#131: Conversation with David Senra: Lessons Learned from Reading 200+ Biographies on Founders
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Kia ora, ni hao and hello. Welcome to the Cherry Journal podcast. I'm your host, Camille Liang. My guest today is David Senra.

David is the host of one of my favorite podcast shows, Founders. Every week, he reads a biography of entrepreneurs so listeners can learn the lessons from those greatest history and modern figures. In this episode, David shared the lessons he learned from reading more than 200 biographies.

Please make sure to check out the show notes to see all the books and links we mentioned. I hope you enjoy the show.

Welcome to the show, David. Thank you very much for having me. As I mentioned before, your podcast is one of the podcasts I listen to almost every episode. I benefit a lot as a solo entrepreneur and just want to thank you first. I'm very happy you like to listen. I love hearing that. Like I said, before we start recording, like the fact that you said you've listened to over 90% of the episodes, I was like, all right, I have to talk.

to you because we're up to like, it's gotta be close to like 400 hours now. I think I'm at 200, I'm at 235 episodes. You know, they usually run about 90 minutes. The longest one's like three hours. I think the shortest one is like maybe 45 minutes, 50 minutes. So it's, it's,

I like your dedication. And that's the one thing I love about podcasts is that, and that's, you know, I was a fan of podcasts for 10 years before I started my own. And I just realized how not only is it a miracle, like anybody can listen on their own schedule all over the world, but you really get to know the person

that you're that you're listening to like my favorite podcast in the world is dan carlin's hardcore history five hours long yeah and he only has you know 50 60 episodes but they're like five hours long but the thing is i've listened to his episodes over and over again like last night before i fell asleep i was listening to ghost of the osferon which is about his he did like a five-part series on the war in world war ii between nazi germany and stalin's soviet union

And it's just like, he's actually the one that inspired me to just have a single person podcast because I just like the idea of, and you know this because you've listened to it. It's like, I just try to, I don't have a script. I just sit down. I have notes on the books and ideas I want, but like, I don't know what I'm going to say next because my whole thing is just like, what if there was a podcast where you could sit down with your friend that read a biography of an entrepreneur every week and he just sits down and tells you what he thought was the most interesting

like important parts. And so that's the way it is. And so you've seen this too, where I've reread some of the books. Yeah, I see. And I'll make multiple episodes in the same book, but they're all different episodes because I don't know what I'm going to say. Just like a conversation with a friend. Yeah, when I listen to your podcast, I just feel like, yeah, it's a friend telling me a story. I get a lot of messages, surprisingly, from like college kids.

And they're like, I feel like you're the older brother I never had. Yeah, that's good. Thanks for telling me that. But I also was like, I take that responsibility very serious. Like I work on the podcast every day. I'm reading four to five hours every day. No days off. Like I'm really, really passionate and serious about it. Because I do think if you study the history of anybody that's done something difficult or great, like they all learn from people that came before them. Yeah.

If there's an idea that reappears over and over again, based on people that didn't know each other, that lived in different periods of history, that worked in different industries in different parts of the world, and yet...

There's something in human nature that we want to learn from the people that came before us. And then the people that are older, there's a reason why so many entrepreneurs write autobiographies towards the end of their life. They say, hey, I spent six decades building this business. I learned a lot. And here's the lessons before I die that I want to pass on to future generations of entrepreneurs, whether it's the founder of Ikea, Walmart, Trader Joe, the guy that founded Vans. These are just some I've done recently. They were like 80, 90 years. Paul Van Duren, he's the guy that founded Vans.

He was 90 years old when he wrote that book. Yeah. Think about it. Reading his autobiography gives you the opportunity to have a one-sided conversation with a 90-year-old entrepreneur.

That's amazing. They do it for 15 bucks or whatever the cost of the book is. So much valuable lessons you can learn from them. How did you start this podcast? Why you want to focus on biography and autobiography only? Okay. So I knew that I wanted to find something that I could do for a long time. Hopefully I work on this for the rest of my life, right? That's what my goal is. And as long as people keep subscribing and telling other people, then I will. So

My natural interest, like if you took a Venn diagram of my natural interest, I like to read, I like entrepreneurship, I like history, and I like podcasts. So like Founders just sits in the middle of all of those. And

And so I've read constantly since I was a little kid. It's like the only hobby that I've never quit, right? The idea for the podcast came from two things. So I was listening. Do you know who Kevin Rose is? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. Yeah. Tim Ferriss. Buddy. Okay. Yeah. So I learned he's actually Kevin Rose is the one that got me interested in technology because I used to like 15 years ago, I listened to his show. It was like an early version of a podcast. It's called Dignation when he was the founder of Digg.

It's a long time ago because he was one of the first Web2 founders. He also had this podcast or this video series called Foundation. And you can find all these videos of his where he interviews entrepreneurs on YouTube. And like back in 2012, he had interviewed Elon Musk twice.

in the Tesla factory. Kevin asked Elon a question that I've never forgotten. And Kevin said, you emigrated from, he's talking to Elon. He's like, you emigrated from South America. Then you went to Canada. Then you show up in California. You don't have family here. You don't have any resources. You wind up starting, you know, Zip2, Elon's first company. He sells for, you know, a couple hundred million dollars when he's still in his twenties. And this is before, right, what he's doing right before PayPal. And he's like, how,

Like, how did you learn how to build companies? Like, these are very difficult things to do. Did you read a lot of business books? Did you have a lot of mentors? Like what happened here? And what Elon said, I never forgot. He's like, I didn't read many business books. He's like, I read biographies. He said, I thought they were helpful. He's like, I like biographies. I like reading biographies and autobiographies.

And he said that he was looking for mentors in a historical context. Because he's like, I didn't have anybody. No one knew who I was. I didn't have any resources. I can't just go to some random guy and be like, hey, mentor me. They're like, no. Who are you? Get out of here. And so he's like, I found that in books. And so he talked about, I love Benjamin Franklin. You know, he talked about the books that Isaacson's written. And then in other interviews, he talks about reading biographies of Howard Hughes, Henry Ford, Nikola Tesla, every single rocket engineer there is.

And that thought spawned in my mind because I also went to school for business and like you read business books and it's like some of them are good, like Blue Oaks of Strategy and all these other ones. That's fine. But I just started reading biographies and I'm like, this is so much better because you get to know who the person is and you see their entire scope of their life. And so then I was like, that's really cool. So I started reading and I've always read a bunch of books, right?

And so then I saw, I found through Tim Ferriss' podcast, actually. There's this podcast called Jocko Podcast. Have you ever heard of it? It's Jocko Willick. Yeah, Jocko Willick. He starts a podcast. He goes on Tim Ferriss. Tim Ferriss is like, you need to start a podcast. So he starts a podcast. And the beginning, now his podcast is like one of the most popular in the world. He's got millions of listeners. It's always a top 10 business podcast. But the very beginning, it was just him and a co-host who really didn't talk too much going over, reading books,

of essentially first person accounts. So think of autobiographies of people that were in war, right? And then drawing lessons from being in difficult situations, leadership lessons, all that stuff.

from these books. And I was blown away. I was like, this is the best format I've ever come across because I started learning about all kinds of things. I didn't know nothing about like, uh, the Vietnam war about the war in Chechnya about the, uh, the, the famine in North Korea, all kinds of crazy books, like, uh, this British soldier getting kidnapped by the Japanese in Singapore. And so what happened is like, I'm starting to listen to these podcast episodes. I'm

I'm learning a ton. And then I'm buying a bunch of books that I didn't know about. Right. So you listen to him talk about it for an hour and a half. He's like, wow, I got it. Like that book sounds amazing. Let me buy it and read it. And so it's like a way to educate yourself and find more books to read.

And I'm like, I should do this. So I combined the Elon idea with the Jocko idea. I was like, okay, Elon saying, read biographies. They're helpful for people building companies, right? Jocko just gave me the format, read a book and tell people like what you were interested in and then just combine those two and then do it for a very long time. So this project's been going on for four years. I've read close to 100,000 pages, 235 books.

And what I discovered is Elon is not the only one. All of them, all of the people we read about, they're like, hey, I studied from this person. This idea that you think is mine, that I built my company around, I learned from this person and this girl and just everybody's influenced by somebody else. And so I was like, OK. And then I thought, OK, this is unique because I listen to a ton of other entrepreneurship podcasts and they're great.

It's insane how much free stuff you can listen and learn from. But I was like, nobody else is doing this. And so I can do something like I can carve out a niche where you can potentially become one of known as one of the best people in this very specific niche. You know, so it's just like and a lot of people are not going to be willing. And something we also learned from the history of entrepreneurship is you've got to do something, one, for a long period of time without giving up. And two, you've got to do something that other people aren't willing to do.

And the percentage of people that are willing to read 100,000 pages is small. But that's good for me because I, first of all, I love it. I can do it every day. It's like Naval Ravikant's idea. Find work that feels like play. Yeah, so I take all these ideas and just combine them. And then when I'm reading these books, I only, hopefully I'm like trying to teach. I'm trying to spend all my time learning and then immediately turn around and teach other people what I learned. But then also it was, oh, that's a good idea for my business. And that's a good idea. Like it just, as every day goes on, like,

the business gets stronger because of the knowledge is compounding, you know? And I think that's what people are experiencing when they're listening to founders. Yeah.

Yeah, you mentioned a lot of founders, if you ask them who they were being influenced by. So you can see Steve Jobs influenced by Edwin Land, Bezos influenced by Sam Walton. Then if you trace back, I think Benjamin Franklin's name had appeared several times. Have you found this trend? What's the origin of all their ideas come from?

what's a common trace among the founders. Right now, America has kind of dominated entrepreneurship right in the last 150 years. I think that it will obviously going to change in the future because now you have

billions of people connected to the internet exchanging ideas building other products like that's now it's going to be way more distributed but by far i think if you said okay who is the single most influential american entrepreneur it's got to be benjamin franklin not only because of what he did but because of the people he influenced who they in turn influence like how many entrepreneurs are influenced by elon musk you know tens of millions i

I don't think that's an exaggeration. And he will tell you, Benjamin Franklin is one of the people I most admire. You should read his autobiography. You should read his, and this is Elon's words, like you should be reading these books. Everybody's influenced by somebody, but I do think you can draw, like it's not a straight line, but you can draw this theme where it's just like, okay, you just keep going back. Let me give you an example.

Steve Jobs, right? Steve Jobs, who in my opinion is my favorite entrepreneur, right? That doesn't mean I'm talking about what he did for work, not necessarily his life. And a lot of the ideas that Steve Jobs popularized and made famous, like when I started reading, you know, I read Steve Jobs' biography and he's like, talks about meeting his hero, Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid. The fact that he went to visit him when Steve Jobs was in his 20s, I think Edwin Land was in his 70s. And he said visiting Edwin Land was like visiting a shrine.

Like these are the words he used. I'm like, whoa, this is crazy. I was like, so I like the way Steve thinks. Let me go read Edwin Land. And then I fell in love with Edwin Land.

I've read five biographies on Edwin Land. He's by far one of the best entrepreneurs to ever live. It's just insane. But I didn't know who he was before Steve Jobs. But then you read about Edwin Land and he's thinking about, OK, how do I market? He invented instant photography, right, with a Polaroid camera. And he's like, how do I market this? And so he goes back and he reads about Alexander Graham Bell. And he's like, I'm going to take ideas that Alexander Graham Bell used to market the telephone.

you know, a hundred years or whatever the timeframe was before the invention of the instant photography. And I'm going to use those ideas. You're like, oh, okay. People die, but ideas never do. That's the cool thing. So that trait never ends. Like you were, a lot of people ask me like, okay, how do I find, like, how do you find the books that you're going to read? At the very beginning, they all came from, I read a book and then one book, books are the original links, right?

