0:00
If you read, you'd fucking know that because you would look at what the most educated people of 500 years ago believed. It was all wrong! Yep.
Search this video
0:10
And so it would be arrogant to think that we're not making the same mistake now. Exactly!
0:14
And so the way I always say is like, one of my favorite maxims is "actions express priority."
0:17
Like, I don't care what people say, I care what they do.
0:20
What's great about it is like it shows you that America before all of the rules and the Fed and all of that kinda moved in.
0:28
It was like, you wanna do something?
0:29
The guy who did Rushmore, he didn't ask for anyone's permission. Yeah.
0:33
He didn't ask for anyone's funding.
0:34
Like, you read this life story, go back and read the Wikipedia page for somebody in like the early 1900s late 1800s It's like, how did one person do all of these things?
0:44
If you have like an Apple or uh, a Ferrari or a Rolls Royce or an Estee Lauder company behind all these brands that, that last for generations and generations and decade after decade is like, you can inevitably trace it back to one obsessed psychotic founder, right?
0:58
I think founders rightly do this as well.
1:00
Like John D Rockefeller, when he came across somebody smart, he hired him.
1:04
Even if he didn't have anything to do, he's like, I don't care.
1:06
The line that you are really getting through with is "we are deterministic thinkers living in a probabilistic world, hilarity or tragedy often ensue."
1:17
And he goes, There's no Elon Musks, there are no Steve Jobs, there's no Bezos, there's no, there's none of these people because everybody calibrated. There's no progress. Right?
1:30
And then you start thinking about previous societies, man, and, there was no progress.
1:36
He described life as he says, Life is a magnificent, mysterious Odyssey to be experienced.
1:43
And I think the people, I think the people that you're describing were, they're like scared of taking risks or like, they wanna live in like this little, like routine or bubble.
1:51
Like they're missing out on a huge part.
1:53
It's like, it's an odyssey, it's an experience and there's gonna be great times and terrible times.
1:58
Hi, I'm Jim O'Shaughnessy and welcome to Infinite Loops.
2:04
Sometimes we get caught up in what feel like infinite loops when trying to figure things out.
2:09
Markets go up and down, research is presented and then refuted, and we find ourselves right back where we started.
2:16
The goal of this podcast is to learn how we can reset our thinking on issues that hopefully leaves us with a better understanding as to why we think the way we think and how we might be able to change that to avoid going in infinite loops of thought.
2:35
We hope to offer our listeners a fresh perspective on a variety of issues and look at them through a multifaceted lens — including history, philosophy, art, science, linguistics, and yes, also through quantitative analysis.
2:50
And through these discussions help you not only become a better investor, but also become a more nuanced thinker.
3:01
With each episode we hope to bring you along with us as we learn together.
3:08
Thanks for joining us, now please enjoy this episode of Infinite Loops.
3:10
Disclaimer: Jim O'Shaughnessy is chairman and Co-Chief Investment Officer of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management, where Jamie Catherwood is an associate.
3:17
All opinions expressed by Jim, Jamie and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinions of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management.
3:26
This podcast is for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
3:33
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.
3:37
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well hello everybody, it's Jim O'Shaughnessy with another addition of Infinite Loops, and I cannot tell you how excited I am to have my now good friend, we talked for an hour before even starting the recording, David Senra of... Where did you hear him? Gosh, I wonder.
3:59
I think you went absolutely fucking viral on my very own son's podcast, Invest Like the Best.
4:08
But with your podcast, which you now are part of Colossus, you provide a service that people, prior to the internet, simply couldn't enjoy.
4:17
In other words, it's like, let's put this back in 1920 guys, what would you pay for a genius obsessive lunatic to read every book about every great entrepreneur and then synthesize that knowledge for you, give you all of the high points of that knowledge for you, give you things that you can learn to make your own journey a little bit easier. What would you pay? I don't know.
4:46
I'd have paid a ton of money, and now because of the internet, we have David doing it for free, now as a member of the Colossus network. David, welcome.
4:55
David Senra: Thanks for having me.
4:57
Jim O'Shaughnessy: One thing that's just killing me is you're a member of the Colossus network, but I'm not, Infinite Loops isn't.
5:03
David Senra: I could put in a good word for you if you want.
5:08
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, no he's got me.
5:09
Yeah, he's already blocked my number on his phone.
5:11
So it's almost impossible.
5:13
Listen, all joking aside, I don't listen to podcasts through very often, honestly.
5:20
I read most of the transcripts, but I love the ability to, as we were talking about earlier, when I can't be reading or whatever, I like to listen.
5:31
I was in one of those things in transit somewhere, and I thought, oh well Patrick's always really good about texting me and saying, "Hey dad, you really have to listen to this particular podcast.
5:40
You're going to love David." So, I listen. You blew me away.
5:45
Honestly, and again, I really mean this, the wisdom to minute ratio on your podcast is probably the densest I've ever seen, because I listened to it again, right after listening to it the first time, and then I read the transcripts. Dude, you are amazing.
6:06
David Senra: I appreciate that.
6:08
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I want to start out with you, as opposed to, we have so many interesting, fascinating people we're going to talk about, and some of the lessons that they give us, I'm a huge reader like you.
6:21
I've read a lot of the books, I saw your list, and I'm like, "Hey, this is a really good list."
6:26
But I want to hear about you, David, because you have a really interesting story.
6:29
Jim O'Shaughnessy: When we were chatting earlier, I'd also like to highlight the point that you made about the people who love the rule of law, freedom of speech, et cetera, the wonderful Bill of Rights in this wonderful country of the United States of America are sadly, well, I shouldn't say sadly, I'm glad that they're here, but they are people who escaped tyranny, and now really value freedom.
6:53
I know your grandfather's story is this.
6:56
So if you wouldn't mind, it's a really fascinating story.
6:59
David Senra: So we were talking, right before we start recording, that I just finished reading the autobiography of Sam Zell, who's obviously extremely famous, has this cool following, and one of the things that blew me away was
7:08
the fact that his dad saw the rise of Hitler coming and he begged, he was on the last train out of Poland before Hitler bombed the train tracks, he gets out, he goes to his parents and begs, "Please come with me, please come with me." He's got a wife and a baby girl.
7:21
He's got a wife and a baby girl.
7:24
Sam is not born yet, and his family refuses.
7:26
David Senra: They wind up taking this two year odyssey to get to America and his parents die, their siblings die, 18 little kids of the family are murdered.
7:37
And so once they get to America, what was fascinating is Sam's born, and they preach the opportunities that Sam has in this country that was just not possible where they came from.
7:49
David Senra: What they would do is, they would celebrate the day of their arrival in America as you would celebrate a birthday, for the rest of their lives until they died.
7:57
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Amazing.
7:58
David Senra: I think his dad died in 1986, and so I'm reading the book and I just made the podcast on it.
8:03
As I'm reading the book, my process is that just whatever sticks out to me, I don't try to overthink.
8:09
It's like, ooh, that's interesting or that evokes some kind of emotion.
8:11
So, I'll highlight it, and then I'll jot down in the book on a post-it note, what's the first thing that came to my mind.
8:18
What came to my mind is that there's nobody that loves America like a refugee from a totalitarian regime.
8:27
I knew that because I grew up with stories.
8:29
I grew up in South Florida, Miami.
8:30
My dad was born in Cuba and my grandfather, who was not an educated man by any means, he worked as a butcher, and he worked in a factory that made socks or shoes, I can't remember exactly.
8:41
David Senra: He saw what was happening in 1959 when he finally leaves, and so he takes the risk, he's like, okay, I'm married, he's in his late thirties, he's married, he's got a baby son, which is my father.
8:53
He does not speak English, does not have an education, and very little money.
8:57
He took the risk just like Sam Zell's father said, "Hey, I got to get the hell out of here."
9:02
He winds up coming to America, and I wind up having, I just as a byproduct of having the podcast too, is I get to meet a ton of smart founders.
9:09
David Senra: I'm so happy that I just stumbled upon what I'm doing for a craft, in a sense half my day is spent having one-sided conversations with history's greatest entrepreneurs, and they do that in the form of a biography and autobiography.
9:25
The other half is meeting all these interesting smart people like yourself through the podcast.
9:28
David Senra: I just had a four-hour dinner with these two Cuban twins that live in Miami, they're founders of this company called Lula, and I think they're 25 or 26.
9:38
They talked about this because they're the son of Cuban immigrants.
9:40
They grew up on a farm in Kendall and same thing, their parents didn't have a lot of money, no education, but they got them to this country.
9:47
And now the country, they just raised 20 million from all these other people, and they're trying to build this gigantic company.
9:53
David Senra: We immediately connected because it's all these other people that go around.
9:58
You don't understand that unless you were raised, Cubans have this thing called Noche Buena, which is they celebrate Christmas on Christmas Eve.
10:08
What they would do is, in the Cuban community in South Florida, is usually you were having wave, after wave, of people that came over on rafts.
10:17
That's what I spent my childhood meeting people that their circumstances back in their home country where they're born, where their entire family was, was so bad that they got on a handmade raft.
10:29
In some cases I've heard stories of people getting over on truck tires, giant bulldozer tires.
10:35
David Senra: You hear these stories and then what do they do?
10:39
They risk the lives of their parents, of their kids in some cases.
10:43
They go to the edge of the coast in Cuba and say, Hey, let's go out and try, and hope that we're just going to go in the direction and actually land in America.
10:52
I just read this book called the Sugar King of Havana, it's a biography, the last Sugar Tycoon right when Castro took over, this guy named Julio Lobo.
11:00
While I was reading that book to make a podcast on a few months ago, I was like, I've got to figure out how many people...
11:05
Because it talks about how many people die doing that, and that's not like you have reliable data.
11:11
They're not saying, "Hey Castro, I'm going to the edge, I'll let you know when I get there."
11:16
David Senra: They're sneaking out, and a lot of them were never seen again.
11:19
There's this project in the University of Miami and they estimate it to be hundreds of thousands of people that perished in that 90 miles between Key West and Havana.
11:26
The way I always say is, one of my favorite maxims is actions express priority.
11:30
I don't care what people say, I care what they do.
11:32
When you have this debate on, of course every country's imperfect, humans are imperfect, right?
11:39
I go, it's not about what we say, it's what we do.
11:41
It's how many Americans have gone to the coast of Miami on South Beach or Key West and said, "Here kids, let's build a raft and I hope you make it to Cuba."
11:50
That thing happens in one direction and one direction only.
11:54
That tells you everything you need to know about it.
11:56
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Totally agree.
11:57
We were talking earlier about a book that, the book itself is really not that great, but the thesis is really interesting.
12:02
It's called The Hypomanic Edge, Why America Is What It Is.
12:07
Essentially, the thesis of the author is exactly what you just described.
12:12
Basically, what was America made up of until the first anti-immigration sentiment started in the early teens with all the anarchist's bombings?
12:23
America became fiercely anti-immigrant.
12:24
But before then, we'd basically been open borders. And who came?
12:29
Well the people who came are people who were willing to say, “Hey, my home country where my family has been for five centuries, you!
12:38
Neighbors goodbye, cousins see ya.
12:42
Oh you don't have any money?
12:44
Yeah, no, I'm going with the suit I'm wearing and I'm going to see what happens.
12:44
” What kind of person is that?
12:52
That's a self-selected risk taker, that's a purchaser of risk as opposed to a seller of risk.
12:58
Jim O'Shaughnessy: The thesis of the book is, well guess what?
13:02
They all married each other and started having kids, and the kids all married each other and because of the sample size we had the population from the entire world.
13:11
So basically, we were creating a bunch of risk-seeking mutts who had an environment where there were...
13:19
There's a great book by, what's his name, Brian? I'm losing it right now.
13:23
It's called America Once.
13:24
Oh, Bill Bryson, and it's America, a summer in 1927.
13:29
If you haven't read it yet, man, read it, because he does such a great job as a storyteller, telling you what things were like, but in such a fantastic narrative that you just can't wait.
13:43
I knew all about Charles Lindbergh, I thought.
13:46
I knew all about Charles Lindbergh.
13:50
When you hear the intensity of his fame, we've never seen anything like it. Literally...
13:57
David Senra: It was more concentrated back then.
13:59
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly.
14:01
What's great about it is, it shows you that America, before all of the rules, and the Fed, and all of that moved in.
14:09
It was like, you want to do something? Yeah.
14:11
The guy who did Rushmore, he didn't ask for anyone's permission.
14:14
He didn't ask for anyone's funding.
14:16
Coolidge loved to fish, and so he went to...
14:19
Was President, Silent Cal, right?
14:22
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Anyway, so Cal didn't know that his aids always stocked the lake in which he fished.
14:28
He couldn't imagine why "I always get lucky here, I just can't imagine why."
14:32
And so somebody comes up to him and says, Mr.
14:32
President, there's this guy who's doing a sculpture on Mount Rushmore of all the Presidents.
14:42
Coolidge is like, well I got to see this.
14:46
So he gets on a mule or whatever and makes the arduous trip up, because at that time there are no roads, no anything.
14:53
Jim O'Shaughnessy: He's looking at it. The guy comes down, "Mr.
14:55
President, very nice to..." "Yeah, interesting work.
14:58
Why'd you decide to do that?"
15:00
"Yeah, because I felt like I had to.
15:02
I love this country and I love these Presidents," but the whole thing is just such a wonderful...
15:10
You got an idea, give it a try.
15:13
The prohibitions, the red tape that we've grown accustomed to as a country, just literally didn't exist.
15:22
You'll love it because things I never knew, Herbert Hoover, the reason he got elected President was because of his handling of some crises in the weather in the middle of the country that there were...
15:35
He was like, "We should probably do something about this," to the Federal government, and they were like, "Not our problem."
15:41
David Senra: I picked up a 600-page biography of Herbert Hoover, I was visiting family in Austin, Texas, and they have these gigantic used bookstores.
15:50
So every time I travel I go to a used bookstore, and now I have to bring another bag because I literally have my suitcase and then I come back with a bag of books.
15:56
And what blew my mind is, in fact I bought five books on Presidents I'm eventually going to turn into podcasts for Founders.
16:03
But what Herbert Hoover, I didn't know is, that he made a hundred million in Chinese mining or something before he was President, he wound up evacuating a bunch of people from... I have to read the book.
16:13
I only got a… reading overview of his life.
16:16
He wound up being really successful, evacuating a bunch of Americans, I think refugees, from England before World War II. It was just... Or World War I, maybe. It was just incredible.
16:25
David Senra: In fact, I had a friend of mine call me the other day because I just reread the autobiography of Henry Ford, and he called me on the phone, he's like, Man, I just listen to this episode, he goes, and I feel like running into a wall.
16:36
His point was that he's got a nine to five job, or it's even more than that, he's an attorney.
16:40
So it's like 7:00 AM to 7:00 at night job.
16:42
But he wants to be an entrepreneur.
16:44
He also, he taught himself how to program in his spare time.
16:46
He's got all these ideas and he's like, Man, I get home from work, I'm so tired, and I just don't do anything.
16:51
He goes to listening to what Henry Ford had to do.
16:54
It ties into what you're saying is, I just feel the reason I'm obsessed with history is because they just did more.
16:59
David Senra: You read this life story, go back and read the Wikipedia page for somebody in the early 1900s, late 1800s.
17:06
It's like, how did one person do all of these things?
17:09
He's like, I listened to the story you were telling, and it's like this guy, Henry Ford's being an engineer and a machinist at an electrical company working 12 hours a day.
17:18
There was no eight hour workday. He helped pioneer that.
17:21
He's like, There's no such thing.
17:22
So, he is working 12 hours a day.
17:24
He comes home every night, he's trying to figure out how to make an internal combustion engine because most of the cars of the time were either electric or steam, and he is like, I'm not sitting on a steam...
17:32
This will blow up, and so he works on that at night, works on it Saturdays, and then takes off on Sunday.
17:36
David Senra: That idea that he's doing in his spare time turns into...
17:39
The next 15 years, fast forwarding the story, he winds up owning 100% of the Ford Motor Company by 1919.
17:45
That's like me and you owning a private 10 to 20 billion company 100% today. It's like, it's amazing.
17:49
That's where it came from.
17:50
My friend was telling me, he's like, Dude, you just inspired me.
17:54
I'm going to go, I'm going to stay up, or I'm going to stay up late, get up early, maybe work on the weekend, whatever I have to do.
17:59
But when you read these stories, they just hold you to a higher bar.
18:03
Because I randomly reread highlights, that's like my version of practice, right?
18:08
And I forgot about this guy.
18:09
I quote him all the time because he's got one of the best quotes I've ever heard in the history of entrepreneurship.
18:13
David Senra: His name was Henry Kaiser.
18:14
Henry Kaiser was as famous in his time as Elon Musk is today, right?
18:19
He founded a hundred different companies. He built the Hoover Dam. He has a great line.
18:23
He says, "Problems are just opportunities in work clothes."
18:27
And so, he would preach it up and down his organization, he's just like, "You're bemoaning that we have a problem."
18:31
He goes, "We get paid to figure it out.
18:33
So, it's not a problem, it's an opportunity."
18:34
It's just, you've got to put on your work clothes to figure it out.
18:36
And he had this unbelievable level of optimism that I think is almost extinct, unfortunately. But you just reread.
