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1. #437 The Tycoons: Carnegie, Rockefeller, Gould & Morgan

   14 oktober 2026 · 54 min

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   What I learned from reading The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy by Charles R. Morris. Lees meer

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2. #436 Ari Emanuel's Autobiography

   5 oktober 2026 · 1 uur 10 min

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   What I learned from reading Ari Emanuel's incredible autobiography Roll The Calls. Lees meer

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3. #435 Mark Zuckerberg's Empire

   28 september 2026 · 41 min

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   What I learned from reading Mark: A journey to the heart of history's largest nonterritorial empire by Jeremy Stern. Lees meer

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   0:00 — "For these, I set no bounds in space or time. I have given empire without end." — Latin verse from the Aeneid, recalled by Mark Zuckerberg

   2:55 — "Carthage must be destroyed." — Mark Zuckerberg on Google

   2:59 — Sean Parker observed "this kind of imperial tendency" in Mark.

   3:35 — "Either a Caesar or nothing." (Zuckerberg's shirt)

   4:25 — "What is it like to be one of the most powerful men in human history, who, by age 42 has secured a place in the books that'll be written about his era for centuries after his death?"

   4:55 — "People call him arrogant. He's not. But time after time, his arrogance just turns into truth."

   7:25 — "One day they will be out of office and eventually dead, while Zuckerberg, whose majority control of Meta's voting power makes his removal effectively impossible, could in fifty years still be ruler of his empire."

   8:05 — "The more power a man acquires, the more his empire expands, the more he depends on other people for information about everything from his own court to the furthest reaches of the empire." (The Dictator's Dilemma)

   14:15 — "I think we all have a void in our lives, and the lucky ones find something that fills that space to make us more optimal, to make us a better human being. Mark filled the void with fighting." — Zuckerberg's MMA coach

   16:40 — "There have been too many things that I've tried to build and then have been told, 'Nah, you can't really build that,' by the platform provider. At some level, I'm just like, 'Nah, fuck that.'" — Mark Zuckerberg

   18:05 — "Meta's capital expenditure this year will exceed the military budget of every country on Earth except the United States, China, and Russia."

   18:15 — "This is how it is for him; there is no stopping. He is not like the others…

4. #434 Sam Walton

   21 september 2026 · 49 min

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   What I learned from reading Sam Walton: The Inside Story of America's Richest Man by Vance Trimble. Lees meer

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   0:00 — "To him, making money was only a game, a test of his imagination and expertise to see how far he could drive a business concept."

   1:35 — "Sam's idea was absurdly simple: buy cheap, sell low, every day, and while doing it with a smile."

   2:15 — "If he adopts a business course that doesn't work out, he's neither too vain nor too blind to see his mistake, to say so, and to change his heading one hundred and eighty degrees."

   3:34 — "The secret is work, work, work. I taught the boys how to do it." — Sam's father

   4:34 — "Sam Walton plunged into this new world of merchandising with the keen and furious dedication of a quarterback who was one touchdown behind with two minutes to go."

   5:55 — "Boys, you know we don't make a dime out of the merchandise we sell. We only make our profit out of the paper and string that we save." — J.C. Penney

   11:10 — "No, I'm not whipped. I found Newport, and I found the store. I can find another good town and another Ben Franklin. Just wait and see." — Sam Walton, after losing his first store

   11:35 — "I insist on buying the building that the store is in. I need control over my own destiny." — Sam Walton, arriving in Bentonville

   11:45 — "My store will be number one. It's important for me to be the best. Not one of the best. I must be the best. I want to be the leader in the category I compete in." — Sam Walton

   13:05 — "Sometimes hardship can enlighten and inspire."

   13:15 — "That same boredom and frustration triggered ideas that eventually bought him billions of dollars."

   18:55 — "Many of our best opportunities were created out of necessity, the things that we were forced to learn and do because we started out under financed and under capitalized." — Sam Walton

   19:30 — "If they had something good, we copied it." — Sam Wa…

5. #433 How Michael Bloomberg Works

   14 september 2026 · 49 min

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   What I learned from reading Bloomberg by Michael Bloomberg. Lees meer

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   Sage: ⁠https://founderspodcast.com/sage

6. #432 The Mind of Napoleon

   5 september 2026 · 56 min

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   What I learned from reading The Mind of Napoleon by Napoleon. Lees meer

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   Sage: https://founderspodcast.com/sage

   Some of my favorite quotes:

   0:00 — " The book gives you insight into the mind of a man who combined energy of thought and energy of action to an exceptional degree."

   0:30 — "Work is my element. I am born and built for work. I have known the limitations of my legs, I have known the limitations of my eyes; I have never been able to know the limitations of my working capacity."

   0:52 — "He knows that men have always been the same, that nothing can change their nature. It is from the past that he will draw his lessons in order to shape the present."

   1:33 — "All my life I have sacrificed everything: comfort, self-interest, happiness, to my destiny. Destiny must be fulfilled that is my chief doctrine."

   2:33 — "A consecutive series of great actions never is the result of chance and luck; it always is a product of planning and genius. Is it because they are lucky that [great men] become great? No, but being great, they have been able to master luck. What is luck? The ability to exploit accidents: The vulgar would call this luck, but in fact it is the characteristic of genius."

   3:30 — "Hesitation is fatal; once an action is begun, it must be followed through with the utmost exertion of the will."

   3:44 — "If I have any ambition, it is so natural to me, so innate, so intimately linked with my existence, that it is like the blood that circulates in my veins, like the air that I breathe."