Yeah, they lead you to another one. So, okay, I read Steve Jobs. And if you read about Steve Jobs, he's going to tell you about Edwin Land. He's going to tell you about Bill Hewlett and David Packer. He's going to tell you about Bob Noyce. He's going to tell you about Andy Grove. Well, right there, he just gave you five, six books to read. And then you keep going on. Now,

I get book recommendations from the audience every day. I can imagine. Yeah, the people that listen to Founders, they're just super smart, super motivated. They read way more than the average person does. And so my queue right now for like books I have in the queue that I have not read yet that I got to turn into episodes, it's well over 100. Like it might be like 200 or 300. I don't even know what it is because to this day, I'm still discovering books. People are just telling me about books I never knew existed.

And now I'm getting like European founders, Australian founders, Asian founders, because founders has, you know, paying, paying customers and all six, every continent except Antarctica.

So I'm now, and this is stuff I was always focused on America because that's where I live. That's where I grew up. You know, it's my main experience. And if you're going to start a podcast on the history of entrepreneurship, it's probably a good place to be. But I do like the fact that now I'm learning about all, you know, there's talented and smart people everywhere. Yeah. I remember one of the episodes you did is about the career founder. Chung Ju Young. Oh yeah. Of Hyundai. Yeah. It's amazing. That is the single most inspiring autobiography ever.

I have ever read. The guy grows up, grows up for those that are listening to haven't heard the story yet. Chung Ju Young grew up so poor in Korea. He had to eat tree bark in the winter. His family, he's like, the only thing I remember my, my family, my parents talking about is the fact that they'd argue over food, not even money. They're arguing over food. And so this guy runs away from homes four times. Cause he's like, I don't want to die a poor farmer. Not only do you have to eat tree bark, but not to gross you out.

He had to go home. If he's playing, he's a little kid, he's playing at his friend's house. His, he couldn't go to the bathroom anywhere, but his house, because he had to go in buckets because they took their own human waste and they used it to grow their food. That's how poor. And then he's an, he's a, he's a extreme character. He'll work, you know, from, from the time he opens his eyes. So time he closes and he winds up,

dying as the richest person in Korea. Found Hyundai, which I didn't know was a huge construction company. I thought it was a car company. It was a car company way later. He's got a great line in that book because he's like, hey, like I will, he goes, he runs off and he goes to, is it Seoul? Yeah, Seoul. I think it was, yeah. And he starts working at a race shop and the owner of the race shop

hires him because his son is lazy and so chung is like i'm running circles around this kid and then eventually he does so well like two years later he buys the rice shop from the owner and he said the delivery boy has become the owner or something like that i was like wow he's just an amazing amazing story um but yeah i highly that book is hard to find it's called born of this land

But every single person that has told me that they bought the book from finding it on the podcast and read it, they thought it was amazing. Yeah, especially for my generation, because I never expect to see people hope more is that person from then he started from nothing from zero, then built up his... From less than nothing. Like we have food to eat. Although there have been some amazing stories that

Again, the benefit of... Not only do I really enjoy making it. I think it shows when you listen to it. I really give a damn. It's put me into contact with all these interesting and smart, driven people that have the same interests as me. So right before we were recording, and I want to talk to you about it too, you were talking about how Portugal is becoming this hub of entrepreneurship. And I feel like Founders is like this digital hub of entrepreneurs. And so I had...

I can't remember. I want to say it was in Nigeria, but I had a guy listening to the podcast. He was homeless. He was living in his car and he would listen, you know, so you can listen to public previews of an episode, but it's a subscription podcast because there's no ads. So he would just listen to the previews over and over again in his car.

Right. For like two years. And, you know, I have a couple hundred previews that are public or whatever the case is. So he's probably listened to for free, like, I don't know, probably 100 hours, 200, whatever the time thing is, the amount of time is. And then he sent me a message and he told me the story. And he's like, I did this for two years. I listened to it over and over again. I was listening, living in my car. He goes, I just started a company. I raised money. It's going well. And now I can sign up.

And then I immediately gave him two of them for free for life. I was like, no, I'm not. That's freaking crazy. Like here. Like, no, that's just amazing. But I was like, I appreciate. First of all, he was like, thank you. I was like, it's not me. It's you. I'm like the fourth most important person here. Like the fourth least important. It's like the people we study are more important. The author who does all the work is more important than I am. The person that takes the initiative to constantly learn and apply these lessons is more important than I am. I was like, dude, I didn't do anything. You did it all.

all. And I just, I was like, thank you for telling me because that makes me jump out of bed every morning because I know the impact I could potentially have if I stay at this for a very long time. I really do believe based on obviously the stories I hear, like hearing stories and learning from past entrepreneurs is beneficial to current entrepreneurs. The analogy I always give is that I heard this interview with the trainer of Kobe Bryant and he was, this is after Kobe died, unfortunately.

And he was like, listen, everybody, he's like everybody in the NBA, they watch tape, game tape on current players. But Kobe would go back and watch tape from like players in 1960s, 1970s. And then he'd reach out and call them and ask them questions about, hey, how did you do this? I saw you did this 40 years ago. Do you have advice for me? And then Kobe would go around telling his teammates, hey, that's nice that you're listening to the tape on the current players. But no, that's everybody's doing that. Yeah.

You got to go back and watch tape on the greats, the Bill Russells, you know, Jerry West, Elgin Bellers, all these other magic Johnson's, all these people that came before them. And I really feel that's like the role I'm trying to play for founders. It's like, listen, there's 100 million people in the world that are interested in entrepreneurship. Like there's all these really smart, talented people that came before us. Like we should we should take the initiative and learn from them.

They're not here anymore. They're not giving talks. They're not giving interviews. But you can talk to them if you pick up a book because that's what – to me, that's what reading – you asked like why autobiography, why biography, and I told you the Elon Musk story. But that's really what I feel like. Like I feel like every day I get to have one-sided conversations with the – what Charlie Munger calls the eminent debt, like some of the greatest minds in history. I just sit there.

And as you can see, like I have a problem talking too much. So what I like about reading books is I'm forced to shut up. I can't say nothing to them. I have to just download into my brain what they're trying to tell me. My grandfather, before he died, he told me like,

talk to the dead people, which he means read more because you can get all the wisdom from the ancient book. You know, he left me a lot of ancient Chinese book, Daodejing or Yijing, which is last for 2,000 to 5,000 years old.

So yeah, he always encouraged me to read the classics one, not just to follow the best seller. Yeah, it's all wise people do. And what I, again, I think I'm developing what, this is more advice from Naval Ravikant, the founder of AngelList, where he's like, you need to develop specific knowledge. Something that takes a long time, it's hard to do. And because you do that, the longer you do that, the more you can differentiate your product. And so I don't think very many people have read hundreds of biographies of entrepreneurs. But what I can tell you as somebody that has done that,

is that all of the greatest entrepreneurs have deep historical knowledge. There's not one of them that ignores what took place before them. And I think what we're suffering from, at least in today, is we live in an age of infinite distractions and feeds. And that skill of learning from history is going to be, in my opinion, moving forward, utilized less and less. And I don't think that's a good thing.

I think the people that came before us had the right blueprint already and we should follow it. Do you have a top three lessons from the previous founders? Once you read so many hundreds of biographies, is there a top three lessons you can share with the founders in today's context? You know, sometimes I feel like people are going to get tired because I feel like I just repeat the same lessons over and over again, but they're different people. But that's what was fascinating to me is like,

This is why I get so excited about this, because what you realize is like history's greatest minds think way more like each other than they do like the average person you're going to run into. And so and they don't know each other, which is really cool. OK, this is going to be weird. I just had dinner with a friend and I was asked like a similar question. What is the actual like the like if you could put can you summarize every single thing?

that you've learned so far in like the size of a tweet. I'm like, all right, well, that's overly, I think I like what Churchill says. Winston Churchill says it's slothful not to compress your thoughts. So he's like, write less from a guy that's wrote 10 million words, by the way, which is funny that he said that, but at the risk of oversimplifying it, what I would say that and bring it into current times, I would say they combine histories of greatest entrepreneurs combine

the self-belief of Kanye West with the work ethic of Kobe Bryant.

And the founders that I admire the most are people that are completely obsessed with what they do. They're determined. They're willing to work on it for an extremely long period of time. They have extremely, they're extremely clear about what they want to do. And so when you know exactly what you want to do, like I always reference the fact that Steve Jobs and any other person I studied, like if you read the way he's writing, if you listen to him talk,

I've never come across anybody that had the clarity of thought that he had. I read this book and it's a bonus episode in the Founders Archive called Creative Selection. And it's by this guy named Ken Kosienda, who was a programmer at Apple when Steve Jobs was there.

And he says something that was fantastic because Steve pushed product design through demonstrations. So we're not having a meeting. This is what I want you to do. I have an idea to build. Build a couple of demos. Bring it to me. I'll look at it just like a customer would. And then I'll give you feedback. And it's like this iterative process that continues, right? And so Ken, in his book, Creative Selection, said – and I recommend every single person building a product should read that book –

In my opinion, because he's like, listen, Steve was like the Oracle of Delphi at Apple. Every single product decision went through him. But unlike the Oracle Delphi, who would like answer your question with a bunch of riddles, Steve was absolutely clear about what he wanted you to do next. And that I think is key. So whether you're a solo entrepreneur or you're leading a team or whatever the case is, like you need, if you're by yourself, you got to know exactly what I want to do. Right. So I get it.

I'll tell you how I apply this lesson. So there's a lot of people that pull me in different directions. They want me to like, let's start a community and you can moderate this community or you can, or you should write a book or, or you should, you know, any number of things you should do live shows and all this other stuff. And I appreciate the suggestions, but my point is like, I know what I want to do. I, if I just keep reading books,

by really smart and accomplished people, and I pull out the lessons, and I record those lessons, and I publish them to the podcast, and I do that for a long period of time, I don't need to do it. I didn't need to focus. So that'd be one top lesson too, is focus. I just got done reading a bunch of Warren Buffett shareholder letters, and he says in there, what worries me and Charlie Munger the most is loss of focus. Loss of focus happens to every single company. He's been a large shareholder in Coca-Cola forever.

And he's like, do you understand that a few years ago, Coca-Cola thought it was a good idea to start growing shrimp. They wanted to farm shrimp.

Your face right now and your laugh, that's exactly, that was me when I read that. I was like, what the hell? And that's his point. He's like, everybody is pulled. There's a million distractions. And he's like, the whole point, what me and Charlie preach to the managers of our business, to ourselves, focus. Do not lose your focus. And that's the difficult part. So I would say they have self-belief. They work unbelievably hard. You just can't believe. This is another interesting thought.

I'm going to try to put into words that I've been having conversations with my friends where I feel like on the macro level, we overestimate the amount of competition there is out there. Okay. Most people are not competitive.

you don't have to worry about them. Like they're not going to build products. The people that do usually quit. You know, there's a huge, if you think of top of funnel, everybody has something, the idea they want to do. And you just keep moving with time. This is actually something. So we were talking before the podcast that we both follow Peter levels. Yes. Who you just interviewed recently. Who's this one for people that have,

for the few people that are listening to this that don't know who he is, he's this one man band that has all these different projects. They make a ton of money, but I was listening to him on the Indie Hackers podcast last night, actually. And he said something about that. He's like,

he talked about his he publishes his revenue uh like publicly and he says what i learned he was like a dj yeah he used to be a dj okay so he's like listen he's like i tried that for many years and then i quit i think he said he if i remember correctly he quit at like year five right uh but he's like the people that were doing the the work with me that didn't quit they're now famous and successful in that industry and he would the lesson he took away he's like

just most people quit, which we talk about the podcast all the time. So it's just like, he's like, so if you look at remote, his remote job board or Nomad List or any of these other projects, they were going over his revenue on the podcast and it's like flat, flat, flat. And then suddenly just, it just grows. Even if it's growing, you know, a couple of percentage points. Now you're eight years in, you have a wonderful business. So on the macro level, people are overestimating the competition.

on a micro level, when you get down to the small percentage of people that are extremely formidable, the people that we study on Founders, they're unbelievably intelligent, talented, driven. They're almost like different human beings. Now, those people...

