David Senra: Why the Best Are Not just 10% Better

- January 12, 2026 (2 months ago) • 01:09:35

Transcript

Start Time	Speaker	Text
00:00	David Senra	"Sometimes I think I should shut up and not say the things I say on podcasts. David Senra, David Senra."
00:05	Sam Parr	The guy's name is David Senra. He has a podcast called Founders.
00:09	David Senra	To even get on Founders Podcast, you have to be so good at your job. Somebody wrote a fucking book about it. That's insanely a high bar. It's almost like it's an obsession. It is — I'm addicted.
00:19	Sam Parr	"I've known you now for—I don't know—four or five years. I think you are crazier now than you were."
00:24	David Senra	I'm not balanced. I don't think I can be balanced. I don't think I want to be balanced. I want to be the best in the world at what I do. People are like, "ten thousand hours" — I'm way past that. Way past that. So, of course, I've changed.
00:36	Sam Parr	I'm not doing this to stay the same. The difference between the world's greatest and "pretty good" is not a little bit better — it's not 20% better. It's like a thousand times better, and that is hard to grasp.
00:46	David Senra	Mediocrity is invisible until passion shows up and exposes it. I've become intolerable of people who are casual, and I don't even know why I'm like that. I think I was lying to myself for a while when I said I didn't need anybody else. I wanted professional success to prove that, even though I was born in the wrong environment, I am not like the rest of these people. It's almost like revenge for being born.
01:11	Sam Parr	Are you a happy person? I don't think you're happy. Okay, so you have to look this guy up: Eliud Kipchoge. You have to see what he looks like. He looks more like a gazelle than a human being. The thing about world-class athletes and runners is you usually see them when they're exerting themselves and wearing their running gear, so they look amazing. But then you see them in real clothes and you're like, "Oh my God — that person is so much skinnier, has so much less body fat than the average." How on earth are these two human beings both human beings? A normal person versus Eliud. He runs the marathon in, I think, about 2 hours and 1 minute, which is like 4 minutes 36 seconds per mile — crazy fast. What we were saying was the difference between the world's greatest — the best there ever was — and "pretty good" is huge. It's not a little better. It's not 20% better. It's like 10 times better, or 100 times.
02:05	David Senra	Or a thousand.
02:06	Sam Parr	Or a thousand times better, and that is hard to grasp. Do you agree?
02:10	David Senra	Yeah. I mean, you asked me, like, what am I thinking? Right before we started recording you saw what I was doing. You asked, "What are you thinking about?" and I was like, "I'm thinking about how this looks." He was like, "But does that matter?" I was like, everything matters. We're trying to be the best in the world at what we're doing, so we have to take everything very, very seriously. I think the only thing I'm obsessed with—there's actually one of the best pieces of advice I ever got that I won't shut up about, and I think about literally probably every day now—is this idea of "constant refinement of association" that my friend Jared Kushner told me about. Jared is unbelievably honest. There's a great line in— I just finished, we were talking upstairs—I just finished reading Bruce Springsteen's autobiography. There's a great line where he talks about his deep friendship with Jimmy Iovine. He's like, "You want Jimmy in the room because he'll tell you the truth." Everybody around Bruce is kissing his ass, and Jimmy's just like, "This album sucks," or, "This is great." You trust his judgment. Jared's like that too. If he's your friend and he likes you, he's very kind, but he will say, "Hey, what you're doing is not good enough for you," or, "This person is not good enough for you. Be careful with this." So this concept of association is important because as you keep getting better at what you do, you get access to people who are great at what they do too. There's a lot of commonalities between them, and once you're exposed to that... I always have this line: "Mediocrity is invisible until passion shows up and exposes it." I've become intolerant of people who are casual with the way they push their work, the friends they choose to hang out with, or anything that is not them striving for excellence. I don't even know why I'm like that—it's just I have to be, I want to be, I have to be the best in the world at what I'm doing, so that
03:42	Sam Parr	Did it become like that because you've studied 400 biographies of greatness?
03:46	David Senra	That's a great question. Michael Dell has this great line in his autobiography where, at 19 years old, he's in his dorm room at the University of Texas. He's got $1,000 and he's like, "I'm gonna compete with IBM." That is delusional. IBM at the time was the most valuable company in the world. It was the first company — I didn't even know this; I had to go back and research it — the first company in history to reach a $100,000,000,000 market cap. You have this kid that's like, "I'm gonna compete head to head with them." The next line when he's talking about this is: "Was I a little full of myself at 19? Sure I was." I think you have to be to do anything special. So I've always had this deep, just delusional self-confidence and default optimism — that if I focus on something, I will figure it out. I will figure out how to do it. But I also think it's impossible. I've obviously changed. I've been doing the Founders' Podcast for almost ten years. I, like, think — I'm feeling like, I don't know, 407 of these books by far. That's hundreds of thousands of pages. People are like, "Oh, ten thousand hours" — I'm way past that. So of course I've changed. I'm not doing this to stay the same.
04:52	Sam Parr	"Well, I've known you now for—I don't know—four or five years, and I've listened to you for longer than that. I think you are crazier now than you were. I think you are more obsessed now than you were."
05:02	David Senra	Sometimes I think I should shut up and not say the things I say on podcasts, because I don't like having a filter. I don't like having two different sides of me; it makes me fundamentally uncomfortable. So I was like, you know what—I'm just not going to hold back. I'm just going to say this. I just did this when I went on Tim Ferriss' podcast, and I talked about... Tim didn't tell me what we were going to talk about, other than he told my team, "Please tell David not to curse so much."
05:23	Sam Parr	That's what I told you five years ago.</FormattedResponse>
05:25	David Senra	And I don't think they came from Tim. I think they came from Tim's team. I think we — we accomplished that goal, but he started asking questions and I hesitated for half a second in my mind, or half a minute. I'm like, "Man, I should not say this stuff. I don't... this is gonna be bad," and I just let it go. Since then I was just on the phone — I won't say who I was talking to, but it's a founder of a public company. He's relatively young, wildly successful, and he was just like, "Hey, I listened to your Tim Ferriss interview," and he's like, "I know exactly what you're talking about, because I went through that too." You hear that over and over again. So, to answer your question: am I crazier — is that the term that you use — or like more intense? I think I was lying to myself for a while. If you look at episode 222 of the Founders Podcast, it says Ed Thorp (in parentheses: "My Personal Blueprint"). Ed Thorp's a legit genius. I am not a genius. Whatever he directed his talents to, he was gonna succeed, because he's a legitimate, I think, fundamental genius. What I liked about him was he was a real, balanced person. You would love him. Yeah, because you are like this, and I think you're truly like this. A lot of our conversations are like this. We're like [unclear: "sicily bounded"] his professional life — he was very successful. I'll give a quick TL;DR of his life: He was the person that invented how to count cards in blackjack. He was a mathematician — a prodigy mathematician — and a professor for a long time. He wrote a book called Beat the Dealer, which tells you how to count cards; in the 1960s it sold millions of copies. He started the first quantitative hedge fund of all time. He was one of the first investors in Berkshire Hathaway. He met Warren Buffett when they were both in their thirties, and he gets in the car and he's like, "That guy's gonna be the richest person in the world one day." He invented the world's first handheld wearable computer with Claude Shannon, who's the father of information theory and another genius. It's just like... how did one guy do all this?
07:12	Sam Parr	"The Forrest Gump of finance."
07:14	David Senra	That's a great way to think about it. He came from a real messed-up family. He got into weightlifting and taking care of his health before there was anything like bodybuilding. He said—when he figured this out in college—“the way I think about this is every hour that I spend in the gym working on my health now is one less day in the hospital when I'm 80 or 90.” He went on Tim Ferriss' show. When you look at him and show pictures, people guess, “Oh, he's like 60,” but he's like 90, 92, or however old he is. His whole thing was, “I want a balanced life.” He would work roughly nine to five, then spend time on his health, his work, his family, and then have fun. It was a much more balanced life. He also did something fascinating: once he made more money than he could ever spend in his lifetime, he stopped traveling. He has this beautiful house in Newport, California, and every time he traveled he thought, “This is a downgrade — why did I leave my house?” Once he had enough money that he didn't need more, he stopped trading time for money. Even when there were easy opportunities—“layups,” like “Oh, I can make $30,000,000 by investing in this oil thing”—he was just like, “What's the...”
