm like that's crazy and i knew i know the two people because those two people also told me and they told brad that means brad raised seven hundred and fifty million dollars from my audience from people that didn't know he existed before i did the episode on his book so that was sam's points he's like you have the most one of most price sensitive audiences in the world you cannot sell things or a hundred dollar this guy and the speech wasn't the speech we go his whole team at his hampton towels he was like thirty of us and he just wanted like shoot the shit in front of them for like thirty minutes and pay me unbelievable amount of money dude this is like that i told ben wilson i so i i found i i've been the history buffer twenty years and i i love ben and i from ben's podcast how to take over the world and i was he sent me the graph i think when i found him maybe he was doing a hundred downloads an episode i was like ben what's gonna happen in the future is you're gonna become sort of like a guru but not in that type of way where because you've consumed all that this is before ai because you've consumed all this history knowledge billionaires is gonna pay you money to help them predict the future by not repeating the past i was like that could be like the business model and it was like hard to understand out at the time but it's selling your time kinda sucks but that's like the joy of reading history it's basically it's like sort of education that's wrapped in entertainment that's why i love it so much do you ever use newspapers dot com i bought description i don't think i've ever gone on you have to use it it's so fun because the problem with biographies and like listening to your podcast is you're telling me these stories when i already know the ending and it's so much better to go back so for example you could read about like dan gilbert and he's just like one of the greatest when it comes to being an entrepreneur and you can read about them and watch interviews but you know that he was successful you already know the outcome of the story and so it's really fun to go back i use new newspapers like i come all the time because i go and find articles in the eighties when they wouldn't and i'll find his first profile like the very first time in newspaper wrote about them i'm like what were they saying about him right then in there or how are they disrespect them or did they like could they spot it or like could see there's vision history like what were people saying about them than in there because because i was in san francisco starting i moved to san francisco when i was twenty one and there's a bunch of like people that are baller now and i'm like i knew that guy when we were nothing i did not see that i did not know that he had that in him or this person i thought was gonna be the shit they were nothing and so it kinda becomes hard to like predict who's gonna be i mean obviously angel investing would be a lot easier if this were the case this is why i say like the only filter i trust like time is the best filter and so that's why i can gravitate towards people that were successful for many decades didn't finish the so like if you think you asked me the living board of directors yeah i think this is a good segue until like what you were just talking about where it's like it would probably be a lot of the people that have had on the new david center show so far so we dell the fur the first spot would go to daniel ec for sure for sure there he was cool because he everyone the shark who's that successful but he had a soft side that i liked he is like swedish buddha i don't know how to describe him he is unbelievably philosophical and he's changed my life in so many different ways i can't believe he's that way at such a young age too and that's the way like we're close in age but he is like so much wiser than i am and i've spent a bunch of time with him and i would say it's the the he's taught me a lot like he he's another guy that will call you on your shit in a very polite way though yeah he's he's great so like he the reason i started doing video the reason i'm doing the new show two's because of him and his whole thing was just like we were having a this crazy dinner this for dinner in new york he's just like why aren't you doing video and i was like i'm not doing this for like fame i'm a very private person i don't wanna ever begin recognized in public and he's just like a lot more people know what i look like than what you look like he goes i got recognized in the gym this morning you know what they do they come over and say hey i love spotify thanks for building it and then they go about their ways and he's just like you i'm para me say she's like he knew i was like obsessed he gave me great advice he's like you're easy to understand so therefore you're easy to help because all you care about is podcasting and so it's very easy for me to help you because i you're a wise line he's this is what i mean if i only had one board of directors it's probably him he and gave you the podcast still story about how he advise da to take the jab of uber and and he was like he tells us amazing story he was like da you know i think he should take this job and da was saying like you know somebody nominated me to like run uber and dana was like yeah you seem like you're been complacent this and that and then he like talks about how he convinced him basically take a chap and then he later tells the store he's like i was someone that nominated you he didn't even tell he was like i dominated you this is the important part for somebody to say that to you're you seem complacent that looks like you're criticizing that looks like you're attacking this is why you have