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Episode 448: Sam Parr (https://twitter.com/theSamParr) talks with David Senra (https://twitter.com/FoundersPodcast) Founder of Founder's podcast, about his love of podcasting, how to become a killer in business, and life lessons from successful entrepreneurs.

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Check Out Sam's Stuff:
* Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/
* Ideation Bootcamp - https://maven.com/samparr/ideation-bootcamp
* Copy That - https://copythat.com/

Check Out Shaan's Stuff:
* Power Writing Course - https://maven.com/generalist/writing
* Daily Newsletter - https://www.shaanpuri.com/
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Links:
* Founders podcast - https://founders.simplecast.com/
* James Dyson's autobiography - https://www.amazon.com/Against-Odds-Autobiography-James-Dyson/dp/1587991705

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A podcast where we brainstorm new business ideas based on trends & opportunities we see in the market. Sometimes we have famous guests, and they do it with us.
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Show Notes:
(00:00) - Intro
(02:24) - What did you do before Founders?
(03:55) - How big is the podcast?
(09:41) - How many books do you read?
(16:50) - The difference between pretty good and killers
(18:24) - Can you make yourself a killer?
(26:20) - Finding good industries to get into
(44:47) - Lessons from meeting Sam Zell and Charlie Munger
(57:42) - What is next for you?
(01:15:47) - Chuck Yeager
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I am probably the most optimistic person in terms of how good of a business podcasting can be.

And I start talking crazy, and then I have some friends that have built giant businesses on the back of podcasts.

I was at dinner with them last week, and they literally pulled me to the side and like, shut the f*** up.

I've listened to dozens and dozens and dozens of episodes.

He basically breaks down different biographies that he read about business people, artists, whatever.

Anyone who's the 1% of the 1% of their field.

And on the pod today, we talked about the difference between people who are like somewhat successful, and the people who are absolute killers and what traits they have, and what the commonalities so it's super fascinating to hear from someone who's read literally 3 or 400 biographies and studies us for a living.

He talks about the commonalities of these killers, whether that's UFC fighters or billionaires.

My favorite part is when we talk about he has this really cool quote from Joe Rogan describing John Jones, who's this amazing UFC fighter, and the difference between John and the rest of the people.

And then somehow David weaves that in with business people, and he lists out all the business people who he says are the 1%, the 1%, the killers of the killers, and he talks about what traits they have and what you can learn.

Yeah, you know, it's a, I understand why you'd live in Miami if your family's there.

I don't love New York, but I'm eventually gonna move there for family.

So the family supersedes all the other stuff.

Like I've been traveling a lot more for work.

And like the day I leave, my kids wake up, her mom is here, her grandmother's here.

So like from my kids' perspective, like Colombians are, South Americans in general, what they do is like, they're very, I like their multi-generational housing.

My wife grew up in a house connected to her grandparents' house.

Like I had nothing like that when I was a kid.

And so I was like, man, I really wanna live in California, but I'm just gonna stay here for family and then spend my summers in California.

I've done a shit ton of businesses since I was like 18 years old.

Like I think me and you are around the same age, I might be a few years older than you.

The business I was working on right before, actually started Founders while I was doing it, was this thing called RoboDB, which is a way to track the true origination points of robocalls through the payment network.

And it was just like a business that was kind of like a clever hack, but I wasn't interested in it the way I was podcasting.

So I was obsessed with podcasting for years.

I remember my friend Eric, He invited me over to his house 1 time, this is like 2010, he's like, dude, you gotta come over and watch this new podcast.

Do you remember the guy from Fear Factor?

And I'm like, yeah, I watched Fear Factor when I was in high school.

And we went to his house, and it's like when Joe Rogan was on the white couch, and he was on Ustream, and then he'd have, there'd be things falling down, he'd have the cheesy kind of, there'd be stars or sparkles and stuff like that.

He's like, oh, you can also listen to it on your phone anytime you want.

Or were you kind of like a struggling entrepreneur?

And then this is like, is this your first like breakout?

This is the first thing that's gonna make, like I'll make a lot more money.

I was like making like dentist or doctor money for like a long time.

You know, like not struggling, but not nearly like, you know, what a podcast could do, like a successful podcast could do.

How big's the pod now in terms of listenership?

A few weeks ago I just cracked over 100,000 individual listeners.