You're not underestimating. You don't you don't compete with them. You avoid them. I remember Jeff Bezos says in his shareholder letter, he's like, I'm looking for an unfair advantage. Right. He's like, do you really want to compete against somebody who's as strong as you are? Because I don't. And so his thing is like, I'm just going to make sure no one and he's ruthless. Same thing when I read a bill. There's this fantastic book I recommend on the first 35 years of Bill Gates life.

It's called hard drive. So Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, these, these people look like nerds when they were younger. And, but underneath their like nerd exterior is this ruthless. Like, I think I called the early version of Bill Gates, Genghis Khan dresses, Mr. Rogers. Like he looks like you don't want to compete with the guy. He's absolutely insane. And so that's what, what I'm, what I'm interested in is that you get around these people and the way they think. And,

And I'm very interested, like when you read books about them and you listen to podcasts about them, you're slowly brainwashing yourself. It doesn't mean I don't want to be like, like, I don't want to be that kind of, some of these people are just crazy, legit sociopaths in my opinion. But what it does is like, it holds me to a high standard. And my whole thing is like, I have one life to live. I don't want to waste it. Part of me having a, like me being on my deathbed, hopefully at a hundred years old,

And looking back is part of having a satisfaction with how my life turned out is like, I want to be really good at the work I do. That's just one thing, you know? So what I would say is there's a lot of people that have a lot of people I read books about, they over-optimized their

for their work life at the detriment to other areas. You know, so you have Enzo Ferrari saying, I shouldn't be married. I, all I do is I wake up in the morning. I think about Ferrari and I think about it all day. So he was a terrible husband, you know? You know, you see divorce, Larry Ellison. He's another crazy. He's like, I said, if Michael Jordan sold an enterprise software, he'd be Larry Ellison. They have the same like fanatical drive to compete. Right. But he's, he'll tell you, he's like, I've been married three or four times. Like, I'm just not like, I only have one. I just,

my competitive spirit dominates. I don't idolize these people. I try to say, okay, I want to know how they think. I want to copy their best ideas and I want to avoid their worst mistakes. And they're further down the life than me, than you and I are. And so they're writing these books. Usually when they're looking back, you know, 60, 70, eight years old, like I made the mistake, you know, the founder of Ikea,

He worked on Ikea when he was 17. He worked on it for 74 years. And he says in his biography, I fucked up. Don't do this. I dedicated all my time to Ikea and I missed my, the three, my, his three sons. I missed their childhood. And he said, childhood does not allow itself to be reconquered.

So to me, it's like, okay, he told you. That's a regret. He can't get that back. He's telling you don't do that. So listen to him. So what do you think? Where all their driven come from? Do you think their childhood is

influenced their behavior later. When I read biography or listen to your podcast, I find out they all have a very not a happy childhood. Do you think that's how they are driven come from? I think being in an environment that you're not happy with

is a huge motivating factor. I think part of it is just you're born with drive. I've been working full-time since I was 15 years old, so I don't know any other way. I just get up and I work all the time. But now I'm balanced. I take care of my health. I have two kids. I spend a ton of time with them. I spend time with my family. I spend time with friends. The person I'm trying to emulate is Ed Thorpe.

who wrote this book called A Man of All Markets. And to me, he's the one person that everybody has studied that mastered life because he's smart as hell. He was the founder of the first quantitative hedge fund. He made a ton of money, but he would also, once after he was already wealthy, he's like, well, I'm not going to trade time to make an incremental more dollar after I have more money I can never spend at the expense of spending time with my wife, my kids. He worked out all the time. So he's alive to this day. Go on YouTube, type in Ed Thorpe, and you'll see it.

He's giving talks and he's 85, 87 years old. He looks like he's in his 60s. So that's just one example. So the drive, but the best description, the easiest description I've ever heard of to answer your question. There's this investor and venture capitalist called, his name is Josh Wolfe.

And same thing. He's like a super smart, super driven guy raised in a single parent, parent household. So he understands this, this mindset, right? I think he was raised in like poverty in Coney Island, New York, if I remember correctly. And he said, he goes, chips on shoulders puts chips in pockets. And so when you grow up,

and you don't have any money, you're probably not going to the best schools, you don't have supports, but you're a smart PSD, a poor smart driven person, they're very hard to compete with because the skills they developed are

to survive in the environment that they came from, like Chung Ju Young, who we referenced earlier, good luck. Good luck competing with them. They're just not... Because they had to go through so much struggle that it's very hard to replicate that, you know? So I think part of it's maybe genetic. For me, I didn't... My family doesn't have any money. There's no education. Like, I was the first person in my family to graduate high school. Like, that's...

honestly like pathetic like high school is not hard to get through and this is like doesn't mean you can't be smart if you drop out of high school so I'm saying but it's just like

I look up and down my family tree and I don't see, like, there's just not a lot of good traits there. And so from a very young age, I just started reading. And I was like, I'm not, just like Elon said, it was like, I can't, I don't have any resources. So I'm going to find my resources in books and I'm going to learn how to think and how to work and how to be driven and how to accomplish goals and be a good person through reading books. Because I don't have, you know, it's not, and it's not my parents' fault. Like as I got older and now I have my own kids, I realized like, oh, okay.

They came from terrible parents and their parents came from terrible parents. And so it's just like this whole just down the generations, just like here, there's just a shit sandwich just thrown down generation after generation. So it's just like I'm a lot less when I had my daughter's almost turning 10. I remember the first year or two of her life. I'm like, why?

I was really mad because I'm like, why did my parents make certain decisions that they made? Like, I have a kid. I would never do that. And then now I have a second kid. And now, you know, I've been a parent for almost a decade. I'm like, all right. They just didn't know any better, man. It's not their fault. Like they did the best. Like I was like, David, you're being an ass. You know, I was like, don't like they did the best they could. Imagine if you were raised by their parents, you know, it's like their, their, their parents, both my sets of grandparents, terrible people, like terrible. So,

But my point is a great thing about reading biographies, you realize that's the standard. It's not like the amount of people that come from good families that are nice to each other. That is a tiny percentage. Me and you were talking on DM about your relationship with your father a few weeks ago. That is amazing. The way you were speaking about your dad, I want my daughter to speak about me. You know what I mean? It just feels, this is a weird thing to say, but it feels good to know that, okay, I'm not unique.

People have gone through way worse situations than I had to go through. And not only did they survive, but they thrived. Yeah, that's very interesting. Because when I read Johan Cluif, I don't know how to pronounce his name, the Dutch footballer he mentioned. Oh, yeah.

He talked to his father because his father died very early, but he went to his father too, then talked to him about all his things. I find this, yeah, you do need like foundation because everybody needs a root. If you trace back, either it's good or bad, but it's in you. You need that support.

if it's bad, maybe it can give you some motivation. Like Larry Ellison, he wants to get approval from his father. Yeah. And he didn't get it. No. So I think that's one of his driven to just pushing him to do more, to do more. There's a saying that I repeat on the podcast all the time. It's from this guy named Henry Kaiser. He founded over a hundred companies. He was as famous as in his day around World War II.

As Elon Musk was in our day, right? And so he built the Hoover Dam. He built a bunch of like liberty ships for World War II. He founded Kaiser Permitente. I don't know how to pronounce it. It's still around to this day. But I loved his perspective. And I think a lot of history's greatest entrepreneurs share this perspective. And he says problems are just opportunities and work clothes.

And so I think any kind of trouble that you have, which is funny because like my wife came from, I remember when we first met, like she'd be on the phone with her grandma and her mom every day. And I couldn't understand that because like I came from this weird dysfunctional family. I'm like, wait, you want to talk to them? Like why? I couldn't, I just, it blew my mind. And so, and so she's like, I just can't believe, she always makes a comparison. She's like, I just cannot believe that.

like how you were raised or like she essentially was like a raised like a feral animal you know what i mean like i didn't have like since i was 15 i was making my own money so i didn't i never had a curfew like my parents didn't really like i had no rules which is good because i don't i'm not like kind of unmanageable anyways but the reason i say that problems are just opportunities and work clothes what i was telling my wife is just like these are good things though because like if i didn't go like if you don't experience these things you don't realize like oh okay

it fuels your drive and your motivation to build a life that's different for yourself. And then once you start creating new people by having kids, you're like, oh, I want to make sure, you know, I'll work every day so my kids don't have to go through that. Or like, I never talked to my kids I was talked to. I don't be, like, I got my ass kicked, like, physically over and over again when I was a kid. Like, I would never, like, do that to my kids. Like, I just don't, that thought wouldn't even cross my mind because, like, I didn't like that. So then why would I then in turn be,

carry that on down the generations. And it's just, my point is like, I don't think of them as, I just think you've, it's a better perspective to view a problem. It's just an opportunity we get paid. And so that's what me and Richard, we have a mutual friend, Richard, and we were talking about this yesterday on DM. And cause he was talking about Danny Meyer has this great book. I did it on the early days of founders. It's called setting the table and,

I think it's like founders like 23 or something like that. So I did it, you know, 200 books ago. And he was sitting next to a guy that was running Neiman Marcus, the department store. And he was, Danny was just bitching and complaining about

problems. And this is an older, more experienced gentleman. Danny was young. I think he was probably in his twenties when this was happening and he put his drink down and he's like, let me tell you something. And he was basically saying, don't complain. Business is problems. And so the opportunity is solving that problem. And so then what me and Richard were talking about is, well, if you think what he said is true, you know, all businesses have problems. This idea where you're going to start a business, just going to smooth sailing doesn't exist.

ever, never will exist. Even at the highest level, there's problems at Amazon, Google, Facebook, all this stuff you don't even know about. And so I was like, if you think about businesses problems, that means that companies are just effective problem solving machines.

And so what you and I were talking about before we started recording is it's very simple. Henry Ford said that money comes naturally as a result of service. And service is usually solving problems. So he solved how to manufacture or mass produce a car so the average person could afford it, right? And not be stuck being pulled around by a horse, for God's sake. And so you just pick a problem and...

You obsessively focus on solving that problem for your customers. And if you do that really good over a really long period of time, they'll give you their time, money, energy. They'll tell other people about it. And that's essentially what you do. I referenced that interview with Peter Lovells on IndieHackers.

He said the same thing. He's like, my businesses, even though they make millions of dollars a year, they're not complicated. It's like, do you want to find a remote job? Then go to my remote board. Do you want, you're a member of Nomad List, right? Yeah, yeah, I am. Yeah. Yeah. So same thing. If you want to find out where can I go in the city that has good internet, that's safe, that has other people like me, go to Nomad List. That's it. And he says, all I do is just focus on that. I don't focus about

fluffy design or I forgot the words he used. I can't remember exactly, but he's like, I just focus on the problem over and over again for a long period of time. Yeah. He provides the value and fill the gap of the market. Because when I want to become a nomad, I need to meet new people. There is a meetup function on his website so I can meet new friends in each new city. Solve my problem. Yeah, that's huge.

