Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with David Senra David Senra (@FoundersPodcast), host of the Founders podcast. For the past nine years, David has intensely studied the life and work of hundreds of history’s greatest entrepreneurs. Every week he reads another biography and shares lessons on his podcast. David has been invited to lecture at Harvard Business School, Columbia Business School, and Notre Dame. Founders is one of the top business podcasts in the world, with hundreds of thousands of founders, investors, and executives listening every week. 

His new podcast, David Senra, showcases conversations with the best-of-the-best living founders and extreme winners. Its goal is to share timeless lessons with current and future generations of entrepreneurs and leaders.

Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!

Additional podcast platforms

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform.

DUE TO SOME HEADACHES IN THE PAST, PLEASE NOTE LEGAL CONDITIONS: Tim Ferriss owns the copyright in and to all content in and transcripts of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, with all rights reserved, as well as his right of publicity. WHAT YOU’RE WELCOME TO DO: You are welcome to share the below transcript (up to 500 words but not more) in media articles (e.g., The New York Times, LA Times, The Guardian), on your personal website, in a non-commercial article or blog post (e.g., Medium), and/or on a personal social media account for non-commercial purposes, provided that you include attribution to “The Tim Ferriss Show” and link back to the tim.blog/podcast URL. For the sake of clarity, media outlets with advertising models are permitted to use excerpts from the transcript per the above. WHAT IS NOT ALLOWED: No one is authorized to copy any portion of the podcast content or use Tim Ferriss’ name, image or likeness for any commercial purpose or use, including without limitation inclusion in any books, e-books, book summaries or synopses, or on a commercial website or social media site (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) that offers or promotes your or another’s products or services. For the sake of clarity, media outlets are permitted to use photos of Tim Ferriss from the media room on tim.blog or (obviously) license photos of Tim Ferriss from Getty Images, etc.

Tim Ferriss: Who is Brad Jacobs?

David Senra: Brad Jacobs is, I think, the only person in history to start eight separate billion dollar companies. A lot of people on the West Coast, they don’t really know who he is because he’s just been an East Coast guy his whole life, but he started his first company when he was like 23. He’s 68 years old. He’s by far the most energetic person I have ever been around and he wrote this book called How to Make a Few Billion Dollars.

Tim Ferriss: What are some of his companies with? What industries and so on?

David Senra: He’s like the roll-up king. He’d roll up logistics companies and trucking companies and now he’s got a massive one that he just took public that’s doing building supplies. Early in your career you might roll up a $5 million company or a $20 million company. His first acquisition I think was like $9 billion. He just gets progressively bigger and bigger and bigger.

What I find interesting about him is usually when you study extreme winners, and he’s obviously an extreme winner, what motivates them is kind of dark like issues with their father, some kind of insecurity, never felt good enough. They grew up poor and they felt they were born in the wrong place. 

Brad does it out of love. He’s got no negativity. He’s just a very special human being and the fact that I get to text him and call him and go to his house is insane. He’s just an amazing human being.

Tim Ferriss: There’s another legend who defeated roulette and then went on to beat the market, Ed Thorp, probably another exception where — 

David Senra: The exception.

Tim Ferriss: The exception where he did not eviscerate his personal life in the quest for business mastery.

David Senra: I don’t think anybody’s mastered life clearly as much as Ed Thorp did. Your two interviews that you did with him were incredible.

Tim Ferriss: Thank you. That was such a moment of gratitude to have the chance to interview him, especially because he is so, so sharp at his age. I can’t recall his exact age right now.

David Senra: It’s like 89 or something like that.

Tim Ferriss: If you want a holistic figure to consider emulating, Ed Thorp would be on a very, very, very short list.

David Senra: I can think of three out of 400.

Tim Ferriss: Who are the three?

David Senra: Ed Thorp is at the top. Sol Price who’s the one that invented essentially the warehouse model like Costco, Jim Sinegal was mentored by Sol Price when Jim Sinegal was 18. Jim Sinegal, founder of Costco, built one of the greatest companies in history and he has this great line in Sol Price’s autobiography. Sol Price’s son wrote his biography. People are like, when Sol died, like, “You must have learned a lot from Sol.”

He goes, “No, I didn’t learn a lot. I learned everything. Everything that I know I learned from this guy.” Sol Price, same thing, good husband, good father, didn’t chase after more money at the expense of other areas of his life after he already had enough money. Ed Thorp turned down so much, hundreds of millions, if not billions. He could have collected. He was just like, “I already have more money than I can ever spend. Why would I do that?” Then, I would say Brunello Cucinelli.

Tim Ferriss: How are those examples different? You should explain for folks. I mean, look, everything I’m wearing I got for free. You should explain to people. I did not know the last name you mentioned until a few years ago because I won’t doxx him, but my friend Tony is basically covered in Brunello. Who is this?

David Senra: Brunello Cucinelli wrote this, I don’t even know the name. I read the book. It’s like it’s something about Solomeo. Essentially, he sells $5,000 sweaters. He sells sweaters that were more than my first car, but he grew up in very rural Italy.

Then, everybody at the time, there was just essentially the hollowing out of his community. Everybody had moved to the cities. He is a very soulful dude.

Brunello essentially works. He essentially bounds his life where it’s like you work 9:00 to 5:00. You are not allowed to send an email to the company after 5:00. You have to take a break for lunch and they have this great Italian food.

Then, he spends his nights reading and then going on long walks and then sitting in the cafes in this little town that he essentially rebuilt and reinvested in. He likes having cappuccino and debating philosophy. He’s just like a real soulful dude. Now the one criticism people have is like that business model works when you have 70 percent margins and your sweaters are as much as a Honda Civic, but it was very intentional. I don’t care what people do. It’s very intentional.

Tim Ferriss:Let me come back to this question of clean fuel versus let’s call it dirty fuel and there’s a lot in between.  I don’t want to look at it in a totally binary way, but why do you think of the say 400 plus that you can only call to mind three or four, Ed Thorp, Sol Price, Brunello Cucinelli, Brad Jacobs?

Why are there so few who seem driven in that particular, let’s just call it positive way, or that they can pursue business excellence without having a lot of collateral damage in their personal lives? What do you draw from that? Look, maybe these are just different animals and out of the box these four are just fundamentally different from the other 396 or so, but what is your take on that thin slice of the total?

David Senra: I would add another one to the list. You’ve also interviewed him, Michael Dell. Recently, I’ve spent hours and hours with him. We had a five hour dinner and then I just recorded a two and a half hour conversation with him for the new show. He is in love. His is very positive. Now he has a big fear of failure, which almost I think me and you probably share this. I won’t speak for you. I want to ask you actually. I am way more afraid of failure than I love winning.

Tim Ferriss: I mean that’s true for everyone I know who wins a lot. I don’t think I can think of a single exception in terms of someone who celebrates the wins as much as they punish themselves for the losses. I’m not saying that’s a good thing, I’m just saying that’s pattern matching.

David Senra: Even now with all the success that you’ve had, is your inner monologue still negative?

Tim Ferriss: I mean there’s a lot of negative. I’m working on that. I look at some of the, I don’t want to call them maxims, but you’ve quoted the, I think it was the founder of the Four Seasons,

David Senra: Excellence is the capacity to take pain.

Tim Ferriss: Right, and there may be some truth to that, but I feel like it’s very risky for me to take something like that and wear it as a marching order for life because I already tilt in that direction and not all pain is productive. I think for me when you are already tilted in that direction where you believe if there isn’t pain, if there isn’t some degree of suffering, then you’re not trying hard enough. It’s very easy to become a hammer looking for nails and that can have a lot of repercussions for your relationships also.

David Senra: For sure.

Tim Ferriss: If your self-talk is negative, at least in my experience, what I’ve seen in a lot of my friends and peers and founders, very often you end up having a similar type of dialogue with people around you. That can have huge repercussions. That doesn’t give anyone a neat, tidy silver bullet of an answer, but the negative self-talk, there’s a place for it. The nuance to me matters a lot. If it’s like, “You’re a piece of shit. You always do X. Why don’t you do Y,” and that has a good outcome, I would still want to refine the process.

David Senra: I read this biography of Jensen Huang, which is fascinating, because it’s right after one of the best quarters in NVIDIA history. He starts this meeting and he says, “I woke up this morning, looked in the mirror, and said, ‘Why do you suck so much?’” 

Tim Ferriss: He’s hardcore.

David Senra: He’s very hardcore.

Tim Ferriss: He’s hardcore. He’s hardcore. I guess what I’d also like to ask you is about not necessarily the people you study, and hopefully you take this as a compliment. It’s intended like a highest compliment. 

When people ask me about you they’re like, “So what’s the story? Why do people like this stuff?” I’m like, “Well, I can only really speculate,” but I feel like you are, in a way, what Dan Carlin did with Hardcore History, you do for business. Hardcore History is my favorite podcast of all.

David Senra: I think Dan Carlin’s the greatest podcaster that ever lived. The reason I do a solo history show is because of Dan Carlin. I’ve given away his back catalog. I wish he would change his business model.

Tim Ferriss: It is a bit janky, but if you want to just listen to the greats, I mean the “Wrath of the Khans” — 

David Senra: “Blueprint for Armageddon”, “Wrath of the Khans”, I think is the best podcast series ever created, in my opinion. “Blueprint for Armageddon”, just everything, I’ve listened to them. I’ve listened. He only has like 55 episodes. He was doing it for 15 years. I fall asleep at night. Right now last night I fell asleep listening to his new one. It’s not even new. It’s like six months old because he never released any episodes, “Mania for Subjugation Part Two”, about the relationship between Alexander the Great and King Philip.

Tim Ferriss: Amazing.

David Senra: He just puts me to sleep. He is the greatest.

Tim Ferriss: The reason that I mentioned that is I feel like I’ve learned so much from Dan Carlin. I’ve learned so much from your episodes. I’m curious though, as I know another person, you’re a fan of Derek Sivers who I’ve known I think since 2007, amazing entrepreneur. People can look him up. I’ll give the one-liner, which is sort of this philosopher king programmer entrepreneur who started companies, gave the vast majority to a charitable trust to fund musical education.

At one point, he was the ringleader in a traveling circus, played guitar and sang at a pig state fair, and has just crafted the most unusual and Derek life for himself and given his family permission to do the same for themselves. Really a true, original thinker who also shows it in his actions and this is where I’m going. Derek has this line. I may be paraphrasing it slightly, but the gist is “If more information were the answer, we’d all be billionaires with six pack abs.”

What do you see or surmise about people who make the leap from listening to your podcast about all of these icons and people who have not just once you’re lucky, twice you’re good, but in some cases they built $8 billion companies? In that case, I might come back to the acquisition kind of roll-up archetype. The people who make the leap from ingesting information to actually implementing and those who don’t, what’s the missing piece in the middle?

David Senra: The way I think about it, the maxim I’ve made for myself on this is learning is not memorizing information. Learning is changing your behavior. If you didn’t change your behavior, this is just all mental gymnastics for you. You’re just wasting your time. What I’m trying to do, I didn’t even understand what I was doing.

I had to have, as happens in many cases, somebody outside of you seeing what you’re doing actually gives you what this whole thing is about. I have a good friend of mine. His name’s Jeremy Gafan and he’s really quick-witted and he has a way to condense ideas really well. We’re just walking around taking a walk in Miami Beach one day and he’s like, “Oh, yeah, it’s pretty obvious what this whole thing is.” I didn’t even think he was thinking about it. I was like, “What do you mean?”

He’s just like, “Oh, you never had any positive influences. You didn’t have any mentors. If you take somebody like you who’s like psychopathically driven and really has an obsessive personality, that’s what this whole thing is. You’re just reading book after book after book to try to find the path, to try to find the answer, to try to find the way out.” I felt like naked when he said this. I’m like, “I think he’s right. I think he’s right.”

For me, I’m definitely not just reading. I’ve been taking all these ideas. The unfair advantage I have is I have one-sided conversations with history’s greatest entrepreneurs. Every week I sit down and read another biography. Then, because I like to talk, this is good because I have to shut up. I can only listen because this is what I think it is. That’s what I think reading a biography is. It’s like one-sided conversation.

Then, I take that and I would be doing this even if I didn’t record it, but then sitting down once a week and condensing my thoughts and reacting to it turns it to an act of service. Then, I take the ideas. I’m like, “Oh, that’s a good idea.” I’ll take that and apply it to my business, which is the podcast. It keeps getting better and better. I’m just like, “Oh, these ideas work so I’ll keep doing this.” 

Then, now what has happened is the people that are trying to be great have studied great people that came before them throughout human history.

Caesar was studying Alexander and Steve Jobs was studying Edwin Land and Edwin Land was studying Alexander Graham Bell. If you’re interested in American entrepreneurship, it all kind of goes back to Benjamin Franklin. Everybody looks backwards like, “That guy or that woman was great. How did they do that?” That is an enduring part of human nature that will never change. It’s going to happen while we’re alive. It’s going to happen 1,000 years from now.

What I didn’t understand what I was doing is that you put it out into the world just like your work. It’s like a tuning fork, right? It’s like then the people that are really great also do this and they have a deep love of history. If you look at the people that I’ve been talking to from the new show that’s not even released yet, they came because they’re fans. They’re in the audience and it’s just like the para social relationship people have with podcasts.

I’m close to the people at Spotify. I’ve been to Stockholm twice in the last six months and I was talking to the head of business at Spotify. His name’s Alex and we were talking for two and a half hours like pretty animated. I was like, “I’m not building a media company. I’m building relationships at scale.” He’s like, “What? Say that again?” I go, “What a podcast is is building relationships to scale.” 

This is the first time we’ve ever met. Now we should talk about how I found you, but literally I found you on MySpace. I’m going to tell you that.

Tim Ferriss: My God.

David Senra: The reason, and we’ll go to the influence that you played on having Founders, but I know who you are. We could sit down and talk for eight hours because I know you. There’s no possible way I can consume all of your books and, I don’t know, 600 hours of your podcast and not know Tim. You can’t act for that long.

What I didn’t understand is like this other path of me trying to find good information, valuable information. I came from a family. Everybody’s like, “Oh, I’m the first to graduate college.” That’s nice. No one even graduated high school in my family. There’s no reading. There’s no self-improvement. The only thing my family read is the Bible and that can be taken to a crazy extreme. 

Tim Ferriss: You also didn’t go to prison.

David Senra: Exactly. My grandfather, I shouldn’t even say this publicly anymore. You have a big podcast. I would say stuff on small podcasts and forget that things get bigger later on. I say crazy stuff that I should not be saying, but whatever. We’re too late now. My grandfather, my father, my brother, I remember being in high school and hearing “bang.” Five guys at 5:30 in the morning come and grab my brother and I don’t see him for a few years.

That’s a fact. My point being is then I’m like, “Oh, wait.” I put this podcast out. Then, it attracts the same people that are in the books and then the fact that I could spend five hours with Michael Dell and he tweets about the podcast and he LinkedIns about it and just giving me phenomenal advice. Then, obviously we record our conversation, but before that they just want to help you because they got value from that.

Tim Ferriss: Let me pause you for one second just because I want to go back to the note-taking and then converting that into some type of action. You’ve done that. You’re hitting, and you’ve had a number of these, but inflection points where now you can sit down with some of these icons and have these extended conversations. Even if you did not have that direct access, maybe your process with the note-taking wouldn’t change.

I’m just curious how you read one biography or multiple biographies on a person and what the actual note-taking process looks like. I’ll volunteer what I do a lot. I use Kindle not for the convenience of the device, although that is convenient, not because I can listen on Audible or actually do it through the Kindle app and then stop and highlight things, which is also why I use it.

The highlighting overall is the reason and then exporting or using something like Readwise in addition to synthesizing my highlights. I believe you also use Readwise quite a bit. I’m not sure if you still use it, but what does your process look like? I know, for instance, like Maria Popova who’s this voluminous, prodigious, genius of a writer, it used to be Brain Pickings. It’s The Marginalian now. She has a very particular process for synthesizing and putting everything together. How do you do that?

David Senra: I actually think I’m going to sit down and make an episode about how I make these because I think it’s actually an older idea here that I just went through when I reread James Dyson’s autobiography. Both of them actually, but the first autobiography I’ve read like five times. The second one, I think this is the second or third time I read it. One of the genius things that he did when no one knew who he was, Dyson wasn’t a thing.

Now it’s one of the most valuable privately held companies in the world. You walk into a retail store. He had one product in one market at the time and you say, “I’m going to buy a vacuum cleaner.” Five of them kind of look the same and then you have this alien-looking thing at the end. Then, what he said, he’s like, “Hey, what is the advantage I have? I’m going against all these huge multinational conglomerates and I’m just some bloke that cares about vacuum cleaners in this remote part of England.”

He convinced all the retailers to let him write a story on a little leaflet and they would hang it on the handle of the Dyson. It tells a story. It’s in 200 or 300 words of who made it, why they made it, why they love it so much, and why you should buy it. People buy stories. That’s what I was saying. It’s like that’s not the first time I came across that idea. You go back to the early 1900s and there’s this guy named Claude Hopkins. I am always interested. You are — 

Tim Ferriss: I read — 

David Senra: Scientific Advertising?

Tim Ferriss: Yes, in the very beginning.

David Senra: I’m always interested in who influences the influencers, right? Let me give you an example.

Tim Ferriss: God, I haven’t thought of that name in so many years.

David Senra: I have so much shit on this guy.

Tim Ferriss: Claude Hopkins.

David Senra: I became obsessed. We were talking before we recorded that we both really, I won’t speak for you, love and admire, and mine is borderline idolize, Charlie Munger. If I can only learn from one person for the rest of my life, if you could say, “Hey, you can only read this guy’s words. Pick one person,” I’m picking Munger. I just love everything about him and the idea that I got to meet him is insane, absolutely insane.

When I’m reading about Munger and Buffett I’m like, “Man, these guys are really genius.” I didn’t know anything at this time. It’s like 10 years ago and I’m like, “These guys are genius.” Then, they kept mentioning this guy named Henry Singleton over and over again and they will tell you. If you admire somebody, what I think is hugely important, go. They will tell you who influenced them and then you have to go and read about these people. Then, you’ll find who influenced them and you realize that the ideas didn’t start with them.

They don’t start with us. They can’t die with us either. You have to push them forward down the generations. I’m like, “Oh, this guy’s interesting. Charlie Munger said that the smartest person he ever met was Henry Singleton. He’s best friends with Buffett. Buffett’s obviously, how did he say that?” Then, Buffett says that it’s a crime that business schools don’t study Singleton. That’s hell of language. That’s — 

Tim Ferriss: Strong language.

David Senra: Strong language, and then you start reading. I’m like, “Oh, my God, the ideas that I thought were Buffett and Munger’s were Singleton’s.” You see this over and over again. I was obsessed. Another guy that Buffett introduced me to was David Ogilvy. David Ogilvy I think is one of the best writers I’ve ever come across and Buffett keeps mentioning this to shareholders. He’s like, “This genius named David Ogilvy.” Why is Buffett calling this guy a genius? Who is this guy?

Tim Ferriss: I read Ogilvy’s stuff at the same time that I read Hopkins.

David Senra: If you read Ogilvy, what does he talk about? He’s like, “That’s the genius. I’m not the genius. I’m just regurgitating Claude Hopkins’s work.” Then, he tells the story of Albert Lasker who made more money. There’s all these, let’s call them a dozen great advertising agency founders, the Mad Men era. The one that made the most money was this guy named Albert Lasker and he had the simplest business, no art department, no research department.

He had Claude Hopkins writing copy and his words rang the cash register. If you can bring more customers to businesses, they will pay you a lot of money and it turns out Claude Hopkins wrote this book called Scientific Advertising. He would try to publish it. It was essentially the secrets of Lasker and Lasker hid it in a safe for 20 years. 

Tim Ferriss: I’ll get that right over to the agent. Stick that in the safe.

David Senra: If you read this, he’s like, “Hey, it may be boring to you.” He uses an example of Schlitz Beer, right? They were fifth in the market share and they hire Hopkins. They’re like, “We want to sell more beer.” He’s like, “Okay.” He does the same thing he does. He does a lot of research and he goes and he tours their distillery. He’s blown away by like that we triple distill the water and I don’t know how beer is made. I don’t even drink that much, but he explains the entire process. Claude’s like, “This is amazing. Why don’t you guys talk about this?”

