[David Senra]
Ben Wilson has stage four cancer and four small kids. I wanted to have him on the podcast to talk about his work on the "How to Take Over the World" podcast, which is, in my opinion, one of the best podcasts ever created, and to talk about what it's like dealing with terminal cancer at such a young age. I also want to ask you for help in any way that you can. Ben is a good man, and he's been dealt a bad hand. Please watch this podcast and see if you can help with medicine, introductions, or donations. It doesn't matter if you have 5 dollars to spare or 5,000. Any little bit can help Ben's family through this devastating time. He's a good guy and a close friend. Please help in any way that you can.

[David Senra]
All right, talk to me about zeal.

[Ben Wilson]
Zeal is the word that we all use, right? So nowadays, zeal means that you are-

[David Senra]
First of all, we all use? No. I don't think it's in everybody's everyday vocabulary.

[Ben Wilson]
Well, it means that you get excited about something, right? You're zealous for something. But it had a very specific definition to the ancient Greeks. So, Aristotle defined zeal as a type of pain. It is felt by someone when they see another who is like them in nature, who has accomplished good or admirable things that the other person is capable of but has not yet achieved. You can see it in a lot of famous historical people. So, one of my favorite stories of zeal is Thomas Edison. He's 21 years old.

[Ben Wilson]
He's a telegraph operator, young, smart guy. Those are kind of like the programmers, tech guys of their age. And he's reading this biography of Michael Faraday, who is an inventor from the generation before.

[Ben Wilson]
And he's reading the biography of Faraday.

[Ben Wilson]
His roommate goes to bed. His roommate wakes up in the morning, and Edison is just finishing the bio. He stayed up all night reading this biography of Michael Faraday. Slams shut the biography, throws it on the table, and says, "Faraday accomplished so much. I am already 21 years old. I might live to be 50. Can I accomplish as much as he did? I am going to hustle." That's what he says, "I'm going to hustle." I love that line. And so, he really felt this pain because he recognized someone who was like him, Faraday, who had accomplished so much more than he had. And so, he wanted to compete with him across the generations. And you see that same story play out with Julius Caesar looking at Alexander the Great. You see it with Rockefeller and kind of the generation that came before. Amos Lawrence is the first person that he really aspires to be like. And so, it's this very unique source of inspiration, zeal, of seeing someone who came before you and wanting to compete with them because they accomplished so much, but is very common among the great achievers across all domains.

[David Senra]
Yeah, I love the fact that anytime you read biographies of Edison, he's obsessed with the word hustle.

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
When he invented the phonograph, he was talking to some guy, and the guy's like, "Hey, if you could hear any historical figure's voice that's long since dead, who would you choose?" And the guy asked him the question, he's like, "Well, I would choose Jesus." And Edison's like, "I would choose Napoleon." And he's like, "Why Napoleon?" He goes, "I like the hustler."

[Ben Wilson]
I like a hustler, yeah.

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
So what are some other examples of zeal? How do you think about it, like the work that you do personally? Because you're studying people with zeal. I guess we should back up and give some people some context. I've been telling people for years that I think you're one of the best podcasters in the world. "How to Take Over the World" is another solo history podcast. I think there's a lot of overlap between the work that you did with "How to Take Over the World" and the work that I did with "Founders." And so we wind up studying a lot of the same people, reading a lot of the same books. We've been texting back and forth for years about book recommendations. But I understand the presence of zeal in these historical figures. I see it just like you do when I read these books. But how do you think about your own life then?

[Ben Wilson]
Well, two things. I think I've made it sort of my life mission to help people with that, right? Because you need to find people who are like you in character in order to have that sort of connection. So for example, if I read about Leonardo da Vinci, amazing story, I love it, I can learn a lot. But fundamentally, I don't feel that sense of zeal because his brain is so different from mine. It's like studying an alien. I could just never do what he did. And so by presenting all these different stories to people that I do in "How to Take Over the World," I'm hoping that you can listen to those, and some of those people you think, "Okay, cool, interesting, but not really for me." But you find one of those stories that just resonates deep in your heart and soul and gives you that moment of, "No, that person is like me. I could accomplish what they did, but I haven't yet." And it gives you that pain and that sort of motivation to start on that journey. That's how I think about that process.

[David Senra]
So wait, if you don't identify with da Vinci, who do you identify with?

[Ben Wilson]
So someone like Walt Disney, for example.

[Ben Wilson]
I read that story and I think, "Ooh, I could accomplish something like that." That's someone who is... Maybe not exactly. He's obviously an enormously talented person. But that's someone who I feel like their personality is more similar to mine, and so it does give me a little bit more of that feeling.

[David Senra]
Tell me more about how the similarities in personality between you and Walt.

[Ben Wilson]
Walt was a very

[Ben Wilson]
creative person, of course. This is the first thing that anyone knows about Walt Disney. But this is someone who created empires of the mind, who was a creative leader who got people to buy into a certain aesthetic vision. And I think on some level, I have that ability to do that. One of the most famous things about my podcast is the intro music that people know and get very excited about it, and I was able to do that myself just messing around in GarageBand.

[David Senra]
I'm very anti-podcast intro.

[Ben Wilson]
I know you are, yeah.

[David Senra]
Because I'm always just like, "Well, we're..." It's always like the worst version of something. I think about back when

[David Senra]
Steve Jobs came back to Apple. I know you've done a ton of episodes on Steve Jobs too. And netbooks were really, really popular, and they were pressuring Steve. And even his friend Larry Ellison is like, "Why aren't you building netbooks?"

[David Senra]
And he goes, "Because they're just shitty laptops." And so instead of being, in his words, instead of taking resources and building a shitty laptop, a product that shouldn't exist, he redirected them, and they wind up inventing the iPad. And I thought that shift was very interesting. So that's the way I feel about intro music for podcasts. Yours is the lone example where I'm like, "This is excellent." I didn't know until just now that you were the one that made that.

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah, in a fit of inspiration. And it's funny because people early on tried to hire me. ... to make intro music for other podcasts, and I just couldn't do it. It was really just

[Ben Wilson]
60 minutes of magic. I mean, that's how long it took me. I kind of figured out the beat, I figured out the vocal tone that I liked, I grabbed a few quotes, and boom, it was done in a flash. It was just like one of those magical moments of inspiration. And anyway, so

[Ben Wilson]
yeah, Walt was a creative, someone who built empires of the mind. When I think about someone like da Vinci in that,

[Ben Wilson]
like,

[Ben Wilson]
actual artistic skill, because Walt was an okay artist-

[David Senra]
He was not a great animator

[Ben Wilson]
... illustrator, but he was not a great animator. But da Vinci was. He was exceptional. He just had that kind of hand-eye coordination that I guess I lack, and just the ability to perceive things in a certain way that I just don't think I see the world the way that he does. And his curiosity goes in a different direction.

[Ben Wilson]
Walt was also an extremely curious person, but he was curious about things that never were, right? About things that could be created. Da Vinci was

[Ben Wilson]
curious about things as they are in the world, and I think I lean more toward that

[Ben Wilson]
Walt Disney model of things as they could be and never have been before.

[David Senra]
Yeah, I remember I was poking a little fun at you a few months ago through text message because I was going to Tuscany, and I was like, "I read Isaacson's biography of da Vinci," which is great, but it's like 800 pages. And I was like, "Give me the best da Vinci book that you ever read." And I'm in Tuscany. It was so bad, I literally left it at the hotel-

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah, the Clark biographical

[David Senra]
... I was like, "Do you have this?" And I was like, "Ben, what the hell was that?" It was like pages and pages about just the way that he would draw a hand that was bent. I'm like, "Why did you tell me to read this?" I really enjoyed that part.

[Ben Wilson]
Well, because I think it's difficult to understand da Vinci and what he did unless you do, at least on some level, grasp

[Ben Wilson]
the science of what he was doing and what had come before. So anyways, but we did get a little bit in the weeds. I'll give that to you.

[David Senra]
I think that's an interesting observation, that essentially he had the most attention to detail of things that already exist. His notebooks are famous, like

[David Senra]
all the little detail in a leaf, for example-

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah

[David Senra]
... where Walt was like, "I want to invent things and bring things to life that don't exist."

[David Senra]
What do you call it? Empires of the mind.

