![[30-David_Senra.jpg]] *Dialectic Episode 30: David Senra - The Clarity of Commitment - is available on [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/episode/2c4mooK7BO1auiUca6JfYU?si=6eFhFWQmS9Cum5Iig0FtGg), [Apple Podcasts](), and [YouTube](https://youtu.be/0PBgbS0N86I), and all podcast platforms.* # Description David Senra ([Website](https://www.davidsenra.com/about), [X](https://x.com/FoundersPodcast)) is a podcaster and loves that title more than anyone. He hosts [Founders](https://pod.link/founders), where he teaches the lessons of history's greatest entrepreneurs by way of the biographies he reads of them. This week, he launched a second show, [David Senra](https://www.davidsenra.com/), where he talks to the greatest living entrepreneurs (often about the lessons from Founders). The [first episode with Spotify Founder & CEO Daniel Ek](https://open.spotify.com/episode/6KPvfGAPcAU9Noktky5pau?si=f099224c6ecd4d75) is available now, and the show is in partnership with Scicomm Media, the team behind Huberman Lab. David is an enthusiast about four things: entrepreneurship, reading, history, and podcasts. His two shows are the articulation of those obsessions in a form of service for the rest of us. He is following Charlie Munger's advice: "take a simple a idea and take it seriously." David is one of the most energizing people I've ever met and has greatly inspired my work. I've had several multi-hour conversations with him that left me buzzing afterward, and I'm pleased that this is no exception. We cover many of his favorite lessons and founders, his process, biographies, focus, fear, endurance, service, and legacy. I hope you are inspired to commit yourself to something worth your days and years. Special thanks to Josh Kale for producing this episode. Please check out his show [Limitless](https://www.youtube.com/@Limitless-FT) on frontier technology and AI. # Timestamps - (0:00) - Open - (1:49) - Intro - (3:02) - Podcasts are Energy Transmission - (7:52) - People Buy Simple Stories - (12:38) - Repetition Doesn't Spoil the Prayer - (16:11) - Trust in Brands and Products (and Podcasts) - (19:40) - Continuous Improvement and Speaking to a Moving Parade - (26:18) - Confidence and Simplicity - (34:55) - What Makes a Great Biography and Biographer - (42:17) - Humanity in Context: Why Biographies are So Practically Helpful - (48:52) - Fear - (54:32) - Self Reflection and Commitment - (1:06:52) - Considering Stuff Beyond Podcasting - (1:10:40) - Focus and Making Time for Relationships - (1:14:00) - What Should David Delegate? - (1:24:36) - Advice for 2017 David - (1:28:21) - Storytelling and Clear Thinking - (1:32:19) - Defying Rationality and Creating Magic with Obsessive Details - (1:38:09) - Self-Deception and Understanding Who You Are - (1:45:01) - Intuition - (1:48:34) - Being Easy to Interface With - (1:52:26) - Biography Most Founders Would Benefit From: James Dyson's Against the Odds - (1:57:05) - Simplicity and Edit Before You Make - (2:02:42) - Lesson for Tech People: Learn from History - (2:06:14) - What David Hopes His Kids Say About Him # Links & References - [‎My Dinner with Andre (1981)](https://letterboxd.com/film/my-dinner-with-andre/) - [Jeremy Giffon](https://x.com/jeremygiffon) - [Special Situations in Private Markets - Jeremy Giffon | Invest like the Best](https://joincolossus.com/episode/giffon-special-situations-in-private-markets/) - [Dithering](https://dithering.passport.online/member/) - [Hardcore History Series – Dan Carlin](https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-series/) - [Jimmy Iovine - Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjQQQkQT4o0) - [My Life in Advertising and Scientific Advertising - Claude C. Hopkins](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/404747.My_Life_in_Advertising_and_Scientific_Advertising) - [#170 Claude Hopkins (A Life in Advertising) - Founders](https://joincolossus.com/episode/senra-claude-hopkins-my-life-in-advertising/) - [The Stubborn Genius of James Dyson - Founders](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hagy0fhiPpY) - [Albert Laskert](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Lasker) - [#18 Yvon Chouinard - Founders](https://joincolossus.com/episode/senra-yvon-chouinard-let-my-people-go-surfing/) - [Zero to One - Peter Thiel & Blake Masters](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18050143-zero-to-one?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=jTIqnlJHMy&rank=1) - [Poor Charlie's Almanack - Charlie Munger](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/944652.Poor_Charlie_s_Almanack?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=tvgRHqEg0g&rank=1) - [#392: Michele Ferrero](https://joincolossus.com/episode/392-michele-ferrero-and-his-40-billion-privately-owned-chocolate-empire/) - [#394 Leonardo Del Vecchio - Founders](https://joincolossus.com/episode/394-an-orphan-who-built-an-empire-leonardo-del-vecchio-and-the-founding-of-luxottica/) - [#255 Sam Zemurray (Banana King) - Founders](https://joincolossus.com/episode/senra-sam-zemurray-the-life-and-times-of-americas-banana-king/) - [#292 Daniel Ludwig - Founders](https://joincolossus.com/episode/senra-daniel-ludwig-an-invisible-billionaire/) - [Justin Mares](https://x.com/jwmares) - [#385: Michael Dell - Founders](https://joincolossus.com/episode/385-michael-dell/) - [#398: Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs In His Own Words - Founders](https://joincolossus.com/episode/398-make-something-wonderful-steve-jobs-in-his-own-words/) - [Will Manidis showing how Twitter works](https://x.com/johncoogan/status/1961216943110881283) - [How to Take Over the World - Ben Wilson](https://www.takeoverpod.com/) - [#383: Todd Graves - Founders](https://joincolossus.com/episode/383-todd-graves-and-his-10-billion-chicken-finger-dream/) - [‎Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011)](https://letterboxd.com/film/jiro-dreams-of-sushi/) - [#397: Jiro Ono - Founders](https://joincolossus.com/episode/397-jiro-ono-simplicity-is-the-ultimate-advantage/) - [#393: The Michelin Brothers - Founders](https://joincolossus.com/episode/393-the-marketing-genius-of-the-michelin-brothers/) - [#373: Breakfast with Brad Jacobs - Founders](https://joincolossus.com/episode/373-breakfast-with-brad-jacobs-how-to-make-a-few-billion-dollars/) - [Huberman Lab Essentials](https://www.hubermanlab.com/essentials) - [Dialect 23: Tamara Winter](https://dialectic.fm/tamara-winter) - [#333 Red Bull's Billionaire Maniac Founder: Dietrich Mateschitz - Founders](https://joincolossus.com/episode/senra-333-red-bulls-billionaire-maniac-founder-dietrich-mateschitz/) - [Robert Caro](https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/722.Robert_A_Caro?from_search=true&from_srp=true) - [Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. - Ron Chernow](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16121.Titan?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=pTsysEOLlL&rank=4) - [John D. The Founding Father of the Rockefellers - David Freeman Hawke](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24568406-john-d-the-founding-father-of-the-rockefellers) - [A Life of Picasso, Vol. 1 - John Richardson](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/396476.A_Life_of_Picasso_Vol_1) - [Sam Hinkie](https://x.com/samhinkie?lang=en) - [Diggnation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diggnation) - [Foundation 01 // Jack Dorsey](https://youtu.be/DQy_HFHOZug?si=-OOMPEOwmyr5uVhw) - [Elon Musk and Kevin Rose](https://youtu.be/L-s_3b5fRd8?si=84dEs6u2hsyMOxA7) - [#325 Larry Gagosian - Founders](https://joincolossus.com/episode/senra-325-larry-gagosian-billionaire-art-dealer/) - [Compound Profile on David Senra - Frederik Gieschen:](https://manual.compoundplanning.com/chapters/watching-game-tapes-of-historys-best-entrepreneurs-with-david-senra) - [Ikigai](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikigai) - [David Senra | Modern Wisdom with Chris Williamson](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_8KKY8fQdA) - [Ho Nam](https://x.com/honam) - [Foxes and Hedgehogs](https://altos.vc/blog/foxes-and-hedgehogs/) - [The Lombardi Rules - Vince Lombardi](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/352407.The_Lombardi_Rules) - [Wouter Teunissen](https://x.com/WouterTeunissen) - [Eric Jorgenson](https://x.com/EricJorgenson) - [#041 Biographies, Self-Belief, & Podcasting with David Senra — Eric Jorgenson](https://www.ejorgenson.com/podcast/david-senra) - [Almanack of Naval Ravikant](https://www.navalmanack.com/) - [Maximise (Leads shortform for Founders)](https://x.com/bymaximise) - [Blake Robbins](https://x.com/blakeir) - [Founders Clips on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/founderspodcast/) - [James Cadwallader](https://x.com/thejamescad?lang=en) - [Profound](https://www.tryprofound.com/) - [Invest Like The Best](https://joincolossus.com/series/invest-like-the-best/) - [Patrick O'Shaughnessy](https://x.com/patrick_oshag) - [#259 Bob Dylan - Founders](https://joincolossus.com/episode/senra-bob-dylan-chronicles/) - [loml - Taylor Swift](https://open.spotify.com/track/3YkNIrAvbKNrrwwEd7NVLl) - [#350 How To Sell Like Steve Jobs](https://joincolossus.com/episode/senra-350-how-to-sell-like-steve-jobs/) - [The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs - Carmine Gallo](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6908348-the-presentation-secrets-of-steve-jobs) - [#313 Christopher Nolan - Founders](https://joincolossus.com/episode/senra-christopher-nolan-the-nolan-variations/) - [Cormac McCarthy)](https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4178.Cormac_McCarthy?from_search=true&from_srp=true) - [Stephen Curry - Absolutely Nothing](https://youtu.be/bmSYMbb0EG8?si=B3bTD6-P01UKS0Uh) - [The Focused Few - David Senra | Invest Like the Best](https://joincolossus.com/episode/the-focused-few/) - [How Spotify Thinks - Gustav Söderström | Invest Like the Best](https://joincolossus.com/episode/how-spotify-thinks/) - [Against the Odds - James Dyson](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/955045.Against_the_Odds) - [Invention: A Life - James Dyson](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57299136-invention?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=hz5wV9HoXl&rank=3) - [TBPN](https://www.tbpn.com/) - [The Lessons of History - Will Durant](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/174713.The_Lessons_of_History) - [#69 Charles Goodyear - Founders](https://joincolossus.com/episode/senra-charles-goodyear-the-struggle-for-a-rubber-monopoly/) - [Jeff Bezos: The electricity metaphor for the web's future \| TED Talk](https://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_bezos_the_electricity_metaphor_for_the_web_s_future) - [#374: Rare Jeff Bezos Interview - Founders](https://joincolossus.com/episode/374-rare-jeff-bezos-interview/) - [Steven Rinella](https://x.com/stevenrinella) - [MeatEater](https://www.netflix.com/title/80126646) - [Steve Rinella on his Kids](https://youtu.be/iSEkf7iE4ew?si=CVXqauVK6F_h3nRk&t=10753) - [#354 Sam Walton - Founders](https://joincolossus.com/episode/senra-354-sam-walton-the-inside-story-of-americas-richest-man/) # Transcript ## [00:00:00] Open ## [00:01:49] Intro ## [00:03:02] Podcasts are Energy Transmission **Jackson:** Somebody tweeted about this. Coffee's good for the beginning of the day when you need to work, and matcha or green tea is good for being with other people. **David:** I don't like being with other people. **Jackson:** That's our opener. **David:** I'm not kidding. The guy that sits in a room by himself and reads books for decades—what a shock. **Jackson:** Fair enough. **David:** Fair enough. **Jackson:** You can have your green tea day. My Dinner with Andre, which I brought up, looks like it's just a dinner. The whole movie is just these two guys having dinner, waxing philosophical. But it was directed by this famous French director. It's not done in a restaurant; they built a set, and it's the most meticulous. There are so many different frames. They've got the guys in the mirror. It's a cool inspiration if you wanted to get inspiration for a really intimate, conversational setting on video. It was made in 1980. **David:** If you think about the best nights of your life, they're not sitting in a studio with lights and makeup. It's just dinner with friends. You don't know what you're going to talk about beforehand. It's rambling. You're eating good food, you're probably getting a little tipsy. It's like a four-hour… **Jackson:** Dinner, and there are bottles of wine. **David:** I can't have short dinners. I can't have short conversations. Especially if we're interested in the same things—we're like the same person. You're going to talk for three, four, or five hours. **Jackson:** The first time Jeremy and I ever met—one of the only times we ever hung out—we had a five-hour conversation. **David:** He told me it was ten hours. **Jackson:** It was close. I got a preview. He went on O'Shaughnessy a month later, and I thought, "This is the same thing. I already heard this." **David:** I was badgering him for hours today. I told him, Do you understand how few people are actually good at podcasting? You went on one of the most important shows, one of the biggest shows. It was the most downloaded episode that year. That is a sign that people like the way you think and that you're really good. The thing about Jeremy is he's quick-witted and quick with it, so he's able to package and brand ideas in a really interesting way so they're memorable. Part of what I was telling him today was just hounding him: "You really dropped the ball here. You should find a format that suits you." He should not be interviewing anybody. That's the worst thing. **Jackson:** Yes. **David:** You don't want an hour of him. The idea I gave him was, "You have some of my favorite tweets, but you stopped tweeting because now you have a real job. You probably tweet a hundred times—pick the ten that resonated the most and just expound on them in two- to seven-minute episodes." **Jackson:** Pretty cool. **David:** And that's the whole thing. **Jackson:** One of my favorite podcasts, and one of the ones I listen to most, is Dithering with John Gruber and Ben Thompson. I like John and Ben. It's fifteen minutes twice a week, and it's exactly fifteen minutes. I think that's huge. TBPN has kind of cracked this a little bit, but there's so much room for it. You have these guys doing two-and-a-half-hour-long conversations. It's a nightmare. You don't even get to the end. **David:** Those are very valuable, but very few people are actually interesting to have a conversation with. This is going to sound disrespectful, but a lot of people reach out to me for help with their podcast. I'll listen to it, and when they ask what I think, I say, "It sucks." Then they ask, "What should I do?" and I say, "Make it better." You have to make something good first. Podcasting is straight energy transmission. That's all it is. So I'll ask them, "When you have dinner, are the people captivated by you? Do they desire more of your presence? Are they engaged? Do they have a good time? Do you see them again?" And they'll say, "Not really." It’s because you have the charisma of a cardboard box. You can't podcast. Go write or do something else; there are other mediums. This is not the one for you. **Jackson:** Do you have to be charismatic to have a good podcast? **David:** I think charisma wins in almost every— **Jackson:** Is Dan Carlin amazingly charismatic? **David:** Yes, for sure. I don't know if he's charismatic in person, but on the show, he's a master storyteller. It's funny you bring him up because I'm always interested in studying who influenced the influencers. It's not enough for me to say I like Steve Jobs. I need to know every single person that he studied, and then every single person they studied. You realize these ideas started 200 or 300 years ago, and people are just repackaging and using them. The reason that I have a solo history podcast is because of Dan Carlin. I think Dan Carlin is the greatest podcaster to ever live. My personal view is that I liked him a lot better when he used to do these multiple-part series like \*Ghosts of the Ostfront\*, \*Wrath of the Khans\*, and \*Blueprint for Armageddon\*. These are some of the best podcasts ever created. They were five-part series, but they were an hour and a half long. As his career progressed, he now does five-part series that are five hours long, and I get lost in it. I actually think the product was better back then. ## [00:07:52] People Buy Simple Stories **David:** One of my favorite podcasts that came out in the last two or three years is Rick Rubin, who is a phenomenal listener. Turns out that's what he did for his job. He did this episode with Jimmy Iovine, and they talk about the first time that they met each other. Jimmy is ten years ahead of Rick in everything. They produced the same people; all of Rick's accomplishments, Jimmy did beforehand. Rick, who was just starting out, plays him a song, and Jimmy says, "Man, that's really good. I wish I could do something that simple." As a young man, Rick didn't understand what that meant. Of course, you could do that simple thing; you're better than I am and have more experience than I do. But a lot of people make the mistake that the more experience they have, the more complications they let in. I think that's what happened with Dan. It was perfect. You told the story in an hour and a half. Now you're taking five hours. It's the old saying: "I would have wrote you a short letter, but I didn't have enough time, so I wrote you a long one." **Jackson:** Has Founders become simpler? **David:** For