The Startup Ideas Podcast
I Met Charlie Munger and Discovered How Billionaires Really Think
Mon, 27 Jan 2025
Meet David Senra, the guy who turned his obsession with reading about successful people into a million-dollar podcast. He's read over 300 books about the world's biggest entrepreneurs and shares all the best bits on his show, Founders. In this episode, David breaks down exactly how he finds golden nuggets of wisdom in these books, building deep relationships with founders, and insights from meetings with figures like Charlie Munger.Timestamps:00:00 - Intro and Founders Origin Story 07:10 - The importance of Naming and Branding14:56 - Energy Transfer in Relationships and Cities 19:51 - How to become World-Class25:03 - Startup Idea 1: Founders for Kids26:52 - The Value of Biographies31:28 - The Power of Long Attention Spans37:42 - You’re never too late39:32 - Innovative ways entrepreneurs monetized their business44:05 - Work - Life Balance Problems with High Achievers48:38 - Meeting with Charlie Munger55:22 - Monetization strategy and business model of Founders 1:01:28 - Biography recommendations and reading strategies1:08:55 - Career Advice from Charlie Munger1) On Building a World-Class Podcast:"Find what you're meant to do and let time carry the weight"David's moat: 375+ books read, connecting historical figures across episodes. To compete, you'd need to read all those books first.And he keeps going. 2) On Business Models:Fascinating approach to podcast monetization:• Only 2 long-term partners (2-year contracts)• Focus on brand partnerships vs CPM• Deep relationships with founders first• Think Nike/Tiger Woods, not traditional podcast ads3) On Learning from History:"Biographies are the closest thing to finding a cheat code in real life"Every great entrepreneur studied other great entrepreneurs:• Elon read Franklin, Ford, Tesla• Edison read every bio in Detroit library• Jobs studied Edwin Land4) On Work Ethic & Balance:Key insight: Almost every legendary figure sacrificed balance for greatnessOne exception: Ed Thorpe (Episode 222)• Built first quant hedge fund• Amazing father/husband• Stayed in shape• Lived a thrilling life5) On Memory & Knowledge:It's not natural talent - it's "maddening repetition"David's method:• Rereads highlights daily• Re-listens to old episodes• Updates/re-edits past content• Constantly connects historical figures6) STARTUP IDEA "Founders for Kids" - Comic book-style biographies teaching entrepreneurship to childrenWhy it works:• Proven model (worked for @SamParr)• Huge educational value• Underserved market• Scalable content7) Key Quote Worth Remembering:"Money comes naturally as a result of service" - Henry FordThe best entrepreneurs don't chase billions - they chase excellence in service.8) Final Wisdom:Want to be world-class? The competition isn't as fierce as you think.Most people:• Never try• Quit quickly• Lack patienceNotable Quotes:"I think podcasting is building relationships at scale." - David Senra"Money comes naturally as a result of service." - Henry Ford (quoted by David Senra)LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/BoringAds — ads agency that will build you profitable ad campaigns http://boringads.com/BoringMarketing — SEO agency and tools to get your organic customers http://boringmarketing.com/Startup Empire - a membership for builders who want to build cash-flowing businesses https://www.startupempire.coFIND ME ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/FIND DAVID ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://x.com/FoundersPodcastYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@founderspodcast4055Founders Podcast: https://www.founderspodcast.com/
The reason I run a solo history podcast is because I think the best podcaster I've ever loved is Dan Carlin from Harger History. And so for like fucking years before I did my own podcast, I would fall asleep listening to Dan every night. Almost every night I still fall asleep listening to Dan Carlin. And so I just fell in love. I think there should be way more monologue podcasts.
I think it's a huge opportunity.
What do you love about Dan's podcast?
Him.
Just him. His personality, how he talks, his stories.
He's a phenomenal storyteller.
Yeah.
And I think somebody said something one time, one of the best tweets I ever read was that they said newspapers were a fad. The village storyteller is as old as language. And now the campfire is 6 billion people connected to the internet. And for Dan, his download numbers are nuts. He's only talked about it a few times.
My guess would be his audience size for some of his bigger things were probably like 10 to 15 million people, I would guess. Because I remember one time he said that, he never mentioned downloads, he's like, My last episode got like 19 million downloads. I was like, that's insane. But then he said that there was a glitch and it was double counted.
So even if it's double count, it's 9 million people. And yeah, I just think he's a phenomenal storyteller. And then the way he does the podcast is crazy because I've listened to interviews on this where I thought, again, it sounds like it's, I thought it was scripted. And it's like, no, he's going to read 30 books, right? He's going to spend half a year doing that.
And he's going to sit down and he records it little by little. So he'll record, you know, little segments over half a year, nine months, and then stitches them all together. And I was like, that's, that's incredible. But the, the benefit he had is he was on, he was on the radio for like 20 years or 15 years or whatever it was a long time before podcasts. He started his podcast in 2005. Yeah.
Yeah. Dude, I went to PodCamp Boston 2006, which was like an event for podcasters. Let me put it this way. The people at that event, there was some... It was like fringe people. Like you were to be a podcaster in 2005, 2006, you were fringe. I mean, yeah. How did you discover it that early? I went to go visit Boston and I saw someone wearing a t-shirt that says, that said, I pod, therefore I am.
So I said, hey, where did you get that T-shirt? And they said, at PodCamp. And I said, what's PodCamp? And they said, have you ever heard of podcasts? And I was like, yeah, I have. Because I had been working on the iPod video, actually. So do you remember the iPod video? The iPod came out. This is not that of an interesting story, but...
The iPod came out and Steve Jobs had this idea that wouldn't it be cool if you could play videos on your iPod? So they built it, but they didn't have any content. And I was working on a website called startcooking.com, which was animations for learning how to cook. So Start Cooking was a partner to the iPod video. Oh, wow. Yeah. Anyways. She had a front row seat.
So I was like, bro, I know about podcasts. But you weren't listening to them. No. I just knew that.
What would you listen to back then? It'd be Dan Carlin.
Yeah, exactly.
One of the early ones I got into too were Bill Burr, the comedian. So he was so early that the way he recorded his podcast is you would call a phone number and you would leave a voicemail. And there's a service that changed the voicemail
into an mp3 player they would take that mp3 and then upload it for you so he would literally his early podcast he's just calling a number he's just rambling into a voicemail and that's converted into a podcast It's incredible. I really do feel it's an absolute miracle. And I still feel this to this day where it's like, it doesn't matter what in the world that you're interested in.
You can find, we were just talking about before we started recording about like, what the hell do you do? Like I have two kids, like what is schooling and what is education in the world of chat GPT? Like my 12 year old daughter is just using chat GPT for everything. And the school is just acting like this doesn't exist.
And the idea is like what I try to teach her is like, obviously like she's kind of forced to listen to podcasts in the car and audio books. And my thing with her is like, I don't care what you're interested in. It's like anything you're interested in, just search the directory.
You're going to find some absolute nut that is dedicated like their entire lives to teaching about whatever subject matter you're into. And they've done it in many cases for decades. you know, a decade, half a decade, there's hundreds of hours you can consume all on demand and you can go as deep as you want. Like that is a miracle.
Like I remember my mom taking me and dropping me off at the public library when I was a kid because we didn't have any money. I remember going to Barnes and Nobles and sitting there because they would let you read. It's like, you know how hard it was to get information as like some young, you know, smart kid, which, you know, my daughter definitely is.
It's just like, you don't even know what you have that's in front of you. And then if podcast isn't the way you learn, that's fine. Read. If reading's not the way you learn, watch videos. It's like there's world-class education everywhere. It's just absolutely crazy. So yeah, I still to this day don't ever like take it for granted.
And I still can't believe that anybody, like no one gave you permission to start this podcast. It was like, I'm going to start it one day. You're going to upload it. And then people all over the world get to enjoy it. That's fucking crazy.
One of the, we were talking before about, you know, I started this podcast with Sahil Bloom and it was- I love Sahil.
He's a friend of mine.
Yeah, he's awesome. I see him every time he comes to Miami. And he, we named it Where It Happens. Horrible name, by the way. Horrible name because I call it a tofu name. Why? What's a tofu name? Tofu name is- Quick break in the pod to tell you a little bit about Startup Empire.
So Startup Empire is my private membership where it's a bunch of people like me, like you, who want to build out their startup ideas. Now, they're looking for content to help accelerate that. They're looking for potential co-founders. They're looking for tutorials from people like me to come in and tell them, how do you do email marketing? How do you build an audience?
