Cameron
Appearances
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And then the other thing I was thinking about, too, in response to this, because I've done probably like, I don't know, like eight podcasts on Jeff. I think he's incredible. And so I read everything about him. And I'm like, this is kind of hypocritical. Like, you're protesting now because, you know, he's got a trillion or two trillion dollar market cap. Right.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
But there was no protest in front of his house after the dot-com bust when the stock goes from $180 to $6. You could have bought a share of Amazon stock at that time for $5.96. You weren't out in front of his house then. And when he had a mass exodus of employees, you weren't saying anything about that. There's a line that... That again, we talk about the fact that it's just a single line.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Like I read all the time, you know, you're not going to read everything. You're not going to remember everything in an entire book, maybe 500 each book. I'll remember a story, a line. Right. And there's a line that I heard Charlie Munger say one time, which he was actually quoting Warren Buffett. And he says, it's not the greed. It's not greed doesn't run the world. Envy. Envy runs the world.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And he's laying up late at night and there's interviews with his wife, which is fantastic because they were married through this whole thing this whole time. They're still married to this day. And she recounts where like she would wake up at like two in the morning and he's just sitting there right wide awake, hands behind his head, looking up at the, at the ceiling, just like can't sleep.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Yeah, his whole point is like, cure yourself of envy. I was like, dude, you're not outside of Jeff Bezos' house because you're trying to fix the broken world. You're envious. It's like, when you hit that line, and then now you start to look at all the interactions you have and the actions of other people, you're like, oh, they're right. Greed doesn't run the world. Envy does.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Yeah. You're the one that introduced me to Chris. I didn't know about Bumstead before I watched your episode with him. I love the question you had for him. You're like, do you think you're a strange dude to be the best in the world at what you are? He's a real soulful dude. Correct. He's very soulful. I thought that was fascinating. I loved his perception because, again, or his perspective rather.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Like, you know, this is somebody who got to literally the best in the world at what you do.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And I love, this is something that's obvious, because one of the complaints that some, very few complaints I get, most of the people listening to the podcast are nerds, right? And I'm talking about history. And it just self-selects for, you have to be kind of a driven, kind of obsessive person to even be into this kind of stuff. And I think, obviously, me and you are both like this as well.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
But they're like, I can tell when sometimes the podcast is not for other people because like, oh, you're not, you're not telling me what to do. And I was just like, because there's no formula. And Chris made the point. He's like, listen, this is how I got there. But there's six other ways. There's 15 other ways. There's like, you could do all, there's no, there's no right way.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
depressed, agonizing over this, like this relentless pursuit of a goal. And so he's the one that said that, that coined the term, you know, excellence is the capacity to take pain. I was like that. And I think by that point I had read like 180 biographies and autobiographies of history, like that's exactly what I see in every single book. There's never a book.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
It's the right way for you.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
I was listening to Michael Dell's autobiography. which is really excellent. The second one, he wrote two, but they're both good. But the second one is the one I was listening to. And for the longest time, I kept talking about the importance of building a life and business as a by-product of that, that's authentic to you.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And then I'm listening to Michael Dell, who's a phenomenal entrepreneur, even when he was like young, like right away, like when he was like 19, he was like making millions and millions of dollars. And so he's running this crazy company in Austin and it's just exploding. And he's still in college. And he winds up recruiting like an older, more experienced, you know, C-suite executive to help him.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And the guy helps him for a few years and he burns out real fast. He's not sleeping. He's gaining weight. And he's like, Michael, I love you, but like, I have to, I have to take a break. I can't do this. I have to like leave the company. And Michael says, felt the opposite. Like he's working all hours of the day.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
He's going to the full limit, but he, what he realized and he put it better than I did. He's like, Oh, the difference was I built a business that was natural to me. This is how I naturally want to spend my time. This is what I'm naturally interested in. This is what I'm naturally obsessed with. This is what I'm natural, what I naturally want my life to be.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
I'm like, natural is a better word than authentic. Yes. And I think what I took away from your conversation with Chris was like, he built a life that was natural to him.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
I actually have an interesting tangent I think you might enjoy. I read a book. So I was obsessed with Arnold Schwarzenegger. I love Arnold. And his autobiography that he wrote when he was 70 called Total Recall is excellent, right? But what's even better is he wrote an autobiography when he was 30 that people don't think of as an autobiography. It's called The Education of a Bodybuilder, right?
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
I would love a weekly Q&A from you.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
The first 110 pages of that book is Arnold telling his life story at 30 and then calling a shot saying, hey, the same principles I just did to give you the best bodybuilder. I'm going to get into movies. I'm going to build a business empire. He just literally calls a shot. And so I read everything and get my hands on. I watch everything with Arnold. And so I thought I read every book about Arnold.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
No life story, no book starts with, hey, this guy had an idea. He did the idea. Everything went well. End of story. It is all like, hey, I have this idea. I want to do something. And it's just one problem, one obstacle.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Then I'm watching that Netflix documentary on him that came out. And they keep interviewing this, his girlfriend that Arnold lived with before he was famous from 21 to 26. And she goes, and it's like author of Arnold and me. I'm like, what? I was like, I ordered the book immediately. And then I read the book. And it's 300 pages of this woman, bless her heart, right?
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
I could have helped her in a minute. Her saying, I don't understand why this outlier of an outlier of an outlier won't just be a normal guy. Yeah. Oh, man. And so the main takeaway from that book was, especially for entrepreneurs, especially for driven people and, you know, people like Chris as well. And I can give you multiple examples in the books as well, like the founder of Four Seasons.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
It's also, it's like for entrepreneurs, you either need a supportive spouse or no spouse at all. Because, like, there is no separation from our work and our lives. And it's not going to work if... Like, you're completely obsessed. The reason me and you get along, the reason I love hanging out with you... We've spent nine hours talking about podcasting in Miami.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Like, because you're a fellow obsessive. And I was like... That's why I flew here. I was like, there's no way I'm recording remotely. I'm coming to, like, give you a hug and to sit down with you. But... You can't, like, imagine your wife, you know, your future wife saying, Chris, don't work so hard on the podcast. Like, oh, it doesn't matter.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Like, that doesn't have to be shot, you know, with a camera that's going to break Spotify's video player. Like, calm down. Like, you don't need to redo the barn. It's just Matthew McConaughey. Like, why does this stuff matter? It's not going to work. You either need a no spouse or a supportive spouse.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And this is where I see so many entrepreneurs, like, fight against this, where their spouse makes them feel guilty. They're attracted to them because they're so driven and obsessed, right?
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
right which is abnormal for the human population you deal with a lot of young men a lot of young men don't they need to get offline and like increase their level of ambition and service to the world right stop thinking about themselves start thinking about other people um and so you're you're attracted to this person because they're so driven then you marry them just like hey i love what you are now be some something please
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And it's essentially emotional and mental and in some cases physical pain to persevere and push through to until they can get to the other side and actually achieve what they're trying to achieve.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
I think what Hormozy did, too, that's smart, that I've seen a few times, because you are going to, you know, these people are obsessed. Like, they're not going to write biographies about normal people. It's not like, hey, this guy had a 9 to 5, and, you know, you just...
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Yeah, pickleball on the weekends and you barbecued and like no one's going to read that book. So by default, you're self-selecting into these very extreme people. And, you know, my entire life outside of spending time with my family is talking to entrepreneurs and hanging out with founders. Like I don't have any friends that aren't founders.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And, like, one thing that you see this conflict between, like, how do I balance work and family? And I think what Hormozy did is, like, he combined, you know, work with Layla. I actually got that idea from two people, from Estee Lauder and Sam Walton. Like, Estee Lauder is one of the greatest entrepreneurs to ever live that no one ever, like, thinks about. They know the company's named after her.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
You know, it's probably $20 million market cap or whatever it is today. Right. But they don't – there's a very hard-to-find autobiography about Estee Lauder when she was still alive, published I think in the 80s. It's one of my favorite books I ever read. If you can get a copy, you can read it in a weekend. And there was a huge conflict between – she's a monster.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
She is a – one of the most driven entrepreneurs ever. And she's like, but I want to also spend time with my sons and my husband. So what do I do? She brings them into the business instantly. So her husband shuts down his business because her business has a lot more potential. He works in there. And then they involve the kids since they were like six.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Can I tell you a funny writer? So I was at a, I do a lot of, well, now I do less of them, but for, for the right people, I'll do like a lot of speaking gigs for like private companies. And you usually like private companies or investment firms. And so I was at one, there was two speakers, me and Tucker Carlson.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And so the CEO of the company that will not be named, I was asking him because I was like, there's no way. Like, I probably charged way too less for it. Like, not enough money for this. So I was like, how much did you pay Tucker? And because, you know, he's a fan of the podcast. Like, I knew I could talk to him like, you know, a friend.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And he goes, well, his writer's a little different than yours. I was like, what do you mean? He goes, he insists that we fly him in and out on our private jet. I was like, I didn't even know I could do that.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
So that is a direct quote from Poor Charlie's Almanac. And it is literally true. In that case, there's this guy named Henry Singleton that I didn't know. I guess I should back up and talk about part of my process, which I think is helpful outside of just making a podcast.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
I really believe like anybody you admire, whatever field, it could be a director, it could be an entrepreneur, it could be an athlete. Find a book about them and read about their life. Like I am an evangelist for reading biographies. I think it's one of the highest value activities that you could have outside spending time on your health with your friends and family.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
I really think people should make it a habit. And so what I do is like, I think Charlie Munger is the wisest person I've ever come across. he's like a hero of mine. I got a chance to meet him. I got to go to his house. It was incredible. But what I'll do is like, I'll read every single book I can find about somebody I, um, admire.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And then I usually find other books about them by going through the bibliography and like books are made out of books. So you, you, anybody usually has one by regressive people referring other people. Yes.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And then not only, so that's not only how you find books to like a hard to find books or books that other people are reading, but inevitably in that book, they all studied history's greatest entrepreneurs, all studied history's greatest entrepreneurs. So they will talk about the people that influenced them.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Yeah, there's no such thing as like an important goal or an audacious goal that comes easily. I think Jeff Bezos has his own way of saying this. And there's this great book called Invent and Wander. And it's the collected writings of Jeff Bezos. So they take his shareholder letters and they take transcripts of his speeches.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And so I'm doing this, going through the same process as described to you for Munger and Buffett. And they keep bringing up this guy named Henry Singleton. I was like, who the hell is Henry Singleton? I've never heard of Henry Singleton. And they say wild stuff like Henry Singleton is the smartest. Charlie Munger says Henry Singleton is the single smartest person I've ever met.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
That Singleton is smarter than Buffett. Buffett says that it's a crime that business schools don't study him. And if he took the top 100 business school students and compared their record for Singleton, he'd blow him out of the water. I'm like, I have to read about this guy. So then you start, there's this book called The Outsiders and I pick it up, I start reading about it.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
I'm like, oh my God, the ideas that I thought where Buffett and Mungers were Singleton. They just applied it to building Berkshire. And then you go, and so then what I do, I go and read everything about Singleton. And then Singleton says, hey, there's this book that changed the trajectory of, he built this conglomerate called Teledyne.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And he goes, there's a book that changed the trajectory of Teledyne. I was reading Alfred Sloan, the CEO of GM's book. And he says, as you're building a business, you need access to financial institutions. So I went out and bought either a bank or an insurance company. I forgot which one he did.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
He's like – and that solved – like that helped Teledyne not only to use the money to invest and keep buying more companies to increase his conglomerate, but literally they made billions of dollars from an idea that was in a $30 history book. And you see this over and over again.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And that's another thing where it's – when I say like all of history's greatest entrepreneurs study history's greatest entrepreneurs. It's really important. What they're doing is they're not trying to copy the what. They're trying to copy the how. They're not trying to build another Teledyne. They're building their version of their business, what they were interested in.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And the greatest example of this is you go back and all the great entrepreneurs can place their work in historical context. So when Steve Jobs is developing the Macintosh, he goes and studies, what did Alexander Graham Bell, how did he market the telephone? Because I feel I just made the telephone of my generation.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And so they're like, oh, there's ideas around marketing this other invention 100 years before my invention that still works to this day. And so that's what I mean. It's like, oh, these ideas, there's ideas with billions in a $30 history book. What about that line between SpaceX and NASA? Oh, so this is nuts.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
So this was in that book, Liftoff, which is really, again, I highly recommend that book because you can, again, read it in a weekend. Some of these books, you know, I don't read, people are like, oh, you must read fast. No, I read pretty damn slow because I'm taking notes. I'm like doing arts and crafts over here. Sorry.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And you really get to understand how he was thinking as he was building Amazon and all the stuff that he's learned. And his whole thing was, you know, I have unrelenting, uncompromising standards for excellence and the talent of the people around me. And if you're coming to work at Amazon, like, I'm not going to bend. You are going to raise to my expectations, my standards.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
I got scissors a ruler a pen I got post-it notes like it takes a long time but you can read that book in a weekend and what they realize is like hey NASA has because it's a government run agency they documented all of their experiments all of their all their their hypothesis all their everything in papers. And you could just download them and read them. Nobody read them.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
So they wind up, I think they said they like cribbed NASA's notes and they got a couple billion dollars of value from like for ideas in the early days of SpaceX. And then you could also do that. There's another line in the book that Elon talks about where this reporter goes, he's flying on Elon's jet after a failed, I think it's like the second failed rocket. And
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Elon's brother's on the jet and he's like watching TV or playing video games and Elon's in the corner reading biographies of all the rocket engineers. Because again, he's like, I want to know what they know so I can, one, take the good ideas and avoid the bad ones. And so this just happens over and over and over again.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Okay, so this might be the most important idea that I've actually internalized and seen play out in the last year of my life. I'm going to go to, there's, I had the ability to, to meet Charlie Munger that I just met and went to his house, had dinner with him.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
The night started out in his library, which is really cool for me because, you know, I love reading and I got to see, I got to see not only like what was in his library, but I also got to see like, I could read biographies the rest of my life and like, I'll never have what he has. And what I mean by that is, he's sitting in front of his bookshelf, right? And I get there.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And first of all, he's like my hero when I mean that. So I, first of all, I'm sitting there and you know, I'm there with two other of my entrepreneur friends and you just start having conversation. They had met him before and I'm in shock. I'm just staring at it. Cause I'm like, that, that's Charlie Munger. Like I watch all the AGM videos. Like that's him. I still watch his speeches.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Like that's him. He's just sitting there. And you know, he's looking at you because he, his eyes were really degenerated. So like he has like the bifocals, but it's not just like, he looks at you like this. He'll look and I'll go like this. Cause he's got to look through the bottom. He's making eye contact with me and I'm looking. And for 10 minutes, I'm just like frozen.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And then my friend Andrew was like, hey, get in here. Start asking him. You're going to waste this. And so what I do, I was like, I don't know what to say. Like I had all these notes. I had made all these things on my Apple notes on my phone. Never looked at my phone once in three hours. And so immediately I just started looking at his shelf behind him. And I started noticing all the books.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Cause again, I find people I admire. And then if they say, Hey, I like this book, I go and read it. So I start asking him questions about all these books. And what I mean that I'll never have what he has. I have to like reread stuff. I have to like study. I have to like practice. Immediately ask him about a book he hasn't read in 25 years.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
He can tell you what the, what the company does, what their revenue was, what, who sold, who, who's partners, who sold it. Like he was a legit genius. Like, absolutely. I don't have whatever brain he has. And anybody at 99 is going to have some level of cognitive decline. Right. You have to somehow imagine him at 35. He would destroy me. He would just like 55, any of that. He would destroy me.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
It is not easy to work here. I'm going to tell you that up front because we're trying to do something that we can tell our grandkids about, that we can be proud to say, this is what granddad did. This is how I spent my life. And he says, he's like, things that you could tell your grandkids about are not meant to be easy.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
So relationships around the world is one of the lessons that he taught us. Cause you know, he, he knew he was not going to lift up. He knew he didn't have that much longer. And so he prioritized meeting with other young, ambitious, like entrepreneurial kind of people. And his whole thing was, we talked a lot about Ben Franklin because he's got a bust. He commissions busts of people he admires.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
So he's Lee Kuan Yew and Ben Franklin. And he's got every biography I've ever seen of Ben Franklin. And his whole thing, he's like, one of the things I learned from Ben Franklin is that no matter your age, go out and seek talented people. If they're peer group, that's fine. But if they're younger and build a relationship with them.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
He talked about how Ben Franklin did that with a young George Washington. Ben Franklin's like 48 years old. When he cold DMs, About the day. Slides in. George, George Washington, who's 21, right? And they build a relationship and they have a relationship their whole life. And then he was describing that. I was like, that sounds like what you did. He's like, that's exactly what I did.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
He's like, I met Buffett. I was 35. Buffett was 28. And we built a seamless web of deserved trust. He goes, everybody knows about us, but there was all these other guys around us that were similar age and similar interests. And we just did deals together. Uh, forever. And most of them had passed on, you know, but by the time I got to meet, uh, but I got to meet Munger.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
But relationships around the world, what you realize is, um, every, like we think of like an organization, like let's say we need, uh, there's something, there's, there's certain, uh, organizations that are important in podcasting. Spotify being the most important one. So we think of Spotify as an organization, but is it an organization?