08:28	David Senra	And so, for a long time—by that time I'd read, you know, 200 of these books—and I thought he was an outlier. Most of these people are singularly obsessed with their work. For a long time I think I was lying to myself. "Yeah, I want a balanced life," I'd say, but the truth is I'm not balanced. I don't think I can be balanced, and I don't think I want to be balanced. I want to be the best in the world at what I do. Again, I narrowly define that. I'm not trying to... I think that the narrow definition is important. That's what I think about all day. That's what drives me. That's when I feel comfortable. Maybe I'll change in the future, but I'm fundamentally uncomfortable not working towards some kind of professional goal.
09:14	Sam Parr	Alright, I read a ton. I would say almost a book a week, and the reason I read so much is because my philosophy towards reading is: I want to see what worked for the winners that I love and what strategies they used. Then I want to see what mistakes they all made, what common flaws they had, and I just want to avoid that. HubSpot asked me to put together a list of the books that have changed my life so far in 2025, and I did that. I listed out seven books that made a meaningful difference in my life, and I explained the differences they had on me and the actions I took because of the book. I also listed my very particular ways of reading because I'm pretty strategic about how I read, how I read so much, and how I remember what I read. I put this together in a very simple guide: it's seven books that had a huge impact on my life, and you can scan the QR code below if you want to read it. Or there's a link—"you guys know what to do"—there's a link in the description; just go ahead and click it and you'll see the guide that I made. So it's the seven books that had a massive change in my life this year so far, and also how I'm able to read so much. So check it out below. So I read a lot. I read one to four books a month, mostly history. You do more or the same? How do you become sensitive enough when you read something to know that that is a.
10:32	Sam Parr	That is worth remembering, because there have been so many times I've read something and then forgotten it. I'm reading — I love the American Revolution — and when I reread books I'm like, "I didn't even remember this or that." You do a really good job of recall. You've done it many times here, and you do a really good job of bringing out the points of the story that actually matter. I think this is an important lesson: how do you be sensitive enough to see what is important and what isn't, and then use that to change your life? </FormattedResponse>
10:59	David Senra	I was a big believer in intuition and in the constant refinement of your own taste. I'm sure I did not have that skill in September 2016, when I started, nearly to the degree that I have it now. Before Kobe Bryant died, he was asked what he sees in Steph Curry that makes him such a formidable competitor. Kobe said, "There's a calmness about him." When you match this calmness and belief in his skill set with his intense desire and work ethic to practice and get better, that is a very dangerous combination. What Kobe was referring to is Steph's answer when people ask him what he thinks about while he's shooting. Steph says, "Absolutely nothing." He doesn't overthink it. He trusts his intuition. If a line in a book or a sentence speaks to him, "This is jumping out to me," he'll underline it and jot down notes. The lesson is: do not overthink—practice the same things over and over again. We see Steph hitting a crazy three-pointer in the Olympics to win—I watched that clip the other day—but we don't see the million other times he was alone shooting threes. I always say: the public praises people for what they practice in private. The other thing about taste I realized when talking to many people who are really great at what they do—other entrepreneurs and people who want to be great but aren't yet—is that they're trying to figure out why they're not breaking through. It's often because you're not actually interested in this; you're lying to yourself. I am intensely interested in this. You can ask my partner Rob—we go through this all the time with the new show: "Hey, let's get this person," and that person's a big name.
12:52	Sam Parr	"You guys don't give a shit."
12:53	David Senra	And I'm like, this is the way I think about my work. Okay — the only way I'm going to do this for the rest of my life is if I'm doing it for the right reasons. So I cannot overcomplicate things. Munger has this line where he says something about: > "The hardest thing to do is to remember why you set out doing what you're doing, and to keep things simple, and to do that for a very long time." So the way I think about it is: Founders are the books that I'm intensely interested in reading — not just a book that I think is going to get a lot of downloads. There have been times when I read a book, I hated that guy, and I literally threw the book across the room. I was like, "I'm not going to spend a week in that guy's mind." Founders are the books I'm intensely interested in wanting to read and enjoy reading, and the new show, David Center, is the people I'm intensely interested in having conversations with. I was on the phone with somebody yesterday. I texted her and I was like, "I want you to fly to Malibu and I want to do a show with you." And she's like, "Are you out of your mind? Are you crazy?" because she feels... because of the guest list has been kind of... [trails off]
13:56	Sam Parr	She's below.
13:57	David Senra	Yeah. She— I was like... and she sent me this funny meme. It's Big Bird sitting at a table and everybody else is like, "This is a normal office; you got Big Bird." She put Daniel Ek and Michael Dell and all these other people I've had, and then her name on it. I'm like, "That's not— that's not what I'm interested." I am intensely interested in people who have singular careers. They do what they do in a way that is completely natural and authentic to them, and they have an inner scorecard, so they're willing to make decisions that may not make sense to you but make sense to them.
14:28	Sam Parr	"Have you read The Inner Game of Tennis?" "No."
14:30	David Senra	But everybody tells me.
14:30	Sam Parr	Listen to this. I think the guy's name is Tim Gallwey. The idea is that he wrote it in the 1960s—or maybe the 1970s. He was a tennis instructor trying to get his students to be better players, and he developed the idea of Self 1 and Self 2. Self 1 is a critic. When you hit a ball you'd say, "Shit, that was horrible. I gotta move my hand this way. I gotta do this." Self 2 is someone who doesn't listen to the brain but listens to the body. You'd be like, "Well, I practiced this a thousand times—just like Steph Curry—I don't need to criticize myself. Instead I'm going to be objective and try moving my hand just a little bit this way, and let's just see what happens with that one hit that didn't achieve the desired outcome. What would happen if I just do this?" And you just kind of feel it. The idea is that you listen to your body more than your brain. It's very similar to what you're saying about keeping things simple and following intuition. In fact, I think Bill Gates is the most recent person to write the foreword for the book. It was launched in the 1970s; they've republished it, and it's now a business cult classic. The idea here is exactly what you're describing: keep things very simple, practice a lot, don't criticize yourself, and don't overthink what will work well.
15:44	David Senra	The criticism — and you and I have talked about this a lot, in private — is that we were both maniacally driven to "fix" things and to achieve financial success. A lot of the time, that drive didn't come from a positive place.
15:59	Sam Parr	Yeah. The way that I see it a lot of times is basically: I build businesses because I feel like I'm not good enough. I also try to fix myself, because you have to fix your personality in order to build a great company.
16:12	David Senra	Mine is not that I don't think I'm good enough. There is—this is gonna be weird—one of my favorite movies is a movie called "Tombstone." It's one of my favorite things, and I watched it when I was a kid over and over again. There's a line where Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp are legitimately true friends, and Wyatt Earp is about to go and have a life-and-death duel. He's gonna meet this guy named Johnny Ringo, and he's like, "We both have guns; one of us is gonna survive and the other person is going to die. This is about to happen to me." He's talking to Doc Holliday about what drives Johnny Ringo to do what he does. The performance by Val Kilmer is incredible, and he's just like: > "People like that have a giant hole in their heart that no matter what they do they can't fill." So then the follow-up question is, "What does he want?" and the answer is, "Revenge." Revenge for what? "Revenge for being born." I think what drives me—if you get into how I think about it—is I wanted professional success to say I was born in the wrong environment and I will prove to you that I am not like the rest of these people. I knew that since I was like six; I felt very different for a long time. I'm gonna do this for myself, but you're also going to see that I'm not going to wind up like these people. It's almost like a revenge for being born in the environment that I was in. That drives me now. Self-criticism could be—my self-criticism was for a long time—and you see this with a lot of high performers, it's constantly negative, overtly, overly negative. What I've now changed to is: that drove me to work all the time to try to find a craft that you can be really good at. That has already happened, so that was useful back then. Is it still useful to this day? This is where Brad Jacobs—who was, I think, the third person on the new show—I’ve talked to him about this a lot. You know, that guy's the benefit of meeting these people now: he has more years of experience as an entrepreneur than I've been alive. The amount of information they can transfer to you in an hour-long conversation, a fifteen-minute conversation, in a sentence—you don't have the capacity to do that unless you have this hard-earned wisdom from experience. I'm reading his second book right now, which I don't even think is out. So much of it is about him reframing negative thoughts into positive ways. He realized that when he was just negative and beating himself up, he was not as effective. He thought that was a tool, and it wasn't a tool. What I've been thinking about a lot lately is: man, that served me back then—the negative inner monologue—but it doesn't serve me now. I always say learning is not memorizing information; learning is changing your behavior.