He goes, “Because our process isn’t different than any other distillery.” He goes, “Yeah, but no one’s telling that story.” He writes these huge, essentially 1,500 words, 2,000 words of this is how the beer that you’re about to drink is made and goes from fifth to first because people buy stories. To answer your question, I think what I should do is sit down. Maybe I’ll just clip this and be like, “Okay, this is how I make the podcast or how I consume information.” I think me and you share a love of the writing of Cormac McCarthy.

Tim Ferriss: Sure, my God.

David Senra: He said — 

Tim Ferriss: Beautiful and brutal in equal measure.

David Senra: Yes, he said something that’s fascinating where he — 

Tim Ferriss: The Road, Blood Meridian, I mean there are many other examples.

David Senra: All The Pretty Horses, The Border Trilogy, just everything the guy just read everything. He’s just incredible. The Road, No Country for Old Men. I saw the movie before I saw the book. It’s crazy how they barely had to change any words. It’s like he wrote a script, so he said something that was fascinating, that subconscious is older than language. And they’re like, “How’d you write Blood Meridian?” He goes, “I didn’t.” He’s like, “I sat there and it came all from my subconscious. I eliminated anything that got in the way of it.” Right?

Tim Ferriss: And you must have a busy therapist.

David Senra: I couldn’t imagine within that guy’s head to write that book. The Judge. The Judge is the craziest — 

Tim Ferriss: Really dark. So dark. Anyway.

David Senra: So anyways, so I am all intuition, all feeling. So basically what I do is I sit down with a book and usually, I do this physically and it’s like I’m doing arts and crafts over here. I sit down with a physical book because that’s how I fell in love with reading. I don’t have memories before I had love of reading and I think one of the best things that ever happened to me is the fact that I don’t know why reading grabbed a hold of me since I was four or five years old. So my mom was dying of breast cancer. What I said about the only thing they read is the Bible that you could take that to an extreme because she tried for two years. She tried to pray her cancer away.

And by that time, by the time we convinced her to see an oncologist, the word he used was the horses out of the barn. And this is the most grueling way to die when it spreads to your bones. It’s just like that happens. I’m calling you to put a pillow over my face. I’m just not going through that. It was just a terrible thing to see. But one of the thing she said, she’s like, you’ve just been like this forever. You were a kid and you’d read the back of cereal boxes. I’d walk in every single room. I did this when I come in here and just automatically read everything that’s on the walls. So I have no idea where this came from. I didn’t choose the passion of reading. It chose me. And all of it is intuition. I sit down with a physical book, that’s how I fell in love with reading. I sit down with pen.

Tim Ferriss: Your mom would bring you to the bookstore, right?

David Senra: Yes. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: They won’t kick you out for reading.

David Senra: Yeah, exactly. And the library. And then I remember the first time it was like this maybe before I even knew words because I was obsessed with Where’s Waldo. So it was my first memory. So you’re not reading anything, you’re just finding the guy with the striped shirt or a striped sweater. So basically I sit down with a book, physical book, pen, six-inch ruler, Post-it notes, and scissors. And I just read and I don’t think, and if something jumps out to me, I highlight it, and then whatever pops to my mind. And normally as our mutual friends like Patrick, Chris, Rick, they’ll all see this. It’s just like I’m not actually listening to what you’re saying. There’s an idea behind it.

Tim Ferriss: Meaning you’re not taking what the author says literally. You’re looking at the idea behind — 

David Senra: I’m just looking for the essence. So if me and Rick are talking about a giant deal that he wants to invest in, I’m thinking about how that’s similar to how Fred Smith built FedEx or how Jim Casey built UPS or how Buffett thought about buying See’s Candy.

Tim Ferriss: So what do you do with the Post-it notes and the scissors and the ruler?

David Senra: So basically, I underline that sentence and then whatever popped in my mind and I’m like, oh, this is kind of like James J. Hill when he was building the only profitable successful American railroad and you just write down whatever comes to mind. 

Tim Ferriss: On the Post-it?

David Senra: On the Post-it.

Tim Ferriss: And that goes on the page.

David Senra: It goes on the page. 

David Senra: So then I’m writing it down and then I might have three sentences, but the Post-it note’s three by five, so I have to cut it. It has to be clean, it has to look good. There’s a beauty to it. I am irrational, crazy when it comes to this stuff. This is why I think I picked up on your work right away. I see a fellow nutcase and obsessive we’re like, I hand edit, now, my transcripts. So everybody’s like, “You should outsource it to AI. You should outsource it to India.” No, I have to touch it. I have to feel it. I just love it. I’m not doing it to do it quicker. I like what Jerry Seinfeld says. “The hard way is the right way.” I like the hard way. This also goes back to obviously have some kind of dark thing driving me, which we can dive into if you want. So then you go through the entire book and so then I have to take pictures of it into the Readwise app because you do it the smarter way. Kindle will just automatically go to Readwise.

Tim Ferriss: Well, I still use physical. I’ll explain. I can trade. I’ll tell you how I use physical.

David Senra: You want to go do it now, or you want —

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, sure. Well, okay, so don’t lose your place.

David Senra: I won’t.

Tim Ferriss: All right, you got the scissors. I want to know about the ruler. Oh, I guess the ruler. 

David Senra: Straight lines. It has to be straight. It has to be beautiful.

Tim Ferriss: So we both have pretty moderate to severe OCD. I remember when I was diagnosed by the psychiatrist who was doing some preliminary formality of taking me through these assessments before I was going to have this experimental brain stimulation, “Send me experimental.” And he had to check the boxes and went through these hours and hours of stuff and he’s like, “Why don’t you to take a seat? If we need to take a break, I understand.” And he gave me this OCD diagnosis. I’m like, “Yeah, what else is new? Keep going.”

David Senra: “I knew this about myself.”

Tim Ferriss: “Yeah, I don’t need time.” The way I use physical, and I do use physical still quite a bit, is I will, and this is another question that maybe you can answer when you pick back up is how a second or third reading differs from the first. Because when I read it the first time, I’m doing something very similar to you. I’m underlining things or if that’s just too much work, the book is actually a gem and it has a lot. Then I will just bracket it on the side of the paragraph so that I know what the highlight is. Then I will go through, if I read it a second time, and I will put T2 in a circle next to the things that still stuck out on a second reading. Now sometimes you’re just a different person if you read it five years later and your lived experience and your position is life is different.

But if I’m doing it in somewhat rapid succession, I want to see what sticks on a second or third reading. So you’ll see T2, T3, etc. Sometimes, it’s just fun to see how I change over time with The Moral Letters to Lucilius by Seneca the Younger — people can find it in all sorts of compendiums. I put out a free PDF called The Tao of Seneca. I like to just see where I am at different points in my life, what resonates. And then, typically with any physical book I’m creating, I just did this with a book I finished yesterday called Deep Tech by Pablos Holman where I’m creating an index in the front. So whenever there’s a page that really, really sticks out, I’ll write down like 168, whatever it might be. Someone I want to look up, someone like a Claude Hopkins, whose name gets dropped and I’m like, that seems important.

All right. And so I have this index and then I’ll take a photograph of the index just in case I lose the book, which has happened. And that’s always painful. I also will have, I’ll make a little box on the bottom right-hand corner of some of the front matter pages and I’ll put next steps there.

David Senra: Wait, what’s the front matter?

Tim Ferriss: So the front matter would be the copyright page, the title page, the pages that don’t really have any content on them. Maybe there’s the dedication page like ‘To Mom’, it’s like, okay, that’s a blank page that I can use. So on the bottom right-hand corner, just two lines that create sort a box, I’ll write down next steps. So for every book, not every book, in some cases if it’s just for pleasure and it’s fiction, but even then sometimes ideas will pop into mind. I’ll be like, okay, what is at least one kind of next step? Maybe it’s looking up someone like Claude Hopkins. Maybe it’s an action, maybe it’s a phone call, maybe it’s an email.

But along the lines of David Allen and Getting Things Done, it’s like one physical next action. And so I almost always have that in nonfiction books. So that’s photos. I take photos of all that. I used to put it all into Evernote. I still sometimes do that because I’ve been using it forever and I have thousands of them. But you’re the last Evernote standing. I might be, yeah, I use scannable to get it into Evernote, but the point is I have a way to then OCR it so I can search it. All right, back to — 

David Senra: So that’s basically what I have to do now, which takes an unbelievable amount of time. But again, then now, so I’ve already read it one time. Now I have to input it into Readwise, right? So you take a picture of it and it’s laborious and now I’ve read it for the second or maybe a third time. Then you see on page and then you have to make sure that it matches up between the page and what’s on your screen. And so you’re reading it over and over again. So then I get it all into Readwise, then I will go back — 

Tim Ferriss: Do you want to take a sidebar just to explain what Readwise is?

David Senra: Readwise is essentially just a way to keep track of your notes and highlights from everything you read. And now they’re expanding out because it turns out the total just on the market for people that want to keep highlights and notes, first of all, how many people are reading books now? That number is dwindling unfortunately. And then of that subset of smaller and dwindling people, how many read as much as you and I do? And then they want to actually research essentially giant, searchable database of everything you’ve ever read. It’s super valuable and they charge like $99 a year for it.

So now basically they were running this for six years. They have a new web reader app and they said they made more money in six months from that than they didn’t Readwise for six years. This is obviously not a lot of people that want to do this. The thing that we’re describing doing. So then I used to read the physical book because actually let’s back up and I want to tell you the role that you played. And don’t let me forget where I’m at though.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I won’t.

David Senra: So I went to a shitty college because I remember when I was in your senior year, I went to public high school and everybody’s like, “Where are you going to school?” And I didn’t understand what they meant. I’m like, “The one I can drive to, the one I can go to at night because I have to work during the day. I don’t know where you’re talking about.” I didn’t know. I got kicked out of my house when I was 18 and I had to live in student housing.

Tim Ferriss: Why did you get kicked out?

David Senra: My mom’s side of the family has severe mental illness and just some of the worst people you’ve ever met. And they just had this belief that you kick your kids out when you’re 18, it’s just like —

Tim Ferriss: Out of the nest.

David Senra: It is not even that. It’s like they pick a fake fight and you have somebody that’s very, I’m not, that was the point of contention between my mom is she had undiagnosed mental illness for sure, maybe not schizophrenic, definitely bipolar. Her sister was schizophrenic. And listen man, as you get older, at the time I had a lot of anger, super, a lot of anger, didn’t understand why they’re doing what you’re doing and then you get older and then you have your own kids. So I went through this crazy thing where I think I hated them even more because when my daughter was born, I’m like, I remember seeing her for the first time. I was like, you think you love a woman? No. Enzo Ferrari has this great line that “It’s impossible for a man to love a woman. The only true love he has is for his kids.”

And I understand what he meant. I think Ryan Reynolds said it best where it’s like “I never thought I’d love anybody as much as I love Blake Lively. And then she gave birth to our daughter and as soon as I looked at her daughter, I knew if we were ever under attack, I would use Blake as a human shield to protect that baby.” It’s funny, but it’s literally when I heard him say that, I go, “Yes.”

Tim Ferriss: Right.

David Senra: That’s it.

Tim Ferriss: So that makes the memory all the more painful.

David Senra: Then I was like, how did you do this to your children?

And then you get — there’s another — you get more experience and then you’re like, yes, but imagine you grew up like they did, poor white trash. My grandfather raped all his daughters, including my mothers. Raped all of his daughters, raped his gr — I didn’t know about this until after he died or else I would’ve been the one to put them in his grave, raped his daughters, raped his granddaughters. They lived in this shitty house in Indiana with one bathroom that was in — there was two-bedroom, she had three sisters. The only bathroom is in my gr — I call them grandparents. I hate them with all of my being in their room. And so if you wanted to go in the bedroom at night, he was a monster. They would urinate in cups and pour it out the window.

So again, it doesn’t excuse the bad decisions that they made and the unhappy marriage my parents had and all this other crap. It was just like, “All right, imagine that. Imagine that. You destroyed your kids. That person was supposed to protect them and I can’t even talk about this.” So anyways, we would fight a lot and she’d be alternate depending on the day, she’d be the kindest person in the world or a storm. And so the unfortunate part was when she got diagnosed with cancer, we hadn’t spoken for six months, so she only survived another, I think, two years. So that means the last two and a half years I missed — what? That’s 20 percent, 25 percent of her life. And somebody’s like, “What were you guys fighting over?” I was like, “The sad thing is I don’t remember.”

But I was not one to let, I was very hardheaded. And so she had some weird fight with me. I don’t remember what it was. And then she was like, “You’re not allowed to live here.” Kicked me out, I didn’t have anything. 

So anyways, I went to, I lived in student housing and that was the first time — they randomly assign you a roommate and it was like the son of a rich rancher because our fridge was full of all this meat stuff, which is bad because it was the summer where Florida got hit by four hurricanes and all the meat went rotting.

Tim Ferriss: Spoiled.

David Senra: Oh, yes, it was disgusting, but I didn’t know that there were people legitimately, this makes me sound like an absolute moron, but I didn’t know that there were people that only went to college because my roommate didn’t have a job. He just drank and went to — I’m like, “What else do you do?” He was like, “What?”

This is crazy. So I don’t know where I was going with that.

Tim Ferriss: You were taking a pause on Readwise and multiple reads and you’re like, “I’ve got to tell you how I found you.”

David Senra: Oh, okay. So again, I’m in a crappy school. It’s a state school in Orlando, UCF. I almost said UFC where it’s MMA. That would’ve been probably more useful now. So UCF, and this is when Facebook was coming out, but Facebook was only at the fancy schools.

Tim Ferriss: Yes, right. It was very much at the fancy schools.

David Senra: We didn’t have Facebook, we had MySpace. And so remember you’d go and there would be music playing on somebody’s profile? Well, people would, they would list their favorite movies and favorite books. And I think I was looking at a girl’s — probably — profile. And under favorite books, it said 4-Hour Workweek. I’m like, that’s a great title, what is that? And I immediately order it on Amazon and then I start reading it, obviously. Then that book inspired, I don’t know, 25 million people, maybe even more, but now and then I start consuming all your stuff. So I’d buy all your books. I bought your TV show.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, I appreciate that.

David Senra: Sometimes I’ll forget because you go on like — whatever, it’s not called iTunes anymore. And I don’t buy anything because everything streams. I’m like Tim Ferriss, [inaudible].

Tim Ferriss: I know from the Natural History Museum back in the day.

David Senra: So I was obsessed with podcasts, I discovered in 2010, and before I started mine in 2016, I listened to thousands of them. And you had one that changed my life, which was when you did Jocko. And that was 2015 if I remember correctly.

And you told him to start a podcast and I think Rogan told him to do it as well. And he’s like, well, if I got these two guys, obviously he’s smart. Just take the advice. And I started listening to his podcast and he changed format. But in the beginning it was just him doing, he would read a first-person account, so an autobiography of somebody in combat and I could not believe what I was hearing. And so what I would do is I’d listen maybe a hundred of the books or I listen to a hundred of his episodes and maybe buy a dozen of the books.

So you learn, even on the episodes, you don’t read the book, you learn so much and you’re inspired. And in the books, he kept introducing me all kinds of crazy stories and I was like, Hey. A couple months later then obviously I had started reading biographies because your friend Kevin Rose did this excellent interview with Elon Musk, we can talk about from 2012. And I was like, what if I do Jocko’s format, but I’m interested in four things. I’m interested in reading, history, podcasts, and entrepreneurship. And so if you look at it’s like it just sits in between those four. And I started doing that and essentially I was just imitating Jocko and no one gave a shit for five and a half years.

Tim Ferriss: Yes. Wow. What a wild story. So I want to dive into that. The interview with Jocko, I owe special thanks to, I think it was Peter Attia — 

David Senra: He was.

Tim Ferriss: Who made the introduction.

David Senra: He said, just trust me on this.

Tim Ferriss: And — 

David Senra: Then didn’t he just show up at your house or something?

Tim Ferriss: Yes, we hung out in San Francisco. I remember exactly which coffee shop we went to. And I made the mistake. I wasn’t even thinking properly. I had a camo shirt on and I was like, I can’t believe I wore a fucking camo shirt to meet someone as legitimate as Jocko Willink. And I was just like, oh, facepalm. But we ended up connecting. That was his first ever public interview, which is wild. 

David Senra: One of the best ones ever done.

Tim Ferriss: Oh. I mean he really brought the heat as Jocko — 

David Senra: He’s my alarm every morning. He’s like, “Get up.” I swear to God, I’m not joking. He’s been my alarm for half a decade. He yells at me. I’m like, “You’re right.”

Tim Ferriss: Yes, Extreme Ownership still highly, highly, highly recommend to everyone. And if you want to hear me and Jocko go toe to toe, not really toe to toe, we’re sort of shoulder to shoulder with a book we did Musashi.

David Senra: Episode 100.

Tim Ferriss: Episode 100, which was like four and a half, five hours long going through this historical novel about the most famous swordsman in Japanese history.

David Senra: I read that because of that episode.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, so good.

David Senra: I think I read the audiobook first. It’s 60 hours long or something.

Tim Ferriss: It’s really long. And keeping in mind, this was originally published in Japanese in a country of whatever the population is like 120, 150 million. I think it sold 80 to a hundred million copies. I mean something just completely insane. And who knows, I might be getting that off, but the numbers are just astonishing as a ratio of the total population. 

So five and a half years, how do you explain no one giving a shit for five and a half years? In other words, was there something that happened, a decision you made, something that changed things around the five and a half year mark? Was it a change in technology?

David Senra: Oh, change in business model.

Tim Ferriss: What happened? Yes.

David Senra: Literally I was doing nothing different, changing business model. So you remember podcasting back in there, because you were one of the OGs and you had this massive audience. Your blog was crazy. You were huge and still are.

And I was none of those things. I was a weird introvert. I didn’t have any social media, I didn’t know anything about the internet. I don’t know how to describe. I just would like to read and record a podcast in my kitchen on a hundred-dollar microphone. And I remember calling around and trying to figure out what’s the business model here? And everybody was like, “Oh, it’s ads.” I’m like, “Oh, that’s great.” And so at the time there was these ad networks, essentially they just sell ads for you and they’re like, we’d love to work with you, you just have to have 50,000 downloads per show. And I go, “What? I will never! 50,000?” It seemed like such a big number. “That will never ever happen.”

Tim Ferriss: In the universe of podcasts, it’s still a big number.

David Senra: Yes, but now there’s a million. Think about how many people listen to The Tim Ferriss Show and there’s millions and millions and millions of people over the course of a year or whatever. So I was like, “Oh, my God, that’s never going to happen.” And so then you’d say, “Okay, well, what can you do?” And back then it’d be affiliate. So remember, Audible scaled massively. People don’t realize how big businesses can get on the back of podcasts, and how many have. Audible was, it was on every — Dan Carlin had one ad and it was an Audible ad.

Tim Ferriss: It was Audible.

David Senra: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: They were very smart about that.

David Senra: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: Yes. They’ve been able to change a lot of their economics — 

David Senra: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: For the better, for Audible and Amazon since capturing more market share. But they did an excellent job of marketing and advertising.

David Senra: They were on every single podcast. And so I did that. And then there was this company called Blinkist, which was a — 

Tim Ferriss: Summaries?

David Senra: Summary, 10-minute summary app for business books, non-fiction books. And that blew my mind because so you only got paid on sales and they would show you not the people, but where the country was. And I remember the first time somebody in Japan bought, I’m like, I’m sitting in Miami in my kitchen, “Great acoustics, by the way, you idiot.” On a hundred-dollar mic with no pop filter, no nothing. There was nothing out there, there was no — editing a podcast now with the script and all the AI tools, it’s like magic compared to what we had to do back then. And I was like, what? Somebody in Japan listened to this thing? This was crazy. 

So the one idea I had, there is this, I actually got the business model from a socialist podcast.

Tim Ferriss: Might’ve been the beginning of the troubles. 