to get over don't listen to random people but if that person genuinely cares about you you have to be able this is something i struggle with like you're this is he he didn't curse he's just like essentially my para phrase is like you're lying just bullshit like get over like he said something where like getting on like i'm i'm str the fence i can't remember the exact words but essentially just like this is the business you've chosen and the fact of the matter is pie podcasts to have video grow a lot faster than podcast podcasts that don't he he got he gets interviews multiple times people ask asking what to say your podcast is he says founders like the he's like he genuinely believes it's good for the world so me not doing video means less people see it yeah for sort of like less impact a horse dealer fighting the fact that ford is around now yeah and it's just like what are you doing like so get off the fence and then then mean pressures at this center too we get in the car after that i'm we're gonna do video do wanna do it either i know neither of us wanna to do it but that's why my point is like you have to be smart enough to change your behavior when you reacting to new information and so this also leads us to really well like my obsession now founders will always always be gonna because nervous stop reading but like like i'm spending a lot of time most of my time will be on david's etcetera is we get in the car i'm going back to patrick's house to to spend the night at his house and he's been pushing me to to to record podcasts and do more what he called interviews at the time and he did for years and was like no no was house you say patrick and we get in the car with the driver and he's like you absolutely have to start recording these conversations that you're having he goes i just spoke he goes i spoke two percent time daniel spoke forty nine percent of time you spoke the other forty hundred percent of time he goes i have known him for four years you got more out of him in four hours and i have in four years nobody can speak to the soul of the founder like you can in the world you have to start recording these conversations and that is the push i was like oh that's conversation different like i can't interview anyway like i like that might be interesting might there could be a differentiation there oh you ever gonna monetize us in a different way than normal media ways ads and subscription no i don't think i'll ever do subscription again because i think that you're only get amount of has ads yeah i think the power of media is like it's free and readily accessible and therefore it can compound the word miles business is a model for how much influence you have i don't well we'll see i have some other thoughts on there that i will keep to myself i think i have an earned secrets so there's one of my favorite tweets this is what i will say like you you mentioned like taking out interesting ideas of the books and how do you do that or whatever the case is and maybe sometimes my interpretation may be different other peoples i remember reading cable cowboy which is supposed to be a biography of john malone right and you know i was like oh like he is just the person that invented the word eb and he has all this ways to finance and he's focused on cash phone there's all these other takeaways that i've heard other people describe that book that's not the main takeaway for me fact is like most industries default into like some kind of like all oli oli and yeah in the cable industry i think there's like eight like main players and you know the top two are bigger and number six is a little smaller where the case was and what's was fascinating is he's like he's one of the eight yet all the other players that are especially competitors like go to him to like learn about like their industry this in this brand new industry that they are the ones essentially building the foundation the one that has now grown crazy in the last like fifty sixty years where the cases is and so one of the important importance for me where i would like disagree but some of the stuff i can't say publicly is like i saw this tweet one time and it says i think one of the most interesting ways to or one of one the ways to have the most interesting careers is to find an earned secret and exploit the hell out of it for decades and this tweet was talking about mark leonard who used to work in vc from costco software saying hey these vertical market software business they are shitty for vc but if i they're great if i put it in a conglomerate and then everything that he did so i think you started out number to say fifty million eighty million and grind it to like eighty billion whatever the number is and so he had that in secret vms bad for vc good for this other way let me just do that and he explored the hell out of it for three decades i think because i've strive to collect more information about podcasting almost anybody else i think i have earned secrets that there i don't think there is any limit to what the the the size or the the performance of the business no and all the great ones like you we were talking about oprah the other day like there there there is the breakthroughs don't particularly have like a blueprint where you're like and we are also talking about how like the people who are number one and certain things are literally a hundred ton better than number two so i i buy into that i'm jay z has a line if i'm gonna make it to billie i can't take the same path and so i'll be very eager to see what you what you're gonna do i hate advertising in most cases i ran an advertising business when you realize rely solely on advertising i i hated it but if you can make money in