19:07	Sam Parr	Yeah, so that's the hard part. In general, people don't change. Robert Greene has this great book called Human Nature, and he was like, "In general, assume most people won't change."
19:15	David Senra	Yeah... most people. I'm not trying to be most people.
19:17	Sam Parr	Yeah, but we still have that in us—where you have to fight inertia. And that's quite hard.</FormattedResponse>
19:22	David Senra	Yeah. We were talking upstairs about Bruce, because you're a Bruce Springsteen fan and his autobiography. I would highly recommend people go watch this movie called Deliver Me from Nowhere — I think it is. I thought it was going to be a biopic of Bruce Springsteen. That's not what it was. It was about a guy who had an unbelievably tumultuous childhood. He funneled that pain into an unbelievable work ethic to get him what he thought he wanted most in the world: being a rock star. Then, right after he hits that — after years and years of struggle — he plunges into deep depression. What he realizes is he can't form — his childhood was so messed up it did not give him the ability to form stable, loving relationships with women. What he desperately wanted was a stable relationship. He wanted to have kids because he wanted to raise them and break the chain his parents did to him. Yet what he would do is freak out: he'd fall in love with a woman, whatever the case was, and then he'd be like, "Something's wrong with her. If she loves me, I am unlovable."
20:24	Sam Parr	Yeah.
20:25	David Senra	So, therefore I'm going to hurt this person — he would run away and then he'd start dating somebody else, and he would go through this over and over and over again. Right, until the point where he has to wind up seeing a therapist. He finds he basically is like, "Hey, my life is going to be miserable. I'm going to be world famous, I'm going to be wealthy, I'm going to have a job I love, and I'm going to be depressed and miserable." The crazy thing about the book — the book is 600 pages long. Half the time you're like, the first half of the book is about his love for his work and his work ethic, so you think you see where it's going. Then this curveball happens in his life where he's like, "Life is more important than work." What Bruce was figuring out is that every human wants relationships, whether it's a romantic relationship, a true friend, or somebody who understands you — someone you can do life with. My friend group now is crazy because of how high-quality they are in all domains, in all areas of their life. That was an "oh my God" moment for me: it's not that I didn't like people or didn't want to let them in; I simply didn't have access to this before. Almost every single one of my new friends has come from the podcast. In some cases they've become best friends — people I've spent years getting to know and with whom I've spent hours and hours talking. That's where it's like, "Oh, this is actually really important to me." Relationships are really important to me in a way I didn't understand, and maybe I was lying to myself about that. That was a huge learning for me. The reason I bring this up for the Bruce [unclear: "feasing"] thing is because he's messing up at something he deeply desires, yet he's smart enough to ask, "What are the tools that I need to fix this?" Because if I don't fix this, I'm going to have another 30 years — or, in his case, 40 years — of my life where I'm miserable. So he changed his behavior. That means he learned: you're not learning if you don't change your behavior.
22:25	Sam Parr	You know what's crazy? Every time I listen to your podcast, I feel envy for the people — not because of their success, but because, particularly Bruce, there are a lot of people who found their passion very early in life. I don't know if that's luck or what it is, but I think that's... whenever I listen to founders, and now the David Seder show, I think, how crazy is it? We were talking about music. Whenever I go to concerts — if it's a band that I've loved for years (I've loved Green Day for years) — Billy Joe will play a song that he wrote when he was 15. And I'm like: > "How fortunate are you that you were able to create stuff at the age of 15 that's still relevant to you in your fifties or sixties?" So I get that. One of my favorite — one of my favorite episodes we've done... I didn't like this guy, but what's the Liz Zodica's guy's name?
23:11	David Senra	Oh yeah, Dovecchio.
23:12	Sam Parr	So basically, for the listener: this guy started a sunglasses conglomerate — a monopoly — and it's an $80–$100 billion company. He tried to pass it on to his sons and make it a family dynasty, but there's a ton of bad things he's done in his life with family. He comes across as a generally pretty angry guy.
23:30	David Senra	"He was like an orphan."
23:32	Sam Parr	Yeah... this is what.
23:32	David Senra	I mean, he had a lot of darkness, but he never dealt with it. I just gave you an example: Bruce is like, "No, I'm not going."
23:38	Sam Parr	It was dealt with at the end. I think, at the end of the episode, you're like, "He was like, 'The thing that I wish I did differently was how I treated my children.'"
23:44	David Senra	Yeah, but on the episode, I said, "\"I don't believe him.\""
23:45	Sam Parr	"Right, and that's what you said. But what I do envy about him—and about many people—is that they found their passion early."
23:52	David Senra	I could see that, but I was 32 when I found... what?
23:55	Sam Parr	I'm supposed to.
23:56	David Senra	Really? Yes. Bruce Tracy was 15. Kobe Bryant was like 11. But you—Leonardo... I think it's Leonardo Dovecchio [unclear]—was what, 17? Yes.
24:05	Sam Parr	30. Yeah, 30—on the fact that you find it in the first place.</FormattedResponse>
24:08	David Senra	This is why—when you asked, "What are you doing? Why are you taking everything so seriously?"—I said that I understand how rare it is for somebody to be able to make a living doing something they love. This is why I hate, especially on Twitter, when I see people engagement-farming and giving the worst piece of advice: "work on what you're passionate about." They'll say instead, "Start a trash-hauling business," and I'm like, no—finding work you love is the best thing in the world, and it's excessively rare. If you find it, you should do everything humanly possible to hold on to it and not mess it up. A piece of advice I got from Michael Dell: he told me, "Tell me crazy stories." This was before we recorded the podcast together—we spent five hours talking. He said, "Most entrepreneurs sabotage themselves." You're not taken out by a competitor; you do something where you're having success and then you self-sabotage. I always say the worst thing you could do is go to sleep on a win and wake up with a loss. One of the things I learned from Jimmy Iovine—he's in one of my favorite documentaries, The Defiant Ones—is the importance of having a full life with crazy experiences. Jimmy has had a crazy fifty-year career. He did an episode on Rick Rubin's podcast two years ago and another in 2023, which was the best single podcast episode I listened to in 2023. I want that. I don't only want to be great at what I do; I want to have a very full life. Jimmy was kind enough to invite me to his house when I did a Founders episode on him. He said a thousand people texted him about it. He's around 72 (maybe 75—probably 72) and he has more practical knowledge in his pinky than I have in my entire body. He told me most people cannot handle success. He's been around super-talented people—legit geniuses—who destroy their lives. I'm not interested in being successful for a year, five years, or ten years and then deciding to stop. I want longevity. His whole point was that there are basically four common ways people do this—four ways they self-sabotage the most.
26:29	Sam Parr	Ruin their success.
26:30	David Senra	They are successful. They're talented, and they destroy themselves.
26:33	Sam Parr	Yeah, are the four?
26:34	David Senra	So, for the first one, it was drugs—pills, heroin, all this stuff. I don't do any drugs; that's not going to happen to me. </FormattedResponse>
26:41	Sam Parr	Did you see the Eddie Murphy documentary?
26:42	David Senra	No. Everybody keeps telling me that about it.
26:44	Sam Parr	Oh, it was so good, dude. One of the main things was—he was famous since he was 16. He was on SNL (I think when he was 18) and did all these movies. When he was 21 he said, "I've never done drugs," and he said that's one of the main reasons why I am what I am.
26:57	David Senra	So he's going to be number three on this list, which we'll get to in a minute — about what could destroy you. He wasn't destroyed by it, but he's addicted to something else, which we'll get to. Number two: alcohol. This could destroy your life. You know, I went to dinner last night with a friend and I had a glass of sake, but I didn't get drunk — it was fine. Three: women. They attract the wrong kind of women, they fall in love with the wrong kind of women, they let the wrong women in around them.