And so the way I think about it is just like, okay, well, so there's a, let me read this quote. It's my favorite quote and it's the way I describe founders. And it comes from one of my favorite thinkers is Mark Andreessen. It's he, and you know, this is very common where he talks about, you just realize that all of these really talented entrepreneurs, even the ones that are have billions of dollars, like they, they,

They could essentially hire, you know, personal tutors. They could learn from whoever they want to. And if you watch a interview with Marc Andreessen today when there's COVID and he's not in the office, which I've watched a couple of them, he's just at his house and his house is literally just stacks of books everywhere. This guy just bought a $177 million house in Malibu. He has unlimited, essentially unlimited resources. And yet he can pick up a book just like me and you.

He said this, and this is the problem I'm trying to solve. He says this, and there's thousands of years of history in which lots and lots of very smart people worked very hard and ran all types of experiments on how to create new businesses, invent new technologies, and find new ways to manage. They ran these experiments throughout their entire lives. At some point, somebody put these lessons down in a book. For very little money and a few hours of your time, you can learn from someone's accumulated experience. There is so much more to learn from the past than we often realize. You could productively spend your time reading experiences of great people who have come before you and learn every time.

And so my thing is just like, okay, there's all this knowledge,

These people can't give interviews because they're dead, right? It's in the books. It takes every single episode of founders. I do. I have to read a book, an entire book. So that's 15, 20, 30 hours before then. So the solution, the problem I'm trying to figure out is like, how can I document all the best ideas in the history of entrepreneurship? All document, the best ideas. So we can copy document all the mistakes that they make so we can avoid them. Right. And then share it with other people. That's the problem I'm trying to solve. It's like all this helpful information is buried in the past. Well,

That's fine. I'll dig. And the way I dig is like picking up a book and going through the pages. So that's it. That's all I'm going to be focused on. And so when everybody else gives me suggestions, you should do X, Y, and Z. It's like, no, I'm going to do this. And I'm going to do this hopefully forever. Yeah, that would be great. So have you found any interesting connections between the

those founders. When I read Churchill's biography and then I read Coco Chanel, I found, oh, they know each other, but I never thought about that they could know each other. That's very funny. Have you had any stories like that? Weird connection? That one is actually, that's actually a great story though.

Churchill is friends with this guy. It's like Duke Wellington. I can't remember. It was this rich guy who's hanging out with Coco Chanel. And this is Churchill before he's Churchill. So this is way before World War II. And he writes. He obsessively journaled and diaried. And so in his thing, he's like... I forgot what he said. He's like, I met Coco Chanel. She's set to either rule men or rule empires. But basically like, oh, she's not a joke. We got to watch out because she's... And she wound up being... At her time, she was arguably the richest self-made woman

woman in the world.

And something I was talking about there is like, that's the deal she signed is the craziest deal I've ever heard about anywhere. And it's the fact that she made a mistake as a young entrepreneur, like we all do. She invented Coco Chanel number five before it was one of the most successful products of all time. She signed away 90%, 90% of the product. She only kept 10% for herself. But again, she, this is also instructive where, you know, young entrepreneur, I think she was in my, in her twenties at the time, maybe

maybe 30, and she's dealing, she's doing business with older, experienced, and I forgot the name of the family. The family still owns Chanel to this day. Werthenheimer maybe is the name. I can't remember exactly, but Pierre, I think is his name. But anyways, she winds up fighting for two decades to redo that deal. And then she signs a deal where they say, okay, you're going to get 2% of all

global sales of Coco Chanel number five. And we're going to pay every single one of your living expenses, big or small. So we pay for your house, your food, everything. You have no bills anymore. And she was making $25 million a year, every year in the 1940s. Today, that'd be like, somebody's going to be like, Hey,

We're going to take care of all your living expenses and we're going to pay you $300 million a year, every year. Like that is just, that's what I love about history. Cause it's like history stranger than fiction. That doesn't seem like it's possible. It happened. It is real. As far as knowing each other, let me go through, let me pull up some of the episode list. Cause I'd have to figure out.

So Winston Churchill and Coco Chanel, that was interesting. A lot of them. So if you go back to like the robber baron period of American entrepreneurship history, like Andrew Carnegie and Henry K. Frick knew each other. They were partners. They also knew who J.P. Morgan was. There's a there's a story where Cornelius Vanderbilt is in his 70s and he wants to go meet with John D. Rockefeller. And Rockefeller is also another psycho.

He was in his 20s at the time. Rockefeller insists that Vanderbilt come meet him. So imagine like a 74-year-old, the richest person in the world at the time was Cornelius Vanderbilt. When he died, here's a crazy stat for you. When Cornelius Vanderbilt died, if you were able to liquidate all of his assets into dollars, he owned one house.

out of every $20 that were in circulation at the time. Wow. So on a wealth accrued with how much currency there is, no one's ever been richer in American history. John D. Rockefeller was richer on an absolute basis. But in terms of

hey, I own one out of every $20 in circulation. It's insane. So imagine having the fortitude, but no, no, you got to come meet me when you're like 26 years old or something. It's just wild. But yeah, a lot of them, especially if you study the early days of Silicon Valley, they all know each other. They all help each other. It's like a hub. Everybody knows everybody. The most, I would be curious, probably the most influential tech company of all time in terms of, again, who they influence and then who those people influence in turn has to be HP.

Bill Hewitt and David Packer just because they were the first. I think they were... I think they started their company in the 1930s? I can't remember. No, it might be 19... I know they grew up in the Great Depression. I can't remember when they started it. But then they influenced like

Bob Noyce and all the Intel people who then in turn, Steve Jobs, and it just goes on and on and on. But yeah, so they all knew each other. I actually read, you use Readwise, right? Yeah, I use Readwise. Yeah. Okay. So I love Readwise. One of the founders, Kristen is actually a subscriber of Founders. Oh, cool. And I told him, I was like, dude, I could not make Founders. Like I literally couldn't make my podcast without this.

But there was something about this. I was rereading my notes when I read Leonardo da Vinci's biography. And so that was written by I'm looking for it right now as we speak. That was written by Walter Isaacson, who has written biographies on everybody. Einstein, Jobs, da Vinci. But he made the point that it was really important for people to meet in person.

which is kind of what you were saying about what's happening in Portugal right now. Yeah, I do think meat in real life is important.

Even for the Zoom call, it's better than just an online DM, I think. It's one of my favorite things to do. Like I've met a bunch of people through the podcast and just to have the chance to like talk to them on FaceTime or whatever or Zoom, it's just, I don't know where it is. I lost it now, unfortunately. That's why. You can find it later and tell me. But yeah, he just made the point where, you know,

Da Vinci knew Michelangelo and then he goes through. And the reason I wanted to bring that to attention because Isaacson makes that connection with all the people that, that, that he studied where it's just like, it's not just Da Vinci doing this in the 1500s. It's Steve Jobs doing it. I think there's a, there's actually a, there's two almost conflicting ideas there is that it's good to be around other people that are like you that are doing similar things, right? They're building companies, whatever it is that you're into, but,

But then you also see in the history of entrepreneurship, the value of isolating yourself. So like I think of people like Claude Shannon, the inventor of information theory, Henry Singleton, who Warren Buffett said had the greatest record in American business history. Well, even Warren Buffett himself, like they purposely isolate themselves from their peers. So I think there's like a combination. Maybe the good idea there is a combination of

spend time around people like you whether you're doing a podcast in person reading the books and then spend time alone with your own thoughts and so this is something I've been trying to do lately where it's just like I kind of hate social media a little bit and I'm sure it's like the love-hate relationship I have with is like same thing everybody else does so this is not unique but I don't like the fact that if I have a free minute I pick something up to just like distract myself

Because Henry Singleton wouldn't do that. Steve Jobs wouldn't do that. Like all these people that admire Enzo Ferrari, David Ogilvie, Edwin Land, all these people I admire wouldn't do that. It's just like, you have to let David Ogilvie talks about this. He's like, I work all the time.

I read a lot and I write a lot, but then he's like, then I do, then I have long periods of time where I do nothing. So I'll go for a walk. I'll ride a bike. I'll look up at the sky. And it says the reason he does that is because that's when his subconscious down, like all the computation that his brain does to all the work that he's doing, all experience he's having, it gives us time to like do the processing. And then when you're not doing anything is when those ideas, like your brain produces a unique idea. Yeah.

True. I know Winston Churchill, he do painting or lay the bricks. Yeah, it's kind of his meditation. And Bill Gates, he spent weeks just with his book. He went to some mountain or

Like a cabin. Yeah, yeah. So he just reads there. Yeah, no, he does the Think Weeks. That's actually, the Think Weeks is actually something I know has been copied by a lot of other people. And that is just good. It's just like, I'm not going to, there's no TV, there's no phone. I'm just going to either, I can read or I can do nothing. In fact, it was really interesting. One of my favorite, I take a lot of inspiration from George Lucas.

And it's not because I'm like a big Star Wars fan. It's I like the original movies, but I don't really pay attention to it too much. But his biography is one of the best biographies I ever read. It's Founders number 35, if I remember correctly. And what I liked about him is he talks about that's part of his creative process where he's when I think he was writing Star Wars. And I forgot what other movie he was writing. He's like, listen, I'm going to say I'm going to sit at this desk from nine to five. And he goes, I can write or I can do nothing. That's it.

And that's how he got it done. And he's like, some days I didn't do anything. I just sat at the wall, but I sat there. Like, I think it's really good to be intentional. So like to show up every day as a professional and like, I'm not big on this. Oh, like what I liked about Stephen King too, when I read his autobiography, I was surprised. He took a blue collar work ethic.

to a creative endeavor. He's like, I don't sit here and be like, oh, I can't wait to be inspired. Then I'll sit down and type. He's like, no, I show up and I write six hours every day for three months straight. At the end of that three month period, I have a book. Cause he's like, I write six pages a day. You know, actually it's less than that. It's 60 days. So it's six pages a day over 60 days. That gives me 360 pages.

And that's it. He's like, but this idea, he's like, he was very skeptical of the idea that writing is this thing where you have to like a strike something, a strike of like inspiration happens and you go to the computer. He's like, no, he's like, what authors won't tell you is that writing has a lot more in common with sweeping the floor. You literally just show up and do the work every day. Some days when you produce, it's going to be crap. You're going to throw it out and some days it's going to be great, but you just show up every day. Yeah.

Yeah, you need to. It reminds me about Ernest Hemingway's quote, there's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed. You just need to be there. So he had a very similar... So I read that book. I think it was called The Traitor and the Spy. I can't remember. But that was a fascinating book too, because it tells you about his work process. And it was the same thing. He woke up real early and he would just...

I think he'd write for like four or five hours, whatever the case is. And then that's it. His writing's done for the day. And then he'd go off and live life. He'd go fish. He'd go, you know, shoot guns. He was a kind of crazy person. He'd drink a ton of alcohol. And then, you know, he was a spy. He lived a crazy life. But I like that dedication. He's like, every day, the first thing I do, and I try to do that same thing. It's just like, I get up early.

I work out and then I work and I try to do uninterrupted as much as like as many hours I can. Cause I feel like I can do better work. I think my brain works better in the early in the day, but that, that idea appears over and over again. It's just like, like I prefer working every day, not that I'm working every day, all hours of the day. But if let's say you're going to work 48 hour a week as a whatever, whatever you want to work, like I would rather distribute those over seven days than take,

take two or three days where I don't do anything. Like I like that Hemingway, Stephen King, George Lucas schedule, or it's just like, I have this block done. And then when I'm done, go live your life. You can't be one-sided, you know, go enjoy your family, go enjoy your friends, go pursue your hobbies. But I just think you get so much more progress done that way. I mean, clearly you're talking about some of the greatest writers and most successful writers ever. We just named three people that like, think about the creative works they produce between Hemingway, Stephen King and George Lucas. Like, what are you talking about? That's insane. Yeah.

