My First Million

my friend i recorded one of my favorite types of episodes my friend howie we started a company called air cable they're worth around ten billion dollars so he has seen it all he knows what's going on in the world of ai and he has an amazing perspective and for this episode i asked him a very simple question which is if he were twenty one again today or he didn't have air table what companies or business ideas would he want to work on and he came with seven seven different ideas that he would work on today and so if you are looking for a different business idea or you're an ai nerd which a lot of us are right now you're gonna love this episode tell me about live shopping with ai avatars i personally think this is a really interesting area i mean you you think about live shopping which is a huge thing in asia i mean there there's like probably tens of billions not hundred billion dollar plus gm in commerce dollars that are getting transact through live shopping this is basically where you have an influencer go and peddle a product right is this like on it's i like i i paid pay attention a little bit asia but where like there that i can go to see this right now there's actually a big chunk of t move that is powered by this and definitely tiktok so tiktok has a huge amount of these these kind of like influencers that basically go and and you know there's actually a shop tab that you can even click on you see these products and it's a person basically describing the benefits of the product so think about like influencer marketing like taking to the extreme where you just watch you know people pedal products and and you click it you you you buy and there's actually one company that's doing really well in the us called whatnot and it actually yeah i like whatnot yeah exactly and then you know what's cool about it is like there's so much personality you know to the content like in a way it's almost like watching twitch it's not just about the actual product it's about like seeing this person like talk about this product and maybe it's a you know like a really cool like a new shoe from nike or like a vintage shoe and they're talking about like their own experience with it and childhood you know experiences with like jordan brand or whatever and and so it comes to like really interactive experience you know my pitch for this idea is basically well obviously you can have like really rich engaging experiences in a very near future with avatars right i mean if you go to h jen dot com it's a great avatar product it's the easiest fastest self serve avatar product out there are you an investor in these guys i am an investor in h jen and i really like the team there and they just built like the best easiest to use avatar product that was kind of their their claim to fame they have basically pre made avatars so these are like get trained on or effectively created from like real human actors that they've licensed from so you know you can use one of their prem avatars or you can create your own you know i think of it this as like a really fundamental capability like you think about all the things you can do with avatars you know sending a sales video where you're pitching each target customer you know in a in a personal way right so a ceo sending a thank you note via video to every single attendee of our last event that kind of thing in this case like i think applying the avatar concept to live shopping where you can now have this one on one interaction action with and it could be a celebrity like maybe you get some some like real influencers to sign on to this and you know it's like kim kardashian type who's actually like represented an avatar form and each person shopping gets to have a one on one interaction with her about skim and you know the skins products that they wanna trial are you guys using the any of this at air table we actually do have an internal setup where it's all powered by air table we use our own air table web agents to go in and research different target customers we've learned a lot about them and then we can actually generate customized email pitches for each of so right now it's just email but we are experimenting with with more of the video we actually have a setup up internally where we can now generate an avatar video powered by h automatically from content in a row of air table so it could be a list of different event attendees at that use case i i just described like i may actually do it for thank you notes for for different events that i host in the future like if i host a a dinner with with our you know some of our customers i could actually now go and automate creating a video that looks like it's me and i would probably be upfront of about it and say like like here's an avatar version of howie e like saying thank you for coming and like the novelty of it itself actually would tickle people's fancy but but like to send dave a personalized thank you video from me to every attendee for all of our events can you do that now like if i wanted to implement i mean that sounds awesome if i wanna go and do that right now how would i set that up so you you can do it today it just requires a little bit of scripting in air table and that itself you can actually generate with ai so the idea is like you would go and create like a list of different people you wanna send the video too or even a list of topics you wanna create a video for and then we already have an air table is scripting layer where you can define any arbitrary code it's hosted in our infrastructure and in this case you would just define the code to go and talk to the h gen api a lot of these ai products have apis and so you can go and create your own kind of orchestration layer and air table to go and automatically for each row ask h to generate a video pro programmatic for you using this avatar and then you get a link to a h end video that you could then go and directly send to a customer or download it and then attach it etcetera cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty impossible but that's exactly what sandler training did with hubspot they use breeze hubspot ai tools to tailor every customer interaction without losing their personal touch and the results were incredible click through rates jumped twenty five percent qualified leads quadrupled and people spent three times longer on their landing pages go to hubspot dot com to see how breeze can help your business grow what's this ai personalized news thing when i think about like my news reading habits you know it's like i do sometimes appreciate reading just like the front page of like the journal or the financial times right and there's something very valuable about like that curated experience like everybody sees the same front page so ironically like i actually do get the the print edition of of newspapers because i like that like physical and consistent experience like i know i'm seeing the exact same paper as like millions of other people out there but for anything else like if i'm reading something online or obviously a link like i end up usually just taking all of the contents and copy pasting it into chat to your claude and then asking it to summarize right and say like hey like pull out like the key information etcetera and i even have some save props to do this but what i really want is not just to do that manual summarize for each article i wanted to go and like automatically look for all of the articles that are interesting to meet like there are certain topics that i care about and i just want like an ai news ag that goes out and knows what i care about and more importantly like it doesn't just summarize the news for me into like here's the summarize articles it actually becomes this interactive agent that i can talk to so like you know your friend who is the super news expert they're always reading all the articles like nick our our mutual friend as an example like he knows everything that's happening in the world like you go to nick and you get thirty minutes with him and you learn about any topic you want like i want that i want nick in like ai form where i could just ask it like tell me more about this and they can go and give you more info dude my semi my company i my company that used to own this podcast before we sold it was the hustle it was a it was a daily newsletter this was our pitch to our customer we were we are your smart i think our tagline line was where your smart no bullshit friend who will tell you what you need to know every morning and i had a team it it was crazy we had a team of three people who would reach almost three million people a day writing this newsletter and we actually were tinkering with this idea and it was so manual where we were like what if a user tells us what they care about and we write tons of different bits of news and we plug it into someone's email base off of what their interests are and then we'll even go yeah you can mix and that yeah and i was like we'll even go and get like an expert like how we like comment on some of the stuff and we'll put some of the comments in the thing in the newsletter and it was like i like oh my god is so manual and what you're describing is like whenever i'm thinking about newsletters i'm like this is just changes everything and and i actually think but you know yeah it could still be a great business huge i would just use ai for all of it totally and and maybe like you could take it to the next level which is like it actually becomes a platform where like subs you allow creators to actually create their own branded newsletters and they push the distribution promo of each one but because you're powering this like kind of white label ai you know powered platform like they can very easily spin up their own custom newsletter you know different regression is like you create these like different ai personalities i think a commonly underappreciated thing is like ai doesn't have to be robotic right like it doesn't have to be like utilitarian summarize this article in like a clean you know ap you know style like you could actually have it injected with tons of personality and say like be like a tmz gossip reporter who just like sensational the crap out of this like news celebrity gossip right and and i think there's just so many interesting ways to play around with that and like news by nature is like a very a high engagement use case right it's like