18:43
That was episode 66 of Founders.
18:46
Since then, I've read another 200-something biographies of entrepreneurs.
18:50
And I go back, I'm like, "Oh, how did that one person accomplish all that in his entire life?"
18:58
David Senra: He did it in one lifetime.
18:59
He wasn't even that old when he died.
19:00
I think he was like 70 years old, or whatever the case was.
19:03
So yeah, and it ties back to me and you were talking about before we started recording, one of my favorite lines in the biography of Alexander Graham Bell.
19:10
He comes over here and he's Scottish, and he's just like, "Americans are crazy."
19:14
He's trying to build a company, He's competing with a bunch of other people trying to, they're all doing telephone and telegraph experiments at the same time, and he says this great line, he's like, "America is the refuge for all the ruffians in the world."
19:25
And that word, I never used it in my vocabulary.
19:27
I was like, that's exactly what it is.
19:29
David Senra: I literally spend seven days a week making a podcast on the history of entrepreneurship, and then I'll get an email every once in a while.
19:37
They'll be like, "Why are so many people you cover Americans?"
19:39
I'm like, "Because it's on the history of entrepreneurship."
19:43
It's like I will read books, some of my favorite books.
19:45
It's like Chung Ju-yung, which is the founder of Hyundai, that's the most inspiring autobiography I've ever read. It's episode 117.
19:51
The guy, he grows up so poor, he's the son of a poor farmer, they have to eat tree bark in the winter to survive.
19:58
He winds up dying the richest man in Korea.
20:00
And I was like, "Oh, he is the founder of Hyundai." I thought he makes cars.
20:03
That's like one thing he did.
20:04
He did that towards the end of his life.
20:06
He built the largest shipyard in the world, had this gigantic construction company, did all kinds.
20:12
His story is fascinating.
20:13
So my point is, yeah, I'll read about anybody that's interesting.
20:17
But unquestionably, there's something in the ethos, the DNA, whatever it is in the early history of America, that it aligns perfectly with people that take risks and that build companies and that start something.
20:29
And I think that's obviously changing, now the world's getting smaller.
20:34
But so far, if you want to consider...
20:37
My opinion, you could trace the history of entrepreneurship in its form.
20:41
Talking about modern capitalists, not the same thing as going around killing people for money or confiscating land and titles and that kind of stuff.
20:49
David Senra: But I think if you trace back to Benjamin Franklin in the mid 1700s in America.
20:55
Because think about it, he built one of maybe the first vertically integrated media company ever existed and figure how many entrepreneurs that came after him that reference him and reading his autobiography and his biographies as they motivated them to do something.
21:11
Including Thomas Mellon, the patriarch from Carnegie Mellon and the huge banking family.
21:15
He talks about in his writing.
21:17
In his bank, he had a bust of Benjamin Franklin and this is in the 1800s.
21:22
I'm reading Benjamin Franklin's autobiography and this guy had less money than me, worse circumstances.
21:27
And look at all the things he was able to accomplish, not only financially but in science and politics and everything else.
21:31
David Senra: He's like, "I need to get off my arse and get going."
21:34
And so, I think that just speaks to, it's like there's just this DNA in the early American history that is in perfect alignment with the same kind of characteristics that you'd find in entrepreneurs. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
21:44
So many jumping off points here.
21:46
And the one I'm going to veer to is, another thing that we were talking about is, I think that there is a genetic component to risk taking.
21:58
And I don't know enough about the science of genetics to assert that as a thesis, that can be tested.
22:08
But from all of my reading, from all of the people that I've had the great pleasure of meeting, I've met a ton of founders, names that everybody knows and I just become obsessed with the similarities that are in a lot of these people.
22:26
And of course, one of my weaknesses, I'm a quant.
22:30
So I build algorithms in my mind all the time.
22:32
I'm building an algorithm around you right now and it's like I can't help myself.
22:37
And so, I know that there's a lot of differences.
22:40
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I know that as you, yourself pointed out, very few true founders have anything resembling a life-work balance.
22:50
Everyone talks about life-work balance, life-work balance.
22:53
I don't know, in my own case, I was so obsessed that, yeah, I did take my kids to Nantucket but the back of our Ford Explorer was taken up mostly by my computers.
23:06
You don't remember because you're too young.
23:08
But the monitors were this big.
23:09
For everyone listening, I'm showing a massive monitor and it was because I was obsessed with writing the book, What Works on Wall Street.
23:17
And I had to do a lot of crazy things to get that data.
23:23
And then once I got it and I realized that the back testing program that they thought worked, didn't work.
23:27
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I literally had to do it by hand year by year.
23:31
And back in the day, I had two Pentium and I had two CD ROM drives and I had to have that computer specially made in Stanford, Connecticut.
23:40
And all of the geeks there were gathered around.
23:43
They were like, "Dude, what are you going to build? A nuclear power plant."
23:47
I'm like, "No, actually I'm doing stock market research."
23:50
But literally, they ported it over to CD ROMs from their mainframes.
23:54
I got the data from CompuServe.
23:56
But I became so obsessed with it that I still have the journals where I had to do it by hand.
24:02
And so, when you have to do a year by year by hand, you've got to be a little obsessed.
24:07
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But you also have to be just thrilled to having this huge opportunity of, look at this man, I get 50 years of data to actually test, if buying stocks with low PEs works and if it works, how well does it work? How often?
24:24
What's the worst case scenario?
24:26
So really super excited about it.
24:28
And then I just started noticing as my career expanded and I met a broader group of people, many, many founders like me, I was just like, "Wow.
24:38
There's just a lot that we have in common."
24:41
And so, I'd love your thoughts about that.
24:43
You, yourself are in my mind at least, a perfect example of a founder mentality because you're obsessed with what you do.
24:54
You do it incredibly well. David Senra: Thank you.
24:57
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, it's my pleasure.
24:59
The beauty here is, is that people like you who have these gifts and talents, now are existed in an environment that 20 years ago, you couldn't have done what you're doing right now. David Senra: 100%.
25:11
That's why it's like, if you think about founders, it's your natural hobbies or your passions.
25:16
Jeff Bezos has a couple of good lines related to what you said.
25:19
He's like, "Listen, we don't choose our passions. Our passions choose us." I think that's dead on.
25:22
And then he also talks about people with founder mentality, it's not work-life balance. It's work-life harmony.
25:29
That is the way to think about it.
25:30
There is nothing balanced about these people.
25:32
The way I think about it and this is an idea really, I think I stole from Charlie Munger, he's read hundreds of biographies and I'll eventually catch him because I have hopefully many years ahead of me.
25:42
But he says, the reason that he does that, as opposed to just reading a business book, he's like, "It's just better if you can tie the ideas to the personality that developed them."
25:50
David Senra: And you understand why...
25:50
that's why if you think about...
25:52
if you were to look at the books that I have highlights on, it's like 90% of my highlights come in the first 40 years of their life, 40, 50 years of their life.
26:02
When they're trying to figure out who they are as a person when they're trying to build a company.
26:04
Because I want to know why did they make that decision?
26:07
And part of that, you have to understand some things that happened in their childhood, who they were.
26:11
But I don't think you could prove this.
26:12
And this is again fresh my mind because I just read Sam Zell's autobiography.
26:15
But he believed that too.
26:16
And he was trying to donate a bunch of money to, I think the University of Michigan because he wanted to start this college of entrepreneurship.
26:21
David Senra: And I don't think it ever materialized because he talks about trying to donate money, no-one had ever called him back, which is kind of weird.
26:28
But then he started saying stuff like, he's like, "I've just always been like this."
26:32
His very first business was going to...
26:32
he was growing up in Highland Park, a suburb of Chicago.
26:38
He'd go to the city of Chicago and there'd be things for sale in Chicago.
26:41
He says the very first entrepreneurial endeavor, was buying the issue of Playboy magazine with Marilyn Monroe on it, which is probably when this was happening.
26:51
Maybe in the 1960s, something like that, maybe 1950s. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
26:54
'50s with Marilyn Monroe. David Senra: Yeah.
26:56
He'd buy it for 50 cents in the city, bring it back to Highland Park and his friend's like, "I'll give you three bucks for that."
27:01
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Arbitrage baby.
27:02
David Senra: And I just noticed, I spend so much time thinking and reading about...
27:06
Well, let me back up a step and then I'll answer your question directly.
27:09
There's a great line in Phil Knight's autobiography, Shoe Dog, right?
27:15
It's hard to say there's a perfect entrepreneur autobiography but Shoe Dog may be it.
27:18
And I think people discount it because it's sold millions of copies and it's so popular.
27:21
But the fact that every chapter is named after a year and it takes you into chronological order from the time he has the idea for Nike and struggling to see what that's going to be, up to the IPO. It's perfect for me.
27:32
But he says something in there that I think a lot of people can benefit from.
27:35
He's like, " What the hell is going on?"
27:36
David Senra: He wrote a paper when he was at Stanford and I think this is graduate school.
27:40
And he's like, "Hey, I'm just going to do exactly what the Japanese are doing for cameras, for running shoes and for electronics.
27:47
The Germans are dominating running shoes, this Adidas and Puma and all that other stuff."
27:51
He's like, "I'm going to import Japanese running shoes.
27:53
They're cheaper and then going to sell them."
27:55
And then eventually he makes his own.
27:57
So the very first Nike sales...
27:57
what turns into Nike is, he orders these from Japan.
28:04
He stuffs them in his trunk.
28:05
Drives around, he also ran track at Oregon.
28:08
So he'd go to track meets all around the state of Oregon.
28:10
David Senra: And he'd just pop his trunk and say, "Here's what I have for sale."
28:13
And every single time, he'd sell out.
28:15
So then he's driving home one day and you see his inner monologue as an early 20 something, probably like 24th time.
28:21
He's like, "What the hell is happening?"
28:22
He's like, "I tried to sell encyclopedias, couldn't sell encyclopedias.
28:25
I got a job selling mutual funds, couldn't do that."
28:27
He's like, "What's taking place here?"
28:29
And he's like, "Oh, I realized that I'm not..."
28:31
He goes, "Belief is irresistible. I believe..."
28:35
The foundation of Nike, one of the most valuable companies ever made.
28:37
He's like, "I have the fundamental belief that if people get out and run a few miles every day, the world would be a better place."
28:42
And running was not popular over there.
28:44
David Senra: He would be running on the side of the road and people would throw soda at him, outside the window.
28:49
And so, that version, I was like, "Damn, that stuck in my mind."
28:51
I've read this years ago.
28:52
I've read it, I think twice since then.
28:54
But I was like, "That's how I feel about reading biographies.
28:57
I feel like the world would be a better place, if I can encourage people."
29:00
You don't have to read 300, like I'm approaching, that's insane but you can read one a month.
29:05
Come on, everybody's busy.
29:07
But you could read 6 a year, 6 to 12 a year.
29:09
I legitimately believe, if more people read biographies, their lives would be better.
29:14
Because essentially the way I think about is, I'm watching game tape.
29:17
David Senra: The same way that Kobe or LeBron or any other athlete on the planet watches tape, of not only their games but people that came before them.
29:25
That's what reading biographies is, for everybody and especially for entrepreneurs.
29:29
The history of entrepreneurship is very, very clear on this.
29:32
You do not get to the top of your profession, without mastering the best work that came before you.
29:37
They all have deep historical knowledge.
29:38
You wouldn't fucking believe it. It's unbelievable.
29:42
So where was I going with this?
29:43
You asked a question about- Jim O'Shaughnessy: You were going with the obsession and... Yeah.
29:47
David Senra: It's inherent.
29:48
So the reason I think it'll make your life better and the world a better place as a result of that, is because you see.
29:54
They're not choosing entrepreneurship.
29:57
He was a 13 year old boy going through puberty when you picked up that magazine. Do you know what I mean?
30:01
Or maybe 17, whatever the case is.
30:03
They all have these weird little stories that show, "Hey, I'm comfortable being an outlier."
30:09
Because even now, there is a entrepreneurial industry per se.
30:14
But it's still a weird fucking thing to do. It is weird.
30:17
And so, you talked about through your work, you get to meet other founders.
30:21
The best thing and this happens to me too and I don't go out to many parties where I don't know people but if I do, I seek out the people that are entrepreneurs because you could talk to them.
30:29
David Senra: I meet a ton of people I've never met.
30:31
They've listened to my podcast.
30:32
Like, "Hey, I'm in your city, you want to have dinner or you want to have coffee?"
30:35
And invariably, we'll talk for an hour or two, three hours because we have the same exact interest.
30:39
I do think there is a weird genetic thing to it and I'm very skeptical that it can be taught.
30:52
The drive is just there, it's not. No-one has to tell me...
30:55
I just went on another podcast and they ended the podcast because it was an investor podcast.
31:00
And it's all about reading books and constant learning machines that most investors and entrepreneurs are.
31:05
And they're like, "Do you have advice for people that want to read more?"
31:08
David Senra: And I think I hit him with the stanky face.
31:12
I was like, "No-one has to tell me..."
31:13
If somebody has to tell you to do something, that's a bad sign.
31:17
And I told him, I was like, "Okay, yeah, pick up a book and stare at it." It's as simple as that.
31:23
If somebody's having to push you, if you need this external drive or if somebody says, " Hey, you should get up early.
31:29
You should work a little bit more.
31:31
You should come up with ideas. You should experiment."
31:34
There's nothing wrong with that.
31:35
You should just go get a job and you should work for somebody that built a company that no-one had to tell them to build the company. There's a great... Oh, go ahead.
31:42
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I just was thinking of the Banksy quote and I'm going to get it wrong.
31:47
But it was like, “you can't imagine what I could have achieved, had somebody else motivated me.
31:51
” Of course, Banksy is everywhere.
31:56
He's the king of spray can art.
31:59
I could not agree with you more completely about this whole motivation thing man.
32:05
Listen, if you want the hard truths of life, you can go to a Tony Robbins seminar and I'm not banging on him. God bless Tony.
32:15
But you can go to one of those seminars and you get super jazzed for two days and then you're going to revert to your habitual behavior.
32:25
And if you can't work up in yourself, the desire to go do that thing or read that book or do whatever, it's like, I don't know how you teach somebody to be curious, for example.
32:41
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And that's another thing.
32:43
I think the world would be a much better place like you, if people read a lot more, not just biographies but read a lot more.
32:50
And okay, why do people start reading?
32:55
Because they're curious and they want to know.
32:58
And when you're curious, it's like Dorothy Parker has a great line, “the cure for boredom is curiosity.
33:04
There is no cure for curiosity.
33:04
” David Senra: [inaudible].
33:06
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And then there is a great woman who got a great quote.
33:10
Something along the lines of, “Curiosity is a shit starter. ” And it really is man. But I don't know.
33:20
If somebody came to me as an investor and they go, "Can you clone David?
33:25
Can you just get a dozen Davids and we'll start them reading different things.
33:31
So David owns entrepreneurial biographies, Let's get somebody who can own architecture.
33:35
Let's get somebody who can own art history.
33:38
Let's get somebody who can own tech and development.
33:42
And then let's do a media empire, right?" Jim O'Shaughnessy: Okay.
33:47
First off, I got to clone you.
33:50
Can I find people like you?
33:52
Maybe but the fact is, if I'm finding people like you, they're already doing the thing, right? David Senra: Yes.
33:59
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I'm not going to find somebody like you, sitting there just waiting for Jim to come along and say, "Hey David, why don't you...
34:06
Hey, you know all those biographies you like to read?
34:09
Why don't you maybe make a living from it?"
34:12
You're going to do it already.
34:13
David Senra: Michael Jordan actually has a great quote about this because this is what I also see is like, oh...
34:15
investors like, "We're on the search for the next great founders."
34:21
It's like, "No, that founder's coming and your point is to make sure you're aware and open to the possibility of meeting with them and them teaming.
34:27
You have the relationship reversed."
34:29
David Senra: And so his whole point is, at the end of his career, they're like, "Who's the next Michael Jordan?
34:34
Is it going to be Kobe, is it going to be all these other people?"
34:35
And he said something great.
34:36
He's like, "You don't have to search for the next Michael Jordan.
34:39
First of all, you didn't find me." That's what he said. That was [inaudible].
34:42
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly. I love that.
34:44
David Senra: He goes, "The next one is coming along. It will happen.
34:46
You don't have to do anything."
34:47
And that's exactly how I think about the founder's journey.
34:48
Let me give you an example of going back to this idea of, it's inherent and you can't tell people about it.
34:53
One of the craziest stories I did not fucking know until I started doing the podcast is, so everybody knows what the Pulitzer Prize is, right?
35:01
I'm like, "Oh, that's interesting."
35:02
So I was like, let me read the life stories of people behind...
35:05
I read the bio of Alfred Nobel because everybody knows Nobel Prize.
35:09
And behind every great brand that's psychopathic, I talked to Patrick about this, where if you have an Apple or a Ferrari or a Rolls-Royce or an Estée Lauder company.
35:19
David Senra: Behind all these brands that last for generations and generations and decade after decade is, you can inevitably trace it back to one obsessed psychotic founder.
35:29
But with the Nobel Prize and with the Pulitzer Prize, it's the same thing.
35:33
So Joseph Pulitzer's life story, I think this is founder's 135, 136, somewhere in there.
35:37
So it's been probably a year and a half since I've read this book.