27:30	Sam Parr	"What's the Patriots coach, Bill Belichick? Yes. You see what he's doing now? He's dating, like, a 20-year-old or something. Oh yeah, man — she just calls the shots."
27:39	David Senra	Okay, that.
27:40	Sam Parr	Well, it's exactly what you're describing.
27:42	David Senra	No — if it gets a lot darker, it can distract you. You want high-quality people around you in every single domain: friends, people who work with you, the people you date. You just want high-quality people. What's the most important decision you make in your life? It's the people that you let around you. I see people are way too casual about this, and I could be really, really ruthless in this domain. The fourth one is megalomania. The reason I say Eddie Murphy is because he's dated a lot of people and he has, I think, about ten kids — a bunch of different baby mamas. He's still living his life the way he wants to, but he clearly likes that number three. Number four is just megalomania: you start to think that you're successful because of you and not the work that you put in. You start to believe you are like a god and that everybody should praise you, and you completely become disassociated from reality. This is why it's very dangerous, especially when you do numbers-driven things. I talk to founders all the time and they say, "I just want to be the first. I want to build a trillion-dollar company. I want to be the fastest company to $100,000,000 ARR." I'm like, you know, no — none of history's great entrepreneurs... That's none of history's great entrepreneurs. I'm calling you.
28:56	Sam Parr	That's bullshit, because when I talked to Ramp, the Ramp founders are amazing — they're like the best of the best. They said, "Our goal is to get to a $1 billion valuation in 18 months." </FormattedResponse>
29:06	David Senra	"That was not their primary goal. Their primary goal..."
29:08	Sam Parr	But they said that's what their goal was. I mean—he, like, I think it'd be cool if we could do that.
29:12	David Senra	Oh, that's different... that's...
29:13	Sam Parr	Oh, come on.
29:13	David Senra	No, no. That is different—100%. I'm saying: the reason for your existence, the reason for what you're doing. These people are telling me, "I'm only starting this company so I can hit a certain financial number." That's completely different.
29:24	Sam Parr	No, that's not what he said, yeah.
29:25	David Senra	"Yeah, that's not what they... I wasn't. Wasn't I there with you in the office?"
29:28	Sam Parr	I recorded with him, and he repeats this all the time. It's like, "That's a cool thing." He was like, "I thought it'd be cool if we could get to a billion in..."
29:36	David Senra	No.
29:36	Sam Parr	Valuation in 18 months.
29:37	David Senra	I... I don't... I don't know if I heard that episode, but like, there...
29:39	Sam Parr	"He said it a bunch."
29:40	David Senra	Okay. Their experience with Paribus beforehand was giving the insight into the founding story of Ramp, so that's a longer story. But my being is, like, I'm hugely skeptical if there's some kind of external metric that I will only be happy if I hit that metric, or if that metric is the reason that I'm doing this. Mine is just: I want to make things that I'm proud of, things I think are good, things that could put good into the world. I don't confuse — like when we were just upstairs and that guy sitting next to us — I don't confuse somebody saying, "Hey, I like what you do." That's the perfect way to say it: "You like what I do." You might like me as a person; if we knew each other we'd probably get along. We probably have the same... but never confuse that they like the work with them liking you. It's the work. Once you stop putting in the work, everything else goes away. That is how the megalomaniacs are: they just think, "I'm so talented — just show up; everything I touch turns to gold; I don't have to practice; I don't have to put any effort; everything's gonna work out." And then they also, you know, treat people essentially not as people.
30:42	Sam Parr	"If you had to teach someone who is 19 how to find their life's work, based on talking to and reading about 400 people and talking to dozens or hundreds of successful entrepreneurs, what exercises would you say they should do?"
30:56	David Senra	My problem is, I think at that age I wouldn't have taken anybody's advice. I think I'm only now, in the last few years, been open to letting other people mold my mind.
31:10	Sam Parr	Well, what would you say?
31:11	David Senra	The fact that they're asking the question... > "I want to know how to write a symphony," a 21-year-old kid tells Mozart. > Mozart replies, "You're too young." > The questioner says, "Yeah, but you wrote symphonies when you were 14." > Mozart answers, "But I didn't go around asking people how to do it." There's something in that story: you feel somebody else has the answer. That doesn't mean you shouldn't ask for advice. To be very clear here, I don't think there's anything magical I could say that would put them on a different path. You need to spend a lot of time thinking about what you actually believe. A lot of people just lie to themselves and repeat that lie over and over. This was a long conversation last night. It started with, "What's the lie that you're telling yourself?" We went back and forth—me and this other person—for a while about it. My lie, I'll just tell you right now (and I'm probably sharing too much publicly), is this: "I don't need anybody else." That's a lie.
32:06	Sam Parr	You think that's a lie? I've...
32:07	David Senra	I've been telling myself the same thing for a very long time. I've learned—because of my experiences and the relationships I have—that you're often doing things as a defense mechanism, not because they're actually true. So my advice would be: take the time to ask yourself, "What do you actually want?" That's very hard to be truthful about. One way I found to answer that is to follow my ungovernable curiosity. I can't tell you why I like to read. When I first started my podcast, I thought, "It'd be cool if I could build a business and a life where I just get to read all the time." That sounds ridiculous, but it actually worked. You just follow that curiosity, and things unfold. Now, that's how we ended up recording this conversation with Todd Graves—one of the people I wanted to meet the most. It might sound crazy: what does he do? He sells chicken fingers. People ask, "Why do you want to meet him?" I wanted to meet him because he grinded himself. He's been in business for 30 years. He started out building the first store by hand. He had no money and took crazy risks to find financing—there was no venture capital; no one would give him money. He even risked his life on a boat fishing off Alaska. He worked as a boilermaker, was highly leveraged, and almost went out of business. He did all these things because he had this "chicken finger dream"—that's what he calls it. He felt he had to do it. I can't explain why. He wasn't looking for external validation. He's like, "I'm going to do this." Everybody's like, "You're an idiot; you can't do that." He hasn't changed his menu in 30 years. We flew to Baton Rouge. The conversation was incredible. We recorded for two hours and then spent another two and a half hours one-on-one afterward.
33:43	Sam Parr	Was he any different?</FormattedResponse>
33:44	David Senra	No, because he—and he also listens to the podcast, so he understands who I am. This is what I meant: I don't make media; I'm building relationships. </FormattedResponse>
33:51	Sam Parr	"He might be a top 10 person I've listened to on your pod." </FormattedResponse>
33:54	David Senra	Yeah, he's incredible. And so this is about following the curiosity. Going back to the 19-year-old, I go back to the airport and I call Sam Hinkie. He picks up and I say, "I'm in big trouble." He asks, "What's going on?" I say, "I am already wildly addicted to having these conversations." I continue, "I've never done ecstasy, but this is how I feel right now: I'm high, I'm wired, I'm like high as a kite." I felt that way because I had this guy—he's got three decades of experience. He had 915 stores; the company is worth over $20 billion; he owns 90% of it. It's growing faster in its near 30-year history than it ever has. He still has trouble sleeping because he can't wait to wake up and get back to work the next day. You just get this download of information and energy from him that made me euphoric.
34:42	Sam Parr	Who would be on your board of advisors? Would he be on one of them?
34:45	David Senra	How many people do I get—six? I have to name them? Yeah. Living or dead? Either. Let me do dead, just because that'll give me some time to think about living. And I think, like... I don't know if I want to answer that question honestly, but I would have to—dead. You know, Rockefeller built the greatest company ever created. Would Rockefeller... </FormattedResponse>
35:02	Sam Parr	I think he's one of the few tycoons, in terms of "unpeachable" character and amazing success. I think he's the best—debatable on "unpeachable." No, "impeachable" is not the right word, because he screwed up; he did lie on the record a bunch of times. But in general, I think he's an ethical, honest person.
35:20	David Senra	"Got a little handsy towards the end of his life, let's just put it that way. I remember... I collect..."
35:23	Sam Parr	Obscure — he was one hundred.
35:25	David Senra	I collect obscure Rockefeller biographies. I have made my own—there's one at my house that I haven't done an episode on. It's 1,700 pages long; it's in a big binder.