How do you go viral on Twitter? All these different things. That's exactly what Startup Empire is. And it's for people who want to start a startup but are looking for ideas. or it's for people who have a startup, but just they're not seeing the traction that they need. So you can check out the link to StartupEmpire.co in the description. Like tofu doesn't really have a taste.
It takes on the sauce of whatever it is. You know, tofu name is something that isn't memorable in people's brains. Like it's just, but you know, when you're talking about your daughter, how, you know, go search for, you know, if she's into design or she's into animation, she can just go search animation. So I renamed this podcast, to the startup ideas podcast.
The thesis was that people are searching for startup ideas. Since doing that, the pod has like, I think like 90 days after I renamed it, I think the pod grew like three X.
I think I read every single biography I can find on Larry Ellison. And I find him an infinitely fascinating person. In fact, a friend of mine was at dinner with Elon Musk a few months ago in Palm Beach right before the election. And everybody at dinner, you can imagine, was just lighting Elon up with questions. And he was asked, like, who's his mentor, who he turns to for advice.
And he's like, the person I ask, I admire the most. He used different words. He's like, Larry Ellison. He's just like, he's like, Larry Ellison is fucking awesome. I don't know. Did you see the leaked text messages that between Larry Ellison and Elon that came out recently? I saw it, but I didn't go deep in it. So I didn't either. I just saw one that was hilarious where Elon texts him.
He's like, hey, are you in for, I'm raising money to buy Twitter. Are you in? He's like, yeah, of course. He's like, I'm not going to hold you to anything, Larry, but like, do you know the amount? And he's like, I don't know, a billion, whatever you want. And Elon's like, I appreciate it, but like, I think you should at least do 2 billion. And I think-
larry responds okay it's exciting whatever and it's like the thumbs up emoji it's like i'm just gonna raise two billion from a friend of mine through text message which by the way sorry to interrupt but the thumbs up emoji is the official emoji of dads yeah like i use it all the time you know i don't know what it is about dads yeah but it's like you can write to your dad i love you yeah and they'll respond with a thumbs up
Or like, hey, you know, I think that there's, you know, someone's robbing my house and it's like, thumbs up. Larry Ellison, hell yeah.
So in one of Larry's biographies, he talks about the fact that he thinks, especially for technology companies, that names are actually really important. And I always think about this. So it was funny, you know, because I knew that the podcast is about startup ideas. And so I was talking to a friend on my drive over here. I was like, well, it's very nice for Greg to invite me on.
But like my startup idea is like whatever you're doing, if you love it, just do it until you die. So like don't start anything new. Just like keep doing what you're doing forever. Like if you think about the people I study, it's like they just find something and they usually do it for decades. Um, but I do think, uh, the startup idea I would have is like around podcasts.
Like I, I think a lot about like the open space and podcasting. Um, my friend, Eric Glyman, who's the co-founder and CEO of ramp. I just gave him this book that a friend of mine gave me. I gave me extra copies for it. It's the guy that, uh, It's the guy that did like, what's the chicken company? It's like Tyson Chicken. I'm going to pull up this excerpt because I think it's really important.
Jamie, pull up. Yeah, do we have a Jamie here? I'll find out the exact excerpt. And I'm just going to read this to you. because I think it's a good way to find startup ideas, because it's like, what do you think about as soon as your eyes open, and what are you thinking about before you go to bed? The name of the book is called, Tough Man, Tender Chicken.
Can you tell me the company that he started? Tough Man, Tender Chicken is the book. So it's Purdue? Okay. So there's a great line that my friend Eric tweeted out. I want to read to you real quick. And they wanted to start a line. They want to start selling hot dogs. And so he's asked, he's like, Frank, how's the chicken hot dog thing going? And he goes, it's too early to tell.
The guy goes, what do you mean? He goes, I haven't been able to find my Mr. Hot Dog. And he goes, what do you mean you're Mr. Hot Dog? And this guy that's writing the book, Tough Man, Tender Chicken, responds. He goes, there's a guy who gets to bed thinking about chicken hot dogs. And then the first thing he thinks of when he wakes up is chicken hot dogs.
And so his whole point is like, you have to find your chicken hot dog, your hot dog guy, right? And so for my version, I was like, podcasts. Um, and so when I think of like new podcasts to start one, I actually think you should spend a lot of time based on the story you just said, thinking about the goddamn name, right? I lucked into founders. I think it's a very good name.
I think you're not going to click on founders. Like, well, I wonder what this is about. You have an idea what it was about. And then the first five words in the description is gives you the value proposition, which is learned from history's greatest entrepreneur. The two other names that I heard that I think are even better than that are Ben Wilson's How to Take Over the World, right?
The value prop is in the title. And then Patrick O'Shaughnessy's Invest Like the Best. And I think naming, like think about what you want the podcast to be, but also thinking about the name is really, really important because you're just infinitely scrolling.
And I think there's like a lot of like, if you think about how much information that we're all reading or consuming on a daily basis, like how much time are you giving into every single tweet or every single video? It's like seconds. And so the name has to like jump out at you where it's like startup ideas. I wonder what that's about. I fucking know what it's about.
It's about startup ideas, how to find them, to generate them, to maybe hear another guest sharing one that you could possibly do. So I actually think that's really smart.
the way people think is they bucket people, ideas, businesses, right? So when, you just got to dumb it down, right? So I think naming comes, the best names with respect to podcasting, I think has to dumb it down. I'm a big believer in that right now.
Yeah. And the ones that we were talking about earlier, how I don't think about it's media. I think about it's like, it's a way to be your authentic self. I think it's podcasting is building relationships at scale. And I think there's something to the fact that, you know, most of the biggest podcasts in the world, they don't have a name other than the person's name.
Like that's a lot harder to grow, especially if you're not famous or if you're not known. But once you have that audience, it's like they're really attached to you. I remember I had dinner with Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify, who's been like a massive supporter and absolutely love. And we were talking about, it was like over a four-hour conversation. He was telling me the history of Spotify.
Daniel's fucking brilliant, as you can imagine. Super polite, but also like you could tell that he's really intense. And he was talking about how one of the most stressful times of building Spotify is when... Yeah, that controversy. You know, they just signed Rogan to this massive deal. He's making this huge bet on podcasting.
And there's this huge cancellation campaign that happens in Rogan's for a few weeks. And Daniel's like, you know, very stressed about this. And he's like, and then his subscriber count over the few weeks went up. He added 2 million new subscribers. And I was like, of course.
Because if you listen to Rogan or anybody else and you've heard him talk for a thousand, in his case, I bet you he's a large percentage of his fans, that heard him speak for over a thousand hours. There's nothing that a two minute clip on the mainstream media can tell you about the guy that you've heard talk for a thousand hours. There's no form of education that could take place.
You know who he is because you've heard him speak for so long. So I think there's actually this, I don't think it was intentional, but this wisdom of just naming these shows after yourself. Again, accruing that audience is a lot harder, but once you get it, it's like they're there for you for a very long time, if not forever.
What else have you learned from Daniel Ek? Because I feel like he's a legend, no question, but- Maybe it's in my bubble. I don't see him in the limelight very much.
I talked about this, where it's like, it's very bizarre. Like, okay. I almost said Shopify. They always do the joke that Spotify and Shopify, and then they kind of look alike. You have a founder and CEO who's been running the company for 18 years, right? It's worth over $100 billion. He's only 41 or something like that? And yet he's still... somehow underrated.
I just think every single person... So I get to meet a lot of remarkable people as a result of the podcast. And... Almost all of them, it's not the same personality type, but it's the same kind of archetype over and over again. They're just like unbelievably intense and dedicated to their work. And so that's it.
I just left the conversation was just like, I thought I was pretty intense and I thought I was working a lot. And I'm like, he makes me look like nothing. So it's like, I just left there. It's like with a lot of motivation. Right before we started recording, you had another guest here that was really big on Tony Robbins and like spending a lot of money to spend time with him.
And I know some people- $250,000 per year. Well, like I know some people could be like, oh, that's bullshit or whatever the case is. But this idea, I don't think, I think, and the way somebody makes you feel and the energy transfer that occurs between two people is like actually underrated. And this isn't some like willy foo foo nonsense shit.
You go back and read old biographies of Warren Buffett and way before he was known. There was this thing where like, there would be like the small groups that get together every year. And I remember in one of the books, there was this guy's wife that was like bitching at him because he had spent like $1,500 to travel to like Omaha.
