How to Take Over the World
“You Couldn’t Pay Me to Stop” — David Senra on Obsession and Great Founders
Tue, 29 Apr 2025
David Senra of the Founders podcast joins to discuss the most important attributes of great founders, how to find purpose, whether chicken fingers is a worthy dream, and much more! 00:00 Introduction 03:12 Church for Entrepreneurs 06:45 The Power of Consistency and Repetition 18:15 The Importance of AI in Modern Business 39:30 Analyzing Podcast Success 40:15 The Importance of Charisma and Obsession 41:00 Tennis as a Metaphor for Mastery 44:30 Creatine and Gains in Bulk 45:15 Who Can Be a Founder? 51:00 The Unique Genius of Da Vinci 51:47 The Obsession of Inventors 55:30 Fame and Focus 01:07:45 The Value of Private Ownership 01:20:00 The Game of Kings and Modern Power 01:22:45 The Artistic View of Life 01:32:40 The Power of Podcasting 01:47:00 Books Every Young Man Should Read 01:57:12 Final Thoughts ----- Sponsors: Austin Lab by Shokworks Gains In Bulk - Go to gainsinbulk.com/pages/ben and use code Ben for $20 and a free shaker. Speechify - Go to speechify.com/ben to get 15% off Speechify Premium HTTOTW Premium - Get all episodes, end notes, mini-episodes, and more at takeoverpod.supercast.com
Chapter 1: What does it mean to be obsessed with your work?
People used to say like, if you love what you do, you do it for free. And I was like, wait, no, no, there's a different level. If you love what you do, they couldn't pay you to stop. And when I realized like how much money would you have had to give Steve Jobs to not work at Apple? The answer is there is no, it was not, you couldn't pay him.
I'll give you $2 trillion, Steve, but you can't ever work on an Apple. You can't build a product in. He'd say, no, he's not doing, that's not what he's doing. He liked hitting the ball. He liked making great products, the best part, some of the best products in the world. And he did that until he died. Um, so yeah, I think that's, uh, yeah, there's all kinds of people.
Some people are like, Hey, this is a good way of fast way of the wealth creation. I'm going to start a scale sell. And then they peace out. Um, but I think the greatest founders, the people that are like, they're doing it for other reasons. I'm going to show you how great I am. This was our finest hour.
I just want to say from the bottom of my heart, I'd like to take this chance to apologize to absolutely nobody.
Hello, and welcome to How to Take Over the World. This is Ben Wilson, and this episode is a conversation between myself and David Senra, host of the Founders Podcast. We talk about the most important lessons we have learned from studying history's greatest leaders and founders, what the greatest and most important biographies are that we would recommend to anyone,
the power of podcasting, whether anyone has it within themselves to become a founder, whether it's better to be Jeff Bezos or Napoleon, and more. I just re-listened to it, and I think this is a really fun conversation. David is just so engaging, and I think he has really valuable insights. So I think you guys will love this episode.
Special thanks to Sierra for helping make this conversation happen. So without further ado, please enjoy this episode with David Senra. All right, what's up? It's David Senra from Founders Podcast. David, how you doing?
Good. I feel like we're doing podcasts all the time like this. We just never record any of our conversations.
Yeah, we talk a lot. You've been super generous to me with your time and with your money, and you've advertised on how to take over the world, which I really appreciate. And we do kind of similar things. So I thought we'd talk a little bit today about just the stuff that we always talk about, right? Which is we've got podcasts about people who achieve great things and how they do it.
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Chapter 2: Is there a difference between being a founder and an entrepreneur?
Chapter 3: How does consistency play a role in success?
Chapter 4: What is the importance of AI in modern business?
And I think there's actually a lot of analogies there that you can draw and put to companies. So What you hit on is absolutely right. The things that most excite me is not necessarily novelty, even though that does occur every once in a while.
It's these ideas that people that didn't know each other, that lived at different times, lived in different parts of the earth, and worked in different industries, all arrived at the same conclusion through experience. So yeah, I would say that I still find... I find, like, interesting applications. So, like, let me give you an example.
I just did this episode on this guy named Todd Graves, who's the founder of Raising Gains, which seems like a weird thing for me to cover. Other than, like, everybody always asks me, like, who are my favorite living entrepreneurs since I studied debt entrepreneurs? And I keep bringing up Todd Graves. I'm like, who the hell is Todd Graves?