[Ben Wilson]
Da Vinci and Isaac Newton, they did it in different ways, which I thought was interesting. Da Vinci would write in his notebook, describe, and then he would write something. Whereas Isaac Newton would write out actual questions of things that he wanted to answer. The thing that I love about Isaac Newton with his notebooks, which are similar to da Vinci's in some ways, but he called it his waste book. In other words, like his trash book, like his book of scraps and notes. And I think everyone should have a waste book because it really takes off the pressure of what you're thinking about, right? Of, "I don't have to come up with anything refined. I don't have to come up with anything insightful. This is just where I'm going to dump my wasteful thoughts." And I think it's in those moments of

[Ben Wilson]
unimpeded creativity that you have some of your most insightful realizations.

[David Senra]
Do you have notebooks? Do you have journals? Do you do this?

[Ben Wilson]
Tons. Yeah.

[David Senra]
What's in them?

[Ben Wilson]
Waste. Like, a lot of trash. A lot of trash. A lot of-

[David Senra]
Work, personal? What is this, though?

[Ben Wilson]
I have one for each. So I do keep a journal, and I started keeping a very detailed journal since I got diagnosed with cancer. But then I also have a lot of creative notebooks where I will draw very poorly. I will plan out episodes. I'll just kind of start writing kind of thoughts on historical figures and their place in history and how they might relate to my own life. Just kind of little essays, mini essays, just a paragraph long. And I get some of my best insights that I end up pulling out of there and putting into scripts for episodes from that.

[David Senra]
Talked to Rick Rubin about this because he said he's worked with

[David Senra]
probably some of the most talented artists that have ever existed in music. And he said something that was interesting one time where he said that Eminem might be the most obsessive artist he's ever worked with. And I asked him to elaborate on that, and he was just like, "Well, he's just constantly writing." And if you look, he's

[David Senra]
got not millions, but hundreds of notebooks. And Rick asked him one day, he's like, "Well, how much of what you're writing do you actually use?" He's like, "Almost none of it."

[Ben Wilson]
Again, it gives you that feeling of

[Ben Wilson]
openness, which I think is really essential in any creative pursuit. Of course, there's a time that comes for refining and for polishing, but if you try and start there...

[Ben Wilson]
I think everyone's had that feeling, at least in high school. You're trying to write an essay, you get that blank page, and you just have no idea where to start. For me,

[Ben Wilson]
the introductions to my episodes are the hardest part. And so if I let myself get stuck there, then nothing good ever happens. And so I will just write the most garbage,

[Ben Wilson]
"Leonardo da Vinci was an artist." Just terrible, terrible introductions so that I can just get into the meat of the episode and I can just get the juices flowing, and then I can return to that intro and work on it later.

[David Senra]
Why did you start "How to Take Over the World" to begin with?

[Ben Wilson]
Well, because I wanted it to exist in the world. Essentially, I was reading this biography of Napoleon, and I found myself extremely inspired. And at the time, I was listening to the Tim Ferriss podcast. Love Tim.

[Ben Wilson]
And he had done three or four interviews in a row that I just wasn't interested in. And so I started thinking to myself, "Who do I wish Tim Ferriss would interview?"

[Ben Wilson]
And I realized I wished Tim Ferriss could interview Napoleon. Obviously, that was impossible, but I immediately had the realization, "Well, I could do that. I could be Tim Ferriss for dead people," was the idea that popped into my mind. And so I immediately went and searched for it. Who's already doing this? And I really would have been content just to find a podcast and start listening to it,

[Ben Wilson]
but I couldn't find it. And so I thought, "Oh, okay, there's no way that I'm the only person who's interested in this, so I'll make it." And so that's where the idea came from.

[David Senra]
What year is this?

[Ben Wilson]
2018.

[David Senra]
Okay. Was Napoleon your first episode?

[Ben Wilson]
Napoleon was my first episode.

[David Senra]
Which biography?

[Ben Wilson]
Andrew Roberts.

[David Senra]
Of course.

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah. Great biography. Napoleon was the first one. I decided to call it "How to Take Over the World," but I didn't want people to get the idea that it was just conquerors. So from there, so it was Napoleon, and then it was Steve Jobs, and then kind of the formula was set for the next eight years of my life.

[David Senra]
So what do you think are some more of the ideas that you learned from studying these people and from reading these books that you applied to your own life, whether it's work or personal?

[Ben Wilson]
Well, it's a big question, right?

[Ben Wilson]
Because

[Ben Wilson]
I do think that there's so much, and as life goes on,

[Ben Wilson]
certain lessons stand out to you more at certain times than others, right? I know you do a lot of the same biographies, right? Because reading it with a fresh set of eyes-

[David Senra]
Oh, yes

[Ben Wilson]
... it's like an entire new experience.

[David Senra]
You mean rereading the books?

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah, yeah. Rereading the books.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Ben Wilson]
It's a new experience. But some of the things I've been thinking about recently, for example,

[Ben Wilson]
is I think you actually do an exceptional job of this with "Founders," which is

[Ben Wilson]
the most important realizations

[Ben Wilson]
are negative realizations, are things that you should not do or things that you should not focus on. So one of the great examples, Steve Jobs.

[Ben Wilson]
He's at NeXT, right? He leaves Apple, he founds NeXT.

[Ben Wilson]
And they go to this retreat in Carmel, and he's got his founding team there. And they lay out their five top priorities for a NeXT machine. And it has to be under 10,000 dollars, it has to come out by such and such a date, it has to have

[Ben Wilson]
this computing capabilities, it's got to have

[Ben Wilson]
certain other capabilities, five things. Okay. And so he asks his founding team, "Of these, which is the highest priority? What is the most important?" And so they go around and they discuss, and everyone makes the case for the thing that they're working on. Their CMO is advocating for something, their head of software is advocating for something else, head of hardware is advocating for something else. And they get to the end, and he says, "Okay, well, the answer is all of the priorities. We have to have all of these things." As a result, it comes out late, it comes out over budget, it comes out over-engineered. The NeXT machine is a terrible machine.

[David Senra]
It was so bad, it almost put them out of business, and then he had to sell off his hardware division. People don't know, there was a time in Steve Jobs' life where he was a software entrepreneur -

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah, yeah

[David Senra]
... against his own wishes.

[Ben Wilson]
Yes. And even the software itself should have been really successful, and he almost submarines that as well. He manages to get an okay exit out of NeXT, but

[Ben Wilson]
he tanks it. I mean, it's terrible.

[David Senra]
Thirteen years of terrible. Me and you just read the book. I think it's called "Steve Jobs in Exile."

[Ben Wilson]
"Steve Jobs in Exile." Yeah.

[David Senra]
Which I'd highly recommend.

[Ben Wilson]
Really good book.

[David Senra]
Okay. And so then you fast-forward 10 years-

[Ben Wilson]
So

[Ben Wilson]
at this point in time, he's a terrible executive.

[Ben Wilson]
I mean, objectively. Both in the way he's leading and in the results that he gets when it comes to the market. Flash forward 10 years, he has returned to Apple, and his mindset has totally changed, where now he's able to make trade-offs. And so he looks at the iPod

[Ben Wilson]
and he says, "Okay, this is a device that is

[Ben Wilson]
under-engineered in a lot of ways." There are already other MP3 players on the market that have more storage capacity, can read more file formats,

[Ben Wilson]
can do more, just more robust MP3 players. And he says, "I don't think any of that matters. I think the only thing that matters is getting a great user experience that makes it easy for people to quickly get to their music." And so they go to market with this iPod, this MP3 player that is deficient in all these ways, and then it's one of the most successful products of all time because he's able to make that trade-off, right? Of saying, "All these things don't matter." And I think every great product, every great

[Ben Wilson]
leader, every great decision comes from understanding that trade-off and realizing what does not matter. And I think, like I said at the beginning, you do a great job with this because "Founders," you said it doesn't have intro music. There's so much that it lacks that, especially 10 years ago, people would have told you is necessary to a successful podcast. And you just stripped all that away and you said, "I actually don't think any of that matters. The only thing that matters is connecting people to these stories and these founders and these insights."

[David Senra]
Me and you had a conversation about this probably three years ago,

[David Senra]
because you script way more than I do. I have my notes and highlights, but I could literally record an episode of "Founders" today on the same book, do it again tomorrow, it's going to be a different episode. It's just like whatever happens to be on top of mind at that time as I'm reacting live to what's going on. And your whole thing was just like, "Yeah, but what some kind of cohesive story?" I was like, "That's not what I do."