literally something you you read every new every day or maybe even every hour and and so like the opportunity to like change how people interact with like finding out about this stuff like i think that's a there's gonna be a very large business to be created there right like buzzfeed you know hustle etcetera like you know all of these were like high growth businesses in that era of news and i think now there's gonna be a different high growth era of ai news hey i got a quick break because i wanna tell you something cool so our sponsor for this episode is hubspot but instead of the ad telling you about hubspot they just wanna do something that's useful for you so they did some research they found that a bunch people in our community have side hustle they start a business on the side they get it going and then it becomes their main hustle over time and so instead of just telling you about the features of hubspot they wanted to give you something that will be useful for your side hustle and so they have put together a database of ai prompt so things that you could put into chat g or your favorite ai tool that will help you with your side hustle so check it out it's gonna save you a bunch of time i think it's a prompt database that you should be using to make your side hustle more successful and you could use this as your little personal little cheat sheet your tool set to be a better operator with your side hustle so you could either scan this qr code that's on the screen or get the link of the description to get the ai prompt database alright back to the show are you a personal finance nerd kind of you know i i was a very early mint user and i remember like really you know wanting to like go and and more like have visibility over my different expenditures and like aggregating it i will say like the the tedious act of going and like doing a lot of planning is not is is not my forte but i you know i have like a like basically a multi family office tech setup that now helps with a lot of that stuff you know you listed on here real time ar ai avatar products for different vertical applications like personal finance advisors tell me about that so that idea here actually is like you know if you're a very high net worth client you can get a very strategic wealth adviser who literally sits down with you looks at your balance sheet looks at all your assets and talks about your goals and actually comes up also like a plan as good as a you know a cfo plan for a real corporation but for you as an individual right like the business of you sam as an individual and you can plan it out you can think about the cash flow needs you have what kind of assets you wanna invest into for near term for long term yield and i mean the reality is like most people don't get that level of attention right and don't get that level of of like you know thoughtful design to a financial plan and and you know furthermore like most people don't even have access to a live financial adviser to just call up and talk to right like there's something very comforting i think about like getting to like literally talk to somebody and it's maybe why a lot of banks still have like you know retail locations right so many of them even though like you know for most transactions you don't really need like people wanna go in and talk to to a person so i think the idea here is like using the really smart reasoning capabilities of the newest models like i don't think you could have done is pre o three where you actually can come up with like a very thought out you know kind of personal financial plan and you know recommend like here's how much you should invest into equities response and like here's how much should you should spend but do it like with a you know an avatar on top of it so that it's a very human like experience and you get to talk to them and and just like call them up anytime you're feeling stressed about your financial situation do you use any consumer facing personal finance at all now i don't because i have this this team that that i can actually go and talk to but like i think you know to me it's like if if everybody could have that experience i mean it's awesome everybody would be able to plan better have you seen let me show you one it's called k cabrera k u b e r a dot com i have no association with these guys but i've talked about them so much that i'm actually like on their homepage because they like quote they they're like quote they quote that's awesome they quoted me yeah there you are and this is doesn't a matter if you're worth fifty thousand dollars or a hundred million dollars you a lot of people use software to aggregate their aggregate their net worth because even if you only have fifty grand sometimes you'll own a couple cars you'll own oh maybe two bank accounts you'll maybe have some amount of money in robinhood whatever and then if you're really wealthy you have many many dozens of accounts right you have you have like you're you have some money with this person somebody money with that person you have probably some like private investment yes and this just does a really good job of aggregating it of of all of it which a lot of companies claim they do that the issue is is that add perk kinda does that for like the high end yeah dude i add a part it seems awesome but i think you have to have a lit like i so like morgan stay or jpmorgan i forget who i talked to you have to have at least fifty million dollars in liquid net worth with one of those banks in order to get access to add par or something like insane like you have to have a you have to be a a little bit more even than an ultra high net worth client so only like you at part is crazy but i've i've never even seen it but with k cabrera they do such a good job of aggregating all the stuff because the connections don't break and so anyone who's ever used mint or who have used wealth front or like whatever the connections to all of your counts breaks all the time and you gotta like oh yeah reenter enter the password login in i gotta sit huge just pain and so these guys have done a good job with that but what they do is they have this version where you can export the information is it is it what's it called it is it called json oh yeah json so you can export it in json format which is what chat gp uses or you could just connect your k cabrera with your chat g it started it started as an export now it it automatically does it and you can ask it questions and so what i've done is i've i've used k cabrera so i use k cabrera to upload all my accounts and when you do this you're they don't actually have access to transact obviously they can just view your accounts and then i use chat where i will create a project that has like a warren buffett book or sometimes i'll have like a more aggressive financial adviser like a book you someone who has written something on financial advising because like you have different guru sometimes you know what i mean like different yeah and i can use this to ask it questions and have my own personal finance adviser do you know what i mean yeah yeah that's something to like give me advice using the the fund of fundamental investor theory yeah and so you'll be like look my net worth is blank today if i wanna be at this mark in ten years show me what i should do or if i wanna buy a house in eight years what would you suggest is a good budget to have based off of what you know about me now you know what you know what i'm saying yeah yeah i'm sure it works great for that dude it's awesome it's so awesome now having a financial adviser is still great sometimes because you still like financial advisers oftentimes the value is not in the advice that they give it's the fact that there's a human being that you can trust but anyway this is how i've been using ai yeah with my i mean i that like that experience that you're getting but like now you know to your point about like feeling like you can trust a human more i mean how much of that is based on like the fact that it actually is a human versus how much of it is like literally just like the psychology ecology of like talking to a face no i think like i could've have i think you and i think that because of our age i my i what if i had here's what i had a bet if i i'm making this up i bet that the eighteen year old today in five years they're gonna go to the doctor and in and when they go to the doctor they're gonna tell their doctor this is the illness that i have and i think it's this because what you and i would have said five years ago or your parents would have said five is web web d says that it appears as though i have this illness right yeah no so the young guys nowadays they just say chat said this and the docs is going to say well i agree with you and according to my belief chat gb says blank and chat gb i think is gonna be the stamp of approval or ai like yeah i think they're gonna trust ai more than a human does that make sense oh for sure i mean i think like today it's already better to i mean everybody should be taking all of their you know personal like health diagnostics you get a blood test or whatever and like running that through chat boutique like upload it as three like hey like here's my my other symptoms here's how i feel like tell me what i might have right or tell me what could be wrong like i've i've seen so many stories from like both personal friends well as like on reddit twitter etcetera of like people who caught diagnoses that their doctor just miss not necessarily because they're bad doctors although a lot of doctors probably are bad doctors right like it well was it worth there dude they spend ten minutes with you like what are they gonna solve exactly that yeah so exactly like i i had a i got a an injury literally wait to like two months ago or something like that and i just used chat to do pt yeah they just told me what to do and i just followed the routine for three weeks and like my back improved totally i mean it's literally trained on the best knowledge out there like you're you're getting the the like wisdom of like peter meets hub meets like you know all of these like you know health pro to to to inform like you know chat response to you i've become the most extreme version of opt for new disruptive entrepreneurs and startups meaning you know i think i think the world moves through these different you know kind of phases right and in in a stable phase