sure. Way simpler. This is actually interesting. I'm going to do an episode because so many people ask me, "Hey, how do you make the show?" They're interested in the process behind it, which is fascinating. This is a principle I think is really important for entrepreneurs or anybody trying to market or sell something: people buy stories. Money flows as a function of stories. If you go back and study the great advertising agency founders from the heyday in the '50s and '60s on Madison Avenue, they would all study the copywriters from the early 1900s. There's this guy named Claude Hopkins. He's probably the greatest copywriter of all time. He was alive in the early 1900s and worked for a guy named Albert Lasker, an advertising agency founder. He made more money than any other single person in the agency business. His business was simple. He said, "We write copy that sells product, and we don't do anything else. We don't do art, we don't do visuals. We don't do any other shit. We write copy." Those words make the cash register ring. The basis of his business was the copywriting work of Claude Hopkins. Claude Hopkins wrote this book called \\\\\\\*Scientific Advertising\\\\\\\*, where it lays out what he learned through experimentation. History doesn't repeat; human nature does. He would run these experiments, put something in front of a thousand people, and see how humans reacted. Then he would constantly iterate and adjust. He wrote the book, and Albert said, "Yeah. That's how I built my business." He took the book from Claude Hopkins and didn't allow him to publish it. He literally locked it in a safe for 20 years. To this day, you can go and buy Claude Hopkins's autobiography, which I think is called \\\\\\\*My Life in Advertising\\\\\\\*, and it comes with \\\\\\\*Scientific Advertising\\\\\\\* for free. It's probably episode 170 or something like that. The reason I bring that up is because one of his clients was a distiller, a beer company called Schlitz Beer, and they were fifth or sixth in market share. They weren't doing well, so they needed help. Claude was a big believer in research and spent a lot of time with the executives. He toured the distillery and saw the process and thought, "This is magic. I love beer. I had no idea how you made it." So he said, "I'm going to describe that. That's what our ads are going to be: what goes into making the product. Once you understand it, you'll have a better understanding and a love of that product." But the distiller said, "We're not doing anything special." He replied, "The difference is no one else is telling them, so you have to educate." They wound up educating the public on how they make their beer, which is the same process all the other distillers are making. It shot them up from fifth to second or first. **Jackson:** Wow. When was this? **David:** That would probably be 1910, 1920, or 1930. **Jackson:** So ahead of his time. **David:** One of the reasons it's normal to me but abnormal to other people is I realized if I make an episode where I talk for 20 minutes about what goes into it, you'll have a further appreciation. You'll like the episodes more. It's like an idea from James Dyson, whose autobiography I'm rereading for the fifth time. He makes vacuum cleaners. You walk in, you see five different vacuum cleaners. Mine looks different on purpose because he thought that was important. More important to help it sell, he would put a little flyer on a piece of string on the handle. In 200 words, he would say who Dyson is. It's a person. This is how I make it. This is what makes it different. Really simple. If you read that, the likelihood that you would choose that one over the one next to it that's half the price was a lot. People buy stories. ## [00:12:38] Repetition Doesn't Spoil the Prayer **Jackson:** There's a thread there that is the Yvon Chouinard nonfiction marketing thing. It's not rocket science or clever. There's broad internet advice now—Sam Hinkie's talked about this, and others have too—which is that you have specific knowledge that other people don't have. 90% of people don't think what they have is special and don't say it. The people who do have giant followings, for the most part. It's within reason, but we all have things that we know disproportionately well. We just think it's not that novel or interesting. **David:** And you're afraid to repeat yourself. **Jackson:** Yeah. **David:** They're like, “No, I need a new idea.” You see this with Peter Thiel. He goes and gives talks on the Antichrist and other stuff. What we want from him is to repeat \\\\\\\*Zero to One\\\\\\\* over and over again. If you only read one book on startups, it's obviously the book. There's this desire... Humans crave novelty: “No, I created great ideas, so now I have to do something new.” No, you have to repeat it over and over again. I'm fascinated with people that do things for a long period of time. I'm not interested in the "start, scale, sell." Go do that. I'll just keep dominating for decades. I contemplate what causes things to last and endure for a long period of time. There's this great line in \\\\\\\*Poor Charlie's Almanack\\\\\\\*. Charlie's son says that he thought his dad thought durability was a first-rate virtue. That's a fucking powerful idea. Durability is a first-rate virtue. In this modern environment, we fetishize growth at the expense of durability, which is a massive mistake—also mentioned by Peter Thiel in \\\\\\\*Zero to One\\\\\\\*. So what lasts a long time? We know what a human lifetime is. How long do companies last? How long do countries last? What are the things created by humans that endure the longest? My answer to that is religion. So I analyze it. I grew up fundamentalist Christian. is probably why \\\\\\\*Founders\\\\\\\* is the way it is. Jumping up and down, preaching. I'm very familiar with the church and with religions. What do they do? They have a shared base of knowledge, usually in the form of written text that has been around for thousands of years. Then they gather with like-minded people, with fellow believers, at regular intervals. Just analyze what religions do. Even if they believe different things, they do very similar things. **Jackson:** It's a scaffold—a social scaffolding. **David:** What happens? We went to church on Wednesdays and Sundays. The preacher didn't get up there and say, “Today we're going to talk about Jesus, and Sunday we're going to talk about some other guy.” No. Repetition is persuasive. You repeat, repeat, repeat. **Jackson:** The central idea there is, "This is the most important thing." We're going to talk about Jesus every weekend forever. **David:** If you analyze the people that last a long time—what has Buffett been talking about for 60 years? What has been important to Michael Dell for 40 years? I just did this crazy episode on Elon Musk. You wouldn't expect it from him; you think he's running seven companies, obsessed with technology. He repeats the same thing so much that the executives in the meeting can mouth the words before he says it. So why are you jumping from idea to idea to idea? You have to identify a handful of timeless principles, repeat them, work on them, and make them the center of your work for decades. That's how greatness is built. ## [00:16:11] Trust in Brands and Products (and Podcasts) **Jackson:** What makes durable products? **David:** I don't know. Let me flip that question back on you: What's the product that you've used for the longest time? **Jackson:** The first thing that comes to mind is Nike shoes. I don't super actively wear them, but I've always had a pair. **David:** Are those Nikes? **Jackson:** They aren't. I've used an iPhone for a long time. An iPhone, a MacBook—these types of utilities. **David:** So we've been using the iPhone for 15 years? **Jackson:** It came out in 2007. I haven't had one that long, but for a similar amount of time. For most people, it's probably something like a deodorant, underwear, or a T-shirt. **David:** There's an interesting principle here. If you read Jeff Bezos's shareholder letters, once he realized he had a winning system—that if you started using Amazon, you stayed in Amazon—you'd buy books, but you'd really buy anything. He said he got this great email one time where he realized there were no limits to what they could do. A guy emailed him after he had bought some books and was happy, asking, "Hey, do you sell windshield wipers?" Bezos realized, "If this guy wants windshield wipers and would buy them from me, they'll buy anything." One of the most important things people skip over in the early Amazon shareholder letters is that Bezos is adamant about this. He said, "We're going to invest heavily in introductions to new customers." And why? Because people are habitual. I order a ton of books, more than 99.99% of the people on the planet. I don't go shopping for price or something else. Amazon got me, and they've had me for 20 years. People are much more habitual than we take them for. Even in software, unless a product is drastically different and a lot better, people won't switch just because you're a little cheaper. They think, "I don't want to switch. It's a headache." **Jackson:** Part of it is trust. Trust is what feeds that habituality. In theory, that's the reason somebody is still listening to Founders in 20 years. You always talk about this, but very tangibly, the only conceivable way it makes sense is that you have built enough trust to say, "Come follow me as far as I want to go." **David:** The best way I've heard this described is that Buffett says a brand is a promise. I know what I'm getting with Apple products. I had an iPhone before I had a MacBook, but I thought, "The iPhone's good, so if they're making something else, that's probably good, too." I just met a fan of the podcast—my life's a blur right now. What the person described to me was, "Thank you for introducing me to spectacular people I didn't even know exist." **Jackson:** This is what I'm saying. **David:** Yes. **Jackson:** This is Rogan. Go down the list. Any modern person with influence is usually this: I get to sit in the seat where Rogan is my avatar. I get to have the conversation he has, and I trust him. I trust his taste. **David:** They might come in for Jobs, Rockefeller, or Bezos, but then they're asking what about this Ferrero guy? What about Del Vecchio? What about Sam Zemurray, who overthrew the Nicaraguan government twice? How is that even possible? What did he do? Daniel Ludwig was the richest person in the world. No one even knew who he was. He beat up the guy that tried to take his photograph when he was 80 years old. What is going on here? There are all these crazy stories. The unfair advantage I have is that you know they're good because they were so good at their job that somebody wrote a book about their life. **Jackson:** And if you're doing an episode, it's a multiplier on that. ## [00:19:40] Continuous Improvement and Speaking to a Moving Parade **David:** This just happened, and this will probably be in the episode I do on how I make the shows. I'm trying to do one a week, but it's always late. Part of that is because I read a lot of books that never make it, and it takes a long time to read. It got even worse two or three weeks ago. I read the book, did the outline, recorded the episode, and then listened to it back. I thought, "This isn't good enough." So I fucking threw it out. **Jackson:** That is hardcore. **David:** That's 60 hours, at least. Maybe a little less because it was in the edit process where I realized this was not going to happen. What I realized wasn't good enough is that I was taking an hour to tell 15 minutes of good information. **Jackson:** You were making it more complex. **David:** I was talking to my friend Justin Mares, and he just said, "Just make it 15 minutes then." So I might go back and edit it down. There's no rule that it has to be an hour, 90 minutes, or anything else. There are good ideas here, but I didn't like how long it was taking me to actually tell them. **Jackson:** Do you cling to those rules you make for yourself? This is something that I've run into a lot. I'm 30 episodes in—a tiny, tiny fraction—but there are certain ways I chose to do something, probably arbitrarily. A lot of times I find myself thinking, "Oh, I have to do it this way, because this is how it was done." **David:** No. The best people in the world at what they do are addicted to continuous improvement. You can't be addicted to continuous improvement unless you're willing to throw out what used to be good. We just met Grace out there, and she was very complimentary to the Michael Doe episode I did. At the time I put it out, I thought it was one of my best episodes. I listened to it again yesterday. People think this is crazy, but I think it's crazy that you don't do this. When my Spotify rap comes out this year, my top podcast will be Founders. **Jackson:** To be clear, this is not the artist or the creator Spotify rap. This is the consumer. **David:** 400 episodes, and I listen to past ones. One, I think of it more as a tool than a form of media. But also, I forget a lot of the great ideas. Just like if you go to church, you have to remind yourself **Jackson:** Repetition doesn't spoil the prayer. **David:** Exactly. It's like a basketball player watching game tape. You think Curry's like, "Oh no, I can't look at me shoot a three?" No, he knows exactly, so I have to listen to it. When that episode came out six months ago, I thought, "Great." Now when I hear it, I think, "You fucked that up. There was an easier way to say that. You should have cut that part. What is that? Why did you leave that in?" I see all the flaws, and I know if I did it today, it would be better. **Jackson:** It sounds like you're getting simpler and you're getting better. Does that feel linear? Is episode 400 better than episode 390? Certainly episode 400 is better than 100. **David:** I don't think it's linear like that because with some of these things, you don't even understand what you're doing. It's much more experimental. **Jackson:** I just re-listened to the Steve Jobs "Make Something Wonderful" episode you re-released. That episode is incredible. **David:** Some of this stuff I shouldn't even say, it's such an unfair advantage. So one of the main principles is that you're not advertising to a standing army; you're advertising to a moving parade. That is Ogilvy quoting Hopkins, so this is a 127-year-old idea that I use. When I made that episode, I spent 60 hours on it. That means I didn't have more time in the week to make another episode up to my standards, so I had to republish an old one. I think I republished 299 as 398 or something like that. When I do that, I usually say at the beginning, "Hey, listen to this again because it's timeless. If not, you need to listen to it right now." I wrote it out but forgot to add that part. That episode ripped. I had people sending me five-paragraph essays saying, "I've listened to a hundred of your episodes, and I thought that Steve Jobs one was the best one." They didn't even realize it. You're not advertising to a standing army; you're advertising to a moving parade. Jeremy and I just had this conversation on the walk over here. I guarantee you there are people--I told him, "You need to tweet more." He said, "I don't have anything to say." I told him, "Go on advanced Twitter search and put that out right now." **Jackson:** Will Manidis did this recently. **David:** I do it all the time. **Jackson:** I had a tweet about coffee that got the most engagement I ever had, and I did it again—the exact same thing. **David:** I guarantee you-- **Jackson:** This is the TikTok mindset. **David:** This is what I said to Jeremy on the walk over. I guarantee you there are people that listened to that Steve Jobs episode when it came out. Two years have passed. They listened to it again and didn't even realize it was the same episode. I'm not trying to be duplicitous. In the show notes, because I forgot to add the intro to it, I put, "I originally published this," et cetera. But people vastly overestimate how much people are paying attention and just how much information people are consuming. You think that every single person is paying attention to every single thing you're doing. Nobody is. You're the only person doing that. I talked to my friend Ben Wilson, who does the How to Take over the World podcast. I think Ben is really, really talented, and he wasn't doing enough volume. I remember we were sitting there one night, and he was asking me for advice on the podcast. Me and Cliff Weitzman were talking to him about it because we were both fans of his podcast. Twenty minutes in, I go, "Wait a minute, you don't number your episodes? How many have you done?" And he's like, "Ninety." There's nothing to fucking talk about. When I did ninety episodes, nobody was listening. Go do 200 more, and then we'll talk about this. So he needs volume. But also, he doesn't know how talented he is. I would rather have more confidence and self-belief than less. He sent me this Twitter thread where he was changing something about his podcast, where he was adding sound effects. He's like, "I don't know what to do here. The feedback that I'm getting is conflicting." So I go and click on it, and one person's like, "I love the sound effect." The next person's like, "I hate it." I was like, "Ben, why are you even reading this shit? What do you want to do? What do you think is great?" Stephen King said, "I'm not just a writer, I'm the first reader." I'm the first listener. If I listen to that podcast and it sucks, you'll never hear it because it didn't make my standards. You just keep doing that. Eventually, the