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Well, inside organizations, there's people and there's people that me and you have relationship with, like Daniel Ek or people on the board or the head of podcasting. So if you need something done, right, because of their personal relationship they have with you, it's a call. It's relationships run the world. And so there's another guy that I got to meet who was one of my heroes.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
This guy named Sam Zell. He also, he was 81 years old when I met him. He passed away, unfortunately, about six months after I got to have lunch with him. And in his autobiography, he mentions, uh, Sam Zell's a legend, you know, one of the best entrepreneurs, investors. He sold, uh, his, uh, the largest real estate company in history for like $38 billion.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Like the guy just could, he fell ass backwards into deals and deals and money. He was just phenomenal. But I got to have a, uh, two hour lunch with him and he's sitting, you know, closer than you are to me. I could ask him whatever I wanted. So I brought up the fact that, um,
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
that I read, he knew I read his autobiography because the way I met him is he got into podcasts and he heard the podcast I did on his autobiography. And he starts listening to a bunch. He goes, hey, can I meet this guy? And so I get a message like, Sam Zell wants to meet you. I thought it was like fake. I was like, yeah, he just doesn't want to meet you. This is ridiculous.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
So I go, Sam, I bought the book that you talked about that changed. Go back to, there's ideas worth 30, I forgot about this. There's ideas worth billions and a $30 history book. When Sam, Sam Zell was making millions of dollars a year when he was in law school. He's an entrepreneur for 61 years and one of the best to ever do it.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And he picked up a book that changed his life when he was in law school. It's the autobiography is a guy named William Zeckendorf. William Zeckendorf is one of the greatest real estate developers to ever live. In that book, he has this idea he calls the Hawaiian technique. And it works in real estate.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And it worked in real estate when Sam Zell used it, but Sam Zell also realized it works in business, buying private businesses, where he says there's components of a building that the land underneath, you can piece it apart. The land is... will be highly valuable to a certain party. You can sell it to the highest bidder there. And then maybe the leases that somebody else prioritizes that.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
So break up the components of the business and sell it to the highest bidder. And the sum of the parts, that's how you make more money, right? And so Sam used that idea, made billions of dollars. He also used it in private business. But- I tell Sam, I go, Sam, I bought Zeckendorf's book. He's like, did you read it? And I go, not yet. And Sam had this, he was famous for his gravelly voice.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
He goes, read it. I was like, okay, Sam Zell tells me to read the book. I immediately read the book. In that book is where it crystallized for me that relationships around the world. Zeckendorf, you know, very wealthy, winds up losing all his money, but at the time very wealthy and didn't,
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
wasn't born wealthy so like very similar to me and you with our background right we don't understand any of this stuff so what he realizes as he climbs through society and he's in new york and he gets more successful and he meets more people and he gets richer what he goes hey you're a normal dude you know how we grew up uh you're at the base of the mountain you can you might be able to see that peak right but what you don't see because you're not climbing the mountain is when you get to the other as you get closer to the peak other peaks starting to appear
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And then – so these are all very influential, rich, very powerful people. And then what you realize is all these mountain peaks are actually connected by little pathways. And you don't have access to those pathways unless you've climbed the mountain.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And he goes, and then if I need something from a Howard Hughes or a Jay Pritzker family, which is a multibillion-dollar Chicago family, or the mayor of New York City because I'm a developer, well, guess what? I'm on a peak too. There's a path right here. Relationships are in the world. And so the advice that they both gave me is like, you need to develop seamless webs of deserved trust.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
I'm surprised Tim said that because if you go back and Steve Jobs is like, obviously what I consider him probably the greatest entrepreneur of all time, just for his, he's got a very unique story. Like there's only, there's really no other founder that if you think about the story of Steve Jobs, he founded Apple twice. And the second time he was alone.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
I love that you said that. There's another maxim. So I try to break everything down to maxims. Like, so everything I'm learning, right? Because I've done, let's see, you probably read 380 biographies, over 100,000 pages, eight years, two months. But like, you can't remember all that stuff. So you have to like, I love what Naval Ravikant said. He's like, I break things down to the maximum level.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
So then they're easy to remember. And then you contextually apply it to your situation.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Well, you can't use it if you can't remember it. Correct. David Ogby has this line where he's like, why do you have to write interesting ads? And you do this phenomenally. I just saw the ad you just did yesterday. Thank you. Because in his response is you can't save souls in an empty church. So then you'll remember, I'll remember, oh, I can't save souls in an empty church.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
If no one reads this or no one, if I want to educate, so I have a, my life's goal is like very simple. I have one simple organization principle is I want to help people learn from history, skills, entrepreneurs, and I want to do that better than anybody else in the world. That's it. So then I can, I remember that that's my principle. And then I look at how I'm spending my time.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Yeah. I want to go back to what you said, though. So my maxim on this is you need to make yourself easy to interface with, okay? And I go back to how we were able to build a relationship. We're in an industry full of second-rate products and second-rate talent. And most people that go to podcasts or podcasters don't want to work. It's not their only thing they do. It's like one of ten.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And what me and you saw in each other immediately was like, oh, this is another me. We may talk about different things. We have different formats, but it's another me. It's so much easier for me to like, I know I listen to your podcast, so I know exactly who you are. And then we can build a relationship real fast. So be easy to interface with the person that did this the best.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And he did it in three words, Steve Jobs, insanely great products. He said, you want to come make insanely great products? Then you come to Apple. If you are passionate about doing this, then come work with me. If you're not interested in it, then remove yourself from my life. And the key thing is where people make mistakes when you go back to relationships around the world. Okay.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
It's very important that you build a seamless web of digital trust. I really do believe these high-end personal networks are the greatest assets in the world. That's not hyperbolic. I literally believe that. You have to make yourself easy to interface with, right? And what people make the mistake of is all these people, right, on these peaks that are connected to these paths,
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And then he winds up coming back, you know, after 12 to 13 years in the wilderness. And he comes back and then goes on the greatest run that we've ever seen. Creates, you know, the most successful consumer product of all time. Sets the foundation for the multi-trillion dollar market cap that Apple has today.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
All day long, I call it gimme gimme. All day long, they wake up and somebody wants something from them. You know, gimme money. Be my customer. Let me pick your brain. Like all this stuff. It's like, no, no. The way you build relationships is doing acts of service. I make myself, the way I'm able to build relationships with these kind of people is really simple.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
I make myself easy to interface with. Why? Because I can point to a body of work. And one, I don't ask for anything, never. I'd never ask for a favor. I don't want to pick your brain. I don't want any money from you. I don't want anything. I just want to give, give, give. And my act of service is the podcast.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
It's like, hey, I spent eight years and two months doing this, hundreds of thousands of hours or whatever the time frame is. And I've condensed it down into 400 hours that you can learn and hopefully be educated and entertained while you're doing other things, while you're on your plane, while you're walking your dog, while you're washing dishes, whatever it is.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And I make myself easy to interface with. It's like, oh, is this a serious person? Well, you've read fucking 400 biographies of entrepreneurs. That seems a little odd. That seems like somebody worth my time. And then the higher up you go, right? Learning from history is a form of leverage. That's another maxim from Charlie Munger. Why is Charlie Munger?
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Charlie Munger is a multi-billionaire, could learn from anybody. Why is he still reading biographies? He could literally pay anybody in the world to tutor him. He's like, this is the best value of my time. And so anybody that builds a very valuable company sees a podcast like Founders or sees somebody like me is like, oh, talking to this guy, a good friend of mine said this the perfect way.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And he runs a multi-billion dollar fund. And he goes, talking to you is like talking to 50 of history's greatest entrepreneurs simultaneously. I made myself easy to interface with and I never asked for anything. I'm not like, oh, you know, can you do this? Can you introduce me to this person? Can you do me this favor? Can you help me raise a fund? Nothing.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And Steve's take on this was the reason that you have to love what you do is because it's so hard and so painful that if you don't, you'll quit. And it's sane. And he goes, why do people quit? Because it's sane. That's the sane thing to do. It's the misfits, the rebels, you know, the people that actually are obsessed with what they're doing that are able to persevere.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
That line is in my favorite book on Buffett and Munger. It's called All I Want to Know is Where I'm Going to Die, So I'll Never Go There. And I thought it was them. So that's funny that you said it's his because I thought it was their quote.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
So again, that line comes from a Francis Ford Coppola biography. So the way I would say this is like, I think... I have a very broad definition of entrepreneur, right? Entrepreneur is like somebody who has ideas and does them. And so I think filmmakers are entrepreneurs. I think certain athletes are entrepreneurs. I think podcasters are entrepreneurs.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
It's not like, it's literally somebody, you don't have a job, you have an idea, you have something you want to happen in the world and you build a company around it to be able to accomplish that. And, that I think it's like, I know if I'm correct, it's like, I was like 242, 243 books in, and I'm going through and reading all these biographies of filmmakers.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Cause I feel like making, creating, uh, I think directors and entrepreneurs, like there's just a lot of, uh, they have a lot of similarities. And, uh, That line, like you can always understand the father by the son, by the story of the father, the father, the story of the fathers, the better and the son was literally in that book.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And it's because Francis Ford Coppola, right, is talking about the relationship that he had with his dad. And. I have two kids and I have a daughter and a son. And I could never imagine talking to my son the way that Francis Ford Coppola's dad did. Francis Ford Coppola's dad was a musician, but he was a failed musician.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And what's going to happen if like you have something you want to do in your life and decade after decade, you're saying, I'm a talented musician. The world's saying, no, you're not. We're not interested in what you're offering, sir. You would become, most people, you know, I would consider the weaker people become bitter, right? And so it's not them. I'm not the problem.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
It's the world that's the problem. No, it's always you. You have to have extreme ownership, you know? And so he would say stuff to his son, like Francis, when they were growing up, obviously not a lot of money. There can only be one genius in the family and that's me. So it can't be you. And like, he would try to like, basically, you know, pull his son down.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
He also has this other quote that he feels what separates the success, half of what separates successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is just pure perseverance. All these ideas are all related, like excellence, capacity to take pain. You should love what you do because if you love what you do, you'll keep doing it through the pain.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
I want my son to like, I would not like, I want him to do whatever he wants. Yeah.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
I think some entrepreneurs, some driven people make the mistake of like, oh, you're driven. And so I'm going to make my kids driven. And I think you alienate them. Sam Walton said this the best, because if you think about how crazy Sam Walton is, like if he didn't disperse his fortune through his kids, and he did this way before the actual assets appreciated. Yeah.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
you know, he created one of the world's largest fortunes. The family net worth today is like $220 billion. He said he's dying of cancer when he's writing his autobiography. And he says something like, well, I'm a fair in the biggest understatement of the century. He's like, I'm a fairly overactive fellow. And I don't know. And he goes, I don't expect my kids to be like me.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
So I don't push them that hard. Yes.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Yeah. I would like I just want my kids to do whatever they want. Like my daughter wants to. Sometimes she's like, oh, I want to, you know, I want to sing. I want to dance. Whatever. I don't care what you do. You don't have to make any money. I'll take care of that. Don't worry about that. I want my son to just be happy. I want them to have good habits.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Like I wouldn't ever, like, you're not gonna do drugs. You're not gonna be a loser, you know, but you don't have to like shoot for outside success. That's ridiculous. And so like just bringing your son down.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
No, no, no, no, no, no. This is a really important... I think this may be the most important maxim. I say it so much. So I surveyed my audience the other day because I've been trying to break down all the lessons because I think repetition is persuasive. I'm not this person who's like, oh, you should learn something new all day.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
It's like, no, no, you should... I think the people that build great companies, they identify a handful of principles, they master the fundamentals and the basics, and you do it for decade after decade. That's what it is. It's the boring shit decade after decade where most people, especially now, they're like, I need... You know, I have to memorize 2,000 new things. No, no.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
It's like a handful of principles and you'll just see them repeat over and over again. That's why I think the best description of Founders Podcast was it's a church for entrepreneurs. So I grew up in a Christian, like a fundamentalist Christian church. It's not like the preacher set up on Sunday. He's like, okay, last week we went over that Jesus guy. We're done with him.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Like, let's go on to somebody else. No, they literally go and teach messages from the same book for centuries, forever. Mm-hmm. I think there's actually a power to that. And I think the best entrepreneurs do that. Jeff Bezos identified a handful of principles. He has 14. I would argue he has one, obsessed over customers. And he said it over and over and over and over again.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
So I would be fine with that, my son, because he's going to grow up. It's not the drive they have an issue with. the source has to be positive. My source is not positive. Yours is not positive. Francis Ford Coppola's is not positive. We're trying to right a wrong. We're trying to right, in many cases, a multi-generational wrong. And so I'm not sitting on a fucking hammock. I don't like to relax.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
I'm incapable of relaxing. People are like, how many hours do you work? All of them. Literally all of them. I just got to get this out. Sorry. So I'm willing... And again, I love my job. I think it's the best job in the world. I like my life. But yeah, I have a hole in my heart that will never be filled.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And it's because it's personally important to me and a mission to me is like to, there's this term I have, and you can call it the founder of a family, is the generational inflection point, right? And essentially you go and look at this family tree and you just see like one shitty branch after one shitty branch after one shitty branch. And then eventually it's all going downhill.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And then there'll be literally, there's like one dude, Sometimes it's a woman, most of the time it's a dude and then straight up, right? And so I- Like a circuit breaker. Exactly. That is what the role I'm trying to play. That is, my friend Sam Hickey has this great line. He says, I find it intoxicating to be there for my tribe. And like, I want that I want that pressure.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
I want that responsibility. So if now I know for a fact, like, you know, I got the shit beat out of me when I was a kid, like stomped on, like all kinds of crazy stuff happened. I've never touched my kids. Like my kids grew up unbelievable. Like they're great kids too. And they're way sweeter and nicer. My boy's way sweeter than I was at his age. And that's fine.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
So if he grows up in this positive environment, he knows he's loved. He knows me and my wife have a good relationship. He sees that his dad gets out of bed and tries to help other people all day. We can talk about this. One of my favorite maxims from History of Entrepreneurship is that money comes naturally as a result of service. People are like, oh, I'm going to be wealthy. Fine.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Find a problem, solve the problem, and then all you have to do is scale up the amount of people you serve. That's where wealth comes from. So I wake up every day trying to do things for other people. I'd be reading these books anyways, no matter what. But the fact that I sit down and record my thoughts and condense a 40-year career and 40 hours of reading into 45 minutes, that's an act of service.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
So he sees what I do all day. He sees I take this very seriously. And if he says, hey, I want to do that, and he does it from a place of good, then good, that's what I want.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Yeah, I think that would be a definition of success. The definition of my success is that my kids grow up happy. There is something, I think what you said, I think you correctly identified the source of this internal drive. And one thing that I think would surprise most people is...