And this is, you know, probably in the 70s or something, like a long time ago. So even $1,500, a lot more money even back then. And his wife's like, why are you spending all this money? And his response was great. He goes, because he gives me energy. And again, I think that is a very real thing. Our mutual friend, George Mack, has this idea of, he calls it sofa friends and treadmill friends.
He's like, pay attention to the energy that you get when you're in an act room with your friends. Some people are like, oh my God, go home. You need to lay into the sofa and just recover. And other people, you want to go home and you want to run on the treadmill. You want to run through walls.
And I think being around like a Warren Buffett, Tony Robbins, I felt that way when I had dinner with Daniel Ek. I feel that way when I get to meet a lot of these people. It's like, oh, there's like levels to this. And I have so much more to learn and so much more room for improvement. And it just fucking excited me.
I think the same is true sofa versus treadmill with respect to cities, right? Like there's some cities, New York City, for example, treadmill city, definition of treadmill city. And some cities that are sofa cities or towns, right?
Yeah, I would get out of sofa towns as much as possible. I almost, I mean, I think Miami Beach to some degree is a sofa town, especially because I don't party. Like, it's like, I don't want to go out. Like, I just want to work. I want to spend time. I want to take care of my health, spend time with family and work. That's all I'm interested in. And I almost left before COVID.
And then after COVID, we had a huge influx of like way more talented people. A lot of them have since returned. They went back to LA or San Francisco or New York. But the people that stayed were good enough where the network was like, oh, I'd stay here just for the network alone. But I, you know, go to New York every month. I spend a lot of time in California.
Like I would, I just talked to, there's this really talented guy. Do you know Blake Robbins?
Yeah.
He was at Benchmark. Totally. He's really good at like finding these like obscure, like people on the internet. Yeah. And he put me and my friend Patrick onto this guy named Maxim. And I think he found him when he only had like a couple thousand followers or something like that. Maxim now has like a million followers. It's by Maximize on- Yeah, I follow him. Yeah, he's the best.
I got to spend time with him in New York City because-
he said the only podcast he listened to is founders and so if you look at maximus videos a lot of them are ideas from the podcast i was like dude can you make some videos for me please seriously he's going to but um he's like like it's a you can look at his working like this guy's a fucking world-class talent and we wind up spending a few hours together in new york and he was thinking about it's like should i move from england and i was like how old are you he's like 23 hey you got any kids no i
You married? He's like, no. I go, you better get your ass over here immediately. Like, absolutely. To be super talented, 23 years old, no attachments. I even told him like, hey, like I will guarantee you a contract for two years to cover your living expenses. If you just make videos for us and you want to build your own company or whatever the case is, like, don't worry about that.
And I don't even think he needs to do that because I think his side business is successful enough that he doesn't need that. But for that, it's like no brainer.
Okay. But you know, he's world-class at what he does. No question.
Yeah.
for someone who wants to be world-class, who has the ambition to be someone like that, should they, and they're 23 years old. I would still move.
Now, that's different from what I did. I literally just like locked myself in a room. Like, you know, the Kanye line where it's like, travel yourself in this three, make it five beats a day for three summers. Like that is how you get good at anything. This is, so in the background, I'm obviously kind of a psycho where,
in the background during work, I just play the last dance that Michael Jordan documentary over and over again. So like my wife walked in and like, sometimes I'll switch it up. It'll be like, Defiant Ones is another really great documentary. Cause you just see the work ethic of like a Jimmy Iovine, of a Dr. Dre, of a Bruce Springsteen, of anybody that's good at anything. It just takes so much time.
And that's why like, I would say if you want to be world-class anything, like you really don't have that much competition. Like the very top, you know, half of a percentile, you know, is very competitive, but the average person on the streets is never even going to attempt it. And even if they do attempt, they quit at everything. Where like Maxim had, he had his huge growth.
He's like, no matter what, I have to make a video a day. And he just made a video about the fact that he made a video a day and he shows his follower count and all the crazy shit that happened to him when he just committed to the daily practice of getting better at his craft. So even for him, even if before he was good, I would still get around and try to get access to these people.
And if you can't access them. So like I started the very first episode of founders in September, 2016 was Ashley Vance's book on Elon Musk. It was the very first one. And part of that was because I was watching this, this guy named Kevin Rose. You remember Dave?
He's been on the pod. Oh, has he?
Okay. So, um, Kevin Rose had like one of this world-class video podcast in 2012 called Foundation.
Yeah.
Like the quality of the shoot was incredible. The guests were fucking incredible. Like I thought he was really good at it. And he interviews Elon when they're on the Tesla, they're at Tesla. I think the only Tesla on the market, they stopped making the Roadster. And I think they had just started producing the Model S. I want to get a little bit of context.
So he- it wasn't just exceptional quality. It was exceptional quality when the quality was low. Was non-existent. Non-existent. So I remember watching some of those first episodes and being like, This is better. This is the best content I've ever seen. It was fucking incredible. Even the website.
Cause I lived on YouTube. I don't even know if he was uploading to YouTube. He had to be uploading to YouTube, but like the website, it was like foundation.kr or something. It was like, it was like the fucking website was incredible.
I wonder like the alternate reality where he never stopped, kept doing it, you know, like it's just, he'd have a decade of practice before not realizing how valuable a great podcast can be, you know?
It's interesting because now he's back to podcasting.
Yeah, but you jumped around a lot, which is like podcast compound. You know what I mean? Like if you look at- Yeah.
Go ahead. No, it's just, you know, it goes back to like the bucketing thing, right? Like people, the new generation doesn't bucket Kevin Rose as- as a podcaster.
Yeah. But if he kept going, they would have. So I think there's another conversation we can have too about one of the most important ideas I've come across in the books is like the importance of being easy to interface with, which I think Steve Jobs is world-class at. Oh, they're all really good at, but he was probably the best there was.
But the reason I started with the Ashley Vance biography of Elon, this goes back to Maxim or any really talented person that's got to figure out what to do is like, If you can't act, if you can't move to a world-class city, you don't have any money or you don't have a network. It's like Kevin asked fucking Elon. He's just like, you moved from Canada. You didn't know anybody in California.
Like, who was your mentor? He's like, I didn't have a mentor. He goes, I read, he's like, did you read business books to learn how to build your fucking first company? He's like, no, I don't read business books. I read biographies and, this is what Elon says, I read biographies and autobiographies. I think they're helpful.
And then he goes on and lists, you know, Ben Franklin, every single person who ever built the rocket, Henry Ford, Nikola Tesla, all these other people. And I was like, and he goes, I think that's a way to find mentors in historical context. That's the sentence that Elon said. I was like, oh, that's a really good idea. And I was like, I should read more biographies.
And so I started reading biographies. I'm like, these things are pretty fucking great. They're very useful. You can download Toby Luque has this great line. where he says that biographies or books in general are the closest thing you'll come to finding a cheat code in real life because you can download the entire learnings of somebody's, you know, multi-decade long career in a few hours.
It's exactly what Elon was doing. And then when you read more biographies, you realize that every person that lived a life so remarkable, somebody wrote a book about them, all read biographies. It's like this weird ongoing chain of, hey, let's use learning from history as a form of leverage, find ideas from somebody else's experience I can use in my life to kind of get me to where I want to go.
So, yeah, that's what I would do. It's like, if I was a young kid, I'd tell this to my own daughter. My son's too young for this. It's just like, I probably bought her... I don't fucking know, 30, 40 of these little young biographies. It's called, um, little people, big dreams. They're in every single bookstore that I've ever gone into.
Um, and it's, you know, every single person, Taylor Swift, Coco Chanel, Walt Disney, everybody. And it's a biography that now she's getting a little too old for them. But when she was young, I was just having her read all these biographies. Like you could do whatever you want to do. Startup idea for you. Startup. Well, it's funny. We talked about founders for kids.
So we talked about Sam Poirier before. That's literally like the reason I knew he would text back fast is because we're working on a project for founders for kids. It's actually going to be like more like comic book-esque because Sam's life was changed because when he was a young boy, his dad would read him like kid versions of biographies about great Frenchmen. And they were very specific.
They had to be great people.
I'm not surprised. Why am I not surprised?
Yeah.
that were that were either living in france or living in montreal which i thought was funny he's like and it inspired him to become an entrepreneur and then led him to the deal fellowship and you know kind of can change the trajectory of a young kid's life and i was like i don't know if it's probably a shit business but it's a great service to the world it would be like really cool um so the first one we're working on we'll see if it's good is uh a kid's version of rockefeller's biography i'm surprised it's not a kid's version of celine dion but
I'm sure that's coming up soon.