David Senra: So there was this, for a long time when I opened a browser, my homepage would be this thing called Graphtreon. Graphtreon is essentially they use the Patreon API and you see people building membership communities. And what was interesting about them is people sell comic books, they would sell podcasts, they would sell newsletters, videos, and the most popular category was podcasts. I’m like, that’s weird. And so at the time, this podcast called Chapo Trap House was the number one and they had 25,000 people.

Tim Ferriss: Thing is on Patreon.

David Senra: Yes. And the only way you see this is because Graphtreon would aggregate the data for you and present it to you. And so, at the time, I think they had 20,000 paid subscribers, at least $5 a month.

And their business model is simple. Every other podcast you have to pay for, so you can listen to half them for free. If you want more, just pay five bucks a month and you can listen to it in a podcast player. Like anything else, you just have to go through the paywall. And every month I’m watching and the number gets higher and higher and higher. Now if you pull up Graphtreon, I think the number one is Shane Gillis, I think he’s got 120,000 paid subscribers. So I was like, oh, there’s like a business here with what if I had a subscription podcast? So it’s one thing to pay five bucks a month for a comedy podcast, but my podcasts are about business. If there’s ideas on this podcast that will make people more money, which is essentially what business education comes down to, you want to be more successful at what you do, there’s some kind of, hopefully you see a better economic outcome for yourself and your family.

I was like, what if I could just sell subscriptions? Because I’m not selling enough Audible subscriptions and Blinkist, that’s not going to happen. And my idea was, I think I was completely in love with podcasting and still am. It’s the only thing I think about. I work on seven days a week. It’s completely taken over my life. And my idea was I don’t even have to be wealthy, I just have to do this for a living. It has to come out of me. It’s like I had no control over this.

And I was like, maybe I can make dentist money. So my idea was like, I bet you I can sell 3,000 paid subscriptions at a hundred dollars a pop, make 300 grand a year. And then I also have a lot of self-confidence like, well, if I could sell 3,000, I could sell 20,000, and then maybe I can sell as many as Chapo can and then I’m making two million. This is the idea I had. And so my idea was the genius idea I had was like, “Hey, your most valuable asset you have, which is your podcasts, they are easy to share and everything else, let’s put a big wall in front of that.”

And so I put a giant paywall in front of it and obviously it slows growth because how are you going to share the episode? And the one benefit I had, which really kept me going, and I don’t think I would’ve quit anyways, I really don’t think I had any other option, but was that we don’t know who’s going to listen to this one. We just see numbers on the screen. 

But with a subscription, you see the email address and the emails were the top founders and top VCs and I had a very small audience and one of them was our mutual friend, Patrick O’Shaughnessy. And I was a huge fan of Patrick. And I saw, I’m not going to repeat his email address here, but I know what the, I was like, I saw that come across and there were so few, I saw every single one. You’re getting like 10 a day, I don’t know, five a day or something like that paid. And I’m like, oh, my God, Patrick bought one.

He didn’t know who I was. He didn’t know I was a big fan of his, didn’t know anything. I had no followers. I think I had 7,000 followers across all, every one of my accounts. And I was trying really hard back then. And he goes, “I never find good podcasts to listen to. I think David Senra’s Founders podcast is excellent. You should listen to it.”

And he linked to that one and Estée Lauder and I could not believe it. Because I was like, why do I have these mentions on Twitter? What is a mention? I don’t get mentions. What is this new thing? And then I log into my email and it’s just because back then you would get an email every time you get a new pay subscription and off of one tweet of an endorsement by people. This is why you and Andrew are kind of like the male Oprah. And I mean that in the — you know how much shit I’ve bought because you told me that it’s good. Why? Because of the trust that, people chase numbers. It’s like that. You’re not chasing numbers, you’re chasing trust and relationships. I love what Warren Buffett said: “A brand is a promise.”

The fact that you guys have such high standards, I’ve never bought anything like what the hell was Tim thinking? And so that’s what makes you so valuable. So Patrick extended that trust to me where I logged into my email and you couldn’t stop scrolling. You couldn’t stop scrolling. And so I screenshotted that because — 

Tim Ferriss: Patrick’s a good dude. Very smart too. Invest Like the Best.

David Senra: Yes. You did an excellent episode with him for when you hit your 10-year anniversary.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, yes. 10 years.

David Senra: And then I was a huge NBA fan and the person that found me, that’s been really, really helpful. When I had 1,500 listeners, guy named Sam Hinkie, former general manager of the Philadelphia 76ers, very, very intelligent, intense, and kind of reclusive guy. Now he’s really hard to get to. And we had talked a bunch and he’s just like, “I really think you have something here. I think you’re — what you’re doing is important and I’ve tried to help you as much as I can.” And I knew him and Patrick were friends, and I screenshotted Patrick’s tweet. I was like, “Look what your friend Patrick did.” Sam didn’t say anything. He just put it, and again, Patrick trusts Sam and Sam’s telling Patrick, “This guy’s worth your time.” He put us in group chat. He goes, “You two need to know each other.”

And I was like, “Patrick, I’m a huge fan. Love to talk to you.” And Patrick doesn’t have a calendar. So he’s like, “What about right now?” And I was like, “Well, let me look at my calendar.” Nothing. Nothing. Literally nothing. I was like, “Yes.” We talked for the first, first time we talked was an hour and a half. And we get to the end, he goes, “I thought I was in the podcast.” And then we become friends. And then I joined his network and then he just poured gasoline on a promising spark.

 Tim Ferriss: Was he the one who convinced you to remove the wall? Or how did you end up — 

David Senra: No. So a friend of mine, again, this is the sad part about becoming, getting more following is so many of my close friends now came from DMs. And now you can’t do that. You can’t even look at mentions.

Tim Ferriss: Yes.

David Senra: I’d be curious.

Tim Ferriss: Doesn’t work.

David Senra: Yes, it’s it kind of rule. It’s such a magical thing. And now because,

Tim Ferriss: Yes, well once verified could be purchased, it destroyed the utility of meeting those people on.

David Senra: It’s like what Charlie Munger said, if you have a bunch of raisins in just a few turds, you still got turds and you could have 99 percent of the people are nice to you. And then it’s these psychos and you’re like, I can’t read my mentions anymore. Can’t check my DMs. It’s sad.

But one of, I met a couple friends through them and again, I was grinding out hundred-dollar-year subscriptions, just like going to the factory every day trying to sell a few more. And one of my friends told me what one of his friends’ company just paid to advertise on one of the biggest business podcasts. And the number was like, what, what did you just say? And then Sam and other people like Patrick, they’re just like, “This is weird thing that you’re doing. Why don’t you just sell ads like everybody else?”

And I was like, “Look at China. They’re 90 percent subscription to your podcast.”

Like, “Yeah, but you’re American, you idiot.”

And so I came up with all these crazy, because I can be very convincing in the opposite direction. It doesn’t have to be a good idea, I can talk myself into good ideas, but I can talk myself into bad ideas too.

And so eventually I called Patrick one day and I was just like, “Man, I am fighting with one hand behind my back. This is really, really difficult. I think I’m going to make an ad based version of Founders.”

He’s like, “Yeah, no shit. I’ve been telling you to do this forever.”

And then I was like, “And I’d like it to be on your network.”

And he’s like, “Ooh, that’s interesting.” And again, he’s just a good dude, and he’s like, “Yeah, but I own all podcasts on my network. Will you sell me equity?”

And I don’t know why I said this, and I was like, “No.”

It was crazy, and I’d had all these acquisition investment offers up until that point, because obviously everybody in the audience likes to do deals, so they like trying to allocate capital.

Tim Ferriss: That’s their sport.

David Senra: Yeah, and I was like, “No, no, no.” It wasn’t a business thing to me, it’s like a special thing. It’s like part of my soul.

Michael Dell has this great answer when he was fighting with Carl Icahn when, and they’re like, “Why don’t you just start another company?”

And he’s like, “I like this company. First of all, it has my name on it,” and he goes, “I’m going to care about this company after I’m dead.”

So that’s how I feel, it’s a rational love that I have for this. And so I was like, “I don’t want to sell equity, but.”

He’s like, “What do you want?”

I was like, “I want you to help amplify my audience and connect me with first-rate advertisers. Then we could just share ad revenue.”

And one call he’s like, “Done.” That completely changed everything. That was four years ago.

Tim Ferriss: Wow. Thank God for Patrick, huh?

David Senra: Oh, for sure. I talk to him almost every day. We’re like brothers, I called him this morning.

Tim Ferriss: He’s a great guy. He’s a very, very good guy. 

Tim Ferriss: Well, let’s just, actually, I’m going to zoom into your expertise, subject matter for a second, and then I want to talk more about podcasting, but just so it doesn’t become too much inside baseball, I do want to come back and talk about podcasting. But you have mentioned a number of different names at the top of your list, people to learn from. Where does Edwin Land fit into that, and who is Edwin Land?

David Senra: Edwin Land is the patron saint of Founders. I want a picture of him in my house like The Last Supper, it would just be Edwin Land in the middle like Jesus. Again, I’m very interested in who influences the influencers, and where do these ideas actually come from? And Steve Jobs, if you have a Mount Rushmore of greatest entrepreneurs, his face has got to be on it, undoubtedly. He created the most successful product in history. I think he did it for the right reasons. I think he’s a very fascinating person, obviously incredibly flawed as a human, which he even said. But what’s fascinating is if you go back, and which I do, is when I read a biography of somebody, I will make a list going back to your outline of what I’ll do in the front of the books, which you called, what’s?

Tim Ferriss: Front matter.

David Senra: Front matter. I didn’t even know that term till now, thank you.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

David Senra: I will write down all the other founders or all the other people they’ll talk about. And so I just did this with James Dyson. He’s obsessed with Buckminster Fuller and Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Jeremy Fry and Alec Issigonis, and all these people. He just repeats them over and over again and you just realize, oh, he studied these guys and then took their ideas and said, those ideas are good. I’ll use them and then make $60 billion or whatever his company’s worth.

Tim Ferriss: Everyone should read about Buckminster Fuller.

David Senra: I haven’t read the book yet.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

David Senra: I’ve read his ideas, but not the book that James read when he was in college. It’s fascinating to me how it’s almost all — and they usually find it early. 

I had lunch with Sam Zell. I’m talking to him.

Tim Ferriss: How did he make his money, for people who don’t know?

David Senra: Well, people consider him an investor. He calls himself an entrepreneur. He called himself an entrepreneur. What he’s most well known for is in 2007, he sold, I think the biggest real estate company in history for 38 billion to Blackstone. He tipped at the very top of the market, but he just likes to essentially buy businesses, try to make them grow. He would sell some, so that’s why people consider him an investor. But he considered himself an entrepreneur originally. By the time I met him, he had 61 years of experience as an entrepreneur. And my favorite entrepreneurs are I love talking to these people that have 40, 50, I’m not interested in the startup founder at all. This 25-year-old kid that thinks he’s smart, he doesn’t have enough experience yet. Life is going to teach you what you need. 

Tim Ferriss: People who’ve ridden many multiple macroeconomic cycles who have had to contend with different challenges at different points in their lives, not just when they have no responsibilities and no dependence, et cetera.

David Senra: Well, he says something in his autobiography that you were speaking to earlier. He’s like, “Yeah, earlier in my life, my career fought my marriages and my career won and that’s why I’ve been married three times.”

The very current theme is that you look at life as everything that’s not work as an unpleasant distraction, and you wonder why your relationship’s broken because you’re not spending any time there. Of course, that’s the outcome, and they all make this mistake over and over again.

So what’s fascinating about this is we’ll go back to Edwin Land in a minute. Sam Zell. In his biography, he’s like, “Dude, I’m in college.” This guy was making millions of dollars a year when he was in law school. That’s how good of an entrepreneur he was from day one.

Tim Ferriss: Was that real estate?

David Senra: Yeah. He was developing, I think student housing at the time, I think the student housing, but he was also doing deals. He’s just a very gifted deal maker, and you see this with Rick. Understanding, you’ll bring something to Rick and he’ll be like, “Oh, here’s 10 things that are important.”

 Tim Ferriss: Do you want to explain who Rick is briefly?

David Senra: His name is Rick Gerson. He’s one of my closest friends. You’ve known him for what?

Tim Ferriss: I don’t know, 15, 20 years, a long time.

David Senra: 15, 20 years, he’s one of the most generous, thoughtful, and also simultaneously super intense people I know.

Tim Ferriss: He’s a master of finance, came out of this just sort of amazing training environment. We can just call that for what it is for now in simplicity and is one also of the best connected humans I’ve ever met.

He identifies, there’s one thing. He learned that from Sam, and then Sam learned that from this guy named Jay Pritzker. It’s very fascinating, so.

Tim Ferriss: Chicago royalty.

David Senra: Yes, 100 percent. So I actually just backed, it’s not a Kickstarter, but it’s almost like this. There’s no biographies of Jay, and so there’s a guy named Rockwood Notes that essentially put his hat out. He’s like, “Hey, I want to do this, but I need to make at least, I think, 40,000 a year to write this book,” and he’s selling $800 or a thousand dollars a year subscriptions.

I was like, “Yeah, I’ll obviously sign up for this. I want a Jay Pritzker biography.”

So Sam Zell in his autobiography, he’s like, “Yeah, I read this book by William Zeckendorf and it changed my life because there’s one idea in this book.” It’s what Charlie Munger said, there’s ideas worth billions in a $30 history book. There was this thing called Hawaiian technique. William Zeckendorf was this real estate developer in New York, and he came from nothing and then made a lot of money, then lost it all, and then made a lot of money, then lost it all again and dies with no money, so you want to avoid that too.

But he had this thing called the Hawaiian technique, which was, hey, if you just parcel out a building and you sell the different parts to whoever values it more, you’ll make more money. So the lease is valued higher by these guys, and the land is valued higher, and maybe the commercial real estate there or whatever, he just would break it apart like Legos and sell it independently and make a little money. What Sam realized, he started using that real estate and he goes, “Oh, this works in business too.” He’d buy business. It’s like maybe you want the IP, maybe you want the talent, maybe you want the actual physical assets. And he’d do this over and over again. So I remember telling Sam to his face, and Sam had no filter, and he was exactly who you thought he was.

If you watched any videos, he’s just like this and I go, “Yeah, I bought that book that you recommended.”

He goes, “Did you read it?”

I go, “No.”

He goes, “Read it,” he’s got the gravelly voice. “Read it.”

I was like, “Oh, shit, okay.”

And I read it as soon as I went home and started reading it. Sam Zell tells you to read a book, just read a book. But the reason I bring this up is because you’ll see this over and over again. They’ll find somebody early. You can go back and read this Playboy interview just for the, I hope when you, it’s just for the interview.

Tim Ferriss: Just for the interview.

David Senra: It’s not for anything else, of Steve Jobs when he’s 25, 26, and he’s talking about the fact that we have the wrong role models and heroes as a society. We want to be. Now, he’d say — you want to be YouTubers or something. We want to be athletes. We want to be all these other things. We should want to be Edwin Land. And at the time, Edwin Land was the founder of Polaroid. Edwin Land’s in his seventies. Jobs meets him, spends time with him a bunch of times. Edwin Land at that time had the third most patents of any American in history.

I think it was Thomas Edison, the second guy, and then Edwin Land, or maybe it’s the first guy, and then Thomas Edison, but Edwin Land was up there, and what you would realize is when Jobs goes on stage and says, “Hey, I wanted to build Apple. I wanted to build a company at the of liberal arts and technology,” and he has that, he literally puts the street sign up on there. That is literally a direct quote from Edwin Land. Edwin Land wanted to build a company at the intersection of liberal arts and technology.

He wanted to make completely vertically integrated consumer products that were magical, that had a magical experience. In Edwin Land’s case, he invented the industry that he then comes to dominate. There was no such thing as instant photography. So when we’re like, how great is the iPhone compared to one that came before it? The difference is vast, but not the same thing as if me and you were hanging out before Edwin Land was on this Earth. We take a picture at a party, “How’d it come out? Well, we’ll find out two weeks from now when we get it back from Kodak.”

Tim Ferriss: Turns out it was a shot of my foot.

David Senra: As opposed to, “Wait a minute and we’re going to see it right here in the Polaroid.” And then dude, the amount of ideas that Jobs took from him. Go look at the freaking tables that Jobs uses when he gives presentations. The actual table, it’s the same table that Edwin Land gave when he gave presentations.

Tim Ferriss: If somebody wants to study Edwin Land, where do they start?

David Senra: I read this biography of Edwin Land I thought was incredible. It’s called Insisting on the Impossible. It’s the most comprehensive biography of him. People read it, they’re like, “This book sucks.”

I think it’s riveting. There is a book, I think it’s called Land’s Polaroid. That’s the one I’d read because it’s only 250 pages and it’s written by a guy that worked for and with Edwin Land for 20 years. And I love those kinds of things because you see them over a decade. But my point being is Jobs was talking about this guy when he was 25. Jobs knows he’s dying when he’s working with Isaacson on the biography, he knows he’s dying and he’s still talking about Edwin Land appears in Isaacson’s biography of Jobs six times. Why is he still talking about this guy? How could you not be interested in understanding why? What is it about this guy that he admired and liked? Yeah, and he has a saying that, he has a personal motto that I love and that I try to do. And Edwin Land’s, there’s two of them.

Edwin Land says, “My personal motto is very personal. It may not apply to anybody else or anybody else or any other company, but is don’t do anything that someone else can do.” The importance of differentiation. I’m shocked at how few people understand how important it is. Dyson, Dyson’s whole thing is it has to be different. Even if it’s worse, it should be different. He demands difference. He’s got a very fascinating business philosophy. Dyson’s mind’s incredible.

And then the other thing is he knows because he dropped out of Harvard, he goes, “There’s something they don’t teach you at Harvard Business School, that anything worth doing is worth doing to excess.”

Tim Ferriss: So how do you think about different archetypes? Perhaps that’s the best word to use within the pantheon of successful entrepreneurs. The reason I ask that is that I imagine you get questions that along the lines of, and I get questions like this also, when you look across all of the biographies, what are some of the common patterns? Give me the top five, top six, and then people want to grab that recipe. But it could be just to use a sports analogy, it’s like, all right, you’re taking the stretching routine from LeBron James, the weight training routine from Arnold Schwarzenegger and this and this and this. You’re grabbing habits from mutants that are in entirely different spheres where they have different bodies entirely and then trying to cobble it together. It may not work. That’s point number one, probably won’t work.

Number two is that within the world of business advice, whether it’s autobiographies, biographies, interviews, there’s a lot that conflicts. So you have one person who says, “Anything that’s worth doing is worth overdoing,” and then you can tell who the novice is because they do too much. And I’m wondering how you think of entrepreneurship for yourself in terms of modeling different people or taking advice because you could have two people, just to use a metric that’s easy for everybody to wrap their head around two billionaires and they give you diametrically opposed advice. How do you personally pick?

David Senra: There’s no formula. This is actually something, one of the things I’m so thrilled with is the fact that I’ve become friends with Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify, and this is something we’re actually trying to work on together because he brings this up. He’s like, “We need alternative founder archetypes.”

And back up, first of all, Daniel is an alien. There is a specific reason that I wanted him to be the very first guest on the new show is I’m able to build relationships with other people. Daniel’s very special in the sense that he’s only a few years older than me, but he’s so much more wiser than I am.

I don’t know how I can put this in words, it makes sense, but because he’s founded and is still running a $120 billion company, he’s been running for 19 years, but to me, he’s still so underrated. And the thing about Daniel is not only is he wicked smart, but he’s given me some of the best advice. And he does it in a very reserved and very precise way. He’s got very clear thinking, and I just cannot get over how generous he is with his time and his advice to me. He told me one of the things that was really important, he said an offhand comment, but he’s like, “You’re really easy to understand, so therefore you’re easy to help. I know what is important to you, and so therefore you’re easy to help and you’re easy to interface with.”

And so his point is every young founder thinks they have to be an Elon or Steve Jobs, and he’s like, “But I’m not like an Elon or Steve Jobs.” And the massive success, not only what he’s done for Spotify, one of the best apps ever created. I think they have the most, I think there’s only one other company in the world that has more paid subscribers than they do, and it’s Netflix. 

But think about the way you feel when you get done using Spotify. And this is why I like all the top people there too and they’ve also been working together for excessively a long time. Gustav, Alex, Daniel, all of them is they want you when you’re done using Spotify to feel good.