Internet's big enough, you'll find people that like the same stuff that you like. ## [00:26:18] Confidence and Simplicity **Jackson:** We can go back to the simplicity thing briefly if you want to. **David:** I didn't understand this. just followed my natural drift and my natural star. For five and a half years, I was just doing it, and very few people were listening. The people that were listening were really impressive, so I was like, "Oh, I might be on to something." There are two things I figured. One, it was a subscription podcast, so I saw the email addresses of the people that were listening, which is very rare. Even though it was only a couple thousand people, it was like murderer's row. It's like, "Oh, this is interesting." As I read more biographies, I realized the greats of every era studied the greats that came before them. That's an enduring human principle. If you can be the best at doing that, you're going to have the best audience in the world. **Jackson:** Were you self-confident before that? **David:** I was born with Tom Ford syndrome. I'm not kidding. Do you know what that is? **Jackson:** No. I have a sense. **David:** Let me pull this up because I want to get the exact thing. Hold on. Tom Ford syndrome. Tom Ford was interviewed by GQ and was asked, "Didn't you always feel like a freak growing up?" He says, "I thought I was fabulous and everyone else was stupid." I obviously didn't think everyone else was stupid. But I grew up in an undereducated family that didn't have any money. I basically just saw a bad example, so I was like, "Oh, that's a good path not to take." To say that I'm going to change the trajectory of multiple generations on both sides of my family, you have to be, I would even say, arrogant. **Jackson:** But you did a lot of things prior to this. **David:** But not on a world-class level. **Jackson:** That's precisely what I'm curious about. You started doing the podcast, you'd done plenty of other things, and you've always been self-confident. That's not the issue. **David:** The conversation we just had sounds almost cliche and cheesy, but we were talking about Michael Dell's infectious enthusiasm. Forty-one years into his business, he's giddy to tell you about new products. How many products has a guy made in his life? It doesn't matter. He's still just as enthusiastic about what's in front of him as he's ever been. I mentioned when we were talking to Grace, when Kobe Bryant was asked what all the people he knows that are great at what they do have in common, he goes, "Oh, it's simple. It's love." We have a deep love of what we're doing. This is why I see a lot of bad advice on Twitter where they're like, "Oh, people say you should be passionate about that? That's a bad idea. You should just get a normal job, buy a dry cleaner, some shit like that." **Jackson:** It's like the David Goggins thing of just grinding yourself. **David:** No, but you'll have superpowers if you love it and you still have the discipline and grind. If my eyes are open, I'm thinking about podcasts. It's not an exaggeration. **Jackson:** Your eyes are closed apparently, too. **David:** You dream about it. This is another common thing. I just talked to Todd Graves, and— **Jackson:** I had Raising Cane's last night in his honor. **David:** He's been working on his company for 30 years. He owns over 90% of it. He's worth at least $20 billion. The guy's gonna be worth $60 billion. His menu has not changed since day one. We were talking about this because I was having trouble sleeping. The sushi chef in the documentary \*Jiro Dreams of Sushi\* was so addicted to his work, he was dreaming about it. Then I'm reading about the Michelin brothers. They were selling fucking tires. They're dreaming about tires. The Ferrero chocolate guy was dreaming about chocolate. It is this very common thing that if you're obsessed with it, you start dreaming about it in your subconscious. If you love it, it's so much easier to give yourself over and let yourself be consumed by your craft and the love of what you're doing. That doesn't mean you can't have a family, friends, or fun. But the level of detail and obsession—there's only one way to describe it. They are consumed by their craft. To tie that back to the simplicity part, it's something I accidentally discovered: all the greats want to learn from the greats. Every single person I meet who is crazy successful—Michael Dell, Charlie Munger, Sam Zell, Daniel Ek, the list goes on and on—they all have this historic base of knowledge in their head. You go to their houses and look at their libraries. They're reading biographies. They're obsessed with history. Then you pick up a biography, and the person profiled in it is also reading biographies and history. If you want a high-value audience, which I stumbled upon because I have a low threshold for fluff... somebody said \*Founders\* is like sashimi-style podcasting. There's no intro music. It just goes right into it and rips through ideas. Simplicity. 1.5x speed for an hour, an hour and a half. If you're a Michael Dell or a Brad Jacobs or any of these people who tweet and talk about liking the podcast and getting a lot of value out of it, how much time do you think they have to ingest content a day? Brad Jacobs has 148,000 employees. Crazy. The shorter, the better. **Jackson:** I don't want to make too many assumptions, but for some of these people, you're probably the only regular media they consume outside of news and Twitter. I wouldn't be shocked at that. They're probably not watching Netflix, first of all. And I would assume they're probably not listening to a lot of other podcasts. **David:** This just happened with the Huberman Lab because I'm close with those guys. They did something that was really ingenious. They do the standard, super-long deep dive into one health topic, and it might be two or three hours. They put that on Mondays and have been doing that for a few years. Then they realized they have this timeless content, so they created a new SKU called Essentials that they put on Thursdays. It's a three-hour podcast edited down to 30 minutes. You know how many high-value people I've talked to that say they only listen to Essentials? What is an hour of Michael Dell's time worth? It's not an exaggeration to say it could affect a swing of $10 million one direction or another. Whatever the number is, you can argue over it, but the number is giant. He's giving you an hour of his time and will continue to do it because you don't waste any of his time. They're smart enough that if they want the full story, they can read the whole book. **Jackson:** I'm curious about this. You don't make 15-minute podcasts. We live in a world where kids can't sit through movies and nobody can read books. We watch three-minute or 30-second videos. You describe this gradual path of simplifying the show, but it's still 45 minutes to an hour and a half. I'm curious what that tension feels like. There's no fluff, but you're still demanding a lot from the listener. You're saying there's an hour worth of content here that, no matter how busy you are, is worth it, even though you could get this much shorter in a classic Instagram video. **David:** Spending more time with it is not necessarily bad. I just think about the distillation. People leave me comments that I mispronounce words. Where do you think my vocab came from? Do you think I heard these words or I read them? The value prop of Founders is very easy. Somebody had a phenomenal 40-year career and learned all these lessons. Somebody put it into a book that probably took them a couple of years to write. So it's a 40-year career and 40 hours of reading that you can listen to in 45 minutes. That's it. If you want more, go read the book. If you want less, listen to less of the podcast. It's going to be hard to top that kind of value prop. The reason I say 45 minutes is because a lot of these psychos are listening on 1.5 or 2x speed. I'm a purist. I listen on 1x. **Jackson:** You're a 1xer. That's crazy. **David:** 1x, because I actually love the medium. I love podcasts. You can rush through sex, but that's not the point. Your goal when you're going to make love is probably not, "Let's see if I can get this over with in two minutes." That's not the point. ## [00:34:55] What Makes a Great Biography and Biographer **Jackson:** One thing I was really curious about, that I don't think you've ever talked about, is our friend Tammy has this line that a biography says as much about the biographer as the person being profiled. **David:** She said that on your podcast. **Jackson:** Maybe it was. You've read more biographies than anyone, and you talk extensively about these amazing people that are being profiled, for good reason. What makes a good biography and biographer, especially because for many of these people, like Steve Jobs, you've read a bunch of biographies on them? **David:** I'm not dodging the question. Something I didn't understand about myself is that my life's work picked me. People would ask for a great book recommendation, and I'd give them one. They'd respond, "That was the most boring shit I've ever read." This kept happening. Somebody literally tweeted a couple of days ago, "I just finished the Red Bull biography. It was a piece of shit." **Jackson:** Is this the one that was translated from German? **David:** Yes, but now it's in English. "David's episode is amazing." My response to it is that it wasn't a piece of shit to me. What I realized is I have a higher threshold for boredom when it comes to reading than almost anybody else. **Jackson:** The distilled subject matter somewhere down there is what you really care about. **David:** No, not even that. It just wasn't boring to me. I recommend this book, and everybody says, "This sucks." The number of people that sent me messages said, "I'm so glad you did an episode on the Walter Isaacson book about Elon," because they didn't like that book. They would ask if I hated it, and I'd say, "I didn't hate it. Look what I made after reading it." **Jackson:** There has to be some of these that you love more than others, more than just the person. **David:** What I find objectionable, whether it's a book or a company, is a lack of taste and craft. You can just tell if somebody cares about what they're doing or not. That's not even my idea; it's essentially parroting what Jobs would say about Microsoft. He said, "I'm glad they're successful, but their products have no soul." I wouldn't use them. I don't want them in my house. I don't want them in my presence, that kind of thing. I think very few people in the world should be allowed to write a thousand-page biography. I've read several of them, 900-page biographies. There's exactly one person living that I would exclude from that rule, and that's Robert Caro. He's obviously the greatest biographer living; there's nobody even close to him. I think most books shouldn't be 600 pages; they should be 250 pages. But that's the problem: most people don't actually understand what's important. One way I find books, to answer your question, is I will read them and they'll be fine. Everybody's read Titan, the Rockefeller biography by Ron Chernow, right? But I will go through all the bibliographies of every book that I read and find so much great source material. Books are made out of books. I'll order 15 books from the back of the bibliography. I don't even care. I'll look at the title and just order, order, order. I'm very promiscuous when it comes to this stuff. In the back of it, I found this book called \\\\\\\*John D. The Founding Father of the Rockefellers\\\\\\\*. When I bought it, it was six bucks. I made an episode on it, and then it goes up to $2,000 because there are only five copies in the world. It was published in 1970 and it's 250 pages, or 224 or something like that, instead of the 700 or 800 pages that \\\\\\\*Titan\\\\\\\* is. It's hyper-focused on what I'm actually interested in, which is how he built Standard Oil, the methods, and how he thought about his business. There is a section—I think it was in \\\\\\\*Titan\\\\\\\*. No, this was a Picasso book. Sometimes I get so induced into a state of rage. I still have not found a good biography of Picasso. I remember the definitive one everyone recommends; it's a three-part series. I can picture it at my house—it's a blue cover with white letters. But I got to the point where they were describing a bar that he would hang out in, and they were describing in detail how the furniture was made. I was like, "This is unacceptable." No one is reading this because they give a shit about a chair in a bar that I'm never going to go to. I literally threw the book across the room and never read it again. That's a sign of somebody not understanding why people were picking up the book. Maybe this guy had a fetish for chairs, I don't know, but I wasn't going to take time to find out. **Jackson:** There are probably people who love that book, by the way. I'm almost certain. **David:** I'm sure there are. I also think when people read, they skip over things. I read every page. I know this because I'll talk to people that have read the book, and you don't have to memorize everything, but there are big chunks of stories that don't register on their face. I'm like, you own the book; it's on your bookshelf. **Jackson:** One of the things I've found is that if I watch a movie or read a book and it's been two years or more and I've only seen it once, the plot's new. **David:** We forget that we forget. I'm rereading Dyson's autobiography. I've read both of them, but the first one four or five times. I just finished reading it again, and I don't remember that at all. How is that possible? This is why repetition is so important and why you should stop jumping from idea to idea. When you study people that are great at what they do, Steph Curry's not like, "Hey, I mastered a three-point shot. Let me go work on something else." He's just shooting threes over and over again. Tiger's working his putt over and over again. Elon's repeating the algorithm over and over again. Jeff Bezos, in 23 years of his shareholder letters, talks about obsessing over customers over and over again. I think it's a super important idea. The level of its importance versus how frequently you see repetition is completely off-kilter to me. It doesn't make any sense. It's very important, and no one talks about it because it goes against human nature. We're just novel-seeking primates. **Jackson:** You also talked about the order in which you learn or study things. We aren't the same, even if the book is staying the same. Taking the memory part away, it might be that you studied somebody else and now you're connecting the dots, or even that you've just changed. I find that coming back to stuff can be totally new, even if I remember what the story was about. **David:** The words on paper don't change, but you do. This happens when I do podcasts. We can record today, and I'll talk about Dyson because I'm reading Dyson right now, or Steve Jobs because that just happened. If we record a year from now now, I'm going to be talking about whoever I'm talking about then. That's why it's so important to go back to these things. I don't have a media company. I'm not even making media. I think of podcasting as building relationships at scale, and I think of it as building a tool for somebody. This is what Todd Graves told me. He said, "Your work is very important, and it becomes more important the bigger my company gets because of the effect of the decision. If I can get one little idea, if I can do a 1% improvement on a $20 billion company..." **Jackson:** That's a huge lever. **David:** Exactly. I want to get to the point where I'm covering so much valuable information in 45 minutes that if you're not listening, it's irresponsible. ## [00:42:17] Humanity in Context: Why Biographies are So Practically Helpful **Jackson:** You've said the reason to read biographies over business books is the human element. Can you say more about that? **David:** That's not even my idea. Hinkie always talks about this. He's a very funny person. I think he would consider me a close friend, and I consider him a close friend. He's kind of like an older brother, but I think I frustrate the hell out of him. I think I frustrate everybody that deals with me. It's very much an acquired taste. **Jackson:** But Sam likes to be frustrated a little bit. He finds these frustrating people. **David:** He gave me one of the best mental models in terms of who to spend time with. He said, "I like people that are so intensely interested in"--whatever it could be, It doesn't matter: it could be reading, podcasts, investing--"that they never reach the end. He does this thing with his hands where there's just no bottom to it. His idea is the advantage you have is that you are now, by association, automatically going to be associated with the Steve Jobs and the John D. Rockefellers. Then it's even worse because their ideas are coming out of your mouth. So people will say, “David's so wise.” No, I just read a lot. **Jackson:** Many years ago, I somehow found myself sitting across from Naval Ravikant. I told him something that I had heard from Tim Ferriss, and he said, “That's such a great idea.” I said, “No, no, that's your friend Tim's idea.” And he said, “Well, it's yours now.” There's something to that. **David:** Charlie Munger framed the biography thing the best for me, but Elon Musk was the one that introduced me to it for the first time. I didn't know anything about tech when I was younger, and I got introduced to it by this guy named Kevin Rose, who's the founder of Digg. This was web 2.0, or whatever it was called back