35:33	Sam Parr	He was a weirdo when he was 90, and he was giving people nickels and shit.</FormattedResponse>
35:36	David Senra	That's—yep, that's fine. Great. Undeniable: one of the best businesses ever created. Charlie Munger told me to my face that he thinks Rockefeller "created the best business in history." Yeah. Okay. Munger would have to be on it... because he's dead, unfortunately now. I think he's the wisest person I've ever studied. If I could only emulate or learn from one person, it'd be him. Edwin Land, founder of Polaroid — "patron saint of founders" podcast — he was Steve Jobs' hero. His whole thing: he's got a lot of personal mottos. He invented instant photography for the entire industry, then monopolized the industry. It's like one of the last great American technology companies that were never... his patents were never
36:15	Sam Parr	When did he die? I've—I've never heard.
36:17	David Senra	He met him in the nineties when he was in his seventies. Steve Jobs met Edwin Land when he—Steve—was about 25; Edwin Land was about 72, I think. Steve Jobs said that spending time with him was "like visiting a shrine." This is how, a lot of the time, I get to meet crazy people in the world, right? I actually had lunch with a friend yesterday, and she told me something fascinating. She said, "You need to take a minute to think about what's going on in your life and the fact that you have this ridiculously sick life because of the people you have access to."
36:50	Sam Parr	You ever write this stuff down? Leave a journal?
36:51	David Senra	No. I think one of the reasons I wanted to do the Bruce Springsteen episode is because I run from my past. I don't like thinking about it — there's just all kinds of other stuff going on. I spent time yesterday with a 71-year-old guy. It looks like he's going to do his first ever podcast interview with me. He just sold his company for $60 billion, and in an hour he transferred more knowledge to me than I would have gained in weeks speaking to a young startup founder. It's just unbelievable. I felt Edwin Land did the exact same thing for Steve Jobs, and Steve Jobs essentially copied — he patterned Apple off of Polaroid. A lot of people don't understand that. You can go back and watch Steve's product demonstrations and see the table and chairs that are on that...
37:39	Sam Parr	The same thing.
37:39	David Senra	These are the exact same ones that Edwin Landau used for Polaroid. People don't actually see. If you're not studying history, you don't have this basis of historical knowledge in your head. You actually don't know what you're looking at. I saw something different when I saw that video than somebody who didn't study history did. It's very, very valuable. We're wasting time doing dumb shit—watching short-form videos all day, being obsessed with the news, following acts… this stuff is garbage. Read books and talk to really amazing people. Try to apply what you're learning from both those experiences to be a better human. The better human you are, the more other better humans will open up to you, and then there's this virtuous cycle.
38:17	Sam Parr	You have three more.
38:19	David Senra	Rockefeller, Munger, Land — and obviously Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs built, you know, the most successful consumer product of all time. I will say about Edwin Land: I took two ideas from him. His personal motto was "Don't do anything someone else can do." I think that's about differentiation — it demands being different. When you listen to my podcast, it's very founder-y. It's not like you can just read books and have a solo podcast and make it — it's a very weird thing. Even the way I'm doing the new show, everybody's like, "This guy interviews weird." I'm not interviewing a goddamn person — I am having conversations. What you're hearing on the show is exactly what you would hear if we weren't recording. This is the stuff. I have the idea that all these guys — everybody that's been on the show, besides James Iso so far — listens to the podcast. First of all, a lot of the early listeners for the new show come from founders, right? Some of the messages I get are like, "Yeah, but you're talking too much, you interrupt, you do all this other stuff — you should do it the way this guy does." We just had 400 episodes of people who built lives and phenomenal careers by being differentiated, and now you're like, "No, don't be differentiated; go do it like this other guy." The differentiation I have compared to other podcasters who want to talk to excessively successful people in business is this: they haven't read 400 fucking biographies about history's greatest entrepreneurs like I have. I spend time with Daniel Ek all the time. I just saw Michael Doe again last week. I promise you — they don't want me to not talk. That is not what they want; they listen to the show. So this idea from Edwin Land — "Don't do anything someone else could do." — is a very simple sentence and a very profound insight. If you actually apply it, most people are so scared to be different.
39:57	Sam Parr	Because your recall is so good.
39:58	David Senra	I wasn't born with that — it's work. It's 10 years of reading, rereading, and building my own database. I've done all kinds of crazy shit that no other podcasters do because, you know, I talk to other podcasters and I ask all kinds of questions. Everybody's like, "You are blessed with phenomenal memory." No — I forget everything all the time, but I don't forget something if I've read it 15 times.
40:19	Sam Parr	I was up in your room and I took a photo of your book — you had the Brad Jacobs book. Yeah, I was like, "I just want to see what he's underlining." I was like, "I just want to see his thinking." You underlined so much stuff. You had so many notes in there.
40:31	David Senra	Yeah, so, this is because — again — I also love what I do. If you love what you do, you're going to do things that are not for financial reasons. You do it because you want it to be great. I am killing myself over this edit right now. The episode I'm working on is probably four days late. I still don't have it, and I feel uncomfortable right now. But I know that's a good feeling because when I get on the other side... this happened before. I did this episode called "How Elon Works." I think it's the most downloaded episode of Founders by far. I remember talking to a friend because I was working in Malibu and I kept thinking, "It's just not ready. I can't... I am struggling." It was supposed to be out on Sunday and it's not coming out. The thing I realized is: no one's going to remember if it came out four or five days late. They're going to remember if it was great or not. Spending that extra time and being confused is a good signal — it means I care, I'm trying, and I will find my path. I will find my way there. I think that's really important. So, let's go back to the other thing about Edwin Land real quick. He also has this great line, and this is where I realized I was lying to myself about wanting a balanced life. He says, "There's a rule they don't teach you at Harvard" — which he knows because he dropped out of Harvard twice — "the rule they don't teach you at Harvard is that anything worth doing is worth doing to excess." I can't hold myself back. I have to take things as far as they can go. That's why I can't do many things. Essentially, I can just do podcasts, take care of my health, and build relationships. That is essentially all my twenty-four hours a day — that's all I have. I can't do anything else. Edwin Land, Steve Jobs, Rockefeller, Munger — two other dead people — I don't think I need the other two. I like fewer, deeper relationships. I tend to talk to the same people over and over again. Being public figures, you could talk to a thousand people a year if you wanted to. I find that I want people I genuinely know — who they authentically are — and I want them to know who I authentically am. I want to skip all the bullshit and get right to the actual stuff we're going to talk about. I want to talk about the relationships you have with women. I want to talk about the guilt you have being on the road all the time and the fact that you're a dad. I want to talk about the stuff you lied to everybody else about. This is the only stuff I'm interested in. I cannot have superficial conversations. I remember one time this guy reached out — he was a billionaire — and he said, "I'd love to talk." I was like, "Sure." Then I got looped in with his assistant. I don't even have an assistant; I do everything myself. Aside from, I guess, the new show where I have a whole squad that you see, everything else I handle. I remember getting the calendar invite and it was for thirty minutes. I was like, "We're not even going to get started in thirty minutes." So I thought, "This isn't going to work. Tell me when you have more time." I'm not going to talk to you for thirty minutes.
43:09	Sam Parr	What do you think would be the biggest regret of all the people you've talked to? What would be the top three biggest regrets they've had?
43:17	David Senra	With these kinds of people, I don't necessarily believe them when they talk about regrets. Sam Walton was writing his autobiography while he knew he was dying. He had cancer and his body was in immense pain. He took some of the last time he had in life and essentially distilled what he learned from his fifty- or sixty-year career. I think it's one of the best books — easily a top-five entrepreneur book of all time. It's such a gift to future generations of entrepreneurs that he did that with his last time. He said he missed out on a lot of things because he was working all the time. He calls himself a "fairly overactive fellow." That's one way to put it, Sam, but he was a conqueror — an "insane person in a good way" trying to do something he thought was good. He admitted, "I missed out on seeing parts of my kids' lives; I was working a lot. But if I did it all again, I would do it the exact same way." I think a lot of people feel that way. It's natural to be nostalgic and wonder what would change. Even Buffett, in Snowball, says that whatever he did that pushed his first wife away — he says he would go back and do it differently. Maybe — I don't know. I think he did exactly what he wanted to do; maybe in that case he's right. He was truly in love with this woman and he messed that up. I could see that being a true regret. I think a lot of these people have a hard time assessing their own regrets accurately.