ways where i own bits of companies that i love to promote or if you do it in some interesting way then it becomes good but the traditional form of advertising i think it's a pain in the ass business model that only captures a fraction the value that you create and so i'll be very eager to see how you will change that and here's the thing i'm very comfortable like putting a lot more value into the world that debt than i capture and i just think i'm gonna capture more than like if you go back somebody asked me my friend at lunch yesterday today asked me it's like what would like the twenty five year old version of you think of this i like i don't even know if i can think in those terms it it's like already wildly like exceeded just very happy like where i'm at and like what i'm doing and i know that i are you a happy person i would just driving no happy with the way my work is going are you happy person i'm not don't think you're happy i think this is again why why is daniel acting number one on my on my board of directors i i already mentioned one of them like he's pushed me in a certain direction another thing that he's taught me is it's like you get around them and you realize like you don't have any ceilings do those people are really rare i've been around a handful of them it it is contagious and i'm always curious i'm like who gave you that this is the key this is where constant refinement of association people hear that like great advice they don't actually do it so a few people will do it this is i'm very interested in being one of those very few i think about this i take this very seriously so i don't think i'm daniel's your question another idea that i got from daniel which is on the first episode of davis center urge people should listen to if they haven't and they've have listened to they should watch it again i'm going to do a founder episode based on the transcript of the conversation that i had to him because there's so many good ideas in there and i'm like i i we print out was like i know sixty pages seventy pages or something like that like it's crazy it's like a little it's like a miniature book so impact over in his whole thing he's just like you don't optimize for happiness you to authorize for impact which is exactly device he gave da for uber the device that he takes for himself and like i am very happy if you saw this goes back to like i don't need to capture i don't need to be let's say if it i don't know whatever the number of value out into the world i only capture one percent of it or two percent of it it's like man there's other things that are so like if you go and like you can go to the website right now and send me a message which i might have to stop reading because it's just like all these messages coming in all day most them are positive but if you would just go through like my emails my dms the the contact form it's just like these people are like you changed my life and it's not me changing their life they are like basically you have all these people are like hey i really appreciate what you're doing i want you to know that like it has an impact on my life this guy chased me down at the airport today day and he's just like you don't understand like the the difference of my life pre and post like discovering your work and so it's like okay that's not a i can't take to the bank and and you know deposit that but that's not there there's a very real tangible benefit from and then this is the crazy thing so the james dyson episode we just did right god bless rob moore took forty five emails back and forth to to get that scheduled it is like this relentless but everybody knew like he was my number one guy that but his first book is episode twenty i bought a dyson because of you exactly they exactly there you go twenty five two hundred three hundred episode four hundred it's all about the same book the book that changed my life the book that encouraged me to persevere when i had no reason persevere fear there was nothing that i was saying that like this is gonna be success other than just relentless of belief that i'm going to figure this out if i focus on it and i wanted it to happen i will make it happen like i feel like i have a very intense will to change like what i want and to happen in life to happen and so the crazy thing i've been talking about this guy for seven years it was seven years in the making that app when we start doing the previews for the episode so show the pictures some of the trailers some of the clips then the episode comes out strangers i've never met are like i'm unbelievably happy for you i cannot i know saw that was going how crazy i was invested into it so like what is that that that is me capturing value and this idea we're like oh i have to hit a certain number i'm not gonna be happy that that's not wise i'm trying i'm not trying to be smart i'm trying to be consistently and not stupid and if i can be consistently not stupid over a long period of time i think that's gonna result in me being wise and that's what i'm after that was a good ending alright that's it that's about i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a goal less travel never looking back alright my friends i have a new podcast for you guys to check out it's called content is profit and it's hosted by luis and ph ka after years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like red bull and orange theory fitness luis and fans are on a mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue in each episode you're gonna hear from top entrepreneurs and creators and you're gonna hear him share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit so you can check out content is profit wherever you get your