[Ben Wilson]
That's why I think our podcasts are different in a subtle way, and that's fine, right? So it's going to be a different thing because you can think about, okay, the iPod was sort of under-engineered from a hardware standpoint, but had this really elegant software that connected people. For other people, it's going to be the opposite trade-off, right? It's going to be something... Oh, you can look at Elon Musk with the original

[Ben Wilson]
Tesla, with the Roadster. And people said, "It needs great range, it needs to be affordable because people who go for electric cars are very cost-conscious. They do it because they don't want to spend money on gas and that sort of thing." And he had sort of the opposite realization, which is, "No, actually we can go way upmarket. People don't care about any of that stuff as long as it goes fast and it is cool and it's beautiful."

[David Senra]
Yeah, I think he said sexy.

[Ben Wilson]
Sexy.

[David Senra]
Is the way he wanted to talk.

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah. And so you can go, I mean, multiple examples from history that I can think of, but-

[David Senra]
This idea of breaking trade-offs that you and I have talked about in the past, I think is really interesting. Your example for the Wright brothers, I think, is really another great way to describe the idea that you're talking about. Do you want to say-

[Ben Wilson]
That's where I had this original realization is reading about the Wright brothers, because at the time that they're trying to solve flight,

[Ben Wilson]
there are dozens of other people trying to solve flight. It's popular at the time. It's like the AI of the moment, right? A lot of different people are working on it. Everyone realizes it's the future. So why do they succeed? Well, because everyone is doing the obvious thing. And what's the obvious thing?

[Ben Wilson]
You're trying to get something in the air, so you're focusing on propulsion and lift. Of like, you're focused on trying to make something fly. And Wilbur Wright realizes that's actually an easy problem to solve. The hard problem to solve is control, is once you're in the air, can you stay in the air? Because he actually realizes from looking at birds. He's looking at birds and he realizes, "Wow, if you look at them, they're making micro-adjustments,

[Ben Wilson]
multiple micro-adjustments every second." They're shifting their wings, they're moving up and down, they're moving all the time. And so he realizes we actually don't need to focus on lift or on getting into the air at all. We need to focus on once we're in the air, how do we stay in the air? And so he goes to North Carolina, he builds these gliders, and for multiple years, they are just working on control, on once we're in the air, how do we stay?

[David Senra]
And a glider, really it's like a big kite is the way I think about it.

[Ben Wilson]
Big kite.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah, exactly. And they go to North Carolina because there's wind coming off the ocean all the time. And so they just have someone on the ground holding a rope

[Ben Wilson]
while he's in this giant kite figuring out, "All right, how do I steer? How do we change this thing to make it so that we can stay in the air?" At the end, he basically slaps an engine on it and it's done. He was right.

[Ben Wilson]
Once you figure out how to stay in the air, the problem of lift was trivial. And so it was that realization that actually lift is not an important problem to solve that allows them to focus on the more important thing.

[David Senra]
So why do you think breaking trade-offs is such a profound idea?

[Ben Wilson]
Because especially today,

[Ben Wilson]
there are all sorts of ideas about things that matter. So for example, your daily routine.

[Ben Wilson]
I could tell you that yoga is important for your daily routine. I could tell you that lifting weights is important. I could tell you that journaling is important. I could tell you that meditating is important. And you'll find people that tell you all these things. So you have all these ideas of all these routines that you should be doing for your wellness, for

[Ben Wilson]
your health, to be successful in life. If you took all that advice, your morning routine would go until like 1:00 in the afternoon. You would never get anything accomplished, right? It's your ability to say, "Okay, one of these things actually

[Ben Wilson]
is so important that you can take it to the negative, that you can say it's worth cutting out this and this and this and this in order to do." So until you are able to actually make a trade-off, until you are able to say this is more valuable than that, things don't really matter. Like, there's so many priorities competing for your time and attention. You have to be able to make trade-offs if you're going to be successful.

[David Senra]
How have you done that?

[Ben Wilson]
As Steve Jobs said, "Focus means saying no." So it's about all the things that

[Ben Wilson]
I don't do. All of the opportunities that you get as a podcaster that people bring to you that I'm sure you experience as well, that you just say, "No, I'm not going to do that." So for example, I told you early on, people came to me and said, "We want you to design our

[Ben Wilson]
intro music." And so at the beginning, I was trying to do a lot of that work because it was money, and early on I just needed money so that I could keep podcasting. But as time goes on, I just realized, no, I need to stop producing other people's podcasts.

[David Senra]
You were producing-

[Ben Wilson]
"My First Million," yeah.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Ben Wilson]
And eventually I just told them-

[David Senra]
That's how I found you.

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah. I was like, "I need to get out of here. I need to focus on my own thing." I have to stop producing for other people, I have to stop launching these side businesses, I have to stop

[Ben Wilson]
my agency, which I ended up shutting down, and just focus on this one thing so that it can be as successful as it can be.

[David Senra]
Hey, real quick. Instead of having ads in today's episode, my partners Ramp, AppLovin, and Deel are donating to Ben Wilson's GoFundMe. If you are in the position to do so, please consider donating as well. The link to do so is in our show notes. I would greatly appreciate it. Okay, so we have a handful of ideas that you picked up from the eight years that you've been doing this project. Zeal was one, the importance of breaking trade-offs is another. What else do you have?

[Ben Wilson]
What makes someone a great leader? In many ways, that's like the question.

[David Senra]
That you're trying to answer-

[Ben Wilson]
That I'm trying to answer.

[David Senra]
... through telling the life stories of these people.

[Ben Wilson]
That's right.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Ben Wilson]
And in some ways it's different, right? Because I study conquerors and artists and entrepreneurs.

[Ben Wilson]
But the thing I've been looking for is the through lines that connect all of those people. And actually, there's not that many, right? Because again, people are very different. There's different archetypes and different types of leaders, but there are a couple.

[Ben Wilson]
And one of those things, and I think probably the most important, is number one, they have vision. Actually, one of my favorite quotes about vision comes from Genghis Khan. And I love it because it's from Genghis Khan, right? And it sounds like a Silicon Valley guru advice from like 2010, right? But his quote is, "Without the vision of a goal, a man cannot hope to manage his own life, let alone the life of others."

[David Senra]
Mm-hmm.

[Ben Wilson]
And when I saw that, I thought, "Wow, it really is true that the same thing that makes Genghis Khan a great leader is the same thing that makes Edwin Land or Steve Jobs a great leader." They have vision, they have a goal. And then the second thing is that they're able to express or communicate that goal. So

[Ben Wilson]
across any domain, these people are excellent communicators.

[Ben Wilson]
That changes, the medium changes. Some of them are great writers, some of them are great speakers,

[Ben Wilson]
some of them are great at writing essays, some of them are

[Ben Wilson]
better at long form,

[Ben Wilson]
some of them are great at one-on-one, some mass communication. But in any way,

[Ben Wilson]
in any situation, in some way, they are great communicators. So they have a vision and they're able to communicate it to a lot of people.

[Ben Wilson]
And the third thing I would say is they are able to focus, so they're able to shut out everything else. And to me, those are like the three great through lines of great leaders across industries, domains, conquerors, artists, entrepreneurs. That's what links them.

[David Senra]
But do you find as you're studying these people, like you notice where you might be deficient in these traits? And are you able to change your behavior once you have the access to that new information?

[Ben Wilson]
I hope so.

[Ben Wilson]
I am trying to communicate it to other people, and I'm trying to be helpful as a sherpa to connect other people to great leaders, but I hope that I'm able to internalize those. I try to. I spend a lot of time thinking about the ways that I'm doing it as well. I'm sure you do as well, right? You're trying to implement the stuff that you're learning into Founders podcast.

[David Senra]
Yeah. The whole activity is just completely selfish.

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
It's just like I didn't have positive examples from childhood, I didn't have a mentor, I didn't have anything. The whole Founders is going to be 10 years old this month, in 10 days from now or something.

[Ben Wilson]
Wow.

[David Senra]
And the whole idea came from this random interview with Elon Musk I saw in 2012. And he was asked, "You come to this country with no money,

[David Senra]
you didn't know anybody. Did you have mentors? Who helped you?" And he's like, "No, I didn't have mentors. I looked for mentors in a historical context." And he says, "I thought reading biographies and autobiographies were helpful." And at the time, it was like huge mad. This is a huge Tesla fan, and they only had the Model S at the time. And he mentioned Henry Ford and Nikola Tesla, and now I can't even remember the other people in there. I probably said this-

[Ben Wilson]
Edison, yeah.