45:01	Sam Parr	There's this great book called How to Get Rich. Have you read that one, Felix Dennis?
45:05	David Senra	Episode 129
45:06	Sam Parr	Yes. One of my favorite books of all time, because his writing is really good—it's the best. I compare him to... he's like if Mick Jagger and Richard Branson had a baby. His writing is the best, and it's one of the very few books that's tactical and written by a billionaire. The reason it's a good book is he was dying—he was dying of cancer. I think he died when he was 60 or something, and he said, "If I could live life all over again, I would accumulate $50,000,000 as fast as I can, hopefully by the age of 35, and then I would spend the rest of my life writing poetry."
45:36	David Senra	Yes.</FormattedResponse>
45:37	Sam Parr	And the reason I believe him is he spent the last ten years of his life retired, writing books on poetry. His philanthropic focus was planting forests—he loved trees. It was very strange. He also said in the book, "I've spent $100,000,000 on whores and crack."
45:53	David Senra	Cocaine. Cocaine — over a decade. I was going to bring that up, where... this is, this is...
45:58	Sam Parr	Wait—was it him? He's... he was a crackhead. He was legit. I didn't... </FormattedResponse>
46:00	David Senra	"No. Was a crackhead."
46:01	Sam Parr	No — it was crack. He was like a crackhead, right around here, actually in this neighborhood.</FormattedResponse>
46:05	David Senra	I believe him because he got to, like, 500 to 800 million. Like, he got way... [trails off]
46:09	Sam Parr	Yeah, but this was in the year 2002, so even more, yeah.
46:13	David Senra	Yeah. And so you read that book, and again—this is why I spent so much time with older people. There's a certain... you don't know yourself as well when you're younger; you're still on the rise. So you're incentivized to put on a show. You're not being truthful, and you can't let the world actually see what you believe about certain things. Especially in this entrepreneur ecosystem you're in, a lot of these startup founders are just straight-up lying so they can raise more money. It's really gross and disgusting. This is my whole thing: I am fundamentally... if I'm being dishonest about something, or if I have different sides of me, I don't like that. I need to reconcile that.
46:50	Sam Parr	"I've gotten so much more value out of listening to older people than I have from reading Twitter or whatever."</FormattedResponse>
46:55	David Senra	It might be because they're willing to tell you the truth.
46:58	Sam Parr	Well, it's also because once you get past a certain level — and that level, honestly, is pretty small — the analogy I heard recently was really good. It was like: > "I'm the captain of a boat, and I'm not trying to fix the engine but steer the ship." So I don't necessarily need tactics right now. I just need... tell me how to live a good life. A good life is a variety of things, but I need to know what the definition of a life worth living is, not how to make money or whatever the tactics are. I've gotten so much more value out of that. My friend Noah Kagan has a channel on YouTube where he interviews people in their 80s, mostly entrepreneurs, and I've gotten a lot of value from it.
47:37	David Senra	You see this. If you can't interview them, at least you can pick up Felix Dennis's book. Who's going to be honest about that? That is a crazy thing to admit to: "I spent $10,000,000 a year for ten years — $100,000,000 on prostitutes and coke."
47:52	Sam Parr	He died. His prostitute girlfriend was living with him.
47:55	David Senra	So, again... I'm sure — I can't imagine the STDs this guy has or had. Doing coke and drinking in nightclubs, I think, if I remember correctly.
48:05	Sam Parr	Yeah, like in the 1980s.
48:06	David Senra	Dude, she's like, "You don't want to do that. What are you doing? It's going to shorten your life." And some people want it. There's a great line in Bruce Feisi's autobiography where he's like: > "Some people's five years are worth more than other people's fifty." You know, some people just have to burn bright. That's their destiny — that's what they're going to do. I want to have a very interesting life, and I want to succeed decade after decade after decade.
48:30	Sam Parr	"Were you making any money in the first five years?"
48:32	David Senra	Back then—there's a long story—but podcast advertising wasn't like it is now. It was less advanced, and you couldn't sell your own deals independently. At that time there were what they called "podcast networks"—though they weren't really networks; they would just sell ads for you. I remember reaching out to one of them, and they said, "We would love to sell ads for you, but you need 50,000 downloads per episode."
48:57	Sam Parr	"And what did you have, 1,500?"
48:58	David Senra	The number they said — I was like, "50,000." It seemed so... it's like, "I will never have that." I did; it just didn't compute. I couldn't process it. I don't even know what I had — a couple thousand or whatever the number was back then. So then you'd try to do affiliate deals, like Audible scaled on podcasts. People don't understand the size of businesses you can build on the back of podcasts to this day. And now I don't even talk about this publicly anymore because, I think, this is a...
49:24	Sam Parr	The secret of my business is that I made a lot of money via podcasting because I promoted my company, Hampton, on it.
49:30	David Senra	And there's just a million examples that people don't even know. I've collected all these cases.
49:33	Sam Parr	The hard part is that podcasts are the most challenging to grow. But they're the most sticky, I think, of all the mediums.
49:39	David Senra	Because Oprah understood the intensity and power of a legitimate parasocial relationship back in the eighties—way before... nothing we're doing is new.
49:46	Sam Parr	She had built-in distribution, right? She hooked up with the network, and that was it — there were only 60 channels.
49:50	David Senra	I did an episode on that — it might be episode 332; I might be wrong about that. The key there... let me just tell you her insight, and I'll tell you what she figured out and how she monetized it in such a huge way. Her key insight was: she would have Brad Pitt or other A-list celebrities on her show, and she's like, "I have something different, because the way my audience responds to a movie star is not the way they respond to me." So they're like, "Brad, oh my god, you're handsome, I love your..."
50:15	Sam Parr	In movies, they're like, "Oprah, it's nice to see you."
50:17	David Senra	"Oprah, come over for lunch. Come over for dinner." When people walk up to me on the street, they get right into it—like, "Yeah."
50:23	Sam Parr	Because they think they know you.
50:24	David Senra	Look, in many cases they do. They know what I'm into and what I'm intensively interested in. And then Oprah's thing — just to close that real quick: First, I think people vastly underestimate the importance of frequency, which is another thesis I'm about to try to prove here. She's in your house one hour a day, five days a week. The intensity of the success of her business and the intensity of the parasocial relationship with viewers would be much more diminished if she did it once a week. I think that's very important. Second, she realized that — at the time, this is all television — the most profitable shows on TV were local news. They cost almost nothing to make, and you could sell advertisers highly targeted spots. Like, "I want to sell my car in Charlotte, North Carolina." That's huge targeted value. What she realized is: if you have Oprah coming in as the lead‑in from 4:00 to 5:00 to your 5:00 news, she's going to bump up your Nielsen rating by, say, three points. For every one Nielsen rating point, your local news might make another $5,000,000 a year. So let's say you don't have Oprah — you just lost out on $15,000,000. If Oprah says, "I'll sign with you; you have to pay me five of that" — I'm making up the numbers — you have to pay her five of that $15 million, you're going to say yes. So, I couldn't figure out how to sell enough ads. I'll close this real quick because I've talked about this on other podcasts too. I had found this socialist podcast called Chapo Trap House that did not run ads because they weren't capitalists — they thought it was immoral. They were using Patreon at the time to sell subscriptions, and the Patreon API is public. There's a website called Graphtreon, and they were at the top of the list. I found that they had 25,000 people — or 20,000; let's call it 20,000 — paying them at least $5 a month. I'm like, "Oh, there's the business model right there." Their model was simple: you can listen to every other episode for free; if you want the rest, you pay $5 a month. I thought, of course business people would pay for this — there's actually a story here. But I sold it too cheap. It was like $100 a year ($10 a month), and then I grew it to a couple thousand [subscribers]. So it's like you're making "dentist money" or something like that — that's the way I would think about it.
52:36	Sam Parr	But then $24 a year ain't dentist money.
52:38	David Senra	"No, you're making hundreds of thousands a year."
52:41	Sam Parr	You... I thought you said 2,000 a month to get it?
52:43	David Senra	No, no. Annual subscribers had a couple thousand.
52:45	Sam Parr	Got it.