where the technology has been pretty stable you know that was basically true of the web and web tech for you know at least like twenty eighteen maybe until like jenny hit so for a few years like it was very stable the technology became very mature and then it really became about like how can you go and either leverage your existing distribution if you're an incumbent so it's really hard to compete against big existing players like salesforce or microsoft etcetera you know in in that era to now like it's like the end and all of the assumptions are off and every company is kinda up for cracks right and what i be by at is like you can look all the way at non tech companies and let's say if you're a property management firm like you know half of your cost structure is is auto right if not more and in that world like the the margins on the business are so low like i actually talked to a the founder of a of a company based in germany that's doing exactly this they're they're buying up different property management firms and basically using their own ai tech to automate a large part of of the job and actually they don't fire people they they keep everybody employed but they take on more business as a result and so they've quickly become one of the largest property management companies in germany if not in europe by just going and aggregating these traditional businesses and creating that ai leverage taking what probably was like a low percents margin business to become a you know tens of percents margin business i mean you know the from a pe standpoint that leverage is huge so i think that's a playbook that we're seeing a lot of like excited around because i think every traditional business especially one that has a large you know part of their cost structure that could be automated is kinda up for grabs like think about obviously call centers bp but really what's the bp labor intensive business process outsourcing company so that's basically you know there's a lot of these offshore companies that have like literally thousands of employees that you can go and outsource very rote tasks too right so like analysts work like go comb through these documents and look for you know kind of a facts or or you know do research for me support centers themselves are a form of bp right so you have these like big call centers that are basically client agnostic so it's not just one company's call center they can take on business from any client so we could go and say like hey like i wanna spin up a call center for air table and traditionally that just meant like you have a whole bunch of humans sitting in a room somewhere and you know you're you're basically hiring them on demand and now of course a huge amount of that can be audited of automated do i get so many of those calls a day and a lot of times they say that they are in ai they're horrible they they they still suck do you get a lot of those calls i i do although i mean i i i don't pick them up do not i pick them on always pick them up like i like i like wanna to i get to know these people like you know sometimes as like that i could i could hear like where they are like here's what i get all the time i always get a text message that says this is coinbase someone in serbia logged in your account and like i know it's a scam but i call them and i'm like oh let's like figure out you how this scam works a little bit like i i do it all the time i'll spend like i mean first of all you're totally feeding the bear because if they if you can give them a response they know you're like yeah you're like the target dude i'm so into it they're like what's your name i'm like oh it's kevin smith and they're like oh i see your account right now i'll be like you do what like tell me about it tell me i have probably yeah this is awesome and and so like they're like they go through these whole scripts and i'm like this is this is awesome that that you found my account that is really do you you gotta figure out how to scam the scammer like by the end of it you get them to give you their their their info have you seen the youtube channels that do that they're so funny no i haven't dude there's guys i be my weekend there's guys on youtube that have ten million subscribers and they're really sharp guys and they will like get they'll pretend like they're old ladies like they use a voice changer and they get the scammer to install software where the the scammer webcam camera will come on and they could control like the it's like the greatest oh no this the greatest genesis it's the greatest amazing but these these ai call companies they're who they're still horrible are you bullish on them well you know i think the the models have to get better at real time synchronous interactions for for you know for especially for voice calls to fully get taken over by ai i think for chat like you're chatting with somebody like it's already better in in many cases right because like you know those chats there's are horrible with humans because like the human is probably doing like twenty different parallel chats they don't really know or care about you whereas an ai can be fully attentive but i agree i think the voice is just not quite there yet you've probably seen that sesame voice demo where it's like you know one of the better real time voice interact with the call or won't get interrupt and sesame dot ai you can literally call it oh yes i did see this i'd absolutely and you think this is a good product i you know it's a research team and this is a demo product but i think it shows where the models are going and i think you know it could be from this team in this company but also i mean you know that opening eye and a eleven labs etcetera are they're all working on making that interactivity better open i revealed the the lit the last voice mode release where you could actually interrupt the ai halfway through a conversation like that was kind of a big deal it's still not there yet because it doesn't feel right i mean if you just talk to it like it doesn't feel like a human but i think that will be a frontier that we just we pass or across in the next year or two so one of the last things you had on here was an ai productivity tools you said cursor for email what's that look like so i just generally think this this this form factor of it's not about using ai to completely replace the current workflow right so the cool thing about cursor is it's not just like a chat interface alone that you're using to generate code or to say like hey you don't need to code like it's actually an ide like they fork vs code to pop their ide and then they added this like agent coding experience on top but as a developer you can still be in the code in fact i think that's the value of cursor i just think of applying that paradigm to a lot of other productivity experiences is one of them being email it's like you think about email you go in and like usually you just come in and like you know click on each email read each one etcetera you can currently go to a separate product like gemini or now claude and opening i both have integrations into email and you can ask questions about your email but i think the ideal experience is actually a blended one where you can actually do agent workflows and maybe ais is automatically doing some pre reading of your emails telling you what's important what's not maybe even doing some like research across your other content sources like looking up you know info in your other accounts and your calendar doing a web search to help you decide like hey like i got this pitch from an entrepreneur who wants to be on my podcast like is it worth my time right and it can already have a recommendation for you so i i just think like you you know one of the places that you spend a lot of time today i mean news i think email if you're a developer or in your ide like i think that's where i would attack is like start with where people are actually spending a lot of time and on first principles like a lot of that time could be automated or augmented with ai so i'm gonna ask you how you would build this because from my i had an email company i a little bit about email but not i don't know the tech i don't know the technical capabilities of everything but like email sucks to build on top of because gmail owns everything and yeah super did something interesting where so for listener so super was a a brand new email client and new download super and you used that instead of gmail they recently sold last week for i think the rumor was eight hundred million or something like that yeah saw that too great yeah too grab and it was a very bold mission i think they fell short if they sold or that's what i'm that's what i'm guessing if i had a guess but it was pretty magnificent of a of an effort to like get get after it and my question to you is if you were gonna build something like this you pretty much would have to start from scratch i would think of a new email client not a gmail plugin yeah so interestingly i also worked in email before air so my my startup up for then was a yc company tax and it was actually i think we were the first startup up to build a gmail plugin it and it wasn't like an official plugin at the time there was no plug in framework like we literally figured out like kind of on our own how to hack what's called the dom which is basically the html representation from gmail of of the email client and like literally just injected a ui on top of that with a chrome extension and so you know we kinda pioneered this idea of like oh wow you could be an email and then we added our own sidebar to every email that you had to show information about who you're talking about but could they have banned you they could have certainly a sent us a cease desist and said like what you're doing is against our to as a site and then b they could do some things to make it annoying for us and like it's almost like they could they they could just keep moving the target so like they could change the layout of the page they should make your life in my html without making it look different yeah to to the user in ways that would break our integration and then that did happen i don't think it was intentional i think they would just update the page re render it and then it would change the layout and then like for a day our our extension would like be broken and we'd have to furiously trying to like code fix to it