[David Senra]
Yeah, Edison and Ben Franklin.

[Ben Wilson]
He thinks they're basically the same person, by the way.

[David Senra]
Ben Franklin, which is another one. I want you to say more about that in one second. And I was like, "Oh, I should just read more biographies and autobiographies." And then you start doing that, and you're like, "Oh, this is super valuable because this person lived an entire life." And then somebody... Essentially, the way I think about it is like somebody had a 40-year career, somebody spent multiple years writing about that, documenting all the lessons that person learned. I can read it in 40 hours and then turn it into a podcast that you can listen to in 45 minutes. That compression is insanely valuable for people where their time is excessively valuable and scarce.

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
Why do you think Edison and Musk, or Edison and Elon are similar?

[Ben Wilson]
Well, their lives are just

[Ben Wilson]
linked in really remarkable ways. Musk himself has pointed this out. He said, "The car company is called Tesla, but in many ways, I'm more similar to Thomas Edison than I am to Nikola Tesla." Because he is a great inventor,

[Ben Wilson]
but more than that, he's also a great industrialist. He's great at bringing products to market and making them successful. Their personalities are extremely similar. Their backgrounds are extremely similar. Their physionomy, they look very similar. They both have these massive heads that people would comment on.

[Ben Wilson]
Their

[Ben Wilson]
fathers are very similar, that they're both these kind of entrepreneurial but kind of crazy, and they don't have a great relationship with them.

[David Senra]
There's some wild stories in Edison's biographies because you remember, he was the most famous person. When he was alive, he was the most famous person in America.

[Ben Wilson]
Right.

[David Senra]
And so Walt Disney said Edison was his hero. Jeff Bezos said Edison was his hero. You hear this over and over again. But I remember reading this book by Edison. I think it was published in 1957. And when he was five or six years old, he misbehaved, and they lived in this little town or little village. They literally put up a note saying that, "Come to the town square on Saturday morning and watch me beat the shit out of my kid." That literally happened to him. And then you hear Elon tells these crazy stories. I think Erik Jorgensen was on this podcast earlier about his book of Elon, where I think Elon relates a story one time where his dad gets in his face when I think Elon's 10 or something, and he's just screaming for hours about how stupid and useless and that he'll never be successful.

[Ben Wilson]
Well, and both of them were considered actually kind of dumb as kids. So in Elon's case, it's probably because he's a little autistic and has trouble

[Ben Wilson]
communicating with people and emoting with them. In Edison's case, it was because he was mostly deaf and so had trouble communicating with people for that reason. And so, yeah, they were not shepherded towards greatness as children. They kind of had to fight for it because people didn't think they were bright initially. There's even one weird biographical element where Elon is from South Africa, but his mother's family actually are transplants. He has deep roots in America and Canada. So,

[Ben Wilson]
Elon's family was in Canada, and he had a great-grandfather who was a

[Ben Wilson]
politically minded preacher who got in trouble with the government and so fled over the border from Canada to the US and ended up living in Minnesota or Iowa. Edison has his grandfather on his maternal side is like the exact same person, but he was in the US, was kind of a preacher, kind of got in trouble with the government. People ran him out of town. They had to move to Canada across the border. So it's like weird biographical things between the two of them that make you wonder if it's like the same person reborn. It makes you believe in reincarnation.

[David Senra]
You collect these things even more than I do, where you pick up on these weird things. Like you just said, a lot of these people have giant heads. People talk about how big their head is.

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah. Oprah's one of those, by the way.

[David Senra]
Who?

[Ben Wilson]
Oprah.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Ben Wilson]
So when she was an actress, they couldn't find hats for her that were big enough to fit over her.

[David Senra]
I have something. I was tormented when I was a kid because my head basically was this size, but I kind of grew into it as I got older. But my brother, my friends were over when I was in elementary school, and he's like, "Shut up, basketball head." I'm like, "Oh, no. He said the nickname." And then they brought it back to school, and then they called me Lollipop because I was super skinny and I had this giant round head.

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
But no, so you mentioned the big-headed thing. You mentioned

[David Senra]
that they had weird diets, which I think, didn't Edison just drink milk or something?

[Ben Wilson]
Milk. He was very into milk for a while. Yeah, he would only drink milk.

[David Senra]
So they had weird diets, and then insane levels of energy, though, is another thing that-

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah

[David Senra]
... you would pick up on. Again, it's just mentioned. Sometimes it's not even a main part of a book. You're just like, "Oh, that's weird." It's mentioned a few times about this guy has unusual, Napoleon, same thing, unusual levels of energy.

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah. I mean, that was one of those things I felt like I was going crazy, like a person with a corkboard who's connecting all the strings. But in the first five biographies I did, Napoleon has a quote, "If you want to dine well, dine with Campuserris." That's one of those, right. "If you want to dine poorly, dine with Lebrun." He's kind of making fun of him because he's German. "If you want to dine quickly-" ... dine with me, because he would eat dinner in, like, 15 minutes, right? And get back to work.

[David Senra]
But his dinner was, like, a whole chicken.

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah. Well, no, because he ate... Well, as he got older, he got kind of portly, but when he was young, he was known for being a peckish eater. Not only would he eat quickly, but he would eat light. He would not eat very much at all, and it was commented on how little he ate. And then you read about Steve Jobs, and he has all these weird diets. He eats almost nothing. He'll go on diets where he only eats apples for months at a time, right? And he eats very little. And then you read about Vladimir Putin, and this is someone who would eat, like, a boiled egg in a day, as his entire diet. And then you read about Joan of Arc, and she fasts all the time, and she barely eats anything. And before I realized it, I've got 20 stories of all these people who are all extremely light eaters, and it's like, "Wow, something weird is going on here." And the realization I've come to is, it's obviously not about the food, right? It's not about the food. But what it is, I think food is a good test for if you're obsessed with something. Do you find yourself skipping meals? Do you find yourself forgetting to eat? That is a really good litmus test for whether you are truly obsessed with something or not, and all these people are obsessives. And so, yes, they eat very peckishly because they're so obsessed with something else.

[David Senra]
I think when you had these three ideas that you were connecting, I think the fourth one, you said focus, and maybe obsession could be interchangeable, but I think you would have to add the fourth leg of that would have to be obsession.

[Ben Wilson]
Obsession. Oh, yeah.

[David Senra]
Like, they just don't write about books about normal, well-adjusted people. They're all obsessive. I mean, if you look back, even on that counter, there's probably, I don't know, 25 books. I see John D. Rockefeller looking at me right now. It's just like every single person they wrote a book about is just obsessed about weird shit.

[Ben Wilson]
I think, for me, I would love to know what book you think best communicates

[Ben Wilson]
that obsession. For me, there's one book I... Well, there are a few books I reread, but there's one I reread every year, and it is "Arnold's Education of a Bodybuilder."

[David Senra]
It's literally right back. It's on the right shelf, one, two, three, five books up.

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
I can see it from here.

[Ben Wilson]
And it's because a lot of these biographies or autobiographies are written retrospectively. And "Education of a Bodybuilder" is written right in the middle of it, and you can just feel the obsession, right? This is someone who not was obsessed in the past and then now has gotten to a better place. This is someone who is obsessed right now, who can't stop thinking about bodybuilding and his craft. And so I just, even though I'm not...

[David Senra]
No, you were jacked.

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah, I was more jacked.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Ben Wilson]
But anyway, but

[Ben Wilson]
that level of obsession comes through. I don't think I've found anyone who is better able to communicate what it feels like to be in that in the moment than "Education of a Bodybuilder."

[David Senra]
But I think he also does in that book, because the first 120 pages, you don't really have to read the first 120 pages because the second half of the book is literally his workouts.

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah, I don't read that.

[David Senra]
I think he's 30 when the book is published, and I figure it's an autobiography of the first

[David Senra]
30 years of his life. But how you were just connecting all of these traits that appear across whether they're a conqueror, an artist, they were living in different parts of history, different parts of the country, or the world, rather. There's a through line there. He identified the same way that I got to the top of this weird, obscure profession, because at the time, being a bodybuilder was like a freak.

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
Like, you were a weirdo. There was almost no money in it. It's like, "What are you doing?" I think when he started in Austria, he said there's, like, five bodybuilders in the entire country.

[Ben Wilson]
Right.

[David Senra]
It's like his parents literally thought something was wrong with him.