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
There's one, I think people would be surprised that a large source, and I think we'll go back to Francis Ford Coppola because this certainly was the case for him, is like revenge. And it's revenge for being born in an environment like that with a father like his. And so how does it manifest? Oh, revenge is so interesting.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
I would say one of the greatest, if you're talking about like one of the near perfect entrepreneur autobiographies is Phil Knight's Shoe Dog, where he's telling the story of Nike. And the reason I think it's great is because it's in every chapter is a year and it goes in sequential order from the time he has the idea till the IPO of Nike.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
It manifests, right, where his dad's like, oh, no, no, I'm the genius of the family. You can't beat him. His fierce work ethic. So it's obvious in the very beginning of Francis Ford Coppola's trying to break into movies, and he's one of the first. At the time in Hollywood, there was no such thing as young directors.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
He's the one that broke down the door for, like, a young Steven Spielberg, a George Lucas, and all these other people, right? The idea that you have a 28-year-old feature film director was unheard of back then. And so he meets a young George Lucas. He meets a Steven Spielberg. Hey! That guy did it. I can do it. But you see the 10 years of work that he put in before that in the book.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
When he's literally, he starts out as an editor and he's literally editing 24 hours. He falls asleep. He doesn't get up from his desk. He just, time to go, I'm editing, time to go to sleep. I'm going to just put my head down. He has this fierce work ethic. And then the revenge is, dad, I'm doing this movie. It's probably gonna be a success because it's the sequel to Godfather, right?
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
He goes on, he has one of the greatest directing runs ever. In one decade, he does Godfather 1, Godfather 2, and Apocalypse Now. Like maybe you've never seen another 10 year run like that ever, especially at such a young age. And he's like, dad, I'm gonna let you do the score for the Godfather 2. And then his dad wins an Oscar.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
for the only achievement he ever does in music came because his son hired him.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Revenge. And so this idea, you just nailed it. I think it's 90 to 95% of sons usually trying to say, I don't want to be like my dad. I'm going to succeed where he failed. And then there's maybe a five to 10% where it's like, my dad has been my hero. I want to be more like him.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
I listen. I think podcasting is a miracle. I think it's world-class education on demand anytime you want about any subject you want. Like you want to learn about history, you want to learn about philosophy, you want to learn about business.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
So like everybody identifies with the struggle, wanting to like have a dream, wanting to achieve it. I wish more biographies were like that because they spend too much time after the person's super rich and like donating things to education. That's way less relatable. This is an egalitarian, a temporally egalitarian book. This is like 90% struggle.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
You'll find somewhere in the podcast directory, some nut crazy educator that has gone down the rabbit hole to a degree that most people find unreasonable and you can download that into your brain on demand. Here's the problem that I noticed. People don't understand what learning is. Learning is not memorizing information. Learning is changing your behavior.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Yeah, perfect. There's a lot of, like, you could tell Hermosi, like, I don't know if he reads a bunch of biographies, but he sounds like he does. Because a lot of the stuff he says is like, oh, like, that sounds a lot like Buffett. There's a lot of stuff there.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Yeah, I'd love to. So...
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
the what i am shocked by because again like the way i spend my life like if i'm not with my family i'm hanging out with other founders and all the founders listen to the show because that's we're like my entire network right and i'm so and you know i become like the founder whisperer and i know a lot about what's going on in their business and everything and i'm like you said you listened to episode 299 or there's like that idea it's like hey uh
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
never ever forget the dynamic range of human beings. Like you saying, Hey, this guy's super talented, but he wants five times the amount of salary as this other guy. Who's like one 10th is good. Obviously pay the most talented person. Like there there's so many times where they know the lessons and they're not actually changing their behavior.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And so I am delusionally optimistic on the impact that podcasts have because I say podcasts are a miracle. And so I do hope it happens.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Yeah, but I'm worried. I'm worried that I'm overestimating. I think we both are. How many people, like I change my behavior. I'm obviously not a perfect person, but like I literally say every single person I've read about, and I have no ego attached to this, they are smarter and more productive than me. That's a fact. That's not hyperbolic. That's a fact.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
So what is the point of me spending all my time studying and learning from them if I don't change my behavior? That means my entire life was a waste and I refused to waste my life. So I changed my behavior. And so I'm just worried that a lot of people don't. So I would love it to be 70%, 60%. My also thing is people are always like, oh, do you have to grow up poor to like have outsized?
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And no, the answer is of course not. It's just most people grow up poor. Like if we, I'm sure we're in a bubble inside of a bubble inside of a bubble. Even if you look at like the top 1% in the world, you know, all across 8 billion people, what is this, like $40,000 a year or something like that? Let's say just in America, I think it's like $70,000 a year.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
It's like, we're in a bubble inside of a bubble inside of a bubble. Um, and so I, I, I, I'm very, uh, and I, I think also human nature is constant. So I'm a little worried that we can shift the variance by that much.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
You don't get to go in and we talk about like the, the, the impact that your relationship with your father could have on increasing your drive. Well, Was Francis Ford Coppola's siblings that way? I just did this episode and this guy named James J. Hill, right? And again, same way I found him. Munger's like, hey, there's this great... James J. Hill is a great operator like Rockefeller and Carnegie.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And then he finally breaks through and then gets the IPO. And then we know what happens after that. We got that. But he ends that. I love what you said because the last chapter, he's like... For the – I think he calls him charlatan. He's like, for the charlatans to tell entrepreneurs to never quit, he's like, that's bullshit.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
I'm like, what? Like, I know Carnegie and Rockefeller. Who's this guy? He's the greatest railroad entrepreneur in American history. He created this... The only... At the time, railroad industry, right, in the 1800s, whereas it was by far the most important industry in America by far. It's like what the internet or AI would be now.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
In 1885, the railroad industry took in twice the amount of revenue as the federal government. Holy fuck. Yeah, yeah. It was the nation's largest employer. The railroaders, which were the railroad entrepreneurs, that's why they were called railroaders, owned over 10% of the landmass in the United States.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Yes, I know, I know, I know. And, but James J. Hill was the only person, right, The only person, only railroad entrepreneur to ever run a rail line that did not go bankrupt. So this guy is the best in the most important industry of his time. He's the Elon of the train. He grows up with a poor father.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
So poor that he's laying in his house and he could see the moon through the roof because there's holes in the roof. Yet he dips out of Canada. He's like, he believed in the dynamic, you know, the power of one individual and everything else. So he goes and he seeks his fortune in America, right? What does his two siblings do? They talk about in the biography. They're like, this is what our life is.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
We're just poor farmers. They stayed.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
He doesn't use that word, but he's like – he goes, you don't ever stop, but sometimes quitting is the best thing. Meaning, like, you're in the wrong path, so quit that path, but don't stop trying to actually do what you want to do in life and what you want to set out to accomplish.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Why? Why? That is probably my all-time favorite maxim from studying all of these history skills. It actually comes from the founder of Four Seasons, this guy named Izzy Sharp. And sometimes you're reading a book or you're listening to a podcast or sometimes it's even like a music lyric. One sentence can stay in your brain forever. I haven't read that book in probably five years.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
No, I mean, I, and this is, I think just part of getting older, having more experience, but I don't care at all what people are like, what they say is important to them. I just look, how do you spend your time? Like you came in here early and I gave you a hug. I was like, how the hell are you even bigger than I saw you last time where I just saw you in Austin like two months ago.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And you're like, I lift heavy weights. Yeah, I could tell. Like, what is important to Chris is obvious. Obviously, you take care of your health. You're a madman about... You have probably... No, not probably. You have the best, most cinematic video podcast on the planet. Like, you are expressing to the world and you make yourself easy to interface with as a byproduct of this.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
It's like, what is important to you? As opposed, if I saw you and you had like this big gut and you're like, yeah, you know, I love working out and, you know, I eat healthy. I'm like... Yeah, are you sure about that? Or like, I take my podcast, so many people come, this part happens to you too. They like, hey, you know, talk to me about podcasts.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And I remember this happened one time where this guy's like, all right, I started a podcast and like, he's a family friend. And so he asked my brother-in-law, he's like, do you think David would meet with me about his podcast? And so I was like, yeah, if it's a favor for you, that's fine. I talked to him and five minutes into this, I was like, wait a minute, how many episodes have you done?
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
He's like, six. I was like, six? I was like, there's nothing to talk about. Like, come back when you've done like 200 and then we can talk. But like, this doesn't make, this is not a good use of your time.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And so the entrepreneurial, like the reason that's so powerful in the history of entrepreneurship is because the greatest entrepreneurs, like they, most of them work well beyond entrepreneurship. well beyond the need for money. So money is not their greatest resource. Money is a way and an asset that they use to bring what they want forth into the world, what they want, right?
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
They all know that time is your most valuable resource. It's the only unrenewable resource that they have. And so if you're watching, like if you're curious about like what was important to Steve Jobs, for example, he really gave, blew my mind about this. And this is something me and you've talked about in private, like I need to get better at marketing the podcast, right? Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And because his whole point was like, hey, I think the Apple devices I'm making are good for the world. I want every single human on the planet to own an Apple device. And first of all, Steve, not at the price point that you're at, but that's fine. And he goes, but to do that, we have to become a great marketing company. He goes, we know how to build great products.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
So now I'm completely back. So the very first episode of Founders in September 2016 was Ashley Vance's book on Elon. And in fact, there's this guy named Kevin Rose, who's the founder of Dig, right? And he's like one of the... the first internet OG creators. He has like one of the first podcasts, but they weren't called podcasts back then.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
We are not a great marketing company. So what do you do? His actions express priority. So he said, every Wednesday, we are going to have a three-hour meeting. I will be there every Wednesday. I will be involved. All the people involved in the marketing and advertising for Apple are going to be present. And we're going to review our work every Wednesday.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And he got to the point where like, you know, some people call them micromanagers. I just say they're into the details. You know, James J. Hill, all the great entrepreneurs are into the details. When you came in here and started, I saw you directing. I was like, oh, this guy, this is another Steve Jobs guy. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
It didn't matter if it was an ad that was going to run as a full page in the Wall Street Journal or a billboard in Nowhere, Missouri. It did not go out without his approval. His actions were expressing his priority. And what you do is like, that's not just in business, it's in everything.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
If you want to be a good dad and you don't spend any time with your kid, your actions are expressing what you actually want to do.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
No, I definitely agree. So you mentioned Tim Kirk earlier. Steve, I think was the best, like he was ruthless. He had the ability to like ruthlessly prioritize things. And so he picked like product, right? And he would, again, just like every ad, every pixel on your screen, every button on that device, he would have to approve before it goes out. But could he do that for everything?
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
He had this video podcast, what we call a video podcast today called Foundation. And it was excellent, high quality. You would love it. Cause like shot in like crazy cameras, great sets. And so you go back and he actually interviews Elon. And so I watched this in 2012. Okay. And their interview is on Tesla's factory floor. So you kind of hear the stuff in the background.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
No, he sucked his supply chain. So that's why he actually hired and had Tim Cook. That was what Tim Cook's job was primarily before, you know, Steve died of cancer. Um, so yeah, I completely agree. I, the way I put it is, um, something that also reappears in the books is they limit the great entrepreneurs limit the amount of details to perfect, and then they make every detail perfect. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Where a lot of entrepreneurs' mistake is like they are optimizing something that should never exist. This is something Elon talks about over and over again. He's like, before you optimize something, make sure it's actually essential to like what you're actually trying to bring into the world. And so for like me and you, or I guess for me, it's really simple.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
It's like, how should I be spending my time? I should either be reading or I should be making podcasts in my work. That's all I have to do. And the one reason, like, I don't have an assistant or I don't have anything else. So they're like, well, you need an assistant. You're hard to get in touch with. I was like, well, then I'm managing a calendar.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
I shouldn't have a calendar because all I have to do is wake up every day. As long as I wake up every day and I read for a few hours a day. Right. And I sit down once a week and I summarize what I learned that week from a reading. I will get everything I want in life. Everything else from that is a distraction. Dude.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
You see this at Elon. So all the stuff that happened with the election, I, you know, I saw all the tweets and everything. I think the most important tweet was that this perfect encapsulation of why it makes Elon great. And like, he literally figures like, what is the most important lever for what I'm trying to accomplish today? And then he relentlessly jumps up and down on it.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
So he identifies like, oh, the entire election hinges on Pennsylvania. So like, I will build a ground game there. I will go like, he's like, if we win Pennsylvania, we do everything else. And so he sets up shop and he just puts all of his resources behind it. You know, in the early days of SpaceX. The only thing that matters is if we don't get a rocket into orbit, we have nothing else.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
So what's the most thing? Getting a rocket to orbit. And then once we do that, we obviously have to sell it and everything else. He, and one of, Elon doesn't have a lot of mentors, but I've heard him reference Larry Ellison as one of his mentors, which I thought was fascinating. And I've read three biographies on Ellison. I wish there were more.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And in one of the biographies, Larry Ellison is arguing, right? He's one of the richest people on the planet. He owns like 40% of Oracle, for God's sake. He's arguing with his assistant because the assistant's like, hey, we have a hundred important things. There's a thousand things we need to get to. He's like, no, no, no. There's not a hundred. There's not a thousand. There's three.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
He goes, I'm going to focus on those three and I'm going to ignore everything else. Ruthless prioritization. Like that is such a key part of achieving things in life.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Elon looks way better than he does now. He's been going through hell for the last- Tough tape around. Yeah, 15 years. But at the time, they're just starting to produce the Model S. And what was fascinating about this is the reason that was the first book that I covered, right?