52:45	David Senra	Okay — 3,000, 4,000, something like that. So that'd be like $400, or whatever the number is, right? But then, let me — I also was like, "You idiot, I'm trying to send this." He's like, "Your biggest asset you have is your back catalog, and you have a big giant 'Do Not Enter' sign in front of your biggest asset." He's like, "I've been trying to send it to people and it's so good that I had to buy gift subscriptions." So he's like, "I spent like $900 this week sending your episode to my nine friends. I have to pay $100 every time I send somebody's [gift subscription]." My friend Sam Hinkie — he was spending like $2,000 to $3,000 or $4,000 a year because he's like, "This is too good." He was just buying it for everybody. He's the one that told Patrick about it, which has obviously changed my life from there. And so then here's another thing which I didn't understand: podcasts are not all — not what they appear from the outside. This is a lesson from Rockefeller, where he realizes that one of his advantages was that not everybody — there's posted rates on how much it's going to cost to ship a barrel of oil over the railroad. That posted rate is a lie.
53:47	Sam Parr	Gets rebates. Yes, the foundation of...
53:49	David Senra	His empire. So what I realized—I remember Hincky called me one day and he goes, "Hey, where are you?" I go, "I'm in the Hamptons." He's like, "What are you doing there?" I go, "This guy DM'd me. We talked on the phone. I really liked him and he has this giant house in the Hamptons. He asked, 'Will you come speak to my company off-site?'" Sam's like, "He's paying you for that?" I go, "Yeah, of course." He goes, "How much?" I go, "X amount." He goes—"and I go"—"he's paying me X amount," and then he put me in this crazy house or this crazy hotel where the room service is like a three‑star Michelin. The restaurant downstairs had only one restaurant, so I'm ordering room service from a Michelin‑star restaurant. Then I go to check in—even though I'm not paying for it—and I see what he's paying a night. It's like $3,000 a night or something like that. I was like, "Yeah, this place is incredible. It's beautiful." We just went over basic numbers and Sam goes, "You have got to stop selling things." He goes, "You have one of the most price‑insensitive audiences in the world. You cannot sell something for $100 a year." He's like, "They would have paid $10,000," because it's relative to their wealth. This just happened when you said the book you saw upstairs. Brad Jacobs, who has now become a friend of mine, sent me an early copy of that book. He did not tell me I'm in that book. He just said, "Here's the book, tell me if you like it." I'm reading the book and it says—at the end of his new company, or not even the end, I think it's on page 76 if I remember correctly—he says most of the investors in my new company, which is now a multi‑multi‑billion dollar company, are repeat investors. However, two of my top 20 shareholders did not know who I was. They discovered me because I was profiled on David Sunra's Founders Podcast [name unclear]. I'm like, "That's crazy," and I know the two people because those two people also told me and they told Brad. That means Brad raised $750,000,000 from my audience—from people that didn't know he existed before I did the episode on his book. So that was Sam's point.
55:50	David Senra	He's like, "You have one of the most price-sensitive audiences in the world. You cannot sell things for $100 to this guy." And the speech wasn't even a speech. We go — his whole team's at his Hamptons house; it was like 30 of us, and he just wanted to shoot the shit in front of them for like 30 minutes and pay me an unbelievable amount of money.
56:06	Sam Parr	Dude, this is like that—I told Ben Wilson. So... I found I’ve been the history buff for 20 years, and I... </FormattedResponse>
56:12	David Senra	Love, Ben
56:13	Sam Parr	I saw Ben's podcast, How to Take Over the World, and he sent me the graph. I think when I found him he was doing about 100 downloads per episode. I was like, "Ben, what's gonna happen in the future? You're going to become sort of like a guru—but not in that typical way—because you've consumed all this... this is before AI—because you've consumed all this historical knowledge. Billionaires are gonna pay you money to help them predict the future by not repeating the past." I was like, "That could be the business model." It was hard to understand at the time, and selling your time kinda sucks. But that's the joy of reading history: it's education wrapped in entertainment. That's why I love it so much. Do you ever use newspapers.com?
56:53	David Senra	I bought a subscription. I don't think I've ever gone off of it.
56:55	Sam Parr	Dude, you have to use it — it's so fun. The problem with biographies, and with listening to your podcast, is you're telling me these stories when I already know the ending. It's so much better to go back. For example, you could read about Dan Gilbert — he's one of the greats when it comes to being an entrepreneur. You can read about him and watch interviews, but you already know he was successful; you already know the outcome. So it's really fun to go back. I use Newspapers.com all the time because I go and find articles from the eighties. I'll find his first profile — the very first time a newspaper wrote about him — and I'm like, "What were they saying about him right then and there? Were they disrespecting him? Could they spot it?" There's revisionist history. What were people saying about him then and there? I was starting out in San Francisco — I moved there when I was 21 — and there are a bunch of people who are ballers now. I'm like, "I knew that guy when we were nothing." I did not see that. I did not know he had that in him. Or this person I thought was going to be the shit — they were nothing. So it becomes hard to predict who's going to be. I mean, obviously angel investing would be a lot easier if this were the case.
57:57	David Senra	This is why I would say the only filter I trust is time. Time is the best filter, and so that's why I tend to gravitate toward people who were successful for many decades. We didn't finish the—so, like, you think you asked me "the living board of directors?" Yeah. I think this is a good segue into what you were just talking about, where it would probably be a lot of the people that have been on the new David Sender show so far.
58:15	Sam Parr	Ovets dell. [unclear transcription: "like ovets dell"]
58:17	David Senra	The first spot would go to Daniel Ek, for sure, for sure.</FormattedResponse>
58:21	Sam Parr	He was cool because, to everyone, he's a shark—someone that successful. But he had a soft side that I liked.
58:26	David Senra	He is like a Swedish Buddha — I don't know how to describe him. He is unbelievably philosophical, and he's changed my life in so many different ways.
58:35	Sam Parr	I can't believe he's that way at such a young age, too.
58:37	David Senra	"And that's the way... we're close in age, but he is so much wiser than I am. I've spent a bunch of time with him, and I would say he's taught me a lot. He's another guy who will call you on your shit — in a very polite way, though. Yeah, he's great. The reason I started doing video, and the reason I'm doing the new show, is because of him. His whole thing was: we were having this crazy, four-hour dinner in New York and he just asked, "Why aren't you doing video?" I said, "I'm not doing this for fame. I'm a very private person. I don't want to ever get recognized in public." He said, "A lot more people know what I look like than what you look like." He went, "I got recognized in the gym this morning. They come over and say, 'Hey, I love Spotify — thanks for building it,' and then they go about their way." I'm paraphrasing, but he knew I was obsessed with podcasting and gave me great advice. He said, "You're easy to understand, so therefore you're easy to help, because all you care about is podcasting." So it's very easy for me to help you because I—" [trails off]
59:34	Sam Parr	"Because that's a wise line."
59:36	David Senra	He's—this is what I mean: if I only had one board of directors, it's probably him.
59:40	Sam Parr	At the beginning of the podcast, he tells a story about how he advised Dara to take the job at Uber. He tells this amazing story and says, "Dara, you know, I think you should take this job." Dara responds that somebody nominated him to run Uber, and Daniel says, "Yeah, you seem like you've been complacent," this and that. He then talks about how he basically convinced him to take the job at Uber. Later, he tells the story again and says, "I was the one that nominated you." He hadn't even told him before — he says, "I nominated you."
01:00:06	David Senra	This is the important part: for somebody to say that to you—"you seem complacent"—that looks like you're criticizing, that looks like you're attacking. This is why you have to get over "don't listen to random people." But if that person genuinely cares about you, you have to be able to hear them. This is something I struggle with. He didn't curse; my paraphrase is essentially: > "You're lying. This is bullshit. Get over it." He said something about "getting on"—I'm straddling the fence; I can't remember the exact words, but essentially it was: "This is the business you've chosen. The fact of the matter is podcasts that have video grow a lot faster than podcasts that don't." He gives interviews multiple times. When people ask him what his favorite podcast is, he says "Founders." He genuinely believes it's good for the world. So me not doing video means fewer people see it.
01:00:51	Sam Parr	Yeah.
01:00:51	David Senra	"Sort of... less impact."
01:00:53	Sam Parr	"A horse dealer fighting the fact that Ford is around now."