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
And he's like, "Well, actually, if you break down where I started and where I'm at, and then look at all the things I used to get there," he's like, "I'm going to use the same exact playbook that I got to the top of bodybuilding to build a business empire," he talks about, "to get to the top of movies." He didn't mention politics, I don't think, but he's like, "No, I'm just going to take that same playbook," and he's calling a shot before he does it.

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
He's only 30. He's like, "I'm just going to run the same playbook and these same traits, and if I apply this discipline and obsession to whatever I aim it at, I will be successful." It's incredible.

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah. Well, and to the point about politics,

[Ben Wilson]
as a foreign-born person, he cannot be President of the United States.

[Ben Wilson]
Governor of California is basically the highest office that you can achieve for someone from his background, and he achieved it, right? So yes, across four domains,

[Ben Wilson]
he does it. And he says that he is obsessed with the stories of Alexander the Great and Napoleon and people like that.

[David Senra]
Charlemagne.

[Ben Wilson]
And Charlemagne, yeah. He loves that stuff. And it's interesting because it was, you talked about, it was kind of looked down on. And so, his parents are concerned. It was viewed as shady and weird. But having said that, he talks about how once he is locked into a vision, a goal for himself, everyone starts helping him, right? People at lunch at his middle school, or I guess at this point he's in high school, are like, "Hey, Arnold, you need to get bigger. Have my milk."

[David Senra]
Mm-hmm.

[Ben Wilson]
"Oh, you need to rest up for your competition. Let me carry that for you." People are doing stuff. There's this good quote by Goethe, the author. He says, "At the moment of commitment, the entire universe conspires to assist you."

[David Senra]
I love that.

[Ben Wilson]
It's such a good quote. And you see that in the life of Arnold. When he commits and he has that vision and he articulates it to everyone, he's like, "Hey, I know you guys think this is freakish, but I am going to achieve this." Everyone is like, "Okay, what can I do to help?" And all these strangers are helping him.

[David Senra]
I'm so glad you said that. I think that's such an important point. My friend Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify, said this about me. He's just like, "You're very easy to understand, so therefore you're very easy to help."

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
He's like, "All you care about is podcasting. That's it." So it's like if somebody... And you have this passion, you try to preach to other people, and so therefore, if somebody wants to help you, you're very legible. It's not like, "Oh, how can I help this guy?" It's like, "Well, he's just obsessed with podcasts, so there's a million different ways that you could help him in that domain." And I feel the great founders do this, too. They're able to explain in just a handful of words what's important to them. And the example I always use, if you went to the studio back there in the other house,

[David Senra]
and you see on the desk where I record founders, there's just one sticky note that's right in front of me. I don't even think you could see it on camera. And it says three words, "Insanely great products." And Steve Jobs was able to describe what was important to him when he was 19 to when he was 55, insanely great products. Do you want to make insanely great products? Then come with me. If you're not interested in this, remove yourself from my life. He's very easy to understand.

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah. I love that idea. That's a great framework. Make yourself easy to help.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Ben Wilson]
Because that's connected, of course, to having a very clear vision. And once you do have a clear vision, once you make yourself easy to help, it really does. It feels like people are conspiring- ... to assist you. Stuff just starts popping out of the woodwork to get you where you want to go.

[David Senra]
Tell me, you've studied way more religious figures than I have. You've done more episodes on them. Tell me what

[David Senra]
you've learned about reading about these kind of people.

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah, I've done a few religious figures, Jesus, Brigham Young, Joan of Arc. I mean, in some ways, actually, even though I'm a Latter-day Saint, so Brigham Young is the one most connected, and Jesus are the most connected to my faith tradition. Joan of Arc, even though she was Catholic, is maybe the one that's captured my

[Ben Wilson]
attention the most. How much do you know about Joan of Arc?

[David Senra]
Almost nothing.

[Ben Wilson]
Really interesting.

[David Senra]
I listened to that episode, but it was three years ago.

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah, it was a long time ago. I mean, a really interesting person. She's a great example of what we're talking about, right? Because

[Ben Wilson]
she comes onto a scene, she's 15 years old. She's a girl. It's the Middle Ages. People are literally swinging swords and throwing spears, right? She's no place on a battlefield. She's so young, and besides being young, she fasts a lot. She's malnourished. She's this thin, right? She's little.

[Ben Wilson]
And the French have been trying to kick the English out of France

[Ben Wilson]
for years and years and years, and making no progress.

[Ben Wilson]
And she shows up, and immediately,

[Ben Wilson]
once the French start following her, they have success.

[Ben Wilson]
And it's impossible to explain. It is actually one of those things that makes you start to believe in the divine because you're like, "Whoa." "What is going on here?" But if you want to explain it in a material sense, it just is there's only one thing that's different about her and everyone else, which is before her, the King of France

[Ben Wilson]
and these dukes that are assisting him and all these field marshals, they all have these competing priorities and all this stuff they're trying to do. And then here comes along this young girl who says, "I have one priority. That one priority is winning this war against the English.

[Ben Wilson]
God is on our side. Follow me. We will be victorious."

[Ben Wilson]
So she has just that clarity of vision. Then everyone lines up behind her, and they immediately start having success because of that clarity. And so it's just this remarkable example of

[Ben Wilson]
she lacks literally everything else except for focus and clarity of vision, and only having that is enough to be victorious.

[David Senra]
I don't know why, but there's this great essay by Paul Graham that comes to mind when I hear you speak about this. It's just like, he was like, "Well, what's more predictive of success, intelligence or determination?" And he has this thought experiment in there. He said, "Well, let's say you started out with one person that's 100 out of 100 with intelligence and 100 out of 100 with determination." He's like, "It doesn't take long if you just keep the intelligence and you just take away determination, you have this brilliant yet ineffectual person." And he's writing to entrepreneurs, and he goes, "If you do the reverse where you keep the determination at 100 out of 100, but you take away intelligence," he's like, "You have someone that winds up rich, but they have trash hauling businesses or something."

[Ben Wilson]
Right.

[David Senra]
They just won't stop. So they eventually stumble into something, a way to serve other people, and they just keep doing it because their determination's at max level.

[Ben Wilson]
Well, you look at these people. I don't think Elon Musk is the smartest person at any of his companies. He's very, very smart. Don't get me wrong, he's extremely smart. But you could probably find an engineer with a higher IQ at Tesla, definitely at SpaceX you could, with a higher IQ than Elon. And the same thing with Steve Jobs. He was not the smartest person at his company,

[Ben Wilson]
but they are the most determined.

[Ben Wilson]
You don't find people like that. They are insane people in how determined they are. Elon has a great quote. Someone asks him, "How do you stay an optimist about..." Because he's trying to accomplish these big things. He's trying to go to Mars. He's trying to

[Ben Wilson]
save the world in terms of save our climate with electric cars,

[Ben Wilson]
save the world from AI with Grok. And so they say, "How do you keep your optimism?" And he says, "Optimism, pessimism, screw that. I'm going to get it done." And that's it. That's the level of determination. He doesn't think about

[Ben Wilson]
optimism, whether he can do it or he can't do it. It's just, "I have to do it. It has to be done." And so that feeling, that level of determination is what separates these people from everyone else.

[David Senra]
I thought your Brigham Young episodes, you did two or three?

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
Multiple parts.

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
Were excellent. If that was your main takeaway from Joan of Arc, what would your main takeaway from Brigham be? Aren't you related to him?

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah, he is my great-great-grandfather.

[Ben Wilson]
From Brigham, I think

[Ben Wilson]
my main takeaway was, A, again, finding something you believe in. This was someone who was a true believer. Number two, unceasing action. Again, this is someone who's not that smart. A lot of the people who followed him were a lot smarter than him. But this is someone who was unbelievably determined and was just relentless, just would not stop.

[Ben Wilson]
There's a good quote about

[Ben Wilson]
another Latter-day Saint, Brandon Flowers, lead singer of The Killers.

[Ben Wilson]
And The Killers were a part of all these group of bands that got big in the early 2000s. So you had The Killers, and you had Franz Ferdinand, and whatever,

[Ben Wilson]
The Strokes. And they all have albums that hit it big

[Ben Wilson]
at around the same time. Brandon Flowers is Mormon, doesn't drink, doesn't do drugs, doesn't smoke, doesn't really party. And so they were interviewing, I think it was the lead singer of The Strokes, and he was saying, "We all had these hit albums at the same time, and we have a hit album, and we're touring, and we're partying, and we're having a good time. And I'm in the middle of this, and all of a sudden I read The Killers have put out another album. And I'm like, 'Will you please calm down? We're trying to enjoy the fruits of our labor here.'"

