· David Senra, Peter Rahal
[00:00:00] S0: Why'd you pick those three traits, though? [00:00:00] S1: They're close to me. I love beauty, I love intelligence, and I love suffering and discipline to a negative point of view almost. Protein bars are where I start. So what do people come to protein bars for? They come to it for body composition. Like, no one really eats protein bars as like, "Oh, I'm just going to enjoy this treat." It's very, very functional. Like, "I need to transform my body, either increase muscle or decrease fat." So the category in protein in general is very oriented around those values as well. And so with David, one of the things I wanted was a weight loss company or a body composition company without being one. So if you look at the great, they're not really great, but the '90s brands in weight loss, like Atkins, Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, like, they're super tacky. But people went to them for body composition stuff. So the question was like, all right, well, how do I make that more refined? Really more European, like higher, better taste. And so did that. And then the other side, I don't know, but when I turned 35 and just looked around my friends, I just realized everyone I knew had some issue with weight. Like, everyone had struggled with weight loss as you get older. Everyone wanted more muscle. Like, everyone I've ever talked to, and it's whether it's a issue they're honest about or they're in the closet about it. So it's like a ubiquitous problem. So the idea is like, how do you create a brand that really embodies that in a refined way?
· David Senra, Peter Rahal
[00:00:00] S0: Well, I'm going to get back to the masterpiece in a minute, so don't let me forget that part. But you said that you're almost attracted to suffering in almost like an extreme, ridiculous way. What the hell does that mean? [00:00:00] S1: I always choose the hard path. Even when I exercise, I choose the most painful exercises. When I take my son out, I refuse to take a stroller. I just always carry him. I just like being strong and doing hard things, and I think there's something spiritual about suffering that I find very gratifying once you get through it. And I think physical suffering is easy because you just get really hot, get really cold. But what's nice about building a company is it's like emotional suffering. It's like a lot of tough conversations. And so I think what I've learned early on is if you face those things, there's growth on the end of it. And so I found this relationship, the more you suffer, the stronger and the more growth you experience. And so when I see it and I feel it, I lean into it. [00:00:00] S0: Travis Kalanick, the founder of Uber, was on this podcast, and he said something that resonated with a lot of people, and he's like, "The life stuff and entrepreneurs, I can take more pain than this guy, and I'll prove it to you." [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. [00:00:00] S0: Do you agree with this? [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. It's fun. Yeah, I love it. Pain tolerance, yeah.
· Peter Rahal, David Senra
[00:00:00] S1: Yeah. It's fun. Yeah, I love it. Pain tolerance, yeah. [00:00:00] S0: I want everything that's in your head about pain tolerance and suffering. Let's just put it out here, because I think this is very interesting. Look in your eyes. I don't know if we can get this on camera or not. [00:00:00] S1: I don't know. It just feels good, and I like... I don't know where it's from necessarily. I think it's rooted in competitive nature, but I think it makes you a better man. I think there's nuance. Like, suffering for no benefit is not good, but I think this is actually it. I have a lot of resentment and anger in my life, and if I do not harness that in a certain way, I become a bad person or I start to not be happy. And so physical exertion, exercise, company building stuff is a way for me to channel all this spite and anger in a way that's really productive. [00:00:00] S0: What's the source of the resentment and anger in your life that you feel you have to channel?
· David Senra, Peter Rahal
[00:00:00] S0: What's the source of the resentment and anger in your life that you feel you have to channel? [00:00:00] S1: So trauma's relative, but for me, when I grew up very beautiful parents, so I don't want to sound like I suffered that much, but when I was a child, I was just labeled disabled because of my dyslexia. And that, I remember hearing conversations of teachers saying, "Oh, is Peter stupid?" Like, I couldn't read well. And I remember that. I overheard those conversations with my parents, and that just, I think, broke me in a way that it's like my deep intrinsic motivation to prove that wrong. And it's actually why I am so disagreeable with any sort of authority or disagree, or contrarian by nature, because my survival strategy as a child was to say, to have self-esteem really is like, "All you teachers are wrong. This whole system is broken. Fuck off." So I think deep in my personality is that, like, proving that all wrong. And then even to just survive in school, it took me just like 10X the effort. To get like a C and D. So I think a lot of my pain tolerance came from some of that. But my resentment and anger is certainly rooted in that. [00:00:00] S0: You still feel this when you wake up today? [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. No, I think it's like tattooed. Psychedelics, therapy, it's like tattooed in me at this point. [00:00:00] S0: You've tried to get rid of it and you can't. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. [00:00:00] S0: And so you feel the outlet is crushing your competitors?
· David Senra, Peter Rahal
[00:00:00] S0: And so you feel the outlet is crushing your competitors? [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. It's winning. And it's like I'm not really proud. I'm just like, it is what it is. I didn't really choose it, but it's like to prove that I'm not that, fundamentally. But I felt when I was fake working as an investor- ... I was deeply unhappy because I wasn't able to channel. I was like, "I'm a sideline." I'm not a fucking cheerleader. Like, I'm on the sideline and I need to channel all this anger and thing towards a result. And reporting on a portfolio is not doing that. [00:00:00] S0: I have a younger friend that I feel like I can kind of share some of the experience I get to have with this person. And I was just like, as a general rule, the further you get away from the person that actually has talent, the more cautious you have to be. So it's like the founder obviously has talent. You obviously have talent. You created something from nothing and you've done it over and over again and now building this. But you have to be careful of these agents. You have to be careful of these bankers. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. [00:00:00] S0: You have to be careful of these investors. The further you get away from the person with talent, they just are incentivized to kind of like persuade, cajole- [00:00:00] S1: Mm-hmm [00:00:00] S0: ... act, in many cases, like against your interests. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. [00:00:00] S0: And I was like, just stay close to the people that actually have talent. And you don't need many friends in life. You can have five. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah.
· Peter Rahal, David Senra
[00:00:00] S1: Yeah. [00:00:00] S0: And those are the kind of friend group that you should have, where you have all these other fakers out here that are playing politics. You can get ahead that way, which is completely different than how the entrepreneur thinks. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah, I agree with that. Yeah. [00:00:00] S0: There's another thing that you were saying, because I'm not going to leave this alone. I want to hear more about your resentment and this attraction that you have to pain. So the founder of the Four Seasons, this guy named Issy Sharp, he has this great line where he started, he's kind of embarrassingly ambitious, and I mean that in a great way, where he's like, "I'm going to build the world's greatest high-end luxury hotel chain." He didn't know anything about it. He never built a single hotel before he had that goal. And so his autobiography is excellent. And in there he says, one of my favorite maxims in his entrepreneurship, he says that "Excellence is the capacity to take pain." [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. [00:00:00] S0: And this same thing, he had this very complex relationship with his father. He had a lot of people doubting him. This idea, like what you just said to me makes perfect sense because it's just in these biographies over and over again, and a lot of people that have come on the show. I just mentioned Adam Vergi. Like one thing that he drove himself was like, "I tried to raise money. I was willing to sell 25% of my company for a million dollars." [00:00:00] S1: Correct.