Like so when I sign into like my podcast host and it says like unique listeners last 7 days, that's the only, I'm not big on metrics, like I don't pay attention to them at all, I just try to make what I want and then put it out into the world.

But the 1 number I want to see grow is that number because founders is also weird, good like you could discover it now.

And because the back catalogs evergreen, evergreen, like I'll talk to people, they'll listen to like the first, the latest episodes, and then they'll go back and listen to shit that I did like 6 years ago, 5 years ago.

Like, cause you're part of, what, Colossal, is that

And so they like sell your ads and they take a cut.

And so is it just you and a producer or what?

So, Patrick, I love, we were talking a little bit about this yesterday.

The 1 thing I love about the podcasting industry is how positive some everybody is.

So I listened to Patrick's podcast for years.

Like, I was taking notes on his podcast, I went back and looked, since like 2019.

And last year in May, my podcast was a subscription podcast.

You could listen to the first 30 minutes, you could listen to all of it, for the first 6 years in its existence, you had to pay to upgrade.

Wait, oh, I didn't know, so you've been doing this for 6 years.

To me, you just got on my radar like a year ago maybe.

David and Ben from Require, they played a big role.

But what happened was, Patrick just randomly tweeted it out.

He's got this massive, very valuable audience in terms of size and average net worth.

I would argue he's got the most valuable business podcast audience in the world.

The average net worth of his audience is fucking extreme.

And he just randomly tweeted out like last May, hey, I never find new podcasts to listen to, I think David Center's Founders Podcast is excellent, you should listen.

And so, I had become friends with this guy named Sam Hinckey.

Sam Hinckey's the former general manager of this Philadelphia 76ers.

I was like, oh shit, look what your friend Patrick said.

And then Sam immediately put me in a group chat with Patrick, he's like, you 2 should know each other.

And so, Patrick, the first time we talked, we talked for like an hour and a half.

We had like the same interest for Addicted Podcast, Addicted History, Addicted entrepreneurship, all this other stuff.

And so we were just friends for a long time.

And then I had several people, Rob Moore being 1 of them, we should probably talk about.

Yeah, Rob and I, Rob's been hooking me up constantly.

Like I'll talk to him and we'll email back and forth, He's always helping me.

Okay, so this is the positive some nature of podcasting.

For those who don't know Rob Moore, Rob Moore and Andrew Huberman are partners on the pod.

Rob is the co-founder of the Huberman Lab podcast.

So, okay, there is, this is the interesting thing.

1 of my favorite quotes, I've read every single thing I could find on Steve Jobs, right?

And 1 of my favorite quotes that really described Steve's, 1 of his superpowers was that Steve was gifted at finding markets full of second rate products.

And what you guys realize, I think as well, is like people have essentially, like when you're inside podcasting, the perception inside of it is completely different than what it's outside of it.

It's like everybody's like, there's too many of them, it's too late to get in, and like you need to start a long time ago.

And what happens is everybody starts a podcast, quits, right?

And when you get in there, podcasts in general are full of second-rate products.

Rob Moore and Andrew Huberman, and I put David and Ben up here as well, they have first-class products and a first-class approach to building their business.

So Rob, I've never talked to Rob less than 2 hours.

Every single time we talk, he, look dude, look what I have on my desk.

Yeah, it's Rob and Andrew have been so fucking relentless with supporting me.

For no, like they have no benefit, right?

They just, they keep, like, every time Andrew tweets about me, the fact that he was, 1 of his favorite podcasts is Founders, he sends me up to church just from his tweets.

Rob's like, hey, we have this new studio, next time you're in California, come out and I'd love to give you a tour.

And our mutual friend, Andrew Wilkinson, had invited me to Victoria.

So I was like, oh, I'm actually flying to Victoria like next week.

That's a pain in the ass to get to from Miami.

I'll just stop in California for a few days to see you.

I met up with Rob, we talked podcasting for 7 straight hours.

Literally, we meet up to have lunch, we stay at the same spot, they're like, it's dinner now, we're like, let's have dinner.

And then we stayed there the whole time, and then he's like, let's go to the studio.

They are, like, to me, I think, not only is Huberman's size of his audience crazy, but if you break down how they think about the quality of the product, how they think about the quality of the business model.

Like, there's ideas I got from Rob that I told Andrew, or that I told Ben and David that they're now using that's gonna wind up making them millions of dollars.