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Ben Wilson]
And it's that feeling of relentlessness. That's what you get when competitors talk about these people who succeed. It's always like, "Will you please slow down?" Will you please act like a normal person? Because the level of determination and relentless action that they take is not normal.

[David Senra]
And you saw that in Brigham?

[Ben Wilson]
I saw that in Brigham Young. I mean, he had

[Ben Wilson]
more of that relentlessness than almost anyone I've ever read about.

[David Senra]
What about Jesus?

[Ben Wilson]
Jesus, of course, is, depending on your belief, part God. It's difficult to

[Ben Wilson]
square with everyone else. But Jesus,

[Ben Wilson]
the thing that separates him is... Well, one of the things you see in early Christianity is something that's similar to Nike. I remember reading about Nike, reading the biography of Phil Knight. You're kind of waiting for this moment of like, all right, when does stuff really... What changes?

[Ben Wilson]
And soon you realize nothing changes. The company grows 50% every year for 20 years, and it's just this idea of compounding. And it's the same thing with Jesus.

[Ben Wilson]
You're waiting for kind of the big break of Christianity, and it never really happens. It's just Christianity grows 50% per year every year for centuries until it becomes the dominant ideology in the entire world.

[Ben Wilson]
Jesus, his ability to persuade, I think, is

[Ben Wilson]
the number one thing that I took away from him. There was something about him, and we can get into some of it. The Paul Johnson biography, I think, does a really good job of-

[David Senra]
That's the one I read, because it's a biography of Jesus written by a believer.

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
And my point was,

[David Senra]
my mom was a fundamentalist Christian. Unfortunately, she took it to a very extreme. She got diagnosed with cancer and to the point where she tried to pray her cancer away. And it took me two years to convince her

[David Senra]
to go to an oncologist. And then at that point, I'm living in Miami, she's in Orlando, and literally, I had to drive up there

[David Senra]
to go to every appointment with her because if I didn't go, she would just skip the appointments.

[David Senra]
So it's like, I have a hard time reconciling this even to this day

[David Senra]
because I went to church every single Sunday against my will, many cases Wednesday night. But my point was just, I wanted to

[David Senra]
make an episode as like, if you believe that Jesus is Christ and God, that you would get something out of it. And if you don't believe that-

[Ben Wilson]
Right.

[David Senra]
... what are the facts that we don't... Nothing supernatural, just what do we actually know about the person that we know existed?

[Ben Wilson]
Right.

[David Senra]
And I think Paul Johnson's biography is the best. If you want that story, I think Paul Johnson's biography is the best book to read on that.

[Ben Wilson]
Well, because Paul Johnson talks about how often the eyes of Jesus are described. All the time in the New Testament, it's talking about, "And Jesus looked, and Jesus beheld." It's always talking about where he's looking and his eyes. And it's one of these things. This is another one that's kind of like the light-eater thing that you're like, "Whoa, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills." So many of these people are light-eaters.

[Ben Wilson]
So many of them, people talk about their eyes.

[David Senra]
They have these intense stares.

[Ben Wilson]
They have these intense eyes and these intense stares, whether that is Steve Jobs or Alexander Hamilton or Jesus. All these people have these remarkable stares.

[David Senra]
Out of the conquerors, the dictators, the religious figures, the artists, the entrepreneurs, if you could only study one category of these people personally, what do you find most fascinating?

[Ben Wilson]
Probably the conquerors.

[Ben Wilson]
I just think that

[Ben Wilson]
life is made of hierarchies.

[Ben Wilson]
We're all competing in these different hierarchies,

[Ben Wilson]
whether that is social, whether that is career,

[Ben Wilson]
economic, athletic, artistic. People compete. That's what people do, and it forms these hierarchies.

[Ben Wilson]
But the highest hierarchy, the one that kind of is at the top of everything else, is the hierarchy of violence, the people who can most effectively channel violence, and that's conquerors. And so they

[Ben Wilson]
are the ones who sit atop

[Ben Wilson]
the artists. They commission all the great art. And the great merchants, the great entrepreneurs, the great founders

[Ben Wilson]
ultimately kind of have to be responsive to politics at the end of the day. So,

[Ben Wilson]
I think those are the most interesting stories because that is the pinnacle of human achievement, is conquest.

[David Senra]
Are there any other books that you reread every year? Like you said, you reread "The Education of a Bodybuilder" by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

[Ben Wilson]
Well, one I read for fun every year is "Ender's Game." I do reread. Have you read "Ender's Game?"

[David Senra]
I don't think so.

[Ben Wilson]
That's fiction that you would love.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
I listened to the audiobook.

[Ben Wilson]
Okay.

[David Senra]
Yeah, because I was really interested in Sean Parker for a while. This is probably 10 years ago. Whenever he popped up on Twitter one time and just had this epic run and it kind of disappeared. I was like, "What is going on here?" And I remember hearing him in an interview talk about "Ender's Game," and I think I listened to the audiobook probably a decade ago.

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah.

[Ben Wilson]
And then "Mind of Napoleon," since I discovered it, I have reread that every year.

[David Senra]
I just did another episode on it.

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah. I saw it.

[David Senra]
Again, same thing, 300 pages of just Napoleon in his own words, published in, again, 1956, 1957. It's one of the best books you could ever read.

[Ben Wilson]
One of the things that I think you highlighted well that I've been thinking about recently is Napoleon was an unbelievably religious person.

[Ben Wilson]
And that's obviously not true in a traditional sense. He was not very Catholic. He was not a believing

[Ben Wilson]
Christian by any stretch of the imagination.

[Ben Wilson]
But the way he talks about destiny, destiny was clearly his God.

[David Senra]
He says, "Destiny must be fulfilled. That is my chief doctrine."

[Ben Wilson]
Yes.

[Ben Wilson]
And he treated destiny like God. He had this unbelievable faith in it. And I actually think that Steve Jobs was an incredibly religious person, too. He was a believer, even though it's not a traditional... It was kind of this California-

[David Senra]
Yeah

[Ben Wilson]
... atheistic, agnostic Buddhism, right? But he really, really- ... believed in it. And I think that sincerity of belief is part of what allowed them to be successful. I think people who are kind of double-minded are always unstable and unable to make...

[David Senra]
What do you mean by double-minded?

[Ben Wilson]
People who espouse things that they don't really believe in, who maybe believe only lukewarmly in what they're actually trying to pursue. Like, you are a great example of a real believer. You believe in founders, in the mission of founders, and what it's trying to accomplish. And you can tell there are certain podcasters you listen to, they mostly believe, but they don't totally believe in what they're doing.

[David Senra]
We had a podcaster dinner last night, and you should see the text. My partner and co-founder, Rob Moore, is sitting behind me. The text I sent him at like 6:00 this morning about it was like, "Oh, boy."

[Ben Wilson]
So for example, Napoleon,

[Ben Wilson]
true believer. He kind of was able to cast aside Christianity because he didn't really believe in it and have this other religion that he very sincerely believed in. There's another, I can't remember which king it was of France, but he was a Protestant. He had grown up a Protestant, and they wouldn't accept him as king as a Protestant, so he had to convert to Catholicism. So he said, "Paris is worth a mass," and he converted to Catholicism. That king, of course, was not a great conqueror. You are never going to be someone who accomplishes great things in life if you don't have a genuine, sincere belief at the heart of what you do.

[David Senra]
I love the summary of that idea as double-minded. That is really great.

[Ben Wilson]
That's a phrase from the Bible. I didn't come up with that. I think that's in the Old Testament. "A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways."

[David Senra]
Yeah, the way I think about this is we talked about a couple of traits that you, and we've now added obsession as the fourth one, and maybe a fifth one would be the ability to evangelize.

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
And it doesn't matter what it happened to be. I'm thinking of Rockefeller because I see him, his face right now, and what does he evangelize? He wanted to impose order on what he saw as chaos. And the fact is, he controlled not just a commodity, but an entire industry that was brand new that he got in on essentially from day one.

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
And he was able to evangelize highly successful other founders in that same industry to sell their businesses and to come with me on this mission of imposing order into this chaos.

[Ben Wilson]
Because Rockefeller

[Ben Wilson]
has these two influences in life. His father, who has a mania for money. His father is obsessed with money, and he is-

[David Senra]
And having multiple families.

[Ben Wilson]
And having multiple families, right? But-

[David Senra]
He's a bigamist.