If me and you spend an hour listening to our favorite music on Spotify, you feel great. You spend an hour listening to Tim Ferriss’ podcast, inspired, you feel great. An audiobook now, you feel great. I spend an hour on TikTok or Reels, I feel like shit. Like Twitter? Oh, I can’t. 

Tim Ferriss: It’s like the anti-therapy.

David Senra: But they’re trying to put something.

Tim Ferriss: If you want to send yourself backwards.

David Senra: So I like what they’re doing.

Tim Ferriss: Is there any other advice that has stuck from Daniel to you?

David Senra: Yeah, so let’s go to the — 

Tim Ferriss: And then I won’t lose track of that.

David Senra: The archetype I think is really important. I think you’ll really vibe with what his opinion on or his perspective on this is. Yeah, Daniel will tell you advice in a, he’s like a wise old man. I don’t know how to describe it.

So one thing is implied and never explicitly stated is he just doesn’t feel he has any, there’s no ceiling on what he can achieve, or what he can learn, or the effect he can have in the world. And when you spend time with him, that is transferred to you. And it’s one of the most important things. And I don’t even know if I told him this. I have tears in my eyes thinking about it.

And then I remember hanging out with him in Stockholm. He’s done phenomenal stuff with Spotify, one of the best apps ever created at best businesses. He’s wildly successful as an investor too. And so I remember asking him, this is the funniest thing I’ve ever heard. And I go, “Were you always interested in investing?” Because I knew his story, we’ve talked a lot about this.

And he goes, “No, I didn’t even know anything about it. I started learning.”

I go, “When did you start learning?”

He’s like, “2018.”

I go, “How’d you start learning?”

He goes, “Patrick’s podcast.” And so he would just listen to people. He’s like, “I like that idea, I’ll take that idea. Oh, I don’t like that idea, I don’t like that at all. I’ll avoid that.”

And the way Patrick describes, it’s like out of anybody you know, Daniel has the ability to apply what he’s learning faster than anybody else, and at a grander scale.

Tim Ferriss: I think he’s also a very, very, very good systems thinker. He is not at a risk cobbling together this sort of camel that is a horse designed by committee that has a bunch of inherent problems and conflicts within it. He’ll be able to figure out how to put pieces together from first principles that function well as a whole.

David Senra: Let me tell one other piece of advice he gave me, and he tells it in a story form. This is why he is the wise old man, and essentially was, remember why people love you. You sit in a room and you read all the time, and then you make this thing on the other side that educates and inspires us and gives us energy. And as soon as you stop doing that and you start saying yes to all these distractions, and I don’t even know, I think we might’ve talked about this in the episode we did, that comes out in a few weeks, but he tells it in a story, and he tells a story from another person.

So he’s not telling you, “David, go do this.”

He’s like, “Let me tell you about this little genius,” or not little genius. “This guy’s really impressive. Look at what he’s accomplished and everything else.”

And then the story will hit you hours later. And he’s like, “Oh, yeah, we’ve invited him to the conference over time. I’ve invited him to visit and I keep hearing no.”

And I’m like, “Oh, he’s like telling me you’re saying yes to too many things.”

The magic that you have is because you say no, and once you start saying yes, and you’re at every conference, you’re traveling around, you’re doing all this sort of stuff, the magic disappears. 

Tim Ferriss: I’m curious what you think are some of the different archetypes because I think of the 100 plus startups that I’ve invested in since 2008, and there’s a lot of variability. You’ve got the engineer, let’s call it the engineer founder, somebody like Tobi of Shopify or Luis von Ahn of Duolingo. Then you’ve got genius operator, negotiator warrior, like a Travis Kalanick, right? Very different personalities, very different superpowers. And you just go down the list and you see some people come from a finance, numbers, spreadsheet God perspective, and they just have an analytical advantage. It’s very comparable to investing in some ways, looking at the investing world. They have this analytical advantage, let’s just call it. And I was trying to pick out what, if anything, might be commonalities because you also have the crazy artists who then figures out how to harness some of their superpower. And it strikes me that there are at least two that immediately jumped to mind. One is longer term time horizon.

David Senra: Those are the people I’m obsessed with.

Tim Ferriss: Like the Jeff Bezos type of mindset where it’s like if you have the exact same toolkit, the exact same competency, out of the box genetically, you’re built exactly the same as someone else, but you are able to think and plan longer term, it can be a huge advantage. Second is something that you mentioned where Daniel was saying to you, “This is the magic.”

Just remember this is the magic. When other opportunities, other shiny objects show up, because they will even in very early stages. And if you deviate, it’s incredibly easy to self-immolate if you lose track of that. You see that a lot when CEOs get replaced, sometimes, founder CEOs and sometimes they need to be replaced. But what else would you add to that or how would you expand on any of it?

David Senra: Just look at the founders of some of the biggest companies in the world now, they would go to war against each other, so think about Oracle and Microsoft. You can’t think of two different founder archetypes than Bill Gates and Larry Ellison. Larry Ellison’s like, “I’m a sprinter. I have intense, very intense periods of work, weeks at a time, months at time, and then I need to go on my boat with a bunch of Italian models. This is how I have to live my life.”

Bill Gates is, we’d be walking into this room right here, and his feet would be under the ground underneath his desk. He’s sleeping for three hours. He’s getting back up and he’s going back on the, he’s a grinder. And then you have, I’ve been trying to name some of these and I haven’t done this yet.

And the problem is I never write anything, and this is all improv, but one of them was the anti-business billionaire. And so what I, in that category is these people are so obsessed about one thing and that’s the quality of the product that they’re making. They make non-financial decisions like Steve Jobs making sure that the inside of the Mac looks beautiful even though you can’t open it up and it costs more money. He doesn’t care. He wants the best product. James Dyson’s like this, he’s an anti-business billionaire. Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia, anti-business billionaire. These guys, they’re obsessed with two things, quality of the product that they’re making and retaining control of their company over long term. And the funny part about this, the reason I call them anti-business billionaires is because if you make the world’s best product and you retain control over your company, you wind up with the money anyways.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I can think of a few people, I mean within my portfolio who retained a lot of their equity at least, and that’s it. Which is preserving the magic in terms of the best product.

David Senra: Well look, everybody’s like, “Look at what’s happening to Larry Ellison right now.” It’s like, yeah, the guy I think they raised, I think this could be wrong, but I think Oracle raised 32 million of equity in their IPO and no more after that.

And then the guy would refuse, even when they were almost going out of business in 1990, he still wouldn’t sell. They’re like, “Sell your equity.”

Like, “No.” It might be worth nothing, he just wouldn’t sell it, and then he’s buying back stock.

He owns, I think, 40, I think he went down to 24 percent, now he’s back to 41 percent of Oracle. The company’s 50 years old, 45 years old. I think he was 30-something when he founded the company. He’s just an anomaly.

And then you have people like Elon where it’s just like, “I’m going to run.” I wouldn’t even think that’s possible, how the hell do you run seven companies at the same time?

Tim Ferriss: I can barely manage three employees, I don’t know.

David Senra: Yeah, exactly.

Tim Ferriss: I don’t have a good answer.

David Senra: That is the point. I do think Daniel hit on something that no one else has put in front of me. It’s like, man, there’s not, the people are going to dominate. Obviously, Elon’s the most famous entrepreneur in the world, but even Bezos is very different. And then you have these people that some of the people just like to make money, and that is their scoreboard.

This is another thing I learned from Michael Dell. There’s two things. One thing you just said: protecting the magic. The advice that Dell gave me when I had dinner with him, and he does this in story form too, because that guy’s been running his business for 41 years, 41 years. It’s insane. And his whole thing is just like, “You’re not going to be taken out by competition. You’re going to sabotage yourself.”

“Entrepreneurs sabotage themselves, and the amount of people that were doing the same thing I was doing, and they were ahead of me.” This is Dell talking, “They were ahead of me, but then they got to 500 million year in revenue and they’re like, ‘I have a house on Lake Austin now.’” They’re in the same city. They’re doing the same thing as him in the same city, and they’re smoking them.

They’re ahead of them by a few hundred million, and they’re like, “Oh, I can chill now.”

No, you can’t, because you’ve got Michael Dell right across the river and he’s not going to chill. That guy has no chill. When I went to him, I was like, “What the?”

I heard he’s got this wonderful house in Hawaii, his son was telling me about this, and we were in Austin in July. You know, it’s like —

Tim Ferriss: It’s hot.

David Senra: What are you doing here? And Michael’s answer is simple. He goes, “I love my business and my business is here.” He wasn’t being mean to me, he was like, “That’s a stupid question, David. I’m working. I love what I do, this is what I’m doing.”

So one thing from his autobiography though is that really, I used to say it only works if you build a business that’s authentic to you. And this is why I asked you about your inner monologue earlier, because I really feel the reason people do their best work usually later in life, in business, is obviously more experienced network, finances, everything else, but I think because they know themselves better. I think me and you, if we would’ve met 10 years ago, we’d be different people and we also wouldn’t know each other. Know ourselves as much as we do now, where I think I’ve built a business and you have two based on what I know about you, completely authentic to you, and that’s the only way it’s going to work over long term.

And I used to say authentic and Michael Dell’s autobiography, which he narrates by the way, the Audible’s excellent. I listened to it three times before I read it to do the episode on it. And there’s a guy named, I think Lee Walker who Michael brought in when Michael was 21. He was in his forties, and he was an older, wiser man, and he had to quit after four years. He was basically running the company with Michael. He’s like, “We’re fighting. We’re taking on IBM with a thousand dollars of working capital from a shitty office in the industrial part in Austin.”

IBM’s the biggest company in the world. I didn’t know this, it was the first company to hit $100 billion market cap. “My back hurts. I’m losing hair, I can’t sleep. I got digestive issues.” Lee’s dead after four years. And he goes, “And Michael’s excited. It’s invigorated him,” and he gave me the line, he goes, “because he built a business that was natural to him. I’m dying and he’s thriving because it’s natural to him and it’s not natural to me.” And I think that’s the key, man. People are like, “Oh, I’m going to imitate X, Y, and Z.” It’s like, no, no, no. You should be copying the how, not the what. You don’t copy what they did, you copy how they did it, and then you just take the little ideas that make sense to you.

So you ask, “How am I applying this for my own work?” I am either completely apathetic and ignore something or completely obsessed. It’s zero or 100 and nothing in the middle. So the reason I love Munger, because Munger gave me really — Munger and your friend Naval, had a big role in this too. Gave me the blueprint where he’s just like, “Hey, we found that…” Oftentimes Munger has this line that oftentimes the winning system in business goes ridiculously far, maximizing and/or minimizing one or a few variables. And he used Costco like the example, and then he has another line. “Find a simple idea and take it seriously.”

Sharing lessons from biographies of great people is a very, very simple idea. Doing it for nine years, working 70 hours a week at it, building systems for it, redoing it over and over again is not — that’s the serious part. His other quote that I’ve already shared earlier, “There’s ideas worth billions in a $30 history book.” That’s another idea. That’s maybe why the work will be valuable and attract the audience that it could attract, another idea from him. You want to maneuver yourself into an area that you’re intensely interested in, that just being a fanatic, like a Sam Walton or a Jim Sinegal or a Sol Price is just — Jeff Bezos, very helpful.

These are fanatics, they’re intensely interested in what they’re doing. That is worth a lot of money, and I’ve become friends with Michael Ovitz, who’s also one of the first guests on my new show. And his whole thing is like, you cannot fight against your job. That’s one of the best pieces of advice. He’s like, “People fight against their job all the time and they lose.” You have to find something that you’re intensely drawn to it.

Tim Ferriss: So I have a couple of bullets. You should explain who Michael Ovitz is. Why don’t you do that first, and then I’ll just hop to two questions related to Michael Ovitz specifically.

David Senra: Michael Ovitz is a shark. He’s one of the most intense people. I think he’s 80 by now.

So Rick and I live very close to each other in Miami, and we always have breakfast at the same spot that I’m not going to say publicly.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, good idea.

David Senra: And so we’re hanging out — 

Tim Ferriss: The disinformation campaign. Yeah, it’s always at Denny’s. Moons Over My Hammy.

David Senra: So his phone is on the table and it rings and it says “Michael Ovitz” and I gasped. I’m like, “Oh,” I read — everybody knows who Michael — Michael Ovitz was the most powerful man in Hollywood at one time. He had like 75 percent market share, 90 percent market share. He was the most powerful agent. He’s the founder of CAA, which still exists to this day. And I’m like, “Oh, God, I know who that is. I’ve done episodes of this guy.” And so he picks up and they’ve been friends for 20 years, 25 years, something like that. And he goes, “Hey, I’m sitting here with somebody you might know. Have you ever heard of David Senra and the Founders podcast?” And Michael pauses, he goes, “I listened to four of them yesterday.” He was on his boat in St. Barts.

Tim Ferriss: That’s incredible.

David Senra: No, but this is how — he’s a shark and a killer. He’s on his boat in St. Barts, he’s like studying Rockefeller and Vanderbilt. He’s quoting stuff from the episode and so, we wind up having dinner.

Tim Ferriss: Rockefeller, one of the biggest sharks to ever live.

David Senra: 100 percent. And so we wound up having dinner, and this is one of the things I asked him, because his whole thing is going to run through — you’re going to meet thousands of people in your life. He’s going to definitely meet way more people than I will, because I’m an introvert. And he used to call 300 people a day, because he was kind of running Hollywood. Ovitz’s advice to me was just like, “You’re going to meet thousands of people in your life, and what I would recommend is just spend all the time with a handful that really matter.” And he’s like, “For me, Rick is one of those people.” And I go, “Why?” And obviously, he’s like, “Well, he’s intelligent,” basically. But he’s like, “Because he tells me the truth.”

Tim Ferriss: That is one thing you can definitely reply. That’s one thing you can rely on Rick for.

David Senra: But in general — 

Tim Ferriss: Not sure he can help himself. Not sure it’s a conscious decision.

David Senra: No, but in general, his whole point is when you get to be as famous and as well-known, as wealthy as Ovitz, everybody is going to kiss your ass. Everybody wants something from you. They won’t either want to tell you how great you are, or they want money from you, or they want you to sell, buy something. And you’re just like, there’s so few people that you know that truly love you for you and don’t want anything from you. They just want to be friends. And they will tell you the truth. And this is the very dangerous thing that really successful people do. They surround themselves with people that don’t tell them the truth. 

And this is an idea I got from Jim Casey, the founder of UPS. He realized that there’s this weird capture if you only talk to your top executives, so let’s say you have 10 top executives, and then they distribute everything else to the company. They work themselves in a position where they have the ear of the king and you hear nothing good. So he’s like, “I don’t want to talk to them at all.” He would stop and talk to every single — he’d make his driver stop every single time they see a brown truck. And he would talk to the people doing the actual service.

Tim Ferriss: Because he wouldn’t get the bad news or they would — 

David Senra: They would tell them what actually is going on.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

David Senra: What is actually happening? And the crazy impressive founders that I’ve been able to spend a lot of time with, most of them are 60, 70, 80 years old. Those are my favorite. I love them. They’re not in their office. They’re in their warehouses. They’re on the factory line. They’re in their stores. They’re in constant contact with the customer and the person delivering the service to the customer. Not with their — they’re not looking at a whiteboard with their executives. They’re very practical, non-theoretical people. I think it’s really important.

So yeah, I think in my own thing, it’s just like I like to be obsessed and focus on one thing. I don’t like to multitask. So therefore everybody is like every single publisher. It’s like, “Write a book, you should do this.” I’m like, everybody says, “Hey, I like X, so do Y.” And I’m like, “But then if I do Y, I don’t do X.” And so my whole thing is just very simple. I want to do one thing relentlessly.

Tim Ferriss: So related to Michael Ovitz, there are a few notes here that I think relate to the new show and the interview you did with him. And I want to ask about two of them. So the first is the benefits of low introspection. And the second — so you can tackle these in either order is “this can’t be my life,” in quotation marks, is a powerful motivator. Can you expand on those?

David Senra: So “This can’t be my life” is a very powerful motivator. You see it over and over again. I think the sense of drive, the way you grew up on Long Island, the way I grew up, I was like, “I’m not going out like this.” I don’t care what I have to do — 

Tim Ferriss: I’m not going to replay this movie.

David Senra: No way. I think in many cases, seeing examples of what you don’t want your life to be is more powerful than seeing what you want it to be. I think maybe that one comes first and then, you start to see, “Oh, actually this is the path I want to go down.”

Tim Ferriss: There’s an expression in Japanese, which is [foreign language] is like opposite side. [foreign language] is teacher and it’s someone who teaches you by showing you what not to do.

David Senra: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Right.

David Senra: Yeah. I would say my family definitely the case — 

Tim Ferriss: One of those.

David Senra: Yeah, you just see this over and over again. And so with him, he grew up in the valley. He could see where he wanted to be. He could see the mansions of Beverly Hills. He saw the contrast between, “This is what I’m worried about with social media.” It’s like before we grew up, what do you see? You basically see, “Oh, that’s the nice neighborhood over there. That’s kind of a bad neighborhood.” Now you see the richest people in the world every day and the poorest people in the world, you’re exposed to nothing but extremes, which is like we’ve never — in human history, we’ve never been exposed to that.

And what is the long-term effects of that? I have a teenage daughter now, and I think there’s a lot of negativity of this like, you only see the most beautiful people. If you were just in a town where we grew up, you might see a really beautiful woman. You’re not seeing them all day long. It’s just this unfair — 

Tim Ferriss: Barrage.

David Senra: Yeah, barrage of unattainable standards. So with him, he was fiercely driven to succeed. And one of my favorite parts of his book, the guy now, wildly successful, but even before that, he left, I think it was William Morris Agency, he starts CAA, they started to have a little success. He winds up buying a house in Brentwood and it was like $650,000, which is fantastic, but nothing compared to what’s going to happen over the next decades in his life. But he just woke up every morning, he’s like, “I can’t believe I live in Brentwood.”

“I can’t believe this. I did this.” And then once you start seeing results, the grind becomes very addictive. And he, if you had, what’s his archetype, grinder. I’m going to throw sheer hours and energy. He’s also an amazing — one of the best salespeople alive, very charismatic. He’s got a lot of superpowers. I actually met Marc Andreessen. I asked him this because Marc Andreessen is on record saying that when he started a16z, they essentially copied CAA.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I think they brought Michael Ovitz in.

David Senra: They did. They both talk about this. And I asked him, I go, “What do you think is Michael’s superpower?” He’s like, “He’s the world’s greatest agent and therefore the greatest salesperson, the world’s greatest salesperson.” And so that’s one example from his book is just like, this can’t be my life. I don’t want to be like this. I’m going to direct all my energy and do something different. 

Now the low introspection thing is I’m not a controversial person. I’m just sharing lessons from history that I read in a book.

You don’t have to listen, you don’t have to pay attention, it doesn’t matter. But when I bring up the fact that a lot of these people have low or zero introspection. Meaning that when they find what they want to do in life, they wake up and they know exactly what they’re doing that day. Sam Walton was not waking up saying, “What are my feelings like today? What should I do? Should I think about the meaning of life?” He’s like, “No, I founded Walmart. I made one Walmart. I’m going to make another one and another one and another one. I will make every Walmart better and better and better.” 

And I think having low introspection after you found your mission in life — and this is a sad thing, I think most people never find their mission. I know I found my mission. I don’t think about what should I do today.

Tim Ferriss: We’re going to talk, obviously, about the new show and we’ve been alluding to it and mentioning some of the guests. But before we get there — so you’re about to meet Michael and he had been ostensibly on vacation, but he’s listening to your episodes on Rockefeller and others.

David Senra: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Do you recall any of the other episodes?

David Senra: The Vanderbilt one stuck up in my mind. I mean, we text about them. I don’t remember — the Vanderbilt is the one that really — the Rockefeller and the Vanderbilt. The Vanderbilt especially because Vanderbilt is like — what I say is I’m kind of telling the same story over and over again. I think it’s more like church than it is like — just like I went to church. I grew up as a fundamentalist Christian. We met together with believers on regular intervals on Wednesday and Sunday. And it’s not like the preacher got up there and was like, “Hey, we talked about that Jesus guy enough, we’re going to move on to somebody else.”

