If you have not listened to David's latest podcast on Michael Ovitz, you need to. It's amazing. Here are the high-leverage moves you can make today based on Ovitz's principles covered in the podcast: 1. Build Your Frame of Reference Starting Now Ovitz subscribed to 210 magazines. He looked at 200 images of art daily. He studied every filmmaker in history before signing directors. Your move: Pick your industry's history and study it systematically. If you're in real estate, read every major deal structure from the past 50 years. In software? Study every major acquisition and why it succeeded or failed. Commit 90 minutes daily to building your knowledge base. Set up feeds for 20-30 industry publications. Skim everything. Deep-dive on what matters. In six months, you'll spot patterns your competitors miss. 2. Show Up Before Everyone Else Ovitz arrived at 6 AM when everyone else showed up at 9. Those extra hours gave him access to 70 years of Hollywood history in file cabinets. Your move: Add two hours to your day, one before work, one after. Use it for deep work your competitors aren't doing. Study the industry. Read books. Build systems. This isn't about grinding. It's about information asymmetry. When you know what they don't, you win. 3. Stop Asking, Start Creating Context Rockefeller never asked Ovitz for money. He had a three-hour dinner about art, politics, and travel. Ovitz donated more than he planned. Your move: Stop pitching. Start building relationships where the decision becomes inevitable. Before your next big ask, whether it's a partnership, investment, or major sale, have three conversations that aren't about the deal. Make them want to work with you before you ever bring it up. 4. Do a Postmortem on Every Failure Ovitz lost the ninth-grade election. He spent two years analyzing why, rebuilding his social network, and practicing public speaking. He won the next two elections by wide margins. Your move: Take your last failure, lost deal, failed product launch, bad hire, and do a complete postmortem. Write down what went wrong, what you missed, and what you'd do differently. Then build the skills or relationships you lacked.

This was in today’s WSJ and I had to share with the group. Chicago State University is running an experiment you don’t see often on a college campus anymore: They’re teaching students how to get rich, not “middle-manager comfortable,” but eight-figure wealthy. A group of mostly Black, working-class students are taking a “Mastering Wealth” class taught by Pete Kadens, an entrepreneur worth roughly $250 million. Instead of résumé tips, they’re setting explicit net-worth targets of $3M, $10M, $25M, even $50M, then building business plans to get there. These students are balancing jobs, bills, kids, and real-world stress. Yet they’re pitching startups, studying pain points, and learning from billionaires who drop in to speak. The goal isn’t incremental progress. It’s generational wealth. And it’s working. You can feel the shift in their expectations. Programs like this should exist everywhere. Not motivational fluff. Not “here’s how you dress for an interview.” But real wealth education for people who’ve never been told they’re allowed to aim big. Kadens is right: When someone in a poor neighborhood becomes wildly successful, the blast radius is huge. Jobs, confidence, role models, capital all of it spreads. We need more of this in the world. But Here’s the Trap I See Coming Ambition isn’t the enemy. Lack of focus is. Reading these stories, you see students chasing three, four, five business ideas at once; aromatherapy, counseling, real estate, publishing, cleaning businesses, tax prep, cannabis ventures, patents, franchising. It’s contagious optimism, but it’s also dangerous. Anyone who listens to Founders Podcast knows the pattern: Every great builder picked one thing, got world-class at it, and earned the right to expand later. Jobs didn’t build Apple and a side hustle. Nike didn’t start with shoes plus a cleaning company plus a tax-prep business. Bezos didn’t build Amazon and an aromatherapy brand on the weekends. The students in this class need the same message:

Here is an example of a prompt I use to create detailed study guides for each episode. I have attached an example of the output. This is just to help start the conversation on the best way to study and learn from Founders Podcasts. The issue I have is, if I don’t have notebook in hand, I miss key actionable ideas. This helps me not forget the most important principles David is teaching u. CO-STAR Prompt: Founders Podcast — Study Guide Builder Context You will create an in-depth, structured study guide for a single episode of the Founders podcast. The audience is a Skool community of entrepreneurs and operators who listen to Founders to sharpen their edge. They want notes that help them think better, execute faster, and build stronger companies. Objective Turn the episode into a tool: a practical study guide that extracts the episode’s most useful insights, strategies, and patterns. This is not a summary. It’s a founder-to-founder field manual built from the stories, decisions, and scars inside the episode. Style Story-driven like Founders, but clean and structured so readers can skim or dig deep. Vivid examples, strong verbs, short sentences, no wasted words. Tone Intense. Sharp. No-fluff. Assume the reader cares about winning and hates filler. Audience Entrepreneurs at every level—first-time founders to seasoned operators. The writing must be clear enough for a beginner, but sharp enough a veteran learns something new. ✅ Response Structure (1–3 pages max) 1. TitleName of the episode or featured entrepreneur. 2. Big IdeaOne or two sentences that capture what matters most from this episode. 3. Core TakeawaysBold bullet points.Tactics, strategies, beliefs, and mental models that are usable. 4. Teachable PrinciplesBreak down the founder’s operating system.How they thought, made decisions, and competed. 5. Reflection QuestionsQuestions that force the reader to apply the ideas to their own business. 6. Noteworthy QuotesShort, powerful lines from the episode showing how the founder thinks. 7. Founder FlawsWhere they got punched in the mouth—mistakes, blind spots, overconfidence, missed markets. 8. Modern ApplicationHow a founder today can use these lessons in 2025:early-stage, growth-stage, or owner-operator. 9. If You Only Remember One Thing…One sentence. The essence.

Here I was trying to build an AI automation to scrape every Founders transcript… Then I did a Google search. Turns out every episode is already organized in one place. Common sense: 1 Me: 0 Asking better questions beats knowing fancy answers. I had the knowledge, but skipped the obvious step. For the group: here’s the link with all 462 Founders transcripts in one spot: https://www.tapesearch.com/podcast/founders/1141877104 Reading transcripts doesn’t replace listening. It lets you study deeper, pull quotes, and create your own notes. Use both. I’ll post a CO-STAR prompt to turn any episode into a study guide you can save, review, or print. Have fun with it. Play with the tools. Build your own system. Even fanatics need the reminder: Ask better questions before you start.

I posted this previously, but I think it got lost, and I would love y’all‘s feedback on this list. I’ve listened to over 250 founders podcast episodes, started from the beginning, and I’ve put together a list of the most common characteristics that I was seeing over and over again, as well as the one that I’ve only really seen in Ed Thorpe. Here’s the list: The 8 - 1. Relentless resourcefulness 2. Dogged work ethic - James Dyson, Ernest Shackleton 3. Watching and cutting costs - Henry Clay Frick, Rockefeller 4. Stupidly high self confidence - all of them 😂 5. Obsessed with control - 6. FOCUS. Intense, singular focus. 7. Time to ponder, aka unstructured thinking time, aka mentally-active-physical-laziness 8. (the one most are missing) Knowing when enough is enough - Ed Thorpe Am I missing any? Or do you disagree with any of these? Would love thoughts on this