And even Churchill, I can't imagine how he finds the time to write so many words beside his politician jobs. Yeah, he had an interesting schedule too. So he wakes up early. He spends most of his morning in bed till like noon. So he's reading, writing, dictating letters, making phone calls.

He's drinking alcohol too. Although I learned it's watered down alcohol, but he's still like drinking basically nonstop, but he waters it down. Thank God. And then he does work and then he takes a nap. So he was a like notorious napper because he felt he gave him like two days in one day. Like you, you take an hour nap or whatever. And then he's up cause he stays up really late, but then he's still up early the next day. So of course he's going to have to sleep some point. Yeah. I don't know. I love that guy. A listener just recommended this book.

They're like, hey, William Manchester, I think is the author. You should do Churchill's biography. When people send me book recommendations, I just like order them. Like usually not without, I don't even think about it. So I go to look, I'm like, wait a minute. And I wrote back to him. I was like, bro, this is like 5,000 words. Like this is going to be like a 10 part series. Like I'll read the books. I'm gonna be wrong. Cause I think Churchill's worth it. You know? Yeah. Churchill's also to go back to your question about tying back who inspires who.

Churchill is mentioned so many times by entrepreneurs because I think Churchill becomes shorthand as how to have the courage not to quit when you're going through a difficult situation.

And so that's what building a company is doing. It doesn't matter if you're, you're have millions, like you're always going to run into problems and you're always going to be tempted to quit. I mean, the quote I always repeat on the podcast over and over again, that I think is one of the most profound for entrepreneurs to remind themselves of is what Steve Jobs said, like Steve Jobs. He think about it. He created amazing products in the seventies, eighties, nineties, and then two thousands right before he died. It's like, who is capable of doing that? And what he said was, um,

That he was convinced that half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the unsuccessful ones is just pure perseverance. He's like just not giving up. Half. And he says it's like building companies is the hardest thing you ever do, but it's the funnest thing you ever do.

And you have to get used to that dichotomy or that paradox, whatever you want to call it. It's supposed to be that way. It's supposed to be difficult because that's a part of human nature. If it comes easy to you, you're not going to appreciate it. If it's easier, everybody will do it. So...

you won't be able to stand out. Yeah. And it's funny because I just got done reading all those shareholders by Warren Buffett. And that's something he repeats over and over again. He's like, man, if you do something difficult or you're excellent at it, or if you take the high road, you're not going to find any traffic. True. He's like, you just won't find traffic. And he talks about that's one of the reasons that he refuses to sell these businesses that he owns 100% of, even if they don't generate, like he could sell the business and put that money in more productive means. He's like, because the people running those businesses are, they're outstanding people.

We like them. We admire them. They're respectable. He's like, I could sell this business from somebody I like and admire, and I could jump into another business. And he said something that was very fascinating. He's like, but the likelihood is the next situation I get put into, that person will have characteristics that are much more consistent with average people.

And so what he's saying is like, these people are rare. Like the fact is that they didn't give up. And in many cases, they've been running the same business for decades. It's like, that's just not, that's a way to signal to other people. It's like, this is not a normal person you're dealing with. This is a very formidable individual. And that's really what I'm like, what I repeat on the podcast a lot. It's like, I want to take the lessons from these books and that's the goal. You should turn yourself into a formidable person. And that could be an individual solo entrepreneur, could be somebody running a giant company. And I got people,

the list of founders that fall between all this, right? But the fact is like, you're very competent in what you do. It'll give you a lot of satisfaction in life, hopefully by, you know, like provide you with financial security. So you're not like where Chung Ju Young was or any of these other people at the very beginning. Walter Chrysler, I was just reading my highlights from his autobiography. I forgot how poor he was. I mean, think about in one time, in his lifetime,

He went from being so poor to having to make his own tools, right? To those tools being on display in a skyscraper in New York City named after him in one lifetime. That's amazing. What achievement. It's just, these are super inspiring stories, you know? And I think...

I don't know. I just, I never get tired. I'm never like, oh my God, I got to read another book. Wow. This is another person I didn't know much about. And this person lives in the same life. I do find out that not many female entrepreneurs or founders biography. Do you read your daughter's role model she can copy from? Yeah, I think that'll change.

moving forward because like it's a history podcast. You have Estee Lauder who, you know, I always tell people you need to read their autobiography of Coco Chanel, uh, Hedy Green, but there's not a lot. Uh, you have, uh, Patricia Ziegler, who was the founder of a co-founder of, uh, Banana Republic. She's in there.

My daughter reads, I think it's like Rebel. They're like miniature biographies for girls. But it is. It's like Amelia Earhart. Who's the one that did all the math for the shuttle program? It's like Barbara Johnson. I can't remember her name right now. But yeah, that's the kind of stuff that she likes to read. But they're not really entrepreneurs. I mean, she read about Oprah. Oprah's an entrepreneur. So I guess that's one. Yeah.

politicians, leaders. Yeah. It's very important to have a role model when girls growing up, I would say. For sure. And that's what I tell is like now you're, you don't have limitations. So my wife's grandmother, so my daughter's great grandmother, she grew up in Columbia, you know, let's

let's see, she's almost 80. So it was a long time ago. They didn't have a car. They didn't have a telephone. So it's just like, and we always say is like, if she was alive, if she was born today, she'd be an entrepreneur for sure. She's got the same characteristics. She's super driven, organized, but she wasn't given that opportunity because of the time that she lived, the culture she came from.

uh but also the time she lived i was like you don't have that you don't have any limitations like you can start in fact she sees me making podcasts and doing all sorts of stuff she's like i want to make youtube videos and i want to do all you can do whatever you want yeah like there is no limit to you and i always tell her that the derek sivers quote i was like the standard pace is for chumps like there is no speed limit like you could start working on this now i gave her an example i was like listen

see this guy that I like watching his tech YouTube videos. His name's MKBHD. This is a conversation I'm having with her. I go, look at him, look at his studio. He's got a $250,000 robot in there. Did you know he started this business when he was 13? Yeah. She's like, what? Really? Like, yes. I was like, that's what the internet does. Like there is no, no one, you don't have to get permission. I go, when I wanted to go, when I wanted to work, I had to, I grew up in Florida and,

I was like, you had to turn 15. Like there was no working before then. Like you couldn't do anything. And now, I mean, their work is obviously like passion products. Like she wants to make videos on like Roblox and stuff like that, you know? But those, again, those like, she's really good at it. She can make tutorials. People will find value in that. Just as one example, it's like, man, you don't understand the access that you have. You know, I go, when I was your age, I had to call the internet.

She goes, what are you talking about? I go, I had dial up and I played, I went to a YouTube video and it, you can hear like when you just try to sign into AOL or through a mode and be like, she's like, what is this? I'm like, that's the internet. Wow. This doesn't make any kind of sense. I was on my laptop last night doing research and my son walks up and he's like pressing, he

He can't figure out why when he presses the screen, nothing happens. They're all swiping the screen or zoom. I know. He's like, this isn't working. It's like trying to press play and stuff. I was like, man, you are so lucky. So lucky. If you could take the upside,

Which is the fact that you have all of human knowledge in your pocket or on your laptop or whatever, but you got to, with the upside comes the downside that you're living in an age of, the good news is you live in an age of infinite leverage. The bad news is you live in an age of infinite distraction. Choose your tool. Which one's it going to be? And so I was like, you got to choose the leverage tool.

Because I love what Naval Ravikant said in that book that was put together by Eric Jorgensen. I actually just talked to Eric through DM the other day. Somebody bought him a gift subscription to Founders. We were talking about the book that he did with Naval. And something since I read that book, I've been repeating nonstop is like, listen, it's no longer blue collar versus white collar. It's leveraged versus unleveraged. And the fact is like the internet gives entrepreneurs infinite leverage, right?

And so like I tried to explain to my daughter, it's like, that's why,

Like, look here, look at this email that came from, you know, I got email from Japan or I think it was in Tokyo. I forgot who, where it was. I was like, this person just wrote for me from Tokyo. And then we looked on the map and it was like, you know, 8,000 miles from my house where I'm at. You know, it's just like that person because of the internet can hear my voice wherever they are. And they can listen to when I'm sleeping, when I'm playing with you, whatever the case is. But you have to start. And it was like, you have to be careful because like, there's a reason every like eight to 10 year old little girl,

Like Roblox, like it's not an accident. Like you are addicted to this. And so I was like, we can't, she doesn't understand. I'm like,

Why can't I just play this all the time? Because like, because on the other side of that screen is a thousand really brilliant engineers that want more of your attention. Yeah. The reason that the, the, the, one of the main lessons from the history of entrepreneurship is focus, right. Is because they know that your attention has value. So just don't give it away to random people. And that's why like, I feel good making a podcast because somebody, there was like, there was like a survey done.

what do you think is beneficial? And like, what do you essentially, like after you engage in this activity, do you feel better or worse? And so I saw on your Twitter the other day,

that you went, like, you're a fan of Barry's Boot Camp. Yeah, yeah. So I was addicted to that for a while. Since the pandemic, I haven't been, but I did, like, hundreds of classes. Wow. And the same thing. Because, like, after you're done, though, you feel... You feel so good. It's the best drug in the world. Yeah, exactly. And I don't do a lot of drugs, so I guess I don't know. But to me, it's like, that's what it felt like. And so the perfect example is, like, after you work out, people feel great. After you read a great book, you feel great.

after you hear a great podcast, you feel great. But then they say, okay, after I scroll on Facebook, I feel terrible. Instagram, feel terrible. Like, you know, there's a lot of, and that's where I'm concerned with having a daughter is that this guy named, I think his name is Jonathan something. He wrote a book about there's an increased suicide rate for young girls in America. Yeah. And then there's depression. Yeah. Mental health issue. So I'm pushing myself and everybody knows like read books, listen to podcasts, go outside, spend time in real life with friends.

workout, don't be on the internet all day, man. Like, it's just not, it's not a good, you're not going to feel good. You're just addicted to it. And I'm speaking to myself, you know, I'm sure if I look at the past like week, sometimes I spend way too much time just scrolling through crap. But if I spend, I think I've read something like the average person's using in America, at least they're using, uh, they're on social apps, something like, I don't know, four or five hours a day. Yeah.

I can read, like, I, you know, if you do that in four days, you just read an entire another book. There's no way.

Spending 20 hours on the internet is going to be better than reading a book. It's just not. True. You know, when you read books about Coco Chanel or Steve Jobs, there are so many different versions. And I do find these two people, sometimes they alter their narratives about their life story. So sometimes you don't know what is true or they just change their description about their life. What's your opinion on that?

So that's the thing with Coco Chanel, because it's like, yeah, she's just so different. I think in general, the world is way more like I'm just suspicious of people that are certain about a lot of things. I feel like the world is a lot more complex than we'll ever understand. I don't think you should go out, do what Coco Chanel did, just make up an entire history. And what she says, like, what was interesting, see, that's a world I don't actually understand.

because you think about like the world of like high fashion, one of the richest person in the world owns a bunch of those brands, Bernard on all. Right. And it's just like, you have convinced there's, there's like, if you read Peter Thiel's zero to one book, I thought he made an interesting point. He's like, I understand everything, a lot of things in business. What I don't understand is the power of a brand. Cause it's almost like this mass psychosis, right? You have like Louis Vuitton, the Louis Vuitton by my house, it's like two miles from my house.