35:40
But I've never forgot it because he starts out in Hungary.
35:46
And by the time he was 17, there's some kind of disease, I forgot what everybody's dying from.
35:52
His parents have nine children.
35:54
By the time he's 17, the only survivors are Joseph, his brother and his mother.
36:00
Imagine the pain that he had to endure by the time he's 17.
36:06
Take the life experience of an average American 17 year old, they can't even relate.
36:10
David Senra: So then he's in Hungary, his family because dad was an entrepreneur but now he's dead.
36:14
So now he's got to support his mom.
36:16
You are the man of the family.
36:18
What are you going to do Joseph?
36:19
And so, this is around the American Civil War.
36:21
There was a group of wealthy Boston businessmen that were paying young European teenagers to fight for the union in the Civil War.
36:32
Joseph's like, "I've got to get the hell out of Hungary. There's no opportunity."
36:35
This is exactly what we talked about, America was the beacon.
36:37
It's like that's where you go to make your fortune.
36:39
He literally was willing to risk his life. So he comes over.
36:45
That's his ticket to America.
36:46
He's like, "I can't get there [inaudible]."
36:47
They'll pay a small stipend and they get over there.
36:49
He survives the union, the Civil War, thank God.
36:52
David Senra: And there's a great line in the book.
36:53
It says, “Within five years, he goes from being a bounty hunting Hungarian teenager to an American lawmaker.
37:00
” So this goes back to what we were talking about, how you read their biographies or a Wikipedia page, like how do they accomplish so much such and so fast?
37:09
And so, goes back to the reading thing.
37:12
He says, "When I came to America, I was tongueless, guideless and friendless."
37:16
Meaning, he did not speak English, he didn't know anybody and he had no mentors or whatever. So what does he do?
37:22
He goes and he gets a job.
37:24
And he spends, it's like $2 a month, which was pretty expensive at the time, for a membership at a library.
37:29
He shows up there when the library opens.
37:31
He sits down with two apples and he reads all day long.
37:35
David Senra: And the two apples is because I don't have time to go to lunch and so, I'm going to eat these apples.
37:40
And then he winds up being a newspaper reporter, gets elected to Congress.
37:43
Builds the entire media...
37:45
the way our media is because he's like a pioneer in [inaudible] journalism unfortunately.
37:49
His playbook was copied by William Randolph Hearst, who built obviously his gigantic media company, was worth the equivalent of 30 billion dollars today.
37:57
But Pulitzer, he just builds this empire.
37:59
He winds up buying a bunch of newspapers, selling newspapers and then winds up...
38:03
His life story goes on for quite a bit but it ends in a crazy way because he winds up going blind.
38:08
And so, he's so rich, he starts circumnavigating the globe.
38:11
His last years were spent on his yacht, circumnavigating the globe as he slowly went blind.
38:15
David Senra: But just the amount of pain and struggle that that person had to endure.
38:20
And the fact that he started with less than nothing. Less than nothing.
38:24
It's like, you don't even have a family.
38:25
At least some people have their family's still alive, even if they can't support you financially.
38:30
That's just an insane story.
38:32
And the history of entrepreneurship and the history of anybody doing anything difficult, it could be, I just read a biography of the partnership, which I didn't even know between George Washington and Ben Franklin.
38:42
Politicians, even people that have started religions, a movement, an idea, a company.
38:50
It's my fundamental belief that when I say the founders are the most important people in the world, I mean anybody that starts something from scratch. I don't care what.
38:58
David Senra: It could be a company, it could be a family, it could be an organization, it could be a charity, all of that.
39:03
It's somebody that's so psychopathic and such an outlier to say, "Hey, this thing doesn't exist in the world and I'm willing to give my entire life energy to make sure that it exists." That's insane.
39:15
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So the only thing I would quibble on there is, you're using psychopathic in the more what I would call, fun version of the word.
39:27
True psychopaths are for the most part, fairly rare and fairly dangerous. David Senra: For sure.
39:34
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And so, I don't know, maybe we could find a word that distills everything you've just said but makes them, that you not have to worry about taking the shower and having them come in and stab you to death.
39:47
David Senra: Fair enough. Fair enough.
39:49
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Because Norman Bates was an entrepreneur man. He had a motel.
39:58
I am so fascinated by it, just like you are.
40:01
And all of my life, I have read constantly, endlessly and then listened and just because of the pure pleasure that it gives.
40:09
I just love learning new things.
40:11
And when you're willing to admit, why isn't the Socratic sense of knowing that you know.
40:18
If anything, it's so little.
40:23
And if you read, you'd fucking know that because you would look at what the most educated people of 500 years ago believed and it was all wrong. David Senra: Yeah.
40:32
It would be arrogant to think that we're not making the same mistake now.
40:36
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly. Exactly.
40:38
David Senra: And I think the better word than psychopathic is obsessive. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yes.
40:41
David Senra: They're obsessive.
40:42
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yes, absolutely.
40:43
David Senra: Whatever it is. They're just obsessive.
40:45
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Whatever it is, exactly.
40:46
And that's like I said earlier, about always building these algorithms in my head.
40:50
I'm always trying to figure out.
40:52
Because honestly, I have thought, "Wouldn't it be cool to be able to round up a dozen Davids and put it together in a little business?"
41:02
But you're absolutely right.
41:04
The way I would do it, is I just go out and look and see who's doing it already, right now.
41:10
And that's the other part that really excites me.
41:13
We're going through what I call, the Great Reshuffle.
41:16
And everything, all the old models are collapsing and people don't understand that.
41:22
And it scares them and they're frightened about it.
41:25
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So what's happening is going to be so, in my opinion, I'm usually wrong, so take that grain of salt but in my opinion, is going to be so extraordinary that there are going to be...
41:39
We talk about who's going to be the next Michael Jordan?
41:42
I submit to you, that even you and I who read like maniacs and know these types of founders and everything, if we try to put pen to paper.
41:52
And you and I were just united on this thing and we tried to name the 10 top professions in 2035, we'd be wrong on nine of them. David Senra: 100%.
42:02
Jim O'Shaughnessy: They have not been invented yet. David Senra: Okay.
42:05
I just got in trouble because my daughter, she was in fourth grade last year and she asked me, she's like, "Daddy, will you please do a talk on career day?
42:14
Because you get paid to talk and read and this is just a weird business."
42:19
And so, I show up to class.
42:22
And so, first of all, the teachers are like, "Okay, where's your PowerPoint?"
42:26
And I was like, "What do you mean?"
42:27
She goes, "Well, every parent has that on a PowerPoint."
42:28
And they're like, "Where's yours?"
42:30
And my response was, "I would never subject kids to such a thing."
42:33
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love you.
42:34
David Senra: And so, I go, "I'm just going to talk to them for two minutes and then we're going to have a dialogue."
42:39
And so, I get up there and I'm like, "Listen, don't listen to what your parents say.
42:42
Don't listen to what your teachers say.
42:43
It's highly likely that you...
42:43
you guys are nine years old, you're in fourth grade.
42:46
It's highly likely what you're going to do for your career, hasn't been invented yet.
42:50
And I know that because there was no such thing as a podcaster when I was your age.
42:56
It wasn't even considered a profession up until 10 years ago."
42:59
David Senra: I go, "The important thing is read all the time.
43:02
What are you truly interested in?
43:03
It doesn't matter what your parents should think that you're interested.
43:04
It doesn't matter what your teachers are saying or your friends.
43:06
What do you think about all the time? What do you read about? What do you learn about?
43:10
What do you watch YouTube about?
43:11
Follow that because then nobody can compete with you on being you and only you know what you actually truly and not what society or other people want to tell you to do.
43:19
And then I go from there, then just keep learning and try to..."
43:21
Basic advice like, "Don't be a shit head." I didn't curse. They were younger.
43:25
But we had the conversation and then I go, "Okay-" Jim O'Shaughnessy: Listen you motherfuckers.
43:29
David Senra: But seriously, it was 2 to 5 minutes and they give you 30 minutes. And I go, "Okay.
43:35
Then no more presentation because presentations are boring.
43:37
Let's have a conversation.
43:38
What questions do you have for me?"
43:39
And when my daughter got home that day, she goes, "Daddy, everybody in class said your presentation was their favorite."
43:45
Because I actually involved them. They're super curious.
43:48
And this is my problem with schooling in general and why me and my wife have a bit of point of contention because she's like, "Well what would you do?
43:56
Would you homeschool or whatever?"
43:57
I was like, "She's really smart and she has the internet. Let her figure out."
44:01
David Senra: You need to know basic stuff, math, reading, writing, that kind of stuff.
44:04
But they're still teaching, even when you look at their curriculum, which I think a lot of parents realized when we went through the pandemic and you saw all those Zoom school.
44:12
Like, what are they actually learning?
44:14
It's not really about education.
44:16
It's some hybrid future insurance against getting a job to daycare.
44:21
It's essentially what it is.
44:22
It's very little to do with education.
44:24
You can learn way more in an hour or two on your own, than you can in eight hours a day with a group of 40 other people.
44:30
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Could not agree with you more completely.
44:33
The vestiges of our public education in this country are based on the late 19th century, when we started to industrialize and the industrialists told the government, "Listen, you know what we need you to do?
44:48
We need you to train people to be content to sit for fucking eight hours in a room, doing the same thing."
44:57
And they were getting them ready for the manufacturing line.
45:00
And that is so removed from what we have available to us today.
45:06
Your daughter, for example, there's a school that I follow, called The Synthesis School, which was based at Ad Astra.
45:12
But Musk started to educate the kids who were living at the factory.
45:15
David Senra: The head evangelist lives in Miami.
45:18
You've had her on the show.
45:19
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I had her on the show. Yeah. She's wonderful.
45:22
And what I love about it is...
45:22
because I've looked into it because I have three grandkids.
45:26
And you can't pull kids away from real learning because they're curious.
45:32
And our educational system essentially and I'm not saying this like it's conspiratorial because I don't think it is.
45:40
But our educational system as it exists right now, is one of those collapsing old models. It doesn't work anymore.
45:48
It is trying to teach people what to think, not how to think.
45:53
And what to think, well, I need a job.
45:56
I need a good job at a corporation. And that's all bullshit.
46:00
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And anyone who has an internet connection can understand that.
46:07
And they can, as you say, follow their passion.
46:10
And the tools that are available right now, for example, Patrick's podcast.
46:15
If you want an MBA, I would say don't get an MBA, listen to everything on Patrick's podcast.
46:20
Oh, you want to be a founder?
46:21
Listen to David's podcast, listen to all of them and then read them.
46:25
Your education from that is going to be vastly better, than from taking an entrepreneurship class somewhere.
46:32
David Senra: And in some of the plans because me and Patrick talked about this all the time, we had this discussion the other day.
46:37
I was like, "Listen, let's say you're trapped on an island.
46:40
The only access you can have..."
46:42
Forget the island part but the only educational access you can have, is literally the back catalog of Invest Like the Best and the back catalog of Founders and everything we do forward.
46:49
David Senra: And then all the ideas that Patrick and I have, not only to remix that audio content, there's software layers, there's reinforcement of certain principles over and over again.
46:59
There's just translation to text and atomic pieces of content and all these other discussions that we're having.
47:04
And it's like, that alone is better than anything that existed on the planet 30 years ago. It did not exist.
47:09
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Absolutely.
47:10
David Senra: This is what I loved.
47:11
I was watching your interview with David Perell.
47:13
And he gets it right away, where he's like, "For the first time..."
47:15
If you think about the education system, the process you were just describing, they actually solved the problem.
47:21
Because I've read a ton of obviously American history in the 1800s, 1900s. Education had no scale.
47:27
And so, the public education system had to solve for scale.
47:29
It's like, how do you make sure that you have at least a baseline of education?
47:32
And then the world changed and now there's a different problem.
47:34
But David has a really good...
47:36
David Perell has a really good idea.
47:37
It's like for the first time, an educator has scale.
47:41
And so, if you're the best in the world at what you're teaching, you get to teach it for everybody because our entire world is dominated by parallels.
47:48
David Senra: That is why I'm so obsessed and focused and why I won't allow myself to think about anything else but building Founders.
47:54
And I work seven days a week on this, is because my goal is not to be the biggest podcast in the history of entrepreneurship. It's to be the best.
48:02
Because if I'm the best, I get to do it for everybody.
48:05
And I think it's arrogant to think that I will be able to be the best in the world at something, even if it's a small niche, a small but valuable niche.
48:12
But it's arrogant to think that you could be the best in the world and I could multitask and think about other things.
48:17
And that's where I feel I have an edge, where it's like, oh, my podcast is not a means to an end. It is an end.
48:24
I think if I never did anything else and there's obviously a ton of opportunities, there's an unlimited amount of opportunities based on who listens.
48:31
David Senra: And the fact that your son put it the best way, it's like, what people don't understand about what you and I do, David, is that we make educational content for the most successful people in the world.
48:39
If you saw the people that listened to Invest Like the Best and listened to Founders, it is some of the smartest and most successful people in the world.
48:46
And so, my whole thing is, I'm not trying to build the biggest podcast because I'm not dumbing anything down.
48:54
There's Andy Grove, that did a fantastic book, Only the Paranoid Survive.
48:58
One thing I am paranoid of, is wasting anybody's time.
49:02
Even now, you give me an opportunity to come on your podcast.
49:04
You give me a great platform to introduce my ideas and maybe my podcast to other people.
49:07
David Senra: It's like, okay.
49:08
Then I spend every day studying.
49:10
Not only am I reading every day.
49:12
How many people are reading their first three to four hours every day of their lives?
49:15
Very few people, seven days a week.
49:16
Then I spend the afternoon talking to other founders and rereading past highlights.
49:22
It's like, I want to be perpetually prepared.
49:24
So right now, I'm making one episode every week.
49:26
And so that means, every one hour of recorded audio, I read at least 20 hours to produce that one hour, because I am extremely paranoid of wasting anybody's time.
49:37
I want people to say, "Hey, if I press play on this podcast, I know for a fact David did his homework, that he actually did a ton of research," and that's why I have the bar so high.
49:46
It's like I'm only doing episodes where I have to read an entire book for every episode.
49:50
That's not going to change.
49:51
Because it's also David Perell and you talked about the idea of having a personal monopoly, and I think it's in line with what we're talking about with not only education, kids' education, but also careers.
50:03
David Senra: It's like take Warren Buffet's idea of how you build a moat, right?
50:06
And so I was thinking about this the other day, and Patrick picked up on this the very first time I got on the phone with him.
50:11
He'd already listened to a bunch of episodes.
50:13
He picked up on this right away where Warren Buffett has this great saying.
50:17
He's like, "Okay, if I give you $25 billion and I tell you, 'Take away the market leadership of Coke,' what is the right thing to do?"
50:25
And he says, "Give me back the money because it can't be done."
50:28
David Senra: And what Patrick picked up on, he's like, "Your podcast is complete and you're so far ahead that even if somebody said, 'Hey, I want to get in. That's a good idea.
50:37
I want to get in and I want to start competing with you right away,'" he's like, "They'll never fucking catch you.
50:40
It's like game, set, match."
50:42
As long as you don't quit and you keep getting better at it and you stay focused, which I'm obviously going to, I hope to do this for the rest of my life.
50:49
I always said, I think I said on the episode I did with him that went viral unexpectedly.
50:53
And maybe I didn't say this but I was like, "To get me to stop, they're going to have to pry the microphone out of my cold dead hand," because I found the thing that is unique.
51:02
David Senra: It goes back to what we were talking about that I jotted down on this notepad while you were talking.
51:09
I believe that life is a constant search to find what you are uniquely qualified to do.
51:15
And then once you find it, you do it forever, because knowledge compounds just like money does.
51:21
But you have to keep looking until you find it.
51:24
And I got this idea from this guy named Edwin Land, who's the founder of Polaroid, who's a Steve Jobs hero.
51:28
And I've read something that he said that was just fantastic and helped me put blinders on.
51:32
You know how race horses have blinders on? Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yep.
51:35
David Senra: I had that blinders on focus where it's like he goes, "I have a personal motto. It's very personal.
51:39
It may not apply to anybody else," but he's like, "Don't do anything that somebody else can do."
51:43
And so once you start looking at Viewpoint, he's like, "Am I the only person that can do what I'm going to do?"
51:50
And that means imbibing your personality into what you're doing.
51:53
The fact that when we started talking, I was like, "Jim, what I love about you is I've listened to enough of your podcast," I like, because there's some ...
51:57
It's weird where I told you I like that you curse, because business people are extreme people.
52:06
Investors, entrepreneurs are extreme people and sometimes they get on and they do interviews and it's like this weird mask, like public relations.
52:14
They take it some extreme brilliant person and you try to make them seem normal and relatable, but they're not normal and they're not relatable, because if they did they wouldn't have started the company to begin with.
52:23
David Senra: And I think leaning into your eccentricities and keep getting more narrowly focused on what can I do that no one else in the world can do is just good to build a personal monopoly, and using Warren Buffet's term, a moat that you can actually build a sustainable, valuable business around.
52:38
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Absolutely.
52:40
And so many great things to continue the conversation there. The idea of compression.
52:48
So I'm very interested in AI, and what is turning heads right now is there's a company with the ability that they have, like what the show Silicon Valley was about.