Yeah. I don't, you've got to figure out who else we're going to do. No, no one, Sam would probably be Napoleon.
It's true.
So do you want to talk podcast startup ideas?
I actually, now I just feel like I'm not reading enough biographies. Like how many, how many biographies should I be reading on a yearly basis?
As many as you can. Like, I don't know what your day-to-day life is. Do you like audio books? Yeah. How do you like to read?
I'm an audio book guy. Yeah.
So I feel like there's no reason you can't read, listen to one audio book a week.
And by the way, I made a controversial tweet that got a lot of people angry. I said, what did I say? Audio books, not reading. What did I say, Jordan? Do you remember? Jamie. I know. I said, basically, the worst form of reading is eBooks.
I agree with that.
And then in a reply, I was like, for me, the best thing is physical books is the best followed by audio books, followed by eBooks.
Yeah, I have a rational love affair with physical books. My workflow for the podcast is literally twice as long because I insist on reading physical books than if I read Kindle versions. Also, I read a lot of old books that there are no fucking audio. There is nothing besides the physical book. There's no Kindle, there's no audio, nothing. but it's the way of reading I fell in love with.
And like, for me, I actually think there's an important part where like, I feel we live in a society where it's like over, everything's like over-optimized and like, way too much prioritization spent on like efficiency and like speeding things up. We actually think spending longer with the material makes my output better.
Like instead of, I'm not trying to take what's going to take me 40 hours, usually for every one hour of audio that I produce, it takes about 40 hours of reading and research. People are like, well, you can do summaries, you can do all this other stuff and make it to 20. It's like, yeah, but then it'd be...
more than half worse because it's the fact I spent so much time with the material that then I can then turn around and teach it or explain it in a useful way to somebody else. So I have this line that I stole from Jerry Seinfeld that the hard way is the right way. And so I use that for like, you know, I sit there when I, when you look at how I go through these books,
looks like I'm doing goddamn arts and crafts. Like I sit down with a pen, a ruler, a post-it note, scissors. Like I'm literally doing like an art project into these books. But I think forcing myself to slow down and spend more time with the material and then doing that every day for eight years actually makes, that compounds and like,
doing it, you don't see what you miss out by taking like the shorter route. And I think actually taking like a longer time, but I'm one of these people that's just like, I have, you know, I think 600 physical books in my house, but I also have like 300 on the Kindle. Like I'll read whatever, I don't care.
I actually saw another idea from Elon where he said that he read entire books because he travels so much on the Kindle app on the iPhone. I was like, that can't work. And I started using it. I was like, that shit works. Like, especially when you're traveling, it's like so much easier than carrying a book with you or whatever.
But I also think that I'm one of the rare people think audio, listening to audiobook is reading. People are like, it's not reading. It's like this.
the same thing it's getting the ideas from the book into your head i don't care how you do it but yeah i mean if you can't do a biography a week do one a month like it depends on what your schedule is and what like what you have going on but think about it's like the average person young person especially for like all the people in the room you guys probably are exercising five hours a week even if it's like walking running lifting weights whatever you're doing okay five hours of audiobook 20 hours there's two books a month right there
And then 24 this year, you know, just 48 the next year, go back and also I think it's smart idea to go back and like re-listen and reread things, especially like we forget that we forget. And so like I'll go and there's some books, James Dyson's autobiography is a great example. I've read it four times. It's episode 25, 200, 205, and 300.
And when you say read it, you mean physical book? Yes.
Read it. And then every time I'm like, I forgot that part or like something has happened in my life or I learned something else that then changes the meaning or my interpretation of the words on the page. So I'm a huge proponent of that. But yeah, I think everybody, like I am an evangelist for reading biographies. I just think it's so fucking smart.
And it sounds like physical books are preferred.
Have you ever seen what my library looks like?
No, let me see. I'll show it to you right now.
So Patrick tweeted that out. It's in order by episode number starting in the top left-hand corner. So everywhere... where my hand is before that I've read for the podcast. Everything after that is yet to be read, but it's not like the, the unread books are not in order. I don't know what I'm going to read next week until I just like pick it up that week.
I went for dinner recently. Well, very well known entrepreneur. And we were talking about reading books and he was saying, And this is a common, a very, very common feedback about reading physical books. I can't, I don't have the attention span.
What do you, what advice do you have for people who want to get into physical books, but you know, it's hard for them to focus and they don't have, you know, it sounds like this is, you have an innate ability and you just kind of love these books. Like what advice do you have for people who aren't born with this?
I don't know because I didn't understand that I just have a shockingly long attention span. And I think having a long attention span is going to get more valuable in the world. Because I do think because of the tools we use every day, it's shrinking. There's a great line that Charlie Munger said where he's just like, I didn't succeed because of intelligence.
I succeeded because I had a long attention span. And I'm working on an episode on Jensen Wong right now. And what's remarkable is like, this guy's been in love with Nvidia and building Nvidia and running Nvidia for three decades. And he's like more interested in it today than he's ever been. It's like, that's the definition of a long attention span. Um,
I get invited sometimes to give these talks at these conferences. And most of them, in fact, especially if you have to travel because I have young kids, I was like, no. I don't care what the price is. It's like missing one day of my four-year-old's life right now is like missing like 100 days. Because these early years are so important. So I'm very hesitant to do that.
But I've done a few locally there in Miami. I'm like, oh, fuck it. I can just drive over here. I'll do it. I'll do it for free. I don't even care. And one of the funny ones was... It was a conference run by a friend of mine who I really like and it's for post-exit founders. And essentially my talk was just like,
When people walk up to me and they're like, or text me or call me, like I sold my company. I always say the same thing. I'm like, sorry to hear that. Like your goal, especially if it's not your life's work, right? I think your goal in life is to find what you are uniquely created to do. And it should be an active service for other human beings.
One of my favorite lines from the history of entrepreneurship comes from Henry Ford, where he said, money comes naturally as a result of service, okay? What I can't stand is entrepreneurs that are like, I'll get emails that are like, hey, I want to build like a $100 billion company. There's like some kind of fucking number attached. And then I'll ask them like, who are your entrepreneur heroes?
And they're like, Steve Jobs or whatever. It's like, you think Steve Jobs started Apple because he thought he was going to build a $3 trillion company? It's like your motivation is wrong for this.
And so what I think is happening is like, people have much shorter attention spans and you're also reflecting that in the fact that there is now such thing as an entrepreneurial industry, which did not exist when we were younger, right? This is something that's relatively new.
Most of it is funded obviously, like you look at the incentive structure in all forms of media, most of it's funded from VC. Like if you think about all the media that founders are consuming, it's like created by and funded by VCs. It's really fucking weird. It's fucking weird to me.
And so like, I don't have advice other than if you have a short attention span, that probably is a good indicator that you're not, you haven't found what you should be working on because I can sit there and read a fascinating, like I just told you I finished reading before we started recording. Or maybe I didn't, maybe I was talking about on the phone on the way over.
No, I think I said this to you. I just finished reading. There's a secret biography written by Michael Moritz of Don Valentine that's passed around in Sequoia and Sequoia founders have it too. I'll tell you, it's only, like, I sat there and read the whole fucking thing. Like, I had to, it was so entertaining, I didn't want to go to sleep.
I wasn't like, oh, let me read one page, let me go scroll Twitter, let me read one page, go to scroll TikTok. It's like, this shit is fucking incredible. And I think that, you know, a lot of the best founders, like, I don't think Steve Jobs, when he was working at Apple, was like, you know, worried about what else was going on other than what he was working on at Apple. Yeah.
So I think the anecdote to a short attention span is like literally find, like taking some time to yourself and figuring out like, what is authentic to you? What is natural to you? What are you actually interested in? And trying to do Munger's advice is like, what are you intensely interested in? And then do that for money.
And at the beginning, you might not make any money, but anything that you're interested in, there's probably millions of people that are interested in that as well. Like I remember when I first started the podcast, People are like, you can't do an entrepreneurship podcast. This is 2016. First they said, it's too late to do a podcast, which is fucking hilarious.
And so I was like, I don't think that's true. They're like, why? I go, there's 750,000 podcasts in the Apple directory right now. 250,000 of them are active. Humans quit at everything all the time. And even you fast forward to now, I'm close to the human lab guys. They just sent me data.
Even now, that's what eight years later, there's like only like 333,000, 330,000 podcasts that have uploaded a new episode in the last month. That is tiny. But back then they're like, one, it's too late. You've already missed the boat. Two, entrepreneurship is a niche subject. And I'm like, okay. That just doesn't make any sense to me. I go, how many people own businesses, right?