then. He had this show that I guess we'd call a podcast now called Diggnation, where they would drink beer on a couch and go over the top stories on digg.com. **Jackson:** I think they're bringing it back. Or maybe it's already back. **David:** You can't put lightning back in the bottle, but they had it for a moment. This is the dangerous thing about all these people that jump around. Kevin had this super high-quality video podcast called Foundation in 2012—best guests, best shot—and he stopped. This is the advice that Michael Dell gave me: Most entrepreneurs aren't taken out by competition; they just sabotage themselves. They get to the point where they don't love the activity for the sake of itself, so they'd rather be at their vacation home. They're rich now, so they don't want to do it. I saw Michael recently. Last month, I had a five-hour dinner with him, and I was like, “What the hell are you doing in Austin in July? This sucks to be here.” **Jackson:** You should be in Italy. **David:** No, he's got a crazy house in Hawaii. And his answer is simple. He's like, "I just love my business. This is where my business is." It's very straightforward and simple. Kevin Rose had this show called \\\\\\\*Foundation\\\\\\\* and he interviewed Elon on the factory floor of Tesla. I think this was right when they were starting the Model S production, so Elon looks totally different. This was 12 or 15 years ago. It's a great 40-minute interview. I looked it up the other day, and I think it only has a couple hundred thousand views on YouTube. It's remarkable. He was asking how Elon learned. He came from South Africa to Canada and then wound up in the Bay Area, starting companies really young. People had forgotten because of Tesla and SpaceX that he had Zip2 before PayPal and everything he was doing in his 20s. Kevin asked, "How did you learn how to build a company? Did you read a lot of business books? Did you have a lot of mentors?" And Elon said, "No. I didn't read business books. I read a lot of biographies. I thought they were helpful." He said, "I didn't have mentors, so I looked for mentors in historical context." I thought that's a really interesting idea, looking for mentors in historical context. Because if you read enough about a person, you can understand how they think. **Jackson:** Yes. **David:** And then you can have this inner monologue with yourself. You mentioned Yvon Chouinard earlier. I have a good model in my head because I've read that book two or three times. I've read every single other book he wrote. If I'm faced with a problem, I would say, "What would Yvon Chouinard tell me to do in this situation?" He would tell you to increase quality because his response to any problem in his company was, "Our quality's not good enough." Increasing quality doesn't mean it's the right answer for your specific situation, but you should be able to pull that from your head. **Jackson:** But having that in the context of his story is way more textured than some business advice. **David:** That's why I started reading biographies. I discovered Buffett, and then Buffett kept talking about this Munger guy. Then I fell in love with Munger. Munger is still the wisest person. If I could only learn from one person for the rest of my life, it would be Munger. Over and over and over again. The way he frames ideas, he's just very wise. What was fascinating—because I got to meet him—is that all the greatest living people in the world came to his house. They went to him in that very modest house in L.A. and sought his counsel. What does that tell you? He wasn't the richest, but all the richest guys said, "He's the one. I want to talk to him." He understood human nature maybe better than anybody else I've ever come across. He said you need to read biographies because it helps to tie the ideas to the personality that developed them. You'll understand why they came up with the idea and why it was important to them. **Jackson:** They can't be out of context. They're less useful out of context. **David:** We were just talking about our mutual friend Jeremy Giffon. He's really good at getting to the essence of things. We should cut this part because I don't want him to feel good about himself. I want him to feel bad about himself. But he nailed this really fast when we started becoming friends four years ago. He said, "It's pretty obvious what you're doing. You're a psychopathically obsessed personality. You didn't have any good mentors, so you're just doing that." That's what Founders is. Going back to Tammy's idea, it's not for you; it's for me. You needed that kind of personality type to do it. The act of sitting down and recording it makes it an act of service to the world and to other people, so they can benefit from this activity you'd be doing even if no one listened. **Jackson:** That's based in love. **David:** And fear. Fear of failure, fear of being a loser. That's a very common motivator for anybody that has an unusual, extreme career. ## [00:48:52] Fear **Jackson:** We talked about confidence earlier. You have this amazing line from Kobe about fear: "The greatest fear you have is yourself. It's scary to accept that dream you have. It's scary to say what you want, lest you fail." You also said Jimmy Iovine's career was built on a tremendous lack of fear of moving forward. On one hand, you have this radical self-confidence and the love of the thing. Do you experience any kind of fear, or have there been periods of fear with Founders? **David:** I feel fear every day. Some people get into what they're doing for different reasons. I started podcasting when it was extremely low status. It was a dorky thing to do, especially by yourself with a hundred-dollar microphone in a kitchen. **Jackson:** Paid only. **David:** It was just something I was obsessed with for a very long period of time. I've become close with a lot of the people at Spotify. I've traveled to Stockholm twice this year alone because I think they're geniuses and they're very generous with their insights and time for me. They were talking about the fact that one of their biggest mistakes was when they were signing all these people. They The beauty of podcasting is, as Andrew Human says, it's like punk rock. You can start in a garage. There's no money and equipment; you're just doing it for the love. And you get better." The guys at Spotify said, we signed... **Jackson:** celebrities. **David:** Celebrities that are expensive. **Jackson:** Meghan Markle. **David:** And we had expensive production. They said, "We should have partnered with people like \\\*you\\\* that came up because of the love." **Jackson:** It's the whole story of content on the Internet: YouTube, TikTok, everything. **David:** A lot of people start podcasting because they want fame. I don't have guests, so it's a solo thing. It's one of the few podcasts in the world that is made by one person. I think that's why Daniel Ek says over and over again in interviews that his favorite show is Founders. He's very generous with his insights and advice to me. When we've been together, he'll introduce me, we'll talk about the podcast, and he goes, "He does everything himself. He's like Prince, playing every single instrument." It's very unusual to read, record, and edit. I'm hand-updating the transcripts now. **Jackson:** The amount of time that you're writing them. **David:** No, after the fact. I had this idea for these beautiful captions I did for the Elon episode. I think it's just better than my face. There are other ideas I wanted to talk about. When you said you hold on to, "I used to do it X way, so I have to keep doing it X way." I'm like, "No, I'm going to do what I feel is best today." Basically, I didn't understand other people's impression of me was different than my impression of me. This is a conversation Jeremy and I just had on the walk over here. I don't think about other people. I am lost in my own world, and Jeremy's a little bit like that too. **Jackson:** But that's the fear Kobe was talking about. It's not actually fear of other people; it's this internalized fear. **David:** It's like you just wasted your life. What I mean by "I don't think of other people" is that I'm so lost in what I'm doing that I don't pop my head out and wonder. The idea that someone I just ran into in this office would say, "Oh my God, I'm a fan," or that I got recognized on the street earlier and then at the airport... It's so weird to me. I asked myself, how do you even know what I look like? I didn't even look at numbers. I just did this giant multi-year partnership with Ramp, and we had hammered everything out. We had everything in agreement. They were like, "Hey, what are your numbers, by the way?" They value audience quality over everything else. I was like, "Good question. Let me look." I was shocked how many people listen because I'm not doing it for that. I honestly didn't want to know. I didn't want to know because then what happens? I put an episode out and it's like, "Oh, I usually get X, and now it's 10% less." **Jackson:** You're focused on the wrong thing. **David:** No! it's just... **Jackson:** or it's quality over input. **David:** Yeah, it's just quality. It doesn't matter. I'm making this for me. The fear that I have is I still wake up every day thinking that this could be taken from me. Or in many cases, if you go back to Michael Dell's advice, it's how you sabotage yourself. Conor McGregor has this great line where he says if you sleep on a win, you wake up with a loss. His whole thing, if you look at young Conor, is that he wakes up every day and doesn't think. He's like a shark. Wake up, go train, eat, rest. Go train again, eat, rest, train again. Do that over and over again. Then what happens? He makes hundreds of millions of dollars, and he's doing coke, he's on boats, he's doing all this other stuff. He's not training. Then he goes back into fights, and what happens? He gets knocked out. My fear is that the way to not rest on your laurels, to not have a rearview mirror, to not go to sleep on a win and wake up with a loss, is just my routine. You're going to wake up, and you're going to read for a few hours every day. And then once you finish the book, you're going to sit down and talk about what you learned. You just do that over and over and over again. It's so perplexing to me when people ask, "Hey, I love what you do. What's next?" This is what's next: today, tomorrow, and forever. That's the only way. As soon as I stop doing that, everything will go away. ## [00:54:32] Self Reflection and Commitment **Jackson:** So that is the fear. You brought up Gagosian—crazy article. They ask him something introspective, and he says, "Oh, I try to avoid self-reflection. That's how you lose your edge." **David:** That's a great quote, by the way. And 100% true. **Jackson:** This is my question. First, a brief excerpt. You did an interview years ago with Frederick Gieschen for Compound, and in it you say, "Whoever you are and whatever is important to you, put that into your company. Don't shy away from the eccentric part of your personality, because your personality is the foundation and the beginning of the culture of your company." You also talk about how everybody has something they loved as a kid that they forget about. They forget the love. And yet, you often say, along the lines of Gagosian, that great entrepreneurs have low to zero introspection. Can you square that for me? I understand that there's maybe a spectrum of introspection, but you actually seem to know yourself really well. And frankly, some of the entrepreneurs you study, maybe some of the more evolved ones, at least do. Am I making a false equivalent? **David:** I don't think those two things are in conflict. I think there's a lot of introspection they go through. This is why reading biographies is so good, because you see them go down these false starts. They make mistakes. They have to backtrack, change their mind about things, and direct their energy elsewhere. It takes a lot of introspection to figure out what you want to do, but once they find their thing... Gagosian did a bunch of shit. He worked for Ovitz. I just had dinner with Ovitz, and he was talking about Gagosian. He was his assistant or something. He was selling art in a parking lot. But then once he found his thing, he was like, "Oh, there's nothing else." Boom. Our mutual friend Patrick O'Shaughnessy... I text people crazy shit sometimes. Sometimes I get in trouble because I don't have a filter, and sometimes I think I should. Some dudes researching my ideas will say, "I've been researching you, and here's a list of ideas you've said on other podcasts." They'll be podcasts I did years ago. I don't remember saying that, but it sounds like something I would say, and I should not be sharing that publicly. Sometimes I think, "Man, I shouldn't say what I'm about to say." But every time I have that thought and just say it anyway—usually it's something personal, like I haven't processed the death of my mom, things you would not tell millions of strangers—I hear from people saying, "I'm like that too. I'm so glad you said that. I had that exact same thought." That's why I try to just let it rip and not have a filter. I'm a bad actor. I don't want to act. If people listen to the podcast and then we hang out, it's not weird. It's the same freaking guy. **Jackson:** That's all the best people. I met Bill Simmons years ago. Literally exactly the same. **David:** Yes. **Jackson:** All of the best people are like this. **David:** It makes life easier. You don't have to like it, that's fine. But the people that love you will deeply love you. I text some random stuff, inner monologue stuff. Patrick and I work together, and we are both obsessive podcasters. We talk about podcasts a lot. I remember it was 7:00 a.m. on a Saturday, and I texted him, "This whole game is for the taking. There's nobody else. The work ethic's not there. This is a fait accompli. As long as I don't stop..." **Jackson:** it's a blue ocean. **David:** He texted me back. First of all, he was in Nantucket with his family and was like, "What the fuck are you doing on a Saturday morning?" But then he said, "Out of all the people I know—and he knows a lot of people—you are the person that wakes up every day the most sure about what they want to do." I thought that was a great response. Gagosian is like that. Sam Walton is like that. Steve Jobs was like that. Phil Knight was like that. Elon Musk. They're all like that. They're not sitting there wondering, "How do I feel today? What should I do?" It's just blinders on. Wake up. Go. **Jackson:** When you know what you're working on, especially if you have momentum, you spend very little time wondering about what else. **David:** I'd be curious about your perspective on this because we've talked for a while, and you were in the wind trying to figure it out. I've been in that spot too. Once you find it, the sense of relief feels like this thing just comes off of you. Now you can direct your energy. You still have love and fear. You're human beings; you have these oscillations of emotions. But the relief that I have is that I've found something. What is it? What's the ikigai? It's something you're... **Jackson:** Something the world wants, something that you're good at, something that you love. And there's a fourth. **David:** That intersection. **Jackson:** Yes. **David:** If you look at my actual interests, I'm interested in four primary things: podcasts, reading, entrepreneurship, and history. **Jackson:** DUH: Founders. **David:** It's actually beneficial for people. This actually just happened: we were at a really fancy wedding this past weekend, and one of my friends, who's an absolute killer—just remarkable, one of the world's best at what he does—said, "You have no idea the impact you're having. You are changing people's lives. It's one of the few things you can put into the world that has no negative externalities. It is good work." I appreciate that he said that. As soon as he says that, you think about it, and then you forget it and go back to doing it. The dangerous part is what I heard from another podcaster, super famous, probably top five in the world. This person mentioned that now, with the interviews she is doing, she said, "I can do this in my sleep." No, you can't. If you believe that, you won't be one of the top ones a few years from now. **Jackson:** To respond to your question, one of the things I found myself telling people very early on in the podcast was, "I'm not totally sure what this is, but it's easy for me to care a lot about it." That was the thread I had to keep pulling on. There's another quote I loved. In your interview with Chris Williamson, he brought up a quote from someone who works with Tim Cook at Apple. Tim said, "When you find the thing, when you're focused on the thing, you're going to have to work super hard, but your tools will feel light in your hands." That so captures what you just said. When you're on a mission, the other stuff falls away. **David:** I don't spend a lot of time with VCs. One of my favorite VCs is a guy named Ho Nam from Altos Ventures. He invited me to have dinner with him and his whole team in their office in the Bay Area. The reason we bond is because he has this great blog post called "Hedgehogs vs. Foxes." Their investment thesis is very simple: They back hedgehogs. You go to their office and there's a giant picture of a hedgehog right when you walk in. The hedgehog knows a lot about one thing, and the fox knows very little about a lot of things. I'm a hedgehog guy. Ho says that \\\*Founders\\\* is a podcast about hedgehogs run by a hedgehog. At the very bottom, he quotes from a book on