You have literally people waiting two hours in line to give them thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars, right? For a purse or whatever the case is. So same thing with Coco Chanel and all these other things where she said, it was like, I forgot the quote, but

She basically says, I'm putting on like a fairy tale. You're not coming in and just buying a blouse or a dress for me. You step through this threshold and you're like in a story. It was almost like, I think it was a Shakespeare said all the world's a stage. Like she acted like that. She's like, I'm the author of my own story. I'm in control of all this. And she understood the power of storytelling.

Steve Jobs says the most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. Right. And so you know that because you hear his product presentations and you realize all the work that he put into it and the narrative that he's he's describing to you. And so Coco did that, too. But she she didn't stop at just the narrative and the story of her brand. Right. To get you. She's like, you're you're not a customer. You're you're part of the story. Right. Which is why I think fast forward 100 years after she said that. And Chanel is one of the most valuable private companies in the world.

But there is a myth, a mythology in all of like in any beginning, beginning of your family, this mythology, the beginning of a country, this mythology. Go back. You know, I just got done reading about George Washington and Abraham Lincoln in this book on heroes that he did a bonus episode on. There's a mythology in the early days of companies. It's all mythologized. So I'm not really concerned.

I'm looking at like the idea behind the story. I don't need to memorize or know if that story is exactly because I'm not going to build a new Nike, you know? So when I read Phil Knight's book, it's not like, did this happen in the sequence? Just like he said, it happened in the sequence. It happens. Like, what is he trying to teach me behind it?

And so that's my whole thing. It's just like building a company is very difficult. Companies, just like it's almost like a microcosm of an economy. You can think about it as like it's a complex adaptive system. They're unpredictable. They're very difficult to predict what's going to happen or how you can trace cause and effect. And so it's not that I'm looking for a formula. It's just like I'm building up in my brain. This is why Charlie Munger said that he reads so many biographies and he's read hundreds. And he's like, you just think of these ideas that you're learning in these books as tools.

And when you fill up your toolbox with these tools, and then maybe two years from now, five years from now, six months from now, you don't know when, you're like, oh, I'm in this situation. How would Henry Ford think about this? What would Steve Jobs do here? He said something that might be helpful here. And so when you think about, I'm pulling out, I'm looking for ideas. I'm not worried about

Humans lie. All of us. I used to have this conversation when I'd be at dinner with a couple of friends. Raise your hand if you've never told a lie. What are we talking about here? How can you possibly tell what's true and what's not? I'm very open to saying, I don't know. I read this book on Charles Kettering. I think it's Founders number 129. And he decided to, no, it's like 128, something like that. But anyways, he decided to name his autobiography Professional Amateur.

And I love that. And this is what they considered him, the Ben Franklin of the 20th century. That was his nickname. Or the 19th century. I can't remember. But he said when he dies...

his wife and kids said that when you die, the only thing that's going to be on your headstone is, I don't know. There's one of the smartest, most accomplished people in history. And he's like, I don't know. He was like one of the first people to learn how to fly. He used to commute. This is like, and then he would fly. Cause he was friends with like the Wrights brothers. He was, he grew up in Ohio. And this is like, when there's not a plane that you think of today, they look like gliders. If you go back and look at them, but I just think like, that's, that's kind of like the, the, the mentality that I want to adapt. The more you learn, the more you realize you don't know. And,

And so even my own daughter, she's like, you say, I don't know a lot. Cause I don't know a lot. Like, I don't know. And then you not only do you not know a lot, you don't know what you don't know. And so I don't make any assumptions that when I'm studying history, like think about, I think it was, might've been Kanye West. It's like,

Oh no, this might be Naval again. I can't remember who, but if news is fake, wait till you get to history. Yeah, true. Yeah. I remember this a lot. Yeah. So me and you could watch something happen, right? Right. Let's say we're in Portugal walking on the street. Somebody gets hit by a car, whatever. Like we could describe, we could both see it with our own eyes. We could see what just happened and yet wait six months or wait three months and let's have another conversation about that. We will probably see different things. And so it's just like, I don't know. I just think you have to be extremely humble. I was talking to actually an investor

that listens to the podcast and we were on Zoom and he was showing me like his portfolio companies. I told him, I was like, you know what? Like, I'm glad you showed me this because I've never felt dumber. And like, I want to feel dumb because the worst thing you could possibly think is like the feeling of having finished something. This is what the founder of IKEA said. The feeling of having finished something is an effective sleeping pill. A person who retires feeling that he has done his bit will quickly wither away. A company that feels that has reached its goal will quickly stagnate and lose vitality.

And so his point is like, you just always gotta be asking yourself like what you could be doing better. And the way I would combine it to what we're talking about, it's just like, there's no point in me thinking I, there's nothing left to learn. That just doesn't make any sense. I like learning from people and hearing about things where I'm like, wow, that puts my, I'm dumb. Like I'm not, I can't do that. Like, and I'm not trying to be negative on myself, but I just think it's like a, there's a sense of like humility because I think when you get into like overconfidence in what you know,

It's very dangerous. It reminds me about an old Chinese saying, if three people walking on the street, one of them must be my teacher. So always be humble. There's always something you can learn from each other. That brings up a good point because

I was on your website, okay? And I wanted to talk to you because I've never met anybody else that had your experience. So you have this great line. Hold on. I'm looking for it too. Where it's like, I was made here. Hold on. Do you know the line? Yeah. Made in China, assembled in New Zealand, delivered in the UK, unpacked in the metaverse. Yeah. I was like, what is it? Okay. So tell me what that means.

So, you know, a lot of people say, oh, the products made in China means something cheap or low quality. I just find it funny. So I said, okay, yeah, I was born in China and raised up in China. So I kind of made it in China. Then I moved to New Zealand.

in my idol's year new zealand culture shaped my identity how old were you when you moved i moved to new zealand when i was 20 okay basically all my idols here i spent in new zealand for 10 years then i moved to the uk now i'm in portugal so how do you wind up in portugal like what brought you to portugal

Every time I make some big decision, I'll use my rational mind to gather dots. Like Steve Jobs said, your life only makes sense when you connect the dots together. For Portugal, one of the reasons I, like you mentioned Peter Levels, his Nomad list, Lisbon is on the top one destination for digital nomads.

And my birthday is very funny. Macau used to be occupied by Portugal, then returned to China on 20th December, which is the birthday. I feel the connection between me and Portugal. How long have you been in Portugal? I moved here...

September last year. I'm still new, but I do feel the vibes here is so good. I quite like here. As we talked about before, a lot of digital nomads and founders living here. That's amazing. Yeah, I heard. So I've been to Spain, but I haven't, I didn't cross like the border. And I started looking at pictures last night.

And I was like, this place is gorgeous. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And on that Indie Hackers podcast that we keep referencing, they both, Cortland and Peter, both talked about that. They're like, Peter talked about how beautiful it was and the weather, the climate's really good. But he's like, it kind of looks like San Francisco. And to me, I thought the architecture, San Francisco's pretty, if you, like, not the bad parts. But I thought the architecture in Portugal's just...

Yeah. Absolutely gorgeous. So it's like, all right, I got to go. I have to visit. I love the fact that there's like these weird hubs that are taking place. Like again, you don't, and they talked about this a little bit too, like you can't predict and you don't obviously want a pandemic to happen, but you know that a pandemic is just like a giant war in the sense that when these, when human society experiences things like this, like on the other side of that, you're going to find a lot of things different and a lot of change. And so I've been living in Miami more than half my life. Like my dad, uh,

was born in Cuba and he was born like a few years before Castro took over. Yeah. So Castro comes over and they, they, they get out of there. So my dad was like two years old when he came to the States, two or three, I can't remember exactly. And so he settled in South, South Florida. And so I spent like,

basically half my life here. It's got a massive, you know, Hispanic population. And then over the last few decades, not just Cubans, it's like South Americans and everybody else. And so what was most surprising about the switch to remote work and then the kind of tech exodus that is occurring in San Francisco is that a bunch of them wound up here, which is really surprising, but it's also really cool.

Because now you have people because I've been interested in it forever. I happen to live here just because our family's here. And so I didn't pick it because of that. But now I have all these other people that are interested in entrepreneurship. They're interested in the same things I'm interested in that are now here as well, which is very welcome because.

I think Miami is going to benefit huge. Yeah, the crypto. They need a diversification of industry because we had like real estate, tourism, international banking, which is just another euphemism for money laundering. I was like, all right, so to see, and I was kind of worried about raising kids here. I want my kids to be exposed to like interesting, intelligent people. And you need industry that's not just tourism and real estate.

you need some kind of different mode of thinking and people doing different things and not just having your kids exposed to, hey, if you stay here, you can do just a handful of jobs. I see. Do you find out the location also play a big role in the founders environment? You know, a lot of writers, for example, in 1920s, they all gathered in Paris. And like I said,

Silicon Valley. Yeah, they all say Portugal is the next Silicon Valley because they attract so many entrepreneurs here. So let's go through this. I think there is no yes or no answer. So we can just go through. Enzo Ferrari would tell you yes because he's like, the only reason I was able to build my company is because there's a certain... He called it like a certain species of psychosis for race cars in Medina where he grew up and where his company was.

David Ogilvie, a personal hero of mine, he set up his company in on Madison Avenue in New York City, but he learned in like Pennsylvania and when he was in Gallup. So I don't know. I think

I mean, obviously go through like Steve Jobs, his company needed to be there because they made the most sense was what was happening. But then again, you have Bill Gates was up in Seattle. No one, you know, there wasn't a lot there. I don't, it's not like a clear answer. It's just random. And that's why I get a lot of like messages were like, Hey, what do you think I should do here? I'm like, I don't like giving advice. Cause like I can tell you. So what I do now,

It's people are very interested in like, Hey, can we, like, can I talk to you so I can bounce off how I'm thinking about my business with what you've learned about like history? So, and so when I have these conversations, it's just like,

i don't know what you should do because i can only know what i can do and i don't like like avon chenard founder of patagonia is one of my heroes too because he's just so damn determined to build his company his way and that's all but he says something's fascinating he's like i don't want anybody to tell me what to do and i don't want to tell what other people and i want to tell anybody else what to do and like that i was like i feel that my soul when he said that so i was like listen i could tell you like i had this kid i i don't mean that as a pejorative it's really interesting he subscribes to founders

He's like 21 and he started a media company. And within the first year, he had a $2 million offer to sell. And he said no. And so we wind up talking for like two hours because, again, I feel like, man, I wish I could. I had that when I was 21. Like if I had like if I podcast didn't even exist when I was 21, for God's sake. So and I was like, listen, man, you know, he has these questions. It's like I don't I'm not a good person to ask. All I can tell you is like based on the reading I've done.

And then I'm going to give you these ideas and you got to make the decision because that is fundamentally what entrepreneurship is. Like there is nobody coming to say that you've got to work yourself in a position where you can trust your own judgment or you're, you're, you're screwed. Right. Cause I will tell you there's, there's two historical precedents for, for what you just did. I go, the founder of Sony was Akio Morita, right? They started Sony in a, literally a burned out department store that had been firebombed by the U S and

in World War II, right? One of the crazy stories is Founders No. 102. And Akio Morita is also like somebody that Jeff Bezos talks about learning from, Steve Jobs talks about learning from, like all these other founders that we like and admire said, hey, this is the guy, go freaking pay attention to what he's saying. So I was like, okay, I'll read his book. Like, you told me to read his book, I'm going to read his book. And so they had no assets. They're not doing that well. And he goes to a sales meeting and the guy's like, and they're building electronics at the time.