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And the interesting thing about my obsession with like maxims and memorable things, like I think a lot of that came from, it's not like I read poetry when I was younger. I listened to hip hop and like they're very poetic and they have lines in there that you just remember. That's from Biggie Smalls, Bad Boys Move in Silence.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And it's funny because I'm reading this obscure biography of Rockefeller and it really clicked because everybody's read. There's one canonical biography of Rockefeller called Titan. It's like 800 pages. It's great. That's fine. I've read it like two times. Rockefeller's the man, right? But I went through the biography or the bibliography and I discovered books were made out of books.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And so I found this obscure biography of uh, published, uh, in like 1970. And now you try to get the book. It's like $4,000 because all these books are out of print and it's in there and it's, it's 250 pages, right? Um, there's a longer thing here where I think, I think it's slothful not to compress your thoughts. That's like Churchill would say stuff like that.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
I think it's disrespectful to people to not like, think about if you want a high value audience and you're saying, Hey, I can tell a story in an hour and a half, or I could tell a story in 45 minutes, but I took an hour and a half. I just stole 45 minutes of your life. You're not getting back times that by however many people, like I, I, I spent an entire day.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
I mean, you've talked about this privately. Uh, one, one of the big breakthroughs I had is like spending an entire day before I sit down and record, just literally going through all my notes and highlights and just cutting. I never, I never add. It's like, Nope, ruthlessly cut, try to respect the people's time. But anyways, uh, I think authors should do that. I like Titan.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Because I wanted to do a podcast on biographies and autobiographies, is because Kevin Rose asked Elon a question that changed my life. And he's like, hey- You know, Elon has a crazy experience. Everybody knows about Tesla, SpaceX.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Do I need to know what the furniture's like in his grandfather's house? No, I do not. I want to know how he built maybe the greatest business that's ever existed. And so this book is 250 pages of how he built Standard Oil. It's called John D., The Founding Fathers of the Rockefellers.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
I know friends that have literally bought the book because they heard the episode and they spent $2,000 because it's like, this is the guy. There's an idea worth billions in a $2,000 history book. And so in that book, it's all...
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
secrecy covered everything in his when I think of bad boys move in silence I think of Rockefeller it's in all kinds of other entrepreneurs but essentially saying hey you don't understand how lucrative this is and I'm not going to educate my competition because if you go and say hey look how much money I'm making What are humans going to do? They're all memetic.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
They're like, oh, I'm going to try to do exactly what Chris does. And so I'm going to do it. And it's, you invite competition and there goes your profits. And so not only he would like do deals and he's like, hey, I'm going to buy your refinery. You can't tell your wife. how much I bought it and who bought it. He would have this thing called, there'd be secret ownership.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
So people hated Rockefeller because he was dominating this area in Cleveland. And so there's this thing called Cleveland Massacre where he essentially in like a day or a few days rounds up like 22 of his top 25 competitors. Like, and then from there on at 25 years old, 28 years old, he's really young. He's the dominant player.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And so then he goes, he also has a secret alliance where they put him at the head of the national, it was like the,
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
kerosene refineries association something like that essentially just like a trade group and he goes around he meets with all the other people in his business and they're trying to uh collude to keep prices like at a profitable level and so he gets to see their books and now as a result of this secret alliance he knows oh just so we know each other it's like i knew chris was a a legit player i need to spend more time with him because he's another me right and then he goes oh that's a that's a good competitor maybe i need to buy him this guy i don't
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
But if you go back and him emigrating from South Africa to Canada and then Canada to the Bay Area and, you know, I don't think a lot of people don't know that he had his first successful company exit when he was like 25, something like that, 26. He sold this company called Zip2, winds up netting something like, you know, 20, 30 million dollars at that age.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And so what he would do is some of those people would say, Rockefeller, you're too powerful. I'm not selling to you. And so they go and they sell to a company, not knowing that Rockefeller secretly owns that company. So if you really want to internalize bad boys move in silence, Rockefeller's the prototype. But there's another great thing.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
In Steve Jobs' lost years, he dumps 50 million of his own money. And at the time, he only had $70 million. So he dumps almost all, you know, the majority of his wealth into Pixar. And literally, they can't make payroll. They don't have a product. He's just writing checks to cover the payroll.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And they pivot from trying to sell hardware, which is how Pixar started, to what the team really wanted to do and they were passionate about. It was like, we want to make the world's first computer animated movies. And so... Steve's like, all right, we need to study like is animation profitable. And he has a great line in that book.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
He's like, it's not like you can go to the library and check out a book that says the business model for animation, because there's only one company that's ever done it successfully. That's Disney. And they don't want anybody to know how lucrative it was. So he went to building relationships, relationships around the world. See how all these things tie together with people in Disney.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
He finds out, holy shit. They can literally like they take Snow White. What he discovers is Snow White came out like 60 years before. And then you have the new invention of VHS and you have a new invention of DVDs in the 90s. And they take something they haven't put a dollar into in 60 years that our kids are still going to watch. They put it on the new technology of the day, VHS, DVD.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
quarter trillion, or excuse me, not quarter trillion, 250 million drops to their bottom line, all profit. That's one movie. And so that's when you realize, oh, the reason they shut up about it because they don't want people to know how lucrative it is. And you see this over and over again. A friend of mine is doing a, He's doing, let me see if I can put this sensitively.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
He is buying a bunch of other companies. So he's rolling up a bunch of other companies, okay? And he's doing it so successful, he runs a publicly traded company, that he caught the attention of somebody else that has been doing a similar strategy in a different domain for the last like three decades. And he goes, they share a board member. And so he meets with them.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And this older, wiser guy tells my friend, he goes, hey, what you're doing is working. He goes, now shut up about it. Stop doing interviews. Stop talking about your strategy. He goes, because I, you know, the amount of competitors I created for myself because I didn't hide what I was doing successfully.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And so people saw how this guy became, the guy that's giving him the advice became a multi-billionaire. Anyways, like this guy's worth $3 billion, whatever numbers. How do you do that? Oh, this is what he does. Let me copy him. He's like, now I just created all these clones of me. And now I have made it more difficult to do what I wanted to do anyways. So bad boys move in silence.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
It's something that appears over and over and over again.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
This drives me insane. So you mentioned earlier, you don't know how normal normal people are. And I'm going to remember that line. Because people are like, over and over again, when you have somebody, you have somebody like the founder of Four Seasons we talked about, you know. Hey, Chris, we're friends. I'm going to tell you my dream.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And then immediately rolls it back into PayPal. And then he rolls PayPal into Tesla and SpaceX and does exactly what he always does now. But the fascinating thing, Cameron was like, dude, you didn't know anybody. You didn't have resources. You didn't have a network. How did you learn how to build companies? You were so young when you were doing that. Did you have a mentor?
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And my dream is to build the collection, not just one, a collection of the world's greatest hotels. And you're like, Izzy, you have no money. You've never built a hotel. What are you talking about? Why would you even think this is possible? What you need to do is prove it first and then we'll believe in you. It's like, no, let's ask backwards. Belief always comes before ability.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
There's a story where Elon's on, you know, he tries to buy a rocket. At first he thought he was just going to shoot like this, this, this like garden for lack of a better word to Mars on somebody else's rocket. And cause he was trying to like draw attention to the fact that, Hey, NASA is not innovating. We're like not, we're stuck in like lower orbit. Like, why aren't we trying to get to Mars?
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Why aren't you trying to, colonize the galaxy. And he goes to Russia. They treat him like shit. And he's on the way back and he just realizes, hey, we're going to build our own rocket. And people laugh at him. They're like, oh, this internet kid. Because he's 29, 28. He's like, what are you, internet kid? You can't do that. His belief came before his ability. He believed that he could do that.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And then he went out and proved it. Now, when I say belief comes before ability, it doesn't mean you just sit there and be like, I'm great. And you don't do it. No, you do the work necessary to achieve what you want. But if you're waiting for the external world to like push, encourage you or, and edge you on, like it's impossible.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Did you read a lot of business books? And Elon says something that's fascinating. He's like, I didn't read a lot of business books. He goes, I like biographies and autobiographies. I think they're helpful. He goes, I was looking for mentors and historical context. And so he talks about, you know, reading the biography of Ben Franklin, Henry Ford, Nikola Tesla.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Yeah. I would like, I, you could say self, when I say belief comes before ability, I mean, self-belief. Yeah. But I don't, that line, I would disagree where it's like self-belief is overrated. I think it's the, the, the, the highest order bit. There's actually one area where I disagree with Steve Jobs and he talks about like, um,
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
The highest order bit, it's from like computer science where it's like the most important part of the system, right? And this is like a complete like oversimplification of it. But, and his whole thing was like the highest order bit is that like you love what you do. And for all the reasons that we discussed earlier, you'll keep doing it for a long time. You'll persevere and everything else.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And I love what I do. I know you love what you do. And I agree, like it's super important. I think it makes life easier. You used a phrase like you're swimming downstream earlier, I think is a great way to put that. And so I was thinking about that because the Steve Jobs archive, which is run by Steve's widow, just released this free book. You can read online called make something wonderful.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Steve Jobs in his own words. And it's remarkable. And so like I've read it a bunch of times and, you know, he talks about this in there. That's where I discovered the highest order bit part. And then I was thinking about it more and more. And I was just like, well, no, that's not like what comes first.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
It's like the belief that you can actually do something that's valuable to the world that provide that like is an active service and makes the world a better place. And I think me and you might be good examples. It's like, how many years were you doing the podcast before anybody gave a damn? Three and a half. Mine was five and a half. Why were you still doing it?
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
because you believed that you could, like you believed that you could do it. The belief that you had that you could actually make something worth people's time and listening, right? That lag was a couple years before the world's like, yes, Chris, we agree with you.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And I was like, that's genius because for the vast majority of humanity, right, we don't have world-class biographies. mentors in person, but you can access their entire life learnings by picking up the biography. So a few years later, I started getting obsessed with podcasts. I was like, I remember that because as soon as he said that, I started reading a ton of biographies.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
So I've heard you say that perspective on your show before. I would say like interacting with you in person, you come across unbelievably. You've only known me for the last two years.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Do you have imposter syndrome today? No. Okay. No, no more.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
I think a lot of people accuse entrepreneurs of being arrogant and of course they are. Like you'd have to be arrogant to think like, oh, I don't have to go, I don't have to work for somebody else. Like I can literally take something that doesn't exist and like bring it to the world. But my... issue with that is like, we don't have an epidemic of arrogance.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
We have an epidemic of people that don't believe in themselves. And so the weird thing about the early days of the podcast, you know, these people that I'm reading about and telling stories about, they're crazy people. Like they are all crazy people. And yet I kept hearing the same review, the same email, the same DM. I find your podcast so comforting. I'm like,
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And then I got addicted to reading biographies. Oh, I should just make a podcast about the biographies I'm reading. And so it's funny you bring him up because I just read for the second time. I reread a lot of books. I think that's actually important. We can talk about that later if you want to. But I just read this book called Liftoff, Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days of SpaceX.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
I was like, oh, there's a million of us out there that are like, this is me too. And that's the biggest key. The reason that biographies are important and life stories in general is not because we're talking about Francis Ford Coppola's life or Steve Jobs' life or any of the lives we've talked about. It's like, no, no, you see yourself in them.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Elon is in a class of himself. There is not, in many cases, like a lot of the modern day founders, like there's a historical equivalent. There is like, you know, there is even a Steve Jobs before Steve Jobs. I've given up on finding another. There's no Elon Musk before, another Elon Musk before Elon. And the reason I love this book Liftoff so much is because it's the first six years of SpaceX.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
I love that you said that because I say the most interesting people are the most interested.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
and like the the people that i'm drawn to right because you to your point like you meet so many people and in some cases like you admire them from afar and i think one of the biggest benefits is like and this is why i'm again evangelist for reading biographies and autobiographies because like we're incentivizing our day-to-day to like make things seem better like you were just talking about the health problems that you know you're like hey i'm not ready to talk about this but you know when i am i'll talk about it but like from the outside people like chris has has it everything you know he's
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
handsome he's in great shape he's world famous like he's got one of the best podcasts in the world and you're like yeah but you haven't seen the shit i've been going through for the last like 12 months and the biography is like you see that because they're not people don't write sit down to write a biography when they're like 30 35 40 when they're still in it they there's some weird genetic thing where it's like i know i'm gonna die soon i want to pass down everything i know in this book it's an act of service to the next generation of entrepreneurs i think is really important
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
and that's the i when i just did the elon episode on um the spacex book the one of the things i said is it's like the reason that you guys should read this book is because like you have not only just elon a genius but all the early spacex employees are genius and the whole book is these geniuses can't figure shit out and like they're running into problem after problem after problem and then you know six years later they figure it out that is so good for you it's like oh if that guy is
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
You know, if that guy couldn't do that, then it makes sense. Like, I feel better about myself. Again, it's technically a story about Elon and SpaceX, but you make it about yourself. I just think that's human nature.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
So my phone has now changed. You know this when I call you, it's Michael Jordan being really intense, but for like a year and a half, it was, or for like maybe two years, it was, by endurance we conquer is the family motto of Ernest Shackleton, who's probably the greatest, you know, polar, one of the greatest polar explorers. And I believe I'm a huge believer in consistency over intensity.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And I think what a lot of people, a lot of entrepreneurs make the mistake is like, there's, first of all, there's never up until the first few years ago, there's no such thing as like an entrepreneurship, like industry. Now there's like an industry and people are incentivized to try to spread it and try to put money into these companies. And so what happens, like people are in a rush, right?