Vince Lombardi about commitment. It says the original Latin root for commitment meant "to cut"—an incision. Ho's point was that once you make a commitment, you cut away everything else. I think most humans are very scared to commit to something. **Jackson:** Yes. **David:** They want to maintain optionality. I'm not interested in optionality. I don't want to think about anything else. People tell me, "You should raise a fund. You should do all this other stuff." No, I will keep podcasting, thank you very much. You're not going to distract me, because I know that 99% of the people on the planet cannot focus on a single thing for a long period of time. That's why 99% will never be great at what they do. It is very important for me to be really great at what I do, if not the best in the world at what I do. **Jackson:** There's a Munger idea that learning is changing your behavior. I have a joke that there are a lot of things I know but haven't yet learned. This is one of the things I'm finally starting to learn. As someone who is very freedom-seeking, the most freeing thing is commitment. When you commit, the other stuff drops away and you're free to run. There's open road. **David:** What's fascinating to me is that when you commit to something, my favorite founders to hang out with are old. When I mean old, I mean over seventy. **Jackson:** Yeah. **David:** They've been working on their business for 30, 40, 50 years, and you get the sense they have an understanding they can't even explain to you. It's an intuition that's built up over an excessively long period of time. They can tell you certain principles that are important. They're usually micromanagers. They were very close to the customer. They spend all their time with the people actually delivering the service or the product to the customer, none with their executives. You see a lot of the same patterns over and over again. I mentioned Todd Graves. The reason he couldn't sleep is because he wanted to wake up to go to one of his stores. His stores are restaurants. He owns 915 of them. That kind of guy will not franchise. They're all corporate-owned. **Jackson:** Crazy. **David:** He's not hanging out at the office. He wants to be there making bread and handing chicken fingers out the drive-through. That's what's important to him. You see that over and over again. The reason I think that's important is once you make the commitment, that's where true specific knowledge comes from—going down this path, iterating, and making a mistake. That's a form of education, and then adapting that to your work. The reason I'm going to make this episode about how I make Founders is because I talk to a lot of other podcasters and they ask, "You do what?" and they're very surprised. I was just at this dinner where they sat me next to Harry Stebbings on purpose. Harry has been really nice to me, and it was the first time I met him in person. They sat me next to him because they know if I'm sitting next to a podcaster, everybody else falls away and I'm just going to ask: How do you do this? Why do you do this? Thirty minutes in, Harry said, "Oh my God. You're an artist. We do different things. I'm glad I wouldn't compete with you because I couldn't. We're not doing the same thing, so it doesn't matter." I think people overrate the competitiveness in podcasts. The world's very big out there. **Jackson:** You're very positive-sum for a highly competitive person. **David:** I wish it was zero-sum. I wish at the end of the year there was some way to say, "I told you motherfuckers that you shouldn't have competed with me." **Jackson:** There might be eventually. **David:** The best analogy for podcasters is filmmakers. They were all friends. They shared information, they shared techniques, and in some cases helped each other finance their films. If somebody watched Jaws on Tuesday and Star Wars on Wednesday, it doesn't take away from Spielberg or Lucas. It's just a better way to get through life. It's weird because I know some other podcasters fight with each other, and it's funny to me. This is not a competitive thing. I wish it was, but it's just not. It's fascinating to see how people that are doing similar work to you approach it. That's my point. If you've only thought about that for nine years, of course you're going to come up with some weird technique that would be impossible to predict from the outside. ## [01:06:52] Considering Stuff Beyond Podcasting **Jackson:** There's one little thread I talked about with Tammy, which is the seventy-year-old entrepreneurs. You have this level of mastery where you go from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence—you don't know what you don't know, to you know what you don't know—to conscious competence, which is most people. Then at that final level, you get to unconscious competence, where they can't even really describe exactly what it is. I have to imagine the 70-year-old David Senra doing this will be like Rick Rubin, who's like, "What do you mean? I don't know what I'm doing. It's simple." The other thing that made me think of that is a selfish question. If you were to do anything else—and maybe this is sacrilegious—the one thing I could see being a natural extension of Founders would be making a documentary. In many ways, Founders feels like a mini version of that. I'm curious if there's anybody who would immediately come to mind as someone big enough or interesting enough that would be exciting. **David:** It wouldn't come to mind. **Jackson:** No? Is there anybody? **David:** That's work for somebody else. It’s like they're writing the book. All the publishers ask me because I sell a lot of books. **Jackson:** My version of that question would be similar: Would you write a biography? Not a book about all the lessons. **David:** No, I will podcast. If your question is, "Will you do something else besides podcasts?" the answer has to be no. **Jackson:** Fair enough. **David:** There's this kid, Wouter, who traveled all over the world, made the Founder's book, and spent all this money. I was hosting this event at Ramp, and they told me this guy wouldn't leave. **Jackson:** I'm meeting him next week. **David:** He's doing crazy research and everything else. The Ramp events team asked me to just take two minutes with him. He paid $5,000 to make me a book. That's a crazy thing to do. So I wound up talking to him. I just like people that show effort in whatever they're doing, whether sweeping the floor, making a podcast, or building a company. I don't care. I just want you to take what you do seriously. Then we sat around—me, him, Patrick, and the two founders of Ramp. How much valuable information did this young kid from the Netherlands get out of that conversation? I told him, "Listen, if you want to do this, what you have here is not what I want. But if you want to partner with my friend Eric Jorgensen..." Eric was one of the first people to put me on his podcast when no one knew who I was. I think it was the second podcast I ever went on. He's the one that introduced me to Chris Williamson. **Jackson:** He does the Naval Almanac and some other things. **David:** He's the CEO of Scribe, which is a way to self-publish, and I thought Eric had to be the one to do the book. I'm never going to sit down and write the book because it's not podcasting. All the podcasters I know that write books say, "Fuck, I shouldn't have done this." I told them so. They're in the process of doing that right now. The deal I made is that I want to make sure it's available for free to read, just like Naval did. I think it's a great idea. You can read it for free, and if you want to buy it, it's 15 or 20 bucks. The money it makes can go to Wouter. I don't need to make money off the book. If it's high quality enough, I will make my audience aware that it exists. If it sells enough, he will probably make a million dollars, and that's fine. It just has to be good enough. So far, the drafts that they've sent are not good enough. This book may never come out because I have to be able to say, "This is worth you spending 20 bucks on"—not even the money, but spending eight hours to read. ## [01:10:40] Focus and Making Time for Relationships **Jackson:** On this note, if focus is saying no—this is the classic Steve Jobs idea. It's not saying no to bad ideas, but saying no to good ideas. Have there been any truly painful things you've had to say no to, either personally or from other examples you've studied? That didn't sound painful at all. You make it sound easy. **David:** Personally, I have never experienced something that was truly painful. The one thing that you could say is a distraction from the podcast is something I also prioritize: relationships. I'm in New York right now. My schedule is going to be different when I'm in New York than when I'm in my studio at home. **David:** Part of the reason that's so important is because relationships are really important to me. What is the podcast? It's an ability for me to build relationships at scale. That is another form of education because I'm reading about great people, and now I get access to them. **David:** We build relationships and I learn from them. They'll also check you. I have two or three people that I've become close with through the podcast that will tell me when I'm fucking up in a direct way. They'll say, "This isn't good enough. You're making a bad decision here." They're not trying to belittle me or anything like that. They're just saying, "No, you don't understand. This is not quality. This doesn't fit the rest of the stuff that you're doing, and it's not a good use of your time." The one thing that would be painful to say no to is people. I don't spend as much time with the people I could spend time with because my work is so labor-intensive. I feel like I'm a manufacturer. I'm not capital; I'm labor. I am the labor. **Jackson:** I think that point can't be overstated in this case. **Jackson:** That is the foundational thing that I think most people are at odds with. They're always looking to automate and get leverage on a thing so they don't have to do it. You're quite literally the inverse of that. **David:** You don't work your entire life to do something you love to not do it. **Jackson:** It's the Charlie Brown guy. **David:** The interesting thing about that is I've had dinners with very powerful people in media and entrepreneurship, and they'll say, "I have an idea for you. Have you ever thought about somebody else reading the books for you?" **Jackson:** That's crazy. You do not understand what this is. **David:** I'm not doing it for that. I think the hard way is the right way. This is not intelligence; this is effort. If you apply considerably more effort over a longer period of time, by human nature, you will have less competition. I'm sure there is another me out there. I'm sure there are probably ten. Are there a thousand? Unlikely. So if there are ten of them and there was a competitive game going on... **Jackson:** We'll share the prizes. It's 10%. **David:** I have a 10% chance. The odds are way better in my favor than with something that is low-hanging fruit—something less labor-intensive and less time-intensive. **Jackson:** The friction is good. **David:** Yes. ## [01:14:00] What Should David Delegate? **Jackson:** One question on this. Walt Disney has the idea: "If we lose the details, we lose everything." Elon talks about not separating yourself from the pain of your decisions. You want to have your hand on the stove. You're very anti-delegation and anti-automation. We are entering a world where we have truly intelligent help or automation, and it's only going to get better. You recently hired Maxim. You have somebody doing shorts for you. It's the one thing that isn't the podcast but is adjacent to it. Most businesses aren't like podcasts. They have to hire people; they have to delegate. Elon has a line where he talks about how if you automate things, you have to make sure you fully do the whole process first. So, my question is, what is the line for that type of thing? Even Mr. Beast has an editor now; he used to not. What is the line for that type of thing? Or is it actually going to go the other way? Are most things going to become more like podcasting, where you have one-person companies? What enables you to hire someone like Maxim? Maybe that's an even simpler version of the question. **David:** Making videos to promote the podcast is not the podcast. **Jackson:** Totally. **David:** Right. I could take time away from making the podcast to learn how to video edit, but that doesn't make sense. So I did what every other podcaster does. You have podcaster friends and they say, "Oh, use this." They all outsource it, God bless them. They're outsourced to the Philippines or India. I'm not trying to make the cheapest thing; I'm trying to make the best thing. I want great. **Jackson:** Great is above scale. Critically, you care about scale, but scale never surpasses great. **David:** I went through so many of these people, and I'd watch what they made. It's considerably worse than the podcast. The edits that Maxim does are on par, if not better. How did I get that? Through years of trial and error, buying clips that you never saw because I spent money on shit that no one ever saw. I thought, "This is embarrassing." I decided I wouldn't have clips. I'd rather have nothing than shit. And then Blake Robbins—he hangs on the edge of the internet, and he's got great taste—said, "There's this kid, Maxim." **Jackson:** I met him on that same trip to New York, I think, **David:** and he's obsessed with one podcast. "Would you take time to meet him?" So he, Patrick, and I met in New York. I think Maxim was 23 at the time. It wasn't to work together. Blake had sent me something like, "Oh, this guy's good." He was making his own videos. He went from zero to 800,000 followers. **Jackson:** He was making a video edit every day. **David:** Yeah, and he did it in six months, nine months, something like that. We were just talking to the kid, and it's obvious. You can tell if somebody's with it, has a brain, is serious. It's a lot easier if they have a body of work to point to. **Jackson:** Yes. **David:** You realize this is a serious player. I'm not wasting my time here. The whole time, I wasn't convincing him to work for me. I was like, "You need to get your ass to America." I go, "How old are you?" He's like, "23." "Do you have a girlfriend?" "Nah." "Do you have any kids?" "No." I was like, "What are you doing? You're super talented. The opportunity here is so much better." I think he was in England at the time, and now he's in France. But he didn't listen to that. I thought he was smart and interesting, so we would text. It took me, I don't know, six months, something like that. I know what he wanted to do. He was making a documentary, and he wants to do more. He didn't want to just stay in short form; he has other ambitions. He was going back and forth because he's doing this insane, full-length documentary on Steve Jobs. I remember texting him one day, "How are you paying your bills?" because he stopped uploading. He wasn't doing any brand deals, not doing anything. He's just like, "Well, everybody always asked me how to do my edits, so I made a course on how to do it. And I'm living off that." I go, "Do you want to do that?" He goes, "No." And I was like, "Why don't you do this? Why don't you just exclusively come and make clips for Founders?" I'm pretty sure we did the whole thing over text. And this is a sign of working with truly talented people. They're easy to understand. They make things easy. So I was like, "Listen, this is what I want. I don't care about numbers. I want great. Can you do one every weekday? Name your price." I went to bed because we're in different time zones. I woke up and he'd sent three paragraphs. He laid out exactly how he envisions it and said the same thing: "Can we not judge it on views?" Which, again, is about audience quality. This is what people don't understand in business podcasts: if you're chasing numbers, you don't know what you're doing. You can measure numbers, but you can't measure quality. **Jackson:** It's the same thing as growth and duration. **David:** Yeah. So he named his price, which is six times what other people pay. **Jackson:** Sure. **David:** And I sent back one word: "Done." And that's it. I don't give him any direction. It doesn't take any of my time. He sends them to me. I don't give him any access to my social media. You're not posting for me. You're not doing any of that. I watch them. If I think it's good, I post it. We've done, I don't know, like 150. And I think I've only not posted maybe six. **Jackson:** This is getting into something really interesting. Obviously, he's an exception, but there is something to the notion of, "I don't delegate at all, and also I allow for exceptions." You have another thing. You have a Post-it note on your computer—or at least you used to—one of two Post-it notes, which is, "What assets do I have that I'm not currently using?" **David:** Yeah. **Jackson:** I realize it's not exactly the same, but it's related. Yes, don't delegate. Focus on the thing. But also, that's a really important question. You're at a level now where you're probably doing a pretty good job of leveraging the assets available to you, but I'm sure you haven't capped out on that. I think most of us are actually way behind. How does that fit with the focus? Or maybe just broadly, how has that question enabled you? **David:** You stay in the details, but there's nothing that I'm currently doing that I could delegate. I'm going to read because I like to read. That's why the podcast is good, because I enjoy