It’s like we literally just go to the same book over and over again. And so I always say there’s always a historical equivalent to anybody we’re dealing with today or in the past. But Vanderbilt, to me — there’s not an entrepreneurial historical equivalent. He’s like Putin or something. When he died, he controlled five percent of the money supply. So one out of $25.

Tim Ferriss: So I guess the reason I was asking about the episodes, and I don’t know Michael, so this is not a judgment or criticism of Michael at all, but I suppose if you believe that there is a value to low introspection for the purposes of building a business, which I would agree.

David Senra: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Is there not a risk, and I have not listened to those particular episodes on Rockefeller and Vanderbilt, but I’ve read a bit of the history. These are not necessarily people you automatically want to model everything in all — 

David Senra: No, I think Ovitz would.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. So this is I suppose my question. Is there a risk of ending up amoral, immoral or sociopathic, if you — one of the things you optimize for is low introspection because — or maybe that’s just hardwiring frankly, and you’re just not inclined to do it.

David Senra: That’s a good question.

Tim Ferriss: Because this archetype does exist, just like the rape, pillage, destroy archetype is an archetype.

David Senra: They’re overrepresented in entrepreneurship. Why? Because, if entrepreneurship [is] done correctly, [it yields] the greatest material rewards in human history.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

David Senra: So of course, it’s going to be full of psychopaths and sociopaths. Whatever — I don’t know if you know the numbers on this, but they assume five percent of the population’s sociopathic or something like that. Is that something like that?

Tim Ferriss: I don’t know the numbers.

David Senra: Let’s just make it up. It’s five percent of the general population. It’s probably five times that of entrepreneurs and investors and people like this or anybody — political power. Power in general. This is why I think the work of Robert Caro is so interesting. And I always make the argument that there should only — there should be a law. The only one law that I would foist upon society is that there’s only one person allowed to write a thousand-page biography. I have no problem reading that. Almost none of the books that I’ve read that are a thousand pages needed to be a thousand pages.

They just didn’t know what to put in there. Robert Caro is the only one that should be able to write long biographies because everything that he has in there should be in there. I think he’s a master of his craft. He’s the best to ever do it. But he’s saying, “I’m not writing biographies. I’m writing about how humans accumulate and then wield power. And I did it first on a local level in New York with Robert Moses, and now I’m showing what happens on a national level. And guess what, LBJ would sacrifice everything to get what he wanted. Personal ethics, his relationships, everything.”

Tim Ferriss: Stealing elections.

David Senra: This is the wonderful thing about studying history. History doesn’t repeat, human nature does. So if you just read Will and — and you both love Will and Ariel Durant, right? Read the history of human civilization. Read their hundred-page book, Lessons of History. The same stuff repeats over and over again. So when it comes out and you see this on the news, “Oh, of course no one stole the election.” It’s like stealing every election in all different countries. Stealing the elections is an American pastime. Just read Robert Caro. And it could be a little Senate election in Texas.

Tim Ferriss: Exactly.

David Senra: If you don’t think — 

Tim Ferriss: That missing ballot box.

David Senra: Yeah. The line I have about this is from Will Durant, where he’s just like, “In every age, humans are dishonest and governments are corrupt.” It’s one of my favorite quotes from Lessons of History, and every age, nothing that we’re doing is new. We’re telling the same stories over and over and over again. You see the same people over and over again. So yeah, I’m sure there’s a ton of people that read these biographies and that listen to my podcast that are absolute psychopaths. I don’t think Ovitz is a psychopath. He’s an extreme winner. He wants to win.

Tim Ferriss: The line may be pretty thin.

David Senra: Yeah, of course. Of course.

Tim Ferriss: I’m not saying he is, by the way, sociopath. It’s just that, just like you were mentioning, you can convince yourself of a bad idea, very compellingly, just as you can a good idea. It’s like when you start to get into the gray waters of morality as winning compounds upon winning, oftentimes the person who cares less about other people wins. If they can discard that consideration.

David Senra: 100 percent, and that’s been true in the past.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

David Senra: True today, will be true.

That’s the point, that this is why it’s so interesting. You have to — I look at this as almost — I think something I didn’t even understand is I have the ability to step outside of myself, and I’m kind of like a casual observer of human nature.

Tim Ferriss: I want to ask you, and then I’m going to hop to questions about podcasting on the new show, about how you think about assessing leaders, entrepreneurs, reading biographies or autobiographies, and figuring out what people claim as things that help them succeed, to succeed, actually help them versus hindering them. In other words, what are the “because of” versus the “in spite of?” So for instance, if high disagreeability or low agreeability is common across a lot of founders.

To what extent is that — can you point to that as one of the causal factors for their success as opposed to just an emergency break they had on, causing all sorts of problems that they managed to overcome, so they succeeded despite. How do you think about separating those two things?

David Senra: So one of the things I love about James Dyson, who is a hero of mine, it’s the person that on the planet that I want to meet that I haven’t met. The number one is him. And what I love about him is how stubborn he is, because I see myself in that. And it turns out his stubbornness worked out for him because he had the right idea, but this is where it goes back to like you can’t blindly copy. There’s no formula. There’s no formula, there’s no track. So it’s like he’s stubborn on an idea that was a great idea, it just needed more time.

You could be stubborn on an idea that’s terrible and going nowhere. And then you did the exact same thing for the exact same amount of time. And on the other side of that, he has one of the most valuable privately held companies in the world, and you have a miserable life. There’s no answers to that. There’s nobody coming to save you. None of this shit works if you can’t trust your own judgment and figure things out. That’s why when people are like, “Oh, more people should be entrepreneurs.” I don’t know about that. I want to encourage the people that think they can do it, to do it.

But I think in many cases, most people should work, like they should choose a different path because it’s very, very risky. Like Todd Graves, the Raising Cane’s guy I told you about, right? His whole thing is entrepreneurs should have higher risk tolerance. James Dyson, multiple times, risked every single possession he had to chase his dream. He signed over his house multiple times. If he failed, they could have been homeless. It worked out for him. 

Todd Graves had this crazy way to finance the first 28 Raising Cane’s where essentially he goes to an angel investor, he goes to Tim Ferriss and says, “Hey, you’re going to give me a 200,000 loan, okay? It’s going to be subjugated loan to the bank. I’m going to guarantee you a 15 percent return on the $200,000 for X amount of time.” You say, “Oh, that sounds great. You’re paying me 15 percent on my 200 grand.” But you don’t get any equity. I take that 200,000 equity that I have from this document from Tim. I go to a bank and say, “This is as collateral. Loan me the other 600 grand or whatever the number is to get this up and running.” And he did that for 28 times and he’s like, “Oh, I’m rolling, rolling, rolling.” Leveraged up to his eyeballs. What’s the problem? “I open up. Every time I open a new Raising Cane’s, there’s a line out the door from day one.”

Well, then a little thing called Hurricane Katrina comes and guess where? 28 of his restaurants are all in Louisiana, and he almost died, and he says, “If I didn’t come out of that, there would be no story. It’d be gone.”

And then I guess the second part of — I don’t know why this popped into my mind, but when you’re reading history, we’re reading about stories that happened a hundred years ago, 200 years ago, 50 years ago. Some of them are from that person’s own mouth. Like, imagine if you tell your own life story, you’re going to, here’s the good part. You’re going to hide the bad. You’re human, right? And so people are like, “Well, how do you know if what you’re reading is true?” The line is like if you think the news is fake, wait till you read history. 

Tim Ferriss: It’s just old news.

David Senra: I don’t know. My idea is we’re not taking a test at the end of this. I’m not saying did this actually happen in 1912. It’s like, is the idea behind what he’s doing a good idea for me? And so the example of Rockefeller that you see that Elon used, where Rockefeller tells the story, I don’t know if it actually happened, but he tells the story where they would have to solder closed the barrels that they transport oil in, and he goes up one day and he says, “How many drops of solder do you use?” He’s like, “I use 40.” He’s like, “Have you ever tried 38?” He’s like, “No, we never tried 38.” “Can you try 38?” They tried 38, it leaks. “Okay, try 39.” They tried 39, doesn’t leak. That one drop of solder at the time of the business saved him $2,500 a year, the business grows and compounds for the next three decades, and now he’s saving like hundreds of thousands from that then.

Did that actually happen? I don’t know. But that’s a good idea to find the limit, to actually, “Hey, maybe I should control my costs a little more. Maybe I need to actually see if I can do this in a more efficient way.” I don’t know if it happened. I just want the idea behind it.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah, just to reiterate what you’re saying, it’s tough to separate the fact from fiction, right? And then sometimes this is actually why I just read fiction because I’m like, “There still are truths to extract,” right? There are principles that you can extract from, this is now cliched because it’s been made into a popular movie, but Dune or Stranger in a Strange Land. You can actually pull a lot from just straight-up fiction.

And then when it comes to the business side, because I’ve read so many, not as many as you, but tons of business books, still have my early copies and my notes from those books with Losing my Virginity, Richard Branson, early Yvon Chouinard, I think it’s Let My People Go Surfing, et cetera, still have all those books, and when you look at — part of the reason also that I like early biographies, so let’s just say like Hard Drive first on Bill Gates versus a later, I don’t want to say sanitized, but let’s say sanitized version where — 

David Senra: I’m going through this right now, where it’s like, look — 

Tim Ferriss: Warren Buffett, love the guy, and he’s turned himself into the “Awww, shucks” grandpa neighbor who takes his garbage out in a robe.

David Senra: Killer. Killer.

Tim Ferriss: He’s a killer, and I remember reading, I think it was The Making of an American Capitalist way back in the day, and the story that stuck out, and I hope I’m not inventing this, I don’t see why I would, but his routine was to go home, walk upstairs, and read.

David Senra: Step over his children.

Tim Ferriss: Exactly. Was it his son — 

David Senra: Yes. Step over — 

Tim Ferriss: — who had fallen down the stairs, is sprawled out like a chalk outline at a crime scene, steps over his injured son to go upstairs to do more reading of S1 filings or whatever he was doing.

David Senra: You bring up something interesting. This is why I don’t believe them when they say they have regrets at the end of their life. So if I read Making of an American Capitalist, an excellent book. I think that’s actually the best biography.

Tim Ferriss: It’s so good.

David Senra: You read Snowball after his wife leaves him and he says, “The biggest mistake, if I could go back and live life again, the biggest mistake I would do is I would change whatever I need, so” — I think her name was Susie — “didn’t leave me.” No, I don’t believe you.

Tim Ferriss: I don’t buy it.

David Senra: No, none of them. When they all say — like a Leonardo Del Vecchio, the guy that started Luxottica. I think I had it translated from Italian. Some of these biographies are in different languages so, again, go back to differentiation, what can I do that no one else is doing, we’ve translated the Red Bull book from German.

Tim Ferriss: It was awesome. I listened to that.

David Senra: I appreciate that.

But he gets to the end of his life, he is an orphan. Dad dies young — 

Tim Ferriss: What was the company again?

David Senra: Luxottica. So they essentially — 

Tim Ferriss: [inaudible].

David Senra: Monopolize glasses, everything. So Mark Zuckerberg just invested, I think, three and a half billion dollars for like three percent of the company.

Tim Ferriss: Wow.

David Senra: And so for essentially 60 years, he just a slow, methodical Rockefeller-esque march through the entire industry until he controls every single component of eyeglasses, sunglasses, everything. It’s like completely dominant. He gets to the end of his life, he’s just like, “Oh, yeah. The one regret I have is…” He’s married multiple times. I think there’s like a 50-year gap between his oldest son and his youngest son. So it’s like he’s like a wild boy, but he’s like, “The one regret I have is I didn’t spend more time with my kids.” No, you wouldn’t change a thing.

Tim Ferriss: It’s not true.

David Senra: It’s not true because I don’t think they could. That’s what where you just said. It’s like maybe they didn’t have a choice. Maybe it’s just hardwired. And so I’m going through that literally right now because this week I read Source Code which is Bill Gates’ autobiography about the first 20 years of his life, his version. I reread Hard Drive, Overdrive, which is also written by the same guys that wrote Hard Drive, and then I pulled all my highlights and notes for Paul Allen’s description of Bill Gates in Paul Allen’s autobiography. There is a vast difference between what’s in Source Code and what is in Hard Drive, and it’s obviously Hard Drive is more accurate. It’s written right after it happened. Bill is not the 70-year-old man he is now, and he’s in a different world, but watch his interviews, watch the documentary on Netflix about him. He’s like, “I was hardcore. That was my advantage.”

Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah.

David Senra: He was.

Tim Ferriss: Killer.

David Senra: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And also these questions, a lot of the questions that I ask myself when I’m reading any nonfiction — I shouldn’t say any nonfiction, let’s say biographies where I’m hoping to model something. One is like is, or an autobiography, okay, what’s the bias here. Are there any particular biases I should be aware of, okay? Is anyone in like reputation rehab mode before they die? Okay, let’s keep that.

David Senra: Sure.

Tim Ferriss: What type of survivorship bias might there be, right? Who tried the same? Do we have 99 out of 100 who tried something similar and failed? Let’s take a look at the tape. Okay. Luck is luck. Luck’s everywhere, right? So the fact that Bill Gates ended up with a computer, winding it up with the computers, it’s just like it’s, yeah.

David Senra: Timing. I think timing.

Tim Ferriss: Timing is a huge piece. By the way, these are not all reasons to discount anything, but I just want to mention a couple of that I try to think of. The other I try to think of, because I might try to mimic someone in sports if I’m trying to learn something, or language learning or whatever it might be, is what are attributes, what is trainable and what is not trainable, right? Because I’ve heard these stories from people who know Bill Gates and they’re like, “Well, we were going to go on this short vacation in…” fill in the blank, I can’t remember, Costa Rica, right? They’re going to go on a birding trip in the morning. It’s just like a two, three-hour thing with a world-class birding guide. They do the trip, and the night before, Bill has stayed up and read five books on birding, memorized them seemingly without trying, and is basically having like a peer-to-peer discussion with the birding expert as they’re going through the rainforest. That’s not normal.

David Senra: No. It’s not.

Tim Ferriss: That’s like “I’m going to do calf raises to make my body look like Michael Phelps.” No, you’re not. That’s not going to work. So it’s like when I’m looking for people to model, I’m trying to find people who have hopefully a comparable composition of strengths that I can amplify in myself or that are coachable, right? And so the question after all that is, does anyone stand out to you, of the biographies or people you’ve met, where you’re like in terms of someone doing the most with the hand they’ve been dealt — so maybe they’re not a freak of nature.

David Senra: So not aliens.

Tim Ferriss: They’re not a freak of nature, necessarily, because there are freaks of nature among the people that you study, the people I study, but it’s like, all right, these people might have a few strengths, but they’re not complete freaks. They’re not the Usain Bolts of — fill in the blank, and man, oh, man, did they play their hand well. They’re just so good at playing the hands that they are dealt, that person. Does anybody stick out?

David Senra: Sam Walton.

Tim Ferriss: All right.

David Senra: Sam Walton’s one of my favorite entrepreneurs. If you really think about it, so he had this crazy thing, this crazy idea. I don’t think he obviously didn’t know what Walmart was going to turn into, but one of the ways they avoided all the inheritance tax is if you give away the equity before it’s valuable. The last time I checked, if you look at all of the Walmart equity owned by the family, that means the wealth that came from his idea, it would be like 432 billion today if it was consolidated in one person, right? When you study Sam, he’s obviously smart, but he was just like, he didn’t really know what he was going to do. Then he had this idea, he’s like, “Well, maybe I can be good at retailing.” And then he starts out in Newport, Arkansas with one store.

This is what drives me insane about the modern day entrepreneurship industry is how everybody, they start out with like weird goals, like “I’m going to build a trillion-dollar company,” or “I’m going to be the fastest person to a hundred million ARR,” and you’re just like, “Okay, but none of these people talk like that. You’re doing it for the wrong reason, so you probably won’t get there if that’s just the case.” It’s like what Jerry Seinfeld says, “If you’re just doing it for money, you only get so far.” With him, he was just fascinated by stores and trying to make it a little bit better every day, and he spends — 

Tim Ferriss: It was on vacation, right? Didn’t matter where he was, he would go into a retail store — 

David Senra: His kids told the story. It’s just like vacation was essentially driving to different towns and checking out different retailers. The most important thing about his story, one of the most important things, is this idea to go slow now so you can go faster later. And so you’re like, “Okay.” The beginning of his career, he’s in one tiny store. I think they start doing 25,000 a year. 25,000 a year in revenue, and I think he gets up to like 250 grand. It took him five years. But for five years he just had one story. It was like experimenting, understanding, trying to figure out what the different parts of retail are because there’s no such thing as discounting and wholesaling and all this other stuff that he was doing that he’s going to do later on.

And then what’s fascinating is later in his career after Walmart, he then takes that idea, he goes and visits Sol Price, who we mentioned earlier, he takes that idea. He’s like, “Oh, this is a great idea. I’m going to do this.” He does Sam’s Club. In that same five-year period, so you have the first five years, one store, separated by maybe 40 years in the career, that second five years when he’s starting something else, in that five-year period he doesn’t have one store. He winds up doing, I think, a hundred stores and like seven billion in revenue from this new category because you see him learning. And so, yes, I think he was brilliant, but he’s not memorizing five books overnight in doing that.

This is like mine, I don’t think — man, one of the reasons that I do what I do is because Munger became a hero and he talks over and over again about being a biography nut, that he read more biographies than anybody else. I got to spend three hours inside of his house talking to him right before he died. I don’t care how many biographies I read, how many books I read for the rest of my life, I cannot have a brain like him. I will never have a brain like him. Anybody at 99 is going to have some level of cognitive decline. You know what one of my first thoughts was about an hour and a half into the conversation with him was, “This guy had to be terrifying when he was 60.” Terrifying. Terrifying.

Think about this. Everybody that I know, when I get to meet fancy people I always ask them, “Who’s the smartest person you know? What’s the best business you know?” It can’t be like Apple. It’s like these interesting, weird things, and every single person that says — if they know Buffett and they don’t tell you it’s Buffett, they’re wrong. Buffett chose this guy to let him mold and shape his thinking. What does that tell you about his intelligence? I remember — because this is what I do, again, I’m like laying bricks every day. I don’t think I’m a brilliant person. I just show up every day and don’t quit. And so I read. Once I find Munger, I read, literally, not, oh, I read some of the books, I read every single book on Munger. Then I reread my highlights over and over again. So my days, I wake up, work out, read for a few hours, have lunch, then reread past highlights in the afternoon. All my social media posts are just me rereading highlights.

I read every single book on Munger, then I reread all the highlights, but then I read all the books he tells me to read, because he’ll tell you, “Read Les Schwab.” He’ll tell you all these things. He’ll tell you Henry Kaiser. I was like, “Who the hell is Henry Kaiser?” Henry Kaiser started a hundred companies. He built the Hoover Dam. He built Liberty ships. I go, “What?”

Tim Ferriss: By the way, just the fact that pretty much everyone listening to this podcast will have no idea of who that person is just underscores, I think, how ridiculous it is to get overly fixated on legacy as an excuse for all sorts of behaviors.

David Senra: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: Nobody’s going to remember you.

David Senra: No. I’m anti-legacy and I’m anti-family dynasty. I think bequeathing your kids a bunch of wealth is — well, that’s another story for another day.

Tim Ferriss: But okay, a hundred companies. Right. Hoover Dam, which, by the way, was made in, what, like eight years or 12 years. I mean, some insane time span.

David Senra: Crazy. So first of all, I’m freaked out. I’m there, it’s me, two other young entrepreneurs in their 30s, and they had both met Charlie before. And then I’m like 10 minutes in and I’m just like, “Ugh.” I just couldn’t believe what’s happening to me. I’m like, “That’s fucking Charlie Munger over there.” And then you know he’s looking at you, because he’s blind, and so if he’s looking at you like this, he’s not looking at you. He’s got to go like this and this because then he’s got to look through his glasses. So you know when he’s looking at you. And then my friend looks at me, he’s like, “Get in here. Do something.” I literally sat there. Me not speaking for 10 minutes, it’s really hard for me to do. There’s a reason I do monologue podcasts.