There's a business owner to me, entrepreneur, like business owners. So my idea was like, how many people own a business, speak English and are connected to the internet? And you run the numbers, it's like 140 million people. Like you grab less than 1% of them and you have a phenomenally successful business. Like, wait, this is not a niche subject.
And now it turns out, like, if you look at what 11 Labs is doing, what Spotify is doing, what YouTube's doing, My calculation was way off because it's not just English speaking people. At the platform level, they're going to, you're going to be in Brazil. You're going to love founders. It's going to know that you speak Portuguese and you're going to hear me speaking fucking Portuguese.
Yeah, so I don't have a good answer other than like find something where you don't have a short attention span. You ever seen a fucking kid play video games? Do they do it for two minutes and put it down? No, they play forever. They just haven't found something they're actually interested in.
A hundred percent. It reminds me, the too late piece is a really, really big insight. I remember in 2000, it must've been 2005, 2006. I went to my first, first and last actually ever fish show. The van. Dude, no.
I thought it was actually like fishing.
No, no, no.
Fish is a wildly profitable. There's a fascinating business story too.
Fascinating business. But I show up. And I get to the campsite because that's how it works. You know, you don't just get a hotel or something. There's a campsite near the events in Burlington, Vermont, around there. And I meet this woman, you know, she's like, hey, you're here for the fish show? And she slaps my hand. I said, yeah. She goes, well, it's too late. And I was like, what do you mean?
She's like, You should have come in 98. Fish is like over. You missed the good years. It's done. And I remember thinking to myself, I actually felt bad. Like here I am, I traveled the distance, spent all this money. I convinced my friend to come with me. And then, and I'm seeing like, a diluted version of this band, this sucks. Go to the show. I had an incredible time.
My friend had an incredible time. And the next day I run into the same lady. what'd you think of the show? Wasn't it amazing? She's like, ah, no, it was horrible. And fast forward to like today, now I hear stories that like that era of like the early to mid 2000s in Phish was like the best possible era. I'm sure that lady today was like, that show was amazing.
I think there's an interesting, the fish story brought something else to mind where I'm always interested in, especially for the people that build businesses that are essentially complete opposite of the way everybody else in their industry does. I think there's like a lot of insight there. There's two examples.
I remember reading, there's this blog that was run by this guy in San Francisco who actually just started following on Twitter. It turns out he listens to founders. It's called Priceonomics. Do you remember this? It sounds familiar. They would publish their blog in a book And one of the blogs they would do is they'd find these like weird, you know, things about economics.
And one of them was the economics of fish where it's like, they don't have any top 10 hits. You know, they make almost, I think they gave away a lot of their music for free before people were doing that. Yet they were making like 140 million a year in tour revenue at like a decent margin, like unbelievable amount of money.
And so I just did an episode last year, maybe a year and a half ago on Jimmy Buffett. And I think it's right after he died. And the reason I had the idea to do that is because if you look, there's like these lists they make of, you know, top wealthiest people in whatever industry. And I remember looking one time at the top wealthiest musicians. It's everybody you would expect, right?
Like, you know, everybody in the list. And then you get down here. It's like number seven. It's like Jimmy Buffett. It's like, what the fuck? It's like not like Rihanna has hits, you know, U2 or whoever, like all these people, Bruce Springsteen, like it makes perfect sense why they're on this list. How the hell did Jimmy Buffett get on the list? So that made it be like really fascinating.
It's very similar situation to Phish where it's like, essentially he started like what I would consider like a traveling cult and the way he was able to compound He made his money on tour, right? So if you're on tour, it doesn't matter where you chart on the billboard. It just matters. Like when you come to Austin, Texas in May every year, can you sell the amount of tickets you want?
And then he was doing it so long that his audience would compound. So you'd be going there now. And then 10 years from now, you're bringing your 10 year old with you. And then your 10 year old is bringing, you know, now your 10 year old's 25 and going without you or whatever the case is.
And there was also a very fascinating way that he would make money is essentially he made the vast majority of his money through licensing. Right. And so as his...
audience age and they were you know they were just like him he was in the keys he liked to drink all the time they like to party they don't like to work they don't except he had a fierce work ethic right so everybody else in his audience didn't like to work he worked all the time and so he winds up making like seven i forgot the numbers are in the podcast it's like so you fast forward 15 20 years
Again, don't, you know, find what you're meant to do. And then just time carries most of the weight. Like do not interrupt the compounding. Time carries most of the weight. That's so important. And all these entrepreneurs are jumping around or just missing all the monies in the future.
So you fast forward 15, 20 years, he's making like 75 million a year in his pocket, just from the license agreements, right? Not including the equity value. So when he passed away, he gave the equity he had in his company to his wife, I think it was like another $1.7 billion, right? It was 1.7 billion equity, but the guy's been pocketing 50 million plus year after year for a decade and a half.
And I just love that idea. It's like, he saw what everybody else did. He's like, well, I can't make money like Bono. I can't make money like Bruce Springsteen. I can't make money like Rihanna. I can do it my way. There's like, the biggest thing is like, there's, it's not, it's never like what you do. It's how you do it.
Like you could find people that make a ton of money in music, ton of money in podcasting, ton of money in media, ton of money in clothing, ton of whatever it is. ton of money, realtors. There's like all these different ways to make money. It's like not what you do, it's how you do it.
And I'm fascinated by the people that are just like find their own weird route in and just, again, compound it for decades like he did. It's a fascinating story. And the idea of Phish, I read that blog post probably when you went to that fucking show, like 2005. We're talking about 20 years later. Are they still touring?
They're still touring. Oh my God. Yeah.
So like how much money have they made since then? They've probably been touring for what, 40 years? Yeah. I just watched the defiant ones, which is one of my, arguably my all time favorite documentary. And there's footage in there. I was thinking about this and I might do an episode of Bruce Springsteen because of that. And they're showing footage when he's 1975, he's doing born to run.
And he has this crazy work ethic that he's still known to this day. And I'm like, wait a minute, 75, like I'm bad at math, but that I think that's like 50 years ago. It's like the guy just sold 80,000 tickets in Italy, like a few weeks ago, a few months ago. It's incredible. It's incredible.
All these people that you study, you know, all these people you've mentioned, like Elon Musk and Bezos and Bruce Springsteen, all these people, they have one thing in common. I think they have extremely high work ethic. And I'm noticing even on your can, it says discipline equals freedom. Right? When I meet a lot of these people,
and I learn about their work ethic, I find that they have very successful businesses, but very unsuccessful personal lives. You know, how do you think about the balance between, you know, discipline equals freedom and work ethic and, you know, having a balanced life?
life yeah i mean they're not going to write they don't write biographies that people have balanced life so it's like there is a selection bias here so i can tell you like my stated preference and then if you look at like my revealed preference it's probably different so i would always said like in many cases the people i read about it's like cautionary tales because like exactly what you said they pursue professional achievement to the detriment of every single thing else health
family, spouses, kids, friendships, like it can get pretty crazy. And there's one guy named Ed Thorpe, it's episode 222 of Founders. And he's, to me, the one that came the closest to like master life. And I think the subtitle of that episode was like my personal blueprint. because he, first of all, lived a remarkable life. He's still alive to this day.
He's like 91 in phenomenal shape, still super intelligent. He started the first quantitative hedge fund, built the world's first wearable computer with Claude Shannon. You know, you ever play blackjack?
Yeah.
You know how counting cards works?
I mean, I don't count cards, but I know how it works.
You've heard of it? That system was invented by Ed Thorpe in the 60s, and then he wrote a book about the system called Beat the Dealer. He sold millions of copies. He was the first LP in Citadel. A 19-year-old Ken Griffin comes to... Ed Dorp's house after Ed had closed his hedge fund, gives him all the files. It's like, this is what we were doing.
And then at the beginning of Citadel, Ken runs that playbook. Remarkable story. Uh, winds up having dinner, uh, with a 37 year old Warren Buffett. They walk outside the car. He tells his wife, Hey, I think that guy's going to be the richest person in the world. One day winds up starting to buy, acquire Berkshire Hathaway stock at like $600 a share or something back then. So like,
Phenomenal shape, great father. His kids still love him to this day. His wife passed away from cancer like 10 years ago. They were happily married forever. Once he had more money he could spend, he stopped trading money for time, even though he was really good at making money. He's like, what the hell am I going to do with it anyways?