It's like he's a guy with a $10 billion chicken finger dream. But, like, all companies need to figure out a way, like, how do you finance a company at the beginning, right? Now, his application is very unusual. Like, he went and worked shift work as a boilermaker, working 95-hour weeks for five to six weeks at a time, fixing things in refineries.
Then from there, he learns from his other boilermakers, hey, you make a lot of money if you're willing to risk your life and you go up to Alaska and work the summer on these boats where people are falling over and dying. If you survive, you'll make a bunch of money. He lived in a tent to do that. That's a new application. Then he saves up his own money.
Then he scrounges up some startup money from his bookie and this boilermaker named Wild Bill. So, like, The idea is the same, right? You need to figure out how to finance your company that you want to start. Sometimes it'll be the customers, the bank loans, venture capitalists, whatever cases. This guy's like, hey, I'm going to risk my life.
I'm going to live in a tent and then I'm going to borrow money from a bookie. So I would say mostly I feel like I'm just telling the same story over and over again every week through a different personality. And that's what makes it powerful.
What you were just saying is, Reminds me a little bit of that quote that you quote a lot. I think it's from Charlie Munger, which is take an idea and take it very seriously. Find a simple idea and take it very seriously. There it is. Find a simple idea and take it very seriously. And I think that's true more often than not. Before we hopped on, we were talking, I was talking about
uh john d rockefeller and how he wanted to work for one of these big firms in cleveland he goes interviews with every single one of them every one of them says no and he's like all right well i'll just interview again because i know exactly what i want so he just goes two or three times and i think so often people think they need to find a novel approach and they don't at all uh there's another good quote
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Chapter 5: Can anyone become a founder?
Chapter 6: What is the unique genius of Da Vinci?
Chapter 7: How do the greatest founders manage their time?
Chapter 8: What are the common traits of successful founders?
So James Dyson, who I am completely obsessed with, I've done four episodes on. Every 100 episodes, I'm rereading his first autobiography. So I'm about to come up on episode 400. That'll be James Dyson's autobiography because I think it's really important to reread books again. We kind of spoke to the influence of religion. And I think revisiting the same ideas over and over again is really good.
But he makes that point in his first autobiography. He's just like, well, listen, if you could just improve an existing product, the good news is you don't have to invent the market. Now, inventing the market is a phenomenal way to build a monopoly. You literally can define and create the category that your product operates in. It's just extremely rare and really hard.
And his whole point was just like, there were vacuum cleaners forever before I started. And he wound up just making the world's best vacuum cleaner. And even now, like, am I ever going to buy another vacuum cleaner that's not Dyson as long as he's alive? No. And it's like, you can buy a vacuum cleaner on Amazon for like 30 bucks. I think it'd be like 600 for mine or 500.
And it literally is the best one in the world. Um, and I think like the, the, the insight there is exactly what you described, where it's like, dude, go to all these fast, like fast foods been around forever, you know, multiple, multiple decades. Uh, shortly, it appears shortly after the invention of the car. And it's like. Go to McDonald's and eat their chicken and go to Gray's and Cane's.
Just tell me the difference. And I just introduced my brother and sister who never had it before. I was just visiting them. And I was like, have you guys ever had Gray's and Cane's? Like, no, what's that? And I was like, dude, we got to go. And I went and the store that I went to just opened up and it's completely packed. It's like they have a cult-like following.
And he positions all his stores around competitors. So across the street, Wendy's. Not a single fucking person in the drive-thru at Wendy's. And you have 200 people trying to get into the Raising Cane's across the street. And again, I think this is just people aren't paying enough attention. It's just like, what do you use in your daily life if you're looking for a business idea?
Like, what do you use in your daily life? Like, this sucks. Guess what? There's no chance in hell that you're the only person on the planet that also thinks this thing sucks. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Right. That's definitely true. By the way, Raisin Cane's, you love it. You think it's that good. I love fried chicken. Yes. I went for the first time. They opened one in Utah, and I went, and I was like, it's good. What better fried chicken place?
Well, maybe I'm just not a fried chicken guy because there's nothing I can tell you that I'm like, oh. Yeah, okay. Some people don't like fried chicken, but if people eat fried chicken, it's going to be one or two on the list.
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