And the guy's like, I love it. We'll take $100,000. And Akio's like, what the hell? He's like, I was shaking. I couldn't imagine because they had no money. Like, this is gonna be a huge order. They're like, okay, but one change I want you to do on the $100,000 you make for us. Take this name Sony, take that off and put our name on there. And so Akio says like, he drained, he like turned white. And he's like, no.

No, I will not. And then the guy starts yelling at him. He's like, your brand, no one even knows your brand. Like this, like we're hugely popular. You're nothing. We'll squash you like being really mean to him. And he said, as somebody in his twenties, right. And he's like,

They don't know my brand now, just like they didn't know your brand then. But I'm building the Sony brand. I'm not building your brand. Right. So it's like I'm rejecting the order. So he turned that down when he didn't have any money. It's really easy to turn it down when you're already rich. Extremely difficult when you don't have any money into the future of your your your company is so uncertain. And so I told him that story and I told him the story of Ralph Lauren. And so Ralph Lauren started out designing ties.

That was his first product. And so he went around, I think it might've been Bloomingdale's. I forgot what he went around to businesses, department stores in New York, trying to sell his ties. They're like, we love it. We love it. Ralph Lauren doesn't have any money. He's not rich at this point. Like he is now. They said, okay, we love your ties. We'll order a bunch. Take off that and put our house brand name on it.

no, I'm not building your house brand. I'm building the Ralph Lauren brand. So even when he didn't have any money, just like this 21 year old kid's not rich, you know, he's, and I told him, I was like, dude, if somebody offered me 2 million at 21, I would have made the mistake. And so, cause that's the same thing. They're like, we love what you're doing, but instead of building your own media company, build it, do exactly what you're doing, but put our name on it. So it's this, this whole thing was,

occurring again. And I was like, that doesn't mean you're guaranteed success. It doesn't mean you're building the next Sony. It doesn't mean you're building the next Ralph Lauren. All I can tell you is that this experience that you're going through right now is not new. It's not unique. And you've got to feel what, and if you took the money, you have to follow your natural drift. That's why it's like, I can't tell you what to do because I'm not you. I can only tell myself what to do. So in that case, like if somebody offered me now,

Do exactly what you're doing, but instead of founders, put my company in. I was like, no. I know what's important to me. Control is important to me. Ownership is important to me. I know things compound. I wouldn't do it.

But I might have made that mistake previously. But now with the knowledge that I've learned from reading all these books, I'm like, okay, just dude, control is way more important. You can always make more money. But if this is the best, this may be the best idea I ever had. This may be the best idea he ever had. That's the best idea that Kio Morita ever had. That's the best idea that Ralph Lauren ever had. Why the hell are you going to sell your best idea? That doesn't make any sense.

Like, unless you just want to disappear onto an island, but you're such a driven person, you're probably not the person that's going to be cool sitting down doing nothing. I just think it's important, I guess, that the main point I'm trying to put here is like, get yourself into a position where you can trust your own judgment. Because if you're running your own company, like, that's what I like about going back to the Peter Lovell thing.

where he's just like, he looked at some of his competitors' websites and he's like, they're really beautiful design. There's all this animation, there's all this flash. He goes, I don't even know how to use icons. So I just use emojis. But he trusts his own judgment. He's like, I don't need to learn this other thing they're trying to tell me to do or make it more complicated. I know that I'm attacking this problem. I'm solving my problem. I'm delivering value to customers. And my customers don't care if I have an emoji or not. In the early days of Founders, I was getting reviews

And the funny part was, I told you like the way I wanted founders to feel. It's like, what if you had a friend that read a book every week and just sat down with you and told you the interesting part? And I got one of the funniest reviews was like,

The production value is not Radiolab, but this is one of my favorite podcasts because the information is so good. It's like I don't even have intro music. I have literally me. I'm sitting in my background. I have like a soundproof studio. Oh, cool. Okay. Yeah, I'm standing in what looks like a booth, a soundproof booth that looks like something I could make a rap song in or something like that, like I could make music in.

But I was like, I just sit here by myself with a book and a microphone. Like I don't need music. I don't need, I don't need anything like any fancy stuff. I just know that because, and part of that is because one human talking to another human is something that has happened forever and it will happen in the future. I don't need to, I'm not putting on a show. I'm just having a conversation. Yeah. I just, so that's my point is like, I just, I trusted my own judgment that, Hey, I'm,

I like when one person just talks directly to me. I'm not unique. Tim Urban, the founder of Way But Why, really helped influence my thinking on this. He's like, when I sit down to write a post, I don't try to think who I'm writing for. He goes, I write for myself because I know, he goes, I know there's at least 100,000 Tims out there.

And the same thing is like, I know I'm not the only person interested in this subject. There's probably in the English speaking world, the people connected to the internet that are interested in entrepreneurship, that's that speak English. Cause you have to obviously speak English to understand what I'm saying. Right. There's millions of people. I don't need millions of people to listen to my podcast to like, to have a nice career or whatever the case is. So that's just part of it. It's like, I'm going to trust that if I make a podcast that I would like to listen to, then other people would too. And Stephen King gave that advice too. He's like, listen,

When you're writing your book, he's like, you're not only the writer, you're the first reader. So you damn sure better be writing something that you would want to read because you're going to have to read it before anybody else does. And that's a simple idea. And I'm like, I remember putting the book down when I read that. I'm like, that is genius because it's a simple idea. He's like completely like, I just wrote a book for some hypothetical person that may or may not exist when it's just easier if I write what I like to read and just trust that there's other people out there that are just like me. Yeah. Just a...

how you do one thing is how you do everything. You just use this simple idea, then repeat, repeat. I'm pretty sure that's me stealing a Bruce Lee quote. I'm pretty sure he said that. But it is, "How you do one thing is how you do all things," I think is the quote. Yeah, he said, "I'm not afraid of people

people who master 10,000 skills. It's a person that did the same kick 10,000 times. In fact, on my... I'll read something to you. You might find it interesting.

My home screen on my laptop is a quote. It's Bruce Lee, and he's got his fist raised towards me. And I'm going to read this quote to you. And I read it every day. He says, if you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus. And you must not stay there. You must go beyond them.

it's one of my favorite quotes of all time one of my favorite bruce lee quotes too just because it's it's demonstrated in these books you know you have phil knight who literally started nike selling other people's shoes blue ribbon yeah well blue ribbon was his company but he imported the tigers from japan and he would sell them out of the trunk of his car at track meets that is the beginning of nike and look where it is now so like this idea where bruce lee's like there's no limits there's plateaus you hit a plateau that's fine and

And I was reading my highlights on Claude Shannon's fantastic autobiography last night. And he made this point. He's just like, he was not only did he invent, he was a great scientist. He invented information theory and everything else, but he was like one of the most successful investors of all time. And he did it part-time with just his wife and his Apple II computer. And he's like, I don't even do it for the money. He's like, I just look at it like it's a problem to solve. And so,

When I run into a snag or an issue, I look at it as like, there's a problem. That's not a problem. It's an opportunity. So let me solve it like a puzzle. And then I solve that. And then I just go on to the next one. Then I inevitably run into another. He just had a really clear way of thinking. I was like, okay, I just, I solved this problem. Moving on as I go forward, I'll run into another problem. Don't despair. Don't get stressed out. It's just a puzzle to solve. And I'll keep moving that. And he's like, but when I solve puzzles in the stock market, I make a lot of money.

And so that's how he approached it. And I think it's, it's a, it's like an echo of the Bruce Lee thing. It's like you hit a plateau, but there's no limits in life. We just talked about that. Somebody literally lived where she was making the equivalent of $300 million a year and no expenses that happened. That's not fiction. There is no limits. Like you can do another great quote, my favorite quote. I know I've quoted Mark Andreessen already, but, but I have to bring this up because I

I think there's a, there's a, they talked about this on the podcast. God, we're going to talk about this podcast a lot about Cortland and Peter levels. And Peter saying that there was a, in his opinion, like there's a more optimism in the Asian perspective.

culture right now than there is in the American culture. Right. And that the American like people growing up in America now feel like, you know, like it's rigged. The world is rigged. If you had success, it was just luck or you had rich parents or whatever. And Peter was like, I don't like that. They both agree. They're like, I don't like that.

that mindset. It's like, it's basically saying, don't even try. Cause if you do try, you're destined to fail. And if you do try and if you do succeed, it was just luck. So just, I don't even know what the end, the end state of that line of thinking, but market, the way I think about it is what Mark Andreessen said. And he said, the world is a very malleable place. If you know what you want and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion, the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you think.

And I think that's, if I'm going to pick between two mindsets, I'm going to pick that one that I actually have. I can affect, I can like push on the world and change things. And you know, that's, that's true. Think about that. Like you tweeted,

You build products. You have a unique set of experiences. You started this podcast. I have a similar journey, although I'm not a nomad. And it's like now our lives intersected. And the work you create goes out and reverberates into the world and people use it as inspiration. And same thing with me. It's like we're clearly changing in our own small way. We're affecting the lives of the people around us. The world is a very malleable place. You just got to go after it with maximum energy and drive and believe that it'll happen.

True. Yeah, so I think Bruce Lee would agree with that. I think Steve Jobs would agree with that. Like almost everybody that I study, it's just like, they're not like, oh yeah, you know, I just woke up one day and I got lucky. It's like, no, they worked at it for a very long time and they went through a lot of failures. Yeah, it is. So last question, what's your biography would be like? What kind of a legacy do you want to leave to this world? That's funny, man. I think about that.

I thought about this last night because I think, have you ever read, Tim Urban has this great idea. It's called Grand Theft Life. No. Okay, so it's on Wait But Why. You can Google Grand Theft Life. He talks about, because he's read a bunch of biographies too and he studied people like Elon Musk. He wrote a 60,000 page or 60,000 word essay on Elon Musk. Yeah, I read that. He talks about this idea where

in the case like if you ever play grand theft auto you you don't think of yourself living as like looking through your own eyes like i think part of what is helpful is like you step outside of yourself and so now now you step back from yourself and you picture yourself right just like you were following a character in a book but it's your life and in grand theft auto it's like okay my character needs to go make money let me go and in the game like you go and do make do a

do a job, you get money. My character needs more endurance. So I take my character to the gym or like you literally just move your character around this imaginary world, this metaverse, you know, his point is like some of the greatest entrepreneurs and greatest thinkers, like they live that in the real world. And so, you know, Elon believes like they were in a simulation or whatever. He just believes that like, we can influence, like we're in this weird game. We should treat it as, as a game. And so the, I think about that idea and I took that idea and combined it with the fact that I read so many biographies,

And like, I, everybody's writing their own story. Like you just said, most people will not read your stories widely read as like a Churchill story or Henry Ford story, any of these other people. Right. But somebody is going to read it. You're going to read the book, your experience and the people that you, that around you, your family, your friends, the people that you, that you had a relationship throughout your life, they're going to see the book of you. Um, and so that's what I was actually thinking about last night. I was actually driving. It was raining. It was like this very interesting, weird thought I was having, but, um,

All I'm concerned at is when I get to the end of my life, if it could be very similar to the end of Ed Thorpe's biography, the autobiography. So that book is called A Man for All Markets. And I'm pretty sure I have the quote, so let me pull it up.

And so I'm trying to the way I what I want to leave behind is like I want a balance in my life. Right. I want a work that I'm passionate about, that I'm that I that I'm good at, that benefits the lives of others. Right. And I think the best thing you could do for somebody else is teach somebody something. Right. This is the best thing we can all do. I want to be able to pursue my intellectual interests, like read about things, even if they're not for work.