01:00:55	David Senra	Yeah, and it's just like, "What are you doing? Get off the fence." Then me and Patrick are at this dinner, and when we get in the car after that, we're gonna do video.
01:01:02	Sam Parr	Well, Patrick didn't want to do it either.
01:01:03	David Senra	I know neither of us wanted to do it, but that's why... my — it's like you have to be smart enough to change your behavior when you're reacting to new information. So this also leads us to, well, my current obsession: founders will always, always be in our sessions, because I'm never going to stop reading. Most of my time will be on David Zenra [name unclear]. As we get in the car, I'm going back to Patrick's house to spend the night, and he's been pushing me to record podcasts and do more of what he called "interviews." For years I was like, "No, no, no."
01:01:35	Sam Parr	"Whose house do you say, Patrick?"
01:01:37	David Senra	And we get in the car with the driver, and he's like, "You absolutely have to start recording these conversations that you're having." > "I just spoke. I spoke 2% of the time, Daniel spoke 49% of the time, and you spoke the other 49% of the time. I've known him for four years — you got more out of him in four hours than I have in four years. Nobody can speak to the soul of the founder like you can in the world. You have to start recording these conversations." And that was the push. I was like, "Oh — conversations are different. Can't interview anybody. It might be interesting; there could be a differentiation there."
01:02:09	Sam Parr	"Are you ever going to monetize this in a different way than normal media—ways like ads and subscriptions?"
01:02:15	David Senra	No, I don't think I'll ever do subscription again, because I think that...
01:02:17	Sam Parr	You're only going to monetize with ads.
01:02:19	David Senra	Yeah, I think the power of media is, like, it's free and readily accessible. Therefore, it can compound through word-of-mouth. It's just shitty.
01:02:24	Sam Parr	Business model for how much influence you have.
01:02:26	David Senra	I don't—well, we'll see. I have some other thoughts on there that I will keep to myself. I think I have an earned secret. One of my favorite tweets—this is what I will say: you mentioned taking out interesting ideas from books and how you do that. Maybe sometimes my interpretation is different from other people's. I remember reading Cable Cowboy, which is supposed to be a biography of John Malone. People say, "oh, he's the person that invented the word EBITDA," and that he has all these ways to finance, he's focused on cash flow, and there are other takeaways people describe from that book. That's not the main takeaway for me. The fact is most industries default into some kind of oligarchy. In the cable industry there are, I think, eight main players: the top two are bigger, number six is a little smaller — that was the case. What's fascinating is he's one of the eight, yet all the other players, who are essentially competitors, go to him to learn about their industry. In this brand-new industry they were the ones essentially building the foundation for what has now grown dramatically over the last fifty or sixty years. One important part where I would disagree with some stuff I can't say publicly: I saw a tweet one time that said something like, "one of the most interesting ways to have the most interesting careers is to find an earned secret and exploit the hell out of it for decades." That tweet was talking about Mark Leonard, who used to work in VC and then built Constellation Software. He said vertical market software businesses are bad for VC but great if you put them in a conglomerate. Everything he did followed that idea. I think he started out — I don't remember exactly — say $50 million or $80 million, and ground it to like $80 billion, whatever the number is. He had that earned secret: "VMS bad for VC, good for this other way" — and he exploited the hell out of it for three decades. Because I've strived to collect more information about podcasting than almost anybody else, I think I have earned secrets there. I don't think there is any limit to the size or the performance of the business.
01:04:32	Sam Parr	No. And all the great ones — we were talking about Oprah the other day — the breakthroughs don't particularly have a blueprint where you're like... We were also talking about how the people who are number one in certain things are literally 100 times better than number two. So I buy into that. Jay‑Z has...
01:04:48	David Senra	A line: "If I'm gonna make it to a billion, I can't take the same path."
01:04:51	Sam Parr	And so I'll be very eager to see what you're going to do. I hate advertising in most cases. I ran an advertising business. When you rely solely on advertising... I hated it. But if you can make money in ways where I own bits of companies that I love to promote, or if you do it in some interesting way, then it becomes good. The traditional form of advertising, I think, is a pain in the ass business model that only captures a fraction of the value that you create. So I'll be very eager to see how you will change that.
01:05:18	David Senra	Here's the thing: I'm very comfortable putting out a lot more value into the world than I capture. I just think I'm going to capture more than... If you go back, somebody asked me—my friend at lunch yesterday—he said, "What would the 25‑year‑old version of you think of this?" I was like, "I don't even know if I can think in those terms. It's already wildly... I'm just very happy where I'm at and what I'm doing, and I know that I..."
01:05:45	Sam Parr	"Are you a happy person?"
01:05:47	David Senra	I would describe you as a happy person. Not happy with the way my work has gone.
01:05:50	Sam Parr	Are you a happy person? I don't think you're happy.
01:05:52	David Senra	I think this is, again, why Daniel is acting as number one on my board of directors. I already mentioned one reason: he's pushed me in a certain direction. Another thing he's taught me is that when you get around people like him, you realize you don't have any ceilings.
01:06:06	Sam Parr	Dude, those people are really rare. I've been around a handful of them. It is contagious, and I'm always curious. I'm like, "Who gave you that?"
01:06:11	David Senra	This is the key. This is where constant refinement of association comes in. People hear that and they're like, "Great advice," but they don't actually do it. So few people will do it. I'm very interested in being one of those very few. I think about this a lot. I take this very seriously, so I don't think I'm apt to answer your question. Another idea that I got from Daniel is: on the first episode of Davis on Earth — people should listen to it if they haven't, and if they have listened to it they should watch it again. I'm going to do a founders' episode based on the transcript of the conversation that I had with him because there are so many good ideas in there. We printed it out — it's like 60–70 pages. It's crazy. It's like a little miniature book. His whole thing is impact over... you don't optimize for happiness, you optimize for impact. That's exactly the advice he gave Dara for Uber, the advice that he takes for himself. I am very happy. It goes back to, like, I don't need to capture — I don't need to be, let's say it, whatever the number of value is out in the world, and I only capture 1% or 2% of it. It's like, man, there are other things that are so... If you go to the website right now and send me a message — which I might have to stop reading because all these messages come in all day — most of them are positive. If you go through my emails, my DMs, the contact form, it's just like: these people are like, "You changed my life." And it's not me changing their life; they are basically saying, "Hey, I really appreciate what you're doing. I want you to know that it has an impact on my life." This guy chased me down at the airport the other day and he was like, "You don't understand the difference in my life pre- and post-discovering your work." So it's like, okay — I can't take that to the bank and deposit it — but there is a very real, tangible benefit from it. And then this is the crazy thing: the James Dyson episode we just did — God bless Rob Moore — took 45 emails back and forth to get that scheduled. It's just like this relentlessness. But everybody knew he was my number one guy; his first book is episode 20.
01:08:08	Sam Parr	"I bought a Dyson because of you."
01:08:09	David Senra	Exactly — there you go: "25, 200, 300, episode 400." It's all about the same book. The book that changed my life — the book that encouraged me to persevere when I had no reason to persevere. There was nothing that made me say, "this is going to be a success," other than just relentless self-belief that I'm going to figure this out. If I focus on it and I want it to happen, I will make it happen. I feel like I have a very intense will to change what I want and to make things happen in life. The crazy thing is, I've been talking about this guy for seven years — it was seven years in the making. When we started doing the previews for the episode, I was showing the pictures, some of the trailers, some of the clips. Then the episode comes out and strangers I've never met are like, "I'm unbelievably happy for you." I cannot... know. Yeah.
01:08:52	Sam Parr	I saw that I was cool.
01:08:53	David Senra	Of how crazy.</FormattedResponse>
01:08:54	Sam Parr	"I was pretty invested in it."
01:08:55	David Senra	So, what is that? That—that is me capturing value and this idea where, "oh, I have to hit a certain number or I'm not going to be happy." That's not wise. I'm not trying to be smart; I'm trying to be consistently not stupid. If I can be consistently not stupid over a long period of time, I think that's going to result in me being wise, and that's what I'm after.
01:09:14	Sam Parr	That was a good ending. Alright — that's it. That's the part.

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David Senra: Why the Best Are Not just 10% Better

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