Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: Well, for how my personality is wired, that is the most exciting possible thing to do, because it means I get to learn about a person and whatever they're doing before other people do, and I like that. I like being at the frontier of what's going on and learning things that aren't widely known. I just enjoy that. I read so much, and have spent my whole life just as a constant learning-type person, so to find something fresh and new is very exciting to me, and you can usually do that with people like this. And then I've just learned about myself that by far my favorite thing in the world is championing other people. That's just what I enjoy doing. If I look back on my life, the sort of, like, wins that I've had, the things that, if you were to write a Wikipedia article about me, would be the accolades or the accomplishments, I don't care about those things. I don't think about them. When they happened, they didn't do anything for me emotionally or otherwise. For whatever reason, that’s just not what I enjoy. But when your success happens, or when many other people that I and my team have championed have a win, I feel that deep in my soul and heart and gut, in a way that is just more gratifying to me than anything else in the world. And this extends to my kids, my wife, my friends, the CEOs of companies that we've invested in, people that we have on our show that we tell the world about. That's the repeated thing that I love, and I also kind of like picking sides. I like saying, "I like this person," and by extension, "I like them more than the other available options in this field or this industry," or whatever, and I just get tremendous joy out of that. So now I'm architecting my life to just be able to do as much of that as possible, and I hope I get to do it for a long time.
· David Senra, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S1: I screenshotted this text. This was, like, many years ago. Somebody was asking me, I can't remember who it was now, but they were asking me what Patrick was like, and I was just like, "Well, 'positive sum' is definitely, like, a way to describe him, and he doesn't do things for money. That doesn't mean he's not commercial. Like, he makes a lot of money. He's going to continue to make a lot of money, but that's, like, not the driver behind it.” Let me go back to one of the craziest days of my life has directly involved you, right? Like, I was in the middle of this five and a half year struggle of being obsessed with something I know I truly cared and thought was really good but the external world was like, "No." [00:00:00] S0: Yeah. [00:00:00] S1: Like, "Nobody gives a shit about what you're doing, David," and, you know, I kept doing it. And we have a mutual friend in Sam Hinkie, who's going to keep getting annoyed because I bring him up on every podcast I go on. Because like- [00:00:00] S0: He's deserving of the mentions. [00:00:00] S1: The two episodes he did with you, especially the one about, like, find your people. [00:00:00] S0: It’s a beautiful one.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, David Senra
[00:00:00] S0: It’s a beautiful one. [00:00:00] S1: I go back to that one all the time and the notes that he says in there. And one of the things that I think about all the time – which again, I'm not an investor, but I want, like, access, and I want deep relationships with people, very high-quality people, and it's just like, he's like, "People are power law, and the best ones change everything." And so once you actually see that, you are very, almost, like, ruthless with who you let have access to you. And I think I've gotten very ruthless and continue to be ruthless because of, like, what I'm kind of chasing after. But I had no followers on Twitter at all, and just like tweeting into the oblivion. Like, no one gave a shit what I'm doing, and one day... this is why it's one of the first things that I think speaks volumes about you and how you actually live your life, and, like, I think you've now leaned into this more over the last four years that we've been talking, and I see a bunch of notifications on Twitter. I'm like, "I don't get notifications on Twitter." Like, "What is this?" The only time, there used to be a same guy that had my name, and he was a Brazilian MMA fighter, so when he would fight... [00:00:00] S0: Oh, that's funny.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, David Senra
[00:00:00] S0: Oh, that's funny. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. It's like-- So, but all the tweets were in Portuguese, so I don't know what they're talking about. It's just not about my podcast. And I almost remember verbatim, I should go and find, see how much I get the text inside the tweet correct, but you were like, "I never find new podcasts to listen to," and, you know, Invest Like the Best. For people who don't know, it's just like, insanely, one of the most insanely valuable audiences in the world. If you could sketch out the average net worth of listeners to this, it's just, like, mind-boggling, and we're about to see that in action with this story. And you're like, "I never find new podcasts to listen to. I think David Senra's Founders Podcast is excellent. You should listen to it." And you linked to an episode on Estee Lauder, which is one of my favorite ones. [00:00:00] S0: I loved that episode, yeah. [00:00:00] S1: And you send me a link, and so at the time, it was a paywalled podcast because I couldn't figure out the business model because I had no listeners. And, you know, back then, I would get an email every time you had a new subscriber. There was not many emails coming in every day. I could count them on two hands, you know? And I was like, first thing I did, well, one, the next day, I log into my email, and it's just… [00:00:00] S0: A wall.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, David Senra
[00:00:00] S0: A wall. [00:00:00] S1: Whoosh, all the way down. Just like, new, new, new, new, new, new. But that is such an unusual instinct. If I'm being honest, like, I don't think I would have done that. What the hell was going on there? You didn't see it as a competition. What was happening?
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: The first thing that flashes through my head is, you know, in my show, I always ask people the same question at the end of, "What's the kindest thing anyone's ever done for you?" Some person on Twitter or something went and compiled every answer, there's 500 answers or whatever, and categorized them and, like, made a pie chart of what people say. And something like two-thirds of the answer to this question were the same, which was the kindest thing was some person made a bet on me, the person answering the question, before I deserved it. Or, like, they saw something in me that maybe I didn't even see in myself. They bet on me before others would. And that was the answer to the kindest thing. And when I was 26, I became very interested in all of the... I studied philosophy early in life and I've always been interested in that stuff. But I became really interested in the religious texts, like all the world's religious texts. And I was kind of in a weird spot in life. I kind of hadn't found anything to do yet. I wasn't that good at anything and I was searching. I was always searching for, like, "What the hell should I do? What the hell is the point of all this?" And I found this passage in the Upanishads, which, as a book, is probably the most important book to me. And the Upanishads is this collection of stories from many of thousands of years ago that were passed down orally through generations and then eventually written down. And I remember getting stuck on this one passage that literally felt like someone hit me in the face with a hammer. And there's a line in this passage that basically says something like, "Those who feed the hungry protect me. Those who don't are consumed by me." And it just felt like there was a moment of understanding that happened in my head. But up until that point, from, you know, middle of teenage, I was this nice, sweet boy, and then I got kind of hardened and went through a period of life that was tough. And it woke me up that the whole point of this is to help other people. That's it. That's the entire point of this existence. And from that point forward, that's been my worldview. And so I think it's interesting, like, that's probably the thing that most informed my worldview.