the activity of reading itself. I prefer to be alone half my waking hours. We said something earlier about an event or people being there. I don't want to be around people. It's not interesting to me. I don't go to group dinners. I don't go to sports games. I like small, intimate gatherings of really smart people and nothing else. The reading is going to stay the same. Is somebody else going to record the podcast? You want me to outsource that? No. The editing—the biggest thing people say, and Mr. Beast tells me this all the time, his favorite podcast is Founders. **Jackson:** Remember who introduced you? **David:** You and somebody else. You and Blake, too. It was two or three people. I forgot who told him about the podcast, but it might have been you. You definitely put us in a group chat. The biggest thing is the idea that an editor doesn't need to be me if they just sit next to me and understand my taste. I just fundamentally disagree. I think the value is in the edit. But there are assets that— **Jackson:** You have that you're not currently using. Do you agree with that? **David:** For sure. One example of this is investing. I can't force myself to be interested in it. I'm just not interested in it. I'm interested in making a phenomenal, world-class product. That's what I think of. Yet I have crazy relationships and access to all these founders and the best investors in the world. I've done very little angel investing, and it's all because I've basically been pulled into it. The crazy thing I realized is that no one else could even get in on that. There's this guy named James from a company called Profound. This might be an interesting story. I spent a lot of time with Kareem, one of the founders of Ramp. What I like about Kareem is how discontent and dissatisfied he always is. He has excessively high bars for products, people, and everything else. I was at his house for dinner, and he was just railing on all this stuff he doesn't like. I said, "Alright, what the fuck do you actually like? I don't want to hear what you don't like, tell me what you do." Because it's a great signal: the guy for whom nothing is high enough quality. **Jackson:** What's above the line? **David:** He was talking about this company and this founder. I pulled up my phone and searched the guy's name. It turns out he followed me on Twitter. I thought, "Oh, I'll follow him because Kareem says this kid's smart." **David:** Immediately I get a DM. He's a huge fan of the podcast and asks, "Are you ever in New York City?" I said, "I'll be there in two days." He told me to come by, and we wound up having this meeting. He tells me this crazy story. He had sold his last company and didn't know what to do. He was in that trough of not knowing what his next thing was. He lives in New York City, has a big dog, and would walk 20,000 or 30,000 steps a day just listening to Founders for hours. He said, "You helped me." Now their company is ripping. They raised from Sequoia and all this crazy stuff. He goes, "Hey, I may be over my skis here, but do you angel invest? The round is closed, but do you want to get in?" I didn't know initially. **Jackson:** It's exhaust for you. That's really all it is. **David:** This is important because a good friend of mine had somehow found out I knew this guy and said, "Get me in the round." I texted him, and he said no. There's no other room. **Jackson:** The exception is for you. **David:** He doesn't have a podcast that I love. There are a bunch of different ways to do this. You could take the money that the podcast makes, and I could partner with somebody like Jeremy who thinks about it all day long. There are a million other things I could be doing around this. I will never be taking individual meetings. To decide if I want to invest in this is so stupid for me; it's a distraction from what I'm doing. The asset that I have that I'm not utilizing is the relationships I'm building from the podcast. ## [01:24:36] Advice for 2017 David **Jackson:** If you were to give advice to David in 2017—to put this in perspective, presumably there's going to be a David in 2029 who could do the same thing—what could that David have been doing better? Aside from maybe simplifying? What assets was he not using? **David:** Guess what? Your biggest asset is your differentiated podcast, and you put a giant wall in front of it. **Jackson:** That's the easiest answer ever. **David:** Maybe don't do that. The amount of people--Hinkie is one of them--You couldn't even share it. Think about how many people share it now. How many people have shared the Elon episode this week? It's been crazy. **Jackson:** Such a great episode. **David:** It's crazy. I've heard from so many people. I think it was charging a hundred dollars a year. He was buying gift subscriptions like it was candy because he said, I can't share your stupid podcast without buying an entire gift subscription, emailing it to them, and then they have to activate the RSS feed. What were you doing? **Jackson:** That's the worst part. It's not even the money. It's the private RSS feed. Good luck. **David:** This is the crazy thing. Not only could you see who was listening and who subscribed, you could see if they activated. I was a huge fan of \*Invest Like the Best\*, and I saw an email address that I recognized. I'm not going to repeat it, but I knew who it was. I'm a fan of that guy's podcast, so that was pretty cool. Then I checked a few weeks later: not activated. **Jackson:** Brutal. **David:** Eventually, he told me the story. He heard about it from one person he trusted, then another person. The second time he heard about it, he bought a subscription. Then he heard about it again and again from people who have his number. He finally said, "God damn it, now I'll activate the stupid private RSS feed." And then he started listening to it. **Jackson:** Then he tweeted about it. Back to Sam's point, there's a lot of stuff where I'll read one good essay. I probably heard the Steve Jobs one really early on, and you listen and think, "That's great." But something in your brain doesn't fully click. I did this with Patrick. I've told him this. I listened to one, two, three, or four interviews with him and thought, "Man, all of those people are amazing." I did not process it at all. Then finally, on the seventh one, I realized either they're all amazing, which is kind of true, or Patrick is a really amazing person at drawing them out. I do find that sometimes you have to go listen to three in a row, and then you realize, "Oh my gosh, it's a treasure trove." I'm sure your show is the extreme version of this. **David:** This is why I like the advice that Anthony Bourdain got. Right before his first book came out, he met with another successful author who was way further down the path. He asked, "Do you have any advice for me?" The author said, "Yeah, promote, promote, promote, or this all dies." **Jackson:** Well that's the moving audience again. **David:** Yeah. Somebody said they have notifications on for when I tweet, which is insane because my phone is on permanent DND. You cannot get to me. They said, "You tweet a lot." And I asked, "How do you know that?" "Because I have notifications on for you." The best way to use Twitter was shared on one of your episodes that I sent you: You just tweet all day long and you read none of it. All of my tweets are just me promoting quotes from past episodes and then linking to the episode. The amount of people who say, "I didn't even know you did an episode on Bob Dylan or XYZ..." You have to promote, promote, promote. Somebody could listen to one, two, or three episodes, but once they listen to 20, 30, or 50, they've told so many people. You've got to get them further down that path. ## [01:28:21] Storytelling and Clear Thinking **Jackson:** One of the most common, recurring themes is storytelling and world-building amongst entrepreneurs. You referenced the Don Valentine quote: "The money flows after the story." There's also an idea from Edwin Land about the "keeper of the language." Language is part of this. What makes for truly, truly great storytelling for people like Steve Jobs or Elon? And how does specific language factor into that? **David:** The best storytellers are the clearest thinkers. You mentioned Steve Jobs. He's the clearest thinker that I've ever come across. If you have clear thinking, you have super clear communication. **Jackson:** Is clear communication the same as great storytelling, though? **David:** No, great storytelling is clear. It's simplified. It would be hard to argue that the best storytellers in the world aren't musicians. If you look at Tom Petty's lyrics or even Taylor Swift's lyrics… my daughter put me on to a song called L O M L by Taylor Swift. I don't even think it has a chorus. Not Love of My Life... Loss of My Life? It's four minutes long, and while reading along with the lyrics, I was like, "Wow, she told an entire story here with so few different words." I did the biography of Dr. Seuss. The guy was 50 years old and wasn't a success, and he wound up selling 700 million books. He was at it for so long. One of his most successful selling books was \*The Cat in the Hat\*, and he designed it within constraints. He asked, "Can I tell an entire story using 50 different words or less?" You can reuse the same word over and over again, but it's only those 50. **Jackson:** Necessity is the mother of all invention. **David:** That economy of... beautiful simplicity is what I think makes the best stories. They're simple to understand and therefore simple to repeat and share. That's my biggest critique of some of my past episodes. Right now, I'm under so much fucking stress and working flat out that I'm telling people around me a line from Brad Jacobs's book: "Resist the urge to flood the channel with non-essential information." There's a certain amount of stuff that I do not want to be aware of right now because I have way too much in my head. A better story, a better idea, a better podcast is always taking away, never adding. That's clarity of thought—the constant refinement. How did Jobs get like that? There is some level of verbal mastery. One of the first things ever written about him was when he was 22, trying to sell the Apple computer at a convention. A random reporter interviewed him for one minute, and you're just like, "Wow." So there's some level of talent. You combine natural talent—are you charismatic? Do people want to talk to you or have dinner with you? That might be a sign that you should be doing things orally, giving speeches or doing podcasts. You have some built-in talent, and then you work at it for a long period of time. There's an entire book called \*The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs\*. I think it's episode 349 or 350 of \*Founders\*, and it's essentially about how he crafted his storytelling. It is not just right off the tongue, let it rip. It is repetition over and over again, practicing every single word. Is there a better way to say it? Can we edit that down? **Jackson:** It's like a magician almost. On stage, he pulls the iPod Nano out of his pocket. ## [01:32:19] Defying Rationality and Creating Magic with Obsessive Details **Jackson:** There's one other piece of this. You say people try to analyze business in a rational way, which is weird because humans are nothing but irrational. A huge part of storytelling is the emotional part or the feeling part. How do great products, founders, the iPhone, or Raising Cane's defy rationality? **David:** Todd Graves from Raising Cane's and I just had this conversation. He's anti-theoretical, anti-intellectual when it comes to business. **Jackson:** Okay. **David:** It's very, very simple. He's very easy to understand because he has a very interesting, simple organizing principle. He believes in doing one thing and doing it better than anybody else. He believes in limiting the amount of details and then making every detail perfect. For him, there's nothing theoretical about this. Is this the best chicken? Is this better? What is the response? Did the sales go up? What's the time? He manages every element of his business. Can we make the coleslaw better? Is the bread fine? He thinks about this at such a granular level. I think all of the iteration and behind-the-scenes work that goes into it is why it has a cult-like following. I was just visiting my brother and sister. They'd never been to Raising Cane's before, and I was going to take them. Raising Cane's was in the South for a long time, and now it's in Florida. We show up and they're like, "What the hell's going on here?" because the drive-through is lined down the block, and we can't even get a table inside because we have to wait for somebody to get up. Todd purposely puts his restaurants around what people view as his competitors, that he does not view as his competitors, like a Chili's or a Wendy's. I remember looking at the Wendy's across the street. There was a single car in the drive-through. I don't even know if you can put into words what you can explain. It was all the work he's done and the iterative work of making his product better. First of all, by saying, "This is going to be the product." So all the iteration goes into making that existing product better, not dividing attention to a different product over here. The result of all that knowledge, skill, and practice has now compounded for three decades. A new person gets this and they're like, "What is this?" They can't describe the magic. There's a line in Dyson's autobiography that I thought was interesting, that I missed the first few times I read it. He said something like, "The magic of a product should never be underestimated." He defines the magic as how it does what it does. It's not, "Oh, the vacuum cleaner sucks air out." There's something magical about the experience when you use a Dyson vacuum cleaner compared to a Hoover. To get back to your original question, it's irrational. I don't know what's going on here. I just know these two things are not giving me the same feeling, the same sensation. **Jackson:** What's interesting is that across all three of those—with Jobs and with Cane's—there's this combination. There's so much work, effort, precision, detail, and almost a scientific level of intensity to make this thing on the other side of the curtain seem like magic. **David:** This is why I always say Jeff Bezos deserves all the money that he has: because he made a magic button. What is that magic button? All the complexity behind it. This is the physical world, man. **Jackson:** It's literally insane. **David:** It's getting more insane. When I travel, if I don't have a bunch of books with me, I read entire books on the Kindle app on my iPhone, which is an idea I got from Elon. The problem is, you're tempted to jump off the Kindle app and go to something stupid like TikTok or Twitter. So my friend said, "Just get a Kindle Paperwhite." He showed me his this past weekend, and I thought it was really cool. They're the size of my hand, but you can only read on it. I had the first Kindle when it first came out. It was huge and complicated with all the buttons. They've removed everything now. It's much more simple. I ordered it right away, and it came to my house four hours later. **Jackson:** It's one of those things we're just used to. One of the really fascinating things about technology, broadly, is the goal posts. If you showed somebody Google Translate in 1980, they would think you had created AGI. And now with ChatGPT-5, it's two weeks old and I'm kind of bored. **David:** This is also why I'm anti-redlining information fast or listening to podcasts on 3x speed. The point is you need to sit with it longer. I had this thought about what a miraculous piece of technology a book is. I'm sitting here with Dyson's paperback book that was published in 2003. It's one of the first editions, and that book in my hand is 20 years old. It's marked up, but I'm looking at these squiggly lines written on a piece of paper that somehow go directly into my brain from another human. I'm able to learn from his collective experience. It's light, I can take it with me, and it's good on my eyes. It's perfect. That's why it's lasted. Books have been around for 5,000 years. It's very hard to improve. In fact, Bezos talked about that when he was building the Kindle: You can't out-book a book, so you have to come from a completely different angle than just making a slightly better book. I just thought it was a beautiful experience of just sitting there, staring at the page and sitting with the ideas. Not, "Okay, I'm on page 25. Let me get to 26. Let me get to 27. I'm done." There's not a test at the end. That's not the point. It's understanding. If you understand, then you actually change your behavior. ## [01:38:09] Self-Deception and Understanding Who You Are **Jackson:** One of your favorite lines is from Michael Jordan: "They're deceiving themselves about what the game requires." You also say entrepreneurship is an internal thing. What are most founders deceiving themselves about? **David:** The founders that I study on the podcast, almost nothing. Because they're the best. **Jackson:** I'm more asking about people towards the beginning of their journey or people today. **David:** This ties into something you said earlier about having a fundamental understanding of yourself. It's very hard to fight against your innate nature. Sometimes you do it because you want money, prestige, or status. Your best bet is to follow your natural curiosity. We have a hard time doing that because we're worried about the perceptions of other people. I just don't think about other people. We were walking through the park on the