and that was like kind of the really really early days and ironically super the founder rahul hole was actually the founder of a a company that kinda competed with a lot that time like twenty ten reported would reported would yeah game for the anyone who's above probably thirty three that was involved in technology reported was a a game changing tool that was so cool that they created that yeah yeah so you know email has been like i mean it's it's it's interesting because from the time that reported and eta tax existed to now like email really hasn't changed very much at all like you look at gmail like it's kind of the same product and you know the a status me was like well it's like good enough don't fix it but i think that like you know to me superhuman was like an interesting innovation on email like they did build their own client i don't actually think it's that hard like certain things seem really hard to do in theory but then in practice like it's actually not that hard like air table i mean obviously it's hard to build air table but like you know we ended up architect our own proprietary database engine to power it instead of using something off the shelf like my sql or post grass to power the real collaboration parts at our table and it turned outlet like it was the right decision and ultimately it turned out to be cleaner and better for us to go that route than to try to repurpose something off the but it's harder you you quick you have to raise yeah you have to raise tens or or you did and someone else would also have to raise a fuck load of money to do that but also getting revenue for that i think would be a s i don't you guys did it fast but like superhuman did not and i mean superhuman was an interesting product for a number of reasons i mean one i think it was a really good product but it was really hard to articulate like what is the killer feature or set of features that make it ten x better than email without you know or or normal email right and i think it was you it was like faster they had some nice features like tracking emails etcetera but it was hard to say this is like clearly a different paradigm like this is ten x better right and i think that with ai like you could now build a product that actually is radically different radically better and so in fact like a former air table employee of mind jb is now working on a company that's doing exactly this i i did a little funding what's call round into it so chief dot s o oh is it loading for you okay there yeah you have to give them you have to write a bigger check though so they can get a like a dot ai exactly yeah i think it's a really interesting space i think i actually think that you can build this product without a massive team and a massive funding round and maybe part of that is because you know like in a very meta way like if you're very ai leveraged in how you build products like you can get so much more done as an ai leverage team than you could have done in the past like her cursor itself it's just hard to build a business when you charge twenty dollars a month meaning it's like it's that's not enough or that's it preclude to many people the first one yeah and so actually one of the premises here is that there is a top one percent audience and not necessarily meaning like one percent like richest people but like there's a one percent power user audience of email for whom email is like their life right probably for you definitely for me every vc maybe even like realtors lawyers etcetera like email is everything to them like and and like if you can make them ten percent more efficient at email like they'll pay not twenty but two hundred a month right maybe even like two thousand a month like if you gave me an awesome email product that even saved me like call it five hours a week in in a in time and like not only that but allowed me to not miss key opportunities like sometimes like i get like literally hundreds of real emails every day that gmail considers important frankly with that many coming in like i miss up and sometimes they're really important my i have a i have a full time assistant and it feels like a large chunk of her job is just categorizing my emails yeah for sure and you know some people have like you know full time ea who like literally doesn't just categorize it emails but like goes through and does research on each one and tells you like hey i did some research this is how you should respond so i think i think it's a huge huge space and i mean what have my lessons learned from from cursor actually and i remember did you invest in them you know first looking at cursor what's that do invested in cursor i i did and actually i was introduced to them by peter fe from benchmark who's our investor at air table and you know just what one of the most like phenomenal picker of talent and opportunity spaces that i've ever met and just you know brilliant in in a every way as an investor but i remember having this discussion with him of like what is the tam for something like cursor and you have to factor in like of course like microsoft exists they actually literally own vs code even though it's open source and you could fork it you they already have github they have this massive developer audience like how big can an ups start get and this was when like cursor was probably like low millions in revenue and you know my argument actually was that like the the developer audience for for ai augmented coding is so large i mean today you might have like call it thirty million developers that's the number that stripe always quotes maybe that actually will expand to like fifty to a hundred million developers brainer it's easier to develop and then on top of that like it would be perfectly rational for every single one of those people to pay at least a thousand dollars a a year for a ai like an a coding agent that makes them way more productive like not like ten percent like two x right and maybe even rational for them to pay ten thousand dollars okay now you're talking about like a thirty to three hundred billion dollar tam like carving off even a small few percent niche of that especially when like coding itself is so fragmented you've got like different types of coding in different languages front end back and etcetera or like all you have to do is win like a sizable five percent niche and you've built like a multi billion revenue business is that the framework for how you think of what's interesting for starting companies i think so i mean i i think there's like you can either go really broad like in this you know cursor example or cursor for x so pick a market that's just so big like there's so many potential target users like tens of millions at least and for whom the the value is significant enough that they will pay for it's not a freemium or it it's not purely like a free ad driven product experience it's not a consumer product pick something that's like broad enough and deep enough where there's just a very large pie to capture value out of and then even if you end up only capturing a niche of that pie like you have a really large business on your hands i think the alternate path is go really deep and narrow so this is more like the property management example where it's like you're probably never gonna have like a hundred million users who need property management software but like if you go into that vertical and you attack it you might have five thousand yeah yeah and if you go in and attack it very deeply and for each one you can extract even more revenue out of them because in this i mean the most leverage where you can extract revenue out of out of a vast space is like not just to sell white label software that you charge a property management for x dollars per month you actually take the entire cake by buying them out outright running the pe playbook and getting leverage on the and what's the air table the first one air cable is definitely the first one so you know we're in a space where like especially now that we've relaunch the product as as basically an gen first product so you can literally come in and talk to our agent omni to ask it to build any app right so like it's very much akin to the live coating products out there but the difference is like ours is backed by the reliable no code components that we've spent the past ten years building and making scalable and real time collaborative etcetera and so if you wanna build any business app i mean for you guys for instance for your business like if you want a crm right if you want a way to track you know people who are coming on your show if you want like a content pipeline any of those things like we wanna be the best way to spin up a reliable business app for internal operations like we're not trying to be like a external consumer facing prototype tool like if you want back go to like you know the rep and the v zero out of the world to spin up like a consumer facing hobby app but like for a business app like you know the the need for that definitely is at least tens of millions of people out there who want to build apps for their own business and every single business should be creating apps this way and probably replacing this you know over the next few years like old legacy software with this alright listen up turn the volume up because it's bo sean and i got a little message for you i talked to hundreds of founders a week and when i talk to founders everyone says the same thing that's the one thing they need the most it's not funding it's not more resources it's just having more time the goal here is to win and the way you use it win is you get yourself free time to do stuff that's high impact how do you do that well i'll tell you my solution the answer is gabby well you might be wondering who is gabby gabby is my assistant she is my wonderful assistant gabby lives in latin america and she helps me save about twenty hours a week so what she's doing for me is every morning my inbox is sorted in triage and the most important stuff is right at the top with draft replies ready for me so i'm never behind on email and then if as i'm on the go i'll just send her voice notes saying hey can you find my kids a soccer class hey could you take care of this car registration thing for me all these little tedious bs things that would take up time in my day she takes care of for me and so that's free time i'm getting back so if you are a ceo who's