53:03
They have a killer compression algorithm in AI, and what it's able to do is take 200 terabytes of data and compress it to two gig. Where does that fit? It fits on your phone. It fits on your laptop. It fits on your iPad.
53:20
So compression is what you do.
53:23
You've got to read 20 hours to speak an hour.
53:26
That sounds about right to me.
53:30
For example, I cannot be scripted.
53:32
I smiled when you said that about having the entrepreneur on and they're sitting there like, "Thank you for having me on, David.
53:40
I want to tell you about our exciting new opportunities with ..." It's all bullshit, man.
53:46
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And we have all sorts of failings in human OS, but one of them is not the inability to see fake, inauthentic bullshit. David Senra: 100%.
53:58
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And people call people on that instantly. We've got that. And why?
54:05
Because, well, wait a minute.
54:07
Did we spend almost all of our time in tribes hunting and gathering? Yeah, we did.
54:12
Why would it be good for a person to know that another person was full of shit?
54:17
Well, their very survival dependent on it, right? David Senra: Yeah.
54:21
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And some people whose theory of why we developed language, and I'm talking serious PhDs.
54:27
I read those papers, too.
54:29
And there is a theory that language was developed so that we could gossip. David Senra: Oh, yeah.
54:34
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Think about that for a minute. Of course.
54:38
If you and I are in the same hunter gatherer tribe and we don't know how to talk.
54:43
We have no language, so we're like ...
54:43
And we're pointing at Grog because both of us think there's something off about Grog.
54:51
Well, now when we talk, we don't want to risk our own identity to call out Grog and maybe the rest of the tribe thinks we're full of shit.
55:00
And then they exile us and we're dead and in under a day.
55:03
Because that world, by the way, was not this whole idea, "Let's go back to nature."
55:08
Listen, man, and you don't want to go back to nature because it was nasty, brutish, and short.
55:14
And every comfort that we have today came out of the minds of human beings.
55:18
Jim O'Shaughnessy: "But it's my right."
55:22
Your rights came out of the minds of human beings.
55:24
There is no such a thing as natural rights.
55:27
Yeah, your natural right is that you don't get eaten by the ... It's not a right. It's like luck.
55:33
I don't get eaten by the bear or the tiger or the lion, and it's not my right.
55:38
It's because I can run like hell.
55:39
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But the whole point of the idea of it comes out of our minds and we developed language because now with language, I can think that Grog's a lay about and ... What was the word?
55:59
A ruffian that you used in the cut.
56:00
David Senra: Yeah, ruffian. I think it was ruffian.
56:02
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I think Grog over there is a ruffian.
56:03
So instead of broadcasting that for the tribe, I know that you probably think the same thing.
56:08
And I sidle up next to you and I'm like, "Hey, David, what's going on?"
56:11
And you're like, "Not much.
56:13
Just avoided death four times today, so a good day."
56:17
And then I say, "Dude, what do you think of Grog over there, man?"
56:21
And then you're like, "Honestly, I think Grog is kind of a lazy fucker."
56:26
And so it all ends up with that's how the communication starts.
56:33
The rest of the tribe is silently brought onside and Grog's gone.
56:38
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But the point is that stuff is just so cool to me.
56:46
And if you understand why do we do certain things the way we do them?
56:51
Well, for the most part, you can either follow the money or follow the evolution. So follow the evolution.
56:57
Our brains are basically designed to keep us alive.
57:00
I mean, that's what our brains are basically for.
57:03
And then, of course, we had this incredible when we discovered fire, and this is the other thing that drives me crazy.
57:10
I want to get your opinion on it.
57:11
So every innovation normally comes with widespread horror, right?
57:18
So when radio got introduced, everybody said the radio waves will kill you, and you can find actual newspapers in the microfiche or the way, way back machine that show a story with a dead bird and then the headline, "Did radio waves kill this bird?"
57:39
But what's interesting is same thing for bicycles in the late 1800s. Same thing for movies.
57:46
They're going to ruin theater.
57:47
David Senra: Every innovation.
57:48
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Every innovation. Every innovation.
57:50
David Senra: There's also an interesting thought there, too.
57:52
Not only do the humans' societal response to change is predictable.
57:54
It's like no, they don't want it, even though their entire foundation of our life is just like we're all laying on the foundation of change, layer for layer of somebody else's change that came before us.
58:04
But what I found interesting also is usually the people that are making the change and the inventors and founders can't even predict what their product is going to be used for.
58:13
David Senra: Perfect example.
58:14
I just reread a 60-year-old biography of Thomas Edison.
58:17
This is the third book I've read on Thomas Edison, because I also think it's like if you find something interesting, it's not enough to read one book.
58:23
I'll read five, six, seven.
58:25
I'll do podcast after podcast on them.
58:27
But he obviously invented forget the electric light, which is amazing.
58:31
But what we're doing right now, recorded audio, that is Thomas Edison, except he called it a phonograph.
58:38
David Senra: And so he makes the first ability to record audio and play it back at a later time. That was Edison, right?
58:43
You know what he thought?
58:44
He makes a list of what this invention is going to be used for.
58:49
And his idea was, hey, if you go to somebody's house and then today you go to somebody's house and they have a wine cellar, it's like all this store of wines, he said that you're going to have a recorded audio cellar in your house or area in your house.
59:02
And so you can listen to preachers, sermons, past sermons of preachers.
59:07
So you're going to come over like, "Hey, you and your wife want to come over for dinner and then after dinner we're going to sit there."
59:11
And it's like what the hell are you talking about, Edison? This is insane.
59:15
David Senra: Steve Jobs made the point, too, because I love the way ...
59:17
Steve Jobs is my all time favorite entrepreneur.
59:20
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Mine, too, actually.
59:21
David Senra: It's like, yes, he had a certain type of genius.
59:25
What I think is his most admirable trait, and something I'm trying to emulate to the tiniest degree and I'll probably never be as good as he is at it, it's his clarity of thought.
59:33
I have never come across a more clear thinker.
59:35
And I've read 12 books on him, and not only I have read a dozen books on him, but then if he talks about his heroes or the people he influenced, like Bell, like Land, the founders of HP, Andy Grove, I'll go and chase down their biographies, too.
59:48
So I accounted for this a few months ago and I realized I've done 39 episodes on Steve Jobs or one of Steve Jobs' influences.
59:56
And so I'll map all that out.
59:58
David Senra: But he said, he goes, "The way you have to think about what you're doing is we're tool builders," which is exactly what most of what we're doing, the people listening to this podcast, me and you, we're building tools.
1:00:06
My podcast is a tool for thought.
1:00:08
It's like I think of ideas as tools.
1:00:10
You're going to hear probably a thousand different ideas from history of guest entrepreneurs.
1:00:14
You'll pick out five or 10 that you're going to use in ways we can't predict.
1:00:16
David Senra: And so the reason he says, he goes, "Listen, I'm a tool maker, but I know that I can't possibly predict what my tools will be used for in the future."
1:00:24
He was talking about the personal computer. This is the Apple Two.
1:00:26
You're talking about this is 1976.
1:00:28
And he uses the example later on that he goes, "There's no way Alexander Graham Bell could have possibly predicted that when he invented the telephone that somebody a hundred years later is going to be using a telephone to call up the movie theater to find out the time of the movie." Now you don't do that.
1:00:43
But in his time, that was very popular. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Sure.
1:00:46
David Senra: That was something that was done.
1:00:47
It's like there's no way.
1:00:49
Just focus on maximizing what your tool can do and then trust that humans are going to find ways to use the tools that you build that there's no way you can predict.
1:00:58
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh, I mean, again, I'm thinking what can I ask David that I'm going to disagree with him on?
1:01:05
Because honestly, for example, the people, the guy, the French people who came up with motion pictures.
1:01:12
Do you know what they thought?
1:01:13
Do you know what their forecast was how they were going to be used?
1:01:16
They were only going to be used to film theater productions.
1:01:24
And I passionately believe that in all the businesses that I've started, my rule is hire people that are smarter than I am and then let them be smart at what they do.
1:01:36
So I push all decisions down to the people actually using the tools, right?
1:01:41
Because what the fuck do I know?
1:01:42
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And so at OSAM, which Patrick ultimately still is CEO of and I founded and started, when we were putting together the team as we rolled out of Bear, one of the guys who worked for me, he's like he came into my office and he is like, "Okay, we've got to decide on trading systems."
1:01:59
And I looked at him and I'm like, "Dude, what?"
1:02:02
And he goes, "We have to decide on what trading system we're going to buy."
1:02:07
And I went, "First off, you and I are not going to make any decision on what trading systems we're going to buy, Chris, because I remember the last time I traded was with you in 1996 off a busted Excel spreadsheet because our trader was sick that day.
1:02:25
And thank god we didn't fuck it up.
1:02:27
But that's the extent of our knowledge about trading. No, no, no.
1:02:30
What we're going to do all, you know all those really smart people that we pay a lot of money to that trade all of our securities for us?
1:02:40
We're going to let them tell us the tools they want for what they do."
1:02:44
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And we had the same experience with Canvas.
1:02:48
So Patrick and I are very simpatico in many, many ways.
1:02:52
And for example, most people hated custom indexing, which was Patrick's.
1:02:57
He came up with that term.
1:02:59
And I personally thought literally that was the most brilliant thing he did around the whole thing.
1:03:05
Because what he did was, again, you've got to be really fucking smart to figure this out or lucky.
1:03:11
So indexing, when indexes were born, people hated them.
1:03:17
They hated them with a passion.
1:03:19
News stories were just about how they were un-American. Seeking to be average? No American does that. Seeking to be average? That's horrible, right? David Senra: Yeah.
1:03:30
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, then index go on to beat everyone else for 20 years, and everyone loves indexes.
1:03:35
"Oh, indexes are the greatest thing in the world." What have they done?
1:03:39
They've conquered neural real estate with all of these great impressions.
1:03:45
Patrick comes along and says, "You know what I'm going to do?
1:03:48
I'm going to hijack that neural real estate and I'm going to put the term custom, which sounds pretty cool, in front of it."
1:03:56
And bing, a new category in asset management is born.
1:04:00
And as we're selling it, I'm trying to get our counterparties to really understand the importance of this. And they did, obviously. They bought us.
1:04:08
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But the team would say, "Well, what are you worried about?"
1:04:13
I said, "I'm really worried if we don't have a competitor in six months, because if we don't have a competitor by then or 12 months at the outside, we're wrong."
1:04:23
And they're like, "Huh, I never thought about it that way."
1:04:25
And so obviously we have a huge lead, like your lead with your back catalog.
1:04:30
Same with Patrick's lead with his back catalog.
1:04:33
You get to a point where you're so far ahead that it's going to be really hard to catch you.
1:04:39
And as far as the tech goes, we were and are so far ahead that it's going to be hard for them even if they throw a ton of money.
1:04:46
And by the way, every big asset manager is right now.
1:04:49
And I cannot tell you how happy I was when I saw an advertisement where Fidelity, Fido is the 800-pound gorilla in asset management for retail. What did they introduce?
1:05:01
The new custom index from Fidelity.
1:05:04
And I'm like, "Oh, thank God."
1:05:08
Because if you control the term of art, that's your baby and you're like the defacto leader.
1:05:14
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But one thing Patrick and I did, and he got some advice from one of his VC buddies which we took very seriously, and the advice was that, what your point about the founder not being able to imagine what other people are going to use the tool for.
1:05:29
So a lot of our folks were really excited, like, "We should do this feature first," and that's natural.
1:05:36
I love to see them absolutely into it and really behind it.
1:05:41
But Patrick and I were talking about it and he's like, "What we should do is just have a limited group of investment advisors we trust and then we should let them tell us what they want it to do."
1:05:54
And God damn it if they didn't ...
1:05:54
If I compared my original list of what I thought were going to be the most popular features with what actually are the most popular features.
1:06:03
I maybe got two out of ten right.
1:06:05
David Senra: There's a great story about that with the guy at Dunkin Donuts.
1:06:07
Because his son, like this guy built up Dunkin Donuts, his son kind of ran it into the fucking ground.
1:06:09
He's like, "I have to back my son's play."
1:06:10
And the son fucked up because they were poor when they started.
1:06:11
He gets wealthy, sends his son to business school and then his son's like, "Hey," his son comes out and starts running the company.
1:06:13
I didn't mean to interrupt you by the way, but- Jim O'Shaughnessy: No, that's fine.
1:06:15
David Senra: I think you'll find this interesting.
1:06:16
His son starts to run the company and his dad's like, "Use me and use all of my partners.
1:06:17
We're a generation older than you, we have unbelievable amount of stuff in our fucking brain."
1:06:19
And he's like, "Oh yeah, no, no, I'm going to hire all my friends from business school."
1:06:20
And they just make one bet.
1:06:21
And so he's like, "Listen, I'm going to let you make your decisions."
1:06:22
So he goes and seeks his dad's counsel and then he'll immediately do the exact opposite.
1:06:23
And so there's a whole...
1:06:24
And it's devastating because he's writing the book when he is in his 80s.
1:06:25
It's called ‘Time to Make the Donuts’.
1:06:26
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh man.
1:06:27
I'll tell you, it's just so fucked up in so many ways, and yet when it works, it can also be just amazingly cool.
1:06:29
David Senra: There's so many ideas here.
1:06:30
We had this conversation.
1:06:31
Me and Patrick were talking about this the other day, because he knows I'm up to 15 acquisition offers on Founders, and usually it comes from VCs because it'd be a great deal flow for them.
1:06:34
And one thing that I think, I've met a ton of smart venture capitalists and I've met some not smart ones.
1:06:36
Like people [inaudible] give you money kind of shit.
1:06:37
And the thing was it's like how could you possibly think?
1:06:38
David Senra: I got this example.
1:06:39
I've thought about the business of podcasting because it's been an obsession.
1:06:40
Recorded audio before there's anything, audio in general, before there was anything such as a podcast, I was completely obsessed with.
1:06:44
Back when it was just AM radio.
1:06:46
Back when you had to stream it from your browser and it would buffer and disconnect.
1:06:50
Way before the actual invention of the term podcast, I was obsessed with it.
1:06:54
And so now I've thought about the business of podcasting every day for at least six years.
1:06:59
And I'll get these emails where it's just like, "Hey, I've thought about this for 15 minutes or I had some researcher that knows nothing about this. Here's a list of ideas."
1:07:08
And I'm like, "How could you possibly think this was valuable?"
1:07:11
That doesn't mean I know everything. Of course not.
1:07:15
But I would at least appreciate you spending hours and hours and hours in thinking about something, and then not sending me some stupid bullshit list that took you 15 minutes. That's not helpful.
1:07:22
David Senra: And so Patrick was talking about that.
1:07:24
He's like, "If the founder is getting advice from me," so he's talking about the people he's investing.
1:07:29
I met Michael from TEGUS, and that is an obsessive. Me and Michael talked.
1:07:32
We've talked for hours on the phone but also through text.
1:07:35
And it's just like, "Oh, that guy has whatever I see in the books, that guy has."
1:07:41
I don't know if his company's going to be successful.
1:07:42
I don't know anything about it.
1:07:43
I'm not privy to the numbers or anything.
1:07:45
Doesn't mean just because you're obsessed you're going to succeed by any means.
1:07:47
But it's like, oh, he is on it the same exact way.
1:07:50
David Senra: And Patrick made the point, he's just like, "Well, if he is asking me how to run his business, there's a problem here."
1:07:56
He's like, "It's the other way around.
1:07:58
I'm there for to give them resources so they could fulfill whatever they want to do, but I'm the one asking questions."
1:08:04
It goes back to it's you have it backwards.
1:08:07
It's like you're not looking for the next Michael Jordan.
1:08:10
That Michael Jordan is coming.
1:08:12
You should need to make sure that if they're a founder and you happen to invest in founders, that they're going to find you first.
1:08:16
And you usually do that through content or through marketing or whatever the case is.
1:08:19
David Senra: But you just said something that was a really smart that comes up over and over again.
1:08:23
It's like we know it's a good idea.
1:08:25
Everybody knows it's a good idea, but it's hard to adhere to it.
1:08:28
And that is usually in the beginning of these companies that I read about, you have to do this.
1:08:34
And usually future generations of managers stop doing this to their detriment.
1:08:37
You have to put your trust into small groups of smart people. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yes.
1:08:41
David Senra: They will figure it out.
1:08:43
Everybody knows that, like, "Yes, David."
1:08:44
They'll shake your hand like, "That's a good idea. I will do it." How many actually do it? It's so small.
1:08:50
And this is something that Ed Catmull, the founder of Pixar, may be the greatest manager of creative and technical talent that ever lived. Right? Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:08:58
David Senra: You figure that he- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Loved Creativity, Inc. That was a great book. David Senra: Yeah.
1:09:02
Steve Jobs learned how to manage.
1:09:03
He didn't know how to manage.
1:09:04
If you see the first half his career, he learned from Ed and then you go on, and you figure all these other people that studied Pixar and learned directly from Ed, and that was his whole thing.
1:09:12
He's like, "Listen," he goes.
1:09:13
And a lot of investors do this, too, and I think founders rightly do this as well. Like John D. Rockefeller.
1:09:19
When he came across somebody smart, he hired him.
1:09:21
Even if he didn't have anything to do.
1:09:22
He's like, "I don't care. I'll find something."