I want to be, I'm curious about the world around me. So I want to know, I have an understanding of history. I want to see the world and I want to travel, you know, see as much of the world as possible. My mom died a few years ago from metastatic breast cancer and she died rather young and her entire life played out in Indiana and Florida. And that's it. She didn't see anywhere else in the world. And that's a tragedy to me. So I want to see the world. I want to be a good dad.

Like, that's important. If I get to the moment in my life and my kids don't want to spend time with me, my adult kids, when they don't live with you, like, I fail. I want to have a good relationship with my wife. I want to spend a lot of time with friends, and I want to take care of health. And so I don't really think about it in terms of legacy because for most people, like even think about the people that are still talked about hundreds of years after they're dead. Leonardo da Vinci. He's been dead for 500 years. People are still collecting his art. They're still talking about him. They're still writing books about him. That doesn't matter to him.

He's dead. It also depends. Some people think there's an afterlife. There might be reincarnation. You might go to heaven, hell, whatever you personally believe. Churchill said his belief was that we go out like when you blow out a candle. Yeah.

He's like, once I'm dead, that's it. I don't have... I'm not coming back. There's no experience. This was the experience. So when people ask me, David, what do you think the purpose of life is? My answer right now, to enjoy it. It's an experience. It's an adventure. Let's treat it as such. And the key to being able to treat your life as an adventure and experience is learning. You've got to learn how to do that. The standard default... I use my mom's life as a cautionary tale. She was raised...

in poverty by terrible parents. She had a shitty roll of the dice. Then she's married and, you know, my parents got divorced and they got remarried. They should have never been married. Like they did not have a good marriage. Right. Then she gets, she, her, the best thing she had was three kids. She had good relationship with all three of her kids. Right. But then she gets a crappy roll of the dice. And when she's in her fifties, she's got breast cancer and the cancer spreads everywhere. Right. And then she dies when she's 60 years old. And it's just like, that's,

most existence in human history forever. And so I take that as motivation. It's like the lesson my mom taught me is like, go, you have like, go for it. Like whatever, figure out whatever your life is. It doesn't matter what it is. Everybody should come up with a different idea.

write it down and then do it. And so if I can get to the end of my life and the biography of my life is, Hey, this dude taught, you know, I want to teach a million. I want to teach the history of entrepreneurship to a million entrepreneurs. I don't know how I'm going to do that. I don't know how I'm going to reach them. I don't know. Like, and I'm willing to do that over, you know, the next 30, 40 years, if I have to, whatever the case is, but like, that's just an idea. Like, because when you learn something on the podcast, just like Richard, like,

Richard learned about the podcast. He tells you that's how you, now when you have conversations, I'm like, so if I could put, if I can be like the spark for like a million people to learn about these valuable ideas and then they can go off, you know, I've heard people that started businesses like trends.vc, which is a drew Riley. Who's been really, really, yeah, really supportive. There's people that have signed up for my podcast just because this guy tells them that he's like, listen, if you're going to have to, if you're going to charge for content, that chart, that content has to be excellent. He said on a podcast like a month ago or something,

He's like, I only pay for one podcast because it's extremely high quality. And he named the podcast. And then I get emails from saying, hey, I just bought a subscription because of Drew Riley. But he's been, he's a badass too, by the way. I really like the way he thinks. He's got this great post about, it's like his 100 simple rules for life. You can go to his website and see it. So anyways, he says, he's like, founders inspired me to start a company. Then he starts a company, winds up being like, I think it went like product, product,

of the year or some shit. Like it's crazy how successful it is and how like, you know what I mean? So like in a tiny, tiny way, like if you can find inspiration, I found other people that were already running their businesses. They're like, dude, I had Dustin Fox. He's like, I was already running my real estate business. I was making a couple hundred grand a year. Now I'm making over $500,000 a year.

based off of what I heard, the lessons I learned from the books on your podcast. So what if I could do that? Again, I don't need to be, I'm introverted. I don't really want to be famous, honestly. Like I don't need to be famous. I don't need to be as well known as Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs and all that. I don't care about any of that. But if I can spend all my time learning and then immediately turn around and teach everybody else what I learned. And then at the end, you know, I influenced a bunch of people and I was good to the people that are in my life and I got to see the world.

I'm cool with that. That's great. That's a life well lived, you know? Yeah. Peter Levos and I talk about niche famous. So we kind of doing something we are passionate about and also attracts people who have the same vision. Like for Peter, he attracts all the digital nomads. For me, I attract a lot of overseas Chinese people. And for you, you attract a lot of entrepreneurs like me.

Yeah, we kind of impact one individual, then the individual also have the impact to others. So we become this niche, famous people in our circle know us, but we don't need to be that, become a celebrity like Kenyon Weiss, everybody knows that. No, because I don't think those people have very happy existences. And I'm very interested, again, the reason I use, I call Ed Thorpe my blueprint,

Just like every other entrepreneur has a blueprint. Every other people, like I read two books on Arnold Schwarzenegger. He says, once I found Reg Park, I saw somebody doing what I wanted to do. I used him as my blueprint. So Ed Thorpe is just like, okay, the guy was smart and he's a genius. I'm not like, he's way smarter than I'll ever be. I could read every day for the rest of my life. I won't be as smart as him. I'm cool with that. That's fine. He's a legit genius, but he built an interesting company, right? He had great relationships with his family, took care of his health,

He traveled and he learned and he's still alive. But when he dies, it's like, all right, that's about as, that's as like, that's as good as it gets. He did not over optimize. And so that's another thing why I say over and over again, the podcast, like we're learning from these people. We're not idolizing them is because there are a lot of them to get to that level. They have, you have to over optimize your work, your professional life at the detriment of your others. And it's just like, I want to be passionate about my work. I took, I was working last night.

I took a break and we went out to dinner with my family. Like I will never like, Oh no, I can't do that. No, I'm going to take that hour. I'm going to take that two hours, whatever the case is like today, I wanted to talk to you. I thought you were a really interesting person. I think we have a lot of the same interests. Like we like working out. We like entrepreneurship. I think our favorite, uh,

the same Tarantino. Like I saw that. And so it's just like, and then the fact that I was like, wait, she grew up and I was like, and then I kind of figured out, I was like, all right, I know she's born in China and she grows up in New Zealand or London. And then she's living in Portugal. And like, and then she has like all this crazy, like your, your personal website's rather like impressive. Like,

Like you've documented all the podcasts you listen to, the books you listen to read. It's like, all right, this person's got an interesting mind. Hell yeah, I would like to spend some time talking to them and getting to know them, you know? Like that's just cool. Like that leads to my enjoyment of life as opposed to, okay, no, I can't do this because I got to work, I got to work, I got to work. I'll work all the time, but when I'm not, like I'm going to make...

room in my life for other things. Yeah, true. So where can people find you? Founders Podcast. If you search Founders Podcast in any podcast app or you go to founderspodcast.com, there's, I don't know, 100 or 150 previews. I've done 235 episodes. They're everywhere. I'm not really active. You can follow me anywhere. I have all the socials. You have Twitter. I just started making videos. And I need advice from you too because

What I realized is like, so I'm making like short videos on TikTok and Instagram. I don't think they're any good yet. They will be good. Just like my early podcasts were not good. And you know, it was like anything takes practice and I'm not used to doing it, but I like vertical video, short vertical video as a way to like, cause I have these 20,000 highlights in read wise. Right. So my thought was,

Now we're getting to the point where we have 400 hours in the podcast, 235 different episodes. That's a ton of information. I want to develop tools for not only for new people that haven't discovered the podcast, but people that have...

that listen to like remind themselves of what you learn. So what I think I'm going to do is like take every highlight that I have, every interesting highlight and turn it into like a short little 30 second video of, Hey, let's not forget what I know we haven't covered this, you know, in 200 episodes, but Henry Ford said something really smart. And so as a way to say, Hey, this is the idea. And then in case you haven't listened to it, I'll say at the end, this is episode number, whatever. So I think that's, if you want to follow founders podcast on Instagram or Tik TOK, I just started, um,

I'm going to do that. And it's also, you know what it came from? And then I know we got to go. I read a 700 page biography of Michael Jordan like two months ago. And that changed, that book changed my life because what he said in there, he taught like, I've been a Michael Jordan fan since I was a little kid. And I didn't, I don't know why it took me this long to, to, to read a biography. But he blew my mind. Cause like he literally looked at it as like the best that ever did what he's done. Right. And then he said something, he goes, all he talked about in his books was the importance of practice, right?

Not everybody knows me because of the game, because of the championships I won, what you saw on the court, what you didn't see. That's 1% of what I did. 99% was done by myself or with my team outside of the public eye. And then he went to the Olympics in 1992 and he said something that gave me chills. And he's observing the practice habits of other Olympians. So they're at the top of the profession, but not

as good as him. Right. And he said, he goes, he thought that he said they were, they're just, their practice habits were not the same as mine. I practice more. I am. He's like, I believe in practice. And he said, he goes, they're deceiving themselves about what the game requires. And so he's like, you've got to practice whatever, whether you're playing basketball, whatever you're doing. And so I was like, okay, how can I do that for me? Because everybody sees the podcast as like the podcast is like my game when I'm done. Right. But they don't see, you know, the 15, 20, 25 hours it took

of me reading the book of doing the highlights. It's like, I'm doing arts and crafts over here. Like I sit down with a pen, scissors, post-it notes and a, and a, and a ruler and go through the whole thing. And then I take pictures of all those highlights and put them in a read, read wise. Right.

So I was like, well, how can I practice? Like, I can't read that book and not let it change my life. And so I was like, okay, make little videos. Like, cause now, now am I able to, when I make a video that you can watch in 30 seconds, you can learn something really fast, but I'm reminding myself, right?

And that's the biggest thing is like, I'm not doing an episode. Like my next episode, I think I'm going to do either the founder of Dunkin' Donuts or Michael Bloomberg. I have two books. I got to figure it out. But it's like, when I sit down, it's like, if I do the founder of Dunkin' Donuts, it's not just about Dunkin' Donuts. It's like, how does this relate to what

Steve Jobs told us or whoever told us. And so the only way I'm going to be able to keep making those connections for the listeners is if I'm constantly reviewing the material myself. Yeah. I just need to shout out to Richard Rees, our mutual friend, the founder of Most Recommended Books.

books, he introduced me to Michael Jordan's Last Dance, the documentary on Netflix. And then once I finished that, then you did Michael Jordan episode. I was like, wow, such a coincidence. Yeah. And I was watching, that's the second time I watched it because as I'm reading the biography, I watched Last Dance again because of that. And it's again, I just think that level of dedication

to your, to your craft is it inspires me. It's something I want to copy. I don't want to just sit here and like mail it in. I'm not interested in being moderate. Like I like extreme personalities. I want to go all in. And so that's why I, and I, and the podcast where I'm like, all right, that's 235 books down 1000 to go. Yeah. That's a reminder to me. It's like, this is just the beginning. This is just the beginning. I can read a thousand books. I can, as long as I live long enough,

And I'm not going to rush through them, but like, we have a lot to learn. And this is like, I'm, I'm very happy that we've laid a strong foundation, but let's keep going. And it's a reminder myself. I was like, man, you got this. This is never ending. This, my exit strategy is death. Like that's it.

I want to do this forever. So yeah. Anyways, thank you very much. Shout out to Richard. His website's amazing. Hopefully we can do this again though. Maybe we check in like every year or something. Yeah, let's do it. I love it. Yeah. I'll have more questions with like listening to your episode and read more biographies. Yeah, absolutely. And then if you want to listen to Founders Podcast, founderspodcast.com or you just look in Founders, search Founders Podcast by David Sunra and any podcast playing out. That's great. Thank you, David. All right.