So then I see we’re in his library, so then I’m like, “Oh, this is my savior,” because I’ve read all those books behind him because he told me to read them. And so this is why I said it doesn’t matter what I do, and this will answer your question a long way. I start asking questions about Henry Kaiser and all these books, and he knows the revenue, he knows the partner, he knows how the business ended, he knows the mistakes they made. And then I go, “Charlie, when’s the last time you read these books?” And he’s like, “15 years ago.” And then I go, when we’re shifting from the library to dinner, I was like, “Charlie, can I go through your library?” He’s like, “Of course.” He’s just sitting in his chair and I’m going through the books and I open them. No notes.

Tim Ferriss: Different stock.

David Senra: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, different stock. Oh, my God. So, all right, we are going to get to the things I promised, but I have to ask you. So in addition to smartest person, best business, what are some of your other go-to questions when you meet the fancy folks?

David Senra: So who’s the smartest person you know? What’s the best business you know? I actually got to spend some time with Eddie Lampert. So Eddie Lampert at one time was thought to be the next Buffett, and he was mentored by Richard Rainwater, and I find Richard Rainwater really fascinating because Richard Rainwater has probably — 

Tim Ferriss: Great man too.

David Senra: Oh, excellent. Richard, first of all there’s no biographies on him. He died rather young. He probably created more billionaire investors in America than any other person in direct mentorship. Eddie broke the record, I think in like the ’80s or’ 90s for the most taxable income made by an American, and he was super young. And so Eddie lives in Miami and I was at his house.

Tim Ferriss: He was like, “Never again. I’m moving to Miami.”

David Senra: No, no. No, no. So that might be one of the best investments because he probably paid $12 million for his house and his house will probably sell for 150 million today because it’s on the island that Bezos lives on, and the house is beautiful.

Tim Ferriss: I’m sure he won’t even notice it on his balance sheet or in his life.

David Senra: He’s much more out of the spotlight now. But again, he’s one of these older guys, just very, very wise and very quiet. He’s like me. He’s introverted. You go to his house, there’s just books everywhere. He’s got this insane yacht that I went on called the Fountainhead. I’ll let people google it. It is insane.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, great name too.

David Senra: Yeah, but same thing. You go on the boat and you go on the boat, dude, and it’s full of books. It’s the weirdest — 

Tim Ferriss: Ran out of room at his house, so had to buy a super yacht for the books.

David Senra: It’s the weirdest unintended hack ever to build a world-class network of just read a bunch of history and they’ll come get you. They’re like — I’ve never sent a cold DM in my life, ever. I’ve never sent a cold email in my life.

Tim Ferriss: All, right. So what do you have? Why did Lampert come? You’re asking him questions.

David Senra: I’m asking these questions, right? Basically, and they’re not mean to me. He’s like, “Yeah, but there’s better questions you can ask.” I was like, “Okay, tell me what they are.” And so his answers are, like the smartest person, he’s like, “Well, I spent a bunch of time with Buffett.” I go, “Okay.” He goes, “It’s obviously Buffett.” He goes, “There’s actually more interesting…” And then who’s the best investor, that was another question I asked. He goes, “There’s actually a more interesting question that you’re not asking.” I go, “What’s that?” He goes, “Who’s the best dealmaker?”

Tim Ferriss: Mm. Mm-hmm. That’s a great one.

David Senra: And I go, “I don’t know what that means.” I don’t know anything about investing. The question I’ve asked Rick and Patrick, they probably think I’m retarded. You can edit that question out, edit that word out.

Tim Ferriss: No, it’s fine.

David Senra: But they’re just like, “What is wrong with this guy?”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. We didn’t even get to — I mean, I would say Brad Jacobs would fit in sort of the dealmaker. Or Zell.

David Senra: Yeah. But yeah, but his is like a different — so, okay, this is very fascinating what Eddie said. So again, Eddie, you can go back and read profiles of him. He was like a boy wonderkid. Rick told me a funny story. They used to all be at the same golf club in New Jersey, and Richard Rainwater walked in, and Rick’s like a young kid and Rainwater’s a legend, and he’s making conversation with him. He goes, “We just wait, the best investor in the America’s going to walk through that door.” And Rick goes, “Buffett?” And it was Eddie.

So anyways, Eddie’s like, “There’s a better question that you’re not asking.” I was like, “All right. Well, you’re way smarter than I am, tell me.” He goes, “Who’s the best dealmaker?” I don’t know what that means. He goes, “Well, an investor is judged on ROIC, return on invested capital.” He goes, “The two best dealmakers I ever knew were Richard Rainwater and David Geffen.” So the thing about David Geffen, he’s super underrated. He’s another person I’d like to spend time with if I could, is it’s one thing to have a bunch of money. It’s another thing to have a bunch of money and be liquid.

There is a line in this profile on Larry Gagosian that I read that says, “Any time there’s a downturn…” Larry Gagosian’s maybe the most successful art dealer in the world. Art soars during great economic times and kind of doesn’t do so well in other times. Any time there was a dip and they needed to make money, they’d call David because they said David is as liquid as the day is long. David gave a 26-year-old Eddie Lampert like 200 million of his own money to run. So David’s just like liquid.

Tim Ferriss: Staked him.

David Senra: And so he goes, “David is a crazy dealmaker.” He goes — 

Tim Ferriss: I guess he didn’t stake him. He was an LP.

David Senra: I don’t think it was a fund structure. I think it was, “Here’s 200, make it bigger.”

Tim Ferriss: Make it bigger.

David Senra: I don’t think he’s going to be like, “You make money if I make money.” I don’t think it was a permanent structure, which is interesting. Sam Zell never had a permanent structure. There’s actually a lot of them. I find those more interesting. But anyways, I was like, “Okay, so why is Richard Rainwater one of the best dealmakers?” He’s like, “Because with Richard it was all returns, no capital.” I was like, “What?” He goes, “Richard maneuvered himself into such an influential position in the American economy because of who he knew, and him being involved in your deal immediately made it more valuable that people just gave him the equity.” All returns, no capital. That was like one of my favorite ideas that I’ve ever heard. Yeah, and he would just tell amazing stories. He told me a story where Richard, when he mentors you — like, he recruited Eddie. Eddie was living in New York, working at Goldman Sachs, if I remember correctly. He convinced him to move to Fort Worth, Texas. Have you ever been to Fort Worth?

Tim Ferriss: I have.

David Senra: Okay. I’ve been there too. There’s nothing there, and in the ’80s there was less than nothing there. This kid moves there, they would travel together, and Eddie said that Richard would want to summer somewhere in Massachusetts, and it was like this 20-room hotel that was members only, so it’s not open to the random public, and he insisted that Eddie be put in the room next to him. One day, a bunch of guys knock on Eddie’s door while he’s in the room supposed to be working and researching, and they come in with a bunch of tools. He’s like, “What are you doing?” He’s like, “Richard wants us to put a hole in this wall.” Richard didn’t want to go in the hallway and walk around to Eddie’s room. So he made them knock a hole and then install a door so he could just go. He could have direct access to Eddie just with a door that didn’t exist.

Tim Ferriss: That’s incredible.

David Senra: He just had all kinds of crazy stories.

Tim Ferriss: All right, so not Buffett, not Munger, smartest person.

David Senra: That I met?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, smartest person. Let’s revise that and just say if you could pick one person you’ve met to be your coach/Yoda.

David Senra: Oh, Daniel Ek.

Tim Ferriss: Daniel Ek.

David Senra: Easily.

Tim Ferriss: All right. That was fast. Okay.

David Senra: Well, again, Brad Jacobs gives me great advice. Michael Dell would give me great advice, like Todd Graves, but this guy is around my age.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah.

David Senra: It’s like the gap between us is so obvious when you solve for that, and again, I just think of the stuff he does, his clarity of thought. 

I greatly admire the product. I like products. I guess we should back up what is actually important to you. I don’t actually give a shit how much money you have. I know a lot of people, and I love these, we’re in New York right now, some of my favorite people. I like the PE guys way more than I like the VC guys because they’re just more honest. The PE guys are like, they have great lines about this, they go, “VC gets all the attention, PE gets all the money.” And then they’re like, “The VCs are lying because they say the founders are the customers. No, the LPs are our customers. The founders didn’t give you any money.” Then the PE guys are just honest. Why do you wake up every day? To maximize the value of my LP dollars. I don’t want to play that game. I don’t want to play it at all, but I respect — their honesty is refreshing.

Their scoreboard is, “I have $6 billion and I’ll be better if I have eight.” I am obsessed with product. The fact that I work on my podcast for seven days a week, the fact that I hand-edit the transcript, the fact that I do — like MrBeast drives me — he’s like, “You’re stupid. Somebody can edit. Basically you need an editor. You need all these other things.” I just am obsessed. It’s like you don’t work all your life to do what you love to not do it. I don’t want to outsource stuff. I like the craft of making the product. I’m very proud — like when Spotify Wrapped, some people might, because it’s embarrassing. When my Spotify Wrapped comes out this year, the number one podcast on that is going to be my own. I go back and listen to it. One, I think of it as a tool, right?

I was on a treadmill in Malibu a few weeks ago listening to episode 221, which I think is the biography of Charlie Munger. I say to Charlie Munger all the time, “We forget how much we forget.” I listened to this hour-long podcast, like, oh, God, he’s got a lot of great ideas that I forgot. I’m not doing it because I like to hear the sound of my own voice. I also do it because do you think Kobe watched game tape? How am I going to get better if I don’t — when I interviewed Michael Dell, really more of a conversation than an interview, but I listened to the Michael Dell episode that I just did a few months ago, and all I hear is the flaws. All I hear is like, “You stupid idiot. You should use three sentences, that could have been one sentence. That is not even interesting. Cut that next time.” That’s how I get better. I go back and listen to it.

So I am obsessed with product. The people that I admire the most are great products. It could be Jiro’s sushi. It could be the Spotify app. It could be, it doesn’t matter, shoes that I like. I just love when people take what they do very seriously and I like the craft of it. And I want to dedicate my life to making a product that makes somebody else’s life better. That is what drives me. I understand, and I have a bunch of friends that like the money or building the systems, if you want to go back to archetypes or just having a big empire.

I don’t have any employees. You have three. I guess I have two technical subcontractors doing clips for me and thumbnails and stuff like that. But yeah, I don’t have any desire for a giant empire. I’m a little craftsman in my local shed over here.

Tim Ferriss: So why do the new podcast, David Senra?

David Senra: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: Why do it? And we can use any number of different entry points here. So number one, why do it? But you don’t have to answer that as number one. I’m also curious where you see the podcast ecosystem. Is it early? Is it late? Is it oversaturated? Is it undersaturated, et cetera? And then how do you diversify an interview-based podcast?

David Senra: Okay. So let’s take number one, the why do it. I was resistant on doing it for years because I like to do one thing and I don’t like to not focus. A huge thing, that if you could summarize nine years, 400 biographies into one word of what I’ve learned, is focus. These people, whether they’re psychos, nice people, different industries, they’re remarkably focused. They’re a different species than the current level of lack of attention spans that we have now that I think are getting worse. So focus is especially important.

If you look at how I spend my time though, we just talked about the importance of building a business that’s natural to you. Half my waking time, I would like to be completely alone, not in even the house with somebody else. Alone in my reading, thinking. I like solitude a lot to a scary degree. So that makes sense. Founders, reading books all day, that’s what you do. That makes perfect sense.

When I’m not doing that though, if you look at what else I’m doing, essentially do this data dump where I’m in silence half the day and then I go out every night that I’m not with my family. I usually have dinner with another founder, usually that I met through the podcast, and we talk for two, three — some people are like, “Oh, really impressed.” People will send me, “I would love to talk to you.” And they send me a calendar for 30 minutes. I go, “I don’t do 30. We’re not even going to start. We haven’t even started. If that’s what you think this is, I don’t care that you’re a billionaire, we’re just never going to meet, ever.”

And it’s always super long from the very first time. I can mention all these people, we talked for a long time. So I’m doing this, anyways. And for years, people like Patrick were like, “You stupid idiot. You should be recording these. This is crazy.” And so there’s two things, to answer your question, that happened. One is, the first time me and Patrick grabbed dinner in New York with Daniel Ek, okay? We talked for four hours.

And we get in the car because we’re leaving the city and going back to Patrick’s house because I’m going to spend the night there before I go back home. And the first thing Patrick says, and again, this is why it’s important. The piece of advice that Charlie Munger gave us when we were at his house, he’s like, “Your job at your age is to build a seamless web of deserved trust with other people who are like you.”

He’s like, “Everybody knows that me and Buffett — I met Buffett when I was 35. He was 28. What they didn’t understand, there’s a bunch of other guys around our age that we built the same level of trust with and we did life with and did deals with forever. Most of them were dead by the time I met Charlie. And so relationships are very important.” And Munger has that line, “Trust is one of the greatest economic factors in the world,” which I’ve never heard anybody else say that. That’s a truly unique idea.

Tim Ferriss: I agree with that.

David Senra: And so there’s a level of trust that I am very standoffish. People call me a turtle, I get my shell. And so once you’ve penetrated that, I have a level of trust that you want what’s right for me. There’s no weird competitive vibes here, we’re not secret adversaries. I want to see you win. And then we get in the car and he’s just like, “Goddammit, you need to record these.” And he’s like, “I’ve known Daniel for four years. You got more out of him in four hours than I did in four years.”

He’s like, “I spoke two percent of the time. You spoke 49 percent. He spoke the other 49 percent.” And he’s just like, “There’s nobody that could speak to the soul of the founder in the world that you can.” And it’s because he says something and it’s not what he’s saying. It’s what Henry Ford did here and Henry Kaiser did there and Jim Casey did over here, and that’s how my brain naturally works.

So I was like, “Okay, that was interesting.” And then part of the conversation was Daniel saying to take — I wasn’t doing video. I have 375 episodes because I’m not doing it for fame. I’m introverted. And Daniel’s just saying in a very nice way, “What are you doing? Stop riding the fence. This is the game that you chose.” And I have the data. Video obviously is important in podcasts. You’re lying to yourself again. The importance of somebody telling the truth.

I want people around me to check me. I don’t want sycophants. And I’ll tell you the second person that influenced me that calls me and checks me all the time. And so that got in my mind for a while and I was like, “Okay, that’s interesting.” And I get sad when I don’t podcast. I would like to podcast every day and I can’t because I have to read an entire book before I sit down to make an episode.

I cannot make more than 52 episodes a year. I just can’t. I can’t read — people are like, “You must read fast.” No, I read slow, 25 pages an hour at most. And I have to do all the other shit I just told you I had to do, highlighting. You know how long this takes?

Tim Ferriss: Taking photographs, putting it into Readwise.

David Senra: Yeah. And so then something else that’s important to me is I’m not a political person at all. I don’t even read the news. I will find out the important stuff. If there’s a pandemic, I’ll hear about it. If there’s a war, I’ll hear about it. Other stuff, no idea what’s going on. I have no idea what’s going on. I’m purposely aloof. But one thing that I am passionate about is that entrepreneurship is good for the world as long as you’re spending your time building. You mentioned Losing Your Virginity by Richard Branson.

He has the best description I’ve ever heard of a business. “All a business is, is an idea that makes somebody else’s life better.” And therefore, there’s always opportunity because there’s infinite ways to make other people’s lives better. And so that’s what I’m trying to do. And so another person who I’ve become close with is Jared Kushner. We live in Miami together. And we went and met for dinner, and Jared’s a really smart and buttoned-up guy. And again, I don’t pay attention to politics.

So the way I met him is actually he reached out to Rick and is like, “I’m a huge Founders fan. Can you contact, see if David would speak at my company offsite?” A lot of companies ask me to speak at their company offsite. And I didn’t know anything about Jared. All I know is that people on the internet like to argue about them because of the Trump stuff, but I judge people on how they are with me. This ever happened to you where you were like, “That person’s great,” and you deal with them, like, “Oh, that guy’s terrible,” or vice versa?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’ve had both.

David Senra: Yeah, exactly. So I’m going to go into this, I’m not going to do the research. I have no idea about all this stuff. I’m just going to see how this is going to go. And then we hit it off right away, and he tried to pay me. I was like, “No, no, no. It’s in Miami. I can drive over there. I can talk about this shit all the time. I like talking about this.” And then we just built a relationship and a friendship from that. We have similar interests.

And so we meet for dinner one day. Basically, he went and spoke at this conference in Miami, and he thought he was going to go talk about his new fund, and he thought he was friends with the guy, and the guy’s selling tickets and making money off his name being there. And it’s not like you’re paying speakers. And the guy, essentially, ambushed him and starts asking questions like, “How can you do business with Saudi Arabia? They chopped up Khashoggi,” and all this other stuff. And then before the talk was even done, his social media team was clipping it and sending it out in press releases and stuff.

Tim Ferriss: What a mess.

David Senra: So I show up at this dinner, and Jared’s always buttoned up and always got his shit together and he’s just like, “What the hell is going on here?” And by the time the dinner ends, it’s everywhere. And again, I’m like, “This is weird that the business and tech press in America, they hate business and tech. They cover things.” I’m an enthusiast. I’m not a journalist, I’m not a critic. I read books all the time where I hate the person or something. You’ll never see me do a podcast about it.

I want to talk about stuff I like, not things I hate. It’s a weird thing to go through. Imagine waking up every day, and your job is to cover people that you secretly wish you were. There’s just weird stuff around this. So we had this idea at dinner. I was like, “There should be a place where…” I am not talking about sycophant. I’m saying Todd Graves, people make fun of him because he says that God made him good at chicken fingers and that he’s living a chicken finger dream he thinks is a mission.

But I’ll tell you what, he believes it. He’s been offered billions. He owns over 90 percent of the company. He will never sell that company. He’s not doing it for money. He’s doing it because he wants to make money and he does a lot of great things in the community. And I think people should know this guy exists and his ideas should be spread. That’s a good for the world.

So those two things happened, and I’m like, “Oh, this is interesting.” I have this weird base of knowledge. So the way Jared describes it is, he’s like, “Talking to you is like talking to 50 of history’s greatest entrepreneurs at the same time.” Because we’ll talk about something and same thing you see I do. 

And then Daniel’s way of saying that, he’s like, “You’re like an LLM trained on history’s greatest entrepreneurs with the temperature turned up because you’re crazy. So it makes it entertaining.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I think that’s no small contributor to why you have a die-hard fan base. It’s the pulpit preacher fervor that you bring to it.

David Senra: But I didn’t understand that until I thought about my childhood. When people say they go to church, that’s not the kind of churches I went to. This really gets me sad and where I was almost crying earlier. My mom deserved a better life. She didn’t deserve to grow up with the monster of her father and frankly, the bitch that her mom was. The one thing that I remember about my mom’s mom that she said to me was that I was a faggot.

That is literally the only memory I have is her — she was mentally ill. You’d go to her house, you know National Enquirer and all those things? There’s National Enquirer, there’s The Sun, and all this other stuff that you get when you go to the grocery store. First of all, she was a hoarder, so you’d go in the bathroom and there’s stacks all the way up to the — she wouldn’t throw them out. But she read them like we read The Wall Street Journal. You assume the stock is what they said the stock price is.

She’d read it like, “This is true. Bigfoot is true.” I was a kid. This is the memory. I was the age when President Clinton was in the White House and she was convinced that Clinton was gay and his wife was lesbian. And so she saw conspiracy everywhere, and she would direct that at her grandchildren, which is monstrous. And so my mom deserved better. And then the problem was, my mom didn’t have an education and she was a very naive person. And so she turned to the church, but the church she turned to was — do you know who Benny Hinn is?

Tim Ferriss: I do know the name. Yeah.

David Senra: Okay. So you come up there and he blows on you and you don’t have leprosy anymore, or he hit you in the face, does this thing, and you can walk now. And all this stuff was acting. They caught these people over and over again. And I remember my mom didn’t have a bunch of money and her putting a couple crumpled-up dollars and giving it to them because she thought this is what she’s going to get in her life.

It’s sickening to me now that that happened to her and that she fell prey to that and that these people did this and they have private jets and they have all this crazy — I’m sure there’s some people that do that and they believe it. That’s a different thing if they really believe it. I know that guy didn’t believe. Come on, you didn’t believe that.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it was a racket.