serious about growing your company you need to get yourself an assistant the best place to go is somewhere dot com some sources the best assistance from low cost areas for you so you can get an amazing executive assistant who's got you know business experience and has supported other ceos for seven eight nine ten dollars an hour and so go ahead go to somewhere dot com tell him i sent you to hook you up with a good deal and get yourself and assistant and you could take me later alright back to episode what's last question what's this all you wrote in the sheet you just wrote exotic question mark exotic ideas for for ai like so that you know it's more off the beaten path stuff i think i think there's some like really interesting new niches that will be created like an example would be like what's the next consumer social app that's ai native right and i don't think that just means like you know it looks like instagram it looks like tiktok and it's got some like ai features to help you like write posts and so on like i think it might mean like i there are a few startups that are trying to do this where you know it's like you you actually have like social networks or chat groups where half the participants are actually ai avatars right and like what does that look like and and i think what's interesting about this space is that like unlike the pe ai approach where it's like take a known problem and do something that's very like sol right like automate support cost automate property management cost with the eye it's like you could very clearly visualize what that looks like think what's really interesting is that like we don't know what the consumer behaviors are gonna look like in an ai native era like you know we saw the transition from like linear tv to internet to mobile etcetera and at each point i think there there were some surprises about like that the the way that the content and the engagement pattern has actually changed right it's not like we just took people watching linear tv right and then gave them mute do the same somehow went from tv to watching video games to my phone is that exactly yeah i mean like nobody would have guessed like twitch right like how's that like the big thing and so i just think like there there's when you have people who are not just technologists like the the first wave of post chat innovation was very much driven by like we're very close to the the models and the model research and understood what the models were capable of i think we're gonna see more and more people who are actually more artists than technologists and think about like the artist tree of like what is consumer psychology and behavior look like when you have this this new paintbrush which is like ai powered experiences in some cases i think you can create like hyper engaging consumer engagement consumer experiences that like actually could be even more addictive than than you know social media is right imagine like you have you know people have like the perfect girlfriend or boyfriend avatar you know people are already kinda doing this right with even chat or g etcetera rock un hinge i don't know if you played with that but like it's it's pretty interesting like it's g the the elon ai product but un hinge mode is where and they also have a sexy mode which you can guess what that is is basically where they've taken off all of the the pg and safety features that charge and claude right so like you could have a very explicit conversation with with this ai and it will happily engage which just kinda shows you like most of the ai experience we're getting especially from the big model companies have been very like cleaned up dude asking my my ketchup boutique controversial questions all the time like yeah like it and it's like it refuses can't answer and sometimes i ask it things where i'm like asking on like like first example i i love history and i'll like if i'm reading about world war two i'll ask it about very sensitive topic but i'll just like explain to me this topic but i'll be like but anyway it it won't even touch some of these things yeah exactly and and you know that's a whole debate is like you know it's a little bit like free speech censorship but like applied to ai right it's like you know at at like how much can you actually you know sensor ai for safety and and for like moral clauses how much of that is is even like globally applicable versus like what's moral for one one one culture maybe immoral for another etcetera and and i think it's interesting to see rock created not like completely una unfiltered but like it is a lot more pushing of the boundaries right so i've never heard of i think there's yeah yeah yeah no try i mean you should try it today like like i like the un like i was trying to learn about the israel palestine conflict like i'm just trying to understand the background and like chat won't even like touch some of the topics and i'm like like try to learn touch controversial like exactly yeah like and and so i think that's that's gonna be really interesting when when you start to see like people really push the boundaries i mean you know they say a lot of great tech is like always always pioneered for like the the sal installations the black market you know i mean so road type stuff right like and and so like what it what does that look like in the ai era well you're the man i appreciate your your insight i like i i enjoyed this this far it's fun because you have a a really interesting perspective you're a young guy but you've been in the game for like so long and you have such breath because of the size of your company and so it's really cool to just see your your thinking and how you how you are gonna like somewhat predict the future and and and all that stuff but dude your bad ass i i appreciate you doing this oh thank you well really enjoy the the combo and happy to chat anytime by alright that's it that's the pod alright my friends i have a new podcast for you guys to check out it's called content is profit and it's hosted by luis and ph ka after years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like red bull and orange theory fitness luis and fo are on a mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue in each episode you're gonna hear from top entrepreneurs and creators and you're gonna hear him share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit so you can check out content is profit wherever you get your

this stock has grown in the last year from a seven billion dollar company to now a forty four billion dollar company forty four billion okay know i mean that's not that's what elon bought x for people this guy selling lo it it's insane it's crazy i feel like i could rule word i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a less night will never look do you know what one of these are oh my gosh ramon will not quit talking to me about these things okay so those alright so for the listener sean showing what am i holding up they look like dolls basically in the same vein as a troll but i have gotten texts from my friend our friend ra ramon who says have you heard this thing it's worth and he says the number and i'm like oh you it must have been a typo so what what's the deal with these things do you know what they're called i don't super or something no this this is a lab boo alright just get you're yourself educated this is a lab boo doll okay does i have a prada sign on it yeah that's part of the part of the stick here okay so what's the what's the story with these things this is basically the most viral toy in the world yeah it's one of the biggest craze since you know e and things like that and so the story behind this thing is pretty crazy i just wanted to tell you some of the things that i know about it of course my wife put me onto this months ago and i just ignored it as the the stock of this company is up like seven x in a year because this thing is go crazy chinese company right chinese company yeah so this is made by the this these dolls are produced by a chinese company called pop mark and the maker of this guy wang he is now the tenth richest man in china and like he's adding like a billion dollars to his net worth in the last you know but he's like thirty right or or like he's he's he's really young like dude look at this picture of him yeah but chinese guys always look really young until they don't till they don't yeah haven't you ever heard like all of my asian friends they're like we always look young and then we fall off a cliff alright do you see this guy yeah yeah i mean he gonna be twelve or fiftieth yeah i don't know yeah so this guy is behind this company pop mart but it's kinda fascinating what's going on with this craze right like it's it's really taken over so somebody gave these to my kids as like a gift and i didn't really understand the significance of it i was like oh cool thanks i didn't realize that we were just gifted like a really important thing this is like one of the more valuable items in my house right now like these things sell for thousands of dollars the top ones can sell for six figures that's how crazy the the craze is for this okay so tell me the story because this is this sounds like a good good stock to short because that's typically how these like collectible kinda we'll get to that yes i i agree with you we'll get that alright so the story of the le abu dolls is there's a guy who's an artist around twenty fifteen he's he's in the netherlands he gets inspired for to create like a kind of like a and a a toy world so like a a character world based on where he's at in the netherlands and he designs these dolls these kinda like like look at their teeth like the little like g looking doll yeah and there there's hope for us okay because the experts are describing this as ugly cute and it's succeeded because it's cute and i just thought like our podcast i just feel like that just gave us like some wind in our sales for what we could do as well on youtube it's worse for us because we're not particularly ugly but we're not particularly good looking is there like a cute what the kids called mid yeah alright so he creates season in twenty fifteen not a lot happens from there but in twenty nineteen so four years later he partners with this company pop mart and pop mart was started about a decade ago because this guy wang had this insight which is he thought that this adult trend we