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And they try to take like an idea and like, instead of building it slowly and making it durable, right? They're like, let's just throw a lot of money and people at it and like try to do it fast. And then you see them, like it may grow for a little bit and pop. And I think there's an issue.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And so what I realized is like the greatest entrepreneurs is like, no one writes a book about somebody who's like, oh, they ran a company and five years in, it was really successful. 10 years, it was great.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
gone right they write about businesses that last and so um i had one of the greatest experiences of my life this year and um i was at this company off site and it was a 70 year old female billionaire owning a private company right and like just her company building philosophy like i told her i was like i'm in love with you and my wife was with me and i was like like i literally love you like i love every way you build your company and her whole thing is just very common sense she's just like
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Handful of principles. I'm always just going to do what's best for the customer and the customer experience. And that's where I'm going to put my money. And I'm in this forever. And so she told me this hilarious story where, you know, she felt because she wasn't trained in business and she was a woman, like, I need consultants.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
I need McKinsey and I need Bain and I need hiring, spending millions of dollars on this. And first of all, they're like, you know, you should buy up all your competitors. And so they start looking into this and it's like, well, how much would that be? And, you know, whatever, let's say that company's going to cost $200 million to buy.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
That's it. Just like I said, I loved how Phil Knight just covered, get to the IPO is fine. This is even better because then you go back and what I do is when I'm reading books, I'll look up, how old are they when this is happening in their life? That book is about Elon Musk when he's 30 to 37.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And she's like, but why don't I just put that $200 million into like making my customer experience better? And so she told me this hilarious story. She's like, year five, you know, I had 15 competitors. Year 15? I have 10. Year 25, I had three. Year four, she's running a company for 40. Year 40, I have one. He goes, I took the money.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Instead of buying other companies, I made my customer experience better, my product better, my marketing better, controlled more things. And they went out of business slowly but surely. And so time carries most of the weight. That's a maximum that I came up with where I was listening to Charlie Munger. Charlie Munger has this good, his whole point is like, hey, there's,
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
If you just master the big ideas and handful of disciplines and you really master them and implement them that like the big ideas in like, you know, physics, biology, psychology, economics, there's only a handful of ideas you actually need to memorize in all these main subjects. And that carries most of the freight. And it's like, oh, that's a good turn of phrase like that. That makes sense.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And then I'm reading more and more about these stories. And it's like, oh, yeah. Like you're not winning because you're a genius. You're not winning because you're winning because you just outlast everybody by endurance. We conquer you. She conquered through endurance because she made sure she was she made her company durable. This is what Peter Thiel is wrote.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
If you're only going to read one book on business, obviously, in my opinion, especially in today's day and age, you read zero to one. Right. And everybody that's building a tech company has read that book. And yet they miss his most important lesson, which is like, hey, don't optimize for growth at the expense of durability.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And the reason you're likely to optimize for growth at the expense of durability is growth is measurable and durability is not. And the reason durability is so important, he says, is because in technology companies and almost all companies, all the vast majority of the profits are 10, 15, 20 years out. The amount of money that that company, that woman I just described, is making today is
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
is 95%, 99% more than what she was making in year 10. All the money was in the future.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Yes. You see that graph. It goes viral on Twitter all the time. And that's obviously the magic of compounding too. And it's like, that's why I say, by endurance, we conquer. Like, I'm not trying to have the hot podcast or a great episode this week. I'm trying to do this until I die. I want them to pry the microphone from my cold, dead hands. And so therefore I need to make sure. How do I do that?
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Now, me and you think of Elon now, like world's most richest man, like unbelievably powerful, tipping elections, like doing all this crazy shit, right? It's like, no, no, he was 30 to 37. And it's insane. And 90% of the book is him failing. It is, they can't get the rocket into orbit. He's running out of money. He's going through a divorce. His infant son dies.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
I have to maintain, first of all, that it's valuable for the audience. I have to have trust with the people that give me their time. And so you just say, hey, I'm not making a decision based on what I'm doing today. Is this decision going to serve that goal so people will still think that I'm trustworthy and that what I'm doing in the world is valuable for 10, 15, 20 years from now?
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
I love that you say Z. Every time I hear it on your podcast, I just... So this is literally a line that was... This guy named Sam Zemuri, okay? So I go out, this is... our friend George Mack, right? Who we both love. He's the one that really has put into my brain the importance of being high agents. You know, he's really good. Just breaking everything about yourself. Keep going.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And he's describing how difficult it was. Like he had no experience in the hotel industry when he found Four Seasons. And yet his goal was like, I'm going to make a collection of the greatest hotels in the world. And he didn't kind of disregard the fact that I've never made a hotel before. I don't have any money. I don't have resources. I don't have contacts.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
It's all your big muscles. That's true. So, So George Mack is the one that put the importance of being high agency in my, like, I think his writing on it, his memes, the stuff he makes is just perfect. And I would say every single person I read a biography about is high agency. The most high agency person I've ever come across is that guy named Sam Samari. So what's funny is,
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
is there's another line in zero to one that I think people mistake too, where they say all technology is, is a better way to do something. So people think technology has got to be like software. It's got to be computers. It's like, no, at one point, a steamboat, the invention of the steamboat engine was a technology of that day because it made, it made it possible, a better way to do something.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And what did that do? So one of the first, this will surprise a lot of people. One of the first multinational corporations to, In human history, we're the fruit companies. Because before, you had a banana, you grew it in Jamaica, or you grew it in Honduras. That banana, you have to eat in like four days. So without the, or five days, or a week, whatever it is.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Without the invention of the steamboat, you have a local market. So you match fruit, which humans have, are going to eat forever, with the steamboat, and you create one of the first multinational corporations. So Sam Zimuri, right, is this guy. He is a poor Russian immigrant, right? right? Comes to America, shows up in like Alabama and builds this gigantic fruit empire.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And the book, the reason the book is called The Fish That Ate the Whale is because the biggest fruit company at the time is called United Fruit. And Sam Zamori competes head to head with them. And then eventually he takes over, the little fish eats the whale. He takes over that company. So the reason that he says that is because his competition, when the founders die,
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
The people running United Fruit, their business is in Central America. That's where all the fruit is grown. And then it's shipped into like the Gulf Coast and Florida and then put on trains and put everywhere else. They thought they were going to run their business remotely in Boston. And this guy's out here. He's literally hacking machetes. He's helping lay the railroad track.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
He's taking inventory. He's building the boats. He's doing every single thing. And the reason he did that, they're like, why are you doing this? His whole point is like, because if I know my business from A to Z, there's no problem I can't solve because I know every component. You just said you broke down your business to four components. You probably know those four components in and out.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Now, if you know, hey, we have a problem with component three. No problem. I understand what we need to fix. It's such an important thing where a lot of people like this goes back to normal people or, you know, unobsessed people. They call this micromanaging or, oh, you shouldn't do all this. It's like, no, they're in the details. He is in the details.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
One of the funniest stories of this is the fruit association or something. There's some kind of trade group. He's in Havana, right? This is probably like 1900, 1910 or something like this. And he's there. They want to give him an award. So like they call out his name. Here's this award for the fruit guy of the year, whatever they call it. And like it's not in the audience. They track him down.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
His girlfriend talks about in the book, him literally waking up in the middle of the night, screaming, not like, oh, how are you doing, honey? I can't sleep. No, no, screaming in pain and agony. And because he put, when he was the largest shareholder in PayPal, okay, this is what I also admire about him, his skin in the game.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
He's on the port. He's going over the inventory. He's like, I don't have I don't care about awards. I care about the business. Like I'm in the details of my business. And so I would say way this isn't like a none of these are like, you know.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
like what chris bumstead said like you know you can some of these work for you some of these are not going to work for you i would say most of the people i read about are you would consider like micromanagers larry ellison i mentioned earlier not a micromanager not a grinder he says in his book he's a sprinter he's like i take care of the top level stuff strategy products stuff like that putting the right people in but then i hire other people to be in the details elon
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
I think maybe changed now, but in his early days, like in SpaceX, he knew the rocket forward and backwards. So these could also apply, again, contextually apply them to your situation. At the beginning of your company, you might want to do that. Maybe your interests shift, or maybe you find somebody who's better at that detail than you are.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
You just figure out how to apply yourself, but this is something that reoccurs over and over again.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
So this goes back to my love of hip hop, that public praises people for what they practice in private is this line from this rapper named Russ. And I think Russ is actually interesting. He'd actually be a good guest for you. He's done some great interviews, but Russ was the first person in history to write, record,
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
produce mix and master an entire album so one person only one person and it got over a billion streams and so and i think he's like a very fascinating person how he thinks about things but he's also a gifted lyricist and he um says stuff that like kind of sears in my brain um and so the this is like the point we were talking about earlier where like you know
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
You can go out and say Jeff Bezos has too much money. He shouldn't have the world's largest yacht. He shouldn't have all these things and a giant house everywhere. And so I'm going to put a guillotine and I'm going to take things away from him. But you didn't see like all the stuff that he was doing before that. You didn't see the fact that he was making door desks.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
You didn't see that he was... Literally, there's a line in his biography where... He is buying knee pads because he's the one putting the packages together, putting them in his Jeep, and then taking them to UPS.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And so one of my favorite stories about this, and it's actually an idea I think that's related to this, that the public praises people for what they practice in private, is this idea of going slow so you can go faster later on. And I think Sam Walton's a perfect example of this.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And I bring up Sam all the time because he's one of my favorite entrepreneurs because it's like a very, business is so easy to understand in a way that I think Amazon is not. You know, what's Walmart's business? I buy cheaply and I sell cheaply and I just do that and I'm bigger and better than anybody else. And that's what generates the wealth.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
When you already have multiple successful exits, you don't have to put your money on the line anymore. You can raise money from wherever you want. He's like, no, no, I want to be the largest shareholder. He made more money on PayPal than anybody else, right? Because he put in all his own money. Gets $180 million after taxes when they sell to eBay.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And so the crazy thing about like the outcome that Sam had is nobody saw that for the first five years of his life, he had a single store. One store. He was trying to figure out, what is this retail thing? What am I good at? What's the merchandise I should do? How do I do this? How's the marketing?
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And there's a great line in his biography where it talks about the fact that his first store that he owned for five years was so successful that he made a mistake, a rookie mistake. He had a lease And the lease could be terminated at any time. There was no option. He didn't have the option to renew. The landlord would have to say, yeah, I want you back in here.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
The landlord realized that, oh my God, this store that was making $20,000 a year is now making 300,000 in a tiny little town. I'm just going to say, Sam, nice to know you. I'm taking over your store. And so he's forced to then go look for another store. That's where he discovers Bentonville, Arkansas. So he buys a store there. But there's like a multiple month timeframe.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
where he has to run two stores for the first time in his life. And this is really important because one, he realized, oh, I don't have to have just one store. I can run two stores at a time. But he's also driving back and forth over between these like mountainous roads.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
So even though the stores are, let's say they're 300 miles away from each other, it's like an eight hour drive or something there each way. And so he's like, man, there's gotta be a more efficient way to do this. And one day he's driving and he hears a plane overhead. And he's like, oh, it's a Cessna. So he goes to the airfield.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
He says, hey, how much would it cost to hire a Cessna to fly me from Bentonville to I think Newport is where the other store was. And it was, you know, whatever, 50 bucks, $100 back in the day. And then he realizes, hey, I don't want to keep having this expense of like having to charter a plane every time, like have somebody else drive. I'll just teach myself how to fly. And why is that important?
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Because this goes back to the public praises people for what they practice in private. They say, look, Sam, you built a $200 billion fucking fortune. Look at all the stuff you did. They don't see all the stuff that happened. What he realized is like, hey, now I can fly my own plane. So this, what was a problem, was problems are just opportunities and workflows.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
I thought me losing my first store was a problem. It wouldn't have been the best opportunity in my life. It taught me one, that I can run more than one store at a time. And then two, I accidentally discovered, oh, I can now fly. I learned how to fly. And so the advantage he had over his competitors, where I can fly over, they're in jets. My competitors in Kmart, they're in jets, right?
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
They're above the clouds. I'm in a little tiny Cessna. I can see traffic patterns. I can see, and he was scouting out, I think he scouted out personally the first like 300 stores that he was doing. And so the idea where it's like, yeah, we can see that he's one of the richest people in the world when he was older. We can see that he has 300 stores and he's got all this other stuff.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
puts $100 million into doing a rocket company, who's never had no experience doing, $70 million into Tesla, where there hadn't been a successful American car company for like 80 years, and then puts $10 million into SolarCity, has to borrow money for rent. And so then this is talking about, he's like, you know, that book is the next few years.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
But it's like you didn't see all the practice that went in there. There's another story that illustrates the public praises people for what they practice in private. He had no relationships with suppliers. So at the time, the hula hoop was like a huge craze. All the kids wanted hula hoops all over America. The suppliers didn't know him, so they wouldn't buy, they wouldn't sell hula hoops to him.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
So he just looked, he's like, what's a hula hoop? Well, that's a problem, right? What's a hula hoop? He's like, it's just a little pipe that's connected and it's colored and you just wiggle your hips. And that's like what the toy is. He's like, okay. He bought the material. And at the end of the night, after he worked all day, he's like, I'm going to make my own hula hoops.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
He winds up doing thousands of these. And then because he didn't have any money, he's like, how now he had multiple stores. How do I get the hula hoop to other stores? He had a john boat, which is like a little tiny boat because he's like a redneck fisherman. And he just put all the hula hoops in behind the john boat and he towed behind his car. And that was his delivery system.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
So in every single story, you're going to see like, it seems like there's no possible way these giant companies can start with these little basic improvisations, like just feeling your way through. And then you're slowly practicing. You're like, oh, that idea worked. Let me do more of that. Oh, that idea didn't work. Let me avoid doing that in the future.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And it's just over and over and over again. And it just compounds. So the public praises people for what they practice in private.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Go listen to, I remember when George Mack, I went back and listened to, because George was like one of your first guests. And I went back and listened to the very first time you saw the show. And then you go and look at your skills as a podcaster. You see this in literally everything. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
So self-pity has no utility is another maxim from Charlie Munger. And Charlie, you know, a lot of people don't like that. They don't like, oh, don't tell me how to feel. You know, like... he can speak to this because he had, he went, he experienced the worst thing somebody could go through. I think he was like 29 years old. He was getting divorced.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
He's got a nine-year-old son named Teddy, if I remember correctly. And Teddy gets diagnosed with fatal leukemia. And at this time, now he could have been safe. But at that time in history, there was nothing, they didn't know how to heal him. So he is, just went through a divorce. He's not doing well financially because Charlie Munger doesn't become a full-time investor until he's 40.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
So he's 20, late 20s in the story. And he's, He is struggling at work, failed marriage, and he is going to the hospital every day and slowly watching his son fade away. So anybody that's lost somebody from cancer, like my mom died of breast cancer in 2017. The last two years of her life were the worst way to die because it was all through her bones too.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And so like you literally see her like get smaller and like not be able to get out of bed and be addicted to pain medication and like can't do anything without it. And so it's one thing for that to happen to your mom is obviously gonna be devastating. The love you have for your mom is orders of magnitude less than you have for your child.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
He just sees all that money just essentially being lit on fire.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
When people talk about, oh, like the way I would describe why this is such an important thing and why to anchor that self-pity has no utility in this story that Charlie Munger mentions it in is because people that don't have kids are like, they think they know what love is, right? And the way I would describe this, the best description of why they don't know what love is yet
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
It's actually a story that I heard Ryan Reynolds, the actor, say. And he's like, you know, his wife, Blake Lively, he's like, I've never loved somebody as much as I love Blake. I think it was impossible that I'd ever love somebody more. And he goes, and that instilled a day that Blake gave birth to our baby daughter.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And then the moment I saw the daughter, I knew that if we were ever under attack, I would use Blake as a human shield to protect that baby. Yeah. And having two kids, I was like, that's exactly right. That is the best description. And so when I, I, I don't just read these stories. I try to put myself in their shoes. And like, I want to like cry thinking about that happening to my son.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And even then he's like, listen, you're going to mourn. It's going to change. Certain bad things are going to happen in your life, right? And many of these are, they're out of your control. That's the point. That's why. It's like self-utility is not the solution. You're going to grieve. You're going to mourn. You're going to be changed forever.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
If you lose your God, if you lose your child, the rest of your life is going to be fundamentally different. Using a parent, your life is fundamentally different.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And his whole point, I think he quotes Epictetus, if I'm not mistaken, where he's just like the response to the inevitable tragedies, the trials and tribulations you have in your life is like learning from them and trying to use them in a constructive fashion. It's not to wallow, oh, woe is me. Like bad things happening is a part of the human experience. So self-pity has no utility.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Utilize, spend your time doing something else.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Um, this is what I love. So originally he's like, Hey, uh, I have enough money for three rocket launches. And that's what he thought. He's like, we can do this. He's also like super early, super optimistic. So it's a little nutty, you know, in that, in that case, he just thought he could do this. Um, and so the third rocket fails and he's like, you know what?