Like the way they set up their business, their ads, everything, they're just fucking first class dudes.

Are you, I see that you're always tweeting out, it looks like a screenshot from Kindle.

How many books a month are you reading to pull this off?

Okay, so I think this is, me and you were talking about the advantage I think you have at Hampton, which is really fucking special.

And it's an echo of what Bloomberg used to build his very unique business.

Like your business is going to produce a lot of proprietary information.

It's extremely valuable to other founders.

Dude, you don't know how many fucking people I've had dinner with that tell me about the Hampton blog and you guys just launched it.

I think we just, we just, we just like, I threw it together like, I think 2 weeks ago.

I heard about some guy doing concrete or some shit or

He was like searching, they told me that he was like searching through like a

Yeah, like looking for their, looking through a database of government contracts and seeing what he can fulfill.

Yeah, so what I realized is when I text you that yesterday, was I'm doing similar things.

So I realized, this is the magic of, you said something that was really smart, where you're like, rich people read a lot.

Our mutual friend, Adrian Wilkins, had just tweeted out, he's like, I wish I could short entrepreneurs that don't read.

It's like not only if the people I studied, it's like they were so good at what they did that somebody wrote a book about them.

And then you read their books, and they're constantly reading biographies, studying great work that came before them.

And so the Bloomberg idea was like, his business is fundamentally, he's like, I wanna sell you like a $27,000 a year subscription or whatever it is.

My business, his business collects a bunch of unique information, and he made like a bunch of atomic pieces of content and started a media company as a way to get his brand and so 90% of the people that read his media will never buy his subscription.

But his media is spread around everywhere.

Just like there's a ton of people that are gonna read your Hampton blog, you know, obviously I think you should do a podcast if you do fucking short form, whatever, it's like that's gonna be spread out like that and then 1%, 5% of those are gonna convert to members.

And the more members you have, the more data you have, the more data you have, the more members you have, and it just keeps going.

So to answer your question, I just hit episode 300, I've read over 300 biographies of entrepreneurs so far.

What I realized is like over time, I input all my highlights into this app called Readwise.

And so everything you see externally are just, they're essentially highlights that I, like the 1 I posted yesterday, we were talking about Bloomberg, and I was like, oh fuck, let me go and read back through my highlights on Bloomberg, and I found 1 where he said that like, you know, you should try to love what you do, because you love what you do, you do a lot, and then you know, that compounds everything.

And I put that out and like immediately these hit and then people discover the podcast and they start listening.

And so me and you and Bloomberg kind of running the same idea, but in, you know, different, different industries are different.

up until like, so 2 years ago, up until 2 years ago, I was reading a ton.

I have 1 that I'm listening to and 1 of that read at night and I like to listen while I'm on walks.

Have you ever listened to Titan or Vanderbilt's book Tycoon?

So I went and found books just by that narrator.

And I started scrolling through and I'm like, oh my God, this guy's done 1500 books or something like that, that he's narrated.

And it's like how to win friends and influence and like all these like businessy, self-healthy books.

And I'm like, huh, he's reading all these books.

And if I don't like something, I brush it off.

Now I strictly read biographies or history.

So your friend Ryan Holiday has a great post where he shared his top 25 biography recommendations and the intro to that post is excellent because he's like, listen, you go to the most successful people in the world, look at their bookshelves, they read a lot of shit, they all read biographies.

He's like some of the most high-value reading you can do.

You notice that as you read through the biographies, like they're all doing this.

This actually clicked for me the other day.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, he helped Naval write the thing.

Yep, so he gave me this fantastic book recommendation that I had missed.

It's by this guy named Peter Bevelen, and he kind of, it's a book on Buffett and Munger, it's called, it's just, All I Want to Know Is Where I'll Die So I Don't Go There.

And there was something that Buffett and Munger were saying in that book that really clicked for me.

They kept saying, it's like, listen, we're gonna share everything we know with you guys.

We know that most of you are just gonna listen or read it and never do anything.

And I thought about that for a long time.

I was like, oh, so learning is not memorizing information like the guy you were just describing.

If you don't change your behavior, then you didn't actually learn.

And so therefore, if I'm not applying the lessons I'm learning in this book for my own business, then that means I'm just wasting my whole fucking life.

Because I'm working on the 7 days a week, like I'm giving a lot of my life energy to this.