talked about this before because you're into legos so he's like this kid adult trend this like kids toys for adults like it's thing yeah and so he creates the store and the store to really takes advantage of this like style this business mechanic called blind boxes which i don't know if you've seen lol dolls or mini brands where you buy the box but you don't know what's inside similar to like poking pokemon card packs you buy the pack you don't know what cards are inside and so this mechanic which i think they call like the gotcha mechanic creates a lot more spending right people will will keep buying because it's a little bit like a treasure hunt and you wanna see what you can find what you can get well you can be a scam like i remember logan paul or jake paul were sponsored or did business with a company called mystery box and that was like a rage like a very trendy thing like three months do you remember that like ten like these loot boxes are in games and people know that okay this is kind of not it's not as damn per s but it's basically manipulative right it gets people to buy a lot more people get addicted to this thing and especially when of your targeting kids which is why logan and paul and those guys got in trouble was hey this is targeting kids the beauty of this is it's not targeting kids so the way these blew up is through celebrities wait can i a question about the company pop mark so he had a yeah pop mart he had this a it was a toy company for a long time or what was the the origin so the story is twenty ten he opens up a small designer store in beijing and he's trying to build it off this kid adult collectible brand he starts selling blind boxes this lo was not didn't play at this point there's other blind boxes that he's trying to sell and in ten years they grow from one store to you know three hundred plus stores two thousand vending machines where you could just like it's just you know you just buy one of these boxes right right out of a machine it ends up going public in twenty twenty stock doubles on the first day the stock has grown in the last year from a seven billion dollar company to now a forty four billion dollar company forty four billion that's what i mean that's what elon bought x for so that's so i'd insane so the before it became when it was just a four or seven i think you said billion dollar company they just sold like dolls that people liked and so which which a seven billion dollar toy company is is that's already a mega success so they sold other people's stuff that was over four years but yeah yeah they're they're selling collectible of different brands different ip and this is one of the ip that they have and this all alone like these these lo did like seven hundred million last year so they're like now like almost it's it's it's getting close about half of the revenue of the company overall because the trend has exploded then they connect with this with this artist and so that's brings us to where we are now yeah so the question is how did this explode where does a the thing that fascinating me is like where does a trend like this even come from how does this happen because it's totally irrational right like why this doll why not another doll who is it the teeth is it the outfit is it what what is it behind it so there's some i guess learnings to have from this about like the psychology of a winning product so so just wanna tell you a little story about how this happens so check this out exhibit a twenty twenty three okay yeah so this is a photo that you clearly can tell it's just rihanna like getting coffee or leaving a hotel just go to an airport and she just looks like she's it's not sponsored she just being a lady and she has one of the toy b box or boo boo or whatever they're called the h off of her book bag book and that was is first it's a first okay i it looks like i'm looking for far away it looks like a book bag okay so she spotted with it interesting at the same time another trend is happening in thailand in thailand people are starting to see these lo boo for whatever reason as possible good luck charms and in thailand people are quite religious and they started to view these as like almost like a spiritual like a little guardian that they could have with them and so that's that rumor starts to spread and then what happens is do you know the black the band black pink do you have ever heard of this band nothing it's like a korean pop band faces like one of the little popular pop bands in the in the world so yeah it's a girl band like spice girls oh i know it yeah i like i like those guys i i see the music videos they're very eye catching i know you're talking about well it's just like it's a sensation you'll go on youtube and you're like what is this thing with a billion views on youtube it's sort of like the sensation of like the bts thing yeah yeah exactly okay so okay so this is right here this is now we're talking about black pink so lisa from black pink goes to thailand to visit her friend her friend says hey what do you wanna do today they decide let's go shopping she thinks okay we're gonna go shopping and clothes bags what are we gonna go by but no she wants to go to pop and she says what the pop i don't know what pop mart it is but they go a pop mart store at the pop mart store the friend really wants a le boo and lisa says honestly not into it don't i don't get it don't don't care about it blah blah but the friend gets super disappointed because they're all sold out and the lady at the store is like listen it's impossible you're not gonna get one and that little meme monster inside leases starts to roar the one in her stomach and she's like you know what if i can't have it i must have it and she decides actually i think i do like little boo and i think i do wanna go get little boo and she starts to collect these now she starts getting obsessed with pop she goes she blows my boxes as she starts collecting this this becomes her d stress type of thing she does from the the stressful life of being a world famous pop star yeah now she gets caught having a lo why because she posted it on her instagram so now we're fast word twenty twenty four this is the photo that created the craze it went from just like you know how a hurricane starts and there's like some some sweeping wins maybe a a casual storm a casual rain storm and then then comes to hurricane and this this instagram story started the hurricane and it's her hugging her le boo can i say something i kind of get it that looks pretty cool it looks it for you youtube at this photo yeah it's it's like an old white guy in overalls it's kinda what it looks like it looks like a farm yeah this does look like a midwest farmer actually this i kinda like i i and it's big it's about two feet tall i kinda think that's neat i understand understand the yeah so they they come in different sizes the the one that's sold for over a hundred thousand that was like a a human size one okay okay so this is the stock since that photo was taken and you can see the stock is up seven x since then as crushing and so the lu craze starts and what you know what's interesting about this is why okay so celebrity started posting about it that's it okay i get that but what else so here's some of the other things that i found kinda interesting from a i don't know behavioral psychology point of view the first is the lipstick effect have you ever heard of the lipstick effect i don't think so so there's an economic theory that basically says that whenever people are under financial pressure so maybe the economy's is a little bit choppy maybe there's you know you know there's inflation there's there's wage pressure whatever it is people will opt people think that you'll stop spending but what actually happens is you shift the spending and so instead of buying a new bag you'll just buy some lipstick they'll buy a new lipstick and so lipstick sales will explode at the time during economic pressure because you take away from bigger luxury purchases and they go into smaller luxury purchases so instead of a two hundred dollar outfit or bag you're gonna buy a twenty dollar item instead and so people think that this is part of what's behind lo which is that this thing you know initially started where these are like you know a twenty dollar twenty five dollar box that you buy and you get a lo but the thing with these the smart thing of these is i showed you the doll this is the most important part this little ring because most stuffed animals you just keep them at home so there's no viral vitality to it right you just have it at the comfort of your own home nobody sees it you don't get to show it off it's not a status symbol by just having the bag clip attached to these things they suddenly became like luxury accessories and so that's why rihanna had it attached to her bag and this black pink lady had hit hers and then david be is posting that and kim kardashian post that she has ten of them and she starts clipping them to her bags it becomes this add on to your luxury bag this cute little add on that you could put on your bag and then each one of these has an outfit so i can take this off and i can buy new clothes for this and i can upgrade my lab so now you have all can you spell lab abu l a b u b u oh okay i see the way lab is actually only one of the characters but that's just what it became called the the character called the monsters but nobody that didn't stick oh my gosh i'm on their website i i picked it's kinda cool i i mean and so and so what what i think is interesting here is that you have this kind of what charlie marker calls the la palo effect so maybe you have the lipstick effect causing people to liquor for little lux then you have the adult effect where you have adults looking for you know maybe comfort and pleasure because when there that's another economic theory here which is that when adults face stress from work and global events like wars and whatnot they find emotional relief and con collecting toys and things that connect with their childhood so you have that effective activity kicking you have the lipstick effect kicking in you have the status symbol effect of this where you can attach this to your bag you have the ugly cute effect which we are just we're just crushing with right now and so all these come together to create the phenomenon that is lo great great great job good fine i i've been hearing