David Senra: But then I didn’t understand that, oh, my God, that influenced the way I make my podcast because it is like — preacher. I feel I shouldn’t be sitting at a desk. I should be sitting at a pulpit. Somebody bought the domain churchforfounders.com, and it points to my podcast.

Tim Ferriss: That’s amazing.

David Senra: So that’s why I’m doing it. And then the other thing was I just like podcasting and I can have a conversation every day. So we’re going to start out every other week, and then move up to every week, and then I want to be having multiple conversations a week. That’s what I want to do because I’m doing it anyways.

Let’s just put a microphone there. And it’s not an interview. Yeah, there’s some questions I have for them, but it’s like a conversation. The idea that I’m going to do a business show interview and compete with Patrick, I think he’s the best interviewer by far. He’s so concise and perfect and he’s just really good at it. And I like to talk. I want to talk 49 percent of the time.

Tim Ferriss: How will you balance the two shows? Because it seems like Founders podcast takes a lot as it is.

David Senra: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: One of the benefits of that format is — now, this might put a cap on growth to some extent, but if you’re not playing the video game, it removes a lot of complexity. You don’t necessarily need to travel. You just read. You enjoy your solitude. You do some long-form audio, you can have notes in front of you. You can be picking your nose as you take a deep breath. There’s a lot of flexibility there. How are you going to balance the two without sacrificing Founders, snuffing out the magic X when you’re working on Y?

David Senra: This goes back. That’s a great question and it’s something I was very concerned with, and that’s why I said no for so many years. And so then you think if you said yes, then how would you do it instead of just blankly saying no? And there’s a secret of dealing with me that everybody that knows me for a long time realizes, anybody that’s been around me for a long time, and essentially it’s like water on a rock.

This is literally going to happen multiple times. So let’s say Patrick or Sam Hinkie would be like, “I have this idea.” And immediately, I’m like, “That’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard.” And I’ll be really aggressive and angry. It’s like, “Stupid idea, terrible idea.” Then they mention it two weeks later, and now it’s just, “Dumb idea.” Mention it again a few weeks later, silence. Then a few weeks later, I’m like, “Hey guys, I have a great idea.”

Tim Ferriss: It’s their idea.

David Senra: It’s their idea.

Tim Ferriss: A slow-bake.

David Senra: They know. They’re just like, “Okay.” It’s just water on a rock. I’ll get to them, it’s just going to take a while. And the problem is now I’ve said that, they know that, and then you have other people that have to deal with me. I’m very difficult to deal with, obviously. You are too. And I think that’s one thing we can bond over. And you’re not trying to be mean, it’s just part of our personalities.

And so the answer to your question is Founders is a one person — so I read, I research, I record, I set my own mics, I do all the editing, I hand do the transcripts, I do everything. The only thing outsourced is that I think the clip guy I have is a little genius, a young kid living in Paris. His name’s Maxim, he’s incredible. And then I have somebody now because I have to play the YouTube game, which I hate, and I refuse to do the YouTube thing. I hate it.

Tim Ferriss: I haven’t.

David Senra: Exactly, I won’t.

Tim Ferriss: I’ve cauterized myself in that.

David Senra: I won’t do that kind of shit. I’d rather not get views. I have to see something and say I would click on that myself. I’m not doing things for numbers. I didn’t even know how many people were listening to Founders until the first six years. I never looked. And then I started doing these big sponsorship deals and they’re like, “Oh, I should look.” And they’re like, “Oh, this is great.” But I don’t like thinking about numbers. I don’t want it to influence anything that I do. And so the Founders basically take seven days. Usually, I’m late on the episode. 

Tim Ferriss: Something in common with Dan Carlin.

David Senra: Yeah. No, I’m five days late. He’s five months late. God, man.

Tim Ferriss: Love you, Dan. You know that.

David Senra: Yeah. He’s literally the best podcaster to ever live. So what I realized is if I was going to do this, I would need a team. And I don’t like working with other people because I’m difficult. I can be mean. I just am. And I don’t want to be mean. I really don’t. You mentioned earlier not getting some of the bad personality traits from them.

And I was worried. I’ve asked friends, “Do you think I’m sociopathic? Am I all this?” They’re like, “No. You have empathy. You have a hard outer shell, but you’re really soft in the middle.” Patrick will tell you that.

Tim Ferriss: Turtle.

David Senra: Yeah, exactly. When I was in Japan, we went to some — what’s the ones where you have 20-course meals?

Tim Ferriss: Oh, omakase.

David Senra: Yeah. And they try to — 

Tim Ferriss: Which literally means, basically, I’ll leave it to you. Omakase is like, “Leave it to you.” So you can use it that way too, “Makaseru.”

David Senra: Well, why do they call it omakase and it’s multiple — what does it have to do with — 

Tim Ferriss: Omakase, is you don’t pick anything à la carte. You let the chef. Sit down and they just give you what they want to give you.

David Senra: Yes. And then they come in there, they make sure — 

Tim Ferriss: So you’re leaving it up to them.

David Senra: But then they come in after everything and they want to talk to you about it.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, that’s very un-Japanese. That’s probably for foreigners.

David Senra: Okay. So they tried to give me — 

Tim Ferriss: They might be like, “This is this,” and then they stop. But this guy was giving you little mini TED Talks?

David Senra: No, he tried to get me to eat essence of turtle. It was baby turtle. I was like, “I’m not eating turtle.”

Tim Ferriss: Doesn’t sound great. I’m not excited about essence of turtle.

David Senra: Hey, the face you just made should be the turtle face.

Tim Ferriss: I feel like if David Senra doesn’t work as a podcast name, you could have Essence of Turtle.

David Senra: So what I realized is I need a team. So what I could see is eventually going down. Right now I’m making a new Founders episode every 10 to 14 days, which is not good. And I’ve tried to do every week. The cadence probably should be every two weeks. Me and Rick were talking about this this morning in regards to you, the same way. What’s that old apocryphal saying? “I would’ve wrote you a short letter, but I didn’t have time so I wrote you a long one.” He says me and you share that thing where the reading’s not taking longer, the recording’s not taking longer. It’s the editing before I do anything, it’s this wieldy, 15,000-word thing. I’m trying to get down to 5,000 words. Takes so long to do. 

So to answer your question, could see a future — I’m never going to stop doing Founders, where I have to reduce. It can’t be 52 a year. Second and biggest thing is I took an idea from one of Rockefeller’s biographies. So one of the things that I do that I also think is important is you read all the famous biographies, but you’ve got to go through the bibliographies.

Books are made out of books. Everybody has read Titan by Ron Chernow. In the bibliography of that, there’s the best Rockefeller biography I’ve ever read, and I have eight at the house I haven’t read yet. I collect obscure Rockefeller biographies that I’ll eventually get to.

Tim Ferriss: What’s your favorite one?

David Senra: It’s called John D: The Founding Father of the Rockefellers, by David Freeman Hawke.

Tim Ferriss: Better writer than a titler.

David Senra: Yes. 250 pages instead of 800, but all about what you really want to know. You don’t want to know about where his grandfather was born. You want to know how he built Standard Oil. And there’s this idea in there that I’ve used called secret allies. And so this is going to answer your other question about podcasting, where he’s at the beginning of the oil industry. It’s the very beginning and he’s there.

Tim Ferriss: Rough and tumble time.

David Senra: Yeah. No one knows shit about oil refining. So what does he do? He goes and builds a network of secret allies with other oil refiners and then eventually do something that’s even more nefarious, which they start something called the Oil Refiners Association of America or something. And then he gets himself elected president to that.

And then what happens is, it’s like if we had a podcaster union and I’m president of the podcaster union, and then I go to you and like, “Tim, what’s your downloads this month? And how much are you charging for ads? And then who’s your next guest?” And he’s getting all this data. So then he sees, “That’s a joker. That guy’s already out of business. He doesn’t even know it yet.”

Tim Ferriss: “Oh, we don’t have to worry about that guy.”

David Senra: Yeah. “That guy’s a killer. I need to buy his company and make him a partner.” And so this idea of secret allies. So I’m obsessed with podcasting. And so what I would go do, I’d go around and I would talk to any podcaster who would talk to me. And we talk about everything, downloads, ads, who you’re selling to, how are you selling, who are you using for editing.

Tim Ferriss: Maybe that’s the spider sense I got.

David Senra: No. No, because I give. I give — 

Tim Ferriss: I know, I’m kidding. I’m kidding.

David Senra: There’s people, literally, they’ll even tell you. There’s podcasters that literally, I took an idea from one podcast and gave it to another podcast because that’s the whole thing. I don’t collect it and hold it. We spread it around and they’ve made millions and millions of dollars from these ideas.

Tim Ferriss: I have a friend named Kevin Kelly. Kevin Rose does that too.

David Senra: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Just gives away. Derek Sivers does it too. Gives away as many as possible. And if he can’t get rid of one that keeps him up at night, it’s like, “All right.”

David Senra: If you’re talking about podcast data, who’s the mad scientist of podcast data? Chris Hutchins. Me and you’ve talked to him. We both talked to him. He has good shit because he tells you stuff and he tells me stuff that I didn’t know. And he’s this weird mad scientist, but he’s in this weird part of podcasting I don’t even think about.

Tim Ferriss: All the Hacks. People, check him out.

David Senra: Yeah. He’s been on your podcast twice.

Tim Ferriss: Once because he wanted to have this long conversation with me about a bunch of stuff I was doing. And I was like, “If we’re going to do that, make it good with your questions and we’ll just record it. And then I can share it because I don’t want to answer all these questions over and over again.” It was about podcasting.

David Senra: It’s a great idea. And so basically, I took that idea. So anyways, I was able to build a lot of relationships with a lot of great podcasters who are friends who share information. But then you also see, “Oh, wait, there’s a lot of disparity between podcast teams and stuff.” And so Rob Mohr and Andrew Huberman tried to recruit me years ago, because they have a podcast network called SciComm that they really don’t do much with because it’s really hard to launch another health podcast when they’re dominating that vertical.

Is there another Huberman in that vertical that’s not discovered? Unlikely. And power laws were everything around us. And so I got this crazy DM and then a phone call with Rob, and he’s just like, “Dude, who are you?” And this is when I had, again, 5,000 listeners. And he’s like, “I’ve never come across anything like this.” And then we wound up talking. I think every single time we talked, it was over — this is on the phone, for over two hours every time and it’s all about podcasting.

And then they’re like, “We’re looking for other Hubermans, and you’re this giant nerd that loves reading obscure shit and breaking it down in an entertaining manner just like Andrew does.” And he’s like, “Would you be interested in joining us on SciComm?” And I was like, “You are two weeks too late because it’s not announced yet. But I have a verbal agreement with this guy named Patrick and I’m joining Colossus.”

But we still became friends and everything else. And so basically me and Rob, we’d spent a lot of time, I spend my summers in Malibu, so I see them all the time. And I’ve talked to Andrew and they’re just killers.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, they’re very good at what they do.

David Senra: They’re just operationally excellent. And they have a small but mighty team, and every single person in that team, they’re very focused. So their photographer’s one of the best photographers. Their editor’s one of the best editors. Their video people are some of the best video people. Their internet guy’s one of the best internet guys. It’s just everything. And so their whole point was — I was like, “Listen, Founders is never going anywhere. It’s staying on Colossus. It’s staying exactly what it is. But if I do something new, I’ll let you know.”

And so when I went to them, it was just like, “Here’s the thing. I am going to pick the guests. I’m highly disagreeable. I will never take direction from anybody. I want to pick the guests and I want to have the conversations. And then everything else has to be A-plus team around me. And that means from visuals, to editing, to clips, to every single thing.” And they’re operationally excellent. I have not met a better — just spend time with them.

Tim Ferriss: Very well-architected.

David Senra: And then the way they built their business is genius.

Tim Ferriss: So what does success look like for you two years from now? Three, five, pick your time frame.

David Senra: Oh, success looks the same now and forever that I’m proud of what I made. That’s it. I don’t care what the numbers are. I love the climb.

Tim Ferriss: Let’s say this show does really well.

David Senra: Oh, it is going to.

Tim Ferriss: So David Senra does really well. And not saying Rob would do this, but you know what we would really love to do is a third show, and it’s incredibly compelling, maybe it’s a slightly different angle or a totally different angle. Who knows? Who the hell knows?

Interviewing spouses of all these famous people, which I think would actually be an amazing podcast. I’m sure someone’s doing it. But besides the quality of the product and being proud of the product, there is such a thing as too many different products.

David Senra: Oh, sure.

Tim Ferriss: There is such a thing as simply burning the candle at both ends. So you’re at a battery capacity that compromises the product, maybe long-term or your life. You’ve got more considerations than just business. So how do you think about those other factors when you telescope out a few years?

David Senra: I’m not a long-term planner. So I would say I’m basically non-analytical at all. I go straight off intuition. Steve Jobs says this great line where he thinks intuition is more important than intelligence, and that intuition played a larger role in his success than anything else. Intuition and perseverance. And so I used to think I was more analytical and I have a five-year plan, a 10-year plan.

All a great life is, is a string of great days. And so the furthest I plan out is 24 hours. I actually have this weird — I don’t even know if I should say this publicly. I don’t think humans actually understand time at all. And when you say a decade, yeah, we know a decade’s 10 years. But do we actually understand what that means? I think we maybe understand a week, a month. We definitely understand a day because that’s how we live. We live 24 hours at a time.

And so all I try to do is like, “Can I design a day that I really enjoyed?” And not hedonistic. I’m not laying around doing nothing. I have to work. I feel guilt and shame when I’m not being productive. And that’s probably a bad thing. There’s all reasons that you could psychoanalyze why that is the case, but I just know how I am. I like to work. I like to get up and get after it. I don’t like taking vacations.

The stuff I get invited to is crazy. I like to work. I like podcasting. I’m obsessed with it. Everybody’s like, “We talked about this multiple times. Why don’t you do something else?” I like doing this. I will keep doing this. So to answer your question, I just try to make a great day. And the way I make a great day is I want to wake up, I want to take care of my health. I want to read. I want to make a product I’m really proud of and I want to spend time with people that I love and admire.

And I’m going to do that the next day and the next day and the next day. And I think if I have a great day today and a great day tomorrow and a shitty day a month from now and then a better day the next day and I get through my life and it’s just a string of great days, that will be a great life. And so two years from now, I don’t know because if you asked me two years ago, I said, “There’s no way I’m going to do another podcast.” But I would say my answer is that simple. The maxim I like about this is I love the climb. I don’t care where the summit is.

I just like the activity for the sake of itself, and so therefore, I’m going to do it. And I hope it’s well-received. But I couldn’t have predicted that Founders was going to turn out the way it was. So I don’t know. I’m just going to do great work that I’m completely fascinated by and it gives me energy. And on the other side of that, this is what Stephen King said, “I’m not just the writer. I’m the first reader.”

I listen to every single episode of Founders before anybody else and I just threw out one. The book is great, Bill Walsh’s The Score Takes Care of Itself. I read it for the first time five, six years ago. I read it again. Love the book. I made a podcast on it. It’s an hour and 15 minutes long. I finished editing it. I listened to it, not good enough, threw it away. That’s it. Can I make something that I’m proud of?

Tim Ferriss: So I believe all of that and I want to push on a little bit.

David Senra: Go for it, please.

Tim Ferriss: Because the great days make great lives, I agree with. But now your circle of interaction is expanding with a show that involves other people with very busy schedules. So to what extent are you going to be traveling to all these people versus having people travel to you? That type of decision has longer-term implications, right? So I’m curious how you think about that.

David Senra: So the way I think about this is this goes to the other side of me that’s probably not healthy, that I have a ruthless competitive drive that I think would terrify most people. I have a very negative inner monologue that I never think I’m doing enough. I have multiple people depending on me financially, way above and beyond just your wife and kids, other people that I have to make sure that I can take care of, so I have a lot of pressure on me. I want the pressure. So, to answer your question, it’s like I’ll do whatever it takes to win. And so, if that means I’ve got to get on a plane, or I get a little less sleep, then that’s what’s going to happen. But I also think you’re also smart, and you can think about these things, like okay, you want to talk to extreme winners in business, is essentially — not really starter/founders, I want people that have decades of experience. Every single person, if you look at the people that we’ve been recording with so long, I’m just more interested in talking to people that have done things for a long time, that are smarter and more productive and better than I am.

And so, setting up here, where we are in New York, is probably a good idea because everybody comes through New York. Now, we’ve recorded several in L.A., here’s also a thing to consider, most of the people I’m talking to have planes. Rick pulls me aside and says this all the time, multiple people have told me this, you don’t understand the impact that you’re having on people, because I don’t think about it. I’m by myself all the time, I don’t look at numbers. And so, people have literally gotten their jets and flown across the country because I was like, “Hey, can you do it on this day in L.A.? Are the teams there? It’s more convenient.” And they do it because they think I’ve done something for them, but I’m just like, “No, no, no, I haven’t done anything for you, I just thank you for listening. The fact that you listen to my podcast means I get to do this for a living.”

This is more Munger has really heavily basically influenced my thinking, it’s just like the reciprocation tendency in humans is so pronounced and it’s evolved. Yes, and it’s never going away, and what I didn’t understand and I still don’t understand, because I don’t like talking about, I don’t like thinking about this shit. I think about, like, as if I’m talking to one person is the fact that so many people have gotten value. Every single person’s recorded an episode with us for the new show so far has listened to a ton of shows of mine. And their point was it’s important work, and it’s more — Todd Graves has actually told me this two weeks ago. He’s like, “It’s important work and it’s more important the bigger your company gets.” Because if I can hear a single idea, or either avoid a mistake or get a good idea — 

Tim Ferriss: That’s true.

David Senra: — and it makes a one percent difference on my business, that’s — I can’t do math, I can’t do public math. A billion dollars, whatever the number is, $2 billion. It’s a huge — no, that’d be 10 percent. So, if it makes a 10 percent difference in his business, it’s a huge swing. And so, so far, and again, you have a private jet, where do you actually live? Wherever you have to — 

Tim Ferriss: Also, your carrying costs for that jet are pretty high.

David Senra: Yeah, so I — 

Tim Ferriss: So, there’s a little bit of pressure just to utilize the damn thing.

David Senra: You want to hear something funny? I’ll go back to why I think New York and L.A. is going to be where I’m recording most of these. And we’re willing to travel, we will if we have to. If Dyson says, “Come do it,” I’m coming to England, I don’t give a shit. So, Sam Zell told me, he’s like, “I told you that lunch I had with him changed my life?” He’s like, “Don’t make the same mistake,” he’s like, “I know all the rich guys,” and he says, “first of all, they’re all guys…” That’s what he told me. He goes, “Two, you’d be surprised how many of them are miserable. And they do stuff they don’t like for more money that they can’t spend, and then they make the same mistake, where they buy slight…” This is his word, it’s not mine. He goes, “they buy slightly nicer versions of the same shit.”

He goes, “The difference between a $10 million house and a 30 million house is negligible.” And he’s like, “I own my place in Chicago, and my compound in Malibu,” that’s the word he used, compound. And he goes, “I rent everything else.” He goes, “The things that you own start to own you.” And he said every year, after, I think, Thanksgiving and in between Christmas, he’d take his entire family, extended family, to this little village in France. And he said, he’s always a shit talker. And he said funny things, he goes, “I could buy the whole village.” He goes, “I don’t, I rent it, and then I don’t think about it until I go back. It’s somebody else’s problem.” And he goes, “There’s only one true luxury in life,” he goes, “it’s a private jet, try to get to private jet money.” And he is like, “I use my jet three hours a day.” On average, he uses jet three hours a day.

He was in South Florida, because he’s like, “I woke up in Chicago this morning, I got on my jet, I went across the street, gave a talk to a bunch of investors and entrepreneurs,” because that’s what he wanted to spend his last days doing. He knew he was dying, he didn’t tell me though, I didn’t know that. We were scheduled to have another dinner, and it got canceled and they said he was sick, I was like, oh, he got COVID. He died three weeks later, so I never got to see him again. But the way he was spending his last days, at his own expense, traveling all over the world on his beautiful giant plane, spending a lot of money, is passing on the knowledge that he learned through 61 years to other investors and younger and entrepreneurs.