It's like not just, people didn't just fucking read.

They took this idea like, okay, how can I apply it to my business?

And then they actually changed their fucking behavior, which is like the key.

I mean, I'll what I my the reason I read biographies is I look for patterns and I say, what mistake did this person make?

And then, like the way that I kind of, this sounds really lame, but we make a joke that I'm I call myself a manifest cowboy because I'm a little redneck.

But the reason being is I'm pretty good at like setting 5 year and 10 year goals and staying focused and working backwards to achieve it.

And like I can like There's this 1 book called How to Get Rich by Felix Dennis.

Or I don't know if he had a cancer when he wrote it, but he died soon after.

And he was like, if I could do it all over again, I would try to be financially secure by age 35 and then just putz around.

So like, how do you just like have like the bills handled?

And then everything else is just, you know, icing on the cake.

I go and read the sections that he talks about.

If you just Google how to get rich free PDF, there's like a website that has it.

So I bought many copies and I have a bunch of his biographies.

But I'll just like refer to that all the constantly.

I'm like, all right, what did he say about this?

And he gives like pretty practical advice like on company credit cards, like how do you issue company credit cards and like office space.

He's like, what he did, he's like, I read the book before I got rich and then you read it after you get really rich.

And I was asking you, I was like, what should we talk about?

And I was like, I want to talk about the difference between the people who are pretty good and absolute killers.

you were like, oh, that's just like a UFC.

But I because I'm fascinated with like I listened to yours.

I think his name is Sam Bronfman, the guy who started Seagram, which eventually turned into like all these other things.

You know, like he almost reminded me of myself, not in the savage sense, but he did a few funny things.

He he was like a hermit and he like didn't go anywhere unless his wife went with him.

I'm like, I don't go out unless my wife calls up me.

Cause I'm, I have like some social anxiety a little bit and like, but when it came to business, he was like pretty brash and like told people exactly what he thought.

Except like when it came to social situations, he was like super, not confrontational.

If I go to the grocery store and I don't see what I'm looking for, I leave.

I'm like, I'm like, dude, I just don't even want to ask for help because it bothers me.

But anyway, I listen to him and then I listen to Napoleon.

Sam Altman said the best book he's read in the last few years is this 1.

No, no, no, I'm gonna do this in like 2, 2, probably 2 episodes.

And, yeah, so, because everybody's obsessed with Sam Altman right now because of ChatGPD.

I didn't mean to interrupt you, but Napoleon's

I forget if I heard it from you or Ben Wilson, but it was something like.

He was talking to someone who goes, you and I are not the same.

I am born of a people of conquerors or something like that.

Like he had this like, he felt like he was just like, I'm here to conquer, get out of my way.

And he had that at a young age, and I thought that was really insightful.

There is something that you picked up on where it's fascinating how you'll listen to founders or you'll read a bunch of biographies and you realize the most successful people in the world, you're like, oh, I don't want their life.

Like, out of like, exactly, first of all, you said something that was really smart too, it's like, people diss like manifestation or visualization, and they think it's like willy poofy nonsense.

I can just tell you it pops up in the books over and over and over again.

I told you Yesterday I'm reading this fucking insane biography of Tiger Woods.

This dude is like 8 years old, listening to motivational tapes, writing it out, and on his wall, it's like, I am powerful.

I will achieve my goals, like over and over and over again.

And you see this from Edwin Land, Steve Jobs, Estee Lauder, Bob Noyce, founder of Intel, Arnold Schwarzenegger, have you read The Education?

I want to send you, I was going to ask you for your address to send you this book, but I was like, he might have already read it.

Did you ever read The Education of a Bodybuilder?

The first 113 pages, it functions as a autobiography of Arnold when he's 30.

And like the visualization thing, seeing things, like he said, he's like, he would lay in bed at night and just picture himself on the stage holding the trophy of the mystery universe or whatever in his hand.

Everybody's like, essentially like bowing down to him.

What I find is that a lot of the people that, even Felix Dennis, man, I think the advice he gave was wise.

That guy had a hole in his heart that could never fill.

He spent $100 million in a decade, $10 million a year on cocaine, alcohol, and prostitutes.

You know, like, that's a fucking crazy story in that book.

See all My First Million transcripts on Youtube

Why Podcasting Is The Most Underrated Business Model (#448)