Very rare to have like that pullback and that discipline to have it. So if you look at that, it's like he had a balance of work that just filled him like intellectually stimulating. He enjoyed it, made his unborn great grandkids rich. Phenomenal husband, phenomenal father, top 1% in physical shape, and also fucking had fun and lived an adventure.
In fact, Nassim Taleb wrote the foreword of that book. And they said that his autobiography reads like a thriller because it does. It's like that guy had a credible life story. So that is my stated preference. If you look at how I spend my time, it's like...
almost all on the podcast like my kids were just on uh winter break right and i was like oh they're not in school i'm gonna spend a ton of time with them and i got to last night was the last night of the break and i was like oh i fucked this up like i spent we went on walks took it to the park went out to eat did all this other stuff went to the beach but i did not
spend nearly it's been half the time i thought i was going to spend with them um so yeah i don't i just think there's a certain personality type that reappears over and over again and um and that personality type seems to like be fine they're they're addicted to what they do they love what they do and they have a hard time putting barriers on it um i just mentioned the defiant ones if you watch part four of the defiant ones um
Jimmy Iovine's wife and Dr. Dre's wife were like, it's really hard to be married to people like this. Jimmy was already divorced by the time the documentary ends. Dr. Dre's like, oh, you know, we're not, we kind of made it out. And then you find out the documentary ends and they get divorced a few years later.
So I, obviously there's no solution to this because every single person I study is smarter, more productive than me. And they didn't figure it out.
Dude, how the hell do you remember everything? You know, you're like, I notice you, your memory is absolutely insane. No, it's not though.
So, okay. For me, it's maddening repetition.
Like, how do I do what you do? That's what I want to do. I want to replicate remembering that on episode 222, I said X, Y, Z. So here's the thing.
I got to go to Charlie Munger's house and have dinner with him before he died for three hours. Okay. Charlie is, like, I consider the wisest person I've ever come across. Like, and before I met him. And he's also the one that said you should read biographies. He's read hundreds of biographies. He's read more biographies than me. Now, I'll be able to catch him because he died. Right?
So, like, I will eventually pass him because I started earlier and I just had such a copy of him. But...
this is the scary thing about him because anybody at 99 is going to have some level of cognitive decline doesn't matter who the fuck you are right it's gonna be some level of cognitive decline i sat in his library so you start the first the night starts in his library for like the first hour and a half then we move to his dining room have dinner so first of all i'm sitting there and charlie was a legit hero of mine i read every single book about him i read all the books he told he said that he read
I watched all the AGM videos on YouTube and I'm sitting there in his library and I'm looking at it. I'm like, that's fucking Charlie Munger. Like I had an out-of-body experience. I was like, what is happening? How is this my life? I sat in a room by myself for years, reading books, talking into a microphone by myself. Somehow that got me invited here. This is bizarre.
And so my friend who invited me, Andrew Wilkinson, so this is going on. He had met him a bunch. Him and Chris had met him a bunch. And they're talking for like five or 10 minutes. I'm just like, what the fuck is going on? I could not believe this. And then Andrew looks at me. He's like, Like, jump in. Like, what are you doing? You've got to say something.
And then I snap out of it, and I look behind Charlie's head, and I see all these books that he had recommended that I read. So then I just started lighting them up with questions. One, that kind of freaked me out because Charlie was, like...
partially blind and so you know he's paying attention to you because he turns his head towards you and then he has to look through his bifocals so he goes like this and he's looking down at you so now you know there's no like you're not guessing who he's paying attention to and so then I'm like try the fucking mongers looking at me like what is happening here so I started lighting him up with questions on these books right
Dude, he knew everything. He could name the company, their partners, what their revenue was, what industry they were in. And I even asked him, I was like, dude, did you just reread this? He's like, no, I haven't read the book in 15 years. After we got done talking, I was like, Charlie, can I go through? I asked him, I was like, can I go through your library? He's like, yes. Very, very polite.
And he was very polite. So I pull books off the shelves. It gets even worse. There's no notes in them. So it's like every once, every like 150 pages, you'll see like some random like name written in pencil. But like I mark things up, I highlight them. I add them to a giant database. I reread them. Charlie had a remarkable memory. I don't, for me, it's all work.
It's like everything I'm telling you about is just like, I go back to the same episodes. I'll like re-listen to my old episodes again. I'll reread, I reread highlights. I reread highlights every single day. you know, for years, I'll like, I get bored and I get frustrated because I can't find any new podcasts to listen to. So I'll listen to old episodes of mine, like over and over again.
Like, oh shit, I did that four years ago. I forgot about that. I just did this with this guy named Chun Joong Young. And I spent like a few hours re-editing it. at the time I was recording like a shitty $100 microphone in like my kitchen. I didn't know anything. I did this episode probably five or six years ago. Now you can run it through Descript. They use their AI, their studio sound.
It sounds fucking perfect, right? And so- what I do. I spent like half of my day going back and rereading all my highlights from Chung Joon Young's autobiography. He's the founder of Hyundai. It's the most inspiring autobiography I've ever read. He grew up so poor he had to eat tree bark to survive. He dies the richest person in Korea. Fucking remarkable life story. But...
the reason I would be able to quote that even now is because I just finished rereading it and just finished re listening to it. So it's not like if it, well, you just said you have a good memory. You tell my wife that she'd be like, she'd laugh at you. She's like, no, he does. Like you missed my anniversary. No, it's just, it's just work.
And it's just, it's another idea I took from Charlie Munger where he's like, you need to find a simple idea and take it seriously. And he says, you can get outsized business success. He's like, many times in business we find that the winning system goes ridiculously far in maximizing or minimizing one or a handful of variables. And so my idea was like, once you start reading biographies,
From the very first biography I read for the podcast was Elon Musk. It's like, oh, all these guys read biographies. So that's an indication like Elon Musk, whether you hate him for his politics or anything else, seems like he's pretty fucking smart. And then you read Walt Disney. Walt Disney's reading biographies. Thomas Edison is reading every single biography in the Detroit library.
I'm not as smart as Thomas Edison. I'll just fucking copy what this guy does. And so then I was like, oh, so... All of History's Greatest Entrepreneurs studied History's Greatest Entrepreneurs.
What if I just build literally the world's best podcast that does that and then do it every single day, seven days a week for eight years and then just keep doing it and then keep making it better and better and better. I think I told you I'm doing this episode on Jensen Wong and one of his things that he told in a video is like, we have to do things that other people cannot do.
And so my version of a moat, right? Which another idea, I don't have any original ideas. I just, like copy what I find in the books. So Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger says, your company should have a moat. I'm like, okay, the podcast is a podcast, but it's also a business and my life works. Like what's my moat?
My moat's like every single episode you listen to today, it's not like the Jensen Wong episode I'm recording this week. It's not just gonna be about Jensen. It's gonna be how Jensen was like Steve Jobs, how he was like Edmund Land, how he was like Alexander Graham Bell, how he was like Ed Thorpe, all these other people.
So to catch, to be able to compete with me, you have to read 375 books to get to where I am now. but I'm not going to stop. So in my opinion, it's like the game's already over. As long as I don't stop, I just, I have to make sure that what I like, what I thought of, and I probably figured this out a few years ago.
It's like, I'm just going to like, I'm going to have a really, really small, but valuable niche. And that's, if you want to learn from history, then you're going to go to this podcast. Anybody does anything else outside of that, none of my business. You jump in here, I'm going to compete very ferociously with you. And I'm going to beat you to death because I take this very fucking seriously.
We talked about kind of like going against the grain and weird ways to make money that goes against what other main people in your category are doing. What's founders doing that's different in terms of monetization and building the business around that?
so this is another idea that i didn't even that wasn't even mine really um so i've become friends with jared kushner through the podcast and he's a very sharp and fascinating guy i highly recommend listening to the episode he did with lex friedman and once he just did with my friend patrick shaughnessy and really his idea was just like you have one of the world's most valuable audiences he's like i know all the elite people in the world they're all listening to you uh you're the best in the world at what you do he's like his whole thing and the
that he's constantly reinforcing. He's like constant refinement of association, constant refinement of association. And he's like inventory destroys value. So just getting in front of the audience you have is excessively valuable to any company. He's like, so take your time picking partners. And then when you do pick partners, you know, this is what you do. You have...
two long-term partners, you're on two-year contracts with them, right? It's finite. It's like, I just did this with RAMP. So I got to know the founders of Ramp. I think they are the best in the category. I spent a ton of time with them. Two of them are in Miami. So I'm with them a couple of times a week. And I have been for a long time, way before we considered working together.