1:09:24
Like, "That dude is smart."
1:09:25
Usually it's a guy in the 1800s. "That guy's smart."
1:09:28
Edwin Land, founder of Polaroid. Same thing. Smart person? You're on the staff.
1:09:32
Because what Ed Catmull said, he's like, "Listen."
1:09:34
He goes, "If you give a great idea to a mediocre team, they'll mess it up.
1:09:38
If you give a bad idea to a brilliant team, they'll throw it out and come up with something better."
1:09:44
So it's like you have to build your entire structure in your company.
1:09:47
David Senra: And in Pixar's case, Steve Jobs said this.
1:09:50
He's like, "Listen, I don't think we're going to have the same level of talent that Pixar had because we're 3000 or 4,000 employees and they're 400.
1:09:57
But they had 400 A players."
1:10:00
He's like, "I've never seen another company that had a larger concentration of talent than Pixar did."
1:10:06
And I think there is something to be said.
1:10:08
The larger a company gets, of course, the level of quality overall has to decrease.
1:10:13
David Senra: And so one thing I'm passionate about is small teams of smart people being enabled by the technology that you and I were discussing in detail before we started recording.
1:10:24
You can make an outsize impact.
1:10:26
What I'm trying to do myself is I want to make a large impact with not a lot of people.
1:10:31
Personally, this is just me personally, I never want to work at a company that has an HR department.
1:10:36
I don't want to deal with Barbara in accounting or saying, "David, you can't use that language," or all the other stuff.
1:10:42
And I think technology, the amount of impact that a small group of smart people.
1:10:46
You may never have to grow out of a small group of smart people.
1:10:49
My version of heaven would be that.
1:10:52
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And again, I don't know, maybe they're going to ask for a DNA test. How old are you?
1:10:57
I've got to account for my whereabouts 39 years ago because- David Senra: Okay. Hold on. Hold on.
1:11:04
The hilarious part about that is if you saw ... So my wife, right?
1:11:07
We grew up completely different.
1:11:09
Do you watch Game of Thrones?
1:11:10
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yes, of course.
1:11:11
David Senra: Okay, so you'll get this. Okay.
1:11:13
Where I ask other people and the analogy falls apart.
1:11:16
And so she grew up in Highgarden and I grew up in Flea Bottom.
1:11:20
And so she always tells me, because I'm not that tall, but I'm way taller than all my siblings and my dad and everybody else.
1:11:29
So I also look a little different.
1:11:31
And my parents got divorced and then were remarried.
1:11:34
My mom passed away, so I don't want to make any aspersions about her behavior or whatever.
1:11:39
I don't think this but it is an inside joke where my wife looks, she goes, "How did that," when she looks at me, "come from that?"
1:11:47
She says that all the time.
1:11:50
Because my dad's a wild dude. My brother's crazy.
1:11:54
I am obviously, too, but we're all completely different.
1:11:58
Luckily me and my siblings get along really well and we're really close and everything else.
1:12:02
But it's funny that you brought that up, because my own wife is like, "I don't believe this."
1:12:06
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But it's true.
1:12:09
It did not make me popular with all my team, but I used to just proclaim before I learned to keep my fucking mouth shut that my goal- David Senra: You got to teach me the way, man. You got to teach me.
1:12:19
I get in so much trouble.
1:12:22
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So one of the things that I did learn about keeping, because listen, I'm a gas bag, and I will go on and on and scream it.
1:12:30
People would say to me when I was publishing What Works On Wall Street, "Don't you want to keep that secret?"
1:12:35
And I'm like, "Are you fucking crazy? I'm going to go on TV.
1:12:38
I'm going to have a Wall Street.
1:12:39
I'm going to give it to Barron's.
1:12:41
I'm going to just shout from the rooftop, and maybe, maybe someone will say, 'Oh, what's this book all about?'" Right? David Senra: Yeah.
1:12:49
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But my dream was always I want to be alive long enough so that I can have a company where I'm the only employee and everything else is tech.
1:13:00
David Senra: That's me right now. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:13:02
But everything else is tech and you are going to be able to fucking do it and I'm envious, because the tech that's coming, dude, it's like you're going to be a kid in a candy store. And this is what I love.
1:13:14
The reason I love people with your mentality and the all in.
1:13:17
I'm very much of an all in kind of guy.
1:13:20
I burn the ships and I know that that is a strategy.
1:13:23
David Senra: That's another common theme.
1:13:24
No, no, but I don't mean to interrupt you, but I have to point this out to people listening, is the advice that you'll get from founders that have built successful companies, so much so that somebody wrote a book about, they were so good at their job, somebody wrote a book about them. That's insane.
1:13:38
And the advice you'll get from average people, usually it's directionally opposite, where it's like, "No, diversify or have a backup plan."
1:13:45
And then you have people like Jeff Bezos who'll say, " Plan B should be to make plan A work."
1:13:49
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly.
1:13:50
David Senra: You have Larry Ellison saying, "Hey, I take the boat out offshore, I pick an enemy, I pick a fight, and then I burn the boat."
1:13:57
It's like they put their back to the wall and force themselves to invent their way out of the problem.
1:14:01
So I didn't mean to interrupt, but that is- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:14:04
No, I mean- David Senra: That's more common than not.
1:14:06
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But you should interrupt because that's a point that people need to hear.
1:14:09
Listen, guys, none of this ... You said it earlier.
1:14:14
Problems are opportunities.
1:14:15
And to me, to you, to people who think like this, so many people, I try to work with younger people, not just in my industry but in a variety of industries to help them in their personal development and see what they should be working on and doing.
1:14:29
And one of the things that I just have the hardest time and I get frustrated because I blame myself that I haven't been able to get through on these issues.
1:14:38
But this idea that so people are so afraid of risk and they're so afraid of, "I'm going to fail and then I will be covered in shame and everyone will hate me and my wife will be mad at me or my husband will be mad at or my kids will hate me." Are you crazy? No, no, no, no.
1:14:56
David Senra: In a world that is constantly changing, the biggest risk is not taking any.
1:15:00
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Totally. 100% true.
1:15:03
So I told you before we started recording about this friend of mine who's really smart.
1:15:07
He's a doctor in Manhattan, but he's also an amazing investor.
1:15:10
And I've had him on the podcast, and he was at my place and he's like, "Jim, I got a bone to pick with you." I'm like, "Sure. What?"
1:15:18
And he goes like, "Dude, a lot of people listen to your podcast."
1:15:22
And I'm like, "I don't think so."
1:15:23
And he goes, "Well, okay, the right people listen to your podcast." And I'm like, "Okay."
1:15:28
And he goes, "But I'm beginning to hear people who I would be surprised to hear them quote you."
1:15:34
And I'm like, "Okay, what do you mean?"
1:15:35
He goes, "The line that you are really getting through with is we are deterministic thinkers living in a probabilistic world.
1:15:45
Hilarity or tragedy often ensue."
1:15:47
And I'm like, "What do you mean? I love that line?"
1:15:50
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And he goes, "Dude, do you want to destroy our entire advantage?"
1:15:56
And I'm like, "Go on, Sid."
1:15:59
And he goes, "Dude, we are risk takers."
1:16:03
When risk is for sale, like if you see that intelligent person hire them, right?
1:16:08
If there's a reasonable risk for sale, people like me and Sid say, "Yeah, we'll buy that."
1:16:14
And he goes, "The only reason we can do that is because 95% of the population want to sell you that risk."
1:16:21
And he's like, he goes, "That's because they're deterministic and they're terrified of what might happen."
1:16:27
And he goes, "Imagine if you will, Jim, that it's 50/50 or 49/51."
1:16:33
And he goes, "There's no Elon Musks. There are no Steve Jobs. There's no Bezos.
1:16:39
There's none of these people, because everybody is calibrated. There's no progress."
1:16:44
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And then I start thinking about that and I'm like that's really a good point.
1:16:49
And then you start thinking about previous societies, man.
1:16:54
And there was no progress.
1:16:57
Literally you could live in a European country. Let's just pick England.
1:17:03
So you could live in England between 1200 and 1600 and you don't notice anything that's different.
1:17:13
David Senra: Tim Urban from Wait But Why has great posts about that, where it's like how the hell?
1:17:16
If you look at the graph he has on his blog where it's like what you said.
1:17:19
Like a thousand years, the line is flat.
1:17:21
Then the industrial revolution in 1800 just goes complete ... Is it parabolic?
1:17:24
What is it when it goes straight up?
1:17:25
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It's exponential. David Senra: Okay. Boom. Just straight up.
1:17:29
This is something, too, where it goes back to the start of this discussion is entrepreneurship an inherent thing, which I think me and you lean towards, where it's like you have a hard time relating to people that think like you, that think like you're describing in the sense that they're like, "Oh, my God."
1:17:43
They look at the downside.
1:17:44
David Senra: When I was in college, Facebook was just taking off. We were all on MySpace.
1:17:48
And the quote on my MySpace profile was, "There is no security, only opportunity."
1:17:53
I've never believed in security, because we're all going to die. We're temporary beings.
1:17:58
We have no idea how long we have.
1:17:59
And we're like, "Okay, let's just sit here and let's just ride this out."
1:18:01
It's like what are you doing? There's a great line.
1:18:05
I just reread Dee Hock, who just passed away at 93 years old.
1:18:08
He's the founder of- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, of Visa, right? Of Visa.
1:18:12
Yeah, I've read about him.
1:18:13
David Senra: And he has one of the greatest lines.
1:18:14
First of all, he's a really ...
1:18:14
I don't know if I've ever come across anybody that thinks like him.
1:18:19
But his description of what life is, and to me, the people that are obsessive like you and I, you have to be good.
1:18:27
You want to control your time and what you do for work, right?
1:18:30
So that's why you found companies.
1:18:31
That's why you start something new, whatever it is.
1:18:34
But that's only part of living a great life.
1:18:37
And this description of what Dee Hock came up, and he's got beautiful language.
1:18:42
What he described life as, he says, "Life is a magnificent, mysterious odyssey to be experienced."
1:18:49
And I think the people that you're describing who are scared of taking risks or they want to live in this little routine or bubble, they're missing out on a huge part.
1:19:00
It's like it's an odyssey.
1:19:01
It's an experience, and there's going to be great times and terrible times.
1:19:05
There's a guy I heard talk on a podcast one time.
1:19:07
He does these crazy things where he walked across the Antarctica. He does shit like that.
1:19:11
He rode the Drake Passage in a rowboat and had his shit in a bucket off the side of the...
1:19:16
And he's like, "Why are you doing this?"
1:19:18
And he says something that was beautiful, and I've listened to it over and over again, because when I find these videos, I save and listen to them over and over again.
1:19:24
And he quoted the Thoreau quote, “Most men live lives of quiet desperation.
1:19:24
” It's one of the greatest quotes ever.
1:19:30
And he says, "What I'm scared of is living a life range bound between four and six," which he says most people do.
1:19:37
David Senra: They don't take risks, they don't actually go after what....
1:19:40
It's like, I'm fine doing this.
1:19:41
But he goes, "I'd rather live a life where I have a bunch of ones and tens, where it's like I have days when I'm on my 40th day of carrying my slud across Antarctica, it's a one.
1:19:53
I am beat up, I'm frozen, I feel terrible, but when I get to the end of something that I took a big risk on, and whether it's a successful mission or not, that is a ten."
1:20:03
He's like, "There are people that live range bound, that live in this little bubble, they're so afraid of the ones, that they cut off the tens, and you're cutting off a main part of life."
1:20:14
It is a magnificent odyssey to be experienced.
1:20:17
Stop being afraid of fucking life and live.
1:20:20
Figure out what you want to do, and go after it like your life depends on it, because it fucking does.
1:20:26
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Preach, brother.
1:20:30
I do threads on Twitter instead of a blog post, because I get a 20X audience, and so I put up one on this whole idea of, why are we here, and you see a lot of the same thought ends up at the same place.
1:20:44
It's what I call the bridge of nihilism.
1:20:47
The people who really think about this shit, like people as disparate as Lao Tzu and the Tao Te Ching and Socrates, all the way through the poets and Shakespeare himself...
1:20:59
Man, you want to read somebody who knows shit about humans, read Shakespeare.
1:21:03
But anyway- David Senra: [inaudible].
1:21:05
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, it's totally the blueprint.
1:21:06
But the whole thing is, man, everybody gets to the same place which I call the bridge of nihilism, which is there is no meaning to life, none, and there's no cosmic, this is the meaning, this is what you must do.
1:21:23
But if you can go walk across the bridge of nihilism, what happens when you get on the other side is, you realize if there is no meaning to life, I get to determine the meaning in my life, and then you start thinking the way I think.
1:21:43
I think I'm one of the luckiest people on the planet every fucking day, because I beat the cosmic lottery, man.
1:21:51
The fact that me and you are here having this conversation, and are conscious and can think these thoughts and have these wonderful conversations with one another, do you know what the odds against that are?
1:22:02
David Senra: Trillions and- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Trillions and trillions against- David Senra: Numbers larger than trillions and trillions. Yeah.
1:22:09
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It's against, and here we are. And what else are we? We are the result.
1:22:12
Every single person you see, or if you're driving, listening to this podcast, or if you're watching it on YouTube, and somebody comes to your door, I don't care where you are, if you're in South Dakota or North Dakota or in New York or London or Paris, any human you see is the results of millions of years of success. Think about it.
1:22:33
Their forefathers and ancestors managed to breed.
1:22:37
They managed to live long enough to pass on their genetic code.
1:22:42
Do you know how many people don't manage to do that?
1:22:47
For much of history, the majority.
1:22:49
David Senra: And then all the things that your ancestors had to get right, or the decisions they had to make for you to even exist.
1:22:54
We started the conversations like, we're connected to the internet.
1:22:57
Guess who doesn't have the internet?
1:22:58
There's no fucking podcast in Cuba.
1:23:01
If my grandfather did not take that risk to jump to the United States, me and you are not having this conversation.
1:23:07
I don't even know what the internet is.
1:23:08
Who knows what kind of mental...
1:23:11
I could not imagine my life without the internet.
1:23:14
The amount of learning that...
1:23:16
99% of the stuff I've learned came after high school, after college, after all this, it came from the internet.
1:23:21
Just that one decision by a person I never met...
1:23:24
He died when I was three or four, so I don't really remember him.
1:23:27
I met him, but you don't remember.
1:23:29
David Senra: But that one decision changed the entire trajectory of my life.
1:23:33
And I always talk about this too where, to some degree I study dead people for a living, and it is one of the greatest things that has ever happened to me.
1:23:41
Because when I think, I'm constantly reminded about the eventual end of our life.
1:23:47
And it's not a morbid thing.
1:23:49
It's like what Steve Jobs said.
1:23:50
He's like, "Listen, death is one of the greatest inventions of life, because in the face of death, everything else that's not important falls away."
1:23:58
And so if you can have the reminder that, hey, I'm here for a short amount of time, it's an odyssey, the purpose of life to me is to experience it...
1:24:06
And entrepreneurs and founders in general and these kind of people, they get to build their own world within the world.
1:24:11
David Senra: And that's the way I think about building a company, is company building is world building, because you get to control how you spend your time, who's around you.
1:24:19
If you're really good at it, then essentially you get a bunch of resources that most people don't have, and that opens up all kinds of unbelievable opportunities.
1:24:26
And I'm not talking about buying Ferraris and shit like that.
1:24:28
That's not what I'm talking about.
1:24:30
I'm talking about freedom, control of your time.
1:24:32
And so that is why it's just like, how could you not be obsessed with something like this?
1:24:37
I've never met an entrepreneur that's good at what they do that is not obsessed about their work.
1:24:43
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly.
1:24:44
And also your idea of Memento Mori, I think about that every day. Remember, you will die.
1:24:50
And I don't think about it in a morbid way at all.
1:24:53
I think about it, it reminds me to live, and it reminds me to cherish every day. And I really mean that.
1:25:02
It sounds goofy, but it's true.
1:25:05
It's like, I'm going to die.
1:25:06
And I guess most people don't want to die, but I certainly don't want to die.
1:25:12
I want to stay around for all the cool stuff.
1:25:14
But I got born in 1960, and hopefully I'll make it as long as my grandparents did, or my dad who didn't die until he was nearly 97.
1:25:23
I've got the good genes, but I'm just so excited about everything that is going on right now that, I'm giddy.
1:25:30
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And you mentioned earlier that it seems that there are so few optimistic people.
1:25:35
Dude, I am so optimistic about what is coming, what is here already.
1:25:41
Listen man, the Prometheans are among us right now, and wait until you see the creative innovations that they're already rolling out, and wait until you see what's coming next.
1:25:54
I'm in a privileged position where I can meet and talk to these people, and see with my own eyes, hey, check this out dude, and you're just like, what?
1:26:04
And it's just- David Senra: Just the energy that you get from these people too.
1:26:07
It sounds like some willie foo foo shit, it is not.
1:26:11
When you're around people that....
1:26:13
The most interesting people are the most interested.
1:26:15
And the position that you're in where I heard you say on one of the podcasts where you're like, "I'm extremely lucky because anybody I find interesting, I can have a conversation with them because I can invite them on my podcast and they'll come."
1:26:24
And so you get to meet all these interesting people on the internet, and they're all inevitably obsessed with whatever their one vertical could be.