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Oh, this is my favorite. This is literally what I'm doing for a living because it's also in the books. So my idea was just like, I don't think like... You don't have to be smarter than everybody else, right? And some of that's out of sight of your control. It doesn't matter what I do for the rest of my life.
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#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
I will never be as smart as Charlie Munger, but I can gather more information than another person would want to, right? And so like the example I have of this is like, I just told you my thing where like I read a biography about somebody, go into the bibliography and I find obscure books. I found this obscure book on Thomas Edison, right? In the bibliography of a book.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
It was published in like 1950 or something like that. And it talks about when he was 12 years old, he was so voracious and had such an innate inner drive to make something of himself and to become an inventor and like to really have control over his own destiny. He was working as like a boy. So like, you know, very common for a 12-year-old boy to have a full-time job at that point.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
He was working on a railroad, on an actual train, and the train would have like a switchover. So it'd be a few hours every day where he would go and he'd wind up, find himself in Detroit. And so what does he do? He goes, oh, there's a library here. He reads every single book in the library over a course of a few years. There's a guy named Edwin Land who I won't shut up about.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
I talk about all the time because he was Steve Jobs before Steve Jobs. Edwin Land is the founder of Polaroid. He's also one of the most prolific individual inventors in American history. When he died, he had the third most patents to his name behind Edison and somebody else.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And so Steve Jobs, the reason I found Edwin Land is because Steve Jobs, when he was in his 20s, talks about meeting Edwin Land when he was in his 70s. And he said that meeting was like visiting a shrine. So Steve's talking about Edwin Land when he's 20. Steve's dying of cancer in his late 50s, right?
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Still giving interviews to Walter Isaacson for his biography, still talking about this guy, Edwin Land, right? So I was like, oh, obviously I need to read about this guy. He started reading about Edwin Land. He does the exact same thing. His idea, he had two goals in life. I want to be the world's greatest scientist and I want to be the world's greatest novelist.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
so obviously outside lobo outside levels of ambition he decides he's like he picks a scientific field where he feels he can be the best he that's the field of light and how it like how it affects our vision And so he starts sleeping with the canonical textbook on the science of light and vision. It's underneath his pillow when he's like 14, okay?
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Gets accepted to Harvard, realizes there's nobody at Harvard that can teach him what he wants to learn. So he goes to the Harvard library, reads every single book in the Harvard library on light, then immediately drops out, moves to New York, goes to New York City Public Library, the beautiful one with the lines out front, reads every single book on light, and then... Starts to do his experiments.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Doesn't have any money. Doesn't have resources. He breaks into, I think NYU might be Columbia. Let's say it's Columbia. Breaks into Columbia, right? There's a lot of, you know, misfits that do breaking in area. They're like trying to steal your TV or something. This guy was breaking in so he could use scientific equipment so he can run his experiments.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
We're going to scrounge up enough money and we have 30 days. We don't have six months. I think it might be six weeks. Um, We don't have six months. We have six weeks. We have to launch this rocket. And his whole thing, he ends that speech after the failure of the third rocket. He's like, come hell or high water, we're going to make this work.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
But it's like they just go to unbelievable levels of like just... Way beyond that you would find reasonable. So another example of this, the good ones no more is this line from David Ogilvie. Again, I didn't know who David Ogilvie was, reading all of Warren Buffett's shareholder letters, right? And he keeps talking about this genius David Ogilvie. I was like, genius, who is this guy?
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Read about him. He talks about, he built one of the most valuable advertising agencies that ever existed. And he talks about, he's like, oh, you want to get promoted? You want to get my spot? Like, how do you think I got to my spot? And he would encourage the people coming up, the young men in his organization. He goes, I'm going to sign you to one of their biggest clients with Shell Oil.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
You're going to read every single piece of paperwork on the company history. You're going to read textbooks on geology. You're going to read textbooks on oil exploration. You're going to know all the executives at Shell. On Saturdays, you're going to go down to the Shell gas station and you're going to interview the customers. that are patronizing their business.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Within a year, you'll be ready to take over your boss's position. And he's like, the good ones no more. It's like that. He worked for a French chef. He's like, they just knew every single thing about, they collected more information about their craft and things related to their craft than anybody else.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
That's a great insight.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
There's a guy named Les Schwab who we could have talked about him when we talked about the trying to not wind up like your dad. Because his dad was a drunk and a loser. And Les was very poor. And his dad, I think Les is like 12 years old or 9 years old. And his dad, they find him dead in a ditch in front of a bar. And Les goes on to build a multi-billion dollar tire company.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And like, you know, half a century ago, 40 years ago. And he says something in his autobiography, he's like, everything you do, it's volume. It's like gusto. And he goes, the combination of gusto, so like, you know, really throwing yourself into it and volume. He says it's a case of repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And again, I think if you really want an edge in what you're doing, again, I'm not trying to copy, I'm not trying to make a tire company. I'm not trying to invent the instant photography like Edwin Land did. I'm not trying to be an inventor like Thomas Edison. I'm not trying to build an advertising agency. like David Ogilvie. But I just take that idea. It's like the good ones no more.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And I just think another thing that history skills entrepreneurs have in common, and I think me and you probably agree with this too, I definitely do, is like the power of will and the power of one dynamic individual to change the course of history.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
So it's like, not only am I going to spend, I read for a few hours every day, right? That's usually in the morning because that's the time my brain works best. Then I usually have lunch. And then in the afternoon, what I do is then I reread past highlights and re-listen to old episodes. And I just seep myself in that.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
So anytime you see like some kind of social media post from me, all that is, is something I reread that day that I read for the first time four years ago. And I was like, oh, that's kind of interesting. I posted this quote about Rockefeller and importance of concentration because I went back through and I reread the highlights from the book Titan.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And that's what I was spending, you know, 30 minutes doing. And it's just like, all I'm doing, I can't guarantee that I'm going to be successful. I can't guarantee that I'm going to make a podcast that people find, they think it's worth their time.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
But what I can do is like, I can't control that, but I can, because it's more like a, especially with podcasts, it's like more like a, it's a subjective kind of thing, right? Yeah. But I can objectively do more work to hopefully influence and tilt the subjective, like, nature of podcasting in my favor. And I just, all I do is read books. I'm like, oh, that's a good idea. I'll take that.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Thank you very much. This isn't fucking rocket science.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
this drives me insane because again, all I do is hang out with founders and, you know, now the, the filters got a lot tighter than it has for the last few years. But what I don't like is when people are like, you know, I always ask them like, you know, who are your entrepreneurial heroes? Like, who's the smartest person, you know, what's the best business you can think of?
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Like, what's your favorite biography? Like, who do you want to emulate? I think picking the right heroes is like one of the most important things you can do in your life. Cause you're going to naturally like, well, All of us are going to copy and absorb things from people around us, whether we're together in person or I'm reading a book about it or watching a movie about it.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And what drives me insane is they're like, well, they put a number on it. It's not like I want to start a company that does X or I want to help somebody do Y. It's I want to build a $100 billion company. It's like, do you understand that people have built $100 billion company? You think Jeff Bezos was sitting back there and like, I'm going to build a $3 trillion company.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
I feel that belief comes before ability is another repeated lesson. It's obvious if you read biographies of people that do great things. And for Elon, I think he believes that he has strength and power of will and that he can literally bend and change the world.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
You think Steve Jobs thought that Apple is going to get to $2 trillion or whatever it's at today? One of my favorite pieces of trivia about Apple is the first ever Apple sale was made barefoot. He didn't even have shoes on when he sold his first set of computers. They weren't even computers. Like his first Apple product, his first sale was made barefoot.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
There's no way that guy was like, I'm going to start this because there's a number attached to it. So money comes naturally as a result of service is from Henry Ford. Okay. Henry Ford's autobiography, I think is like a mandatory, like, I think entrepreneurs should read it over and over again, you know, every two or three years.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And he, Henry Ford, in 1919, he owned 100% of Ford Motor Company because he bought out all his investors. And he was arguably the richest person in America at the time. So it's like, it's like me and you owning like a $20 billion company with no outside shareholders today. Like just insane, right? Yeah. And yet you go and you analyze the life of Henry Ford, and he's the one that said that.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
He had one single idea. He's like, it's kind of messed up that cars are only for the rich people. At the time, they were hand-making them. Most of the cars on the road are either electric or steam. He obviously popularized the internal combustion engine. Let me take a tangent. There's a funny story. I'm rereading Rockefeller's autobiography that he wrote when he was in his 80s a few months ago.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And there's a line in there where he's like, young Henry Ford came to visit to me today. I love that guy. And I'm like, yeah. He made like the demand for the product you have a monopoly on, like orders of magnitude. Yeah. Yeah. I bet you probably give him a hug and a kiss when you see him. Like, of course you love him. But, but Henry, what I love about Henry Ford, and I love this about everything.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
It's like, you only need one idea. You only have to be right one time. Henry Ford had a single idea in his entire career. One idea. everybody should be able to afford a car. We can't do that right now because at the time car, let's say cars were like $6,000 and the average person made, you know, two bucks a day, a dollar a day. It is not going to happen.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And so it took him when you read biographies about him and his studies career, it took him like a decade and a half, two decades to finally figure out mass production. So you can drop the price of the car. Right. And so how did he become the wealthiest person in America at the time that he was alive? Money comes naturally as a result of service.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
He, the service he provided was he made the car affordable. So everybody, and I literally think about like, there's a lot of great products. There's not many products you can make that change the geography. Like that's how influential this guy was.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And so what I think where people make mistakes, they're always like, I want to make X amount of money in my pocket, or I want to make, you know, my market cap of my company being this, it's like, well, the way to get wealthy is to solve a problem for somebody and then increase the amount of people that you're able to solve that problem for, assuming that is a widespread problem.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
It turns out how many people would want a car that they could afford? Well, they're either on foot or they're being driven by horses. Probably a lot if you can solve that problem. And so the second line of that, after Henry Ford says money comes naturally as a result of service, the best definition of a business I've ever heard is that second line from, and that came from Richard Branson.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And the weird thing you're going to see, and he says that all businesses is an idea that makes somebody else's life better. The weird thing that happens, there's another maxim I repeat over and over again on the podcast, that history doesn't repeat, human nature does. Every generation thinks that there's no more opportunity. Like, oh, we missed it.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
There's always, there will be limitless opportunity as long as humans are alive, because all a business is, is an idea that makes somebody else's life better. Podcasts can make somebody else's life better. The people that made the camera, that makes your somebody else's life better.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Whoever made the microphone, the iPad, your drink that I down, the orange sunrise when I'm doing my podcast, that makes somebody else's life better. There's an infinite way to make other people's lives better.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
That line. So the closest historical equivalent to Elon, and this is still a bit of a stretch, you have to bear with me. There's a guy named Henry Kaiser. Henry Kaiser founded over 100 different companies. He built the Hoover Dam. In his day, around World War II, he was almost as famous in his day as Elon was today. I think now Elon's on a different level. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
this is something that's fascinating. Cause like my dad is like a, he's a blue collar guy. He's got like an eighth grade education. And I realized you said how normal, normal people can be. And I told him like, like it was like a big deal to me because it was like the first like super famous and like wealthy person that I got to spend time with was Sam Zell.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And you know, at the time Sam Zell probably had like $10 billion or something. Like it was insane. He's 81 years old. He's working seven days a week. And he was, you know, I talked to him. He's like, I'm going to be doing deals till I die. He was like obsessed with this. And he was right. He was working on deals. Six months later, he was dead. Still working, you know, every day.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Or, you know, a lot, maybe not every day, but he was still on it all the time. And my dad for the life of him could not understand that this guy had billions of dollars and he still chose to work. And he realized like, oh, for a vast majority of people, they equate work with something I have to do. It's drudgery. There's a great line called how to do great.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
There's a great essay called how to do great work. It's by this guy, Paul Graham. Yeah. And he, he, his guess is like how many people out of 8 billion people on the planet, really wind up finding work that they love to do, and they're able to support themselves with it?