about this but i didn't exactly dive deep so that's cool that you did this this is not sustainable and this is definitely gonna go away in the next five years but let's get it while the getting is good alright so i've built a few companies that have made a few million dollars a year and i've built two companies that have made tens of millions of dollars a year and so i have a little bit of experience launching building creating new things and i actually don't come up with a lot of original ideas instead what i'm really really good at what my skill set is is researching different ideas different gaps in the market in reverse engineering companies and i did invent this by the way we had this guy brad jacobs we talked him on the podcast he started like four or five different publicly traded companies where tens of billions of dollars each he actually is the one who i learned how to do this from and so with the team at hubspot we put together all of my research tactics frameworks techniques on spotting different opportunities in the market reverse engineering companies and figuring out exactly where opportunities are versus just coming up with a random silly idea and throwing it against a wall and hoping that it sticks and so if you wanna see my framework you can check it out the link is below in the youtube description so i started thinking how do i make money on this alright so the first way i should've made money on this was when my wife started telling me about this which was i don't know six to eight months ago i should've have either brought the stock i should have looked i didn't even think it was gonna be a stock i just thought it was like a stuffed animal i didn't think it was a a public company should have bought the stock or you know you could could've have could have tried to collect and flip okay that's too much effort so what's the play here so i went and looked up i asked ai i said tell me the last five crazy toy craze as crazy as le boo over the last fifty years and compare them what were some of the other ones so it would have been cabbage cabbage patch was the first one that i can baby baby babies babies was the second i think trolls were popular for a minute but i don't know if they were a craze then it gave me pokemon pokemon cards which had two two bumps there was the one when we were kids were buying a collective packs reached about about the same revenue about two billion dollars a year and then it died down for about twenty years and then recently would like kinda logan paul started collecting them again yeah video another peak it had one point six billion in it sales on the pep cards recently so pokemon and then the last one i gave me which was i thought kind of interesting as ai but actually is a good point because i was thinking maybe fur or tom i i didn't know what was gonna give me those were smaller it gave me stanley cups which actually makes total sense because it's the same thing it's the exact same thing and so it gave me those and the funny thing about these is on a on the scale lo abu is actually still small so this doll in about seven hundred million those all at their peak were kinda like one point six to two billion dollars in sales so i actually expect that over the next year this thing goes even the star kinda of goes viral nova it burns out and it hits a two billion or three billion in in revenue and then it's gonna crash because the funny thing with all of these is they all had about a two to three year peak tops and so i think the actual play if you wanna make money on this thing is to short pop mart stock so starting around you know end of twenty twenty six and you know maybe maybe through twenty twenty seven now shorting is dangerous because you can lose your shirt because it short has sort of asymmetric downside but if you i think if you were betting man the odds are that you know by twenty twenty seven this thing is not a forty four billion dollar company anymore what was the name okay so you had a friend michael michael smith michael act smith he had a the guy who created calm dot com before he created calm dot com the the meditation app he actually had a toy a stuffed animal toy company called like middle monsters or something that's right what was the name of this and this so his company was called mine candy and it was moshe monsters what's the most was a a mobile game was this if i remember correctly this is all fifteen years ago it's so it's harder to remember everything but he raised lots of money as a technology company almost or at least from tech vcs and he was like i'm gonna build a massive toy business and i remember reading at the time this is insane you're stupid but now that i think about it there's been many examples of where that is not stupid and this is yet another one of where you could actually build a really cool ip toy company and he was sounds like he was on the right track it didn't work it it was big in the uk so in the uk it was like i don't know one out of every three kids is playing motion monster it was like insane it was like ninety million users globally and i remember meeting him i think it was still during the kinda like it was kinda like the tail end of the peak so it it was big but it was it it had stopped exploding and he was like that's okay we're gonna like try to turn this into a thing and he was telling me they're making moshe shampoo and ba wash and you know it's going into every category but unfortunately that one didn't work out we have to get michael on by the way i gonna say that we have to get michael in the pie because have you mind he's one z coolest guys i've met he's such a nice guy first of all like total genuine good dude super creative really creative genius and then also like a rock star kind of like would you meet him you're like oh i'm talking to russell brands like you know cooler cooler brother you should everyone should google him name's michael act smith and i remember back at fourteen or to thirteen or twelve where i'd i'm still interested in but i was like i wanna be like i was like looking for a person i wanted to be like and it was like him he would be because yeah there was like photos of him like holding hands with like pairs hilton or like he was like if you google like michael laughed smith like but they're not even dating that's the best part just hold his hands he was like he had like paparazzi photos of him because he would have this like tech angle even though it wasn't exactly in tech but he if you guys google him and see what he looks understand he looks like yearly telegraph described him as a rockstar star version of willy won that's his your wikipedia page it's great this guy was so cool and now he has since started calm which i've no idea how big it is but it's hundreds or hundreds of millions door billions a multi billion dollar company yeah he's the man this guy's absolutely the man and he's been the man for twenty years he has he has he's he's amazing okay i'm gonna call him after this and be like i will fly to you let's do it up episode because where's he i live now i think he was in the uk he was kinda back and forth between like you know us and uk i think he's in uk now he's just like a rich guy now he just like does what he wants well i think he always did what he wants that's why he was that's why he was our that's the difference between that guy needs to do a big rich that's the difference between guys like me and guys like him i guess like he is exactly you chase money and money chased him yeah it didn't run very fast this guy's is the man cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty impossible but that's exactly what sandler training did with hubspot they use breeze hubspot ai tools to tailor every customer interaction without losing their personal touch and the results were incredible click through rates jumped twenty five percent qualified leads quadruple and people spent three times longer on their landing pages go to hubspot dot com to see how breeze could help your business grow okay i have another one for you can i give you another one so we did kids toys i have another one you might know the story of this one if you ever had one of these what's this oh i'm holding up no it looks like boys that bubble a box of tony's choco hell yeah brother i love tony's choco do they have something that have pop rocks in on buy i been saying wrong for a long time it's not tony's choco it's tony's choco lonely do you know that i just call it tony's i love tony's i learned i i have i've always bought them and then when we hung out with job mister beast i kinda he told us the backstory story i didn't realize how amazing they were i love tony's yeah yeah they're and their back even better than i thought because when we were hanging out with jimmy he was like oh yeah i you know he for for feast really wanted to get feast to have a supply chain that had no child labor he's like you know most of the cocoa farms in africa have child labor all the big chocolate brands you know hershey's etcetera they all buy from them when i learned that that was f up i went over there and we try and we basically been spending you know couple years now trying to fix the supply chain so that that doesn't have to be the case he was like every company i don't like this this or that thing about him but there's one company that i really admire that seems to be doing something well and i think that's how he phrase it and he said tony uses the one they do things right is basically what exactly and he actually called the founders of this and learn from them of like okay what do i need to do which is cool because they were the ones who were who initially made the push but do you know the the backstory of why they made the push into doing this wasn't it started by an actor or a famous person in holland or something like that a journalist okay it was like a non business person who started it and they started it with it's one of these cool stories where they didn't so much care about chocolate they cared about like helping the earth or human rights or something and we're just so happened to be doing it via chocolate like it was like story like that wasn't it so the story is these i think there was two dust journalists but these two just journalists they're covering the chocolate industry on their tv show and they hear about you know that the chocolate companies are all all the chocolate