And I was like, these guys are fucking geniuses. I think they have the best technical talent in their industry by far. And I think the technical talent is just going to win. Like the gap between them and everybody else is just going to keep expanding because of that.
Um, and so like you just do large instead of selling like most people sell on like a cpm basis We were talking about that right before we got here or right before we started recording. There is no cpm It's just like you know who's in the audience Uh one of the founders how this deal came about or this partnership came about It's because one of the founders was talking to me one day.
He's like I know 10 to 15 billionaires personally That listen to your podcast He's like, this is not normal at all. He's like, what's the chance? I know all the billionaires that are in your audience, like fucking zero. That is just impossible. You know how, what is their hourly, what is the hourly, what is an hour of their time worth, right? What would people pay to get an hour of their time?
And they give it to you for free. Like that is very unusual.
And so basically the idea I had is like- They're not even just giving it to you. They're not saying a word and listening to you. Yeah. They're consuming.
And then you become friends with them, which is even wilder. But the idea was, hey, essentially, you know, most, let's back up. Business podcasts, it's like bizarre world. It does not, you can't think of it as like a normal podcast. So let me explain how normal podcasts work. operate, you know, you'll have a ton of ad partners. Hopefully you're vetting them and you're not just like taking anybody.
Right. But even like if you're heavily vetted, like human lab guys, they have eight to 10 advertising partners on a yearly basis. They have over a hundred on their waiting list. Right. They vet the hell out of them. and they'll like rotate who's in the podcast. And usually sold on like some kind of CPM basis. Now Huberman's like the male Oprah.
So like, you're gonna pay a higher CPM because he's gonna, if he says he uses your product, his people will buy the product. I know how much he like, he can move vast amounts of products. That's why he has a huge waiting list. I'm not, I don't want, one, I work by myself. I don't have an assistant. I don't have a researcher. I don't have anybody. It's just me.
And so therefore, like any time taken, like for me to do ad sales takes time away from making the podcast. I have to be very careful to take time away from making the podcast. So Jared's idea of, hey, just grab, you know, you have dozens of people that want to advertise in your podcast.
pick the two best ones that you feel most comfortable with, the most, like that makes most sense for your audience. Like RAMP is a perfect example. It's like, what does RAMP do? RAMP, like it's cost control.
The biggest, the idea, the difference between the people I said in the podcast with like how most entrepreneurs are taught today, it's like every single great entrepreneur is obsessed with controlling costs. And they have been for hundreds of years. So it's like perfect partnership there. And so the idea is like you pick,
You have like two of those long-term partnerships and you can add in a couple other ones to experiment or if you want to do that. And then you just go to them month 12, you start developing relationships with other people. You take it real slow. You vet their product. You build relationship with them. Like I have people that want to advertise on the podcast. Like I don't know the founder.
I will never advertise anything where I haven't talked to. I have to, I have to build a relationship with the founder. Like the podcast is called founders for God's sake. And so you start building relationships and you go to your existing partners six months before your contract expires and say, hey, I have X, Y, Z. This is what they're interested in.
Do you want, like, do you want to continue the partnership? Do you want to modify it? What do you want to do? But essentially just like you pick, I think of them much more as like brand partnerships, like the way like Nike would be with like Tiger Woods. And I think that's going to be very, way more common than even podcast ads on normal podcasts.
I talked to a bunch of the biggest podcast advertisers in the world and become friends with the founders of these companies. And so, cause I want like a God level view of the entire industry. And they were even saying like for a lot of the early days of the podcast, it's like a lot of direct response.
And I think one, a lot of the direct response advertisers, they've noticed the efficacy of podcast ads because they're saturating the whole ecosystem has greatly declined. And a lot of podcasters are, I think you're just going to see a lot more brand advertising in general. And so that's what I'm much more interested. It's much more like a partnership. We do events together.
I consult, I advise on marketing. I help them. place ads on other podcasts. Like it's much more of like, you're getting me on the team and everybody in my network is like, I will try to help you as much as I can.
I love it, dude, man. This has been a lot of fun. I just feel I haven't, I got to read some autobiographies and some biographies.
What are you interested in?
Like, well, you know, whatever.
The easiest way to get started is like, who do you most admire? When I say, who do you most admire? Give me a list of three or four names that come to mind right away. Living or dead?
I'm going to get judged on this, but judge me, you know?
You can't give a fuck what anybody else says.
So... Or thinks. I mean, I think Mark Zuckerberg. Okay. Just a really fascinating guy that...
he what's really impressing me of him lately is how much he's been able to reinvent himself i love this concept of constantly reinvention for example like right now he's like he's an ai guy he was a metaverse guy he was a social network guy he was a mobile guy he's a web guy like he's just constantly reinventing undeniably the most impressive young entrepreneur in the world Yeah.
You mentioned Jared Kushner.
Yeah.
I think he's fascinating. I'm also interested in Josh Kushner. Yep. I met, I remember I met Josh when I was, he's, he's about a year or two older than me. So when I was 22, maybe around there, 21, I remember being, having coffee with him in Manhattan, which to me was like an exotic place at this fancy hotel. And yeah, he was kind of like picking my brain around raising his first fund.
We were talking about his first fund that he was raising. You know how small his first fund was? 5 million. It was smaller.
Yeah.
It was 2 million. Yeah. If, if my memory serves me correctly. And it was just so cool of him that he like, obviously he can raise $2 million. Yeah. But the fact that he was, you know, getting feedback from other people and, how do I think about positioning? How do I think about portfolio construction? Not having an ego about it.
I think, I think Josh Kushner, like if Josh Kushner had a book, I would read it.
So I just talked to Josh like last week and he listens to Founders a lot. He told me he finds it very comforting because he's a very, very, very unbelievably polite. If you do any kind of reference check on him, it's like, it's not an act. It's like, he's like old school polite, but he's also a grinder, which I love and just completely obsessed with every single aspect of his business.
And what he said about listening to Founders is that, it's comforting to realize that he's not the only one. They're all like this. If you want to be great, they're all very similar. What I would say is like, so Zuckerberg right there, I'll give you a book recommendation. When he was, before he started Facebook, he's at Harvard.
He goes and watches Bill Gates speak because he looked up to Bill Gates. So read Hard Drive. Have you read Hard Drive? Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire. One of the best fucking books. I've read it twice. I have two episodes on it. This is how I know my memory's not that great. I don't remember the episode number on the last one. Just search.
And if you search in Founders, always listen to the second episode I did on them because I get a lot better with time. But there's the first one, read hard drive. It's one of the best biographies I've ever read. It covers the first 35 years of Bill Gates' life up until the IPO of Microsoft and right after. And there's crazy fucking stats in that book.
Like for example, Microsoft's the first software business in history to sell more than a billion dollars of software. Might've been the first pure software company in history. The first 30, this is why I always bitch and yell at my founder friends because they hire all these fucking people that are not doing actual work.
I go, dude, I just had a walk with a friend of mine in Miami Beach because he's like raising all this money. I said, no, no, you sell before you have a product. He goes, what are you talking about? I go, Bill Gates sold before he had a product. Steve Jobs sold before he had a product. Larry Ellison sold before he had a product. Do you need three other examples besides that?
The first 30 employees of Microsoft, 28 programmers sold. Bill Gates, secretary and assistant, and Bill Gates. And Bill was doing all the sales. It was all founder-led sales. They were unbelievably profitable. That is the biggest bootstrap business of all time. It fucking drives me insane. We're like, oh, they raised VC. The year before they went public, which was maybe 1976.
Can you double check to see if I'm right about this? They were doing 140 million a year in revenue and 39 million a year profit. They sold a million shares for $995,000 a couple months before the IPO. That's a fucking venture-backed, that's not a venture-backed company. They wanted the guy's expertise and they wanted to incentivize him for that. 1976, boom. 1986, yeah, there you go.
They started in 1976. Sorry about that. Apple, I think, was founded the same year. So there's your first biography to read. Jared Kushner, read his fucking book, Breaking History. It's incredible. The life experiences that the guy has had. And then he will talk about reading The Art of War. He'll talk about reading Theodore Roosevelt. Every single book, books are made out of books, right?
They will lead you You just name three people you're interested in, you probably have fucking 10 more. Pick up one of the books, the biography of them or a book they recommend. And then in that book, they will then recommend other biographies of the person or other people they admire. And so what I'll do is I'll map out every single person. Like I became interested in Charlie Munger.