[Ben Wilson]
He's a bigamist. He is a huckster. He's always selling these fake cures, whatever. He has mania for money. And his mother is incredibly religious, right? She's old Puritan stock, like real, real Christian woman. And he discovers this biography of Amos Lawrence, who gives away crisp dollar bills, is what he says, and gives away $100,000 in his lifetime. And he's 10 years old, and he tells his

[Ben Wilson]
childhood friend, "I'm going to be worth $100,000 someday. I'm going to do it, too."

[Ben Wilson]
Because Amos Lawrence is this guy who gave away $100,000, and he found in that the ability to bring together his two passions, which were money and Christianity. And so he was able to

[Ben Wilson]
justify those two things and then have this very sincere belief. I think my favorite quote about belief comes from

[Ben Wilson]
Phil Knight. And he talks about, in "Shoe Dog," trying to sell encyclopedias and then trying to sell-

[David Senra]
Mutual funds.

[Ben Wilson]
Yep, mutual funds. He's not that great of a salesman. And then he starts trying to sell Tiger shoes, and he's an exceptional salesman. He'd sell like crazy.

[David Senra]
Can't keep them in stock.

[Ben Wilson]
Yes. And he says, "What is the difference between the first two things and the third?" And he says, "Belief, I decided. Belief is irresistible." I love that quote. "Belief is irresistible." And it's so true. When you find someone who really believes, it's irresistible.

[David Senra]
Yeah, passion is infectious.

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
There's people, I always talk about this guy named Steve Rinella.

[David Senra]
He's a podcaster, a writer. He makes this show on Netflix. He does a bunch of things, right? I think primarily he might describe himself as a writer, and his writing is incredible. But he has a passion for the life of outdoors, hunting, fishing, camping. These are things I don't even do. But the guy is so, first of all, so intelligent and is mission-driven, right? And so passionate. I said one time, I was like, "This guy could read, he could make a podcast of reading the phone book, and I would just listen to him." Because I'm not even interested in the same subjects he is, but his passion has infected me. And then he's also taught me a ton about the natural world and history and all these other people that played a role in

[David Senra]
the frontier and all this other crazy stuff, a lot of it being American history.

[David Senra]
Yeah, it's just like I got completely wrapped up in this guy's passion-

[Ben Wilson]
Yes.

[David Senra]
... and he made me part of his mission.

[Ben Wilson]
That's what's irresistible about it, right? It's like it's not even something you care about, and yet for that moment, you kind of get sucked into this vortex of passion.

[David Senra]
Yeah, and then he pulls, very similar to the work that you and I do, he pulls these ideas or these principles out that he might have learned from on a very grueling 11-day hunt in Alaska, but that are applicable to whether you're building a company or conquering a nation or

[David Senra]
creating a sculpture.

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
It's like these principles you can adapt across these different domains, these different professions. Is there anything that you feel, because our work overlaps a lot, that you have discovered that I'm missing?

[Ben Wilson]
You really believe in the insights, and I really believe in the power of the story.

[Ben Wilson]
And I don't think either of those approaches are wrong. So I don't think there's anything missing. I don't think there's anything I have found that you haven't found. At least nothing that comes to mind. Because honestly, a lot of the lessons are

[Ben Wilson]
the lessons. You learn them pretty quick. For me, that's why I like to focus on- The stories is because, but sometimes when it's framed in a slightly different way, with a slightly different problem or a slightly different setting, all of a sudden it clicks for you. Brigham Young,

[Ben Wilson]
I learn the same things that I learned from Edwin Land or I learned from Joan of Arc.

[Ben Wilson]
But just that slightly different setting, that different personality, the way the challenge is framed

[Ben Wilson]
will make it click differently for you at a different time. So that's why I get very intrigued by the stories, and that's just why we have different approaches, I think.

[David Senra]
So that, I think, is the perfect time or spot to transition into the second thing that I want to talk to you about, which is, I've said I think a few times in this episode, you're one of my favorite podcasters. My life has greatly benefited from your work, and I think you're world-class at what you do. And I think I've told you this even before you thought there was a business here, and I remember these conversations we were having about like, "Hey, ditch the agency. Stop producing," doing all this other stuff, right? I remember that one night when we were in Austin, it was me, you, and Cliff Weitzman. Do you remember this conversation?

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
And essentially, me, you, and Cliff talked about your business and your podcast for probably 90 minutes, because both Cliff and I were super fans of your work, and we were just like, "Man, if you just focus, you have the thing. You've already done the difficult thing." And so, obviously called you. I'll give some background here. I was about to record with Mickey Malka. I was in the Bay Area, and I try to sell ads for you all the time. I don't get any money off of it. Just do it because I love you and I want you to succeed. And I remember like, "Hey, Ben, I only got 60 seconds. I'm about to record, but I have a good partner for you, I think. Do you have any ad inventory?" And you're like, "Well, something's going on with the podcast I need to tell you about." And then I was like, "All right, just tell me now." And he's like, "I don't want to ruin your recording." And I was like, "Ben, what the fuck is going on?" And you're like, "I have cancer." And I was like, "Oh, shit." And then I was like, "I'm going to call you back when I'm done." And then we obviously talked about it, and then you did what I think is one of the most profound

[David Senra]
episodes I've ever heard, which is on the "How to Take Over the World" feed, and it's called "The Cancer Episode." And you lay out what you're going through right now, and then your

[David Senra]
perspective on this. It's just like,

[David Senra]
I don't know a word to say. It's remarkable. So can you just tell us what's going on right now in your life, and then what's going on in your mind as you go through this experience?

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah.

[Ben Wilson]
So,

[Ben Wilson]
I was feeling terrible. I was feeling really bad, and I went in and saw a doctor, and it was just this primary care doctor. I didn't even have a doctor because I don't like to go see the doctor. So I met this woman for the first time, and I say, "I got all this stuff going on. I'm losing weight. I can't really explain it." And she starts poking around in my body, and she pokes me and says, "What's that?" And I said, "I don't know."

[David Senra]
Where did she poke you at?

[Ben Wilson]
Right here, right in my liver. And she said, "You need to go get scanned right away." And so I got scanned, and I had a lot of cancer. Like, a lot of cancer. To the point some of these oncologists were like, "How did you just keep functioning normally? How did you not come see a doctor earlier?"

[David Senra]
What was your answer to that question?

[Ben Wilson]
Everything in my life,

[Ben Wilson]
you get aches and pains, and they all go away. I had always gotten better. You know what I mean? My back hurts, okay, rest a little bit, it'll get better. And so, yeah, stuff had started hurting, but I was getting older, and I just thought

[Ben Wilson]
stuff would get better. And it was really only after months that I thought, "This is really not normal." And

[Ben Wilson]
so that's why. That's why I hadn't gone in earlier. I think that's true of a lot of men, by the way. So,

[Ben Wilson]
go get checked out if something feels off.

[David Senra]
Didn't you say that you were initially reluctant to go to the doctor and then you were putting your

[David Senra]
symptoms into Claude?

[Ben Wilson]
Yes.

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah, I still was putting it off,

[Ben Wilson]
even as things were getting worse. And I put my symptoms into Claude, and Claude sort of said, "This isn't the kind of thing like go in next week when you have a chance. This is the kind of thing like

[Ben Wilson]
go in right now. If you can't be seen right now, go to an emergency room." And Claude was right. So if I had been untreated, if I lived in a world where there were no cancer treatments, I probably would have been dead within a few months. It was really, really bad. I lost 40 pounds, so

[Ben Wilson]
things were very bad. And the initial prognosis was

[Ben Wilson]
one year.

[Ben Wilson]
And if you go and look up

[Ben Wilson]
the survival statistics for the type of cancer I had and the amount of spread that I had, the five-year survival rate is 0%. So, this is all stuff I'm reading, and it's very sobering.

[Ben Wilson]
Having said that,

[Ben Wilson]
the amount of new treatments that are coming out for all sorts of different types of cancers is remarkable. We live in a really remarkable age. And so,

[Ben Wilson]
I hope not to die in the next five years.

[Ben Wilson]
I have to live in two different worlds. One being, I have to prepare. I have to prepare my family

[Ben Wilson]
that I might not be here. But at the same time, I've also got to live like I've got my entire life in front of me, because that also might be the case. And so

[Ben Wilson]
that's where I've been, is trying to live two lives at once. One in which I die sometime in the next year, and one in which I've got 20 years.

[David Senra]
What kind of cancer do you have?