way here, and I had that moment where I zoomed out and realized there are other people around me. This is interesting. All these people in the park are choosing different ways to live their life. I'm choosing to read books and make podcasts. This guy's dancing with no shirt on. This guy's begging for money. This fat guy's eating an ice cream cone. We're all choosing. And then I go back to working on Founders, reading more books, making more podcasts, and finding more listeners. It’s the stuff that I just naturally think about. The answer to your question is something that I believe but cannot prove: The reason the best entrepreneurs, almost without a doubt, have their best work decades into their career is not just because they have more experience, a better network, more money, and more resources. I also think they have a much deeper and more fundamental understanding of who they are, and they've built a business to reflect that. That business is completely natural to them. That's where a lot of the younger founders are missing. Rule number two in my family’s household is to mind your own business, so I don't care what other people do, but sometimes I forget the audience. A friend of mine runs a fund, and his thesis is backing second-time founders. I don't do many speaking gigs—it has to be convenient for me or for a friend. This one was in Miami, so I could drive to it, and I'm friends with them. I went up on stage and talked about how stupid it is to sell your company. When people walk up to me now and say, "I sold my company," I say, "Sorry to hear that." My friend said, "You know who's in the audience? Every single person in the audience..." **Jackson:** That's the whole premise. **David:** I saw one of those guys at a wedding I was at last weekend. This was about a year and a half later. He said, "Something you said that day really rattled my mind." He thinks it was a mistake because now he has a job, and he's really an entrepreneur. How much would you have to pay me to be demoted to an employee? There's no amount of money. I'm not working for you. I don't care what the money is. Now he can't come up with a better idea. His mistake was that he sold his best idea. I'm not saying you should never sell your company. You should always be working on your best idea. If you have a better idea, then sell the other one and get a big bag of money. Good. I like wealth. I'm as capitalist as they come. **Jackson:** By the way, there are a lot of great entrepreneurs who had an early win. Patrick and John Collison are a great example of this. Their early win is what enabled them. Maybe they could have done it anyway, but there are a lot of cases where that happens. **David:** If you're broke, it's going to be a lot harder. The mistake younger founders make is that they're interested in \*a\* startup. I'm not interested in a startup; I'm interested in your last business. I want to know, is this your last business? Because then we can have really interesting conversations. I know you're going to be doing it forever. You're going to be investing in things that compound. We speak the same language. We're not this start, scale, sell mentality. I know we're doing this in a VC's office, and this is their entire business. They can make money and they love it. **Jackson:** There are VCs who like to invest in businesses and hold them forever too. **David:** Do whatever is interesting to you. That's just not interesting to me. If you really want to be great at what you do, you have to try to get to your last business as fast as possible. The longer you're in it, think about what Michael Dell can explain to you after having 41 years of business, reinventing his business, and surfing so many different technological waves. Think about what's in that guy's head. I hung out with his son, Zach, a few nights ago. He has this thing he calls "Dad Terminal." Instead of a Bloomberg Terminal where you type in a question to get an answer, he just calls his dad: "Hey, I'm having a supply chain issue. Do you have any advice?" I'm sure Michael Dell knows a thing or two about supply chains. That's the stuff that's interesting to me. There wasn't such a thing as an entrepreneurship industry, but there is now. When you're talking to somebody and seeking their advice, you have to think about their incentives. What did Charlie Munger say? Incentives rule everything around you. He says, "I've been in the top five percent of my age cohort my entire life understanding the power of incentives, and not a year goes by that I don't underestimate the power of incentives." There are a lot of people playing house, as Paul Graham says. They think of founders as being glamorous or rich or famous, and they're just doing it for all the other stuff. I like people that love the activity for the sake of itself. Steve Jobs was going to make insanely great products whether he was rich or not. He was compelled to do that. That's the stuff that's very fascinating to me. Do a business based around an activity that you love for its own sake. You could be obsessed with supply chain management, investing, or reading. I remember telling one of my oldest friends when I started the podcast that I was going to make a living reading books. They thought it was the stupidest thing they'd ever heard. Six years later, he could name the restaurant we were at and where we were standing when it happened. He said, "I can't believe you did this. I thought it was the dumbest thing ever." Think about how much effort and time I put into that because I loved the activity for the sake of itself. ## [01:45:01] Intution **Jackson:** I have a bunch of questions we can take quickly, like a lightning round. They don't have to be instant. **Jackson:** In the Nolan episode, you talked about how instinct kept coming up across all these founders. Why do you think instinct and intuition is such a common theme? **David:** I don't know about instinct. I think intuition. My favorite living novelist was Cormac McCarthy. He just died, unfortunately. He didn't give many interviews throughout his life, but he did give a few, and he was remarkably consistent about what he said. When he wrote Blood Meridian, which is a masterpiece that will probably be read 100 years from now, he said he actually didn't write it. It just came from his subconscious. He let that channel open, and his fingers were tied directly to his subconscious. Out this story came. He said something fascinating I had never heard before: people underestimate or under-prioritize their subconscious mind, and the subconscious is actually older than language. It survived as we evolved for a reason. It's very powerful and wise, but we don't understand it. My life is entirely based on intuition. When I was growing up, I thought the value was in being analytical and numbers-based. I didn't want to live that way. It's not interesting to me. Everything I do is based on that, including spending time with you. Somebody asked me before I came here if I say yes to every podcast. Of course not. But I like Jackson. I don't know why; there's just something there. There are also weird things where we almost ran into each other in Japan—we were on the other side of a wall. We were on the same street in New York and didn't know it. The universe is putting us together without us planning. My intuition says I like this guy, and I'm a fan of your podcast. Most podcasts suck; they're terrible. I think you're good at it, and you're good early, which is a sign that there's something here. When people ask how I pick what to include in the podcast or what I underline, it's all intuition. I don't think. I've mentioned Steph Curry a few times—I guess he's on my mind. It's probably because of a clip I keep watching where they ask him, "What do you think when you shoot?" He goes, "Absolutely nothing." It's just the practice over time, and to me, that's a form of intuition. It's the subconscious. It's not me sitting here thinking, "Let me pause. Let me think. Where's my elbow?" I don't know why I get to a certain page. A single page might have 500 words—I don't know the number—but those seven jump out at me, so I'm going to underline them. When I read them two, three, four, five, six times before I record the podcast, if I still feel that way, then it should be in there. There is no other justification than that. If you think about Steve Jobs, one of the greatest entrepreneurs, he said intuition has been far more important to his career than intellect. As he got older, he was able to trust his intuition more and more. That's the only thing that guides me. I go off intuition and vibes. It sounds so willy-foo-foo. Ten years ago, David would hear me say this and think, "What is wrong with you?" But there's some kind of intelligence that I can't comprehend that I trust. It has guided me to this point, so I should keep doing that. ## [01:48:34] Being Easy to Interface With **Jackson:** You and Patrick talked about being easy to interface with. How have you gotten better at that? **David:** This is another idea from Steve Jobs: easy to interface with, easy to understand. If ideas and products are easy to understand, they're easy to spread. That's what's important, and it goes back to clear communication. I tend to think in maxims, and I spend a lot of time distilling ideas down to them. For that Chris Williamson episode, I wrote an outline that was just 15 or 17 maxims. I have a notebook with about 150 that I've learned from the podcasts. You distill them down so you can remember them and carry them with you. **Jackson:** Creating internal memes. **David:** Then you can apply them as these situations come up. This is something that Daniel Ek told me. He's ridiculous. He the only company with more paid subscribers than Spotify is Netflix. It's crazy the business he has built, and to me, he's still vastly underrated. **Jackson:** And there's Gustav as well. **David:** He's a killer. **Jackson:** Oh my gosh, that guy. **David:** I spent two and a half hours in Stockholm two months ago talking to him. There are whole teams like that. The reason I bring that up is because he's also very wise. He's like a sniper—he completely identifies what you're doing wrong. He inputs ideas into my head better than almost anybody else because there aren't many of them, but they're very impactful. He's very wise for being so young. We're a similar age, and he's way wiser than I am. He said something to me: "You're really easy to understand, so therefore, you're easy to help." I think that's very powerful. **Jackson:** Oh my gosh. That is one of the most profoundly important ideas, especially in the modern world where there's so much noise. That's powerful. **David:** As for being easy to interface with, I don't know if I would say I am, because of my intensity. **Jackson:** Inviting. Or infectious? **David:** I think it's scary to some people. Passion is definitely infectious, and I'm enthusiastic, but I'm also very stubborn and very hard to deal with. This is why I say I'm sure Hinkie loves me but also hates me at the same time. He finds this pigheaded mule of a person very frustrating to deal with. For example, you'll give me an idea, and I'll say, "This is the stupidest thing I ever heard. I'm not doing it." I'm very direct and don't have a filter. Then six months later, I'll say, "I have this great idea," and you're like, "That was my idea. I told you about it six months ago." **David:** The good news is, you know where you stand with me. I don't act. I don't have the social graces, so there's no hidden motive with me. That may be easy to interface with, but I am difficult to deal with. We were just at this wedding, and one of my close friends was there. We were in a group deciding what to do, and they said, "David doesn't roll with the punches very easily." I'm just very rigid in how I want to spend my time and ruthless about that. I don't want to go spend six hours on a tour; I'd rather read. Distilling down what's important to you in an easy-to-remember phrase and then repeating that to people will be a benefit. You'll be easy to understand, so therefore you're easy to help. If you're marketing a product, if your idea is easy to understand, it's easy to spread. ## [01:52:26] Biography Most Founders Would Benefit From: James Dyson's Against the Odds **Jackson:** Is there a biography that you think most founders would benefit from reading in full? **David:** James Dyson's \*Against the Odds\*. He wrote two: one when he was 45 and one when he was 69. I reread both of them. I'm packaging them in one episode, and that's why the episode is late. The outline is way too much information; I'm wrestling an alligator here. I could make an episode today, but it's going to be complicated and annoying to me when I listen to it a year from now. So I'm editing. It's something I learned from Walt Disney. Animation at that time was so expensive that he said you're forced to edit before you create. What was the thread that we were just on? **Jackson:** James Dyson. **David:** They're both good. The second one is called \*Invention: A Life of Learning Through Failure\*, and you have a much wiser version of him. The reason the first one is so important is because excellence is a capacity to take pain. If you want to be excellent, you're going to have to endure through periods of pain. I have a good friend running a massively successful company, and he said, "I cannot believe this. Our first five years, we've had no problems." I told him that's not going to stay that way. You are going to experience a hell of a lot of pain, especially because you want to do this for your life. There's no such thing as a restart where everything went perfectly. This is not going to happen. The reason that book is so important is because 90% of it is just him failing year after year and refusing to give up. He's funny as hell in the book. He has a distinct point of view. What I'm cutting away for the episode is not the story of perseverance through struggle, because I've covered that in the four episodes I've done on Dyson so far. He's got a very unique philosophy on company building that I think is important to put out there. The way I would describe it is "anti-business billionaires." Maybe it's "anti-business-as-usual billionaires," but "anti-business billionaires" is better branding. It's people that are so obsessed with the quality of the products they're making that they retain control. That is all they focus on. They make sure that they retain control of their company over the long term. They build the world's best products, they never relinquish control to other people, and they wind up with the money anyway. **Jackson:** The business and the money are just gas for the engine. **David:** If you can make the iPhone, you're going to be rich. If you can make Patagonia, starting with climbing equipment and then clothing, you are going to be rich. If you can make the Dyson vacuum cleaner, you are going to be rich. That's why they're anti-business—because they're not doing it for financial reasons. They're not saying, "Okay, this is what the quarter was. How do we enhance shareholder value by 10% over the year?" They don't. It's quality over everything. I didn't even know for years how many people were listening to the podcast. I just tried to make the best possible thing, and I still do that. I'm very glad that the Elon episode is going to be the most downloaded episode of Founders by far. I'm happy with that. It's exciting for a day, but I'm going to go back and do it again and again. Now I'm back struggling with the next one, because that one was five days late. **Jackson:** You're Sisyphus. **David:** Exactly. It was five days late. I went on TBPN. I wasn't sleeping. I looked like shit. I'm close friends with John and Jordi, and they asked, "What is going on?" I said, "I can't find this Elon episode. I can't find it. It's here, but I can't find it." **Jackson:** I know it's here. It's in the marble. **David:** Yes, I have to find him. Yes. I'm going through the exact same thing, and I'll go through it again and again. The fact that it was painful means it will most likely be better. In the back of Raising Cane's, in their kitchen that the customers never see, there's a great sign that says, "Never sacrifice quality for speed." And they're fast. He knows if you walk up there, it's two minutes and 29 seconds. He has everything dialed in, but not at the expense of quality. It's almost like the Elon algorithm where you automate at the end. You add the speed after, but not first. The quality has to be there. That's a handful of words that have helped me through the last few weeks. No one's going to remember if the episode is five days late. They'll remember if it's good or not. ## [01:57:05] Simplicity and Edit Before You Make **Jackson:** Walt Disney. Edit before you make. Animation. **David:** This is my process. What I used to do is go through and underline with a ruler and a pen. I don't do anything sloppy. Then I have Post-it notes, and I write down whatever comes to mind—for example, "Henry Ford said something similar." That's how my brain works. I'll go through the entire book. This was my process for a long time. Then I would go through and read it again, so by the time I sat down to record, I'd have read it three or four times. I used to just move through the book in chronological order. When I got to the end, I was done. That was the episode. What I started doing instead was taking things out. My first edit was realizing that sometimes, in the middle of an episode, I'd get to a page and think, "With the flow of the conversation, I don't need that." So I would just skip it. That was my edit. I didn't have to edit it out