And so he goes, “I did that this morning, came over here, had lunch, I’m going to get in my car, and go back to Chicago.” He used it three hours a day. So, so far people have been willing to fly to come to us, I’ll come to some people if they’re super busy schedules, and then I think just setting up in a place where they all will come through would make a lot of sense.

Tim Ferriss: Anyone on your wish list that you haven’t been able to track down?

David Senra: No, surprisingly, again, I don’t like thinking about this, where I don’t understand that today, right now, if I do an episode on somebody living, it’s going to get to them. They might not be a listener, but — this just happened with Jimmy Iovine. So I have these weird, people are always surprised, they think, who’s on your list? Obviously I respect Bezos, respect Elon, all of them, but I would say like Todd Graves, they’re like, “What the hell’s wrong with you? And James Dyson. The vacuum cleaner guy?” I’m weirdly obsessed with these people. And so, one of the people I’m obsessed with is Jimmy Iovine. And Jimmy Iovine, Defiant Ones.

Tim Ferriss: Such a good series.

David Senra: I watch it — 

Tim Ferriss: Oh, my God, it is so well done. If anyone hasn’t seen Defiant Ones, go watch it. It’s head spinningly good.

David Senra: With the description of the four-part documentaries, oh, it’s a relationship between Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine. Yeah, it’s really a documentary about entrepreneurship, it’s about chasing a path — chasing a path, there’s no path in front of you. There was no path for Dre to get out of Compton, there’s no path from Jimmy to get, for the son of a longshoreman in Brooklyn, to go what happened to him. He’s fascinating. And then this is my point about what do you actually value in life? Jimmy’s a billionaire. I don’t know, he’s got a billion, $2 billion, whatever the case is, I’d be more interested in that than if he had $100 billion. If you asked me whose life would you want, Buffett or Munger, Buffett was 100 times richer, I’m taking Munger every day. What I like about Jimmy is that he lived an interesting life.

The episode, you see it on Defiant Ones, crazy stories in there, but Rick Rubin, who, you mentioned, if podcasting is saturated, which we can get to, Rick Rubin’s really good because he’s a world-class listener. He took a skillset, what was his skill for the work that he did? Why are these musicians hiring him? To listen, to hear something they don’t hear, and to suggest something they might not hear, might not understand. And the episode he did with Jimmy Iovine I think came out in 2023, I think it was the single best podcast I listened to all year. And it’s just Jimmy Iovine telling insane story after insane story about the music business, because the music business is a wild business. And what I like about my business is that it’s a unique experience generator.

It creates opportunities and experiences you can’t buy, and the amount of people I get to meet and talk to — my memoirs are going to be wild because of the weird dinners I’ve been to, and the planes I’ve been on, and the boats I’ve been on, and it started because I was a giant nerd, with a giant head, sitting in a room by himself for five years, just mainlining biography after biography after biography. Jimmy’s really interesting to me, and then what happened is, I don’t even — part of this, I can’t tell you how I got connected, he agreed to do the show, and one of the previous guests is the one that connected me, which again, I just don’t feel I deserve how nice these people have been to me and what they’re willing to do, and I don’t even like asking them for this. But it got to Jimmy — 

Tim Ferriss: Is that true?

David Senra: No, I don’t like — the worst possible — 

Tim Ferriss: You put a lot of work into your podcast.

David Senra: It doesn’t matter though, the worst possible thing — Buffett has — 

Tim Ferriss: Do you feel like you don’t deserve it? I feel like that’s an important question.

David Senra: Buffett has a — I’ll answer that question in a minute. Buffett has the line’s, it’s like, “The people that win are the ones that their eyes are on the field, not the scoreboard.” I don’t — I was going for a walk last night, and you know this happens to you all time, I’m way earlier, you’re like an OG, man, you’ve been famous way — I still, when people stop me on the street, which happens, I’m like, “How do you know what I look like?”

Tim Ferriss: No, that’s going to happen more and more.

David Senra: Yeah, exactly. So, I’ve read all your blog posts about this too. I was on the phone with Morgan Housel this morning, who’s a big fan of yours.

Tim Ferriss: Great guy.

David Senra: Obviously you guys are friends. And we were talking about that, security around this, and all this other stuff, and then we were talking about you. Morgan’s just a peach of a human, he’s the opposite of me.

Tim Ferriss: Psychology of Money, great book.

David Senra: It won’t stop selling, won’t stop selling.

Tim Ferriss: I know. Yeah. Got lightning in a bottle on that one. Yeah. Earned it. Earned it too.

David Senra: Oh, 100 percent. And the nicest guy. If you think you want to find my directional opposite, and we’ll go back to the question you think is important, Morgan genuinely believes that his ceiling that he should have — he should be an insurance salesman somewhere in the Midwest, making 100,000 a year. And the fact that this guy got really, really wealthy — 

Tim Ferriss: Astronomical numbers.

David Senra: Yes. Really, really wealthy, and just wakes up every day, can’t believe his life. I wake up every day like, “Why am I not a billionaire?” It’s like, he’s happy in a way I will never be, and this is why I think Daniel Ek’s advice about chasing — Daniel does not believe, this is one of the first things I asked him on the show, was — he was the one that put this idea out there that life is not about happiness, it’s about impact. He is not chasing happiness, he’s chasing impact. And he’s the one that actually convinced Dara, the founder of Uber, tells the story, they were having drinks — 

Tim Ferriss: Dara is CEO.

David Senra: CEO. Yeah, sorry. Good distinction. I met Travis too. Most intense person I’ve ever been in contact with.

Tim Ferriss: He is one hell of a builder, man.

David Senra: Oh, for sure.

Tim Ferriss: And different batteries.

David Senra: Most intense. And I’ve been around a lot of intense, he is — 

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. He’s — 

David Senra: Very fascinating.

Tim Ferriss: — he has different gears than most people.

David Senra: Oh, and the storytelling, and the — he’s a phenomenal storyteller, phenomenal communicator. So, anyways, when Dara was going back and forth about becoming CEO of Uber, he said originally was going to say no because he was pretty happy with his life, and Daniel, in a very direct way, was like, “When’s life about happiness? It’s about impact. It’s like one of the most important companies in the world, and you can have an impact on it. You can have an impact on the way cities are changed. You absolutely have to do this.” And I think that’s a really interesting idea. So, I am trying to have impact. So, to answer your question, do I think I deserve it? I obviously know that I put a lot of work into it, and I believe that the product is good, and I think I found what I’ve put on the planet to do, but I don’t like thinking about it. I don’t like thinking about its impact on other people.

I like it because I like it. I make it, I’m like, I would listen to this podcast, I think it’s valuable. I think you start doing shit for the wrong reasons — I talked to a lot of the head people at Spotify, and they said the biggest mistake, one of the biggest mistakes they made is the great thing about podcasting is that people that come up like we did, through the garage. You just started — I listened to your first episode. I remember TimTim TalkTalk.

Tim Ferriss: TimTim Talk.

David Senra: Yeah, I remember.

Tim Ferriss: From my kitchen table.

David Senra: With a friend. And why did you do it? I think you had a couple glasses of wine, right? And with a friend, because you’re like, I don’t — 

Tim Ferriss: Figured it out pretty quickly after listening to episode one that the second episode was going to be sober.

David Senra: Oh, man.

Tim Ferriss: Josh Waitzkin, number two.

David Senra: Yeah. But you come up with, you did it because you were curious, you only talked to people you really want to talk to, you had no production costs. And so, Spotify said they flipped it. They’re like, we took something that was low production costs done by enthusiasts and people in the garage. Huberman’s analogy of this is, it’s punk rock. Punk rock is great because it started with people that just wanted to play in the garage, and then they got good, and then they played for stadiums. And so, Spotify’s like, oh, what we did was we took a low production cost, made a high production cost because we had these big contracts, and then we hired celebrities, and no one listened, and the people that did listen, they stopped because the celebrities were just doing it for money, they didn’t do it because they love it.

And I think that’s the key. It’s like, I truly love this, I did it for five and a half years when no one was listening. That tells you that I love it. But I think one of the worst things you could do is, I’m going to do it because status is the funny thing. Podcasting is dorky, it’s low status.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, totally.

David Senra: In 2016, you think that was fucking high status?

Tim Ferriss: No.

David Senra: No. It was like, “You dorky nerd with a podcast.”

Tim Ferriss: And to be clear, I’m not asking if you’re seeking status, it was more if you feel that you’re unworthy of people flying to you and doing these things, those are two very different — 

David Senra: No, yeah, I meant I think you see this now, that podcasting is obviously very influential and can be — there’s so many people jumping into it that clearly don’t love it. They like it because the CPMs are high or whatever, or they want to be famous. I had no video for eight years, do you think I want to be famous? Do you think I want to be recognized? No, I obviously don’t. I had to fucking had the most powerful person in podcasting berate me at dinner, in a nice way, saying, you idiot, you have to do video. That’s the only reason I do video because Daniel told me to. And how smart am I if I don’t listen to him? Then I’m an idiot. I have to do it. I don’t like doing it.

So, I don’t know, man. I don’t know. I think at some point the platform gets big enough, like, “I flew here for this. Why? Because you have a massive platform, and you’re willing to extend it to me, and I’d travel wherever. You say. Iceland? I’m coming to Iceland, brother. I don’t know what to tell you. Like, I knew you like Argentina, let’s go down there. We’ll do an Argentina. So, yeah, I think eventually, when they see it’s big enough, that people would come to you, also try to make it easier, and I’m not doing it in Columbia, Missouri, I’m doing it in New York or L.A., you’re going to be there anyways.”

Tim Ferriss: And also with the particular cohort that you’re interviewing with jets, if they’re like, “Sure, I’ll fly to New York,” and then they can also set up five other meetings with friends or business associates, or fill in the blank.

David Senra: Make it easy. But I think really, man, I do this — I don’t, this is the turtle in me. I don’t like asking.

Tim Ferriss: This is the turtle.

David Senra: You can ask all the people that — we have a bunch of mutual close friends, I don’t like asking for help. And I think one of the weird ways that I think I built true friendships with some of these people is because all day long it’s, give me, give me, give me.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

David Senra: I have never asked Rick for anything. I think one time to crash at his house, that’s it. All I want is to be homies, to be friends. I don’t want anything from this. And I think I didn’t understand because I didn’t come from this background, that when you’re high profile, and you’re building these empires, these are all empire builders. All day long they’re just surrounded by people that want something from them. And I’m just like, here, I have this podcast that might be valuable for you, you want it? I don’t want anything from you. And when they tell me, ask me for stuff, I still don’t like doing it. I don’t like doing it. It really hurt me to, would you be on my show? But I was like, all right, well, if I’m going to ask for something, I’ll do this. And not a single person I’ve asked has said no.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. Well, you love what you do, that is essential to producing the quality that you produce. It’s essential for the endurance to sort of outperform and outlast, because podcasting as a whole is just an elephant graveyard of three to 10 episode shows. So, if you choose something you really like, that you would make because you intrinsically enjoy it, if it’s an outgrowth of reading the biographies, taking the notes, and you’re like, well, this is really sort of in terms of additional work for me on top of something I might already be doing, actually not like the majority of the pie, and you have the fuel of that obsession you’re going to do well, even if it’s just for yourself, but certainly with the longevity you have the competitive advantage of durability.

David Senra: That means a lot coming from you, and everything you’ve accomplished, and I think you actually hit to the essence of it, where it’s like, I can’t sleep after these things. I had to get up the next day when I was in Austin, I think I had a 7:00 a.m. flight, and I slept maybe three hours because just gem after gem after gem from Michael Dell. Or you’ll see this on the Todd Graves episode, dude, we were the same person. We’re the same person. And so, we’re spontaneously high-fiving — I’m sure I’m going to get a lot of, “This guy’s a dork.” Like, “Hey, give me another high-five, buddy.” We were just geeking out about minute details of just being obsessed with, his whole thing is do one thing and doing it better than anybody else. And I remember going from the airport, it was in Baton Rouge, and I immediately called Sam, who’s the closest thing I have to a mentor, and I was like, “I’m in trouble,” and he’s like, “Why?” I go, “I’m addicted to doing these things already, I can’t stop.” This was crazy.

Tim Ferriss: It’s a good sign.

David Senra: Crazy.

Tim Ferriss: That’s how I pick my projects, largely, it’s how I pick some of my startups too that I get involved with. If I have what I would call good insomnia, for at least a few nights in a given week, and then I try to quell it, it doesn’t matter how much Trazodone I take, or anything else, I just am so excited by something that my mind is worrying and I can’t go to sleep, I’m like, okay, there’s probably something there. Also because it seems to be such an energetic unlock, I’m like, even if that one thing doesn’t do very well, if I can create this nuclear power from that, it’s not compartmentalized, it can apply to other things. So, I get it. I get it.

Now, I was listening to, I don’t know how I found it — actually, I was going on, I think it’s Tom Papa’s show. He’s a comedian, great interviewer, and I was going on his show, this is a while ago, and I was doing some homework on my own, listened to an interview he did where he interviewed Joe Rogan. And I’m paraphrasing here obviously, but Rogan effectively said, he’s like, “Yeah, I don’t really think much about discipline or willpower,” he said, “what I do have though is obsession. And when I find something that I’m obsessed with, when I deep dive, it’s like I don’t need to worry about discipline. I don’t need to worry about willpower.” So, it’s like finding that thing that you are obsessed by.

David Senra: I think 100 percent right.

Tim Ferriss: And so I think you’ve done that. You’ve done that. So, you’ve found your lane. A lot of people don’t find it, right? They don’t find that thing. It’s like you wonder if Kobe Bryant were born somewhere and didn’t have the chance to pick up basketball, would it have been something else? Maybe if you were Michael Jordan, okay, it’s baseball or this or that, but it’s like, you found your thing, that’s kind of amazing.

David Senra: No, I appreciate it. And the way I think about it’s, it took me 32 years to find my path, and five and a half years of struggle before I could even pay my bills. It was a long time. Kobe found it — imagine finding it at 12 like he did, and knowing. I read the 600-page biography on him by Roland Lazenby. And the middle school guidance counselor is like, he wrote down, “What are you going to do?” He’s like, “I’m going to play in the NBA.” He’s like, “You need to pick something else, that’s a one in a million shot.” He goes, “I’m going to be that one in a million.” To be that so sure at 12 years old, and this is what goes back to the lack of introspection.

I had a lot of angst, and what is the meaning of life, or what am I doing here? And then once you find your thing, there’s like a, definitely not resting on laurels, but there is almost a relief, like — 

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

David Senra: Because it’s not just finding something you love to do, it’s like, what is that — you’re like a Japanese encyclopedia. Ikigai, what is the —

Tim Ferriss: Ikigai, yeah.

David Senra: Yeah, it’s like the intersection of what you love to do, what you’re good at, and what’s good for the world.

Tim Ferriss: Something like that. Ikigai gets used in a bunch of different ways. Japan’s always good for these pithy, conceptual words.

David Senra: I think, I’m just going to be blasphemous for you, but I think travel is generally overrated, after you do it — 

Tim Ferriss: I am not jumping in — 

David Senra: — after you do it for a while. Because the problem is we keep going to all the nice places, and all the nice places are all the same to each other. The one thing that Japan blew my mind and why it’s the top of my list now of everywhere I’ve been, and where I’d want to go again is because it’s one of the few truly distinct cultures in the world.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s a wild one. They also, they’re kind of like a chameleon, because they pull so much from other cultures. So, when it was in isolation, it was certainly an alien environment, and then you look at everything they’ve incorporated, and in some cases, in the case of, say, The Toyota Way, right?

David Senra: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: You have, I guess it was, I want to say Deming?

David Senra: Yep. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Right. Who was basically, not ignored, but certainly not embraced in his country of birth, gets adopted by the Japanese, and you see them do this over and over and over again. So, yes, it’s a fascinating place, and I would agree with you that especially people who travel in the lap of, it doesn’t need to be luxury, it could just be comfort — like rich person travel is the most boring shit in the world.

David Senra: Same stores, same — 

Tim Ferriss: It’s just like, okay, you’re going to the Four Seasons in 12 different places, getting on the Wi-Fi, doing whatever it is you would’ve been doing at home, and then going to the most expensive meals, it’s just not interesting. So, I think if anybody wants a great book on the art of long-term world travel, if that’s of interest, Vagabonding by Rolf Potts.

David Senra: I read that because of you.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

David Senra: The amount of books in my library because of you. I did the same thing with you that I did with all these other people, it’s like, oh, Tim says to read it, I read it.

Tim Ferriss: And a lot of these books, they’re underneath it all, at least in the case of Rolf Potts’ book, Vagabonding, they’re really philosophical operating systems, and it’s a hat you can try on. You don’t have to wear it forever, but it’s like, okay, if you only have one jacket to wear, which is six gear workaholic, neglecting family guy, just expand your wardrobe. You can always put that jacket back on, you just hang it up for a moment. And similarly, I like these books, and they certainly can be business books, whether it’s Branson, who is in some ways, he took risks, but he’s kind of the opposite, at least in a lot of capacities to a Dyson. He risk mitigates the hell out of his ventures, and caps the downside in so many creative ways.

David Senra: Like his airline.

Tim Ferriss: Exactly. So, the artistry of deal making for minimizing or capping downside is one of Branson’s superpowers. Even though the stuff on the magazine covers back in the day, it was like, the mad man, who’s doing X, Y, Z, and has the models, and he’s — 

David Senra: Phenomenal marketer.

Tim Ferriss: — and he’s kite boarding with a naked model on his back. You remember that?

David Senra: That’s literally the picture I have in my mind.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, my God.

David Senra: That looks fun.

Tim Ferriss: He is also, can be a wild man. But I digress. I was just going to say that these are hats that you can put on to test them out as philosophical operating systems, which is how I pick a lot of the books. Yeah. Books, books, books. I was very similar to you when I was a kid, and also all throughout, just living in books, living and living in books, and — 

David Senra: It’s very common though in these stories. Rockefeller, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Edison, Edwin Land, Winston Churchill — the way I say this is like they don’t just read, they devour entire shelves. There’s multiple examples of Thomas Edison, Thomas Edison read every single book in the Detroit library. Edwin Land read every single book on light in Harvard, then dropped out because he didn’t think he had anything else to learn, moves to New York City, I think one of the most beautiful buildings is the one we passed on the way here, the New York City Public Library, read every single book on light in there, and then is like, okay, I learned enough, now I can do my experiments. They just devour entire shelves.

Tim Ferriss: Monster. David Senra, what have we not talked about? People will be able to find, of course, the show. Davidsenra.com.

David Senra: Yep.

Tim Ferriss: Is that the best website?

David Senra: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And

David Senra: David Senra on all social channels, Instagram, X — 

Tim Ferriss: All social channels.

David Senra: Podcast app — 

Tim Ferriss: Founders podcast, of course, founderspodcast.com

David Senra: I appreciate you, you’ve included me in your newsletter in the past — 

Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah.

David Senra: — on your blog. I read all your shit. And I’m like — and I didn’t even know, it’s shocking to me when I’m like, oh, because it’s not like you told me. I was like, what the hell?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you put out. The obsession and attention to detail doesn’t surprise me at all, when you told me about going through your transcripts by hand, I’m like, yeah, that makes sense. And I really have my fingers crossed for you, I don’t think you need any luck, but that David Senra is as durable as Founders podcast. If anybody can do it, you can do it.

David Senra: I appreciate it. It means a lot coming from you, man.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Congratulations.

David Senra: You’ve had a huge influence on me.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, thanks man.

David Senra: It’s long overdue, like I said, I ran into the hallway and grabbed you. I was like, “It’s been too long — 

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, very, very, very long overdue. So, everybody listening, check out David Senra, I’m excited to check it out.

David Senra: Thank you, brother.Tim Ferriss: And also know the team at Huberman Lab, Andrew, Rob, those guys are all top tier, so what’s coming is going to be absolutely top-notch. So, I’m excited to see it. And as always, everybody, we will put links to anything that came up in this conversation in the show notes, tim.blog/podcast, just search Senra, S-E-N-R-A, or essence of turtle, and you’ll be able to find everything. And until next time, just be a bit kinder than is necessary, to others, yes, but also to yourself. Thanks for tuning in.