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
There's a lot of people that find things they like to do that they love, but can they make your avocation, your vocation, I think is the line from Steve Jobs. And Paul's guess, Paul Graham's guess is probably a few hundred thousand. I think he might be right about that. It is unbelievably rare where I don't look at... I wake up every day like, I get to do this, not I have to do this.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Sam Zell looks at it like, I get to do this, not I have to do this. And what's remarkable is the overlap between people that got to the top of their profession and the people that had no exit. Their exit strategy was death. Not only would they not sell their company, they would never retire. I did this, this, one of the episodes I'm most proud of.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And one of the guys I really like, and I, uh, uh, it's the founder of Red Bull and his name's like Dietrich, Dietrich or something like that. There's no even biography of him in English. So I had to, I had to use chat GPT to translate a German biography to read in English, which is, you know, the translation, not perfect to do that episode.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And he, he came to my attention because he had just passed away. And he remarkable story didn't start. He was like a, uh, executive, like an account executive for like Unilever or something like that. And didn't start his first company. It was Red Bull. He was like 41 years old. Uh, he owned 49% of it. So he had, there was a 49% partner, 49% partner, another guy that owned 2%.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Um, towards the end of his life, uh, he turned, uh, he was paying himself between like 200 million a year and five, 700 million a year every year. So that's his paycheck. That's his paycheck. Right. Right. Uh, was turning down like, Right now, you could sell Red Bull for $40 billion, probably more. So multiple times he turned down $10 billion in his pocket. His share would be $10, $20 billion.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And his whole point, he's like, I love what I do. Why would I sell it? Then I don't have anything to do. And he was like, you would love him because he took care of his health. He had his own fleet of airplanes, so he'd fly his own planes. He'd ride his motorcycle. He'd just live life to the fullest.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And there's so many people like that where they achieve outside success because time carries most of the weight. It's all the stuff we've been talking about today. To them, taking that away from them would be like losing a child.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
you know, multiple billion dollar companies. He built ships and he just like helped the allies win World War II. But that's his line where he was just like Elon, just default optimistic. Like every day, like I'm going to, I know I wake up every day. There's going to be problems. That's fine. That's what I want because problems, that's his line. Problems are just opportunities and workflows.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Where did that line come from? That's a line from David Ogilvie. And same thing where he noticed it. The problem is, is like, I think you've mentioned this on your show. And I think you got some like shit for it before too, about like the different values that historically men and women and like how it contrasts.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
But for men, like for us, I think it's really important for us to like wake up every day and like put, solve a problem, put something out into the world, feel like we're being useful to our tribe. You are not a selfish person. Like you are a driven person, but you are doing, you are doing things every day for other people.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And I think when you remove that, and they've showed studies like this, it's not just work. This is my life's work. This is my purpose. I wake up every day with a burning desire to achieve mission success.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Your friend Jordan Peterson said something one time. I saw this clip on YouTube and I didn't see the whole conversation, but the clip was, I was like, oh, this sounds exactly, this sounds like this guy's read hundreds of biographies because he said successful men are insane. And he's just like, they wake up every day.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
He goes, you could put them in a forest and they would just run around all day, chopping trees down with an ax. Like they have to do something. And to take away their ability to be productive, to be useful using your term is torture. It is, it takes away their purpose. It takes, and in many cases, like you'll find like, oh, they stop working.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
So the whole book, the autobiography, which I think he wrote when he was close to 80 years old, is now him recounting this for the reader. And there's just so many times where he's just like he hit a like there's a problem he can't figure out how to solve, you know, problems with partners, with contractors, with financing. all kinds of like, you know, basically unresolved issues.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And then all of a sudden this young or not young, this, you know, virile, healthy, overall healthy older person is dead. How did that happen? And so I think the point is like, this is the way I would describe this that I think is really important. And this is the maxim that I took away from the two-hour conversation I had with Sam Zell is go for freedom.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And essentially what he told me, he's like, listen, I know all the rich guys. He's like, they're all miserable. He's like, they make the mistake of like buying, spending more time doing shit they don't like to buy slightly more nicer versions of the same shit. That's his word, himself. That's what he said, right? He also did something that's hilarious. He's like-
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
I have a place in Chicago and I have a compound in Malibu. That's the word he used, right? And he goes, every year I take my family, like his kids, his extended family, and we spend the holidays in the South of France. He goes, I could buy the village. He goes, I don't buy it. I rent it because the things that you own start to own you.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And then he's, the funny thing is he wanted to show me pictures of his Malibu house. And so I thought it would be like pictures on his phone. He hands me his phone and it's Google images. It says Sam Zell Malibu house. So it's like, imagine having a house that's so well known, a compound where it's like, it's on Google images.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
But his whole point was like, David, you do not trade money for freedom. Okay. He goes, go for freedom. And this is the rough synopsis of what he said. He goes, if you go for freedom, if you have freedom, you can control what you work on. If you control what you work on, you can work on what you love. If you work on what you love, you'll do it for a long time.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
If you do it for a long time, you'll get really good at it. If you get really good at it, money will come as a result. And so his whole point, he's like, I had unlimited money. I never made the mistake of trading money in exchange for my freedom. And that is really powerful.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
So when his like employees would, you know, bitch and complain about, oh my God, this, this thing failed or this order fell through, or we can't find a guy for this. It's like, good problems. There's opportunities to work close. So you, the default state, I think for humans, it's like to complain, oh, woe is me. Here's another problem. Entrepreneurs, what they realize is like, oh,
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And that gives you the ability when you find like, when you really, your goal in life is to find your life's work and a thing that like the purpose, why you feel you're here and then to do it until you die. I can give you a list of people, Enzo Ferrari, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett's doing this, Charlie Munger, Coco Chanel, Estee Lauder. The list goes on and on and on and on. They, these people are,
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
We're decades past the need for working for money. And in many cases, like Enzo Ferrari, he was working like 11 hour days, seven days a week for the rest of his life. He didn't need the money.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
Founders Podcast and your podcast player, you Founders Podcast on all the networks. Dude, Chris, I admire you. I'm so glad we became friends. Like, I love the opportunity and I appreciate you inviting me.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
You're the man. Appreciate you.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
The problem are actually, if I can solve that problem, any problem you solve for a person could be a business. And so the second line where it says like, you know, business is problems, that's something that's repeated over and over again. But then when you think about it, that second line is something I came up with where it's like, oh, well, business is problems.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
That means the most successful companies are just effective problem solving machines because the perpetuation of their existence is the fact that you know that they're solving problems for other people and they're doing so effectively. So if you want to build wealth and you want to be a successful company, it's like find a problem and then solve it better than anybody else.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
I almost clipped it and then posted it. I appreciate it. I watch all your Q&As. I love them.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
I was thinking about this yesterday because, um, you know, we talked, we, we, you know, we talk all the time. And one thing that you notice is like, I'm kind of like oblivious to what's going on online. Like I'm just reading books and talking to podcasters and entrepreneurs. It's like, oh, that's what my entire life outside of spending time with family.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And I was struck and kind of shocked because I saw a headline where there was a bunch of protesters that set up a guillotine outside of Jeff Bezos' Washington, D.C. house. This was like a year or two ago or something like that. an actual guillotine and, you know, like kill the rich or eat the rich.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
And I looked at that and I was dumbfounded because I'm like, Jeff Bezos made a magic button that I could press. And if I want something to appear in my house in a day or two, I just press the button and Jeff hides all that operational complexity. Do you understand how difficult that was to do? And this talentless hack shows up at his house with a guillotine, like, give me your money.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
What did you do? Did you make a magic button? Jeff deserves that money. And that doesn't even talk about all the other businesses. In fact, he owns the largest cloud computing business.
Modern Wisdom
#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
The fact that the hardware businesses he has, the invention of the Kindle, his advertising business, they probably have more multi 10 billion plus businesses, uncorrelated 10 billion plus businesses inside of Amazon than any other business on the planet. Like, you think you could have done that? Like, that's insane. He deserves that money.
Next Level Pros
#136: Title: "I've spent over $1M on my education" - My Advice to the Youth - Chris Lee Unplugged
My teacher had a specific question for you. Cool. She wants to know how education underneath the American school system has benefited you on your entrepreneurial journey.
Next Level Pros
#136: Title: "I've spent over $1M on my education" - My Advice to the Youth - Chris Lee Unplugged
Solid advice. Transparency is great. It's, starting it off, at least for me, it is a little bit difficult, right? Very small business, had a, occasionally my window cleaners come through, like, hey, do we have work all day Friday? And I'm starting to think, like, yeah, probably. Look at my schedule, and no one's booked, you know?
Next Level Pros
#136: Title: "I've spent over $1M on my education" - My Advice to the Youth - Chris Lee Unplugged
So now I'm scrambling last minute to make some sales, get to work for them. And I see what you're talking about there. It's a fine line. It is more than just a paycheck. My teacher had a specific question for you. Cool. And I mean, she went to college, right? Eight years and teacher of high school, right?
Next Level Pros
#136: Title: "I've spent over $1M on my education" - My Advice to the Youth - Chris Lee Unplugged
She wants to know how education underneath the American school system has benefited you on your entrepreneurial journey.
Next Level Pros
#136: Title: "I've spent over $1M on my education" - My Advice to the Youth - Chris Lee Unplugged
Yeah, yeah, totally. I had a buddy from class when I gave a quick rundown on you before I started this assignment, which is actually my final for a few classes. And my buddy, he goes, well, crap, I have a business idea, and I'd like to get started. His parents are both doctors, so they've been through college, right? And they're really pushing college on him.
Next Level Pros
#136: Title: "I've spent over $1M on my education" - My Advice to the Youth - Chris Lee Unplugged
But he's not the best performer in this traditional academic sense. And he wanted to ask you, if he has an idea to go start and learn a business, just try something new, where would you recommend he start or when?
Next Level Pros
#136: Title: "I've spent over $1M on my education" - My Advice to the Youth - Chris Lee Unplugged
I had a buddy actually ask me one day, and I was about to leave to your mastermind, and I was just hanging out with some friends beforehand, and they went, you're about to drive 30 minutes to go sit down for an hour and listen to a dude talk? I'm like, yes, of course.
Next Level Pros
#136: Title: "I've spent over $1M on my education" - My Advice to the Youth - Chris Lee Unplugged
A lot of people my age don't understand the value in going out and learning, and not the traditional, oh, learn about biology or psychology, stuff like that, but sitting down with something you're passionate about, for example, business for me, and putting it to go up there. 30 minutes is not bad when I'm learning 30 grand of information, 20 grand of information in my life, if not more.
Next Level Pros
#136: Title: "I've spent over $1M on my education" - My Advice to the Youth - Chris Lee Unplugged
I think your masterminds are great. Love what I'm learning out there. And you recommended reading a few books, right? You had us read Rich Dad Poor Dad, And then you one day were talking about the psychology of money because some other kids asked about other books. So I actually went out and bought Psychology of Money. I was reading through it. Very interesting book.
Next Level Pros
#136: Title: "I've spent over $1M on my education" - My Advice to the Youth - Chris Lee Unplugged
And there's a concept in there that's brought up and it is the concept of not knowing when to stop. It's not a problem for people who are like me, for example, not worth millions of dollars, but I noticed it talks about people who made millions, hundreds of millions, and you're so locked in on the idea of hustling and grinding and you love improvement. I'm sure you do, right?
Next Level Pros
#136: Title: "I've spent over $1M on my education" - My Advice to the Youth - Chris Lee Unplugged
You're working on all these new businesses. And there's a point where a lot of people climb so high, climb so high, and a lot of people tend to crash a little bit. And this book, for example, super simple term makes it basically just like, you climb so high and you fall in a nutshell, right?
Next Level Pros
#136: Title: "I've spent over $1M on my education" - My Advice to the Youth - Chris Lee Unplugged
When I look at you, you made $2.2 million in that $2.2 million business, you hit bankruptcy, you didn't stop there, you kept going, you kept climbing even higher. More businesses, more back-to-back, and here you are, sold your power, sold it for nine figures up there. And that is crazy.
Next Level Pros
#136: Title: "I've spent over $1M on my education" - My Advice to the Youth - Chris Lee Unplugged
If he has an idea to go start and learn a business, just try something new, where would you recommend he start or when?
Next Level Pros
#136: Title: "I've spent over $1M on my education" - My Advice to the Youth - Chris Lee Unplugged
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Next Level Pros
#136: Title: "I've spent over $1M on my education" - My Advice to the Youth - Chris Lee Unplugged
Thank you. Thank you.
Next Level Pros
#136: Title: "I've spent over $1M on my education" - My Advice to the Youth - Chris Lee Unplugged
the of the United States of America has to be one of a position of power and cannot be weak right totally yeah in my eyes wars at least up near the top of my list priorities and Biden and Kamala, they haven't been too promising, at least from history at all.
Next Level Pros
#136: Title: "I've spent over $1M on my education" - My Advice to the Youth - Chris Lee Unplugged
So AI, jump on topics here. AI has been a very relevant topic recently. Absolutely. I scrolled through your podcast a little bit, saw it's a relevant topic for you. You've been talking about it. I myself am in computer science. That is the field I'm interested in. And machine learning and artificial intelligence is a very reoccurring topic I am digging into.
Next Level Pros
#136: Title: "I've spent over $1M on my education" - My Advice to the Youth - Chris Lee Unplugged
So for you, I haven't looked too much into the business side of AI. And I wanted to hear your thoughts on how is AI going to affect business? How is it going to affect entrepreneurs?
Next Level Pros
#136: Title: "I've spent over $1M on my education" - My Advice to the Youth - Chris Lee Unplugged
Yeah. AI is so heavily frowned upon in school. Teachers hate it, school hates it, you're cheating on your tests, all that, right? And I have two teachers specifically that I think are great teachers, and they are very positive on AI. They want us to go learn it, they allow it in class, and then Pascal's Soul District actually blocks it on the school network, which is more fun.
Next Level Pros
#136: Title: "I've spent over $1M on my education" - My Advice to the Youth - Chris Lee Unplugged
But I think, personally, ChatGPT and these large language models, all this stuff is so beneficial. The back end of my business is solid 67% AI. It cuts out a lot of the management roles. If I were to hire someone, it cuts out all the management roles, a lot of marketing too. I think it's a great powerhouse.
Next Level Pros
#136: Title: "I've spent over $1M on my education" - My Advice to the Youth - Chris Lee Unplugged
But yeah, I see a little bit of fear in the rapid growth of AI and the idea that China's going to outrun us. They're going to outperform us here. And realistically, there's a topic called AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, and in a nutshell, it's basically when a model doesn't want to die, when it has a will to not want to die. And that's when, theoretically, humans are at threat.
Next Level Pros
#136: Title: "I've spent over $1M on my education" - My Advice to the Youth - Chris Lee Unplugged
The idea is if China gets to this AGI first, then China is in the hands of all the power, and then it becomes a real big problem. For you, as somebody who, financially, you have the palm salt, right? What are your big fears with AI coming up?
Next Level Pros
#136: Title: "I've spent over $1M on my education" - My Advice to the Youth - Chris Lee Unplugged
Cool, yeah. Do you wish ChatGPT existed when you started Solgen?
Next Level Pros
#136: Title: "I've spent over $1M on my education" - My Advice to the Youth - Chris Lee Unplugged
Yeah. Yeah, AI, ton of pros, ton of cons. Starting to see a new con with my friends as the critical thinking skills go down about as fast as AI is improving. Interesting observation in my eyes. So, I had a question that's actually quite specific, a little more for me, and...
Next Level Pros
#136: Title: "I've spent over $1M on my education" - My Advice to the Youth - Chris Lee Unplugged
Before I start, I actually do want to mention, when I was in that mastermind with you, you mentioned I'm selling convenience, I'm not selling a product, I'm not selling a service. I'm mainly selling convenience. When you're talking about sprinkle blowouts. Yep. My original price was $45. Then you go, you're $75. I'm like, all right. So I actually put this to test. The season's ending.
Next Level Pros
#136: Title: "I've spent over $1M on my education" - My Advice to the Youth - Chris Lee Unplugged
I did the first two weeks at $45, and then jumped it over to $75. And then I jumped it up to $100. And I want to just let you know that that advice you gave me was some of the most solid advice ever, at least for me. Because not just minkle blots, you know, profits raising, but I moved that over to window cleaning and then the pressure washing side of my business.
Next Level Pros
#136: Title: "I've spent over $1M on my education" - My Advice to the Youth - Chris Lee Unplugged
And less clients is amazing when there's less liability. And also when they're paying, you know, 33% to 44% more. No, double price.
Next Level Pros
#136: Title: "I've spent over $1M on my education" - My Advice to the Youth - Chris Lee Unplugged
amazing advice i want to thank you for that because i have seen like uh from the math perfect was around 30 increase in profits with like hey charge more like it's so simple i wish i understood earlier but i really appreciate you for putting one out there you are a public speaker hi hi and you do a lot of leadership courses for example you were out you just gave a presentation out in vegas
Next Level Pros
#136: Title: "I've spent over $1M on my education" - My Advice to the Youth - Chris Lee Unplugged
And you're a sales guy, right? So you're good at talking. When it comes to public speaking and selling people or informing people, what is the most valuable skill you have, or at least you think there is when it comes to talking to people in general?