[Ben Wilson]
It's called neuroendocrine.

[Ben Wilson]
Primary neuroendocrine carcinoma, stage four,

[Ben Wilson]
metastatic.

[Ben Wilson]
Neuroendocrine means the cells that form

[Ben Wilson]
your endocrine system, so that's your hormones, as well as your neurological system, so it's like your nerves.

[Ben Wilson]
So it's those types of cells. It's very similar. It's related to

[Ben Wilson]
small cell, like smoker's cancer, small cell lung cancer.

[Ben Wilson]
But mine, it started in the lungs as like a sort of very not aggressive cancer, and then at some point, it spread to my liver, and at that point it became metastatic. And it transformed and mutated and became very aggressive.

[David Senra]
Where has it spread to?

[Ben Wilson]
The liver is the main thing, and then the lungs and the spine and my brain. The brain is maybe the biggest issue right now that we're trying to work with.

[David Senra]
And on the episode, you were talking about some kind of therapies and drugs that you were trying to do. What have you done so far?

[Ben Wilson]
So far, I've just done chemo, and I finished chemotherapy for now, which is excellent. It feels great to be done. And now I'm starting on a drug called toripalimab, which is we call our second line. So, the chemo did a good job of pushing back some of my cancer. I feel way better than I did at the beginning of this. And now we're just going to see if we can keep that going. And if toripalimab works for me, then I've got great prospects. And if it doesn't, then we've got to try and figure out something else in a hurry.

[David Senra]
I don't want to poke and prod you and make you uncomfortable, but you have four small kids.

[David Senra]
If there's anything that anybody in the audience can do to help you,

[David Senra]
I want to give them as much detail as possible and surface area to hopefully find some lucky thing for us, for you and your wife and your kids. So if you can describe the drug that you're on. We were on the phone two days ago about this.

[David Senra]
What are some of the prospects? What are the good news? Because essentially, we just need to buy you more time.

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
Because there's just way more, whether it's AI, whether it's just immunotherapy, whether it's just new drugs. We just need to buy more years, is what we're trying to do. So explain what's going on with this new drug.

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah.

[Ben Wilson]
So toripalimab is,

[Ben Wilson]
it's technically not an immunotherapy, but it's very similar to an immunotherapy. And

[Ben Wilson]
the encouraging news is

[Ben Wilson]
toripalimab was initially approved for people with small cell lung cancer. And there, it helped extend life expectancies by six months to a year, which is still a good time that you would take.

[Ben Wilson]
But there is a certain subset of people who have my type of cancer

[Ben Wilson]
who have only been on the drug for two years, and they've been on it for two years, and it's working.

[Ben Wilson]
And that's all we know. It's only been two years, so maybe it's going to stop working any moment now, but maybe not. So that's the hope that we have right now.

[Ben Wilson]
But the assumption that I'm trying to make is that this will last for a certain amount of time, this drug, toripalimab. And so then we've got to find something else. Every cancer is unique with its own special snowflake, and it's got these different receptors, different markers. And so one that I have is called SMARCA or SMARCA4. And so that's one where there's not a lot of great therapies yet, but there are a lot of clinical trials. And so that's maybe the next thing that we're looking at, is if toripalimab stops working for me, then we go in some of these trials. That's the next

[Ben Wilson]
thing that we can attack with this cancer. So I'm just about to start this new drug and hopefully continue to keep things at bay.

[David Senra]
Is that covered under insurance? How does this work? Is it in short supply?

[Ben Wilson]
So it initially was not covered under my insurance, but they just had

[Ben Wilson]
a new study that they got a positive indication for

[Ben Wilson]
just this month. And so now it is going to be covered, which is great news. And so now the next thing that we're looking at is, can we enhance this with a

[Ben Wilson]
custom mRNA vaccine to make it more effective? That's sort of right now the cutting edge of

[Ben Wilson]
cancer treatment, and that's what we're looking at spending money on right now.

[David Senra]
Do you want to talk about some of the same stuff you shared in terms of your outlook?

[David Senra]
You're a man of faith.

[Ben Wilson]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
I don't have the same faith that you have. I have no idea what happens after somebody dies. But I was just, again, I think that episode you made is one of the most profound podcast episodes ever created. I can't imagine what you're going through, because your kids are all five and under, right?

[David Senra]
You said in that episode where it's like, I think it was the quote maybe by Nietzsche, it's like, "If I could live my life over again the same exact way, I would pick the same life." So, you're a good man. I've been telling everybody this. Much better person than I am, for sure. You found, I think, something you love to do. You have this beautiful family, you have this faith, you have all these friends, you have everything that you wanted in life, and that might be that future deprived from you. And yet,

[David Senra]
the message you're putting out there is not like, "Oh, pity," or, "Woe is me," or, "I'm all sad." It's almost unbelievably positive, for lack of a better description.

[Ben Wilson]
I

[Ben Wilson]
really believe that.

[Ben Wilson]
Especially when you study history. And you study,

[Ben Wilson]
I think about Napoleon. He's fighting in France in the War of the Third or Fourth Coalition or whatever, and his

[Ben Wilson]
armies keep getting wiped out. And so by the end, they are just new conscripts. As soon as they can get them, they put them on a horse and they send them out to the battlefield. And they call them

[Ben Wilson]
children running around on chickens, because it's like baby kids. It's like 16 and 15-year-olds riding around on these new horses that aren't even trained for combat. And so you have all these 16 and 15-year-olds dying in war. You read about the amount of disease. It's like, look-

[Ben Wilson]
If I go next year,

[Ben Wilson]
you can't study history for long and just not realize I've had an amazing life. I really have. I would choose this life over again. It's been great. I have a wife who I love. I have great kids, four kids who I really love. I found my vocation, my calling in life.

[Ben Wilson]
I wake up every day excited about what I get to do. That was not the beginning of my career.

[Ben Wilson]
Working in consulting is not exactly the coal mines, but I didn't love it.

[Ben Wilson]
And so I've got to spend years doing the thing that I love.

[Ben Wilson]
So,

[Ben Wilson]
life ends a little bit early maybe. If it does, that doesn't mean I have this very unfortunate life. I still feel like I've had a very fortunate life. And so,

[Ben Wilson]
context. When I'm going through pain, it's not always easy, and I have bad moments. I think people can get the wrong impression from reading or from watching that podcast. For other people who are going through cancer or going through disease,

[Ben Wilson]
you guys know. You have moments, okay?

[Ben Wilson]
But that's okay. I just try and remember that for the most part, I've had a very charmed life, and I really believe that to be the case.

[David Senra]
Listen, man, I admire you. I'm glad we're friends. I really love your work. I'm really glad you chose to do this with me. I know we were thinking about timing and

[David Senra]
I didn't want you to be reluctant of it, because I do think there's a bunch of

[David Senra]
positive externalities, unpredictable externalities that are going to come out of this conversation. I would just say in closing, if anybody's hearing this and we could do anything, whether you have resources, drugs, anything that could help Ben and his family, please get in touch. We'll leave contact information in the show notes. We'll leave Ben's email address, if you're cool with that, in the show notes as well. But you're a good dude. You got a bad hand, and I want to do anything I can to help you. Thanks for taking the time.

[Ben Wilson]
Thank you. Well, if I can end with one more thing, which is to say,

[Ben Wilson]
I am alive at least in some part

[Ben Wilson]
due to the influence of a man named Jon Huntsman, who was a billionaire from Utah, who decided the thing that he wanted to do with his money was found a world-class cancer institute in Utah. And I tried going through the medical system

[Ben Wilson]
outside of that, and then I got put in this world-class cancer institute, and I've had remarkable care since then. People know me

[Ben Wilson]
and feel like they know me because of the podcast, and people have been remarkably generous. But when you're in this situation, you just can't help but think of all the people who are probably just as good of people as I do, who don't have the type of resources, don't have the type of audience that I have. And so,

[Ben Wilson]
I guess I would also just like to put in a plug for everyone else.

[Ben Wilson]
I do have a lot of resources, and so if you know of someone else in your life who could maybe use it more than me, also be thinking about them. Think about donating to Huntsman Cancer Institute or other cancer research and stuff like that, so other people can be helped out as well. I would really appreciate it.

[David Senra]
This is not an act. This is how he's been since I've known him. Thanks, Ben.

[Ben Wilson]
All right. Thanks, David.

[David Senra]
I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review, and make sure you listen to my other podcast, "Founders." For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through "Founders."

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