1:26:33
As long as somebody's super interested in something, you don't have to share their enthusiasm for the subject, you're still going to be interested in it, and you're going to feed off of their energy, because they wake up everyday trying to build this thing they want the world to have. That's a special human.
1:26:49
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It truly is.
1:26:51
And I love that point, because I am. I'm really lucky.
1:26:55
I always admittingly say, I'm basically a very lazy person.
1:27:01
I say, I'm a cognitive miser.
1:27:03
So one of the kids who works for us talked me into starting this podcast.
1:27:09
And I'm like, "Dude, I'm not going to edit anything."
1:27:14
And so I'm talking to Patrick about it, and he's like, "Okay dad, why are you doing this?" And I said, "Honestly?" And he goes, "Yeah."
1:27:22
And he goes, "I have an idea, and I want to see if I'm right." And I said, "Okay.
1:27:26
Well, because I want to talk to people who are much smarter than me about things that I'm really interested in."
1:27:30
And he goes, "Bam, I knew that was your reason."
1:27:33
He goes, "You'll do great. Just do it, because..."
1:27:36
He goes, "Your reason is authentic you.
1:27:39
That's all you really want to do.
1:27:39
” David Senra: This goes back to I feel like advice for founders and people who want to start something, is you have to just listen to people that have that same gene or that same mindset, because this is what you hear, it's like...
1:27:53
Every time I come across somebody with an unusual brain, I tell them the same thing, you need to have a podcast. They're like, why?
1:27:58
Because you have an unusual brain.
1:27:59
And you probably don't know how unusual your brain is.
1:28:01
And once you start recording your thoughts, and people all over the world can access it at a time convenient to them, they're going to tell you that you have an unusual brain, and that's going to open up all kinds of opportunities you cannot predict.
1:28:10
David Senra: And they say the same shit, oh, I've heard that it's too late.
1:28:14
There's too many podcasts in the world.
1:28:16
It's like, it's the opposite.
1:28:17
It's like we're in day one.
1:28:19
Even now they're like, oh, there's...
1:28:21
I just saw this numbers, and I think I said this to Patrick, where this thing is like, oh, there's 3 million podcasts in the world, it's already too late, and then somebody does the number, if you figure out how many are still actively updated, you're at 155,000, 200,000 or something like that.
1:28:35
David Senra: Imagine going back to the beginning of the internet when there was only 200,000 blogs, I guarantee you people said the same.
1:28:42
You can't have your own website.
1:28:43
There's already 200,000 of them.
1:28:44
Jim O'Shaughnessy: That's bullshit.
1:28:45
David Senra: Or go back, oh, there's already 200,000 books, why do we need more books? No one would say that. That's absurd.
1:28:52
And so I get to talk to podcasters, because we're in this business, and every single one of them, I have not talked to one that wasn't like, this is the best thing I ever did, and I'm going to do it forever.
1:29:06
You don't understand the power of a podcast until you have one.
1:29:10
And once you have it, you're like, damn, I should have listened to these people who told me to start a podcast years ago. it's amazing.
1:29:18
It's an unbelievable technological revolution that so many people, because they think it's somewhat ubiquitous, because there's only about 50% of the population of America that actually listens, they think, oh, it's somewhat ubiquitous because everybody knows the term now, that it's saturated, and that's not the case at all. Jim O'Shaughnessy: No.
1:29:31
And David Bohm, the quantum physicist, he had a great line which was along the lines of, if you really don't understand the subject, the best way to learn about it is to write a book about it.
1:29:41
And literally I love that quote, because I've written four books, I feel the same way about writing. I've been writing...
1:29:49
If you can't write out your thoughts, you don't know what you think, but also it is woo-woo sounding, but I found it to be really true.
1:29:56
Literally there is some kind of magic that happens when you take the thoughts and extract them from your brain, and put them into reality on a piece of paper or whatever, or you speak them onto a podcast.
1:30:11
You've kept Robert Anton Wilson, who's way before his time, contemporary of Bucky Fuller, who by the way was another guy Jobs adored- David Senra: I have a biography of him I'm reading, eventually turning it into a podcast- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, I finished that one- David Senra: He inspired a lot of people, including James Dyson, whose one of my entrepreneur heroes as well. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:30:29
I know his daughter, Esther. David Senra: Oh shit. That's interesting.
1:30:33
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And anyway, one of the things that is absolutely true is this idea of, oh, but there's already too many of that.
1:30:43
One of the kids who works for the podcast told me this...
1:30:45
And I haven't verified it yet, so it might be apocryphal, but I hope it's not, because it's so perfect.
1:30:51
He was telling me that literally they found the first form of writing that wasn't just accounting, because that's how writing started.
1:30:58
Writing started because for accounting basically.
1:31:00
It was like, I was trading cattle for lambs with you, and we needed a record.
1:31:07
But here's the thing- David Senra: A treaty.
1:31:09
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But also, here's the thing that he told me.
1:31:11
He said the first form of writing that was not accounting-based was found in...
1:31:16
And it was in ancient Sumerian, and basically it translated as a young poet lamenting that all the good poems had already been written. I just love that.
1:31:31
David Senra: So something I repeat on the podcast all the time is that history doesn't repeat, human nature does.
1:31:37
You can expose humans that don't know each other, or lived in different places of the world, different times of history, worked in different industries, and they arrive at similar conclusions. That to me is...
1:31:47
When I find stuff like that, it gets me so excited, because these people, in both cases, they reached the top of their profession, the tiniest percentage to get to the top of their profession that ever lived, and they thought about their business the same way, even though the principal behind...
1:32:03
I always say it's like, I'm not trying to copy the what, I'm copying the how.
1:32:08
That's the important part.
1:32:09
I always look at what's the meaning behind what they're doing, why are they doing that.
1:32:13
David Senra: When I just read about Sam Zell, which is the podcast that'll come out whenever I get it out today, I'm not going to go build a $39 billion REIT or whatever he's known for doing, but I can understand why he made the decisions in building his business that I can apply to the business of podcasting. Ideas are tools.
1:32:33
Just make sure when you need to hit a nail, pull out a hammer, not a screwdriver.
1:32:38
No one can tell you what the right tool is.
1:32:41
So collect these tools, and then pull them out at the right time.
1:32:45
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Everything ultimately is a tool.
1:32:49
Sometimes people look at me like I'm weird when I say money is a technology.
1:32:53
And what do you mean money is a technology?
1:32:55
And then I'll explain the different forms of things that we use to trade, why money became important, all of these things, why interest became what it was, credit means, comes from the Latin credo, i.
1:33:09
e I believe you, I trust you, and the reason I think that having this, what other people would say, well, that's just weird extra knowledge, no, it's not, man.
1:33:23
It's the map to understanding what all of these great minds that we can read for free...
1:33:29
I mean, I think it was Descartes who said, reading the great thoughts of people who went before you is to have a brilliant conversation with the brightest minds of history always.
1:33:39
And- David Senra: That's exactly how I think about it.
1:33:41
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Me too. Me too.
1:33:43
David Senra: I think I said earlier, it's like I'm just having one sided conversations with history's greatest entrepreneurs all day.
1:33:47
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly.
1:33:48
I mean, who wouldn't want to do that, is the way I look at it.
1:33:51
And the other thing that I just am kind of amazed by is the...
1:33:57
So for example, one of my taglines, you just said it a moment ago, history never repeats, human nature always does.
1:34:03
And that's one of my lines about the market when people say, well, what's your strategy?
1:34:07
And I say, look, markets change microsecond by microsecond, human nature barely budges millennia by millennia.
1:34:14
David Senra: It's not going to.
1:34:15
Jim O'Shaughnessy: All I do- David Senra: It's going to be the same 1,000 years from now.
1:34:18
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Of course.
1:34:19
All I do is arbitrage human nature.
1:34:21
It is the last sustainable edge.
1:34:25
But to arbitrage human nature, you've got to understand that you yourself are human, you yourself are running human OS, you're going to be just as fucking dumb as everyone else if you don't figure out the process that's going to help you not be dumb, and sometimes that's tying yourself to the mast like Odysseus, because he wanted to hear the sirens sing.
1:34:46
David Senra: He knew what was going to happen.
1:34:47
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But he knew what was going to happen.
1:34:49
And so it's like- David Senra: It's like Charlie Munger warning us, hey, the way a rich person goes broke is by ladies, liquor and leverage.
1:34:58
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Leverage. Right.
1:35:00
David Senra: It's just like, you know you're not the first person to make these mistakes.
1:35:03
I mentioned the last sugar tycoon in Cuba, Julio Lobo, same situation.
1:35:09
In the 1960s and '70s, he had a net worth equivalent of $5 billion today.
1:35:13
His biography is really a cautionary tale, because he kept levering himself up.
1:35:17
He dies in his eighties living in an apartment in Spain that is paid for by his adult daughter.
1:35:23
Imagine having $5 billion.
1:35:25
And he almost the second or third time...
1:35:28
He lost his fortune a bunch of times.
1:35:29
The second or third time he thought about...
1:35:31
I think he was in New York in the crash of '87, and he's about to jump out the window, and he somehow...
1:35:37
I don't know if a friend pulls him back, or his own inner monologue, but there was a chance that he didn't even get to 80, because he was like, oh, I fucked this up again, I'm going to jump out the window.
1:35:46
One time me and Patrick talked for an hour or two because there's an observation that I had, which I know nothing about investing.
1:35:57
I would be very happy if I have 100% of my family's net worth writing on founders.
1:36:02
And so I was telling Patrick about the story that was really interesting about Jeff Bezos's reluctance to get into physical retail.
1:36:10
And he made the point one time that I thought was fucking brilliant, and he's like, "Retailing is an ancient industry."
1:36:16
To your point, the use of written language is like accounting for the fact that we're trading something before the invention of money. And so Jeff knows this.
1:36:24
Jeff's obviously fucking brilliant.
1:36:25
And so he goes, "I am not going to get involved in an ancient industry and expect to have an edge, unless it has to be 10X drastically different."
1:36:34
David Senra: And so the first time he agreed to let Amazon's resources be used to attack this ancient problem of physical retailing was the stores where you walk in, grab the stuff, and you walk out.
1:36:47
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Amazon Go. Yep. David Senra: Yep.
1:36:50
And there's variations of that idea where they used to, when they were building the prototypes before it was public, you would go and you could buy fish and meat, and Jeff's like, "No, our edge is you walk in, you walk out.
1:37:03
There should be no lines.
1:37:05
Now they're in line to talk to a butcher or somebody selling fish."
1:37:09
He's like, "You lost your theme here. Remove this."
1:37:12
And so me and Patrick had this conversation, I was like, "Listen, there's an investor that I think everybody should study, her name was Hetty Green.
1:37:18
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I know Hetty very, very well.
1:37:20
The witch of Wall Street.
1:37:22
I've read about her endlessly.
1:37:23
David Senra: So when we were having this conversation...
1:37:26
And this goes back to Edwin Land said, if you want to keep something secret, you shout from the rooftops.
1:37:31
And so I meet with all these investors, I'm like, why aren't you guys starting podcasts?
1:37:36
Does anybody understand what Patrick's advantage he has?
1:37:39
Not only does he get to talk to interesting people, he's got a giant audience, those people want to invest in his fund, but also he brings distribution to any company that he wants to invest in. It's powerful.
1:37:48
And I go, "Patrick, what's really interesting about this is, you're involved in an ancient industry.
1:37:53
Humans have been investing since we've been alive, it just takes different forms."
1:37:58
And I go, "So I think about...
1:38:00
Hetty Green's interesting in the sense that she was so rich that she built..."
1:38:03
Think about this, being so rich, richest woman on earth at the time, she bailed out New York City.
1:38:08
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I know. Yeah. David Senra: Yeah. So you know the history.
1:38:12
And she lived through how many...
1:38:13
They didn't call them depressions or recessions, they called them the better name, financial panics.
1:38:16
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Panics. Exactly.
1:38:18
David Senra: That's a nice word for it.
1:38:19
But why did we change the name?
1:38:20
That's exactly what it is.
1:38:21
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Totally insane.
1:38:22
David Senra: She lived through 12 of them.
1:38:23
And so my point that I was making is, at a fundamental level, you and Hetty Green are involved in the exact same trade.
1:38:31
In her circumstance, her advantage was geographic.
1:38:35
She set up in the second financial capital of the world, depending on if you thought London or New York at the time, and she literally took a desk inside of I think Chemical Bank, or whatever the name of the bank, and so her deal flow, her edge is physical.
1:38:49
They know that she has a ton of money, and that every time there's financial panics, there'd be a line at her desk of over-leveraged investors willing to sell her railroad bonds and all the other stuff.
1:38:59
David Senra: She made money, and she made money with railroad bonds, real estate, that kind of stuff, and financial instruments.
1:39:03
And so I go, but if you were trying to say build that from scratch in the now 2020s, and you're still engaged in this very ancient craft in trade of investing, what would it look like?
1:39:15
And I go, it would look like what you're doing.
1:39:18
You would start an educational podcast for entrepreneurs and investors where you guys can get together, share notes, essentially what we're doing.
1:39:26
We're like, hey, this is some shit I figured out in building this company. This worked. It might work for you. Oh, I made that mistake.
1:39:32
Avoid that mistake, all this other stuff.
1:39:33
Here's an opportunity over here you might want to pursue, that kind of thing.
1:39:35
So you build this gigantic audience, then it's super leveraged, has inherent leverage within the form of media, and then you put a giant fund that's like an old form of leverage on top of that to supercharge.
1:39:45
David Senra: So you have two very drastic forms of leverage operating.
1:39:50
It's like the Lollapalooza thing that Munger says in all his talks and writing.
1:39:54
And I go, that's what you would do.
1:39:55
But essentially the important part of this entire discussion is understanding that most of the craft and trade that we partake in are very ancient.
1:40:06
We were talking about AI generated art.
1:40:08
That's interesting to me and you.
1:40:10
We talked about it a lot, but humans creating art has been happening forever.
1:40:15
David Senra: This is just, if you did it today, you wouldn't say, hey, go to the art store. Unlikely.
1:40:21
You're going to say, go to the art store, buy a canvas, buy some paint.
1:40:24
You can still do that of course, but in the future, it's going to be all AI generated, or at least it's going to wind up dominating.
1:40:31
There are still going to obviously be people creating art that way.
1:40:34
But I just like that idea.
1:40:35
It's like, oh, okay, what is the version of that?
1:40:37
So my version of this is...
1:40:40
There's a great tweet I read one time where it's like newspapers were a fad, but the village storyteller is as old as language, and now podcasts are that version, except around the campfire, there's not 10 people or 15 people, there's 6 billion.
1:40:54
Jim O'Shaughnessy: No question.
1:40:55
David Senra: But fundamentally a podcast is storytelling.
1:40:58
And we talked about it earlier, that is the first way humans transmitted information.
1:41:06
Me and you are engaged in an ancient art, we're just using the latest technology to do it.
1:41:11
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly.
1:41:12
And to your point about AI art, actually I take a different position than you do, I think there's going to be more human artists, not less, because I think that the tool that AI art gives the artist- David Senra: No, I agree with that. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Is... Okay.
1:41:29
So I think you're going to see a massive burst in humans being creative as artists, because they have these new tools, and all they do...
1:41:37
We've collected contemporary art for maybe 25 years, and there's a podcast with one of the sculptors in our collection that is really on this point.
1:41:46
His name's Barry X Ball, and he does exquisite work.
1:41:52
He works in very unusual stones.
1:41:55
And when you see his stuff, it's almost ethereal in its beauty.
1:41:59
And we have a bust of his that is...
1:42:01
I mean, it's one of our most commented on pieces when people see it.
1:42:05
And so I'm listening to this podcast that my wife sent me of Barry, and you'd think...
1:42:11
I'd heard he's really temperamental and the whole artist thing, but as I'm listening to the podcast, do you know what he's saying?
1:42:18
He's talking about tools in art, and he's saying artists...
1:42:21
He goes, "I don't understand my fellow artist's fear of new tools."
1:42:27
Jim O'Shaughnessy: He's like, "Bernini, one of the greatest sculptors in history.
1:42:31
He's got his own garden in Rome.
1:42:33
He used every new technology."
1:42:36
And then Barry goes on to say his sculptures are impossible without the robotics and the software that he uses to help him shape that piece of art.
1:42:48
And so I get frustrated when I hear people say, oh, it's going to take the artist away, it's going to take the poets away.
1:42:55
No man, it's going to give us a million ones.
1:42:59
And all we have here, it's like if you're a visual artist, would you get really bent out of shape if I said to you, hey, I just invented a new color, and I put it on your color wheel, do you think you're going to use that color?
1:43:14
The artist will look at it and say, fuck yeah. I got a new color. Are you kidding me? That's wonderful. Thank you. I love this opportunity.
1:43:22
Jim O'Shaughnessy: That's all AI is here. It's a tool.
1:43:26
It's a tool that I have seen really incredible graphic artists...
1:43:30
I've actually watched them iterate on their own work using an AI tool, and the outcomes are so incredible, because essentially it's almost like they're having a conversation with themselves in a way, because the AI is taking, it knows what they want it to do, it does it, and then they're like, no, I don't... Let's try...