later; it never even made it into the microphone. What I've been doing now is ruthlessly editing. I take all of my notes and highlights and put them into a single, numbered document. Really great episodes tend to have maybe 50 things that I want to talk about. The Michael Ferrero episode, which I'm really proud of, is about the guy who owns Ferrero chocolate. It's a privately held company worth $40 billion, owned by a single person. He died, and today it's probably worth $80 billion, still owned by his son or maybe his two sons. That episode had 65 numbered things I wanted to talk about, and it was the perfect length. To give you an indication of where I am in the Dyson edit, I'm at 180. So I'm in big trouble. Basically, what I'm doing now is going back and asking, "What do I actually want the episode to be about?" For Elon, it was: I don't want to talk about his dad, politics, or Twitter. I want to talk about the fact that this guy has the best goddamn company-building principles you will ever come across. **Jackson:** You are not tracing the arc of the biography. **David:** No, I'm not summarizing them. Books that can be summarized are books that are not worth reading. Biographies are worth reading. They nourish your soul. You're an idiot if you're not reading biographies. If all the smartest, most productive people in the world are doing this activity, what are you going to do? Scroll? You're insane for not doing this. You don't have to read a ton, but you should find some. Maybe it's the same one or a handful that you read over and over again, but you definitely should be doing this. I think it's one of the highest-value activities in the world, outside of spending time with your family, taking care of your health, and working on something that's making somebody else's life better. Now, essentially, what I do is just the ruthless edit before I even record. It's just fucking chopping and chopping and chopping. For the Elon episode, the reading took four days. The editing of the outline took five. **Jackson:** And you presumably had 180 of those. **David:** Not only are you cutting entire parts off, but you're also cutting individual words in each sentence and rephrasing them so it sounds better. it's not just taking out individual lines or bullet points; it's rewriting them. Then it's organizing them where they should go together. You realize, "Wait, I kind of already said that. That's another way to say a similar idea," so you can just cut that. It's just literally cutting, cutting, cutting. It's the exact same idea we talked about earlier: it takes a lot longer to write a shorter letter than a longer one. I was talking to Andrew Huberman about this because I'm very interested in the process behind it. He even videotapes himself talking out the ideas aloud. I asked him, "How often do you talk to yourself?" He said, "All the time." I do too. I talk out loud constantly. Sometimes, it's just me hearing the idea and asking myself, "Does that make sense? Do I actually understand what I'm saying?" I don't even know if I understand it. Then I'll start saying the outline out loud to see how it sounds. I don't have to read the whole thing. **Jackson:** Yep. **David:** You just get to the point where there's nothing else to cut. This is it. Then you sit down and record it. After you hear it, you'll edit even more. **Jackson:** You have to feel it. You have to feel it in your hands, or feel it on your tongue in this case. **David:** It's funny you use the word "feel," because I started hand-editing the transcripts at the same time I edit, which is a bad idea. I should do it after I edit. **Jackson:** I do it as I edit. **David:** So it takes forever. That's the way I describe it. I can feel it. I literally feel it. **Jackson:** It's your hand on the stove. It's Elon's thing. It's the same thing. **David:** It's weird because I would never do another all-digital thing again. If I did anything else, I'd have to do something physical. I think there's just something magic. **Jackson:** There's a tighter feedback loop. **David:** It's not even the feedback loop; it's just more interesting. And there's a magic in the fact that… **Jackson:** Talk about durability. **David:** There's a magic in the fact that you can talk into a microphone and anybody over the world can hear it on demand. It's a miracle. But it's so disassociating and hard. I have no other way to describe it other than, by editing the transcript, I feel it. I touch it. I feel the product that I'm making. When I wasn't doing this, I just didn't have that sensation. ## [02:02:42] Lesson for Tech People: Learn from History **Jackson:** Most of my listeners are in technology in some way or another. You study a wide range of people: some of the great technologists, but lots of other people, including people who make chicken tenders and vacuums. **David:** A vacuum is technology, though. That's the world's first dual-cyclonic vacuum. You try to do that. It's not software, but it's patented. **Jackson:** Do you think there's anything that tech people in particular could learn from the other types of entrepreneurs you study? **David:** I don't make a distinction between them. Andrew Carnegie was a tech company founder with Bessemer Steel. It was a better way to do things. What is technology? I think the best definition of technology is in \*Zero to One\*: it's just a better way to do something. One of the reasons that book was so well received is because it's easy to understand and easy to spread. He distilled this down. What is actual technology? It's just a better way of doing things. There's a great line in the book \*The Lessons of History\* by Will and Ariel Durant, where all new technology is just new means to do old ends. **Jackson:** Something like that. **David:** Andrew Carnegie was a technologist. Johnny Rockefeller, oil was technology. I did an episode on Charles Goodyear. Vulcanized rubber, that's a technology. Railroads, that was the technology of the day. Telegraphs, electricity—these are all things that are not thought of as technology now, but they were technology in their day. And you could argue they still are. There's just a lot of lessons you can draw from them. If you're in tech and you're not studying history, why did Bezos get so many ideas? Go listen to the TED talk that Bezos gave 25 years ago. He says the electricity metaphor for the Internet is much better than the "Internet gold rush" metaphor from the late '90s. He thought of the Internet as a thin, horizontal, enabling layer, much more akin to electricity than to a gold rush. These thin, horizontal, enabling layers, once they're invented, go everywhere. Electricity, once it was invented, went everywhere. The Internet, once it was invented, went everywhere. He just gave a talk with Aaron Ross Sorkin at the DealBook Summit, and I did an episode on the interview because it was so good. He says AI is the same thing. It's a thin, horizontal, enabling layer, and it will go everywhere. The analogy for AI is fucking electricity. The one critique I would have is I talk to some young technology founders, and they don't know anything that went before them. There's an old line from Cicero: the man that doesn't understand what happened before he lived goes through life like a baby. Do you really want to go through life like a baby? Why does Steve Jobs have historical knowledge? He would do a product launch on the Macintosh and talk about how it is similar to the work that Alexander Graham Bell was doing in the 1870s. How did he know that? Why did he know that? Why was Jeff Bezos studying Akio Morita? In the James Dyson books I'm reading now, he talks about 17 engineers and designers, from the guy that started Honda to the guy who designed the Mini to the guy that built one of the biggest ships in the world in the 1800s. They use the entire world as their classroom. You can't build upon work that you didn't know existed. You should have that base of knowledge and then try to build upon it, and let it influence and enhance the work that you're already doing. ## [02:06:14] What David Hopes His Kids Say About Him **Jackson:** You talk a lot about looking for role models and studying these people. One thing you've brought up plenty is that many of them actually had terrible personal lives. There's a line from Hans Zimmer that you brought up in the Nolan episode. He says, "Once your children are born, you can never look at yourself through your own eyes anymore. You look at yourself through their eyes." As someone who is as fascinated by and in many ways pursuing greatness as you are, you are clearly attuned to this as well. I'm curious what you hope your kids someday say about you. **David:** I will give you a clip. If you want to insert it, it's up to you. It's probably the best thing that I've heard all year. There's a guy named Steven Rinella. He started out as a writer. Now he's got the biggest outdoor podcast in the world. He does this great series called Meat Eater on Netflix. But fundamentally, he thinks as a writer. He's a real soulful dude, kind of like you. He's one of these people we talked about—his passion, energy, and enthusiasm are infectious. I would say the most interesting people are the most interested. I am not interested; I don't camp, I don't hunt. I think nature's beautiful, but I'm probably never going to do those things. And yet, this is what Steve's dedicating his life to. He's so passionate about it that I would listen to this guy read the phone book. I find him very, very fascinating. I'm learning about all this stuff that I may never even experience because you can feel his love in it. Hunting is not growing very fast. His dad's generation did it, if you live in certain places in America. His dad taught him how to do it, and now he's trying to do that for his own kids. He's always asked the question, "What if your kids don't like hunting as much as you do?" And he says, "Well, few people do. I don't care if they never hunt. But what I'm trying to show them is what it means to go through life with a passion and to chase after something." **Steven (Clip):** One of the most important things you can demonstrate to your kids is what it's like to be passionate about something. If all you ever bring to the table for your kids is ambivalence and passivity—"Well, I guess we'll go down to the park because what else are you supposed to do with a engage with the world? Even if my kids don't—and they probably won't. I remember someone asking, "What if your kids don't like to hunt and fish as much as you do?" Not many people do. If they don't go at all, when I'm dead and they're sitting around with their spouses goofing on their dad and remembering their dad, they're going to remember someone who was on it. Who was driving hard. They maybe won't like it, but later, they'll laugh about it. They'll probably begrudgingly say, "Yeah, I learned something from that," and it'll be that: be tenacious. To me, getting them into the outdoors selfish because that's what I want to do. But I'm also showing them what it's like to care about something, what it's like to try to excel at it, what it's like to be in it, and what it's like to do hard little goals. It's not just to make them be outdoors people; it's to have them see that it's good to go through life fired up. We're going. It's windy. It's cold. Let's go. **David:** going to see after I'm long dead what it means to go through life chasing after something. And they're going to say, "I learned a lot from my dad." **Jackson:** Saw it up close. **David:** From his passion, the fact that he wasn't apathetic throughout life. This is my issue with most of the world: Most people don't have a mission. Most people are just average by default. I'm going to do an episode on Nick Saban because he has all these great quotes on this where he says, "Mediocre people hate high achievers, and high achievers hate mediocre people." It's normal to be mediocre. You shouldn't be mad at those people. It's abnormal what you're trying to do. What he's trying to show his kids is that it doesn't matter what you direct this to. You can direct it to whatever you want. He's directing it to hunting, fishing, developing TV, and making podcasts. I'm directing it to reading and making podcasts. I don't care what my kids do, but they're going to damn sure say, "My dad chased after something." My daughter's old enough now, and she's written me notes. I'm just really impressed with the person she is. I took her out of school to go with me to meet some of these founders, and I need to keep doing that. You get a chance to meet this world-famous guy, multi-deca-billionaires that for some reason give me hours and hours of their time, and you get to be there. You're going to learn way more from two hours with this person than from a whole year at school. One of the things I'm most proud of is she says, "y ou're extremely driven, and you know what you want to do." I also did something with her that I thought was really important because you can never really tell what your kids actually understand at 13 years old. I took her to where we lived when my dad got out of jail when I was small. We had to live in this really shitty place in Hialeah, which is the Cuban part of Miami. My dad's a Cuban immigrant; he was born in Cuba. My dad had a wife and two kids, but no money and no prospects. We were living behind a really shitty grocery store in a two-bedroom duplex with my grandmother, his mom, and my cousin, who was developmentally disabled because her mom—my dad's sister—did a bunch of drugs when she was pregnant. She was mentally retarded and would bang her head on the floor and drool. She and my grandmother were in one room, and the other room was for me, my mom, and my older brother. The house is still there. My daughter goes to private school. She lives in an insane neighborhood. She has tutors; she has everything. So she understands that I, as her father, am very different from everybody else in my family because she's met everybody else. She saw that what I was doing around her age was a very different experience. She also sees me getting up every day. She told my wife the other day, because even when we travel together, I'm working all the time, "Daddy doesn't stop." I think that's the most important thing. I don't care what they direct it at. Just pick a mission. A mission in life should be in service of other people. Money comes naturally as a result of service. What I think is the saddest thing is the descendants of really wealthy people. I'm kind of anti-dynasty in most cases because they dedicate their lives to drugs and sex. Think about what Churchill wrote to his son: "You're living a perfectly useless existence. I still love you, but I like you less every year." You should be getting up and getting after it. I don't care what they dedicate their lives to. I'm not going to try to guide them and say, "Oh, you should be a doctor, you should be this." I wouldn't have listened to direction. There's no way anybody could have told me what to do. I have resources now. I have a network. I will give you any knowledge I have. **Jackson:** Find your thing by exposure. Let me help you find it. **David:** You have to understand. I'm obviously very extreme. I would quote Cormac McCarthy's \*The Road\* every night. Every night, I would go around making sure all the doors and all the windows were locked and then say goodnight to her. Then I'd quote a line from Cormac McCarthy's book, \*The Road\*. It's supposed to be a post-apocalyptic thriller, but that's not what it is. It's about a relationship between a father and son. There's a line in there where he tells his son, "I was sent here by God to protect you, and I will kill anybody that harms you." That's what I would say before my daughter goes to bed for her to understand that she can never be in trouble with me. I don't care if you're drunk at a party or you're in danger. Just call me. You will not understand how much I love you until you have your own kids. When you say "I love you" to me, you don't even know what that means. I love you more than you love yourself, and I will do until you die. And I would also say that to her when I drop her off at school. **Jackson:** It says a lot that loving her that much, the thing you want most for her—outside of safety and health—is to find something that she can really pour herself into. **David:** And if that fits her personality type, too. Sam Walton had a great line in his biography. He said, "Listen, I didn't push my kids too hard because I understood that I was a fairly overactive fellow." That's a hell of an understatement, Sam. If all of his wealth wasn't given away before it was valuable—because he gave the stock in Walmart before it increased in value—and it was concentrated in one person, I think their combined net worth right now is $432 billion that came from that guy. If they want to be a normal person with a 9-to-5 and they just want to barbecue on the weekends, I want them to do whatever they want to do. But I do want them to see an example. There is something that's different: a life of passion and a life that can be painful but unbelievably fulfilling. This is what I love about these stories. James Dyson's biography, the one I mentioned earlier, does the best job of this. It's difficult, but it feels so good. It's the best feeling in the world. I was just talking to Patrick and Jeremy before I came over here about what's important. I think for me, it's making something that's truly excellent that makes somebody else's life better. That is a feeling better than anything else I've ever experienced. I love it. **Jackson:** David Senra, thank you very much. **David:** Thanks for inviting me.