   4:14 — "To have lived without glory, without leaving a trace of one's existence, is to have not lived at all."

   6:25 — "Without great men, we have only mediocre men, and if there had never been anything but mediocre men, we would still be half apes."

   7:20 — "The great majority of men attend to what is necessary only when they feel a need for it-the precise time whe…

7. #431 How Henry Singleton Worked

   31 augustus 2026 · 49 min

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   What I learned from reading Distant Force: A Memoir of the Teledyne Corporation and The Man Who Created It by George Roberts and The Outsiders by William Thorndike. Lees meer

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   Some of my favorite quotes:

   0:00 — "He aggressively repurchased his stock, eventually buying over ninety percent of Teledyne's shares."

   0:45 — "He was known as The Sphinx for his reluctance to speak with either analysts or journalists."

   1:25 — Charlie Munger: "Singleton's financial returns were a mile higher than anyone else's, that they were utterly ridiculous."

   2:00 — Buffett: "The heads of many companies are not skilled in capital allocation. Their inadequacy is not surprising. Most bosses rise to the top because they've excelled in an area such as marketing, production, engineering, administration, or sometimes institutional politics."

   4:10 — Singleton: "Our conclusion was that the key was cash flow. Our attitude towards cash generation and asset management came out of our own thinking. It is not copied."

   4:30 — Buffett: "Henry Singleton has the best operating and capital deployment record in American business. If one took the hundred top business school graduates and made a composite of their triumphs, their record would not be as good as Singleton's."

   9:40 — Singleton: "If anyone wants to follow Teledyne, they should get used to the fact that our quarterly earnings will jiggle. Our accounting is set to maximize cash flow, not reported earnings."

   10:50 — Singleton believed buying stock at attractive prices was self-catalyzing, analogous to coiling a spring that at some future point would surge forward to realize full value."

   11:50 — Singleton: "I don't reserve any day-to-day responsibilities for myself, so I don't get into any particular rut. I do not define my job in any rigid terms, but in terms of having the freedom to do whatever seems to be in the best interest of…

8. #430 How to Write Ads That Sell

   23 augustus 2026 · 1 uur 4 min

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   Claude Hopkins was the greatest copywriter of all time. His ideas were so valuable that when he wrote them down in a book the founder of his advertising firm locked the manuscript in a safe for 20 years. Lees meer

   When the book was finally published it sold over 8 million copies. David Ogilvy said that nobody should work in advertising until they had read the book seven times.

   This episode is what I learned by reading Claude Hopkins' autobiography My Life In Advertising and his legendary book Scientific Advertising.

   Made possible by:

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   Some of my favorite quotes:

   0:00 — "Any man who by a lifetime of excessive application learns more about anything than others owes a statement to his successors."

   5:12 — "The man who works twice as long as his fellows is bound to go twice as far, especially in advertising."

   5:30 — "If I have gone higher than others in advertising or done more, the fact is not due to exceptional ability but to exceptional hours."

   6:48 — "To poverty I owe the fact that I never went to college. I spent those four years in the school of experience instead of the school of theory."

   9:08 — "Which is work and which is play? If a thing is useful, they call it work. If it's useless, they call it play. But one is hard as the other. All the difference I see lies in the attitude of the mind."

   9:32 — "I came to love work as other men love golf. I love it still. The love of work can be cultivated just like the love of play."

   9:58 — "We do best what we like best."

   13:05 — "A good product is its own best salesman. It is uphill work to sell goods without samples."

   15:00 — "We must never judge humanity by ourselves. The things we want, the things we like may appeal to a small minority."

   15:23 — "We must submit all things in advertising to the court of public opinion."

   17:48 — "Some of the greatest successes I have ever known in advertising were ignorant men. One w…

9. #429 Bob Dylan's Autobiography

   16 augustus 2026 · 1 uur

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   What I learned from rereading Bob Dylan's autobiography. Lees meer

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10. #428 How Claude Shannon Worked

    9 augustus 2026 · 51 min

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    Claude Shannon changed your life and you probably don't even know it. Claude is the father of information theory. He transformed information into bits and created the intellectual foundation for computers, the Internet, digital media, high-speed communication, and Artificial Intelligence. Lees meer

    The way Claude Shannon worked is what interested me the most. He combined extraordinary abstract reasoning with an engineer’s instinct to build. He reduced complex problems to their essential structure. He connected ideas across mathematics, engineering, cryptography, artificial intelligence, investing, chess, juggling, and robotics. He treated every experience as material that he might later combine into a new insight.

    He was also relentlessly independent, guided more by curiosity and freedom than recognition, money, or usefulness.

    This episode is what I learned from rereading A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman.

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    0:00 — "The great insights don't spring from curiosity alone, but from dissatisfaction... A genius is simply someone who is usefully irritated."

    1:36 — "It seems to be much easier to make two small jumps than one big jump in any kind of mental thinking." — Shannon

    4:41 — "He was a man almost entirely written out of a history that's defined by self-promoters. His was a life spent in the pursuit of curious, serious play."

    5:20 — "He worked with levity and played with gravity. He never acknowledged a distinction between the two."

    6:00 — "Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they do is the same as what they most want to do."

    6:59 — "I do what comes naturally, and usefulness is not my main goal. I keep asking myself, 'How would you do this? Is it possible to make a machine to do this? Can I prove this theorem?'" — Shannon

    11:50 — "Chemistry always seemed dull to me. There's to…

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