Next Level Pros
#136: Title: "I've spent over $1M on my education" - My Advice to the Youth - Chris Lee Unplugged
Yes. Yes. Hopefully this was enough. So those are all the questions for my assignment part of it, right? I also tossed a few of my personal questions in there. Hopefully it's enough to get me an A. Really appreciate you actually giving me this time. If you want to book a meeting with Chris, go to meetwithchris.com.
Next Level Pros
#136: Title: "I've spent over $1M on my education" - My Advice to the Youth - Chris Lee Unplugged
Amazing course. I love your mastermind. I'm so glad I attended. So glad Mike put me on that. Wonderful. Good stuff.
Next Level Pros
#136: Title: "I've spent over $1M on my education" - My Advice to the Youth - Chris Lee Unplugged
Today, I have someone quite special on this interview. Not someone, you know, like your friends or your parents, like everyone else is doing. I have someone quite a little bit more important, at least in my eyes. Today, I'll have Chris Lee on our interview. He's a family man, businessman, man of God, and in my eyes, a very, very successful businessman. Chris, real quick, run it down for my class.
Next Level Pros
#136: Title: "I've spent over $1M on my education" - My Advice to the Youth - Chris Lee Unplugged
What has been your past?
Next Level Pros
#136: Title: "I've spent over $1M on my education" - My Advice to the Youth - Chris Lee Unplugged
Awesome. Dude, your highs are so high and your lows are so low. It's incredible to see how deep you've gone and how far you've dug up after that. Dude, bankruptcy on the 2.2 million? Yep. Oh, brutal, brutal. Yep. I have a lot of respect for missionaries who can go out and sell because you are selling the hardest product I can imagine, right?
Next Level Pros
#136: Title: "I've spent over $1M on my education" - My Advice to the Youth - Chris Lee Unplugged
I mean, you're pretty much going at the door and saying you need to change the trajectory of your life, right? And it seems so hard to sell. Do you think as a missionary your sales have improved? So how do you mean? Like for the, because in my eyes it's really hard, hard to sell, right?
Next Level Pros
#136: Title: "I've spent over $1M on my education" - My Advice to the Youth - Chris Lee Unplugged
Good missionary.
Next Level Pros
#136: Title: "I've spent over $1M on my education" - My Advice to the Youth - Chris Lee Unplugged
Nice, nice. You had Todd as a mentor at Vivint, CEO of Vivint. What are some lessons or information he's given you that really changed your trajectory?
Ninjas Are Butterflies
125 - Bankrupting Zuckerberg, Ancient Map Mystery & Finding Atlantis
I love that story so much.
Ninjas Are Butterflies
125 - Bankrupting Zuckerberg, Ancient Map Mystery & Finding Atlantis
The Gulf of Love.
Ninjas Are Butterflies
125 - Bankrupting Zuckerberg, Ancient Map Mystery & Finding Atlantis
On the world? What are these? These are socks. New socks.
REAL AF with Andy Frisella
878. Q&AF: Is It Too Late For My Purpose, Feeling Aimless & Siblings Holding You Back
In the office. I'm in San Diego.
REAL AF with Andy Frisella
878. Q&AF: Is It Too Late For My Purpose, Feeling Aimless & Siblings Holding You Back
My question is, how do you leverage dark energy from mistakes you've made yourself? I've heard you share leveraging it from others, but curious if you do and, and how you do, um, turn that negative into a positive. Really appreciate it.
REAL AF with Andy Frisella
878. Q&AF: Is It Too Late For My Purpose, Feeling Aimless & Siblings Holding You Back
Can you give me an example of what you're talking about?
REAL AF with Andy Frisella
878. Q&AF: Is It Too Late For My Purpose, Feeling Aimless & Siblings Holding You Back
Be having to get the last word in, um, and damaging relationships or, um, and, uh, just the coming to the coming to things to those types of shortcomings personally that can negatively impact relationships or let me ask you this.
REAL AF with Andy Frisella
878. Q&AF: Is It Too Late For My Purpose, Feeling Aimless & Siblings Holding You Back
And I can't stop thinking about it. What would you say to me? As a friend.
REAL AF with Andy Frisella
878. Q&AF: Is It Too Late For My Purpose, Feeling Aimless & Siblings Holding You Back
That you really need to work on yourself so that you're not, um, and build confidence and self-esteem so that you're not, you don't feel the need to do that. Um, and you're more compassionate in those situations and don't even think about having to get the last word in and instead just handle it with grace.
REAL AF with Andy Frisella
878. Q&AF: Is It Too Late For My Purpose, Feeling Aimless & Siblings Holding You Back
I just can't get over it. What would you say? Just stop. Stop what?
REAL AF with Andy Frisella
878. Q&AF: Is It Too Late For My Purpose, Feeling Aimless & Siblings Holding You Back
Stop getting the last word in.
REAL AF with Andy Frisella
878. Q&AF: Is It Too Late For My Purpose, Feeling Aimless & Siblings Holding You Back
34.
REAL AF with Andy Frisella
878. Q&AF: Is It Too Late For My Purpose, Feeling Aimless & Siblings Holding You Back
Absolutely. Thank you so much for this and all you guys do.
REAL AF with Andy Frisella
878. Q&AF: Is It Too Late For My Purpose, Feeling Aimless & Siblings Holding You Back
Yeah. All right. See you. Thanks, Andy. Thanks, CJ.
REAL AF with Andy Frisella
878. Q&AF: Is It Too Late For My Purpose, Feeling Aimless & Siblings Holding You Back
Here we go.
REAL AF with Andy Frisella
878. Q&AF: Is It Too Late For My Purpose, Feeling Aimless & Siblings Holding You Back
25.
REAL AF with Andy Frisella
878. Q&AF: Is It Too Late For My Purpose, Feeling Aimless & Siblings Holding You Back
Right.
REAL AF with Andy Frisella
878. Q&AF: Is It Too Late For My Purpose, Feeling Aimless & Siblings Holding You Back
Hey, this is Cameron.
REAL AF with Andy Frisella
878. Q&AF: Is It Too Late For My Purpose, Feeling Aimless & Siblings Holding You Back
Hey, DJ. Hey, Andy. Cam, what's up, bro?
REAL AF with Andy Frisella
878. Q&AF: Is It Too Late For My Purpose, Feeling Aimless & Siblings Holding You Back
Thank you so much for picking me.
REAL AF with Andy Frisella
878. Q&AF: Is It Too Late For My Purpose, Feeling Aimless & Siblings Holding You Back
Doing well. Thank you. Thank you so much for picking me and everything you guys do for us.
The Charlie Kirk Show
The Death Penalty? Israel v. Hamas? Calm Under Fire? + More From USF Tabling
But then after the kids are born, you're advocating for less social protections for them.
The Charlie Kirk Show
The Death Penalty? Israel v. Hamas? Calm Under Fire? + More From USF Tabling
When you said that people have an over-dependence on social welfare.
The Charlie Kirk Show
The Death Penalty? Israel v. Hamas? Calm Under Fire? + More From USF Tabling
And I also think that foster care gets left behind in the whole argument because you're advocating for traditional family values, and that doesn't really include adopting a kid. It includes having your own nuclear family.
The Charlie Kirk Show
The Death Penalty? Israel v. Hamas? Calm Under Fire? + More From USF Tabling
Because so many foster kids are left behind. That was just the point.
The Charlie Kirk Show
The Death Penalty? Israel v. Hamas? Calm Under Fire? + More From USF Tabling
My deaf ASL professor has no problem. She actually preferred closed caption.
The Charlie Kirk Show
The Death Penalty? Israel v. Hamas? Calm Under Fire? + More From USF Tabling
I'm not sure the answer to that question. You might say because we have a lack of families to adopt them.
The Charlie Kirk Show
The Death Penalty? Israel v. Hamas? Calm Under Fire? + More From USF Tabling
The second contradiction was about how you advocate for a limited government but think that the government should have the jurisdiction to kill someone.
The Charlie Kirk Show
The Death Penalty? Israel v. Hamas? Calm Under Fire? + More From USF Tabling
Under every circumstance? Under most, yeah.
The Charlie Kirk Show
The Death Penalty? Israel v. Hamas? Calm Under Fire? + More From USF Tabling
Okay. That was all I had.
The Charlie Kirk Show
The Death Penalty? Israel v. Hamas? Calm Under Fire? + More From USF Tabling
I would say lock them up and make them pay for their mistakes in real time. But I understand that costs taxpayer money and everything, but I just am against the death penalty.
The Charlie Kirk Show
The Death Penalty? Israel v. Hamas? Calm Under Fire? + More From USF Tabling
Yes, I think that school shooters and mass murderers and crimes against humanity, like you said, but not eye for an eye nonsense.
The Charlie Kirk Show
The Death Penalty? Israel v. Hamas? Calm Under Fire? + More From USF Tabling
Because you're taking more lives, and I'm against the death penalty because, again, you're taking another life. It's like you're being hypocritical.
The Charlie Kirk Show
The Death Penalty? Israel v. Hamas? Calm Under Fire? + More From USF Tabling
That has been studied and tried, and I'm just a kid.
The Charlie Kirk Show
The Death Penalty? Israel v. Hamas? Calm Under Fire? + More From USF Tabling
Because...
The Charlie Kirk Show
The Death Penalty? Israel v. Hamas? Calm Under Fire? + More From USF Tabling
Thanks, thanks. Because I think that there's definitely degrees of evilness, and I just don't believe in an eye for an eye, like a direct proportion killing because they killed someone.
The Charlie Kirk Show
The Death Penalty? Israel v. Hamas? Calm Under Fire? + More From USF Tabling
I think an institution should never be able to make decisions that influence life or death things. The government is not a person with feelings or morals. It's an institution comprised of people that can be corrupt. So depending on what the law is and everything, then the justice would mirror what the government's saying.
The Charlie Kirk Show
The Death Penalty? Israel v. Hamas? Calm Under Fire? + More From USF Tabling
Yes, absolutely.
The Charlie Kirk Show
The Death Penalty? Israel v. Hamas? Calm Under Fire? + More From USF Tabling
Yes. Okay, thanks, John.
The Charlie Kirk Show
The Death Penalty? Israel v. Hamas? Calm Under Fire? + More From USF Tabling
Can I have a hat?
The Charlie Kirk Show
The Death Penalty? Israel v. Hamas? Calm Under Fire? + More From USF Tabling
Thank you so much. Nice meeting you.
The Charlie Kirk Show
The Death Penalty? Israel v. Hamas? Calm Under Fire? + More From USF Tabling
Hi, Charlie. My name's Cameron. I wanted to talk to you a little bit about some contradictions that I heard in your arguments. So on the topic of foster care, you mentioned earlier that you were in favor of cutting social welfare programs, and that would include foster care because those people are dependent on it. So I don't understand how you could be pro-life. I
The Ramsey Show
Don't Chase Money, Chase Freedom
We live in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, right outside of Knoxville.
The Ramsey Show
Don't Chase Money, Chase Freedom
And she. One of you wasn't working. You got it. That's it. All right. So she was still in school when we started.
The Ramsey Show
Don't Chase Money, Chase Freedom
And then she jumped on and helped out quite a bit, obviously.
The Ramsey Show
Don't Chase Money, Chase Freedom
It was our house. You paid off your house? Yes, sir. Wow.
The Ramsey Show
Don't Chase Money, Chase Freedom
And I'm 27. That's illegal. You are so weird. I love you. What's this house worth? I'd say about $290 now. Somewhere in that range.
The Ramsey Show
Don't Chase Money, Chase Freedom
They have some comments, some good, some bad. I bet.
The Ramsey Show
Don't Chase Money, Chase Freedom
So I can attest to my mom. We were homeschooled, and we started in the foundations and finance course for that.
The Ramsey Show
Don't Chase Money, Chase Freedom
She's awesome. She is awesome. She has been our biggest cheerleader through the years. I bet. But I can thank her a lot for that. And then we just kind of did the Dave Ramsey method. We actually bought the house, or I bought the house prior to marriage. No score loan with Churchill Mortgage, actually.
The Ramsey Show
Don't Chase Money, Chase Freedom
So it worked out perfectly to a T. Those guys were super helpful through the whole process. And we just ate away at it. We actually were here two years ago, almost a day, for the first event up the hill. Oh, yeah.
The Ramsey Show
Don't Chase Money, Chase Freedom
And that's where we decided, you know what? We could knock this out whenever she graduates. So that's what we did. We planned it out.
The Ramsey Show
Don't Chase Money, Chase Freedom
That's the only way we can live. So what was the original game plan? So the game plan was we were going to hang it off by January 1 of this year, 2025. Her birthday is on the 30th prior to that. So we were trying to knock it out then. We missed that date by eight days. Wow. So a little too bad. I'm going to call that a bullseye.
The Ramsey Show
Don't Chase Money, Chase Freedom
It really hasn't hit yet. We've had a couple months now of no mortgage payment, so it feels odd. The money just kind of sits there now. I guess we're going to have to find a plan for that too. Yeah.
Watch What Crappens
#2701 Southern Charm S10E07: It Takes Tuba To Tango
I'm so sorry I called you all the C word, but it's because I went fishing when I was young. Victim club, fishing victim club.
Watch What Crappens
#2701 Southern Charm S10E07: It Takes Tuba To Tango
Shep's like, so, I mean, where's JT even from? I mean, come on. Even in Nebraska, you have a little fishing hole. Come on. As a young boy, someone surely took you fishing and taught you how to eat peanuts like this.
Watch What Crappens
#2701 Southern Charm S10E07: It Takes Tuba To Tango
Oh my God. How am I going to do that?
Watch What Crappens
#2701 Southern Charm S10E07: It Takes Tuba To Tango
He texted me really upset. He thinks we took a picture of the fish as a jab at him.
Watch What Crappens
#2701 Southern Charm S10E07: It Takes Tuba To Tango
People have been sending around a clip from years ago where Shep's like, gosh, Thomas, being in my 40s, dating someone in their 20s. I mean, it's kind of pathetic.
Watch What Crappens
#2701 Southern Charm S10E07: It Takes Tuba To Tango
I dropped into a gorgeous beauty queen who's totally my real life girlfriend.
Watch What Crappens
#2701 Southern Charm S10E07: It Takes Tuba To Tango
So he's like, we're exclusive, I think. I mean, we haven't really talked about it, but basically, I mean, how can you not be?
Watch What Crappens
#2701 Southern Charm S10E07: It Takes Tuba To Tango
And then Shep's like, well, I guess I would do her too because, you know, I find the fact that she's a trained musician incredibly charming. Go, go, go, go, go, go.
Watch What Crappens
#2701 Southern Charm S10E07: It Takes Tuba To Tango
Where is she? Where's the true love of my life?
Watch What Crappens
#2701 Southern Charm S10E07: It Takes Tuba To Tango
And Shep's like, oh my God, tantric sex is so stupid. It takes forever. I hate doing that.
Watch What Crappens
#2701 Southern Charm S10E07: It Takes Tuba To Tango
He's just like, gosh, gosh, gosh. Okay, thanks.
Watch What Crappens
#2701 Southern Charm S10E07: It Takes Tuba To Tango
And he's like, oh, I don't remember hearing that. But I probably couldn't hear it over the sound of my beating heart after I found the love of my life.