Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, David Senra
[00:00:00] S0: It was, yeah. [00:00:00] S1: It's Invest Like The Best. The title is Passion & Pain, and people were always like, "Oh, like, did you guys sketch this out?" I was like, "No, Patrick doesn't sketch things out like that." He's like, "we built a friendship. I want you on the show." Like, I don't think you told me anything we were going to talk about. I do remember you texting me a few hours. We were supposed to do it at 10:00 AM. You're like, "Hey, I got pushed back. Can we do 1:00 PM?" I'm like, "Oh no, my brain only works in the morning." So I took, like, a quick power nap, and then I'm in this booth. We didn't do video, but you can see me, and I'm in, like, this phone booth that I put in my house that... I was the only person... These phone booths are in all these offices, and I had one... They came and delivered to my house, and they're like, "You know, we've never delivered to somebody's house before." I was like, "This isn't a phone booth. This is a podcast studio. This makes perfect sense to me." [00:00:00] S0: Yeah.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, David Senra
[00:00:00] S0: Yeah. [00:00:00] S1: And then we just had that conversation and that was a huge inflection point. Like, that weekend that happened after that was, like, one of the craziest weekends of my entire life. But then you pushed me for years. You were like, "You should be recording conversations. You should be recording these conversations. What are you doing?" And I was like, "No, no, it's a distraction. I don't want to do it, I won't do it." And then, you know, I've told this story a bunch, but I think it's really important, where I would not be doing what I'm doing right now at this very moment if we didn't have... me and you had this dinner with Daniel Ek in New York. It lasted four hours. I know you don't like when I tell you how long I talk to people. [00:00:00] S0: This is one of David's quirks. He tells you how long he talked to someone every time. [00:00:00] S1: Because I'm not in- [00:00:00] S0: You just had this four-hour lunch with so and so. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah, because I'm not interested in superficial at all. I can't tell you who it was. I just had dinner. [00:00:00] S0: How long was it?
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, David Senra
[00:00:00] S0: How long was it? [00:00:00] S1: I'm going to tell you right now. But it was an incredible dinner the first time we met, and it was unexpected, requested by them. And three hours into this, this person's like, "I have told you things no one else knows about me." The very first time I met them. So it's just, I have no interest in the superficial, and I think you have to talk for a long time because it takes a little while to get warmed up and feel the person out. And this is why what you said earlier is so important, like, fewer deep relationships. Dude, think about the crazy conversation, which we're not going to relive, but, like, me and you had an insane two-and-a-half-hour conversation in Tel Aviv at like, 2:00 in the morning. And to have that level of honesty in conversation, you would have to have years of getting to know somebody. So, I do think...
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: I also think you're providing people with a sort of set of ingredients, maybe, through these episodes and conversations, but that it's important that people then go make their own recipe. You shouldn't just want to live like person XYZ. A lot of people you cover have the same pitfalls in their lives, and one might be tempted to think those pitfalls are just inevitable byproducts of success, but I hate that kind of thinking. I think, screw base rates. I never care what the base rate is. The most interesting stuff is outliers, by definition. So, I don't care what happened to everybody else. I don't care if there's common pitfalls. I think it's important that people make their own recipe from the ingredients that you've offered them from all these amazing and interesting lives that you've studied. And you're just doing that for yourself. Like, that's been the search.
· David Senra
[00:00:00] S1: I think it is for myself. You are interested in other people, frankly, in a way that I am not. And I've seen, it's very real, and it happens every time we're with other people together. I'm like, "Oh, he actually wants to know," whereas I am on this search of like, "How the hell do I not have a terrible life?" This is why I think the skillset that gets you to where you are, like, so many people plateau, and I'm not interested in plateauing. I'm not interested in mailing it in. I'm interested in... I want to get to an end in my life. I don't want to tap dance on a giant reservoir of potential. I want, like, "There was nothing more that I could've possibly done with my skillset and everything else." I want to figure out how to get the most out of that. And there's something you just said about, like, there's a line in this Bruce Springsteen autobiography where he's like, "People don't come to rock shows, or to concerts rather, to learn. They come to remind them, for you to remind them of stuff they already know is true." And I think, yeah, you're going to learn, like, there's obviously creative ideas on how to build a company in a 400-page biography of somebody. But what you're going to realize is just that there's a lot of stuff that you already know and you know is true and either you haven't applied it, or you forgot it, or you did it for a little bit and you need a reminder. This is why me and you always describe Founders like it's church. It's church for entrepreneurs.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: Well, in that church, I think the animating interesting question is… you read these stories, all of which go back to my idea of originality, hardship, transformation, you know, best story wins. That originality is you're inspiring people to wonder, "What's my thing?" Everyone's got something. I guarantee it. It's my favorite thing to search for in conversation, especially if someone's not yet doing it, which is kind of the same, the same search for unrealized potential or something. Everyone has a thing that, for whatever set of reasons, their life experiences, how they're wired, their naturally endowed gifts. And searching for that thing is really interesting and really hard. And I think that's what Founders continues to do for me, is show me examples of people that went to the trouble to find their thing and then, once they found it, fostered it the rest of their life. And again, once you find your thing, the second thing is hardship. It's not supposed to be easy. Nothing meaningful is easy, and that's fine. And then once you learn that, I think that's when it gets really fun. I always have this feeling that the second something just feels easy, and I'm kind of going through the motions, I get really uncomfortable and want to try to push myself in in some new way. But I think that's what Founders does so well, is it shows... it's what, back to the very beginning of our relationship and why I sent that tweet out, and why we talked to each other for an hour the first time we talked. It's because it was so unique, and so different, and inspiring. So, I think it's a powerful thing to do for people.