1:43:53
And then all of a sudden, this graphic artist that I'm referencing, he had 10 new images that he was going to be able to market.
1:44:04
I love the way you put it too, because so much of what we do is ancient really. We all got to eat.
1:44:12
We all got to have houses.
1:44:13
These are all things we have to do.
1:44:16
And all we're able to do, why you're able to build your killer business with Founders Podcast is because the tools just got better.
1:44:25
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And before...
1:44:27
And this is one of my huge themes with the Great Reshuffle.
1:44:31
You don't like your neighborhood?
1:44:32
Pretty hard unless you've got a lot of money to move, or you need a job, or you need these things.
1:44:37
You don't like your digital neighborhood? Very easy to move. Just do it.
1:44:42
And the things that I see, the ubiquity of the internet...
1:44:47
Matt Clifford, somebody we've invested in through O'Shaughnessy Family Partners and Patrick has invested in through Positive Sum, has this great example.
1:44:55
He's on my podcast as well.
1:44:57
And literally I invested in his company because of my talk with him on the podcast.
1:45:02
Like, oh man, this is your version- David Senra: All these things feed each other. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:45:07
It's also your version of, see this smart guy, hire him.
1:45:09
Hi Matt, how do I give you money right now?
1:45:11
I want to give you money right now.
1:45:13
And anyway, he's talking about the internet and he's like, "People don't understand it is the greatest variance amplification invention in human history."
1:45:23
David Senra: That's a great line.
1:45:24
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And if you think about that- David Senra: That's a really good line. Jim O'Shaughnessy: ...
1:45:27
For a minute, what happens, man, is time, space, geography all collapse. They're all gone. They're gone.
1:45:33
So that means that I'm starting a new company after I retire out of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management.
1:45:39
It's called O'Shaughnessy Ventures.
1:45:41
And one of the things that we're going to do is, we're going to find all of these people who were findable 20 years ago, because they're there.
1:45:50
I always knew they were there, but how am I going to find the kid in Bangladesh who's a genius, who came up with this really killer algorithm?
1:45:58
I cannot- David Senra: I can't believe you said that, because I just talked about this in the Sam Zell episode that I made yesterday.
1:46:03
I met this guy through Twitter.
1:46:04
It's ‘Mostly Borrowed Ideas’ on Twitter.
1:46:06
He's very popular on Fintwit [inaudible].
1:46:07
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I know him. Yeah. I know him. Yeah.
1:46:11
David Senra: And so I wound up talking to him. I met him.
1:46:13
We've Zoomed before, we've exchanged DM's.
1:46:14
He DM'ed me the other day because he's from Bangladesh, and he goes, "David, your podcast is spreading all over the world, because I went to go tell my Bangladeshi friends about it, and they've already been listening."
1:46:25
And so one of my favorite examples that I ever had.
1:46:29
And again, I think podcasts in general are great businesses, and that's fantastic, but it's also an obsession to me, but one of the benefits is that there's very few other businesses in the world where you have more of a connection with your "customer."
1:46:44
Because they're not really a customer.
1:46:45
It's like a para-social listener relationship.
1:46:47
And so I get literally, I don't even know how many messages every day, which is fascinating, because then just like, hey...
1:46:53
They'll hear one line, and their application of it, they'll tell you, hey, I did this, or whatever the case is.
1:46:58
David Senra: And so back when it was...
1:47:00
I have experiments with a bunch of different business models.
1:47:02
Now obviously it's open, free for all and ad-based, and obviously connecting with Patrick was a big help in doing to that.
1:47:08
But back in the day, I would do one free episode, and then do subscription for the next episode.
1:47:13
So every other one was free, and that's how the business model was.
1:47:16
And so I got an email from this guy, I'm pretty sure he's in Nigeria...
1:47:20
I'm going to say his last name, because I don't want to say his full name, in case he doesn't want this out there, but last name is Gondo, and it was the craziest email where he's just like, "I've been listening to your episodes over and over again, and I was homeless, I was living in my car."
1:47:35
And so he's like, "I used what I learned from these stories, I started a company, I raised money from a venture capitalist for this idea, and now..."
1:47:46
David Senra: And I think it was 10 bucks a month. I forgot what it was.
1:47:50
$10 a month, $99 a year, something like that.
1:47:51
I changed a bunch of prices.
1:47:52
But he's like, "I didn't have the money to access the other episodes, and now I do."
1:47:59
And he knew that, because when you sign up, you get my email address, and so he emailed me and told me this.
1:48:04
And I was like, this guy went from living in his car, taking ideas he heard on a podcast in fucking Africa and starting a company, raising money.
1:48:11
So I immediately refunded and I go, here's a lifetime membership for free, bro.
1:48:14
You're not paying me a God damn thing.
1:48:15
David Senra: That email alone was way more valuable than you paying me 100 bucks a year forever.
1:48:21
That's fucking incredible.
1:48:23
And so when you hear stories like this, the result is, I got to get off my ass.
1:48:27
I got to wake up in the morning and I got to get going, because I have no idea, it's completely unpredictable how people are going to be using what they're learning from the miracle...
1:48:37
And think about the podcasting in general.
1:48:38
It is a free tool, an open protocol that nobody owns.
1:48:43
Imagine if it had to come from a company. That's insane. And it's permissionless.
1:48:48
You could start a podcast right now, cost $10, $15 a month on a starter plan, or maybe even free on a podcast host, and it's in every single podcast directory in the world in 15 minutes. And then, I recorded...
1:49:00
People were like, "Oh..."
1:49:01
I get emails all the times, like what kind of equipment you use?"
1:49:02
And all this other stuff, I was like, I recorded my first 200 episodes with a $99-USB mic.
1:49:08
It's like it's not the fucking equipment, man.
1:49:11
David Senra: It's like what is coming out of your mouth.
1:49:14
What are you talking to people about. It's not the equipment.
1:49:16
You could start a podcast worth a hundred bucks, like that's it.
1:49:20
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Totally could not agree more, and the idea that you've taken is a timeless idea, in my opinion, is, it's all comes down to action, your ability that the passion pulls you towards.
1:49:37
And then, if you could tell a good story, that's an asymmetric advantage.
1:49:41
If you're a good storyteller, the world is a nicer place for you.
1:49:47
Because it really is, it's one of the... I believe you can...
1:49:50
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Like Buffett himself, right?
1:49:51
He went to Toastmasters, because he was afraid to speak in public. David Senra: Yep.
1:49:56
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And that's the only fucking diploma- David Senra: What's the return on investment he got from that?
1:49:59
Jim O'Shaughnessy: What's the... How do you even... like infinite, right?
1:50:03
Like- David Senra: And then, let's say you want to start a podcast on books. Right?
1:50:09
I've spent thousands of dollars on books. It is insane.
1:50:11
You don't have to do that.
1:50:12
Go to Guten, go to Project Gutenberg.
1:50:14
There's literally thousands of books that are out, like they're free.
1:50:17
And you could read them, and then, make a podcast about them on any...
1:50:20
We talked about philosophy, history, entrepreneurship, whatever the hell you're interested in, like do it.
1:50:27
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So, I had a friend who was kind of a pessimist by nature and he's like, "Yeah, but I can't do that".
1:50:33
And I just smiled, and he goes, "You're going to tell me to do it on the internet, aren't you?"
1:50:38
And I went, "I'm not going to name it".
1:50:39
I said, "Friend, the internet is taking all of your excuses away from you.
1:50:46
You don't have any excuses anymore".
1:50:49
David Senra: There is a talk that, I think, is the best talk for entrepreneurs to listen to, it's by Bill Gurley from Benchmark.
1:50:55
It's called Runnin' Down a Dream.
1:50:56
I won't shut the fuck up about this talk. And it has...
1:50:59
It's really a combination of all the themes that we've been talking about, the importance of passion, and then, what you just said there is in that thing.
1:51:05
Because his whole point was like...
1:51:06
David Senra: And I heard this and it really like, I was already doing the podcast but made me step up my game because he's like, first of all, he goes, if you're trying to compete in...
1:51:14
He was giving a talk to MBA students at the University of Texas, and he goes, "Listen. You can't fake passion". Jim O'Shaughnessy: No.
1:51:20
David Senra: He's like, if you act like you're passionate about something you, you're going to compete against somebody that actually is, and his line is something like, and you're going to get smoked. That line was fantastic.
1:51:28
They're going to smoke you, or you're going to get smoked a hundred percent.
1:51:31
David Senra: But he goes, "There is no excuse".
1:51:34
He's like, "This is not the same thing as being the smartest, right?"
1:51:38
He says, "There's no excuse to not be the most knowledgeable person in the world in any field that you choose". Right?
1:51:44
He goes, "You can collect more information and there's no excuses because, now, it's free and on the internet".
1:51:48
David Senra: And when I heard that, I'm like, okay, that's my fucking line.
1:51:52
It's like I will not allow anybody else on the planet to read more biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs to me.
1:52:00
That's a small niche, which is fine. I don't give a shit.
1:52:02
It doesn't have to be large as this, but that, no excuses. David Senra: Like it is.
1:52:06
It's as simple as picking up the book, reading it, thinking about what's actually taking place, taking notes, and organizing information, and then, presenting it to other people.
1:52:11
And if I do that- Jim O'Shaughnessy: I got to interrupt you for a minute. David Senra: Go on.
1:52:15
Jim O'Shaughnessy: You're being too modest about yourself because, yes, you're right, anybody can pick up a book, yep, anybody can read that book.
1:52:24
Anybody can take notes from that book.
1:52:26
However, it is an art form and a gift to have the ability to synthesize ideas in such a manner that you do on your podcast, like I said at the opening of this, like I don't listen to podcasts twice in a row. I just don't.
1:52:44
Not my own, not my son's, not yours. David Senra: Yeah.
1:52:47
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Like nobody's.
1:52:48
I listen to your podcast twice in a row, dude. Because I was...
1:52:53
my wife came in and she was like, "Oh, you're really digging something, right?"
1:52:59
And I'm like, "You got to listen to this".
1:53:03
But the point is I think that it's a skill that's partially innate.
1:53:08
It can be learned through repetition, which you proved with your 300 books. David Senra: Yeah.
1:53:14
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But the ability to curate, the ability to synthesize knowledge the way you do and the way that...
1:53:17
you tell a great story, too, man.
1:53:23
I mean, let's just be honest.
1:53:25
And so, what could be more entertaining than actually learning a lot of new things and be entertained at the same time? Are you kidding me?
1:53:35
To me, that's what education should be.
1:53:36
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I also think being funny, like Lenny Bruce, the guy who gave us George Carlin. David Senra: I love him.
1:53:43
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right? I love him too. Right?
1:53:46
I love- David Senra: I think standup comedy is one of the greatest art forms in the world.
1:53:48
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I agree.
1:53:49
David Senra: They stand up there with just their mouth.
1:53:50
Their brain and their mouth.
1:53:51
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Like Patrick's sister, Patrick's youngest sister was, is a standup comedian, and she's hysterical.
1:53:58
Anyway, but my point was going to be that the ability to synthesize knowledge, present it in an enjoyable and fun way and curate that knowledge, right?
1:54:11
Like, so, am I going to rely on myself when I'm trying to decide on the 12 different books of Edison, or am I now that I know you going to text you and say, "Hey, David. Which one, man?" David Senra: Yeah.
1:54:25
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Give me the one Edison book.
1:54:27
And this is all that connection thing, which you're talking about, Patrick, with the funnel and top and the leverage.
1:54:33
Listen, one of the things that I'm obsessed with are networks, and what we have right now is our networks in earlier pre-internet days were just very physically confined. Right?
1:54:45
Unless you had a lot of money or whatever...
1:54:48
David Senra: That's a great point. Jim O'Shaughnessy: ...
1:54:49
you couldn't go to a million different places. Right? It was very difficult.
1:54:54
You mentioned Hetty, the Witch of Wall Street, she had her edge.
1:54:58
Her edge was she had money and she had physical location.
1:55:01
But you've got to change your thinking in terms of network now, because my network is infinite, and like you're a node on it.
1:55:10
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And now, you're going to be a bigger node on it because we know each other now and we're going to interact more, but the fact is I can put a bunch of different nodes from all over the world on that network and they can communicate and talk and bullshit with each other- David Senra: You just did this for me.
1:55:30
So, Trung Phan, who I had known because I liked his threads and I listened to his podcast, ‘Not Investment Advice’.
1:55:36
He found my podcast because you were very enthusiastic about it, which I appreciate it. He starts listening.
1:55:43
First, he starts following me on Twitter, then, he starts listening.
1:55:45
David Senra: Then, he sends me a message that like he's working my way through, like he's listening to a bunch of episodes.
1:55:49
I'm like, "Bro, I fucking listen to your podcast".
1:55:51
Then, he's like, "Do you want to come on my podcast?"
1:55:53
So, I'm going to go on his podcast.
1:55:56
Then, we ended up having a two-hour conversation because of you. You know what I mean?
1:56:00
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly.
1:56:01
David Senra: Like that's fucking crazy.
1:56:02
And now, literally, this morning, we're texting about Francis Ford Coppola and Apocalypse Now.
1:56:05
Because I did his biography, and then, he just went on your podcast to talk about the future of television and all this other stuff. It's like, oh, this...
1:56:12
There's a million different connections here.
1:56:13
Like this is fucking crazy.
1:56:14
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And the cool thing about this network is as you just outlined.
1:56:19
In the past, we wouldn't know a 10th, not even one 100th of the things that you just mentioned, the connections that got made, because we didn't have the opportunity to. David Senra: Yeah.
1:56:29
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I think if I have any gift...
1:56:31
I was born in 1960, so, I remember what that world was like.
1:56:35
David Senra: The analog world.
1:56:37
Jim O'Shaughnessy: The analog world, man.
1:56:39
And the analog world fucking sucks.
1:56:41
Honestly- David Senra: For super driven, curious people like you and I... Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:56:45
David Senra: This is my point.
1:56:47
You used the thing earlier, it's like trillions upon trillions of...
1:56:47
we're so unbelievably lucky.
1:56:51
Not even be conscious, but to be alive now, do you want...
1:56:54
Like that's fucking crazy.
1:56:56
What the hell would you and I be doing a hundred years ago.
1:57:01
You talked about- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Perambulating. We'd be perambulating.
1:57:05
Watching around- David Senra: The amount of lengths... Sorry.
1:57:08
I read a bunch of biographies on Ben Franklin and Abraham Lincoln.
1:57:10
They're both personal heroes of mine. Like heroes.
1:57:14
You go and go to the amount of length that they had you to just get a book, they literally would have to fucking stay up all night long because generous people in their life would lend them a book, which you have to give it back the next day.
1:57:27
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Next day. Yep.
1:57:29
David Senra: And they're reading by candlelight.
1:57:30
And I just talked about this, and you talked about people's reaction to new technology.
1:57:34
People did not like the car.
1:57:36
They threw stuff at it, they said, we have to make it outlawed.
1:57:38
They have to make it illegal because it scares horses.
1:57:41
And I made the point in the Henry Ford autobiography podcast I just said a couple weeks ago, I was like, "Do you understand that picking up horse shit used to be a job?" Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:57:50
David Senra: That was like your dad's job, it's, "All right. I'll see you later, son.
1:57:53
I got to go out the house at 5:00 in the morning.
1:57:55
I'll be back when it's dark, and I'll spend my day shoveling horse shit".
1:58:02
We are unbelievably lucky.
1:58:03
So that's why people always like, "Oh, you're working seven days a week.
1:58:07
Are you worried you're going to burn out?" I'm like, "No".
1:58:09
David Senra: Because anybody that burns out lacks historical context.
1:58:13
If you were able to make money in air condition looking at computers all day, you were luckier than 99.
1:58:18
999% of every human ever fucking lived.
1:58:22
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I even go further...
1:58:23
I even go further than that.
1:58:26
Every day I take a shower, a hot shower.
1:58:29
And every day that I get into a hot shower, I just look at the universe, I'm not a religious person, but I just look at the universe and I say thank you.
1:58:38
I can't fucking believe how lucky I am that I get to have a hot shower and a clean body every day. David Senra: Yeah.
1:58:46
Jim O'Shaughnessy: If you understand human history- David Senra: Indoor plumbing. Are you kidding me?
1:58:50
There's a great story in Dee Hock.
1:58:52
I mentioned Hock, the founder of Visa who has been in my mind recently, because I reread his autobiography again when he passed away as my own small way to honor him, right?
1:59:00
He's been hugely influential, like the Collison brothers' Stripe, like they talk about Dee Hock and looking up to him all the time.
1:59:06
David Senra: That's what, I think, the greatest thing about entrepreneurs, is when they get to 70, 80, 90 years old, they all write these autobiographies, and they're like, "Hey, I had all these ideas.
1:59:14
I know I'm towards the end.
1:59:15
I'm going to push them down the generation," like it's so fucking generous.
1:59:18
David Senra: But the funny thing that you just thought about that is like his mother taught him, like there's no indoor plumbing.
1:59:24
He did not have indoor plumbing.
1:59:26
So, he was living in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, and he would like you had to run in the winter like a hundred feet to outhouse.
1:59:34
And the lesson he learned when you're trying to go to the bathroom in subzero degree weather is not to dawdle.
1:59:41
David Senra: And so, that's...