So I go and read everything on Charlie Munger, but then I also read everything that he read. And then what you do is you go and you go in the bibliography of the books and then you'll discover, like there's a Bill Gates biography, Right. In that biography, there'll be other biographies of Bill Gates or important people in there.
And then you go and get that book and you just go on and on and on and on. You take it very seriously. You start mapping this out and you have a very fun. You can read, you know, five books on a person and maybe another five books on people they admire. And you have a good idea of how they think. And that's really what I'm trying to go after.
It's like in many cases, like what would Munger do like in my situation? And it's very simple. It's like, what do you intentionally, I've mentioned it multiple times. What are you intentionally interested in? Do that for work. Find a simple idea and take it seriously. Just all kinds of ideas, maximize, minimize, or go out of your way to minimize or maximize one or a handful of variables.
Well, that's the cool part about reading biographies is it's not just what would Munger think, it's what would Jared Kushner think in this situation? What would...
This is the other, you mentioned the business model of founders too. It's like, I didn't know shit about shit when it comes to finance. And so now what do you have? You have a business that has cash flow, right? What are you going to do with the money? And so now I literally get to have access to some of the greatest financial minds. I'm like, what would you do? They become friends.
And then, so another extension of this weird business is like, they say, hey, you should look at this investment or you should look at this or you should do that. It's like, now I have another form of education where it's like, I don't know any of this.
other than like and i've been interested like the episode i just put out on heady green she was the single biggest individual financier in the world when she was alive she she was so rich she bailed out the city of new york herself she ran her own money like how did she do that what did she invest in what advice did she have i'm very interested in learning how to do this because it's such you can have like a one-man berkshire hathaway but founders it starts with founders like okay then what do you do now
And then you have this unfair advantage. Then you start building relationships with the founders that listen to your podcast. And a lot of them want you involved where they don't even want your money. They just start giving you stock.
What would Charlie Munger, if you asked Charlie Munger, hey, I've got this business, is that what he would tell you to do?
No, he would tell you to learn exactly what he would, I think I would do, I'm doing what he did, which is he didn't know anything about investing. He was an attorney. So they set aside a certain amount of his time a day. At that time, I think it was the first hour of every day. He sold back to himself to learn real estate investing and then investing in stock.
And then he winds up becoming friends with all the people, like Buffett and all the other people. It wasn't just Buffett though. I talked to Charlie about this at his house. Because his whole point was the book I gave him, I was able to give him a book because he has two busts in his house. It's Lee Kuan Yew and Ben Franklin.
And if you go to Charlie Munger's library, he's got every single biography of Ben Franklin you could find. And somehow I was able to give him a biography of Franklin he didn't have. And it was this book called Franklin in Washington. He didn't read the book, but he fucking knew everything in the book already.
And he was just like, yeah, one of the things that Ben Franklin did was he sought out a young George. This is what the book is about. Ben Franklin is 48 years old. He's the most famous person in the colonies. He reads George Washington is fighting the Native Americans with the British when he's 21 years old. He winds up seeing one of the best British generals get absolutely killed and massacred.
Because he was taking basically the playbook that worked in Europe and tried to fight the Native Americans with it, which is not going to work, right? And so a young George Washington writes in a journal about his experience. It's one that's being published in all the newspapers throughout America. Ben Franklin reads it. He's like, this guy's fucking smart. He has information I need.
I need to get to him. And so they start, he reaches out to him, he starts building a relationship that they wind up having up until, they weave in and out of each other's lives up until 40, seven, 30 years later, something like that when Franklin dies. And Munger's advice to me was like exactly what Ben did. He went out of his way to build relationships with other talented people.
He's like, that's exactly what we did. And he goes, everybody knows about me and Warren. It wasn't just me and Warren. It was all these guys. We built a seamless web of deserved trust and we did deals together forever. And the sad thing was most of them, by the time I met Charlie, had already passed on besides him and Warren. But I think that's, he would be like, you need to learn stuff.
You can't outsource it. He let other people run his money. This is why Hedy Green was so interesting to me. I love people that run their own, like the idea of running our own money is fascinating. And I don't, I'm uniquely unfit to manage institutional money. I don't have that personality. A good friend of mine was mentored by Sam Zell. And I just did another episode on Sam Zell.
And he's like, come over to my house the night before. I'll tell you all these stories from Sam. You can put it in your episode. And one of that was just like, Sam was too wild and crazy and would say crazy shit.
So he can't, he's like, he was, he said something like he was constitutionally unfit to run institution, to manage institutional money, which is a nice way of saying Sam's a fucking crazy guy. But I think Munger's point was like, he only let one other person run the one other outsider managed Munger family money. That was a Lilo.
And he said in nine, nine, once in 95 years, he gave money to an extra, to an outside person. He said, can Lilo. And he has a fascinating story with this, where he's like, I read Barron's magazine for 40 years, for 50 years. I found one idea I could act on in that 50 years of reading that magazine. Um, I made 40 million. No, I made $80 million on that. Charlie speaking.
Charlie's like, I made $80 million on that deal. Then I gave that 80 million and Leeloo, I gave the 80 million to Leeloo and Leeloo turned it into 400 million. So he goes, so I made 400 million by reading Barron's magazine for 50 years and giving that money to Leeloo. So he's very, very, you know, selective and he's like, you have to learn yourself.
We got to wrap this up, but dude, this has been super special. Um, if you've made it this far, you have to go check out Founders Podcast. Absolutely. Go check it out. I guess the recommendation is just scroll the list of episodes. Yeah. The weird thing about Founders, it's like...
If you, most other podcasts will like, they'll have like a consensus, this is the best episode. There is no consensus. It's like, depends, there's 375 of them as of today. Actually 391, because I have 16 that are not numbered. I checked that today, so that's not memory. I literally checked it today. So I have 16 bonus episodes that are not numbered.
But yeah, I just think like the obvious thing is find, one, if you already know you're interested in somebody like Bill Gates, what I would do is I would search Bill Gates and I would listen to that. And in the episodes, I'm going to reference other episodes. And so it's like, oh, this is like Ed Thorpe or this is like Edwin Land or whoever it was. And so in every single episode, it'll be,
like a pathway to other episodes. And then I think the thing I'm most interested in, Sam Poirier, who we referenced a few times, the first time I had dinner with him, he was in town for the Teal Fellowship meetup and he skipped it to have dinner with me, which I thought was very like nice of him.
And he says the product market fit of your podcast is not the Steve Jobs episodes or the Alexander Graham Bell or the Thomas Edison or the Walt Disney. He's like, it's the guys I've never fucking heard of that are remarkable. Like one of my favorite ones is episode 292. Can you check this for me? Daniel Ludwig, the invisible billionaire. I might be wrong on that.
He was the richest person in the world. I got it right? Okay. 292, Daniel Ludwig, invisible billionaire. He was the richest person in the world and no one knew his name. He paid a PR agency to keep his name out of the papers. And it's just like, that book was written, it was published in 1980, 1980 something. It's just like, this guy lived a remarkable life. No one knows who he was.
I wound up randomly picking up a book, probably a used bookstore, reading about him. And now you get to know that he existed and learn from him and read the book. It's remarkable.
Is it Brad Jacobs? Is that his name? Yeah, Brad Jacobs, the man. The man. I heard about him through what episode? No, this was the one that, 331? 331? No, that's wrong.
There's, is there two episodes? So Brad was a huge fan of founders.
Okay.
So he's like my LinkedIn reply guy. It's hilarious. And three 30, three, three, seven. No, no, that's the breakfast of Brad Jacobs. There's another one. Yeah. It's called how to make a few billion dollars. You see what episode number that is. So I can talk about this publicly because Jared said it on the conversation you had with Patrick.
He's very fucking nice to say this and I don't, I don't deserve it. 335, so I was off by four. He talks about this on Patrick's podcast. He's like, he heard about Brad Jacobs while listening to that episode, goes to meet him. They hit it off. He hears about Brad's idea for his new company, XPO, I think it's called. He winds up investing $150 million to joining the board.
So Brad is another person where it's like the amount of information that's in that guy's head is scary. He's 68 years old, the most energetic person. I just went to his house. 68 years old, the most energetic person I've ever been around. And just relentless note taker, relentless reader, relentless podcaster in his book. how to make a few billion dollars.
You got to read the section on the research he does before he invests. It's fucking incredible. Absolutely incredible. The amount of information he collects.
Honestly, must listen to Pod. And dude, this has been amazing.
Thanks for inviting me. Sorry, we didn't do any startup ideas. I don't have any besides do a podcast.
All right, cool.