1:59:42
His mother rephrased that, she's like, "Oh, it'll teach you not to waste time".
1:59:46
And that dude grew up like that, and he started of Visa. What excuse do you have?
1:59:50
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly.
1:59:52
It's just like there are...
1:59:52
the internet has taken all your excuses away from you, you can get...
1:59:58
If you refuse to learn, it's because you refuse.
2:00:02
If you want to learn, I can give you a curriculum that will take you an entire year and will cost you zero.
2:00:11
Your podcast is on it, Patrick's is on it, some of mine are on it. A lot of reading on it.
2:00:16
Lots of YouTube videos on it.
2:00:17
David Senra: Take the classes. Go and read...
2:00:19
You just said Shakespeare. Go read Shakespeare.
2:00:21
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Shakespeare.
2:00:22
David Senra: Go read the books that's been around for 500 years, thousand years. They're free. They're free. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Free.
2:00:27
David Senra: I have a listener who started a podcast, and what he does is, there's a lot of people that are interested in history, right?
2:00:31
And he does 10 minute episodes, which I think is actually a good idea.
2:00:34
And it's like, well, they don't have biographies written about them, but they have blog posts, or they have Wikipedia pages.
2:00:40
It's like that's an interesting story.
2:00:42
Why somebody should do that?
2:00:43
David Senra: And he learned that idea from Founders, he says, "I'm not going to read a book, but why don't I cover the people that don't have books?"
2:00:48
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It's so interesting that you say that, because I've mentioned O'Shaughnessy Ventures, and we're doing several verticals only where we feel we have an asymmetric edge and where it's win-win.
2:00:57
I'm just tired of this zero sum game mentality.
2:01:01
The internet is making it a win-win society that we're moving to.
2:01:05
And I'm going to do everything I can to demonstrate that.
2:01:08
For example, David Perell.
2:01:09
I just underwrote 15 scholarships there.
2:01:12
And the reason I- David Senra: That’s incredible.
2:01:14
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I did it because I'm greedy, man.
2:01:16
I want access to those big brains. David Senra: Yeah.
2:01:19
Jim O'Shaughnessy: The deal that I struck with David is two of those people are, those who wish, are going to be offered internships at O'Shaughnessy Ventures.
2:01:27
And then, we're going to let them learn.
2:01:30
We're going to learn from their learning, but then, most importantly, we're going to plug them into our network.
2:01:35
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And what is my advantage, right?
2:01:39
My advantage is, I've been around not my first rodeo, and you just look...
2:01:44
I look at all of this talent, all this youthful talent, and not just youthful by the way.
2:01:48
There's some people who decided they hated what they did and they just chucked it all at age 50, and they're kind of trying to find something that- David Senra: We got to talk about that. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
2:01:58
David Senra: We got to talk about that when you're... Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
2:02:00
But the point is, like what are they lacking?
2:02:01
They're smart, they're eager, they're showing up.
2:02:04
Like, I love this Michael Jordan thing because I'm going to use it all the time now.
2:02:09
Michael Jordan is always coming to you, man.
2:02:11
Not the other way around. David Senra: Yeah.
2:02:13
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And as he pointed out, you missed me, you missed me. David Senra: Yeah.
2:02:17
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And so, I don't worry about that.
2:02:18
They're going to come, and to me, what can I do for them? I can give them money.
2:02:22
I can give them structure.
2:02:23
I can give them, here, learn all about this for me, and then, do this report and/or write this thing.
2:02:31
We'll have them do a bunch as interns, but all of that time, they just get to learn, and then, they get plugged into the network, and no doubt, they've got a business idea.
2:02:39
Maybe they've got a book idea.
2:02:40
I don't really care what it is. They've got an idea.
2:02:44
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And now that we have this limitless network...
2:02:46
Those people, those great talents will see us at O'Shaughnessy Ventures, and they'll go, "Oh, I might want to check that out".
2:02:53
But the reason I'm bringing it up is your idea about the 10-minute thing.
2:02:57
So I've got a fun book here that's called Zanies, and I've looked for it online, it's out of print. I haven't found it.
2:03:05
I check for it occasionally.
2:03:07
Anyway, it's about eccentrics throughout history.
2:03:10
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And I was talking to my team, and I'm like, "You know what we should do?
2:03:15
Just once a day on the website, one of us should narrate for five to 10 minutes one of these stories".
2:03:23
Because I can almost guarantee you that nobody's heard of these people.
2:03:27
And I love this book, because as you read it, man, it's just like the shit people did, and it's just fascinating and it's fun.
2:03:36
And the way people used to...
2:03:37
There was a guy, the Emperor Norton of San Francisco and he was like, today, we would say he was homeless, or he was mentally-challenged or whatever.
2:03:47
He declared himself emperor of the United States.
2:03:49
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And the citizens of San Francisco were so taken by this that they let him, they let the charade go.
2:03:57
He issued his own currencies, and he brokered pieces between neighborhoods.
2:04:04
And he got a state funeral when he died in San Francisco.
2:04:06
David Senra: That's nice.
2:04:07
Jim O'Shaughnessy: All the San Franciscan lined the streets on both sides.
2:04:12
And like just what a charming story, what a great story.
2:04:16
All I have to do is pull this book off the shelf.
2:04:20
We'll pick one a day, we've got 365 days right there.
2:04:24
David Senra: I think about the medium of podcasting, obviously, all the time, right?
2:04:29
And what I realize is people think podcast is not a thing.
2:04:32
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
2:04:33
David Senra: It's like, oh, it's got to be an hour-long interview show and like... No. it's a medium.
2:04:36
It could be whatever you want.
2:04:38
And there is a gigantic hole in...
2:04:41
My podcast, I like personally podcasts that are about 60 to 90 minutes long, in general.
2:04:46
Because you said, the values and the compression, right?
2:04:50
And I think if I'm going do four or five hours, I'll just buy an audio book which is been edited and scripted out...
2:04:55
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right. Exactly.
2:04:57
David Senra: That makes the most sense, right? Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
2:04:59
David Senra: And so, what I realized is we're all around an hour, hour and a half time, and I was influenced...
2:05:03
You brought up the importance of standup comedy, and I think we share a love of the art form, and one of my favorite podcasts forever that's been around for nonstop for almost 15 years, maybe 12 years, is Bill Burr, the comedian... Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. David Senra: ...
2:05:13
is Monday Morning podcast.
2:05:14
It's like that's the why, when you listen to my podcast, it's just me. There's no...
2:05:20
What I wanted is like what would it be like if you met up with your friend once a week who read a lot and he just told you the shit he learned that week.
2:05:26
It's like, that's how it is.
2:05:27
That's why I speak directly to the audience.
2:05:28
It's like no fluff, no other shit, that came from Bill Burr.
2:05:32
That's literally what he does.
2:05:33
David Senra: And it's amazing that he could just do this with just his mind and his mouth, and he makes an hour long...
2:05:38
I, at least, have a book to support me.
2:05:40
He's going off life experience of being a standup comedian for 30 plus years or whatever the case is.
2:05:46
David Senra: I do want to circle back around to one thing before I forget though, and that's this idea that you have to be young to do something, which has been the exact opposite experience that I have.
2:05:59
I repeat this line on the podcast several times, like don't be surprised if your best idea comes 30 or 40 years into your career.
2:06:05
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Totally.
2:06:06
David Senra: And you look at all the experiences you have is just preparing you for an opportunity you can't yet see.
2:06:11
Like even if you're working in the same industry, so the famous example of that is Sam Walton, right?
2:06:17
He was 44, 45 when he started Walmart.
2:06:20
He had been working different forms of retail, and at this craft for 20, 25 years, right?
2:06:24
David Senra: Steve Jobs came up with his best product when he was close to death, the iPhone, right? Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
2:06:30
David Senra: He made great products in the '70s, '80s, '90s, 2000s, right? It was 40 years.
2:06:35
And then, he comes up with his greatest idea.
2:06:37
David Senra: Henry Singleton, which is a personal hero of mine- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh, yeah.
2:06:41
Singleton is an amazing, amazing...
2:06:42
David Senra: He didn't start Teledyne, he was like 43.
2:06:44
That was his first company. Right?
2:06:46
Had all these experiences, obviously, a genius too, so I'm not trying to compare myself to him.
2:06:50
But he starts his first company at 43.
2:06:53
Runs off one of the greatest records in American business history for the next 20 years, and then, just dips out and works on his ranch. It's not...
2:07:00
In many cases, I can't think of any, out of anybody I've ever read about besides Mark Zuckerberg who is the outlier of outliers, they all had multiple times of failure before they found what they were good at.
2:07:10
David Senra: Most people were surprised.
2:07:12
Walt Disney's first company went bankrupt.
2:07:13
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh, yeah.
2:07:14
David Senra: His first company went bankrupt.
2:07:15
David Oglesby who's a personal hero of mine, he didn't start in advertising industry until he was 35. Like people have time.
2:07:24
That's the biggest thing I try to pull out.
2:07:25
One of my favorite lesser known founders that I learned about through the process of researching for the podcast is Henry Leland.
2:07:31
Henry Leland founded the first commercially-successful American automobile company.
2:07:37
That company was Cadillac.
2:07:38
It was making $2 million a year in profit when he sold it to GM.
2:07:41
Henry Leland was 60 when he founded Cadillac.
2:07:44
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Amazing. David Senra: He was 70.
2:07:47
His hero was Abraham Lincoln.
2:07:48
That's why Lincoln Motors is named Lincoln Motors. He was 70.
2:07:52
He founded Lincoln Motors when he was 70. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yep.
2:07:56
And again, it brings us full circle to...
2:07:59
And I can't believe it, I'm so happy I asked you for three hours, because we are closing in, my friend.
2:08:05
But it circles back to, that's another great example of all of your excuses are gone.
2:08:14
I mean, we're living longer.
2:08:16
So, if Leland, back when the average death happened at age 65...
2:08:21
By the way, that's why they picked age 65 to give social security, because you were dead. David Senra: Yeah.
2:08:29
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It's basically, congratulations, you fucker, you beat the actuarial tables. Nobody...
2:08:34
I mean, if we were doing it today, they'd pick 85 or whatever.
2:08:39
That excuse is gone now, too.
2:08:42
And so, what I love about you and your message, it's so consistent with mine, is like you are one of the luckiest creatures on this planet, and you, I'm talking about all of us. David Senra: Yes.
2:08:57
Jim O'Shaughnessy: You are one of the luckiest creatures to ever exist in this universe. Just put it in that...
2:09:03
Instead of the opposite, I'm just a spec, I'm the third rock from the sun, I mean nothing.
2:09:09
Put it the other way around, and say the odds against me are trillions and trillions against, and yet, here I am.
2:09:19
So, what are we going to do with that?
2:09:22
What my advice is, if you want your life to have meaning, you got to give it meaning.
2:09:26
You've got to find something you're passionate about, something you love like you've done, and then, just bring it, the whole... Bring it home.
2:09:34
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Because your life...
2:09:36
You might not even succeed. You probably won't.
2:09:39
The first couple of times, as you well point out.
2:09:41
I failed spectacularly with one of my companies.
2:09:44
And it was just filled with learning opportunities, rather than anything else.
2:09:49
So, listen, I mean- David Senra: [inaudible]. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Go.
2:09:54
David Senra: I think a piece of advice that I've realized from studying the life stories of so many people is a great life is just a string of great days. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
2:10:02
David Senra: So, the first step is finding out how to have a great day, and then, put another day next to it.
2:10:06
And so, the way I do that is like my personal hero, I got my blueprint from this guy named Ed Thorp, who's obviously extremely famous.
2:10:11
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Of course. Yeah. No, no, no.
2:10:14
David Senra: And out of every single person that I've studied, he's the only one that you didn't over optimize for his professional life at the detriment to his health and his personal life, right?
2:10:24
And so, what I realized is... What did he focus on?
2:10:27
He focused on his health, he focused on a business that he thought was intellectually-stimulating, he could build wealth at. So he build wealth. He had fun.
2:10:34
He spent time with his kids and his wife.
2:10:37
David Senra: And so, that, when I looked at it, I was like, he just gave me a blueprint for a great day.
2:10:40
So then, my life is a balance of I focus on my work, spend time with my family, take care of my health, to have some fun, because we're alive, Goddammit. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
2:10:49
David Senra: And then, I do the same thing every day.
2:10:51
So, if I do that, I've now organized my life and I have complete control over...
2:10:56
I have more autonomy than most people do, granted, of course, that was by design, but if I do that today and I do it the next day and I do it...
2:11:02
I'll get to the end of my life, like that was a great life. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
2:11:07
Listen, I agree, I admire Ed Thorp greatly. I think he's right.
2:11:12
I think it's a good blueprint to use.
2:11:14
I try to do basically the same thing. I'm lucky that I live...
2:11:17
Like Patrick and Lauren live five minutes from me and I see my grandkids all the time.
2:11:24
That's as big a part of my life as the business part.
2:11:27
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Now, there are times some...
2:11:27
like when I'm starting a new thing like I am now, it takes a lot of time and effort and everything else.
2:11:33
But they still show up and I still go play with them.
2:11:37
David Senra: Yesterday was a perfect example where I was working, and it's funny, because, right now, there's this hurricane coming, so we have, instead of a snow day, you have hurricane days. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
2:11:47
David Senra: Again, I woke up, I worked out, I was working on the podcast for a while, and then, it got to lunchtime where I was like, "Okay."
2:11:54
Well, my daughter has to do a science project, so I was like, I'm going to take you, I'm going to take...
2:11:58
It was my wife, our son, and our daughter, I was like, "Let's go to lunch, and then, let's go...
2:12:03
I took basically a two-hour break in the middle of the day. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
2:12:06
David Senra: And so, we had lunch, we got all the stuff we needed.
2:12:09
And then, I came back home, and I went back to work. It's a balance.
2:12:11
It's that work life harmony.
2:12:12
Like- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Harmony. I love... Yeah. Yeah.
2:12:17
That's your term, and I prefer that.
2:12:18
David Senra: Well, it's Bezos'. Bezos'. Yeah.
2:12:21
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh, okay. Wow. Yeah. All right.
2:12:25
I am at the end of my time here.
2:12:26
I got to have you on again.
2:12:27
I hope I can get you to agree to like- David Senra: Anytime you want.
2:12:29
Jim O'Shaughnessy: All right.
2:12:30
Because this has been more fun actually than I even thought it would be.
2:12:31
And man, my expectations were super high, as you know, because I asked for three hours.
2:12:36
So, I end my podcast differently than Patrick, that little sneak, got the really good question.
2:12:43
But he did name the podcast after my first book as an homage.
2:12:46
David Senra: Which obviously- Jim O'Shaughnessy: I found out recently. David Senra: Yeah. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
2:12:50
I thought that was very nice.
2:12:51
His other contender for the title was This is Your Competition, which I thought it was pretty good too.
2:12:57
David Senra: That is good.
2:12:58
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Anyway, so- David Senra: I think he named an episode, that with, I think, Josh Wolfe.
2:13:02
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, he did.
2:13:03
David Senra: Yeah, I saw that.
2:13:04
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So, what I'm doing is I'm waving a wand, I'm giving you a magic microphone, and you get to speak two commands into it that will incept every human on the planet.
2:13:16
They're going to wake up the next day. You can't kill anyone.
2:13:19
You can't do anything bad, but you are going to incept two ideas in all of humanity.
2:13:25
They're going to wake up the next morning thinking it was their idea, not yours, and they're going to act on it.
2:13:31
What two things are you going to incept?
2:13:32
David Senra: I'm only going to do one, and pick the right heroes.
2:13:38
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love that. That's great.
2:13:40
David Senra: I think human beings, whether we want to believe it or not, it's like we are constantly copying and emulating the people around us.
2:13:47
You have to be very careful...
2:13:49
There's a line I took from a rap song where it said, "The mind is a powerful place.
2:13:53
What you feed it affects you in a powerful way".
2:13:55
David Senra: And so, regardless, we assimilate and copy everything around us.
2:13:59
And so, I think picking the right heroes is one of the most important things you can do.
2:14:02
And a lot of that is this discovery process I've gone through like under...
2:14:06
I now have a better understanding by studying almost 300 lives of other people of what's important to me and who I am as a person.
2:14:12
David Senra: And so, a lot of this is like, oh, I don't like that behavior, or I like that.
2:14:16
And so, over time, I've been able to pick the right heroes.
2:14:18
And I think that'll change the trajectory of your life.
2:14:21
Jim O'Shaughnessy: We're ending it there, my friend.
2:14:23
This has been more rewarding, more fun than I thought.
2:14:26
I'm going to have you back on.
2:14:28
I'm going to hold you to that. David Senra: Yeah.
2:14:31
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Now, you've joined the Colossus network, so your show is free. David Senra: Yep.
2:14:35
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It comes out once a week. David Senra: Yep.
2:14:37
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And I cannot more highly recommend a podcast than this one, listeners and viewers. It's amazing.
2:14:44
David does an amazing job, and you're going to learn so much.
2:14:46
David Senra: Thank you so much.
2:14:47
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But at the same time, you're going to be really entertained, and I love that combination.
2:14:51
All right, my friend, cheers.
2:14:53
David Senra: Thanks for the opportunity, Jim.
2:14:55
And I'm super happy we got connected.
2:14:56
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Me too. Cheers.