all the cocoa comes from west africa and that there's a lot of child yeah slavery and child labor so two separate things right slavery and then child labor happened happening on the farms there so they wanna go and investigate so they go down there they investigate they find that it's true and they put you know they put out a story to try to help and i think there's store the exact story is that at one point all the big chocolate companies signed like a treaty they signed like a pact to say we're gonna stop this and i guess like years later they had gone back they had gone to investigate and it was like the exact same situation they saw that it kinda nothing had really changed and so these guys are pretty discontinued by it so they decide like this is where the story gets crazy because a normal person even a normal a great journalist would just report the story maybe use some some some choice language when they when they talk about it and then they would shake their finger at them and move on but these journalists went and did like you know took the exit off of high agency avenue and we're like no no watch this and so the guys they come back and they do that they decide to do a publicity stunt so he eats the chocolate and he calls the police and the police come and they're like what are you doing and he goes i'm eating chocolate that was made with slave labor and child labor and they're like that's what that's not a you're eating chocolate that's not a crime he goes no no actually according to statute blah blah blah knowing consuming this product knowing what i know that this is the product of great child labor and slave labor that's actually illegal arrest me boys and so they lock them up they take them to jail and that becomes this viral sort of news stunt that brings even more attention to this now prosecutors end up dismissing the case because they're like we're not gonna prosecute this but they decide to go in and create their own ethically made chocolate brand and they decide to call it tony's chocolate lonely because they're like the guys the guy's name is too and but in the that's this dutch name but they're like american eyes western eyes version of of of tone i guess is his name would be tony so they goes tony's and instead of and they said it's gonna be very lonely to build a chocolate company that's actually trying to be like ethically sourced so we called it tony's choco lonely okay great and that's how they felt in their fight against the cocoa you know industry and it becomes a hit or pretty much right away they they sell twenty thousand bars in two days because of the public like resonance with their story and it becomes the best selling taco brand in their market which is the netherlands they get like twenty percent share in the in the netherlands it passes up mars and nestle and other other competitors there and then they start expanding and they keep expanding and they start finding like minded brands so they're you know i don't if you know about ben and jerry's but ben and jerry's is also one of these like very sort of like strong ethical yeah opinion driven they they stick to what they wanna do good people corporations actually saw ben or jerry i forgot which one talk at an event i was at like fifteen years ago and i've ever been pretty blown away by the like how genuine it was for them and how the extent that they had gone right so for example i don't know if it was like they have this one flavor that's like they're brownie flavor i forgot it like you know i'm so fucking fit out i can't even remember the name dude it's insane let's talk the fudge brown yeah something tell fat so so that's so my past i'm just you're like i i barely remember how that felt last week by the way meanwhile i'm holding up this tony shaq only three bars are missing from this pack blame it on the kids too my wife gets pissed off at because whenever we bring like a treat like a friend's house so we bring dessert they cooked dinner and like it's like already opened like she's like what the hell you can't like give like a pack of ice cream when there's like one i'm like why not we're gonna open it anyway like happen i'm my get open it now that's so good one that's sort what happened exactly she's like i'm a she's she's like i'm a she always compares me to like a bear looking at the cabinets for honey and i get my my brother are here's my brother on aaron he's one of these people that like you know doesn't know it doesn't eat a ton in general like food not a big it's not a big foodie yeah but if you leave like a snack he's like a barrel like if you leave a treat in their house it's gone by the morning and you're like did you wake up and and and so like he'll eat the whole bag right of anything and so my sister calls it like with oreos like like we got a pack of oreos right and she's like oh my god aaron's doing a line right now i i'm doing a line to her man you eat the entire row of oreos like you did a whole line and i just thought that was so aaron like sam party exactly oh we gotta have a back on brother aaron was the og the real og now he used he had two guest cameo experiences like way back in the first thirty up episodes of hilarious anyways chocolate the company so tony chocolate only what do they do or ben jerry's sophisticated ben jerry's thing they opened up a factory i think somewhere like in upstate new york or something like and they they it was after they met what's it called when you get out of jail and like you're in the program but like don't wanna go rec like they they wanted to reduce rec like people go back end up back in jail which traditionally incredibly high it's really high and one of the big drivers of why do people who after a long sentence get out and go back it's not because they're like kinda of morally corrupted at their core it's like they couldn't get a job and then they didn't have have money and the they their social life in previous friends or losers or they let prison without knowing in one but only at fifty dollars exactly and so a big a one way to decrease is if people can get a job but nobody wants to take them up job so they created a whole factory their brownie factory is all brownie made by ex cons basically the the the ben jerry's flavor they're like we wanted to they they they met some guys who had a good good recipe and they like built a factory around them essentially so they're they're do good so child to chocolate only me to break into the us starts partnering with ben and jerry's and the revenue has just grown and grown and grown and so like last year i think they did two hundred million in revenue and they made this like a legit chocolate company that started with two journalists just basically trying to make a stand against the man how cool is that this is awesome this is so cool i do they run the company now no so they're out now there's like a ceo they they like you it's just kinda run by like you know not normal suits basically at this point and they get some fl because like their supply chain is still not perfect and but they're very transparent about it so they're the crazy thing is like they'll report that they had like you know eleven issues this year of like child labor discovered in their supply chain and people are like see you're not totally free and they're like what we're trying to like we're trying to be transparent and say you know we we're way less than anybody else been also honest about this and we're reporting it so that we can keep improving this but they get some slack as like you know so i guess like skeptics say that maybe they're just washing at this point now since the founder left and even i think the founder has sort of alluded to like it's not the same since we left i don't know the exact story it's like i'm trying to read these like dutch translations of articles and decided that like i'd rather just eat the chocolate and chill so i'm not sure the exact story but i think there's maybe a little controversy around that yeah i i've known about this brand for a while and this and i didn't know the i only knew it what jimmy had said which wasn't in this depth but that makes me like them way more the product's awesome mean i love the brand they all also and i i eat the shadow out of them i mean it's it it messes me but that's cool maybe you could be the influencer that blows them up even more same far i eat the shit out of them it's just like you most of my like guilty evening start with a bar tony's is like you and the part of the end jar on let's not of how finally like that the the issue is they would sell their candy like it used to come in like the extra huge guys it was a huge bar they only sell in bulk by the way did i ever tell you about the time we were talking about rec this is not entirely related to business but i think you'll get a kick out of this did i tell you about the time do you know that i've been to like i think we've talked about this i'm gonna san quentin in a few times in indiana state prison so you've mentioned that you did but i don't know the exact story what's i the background of this so i've gone to i have a friend who i'm this is the story it's it gonna be a him but i've been to indiana state prison a couple times or once i went to santa quit quentin in a few times one time i went to indiana state prison so we we go because my friend has this charity called the last mile and the idea is like when you commit a crime particularly murder you're not always sentenced to life you're inevitably going to get out and it's better for that person if if they get out and have a job it's better for society if they get out and get a job and it's better for the taxpayer if they get out and get a job because you don't want them to go back to prison because that's that's bad for everyone and so it's we are all incentivized it's totally bipartisan to get this person to be trained and to get a job and so this company the last mile started offering friend chris they helped you learn i think when i went i think they were learning wordpress i don't know what they learn now but this was a while they were learning wordpress or they're learning learning like some front end development so you can get a job at like an ebay or like coding now yeah i don't know what they do now yeah they have like some like weird like like hot or not app just something like i don't know what these guys are doing but my friend chris started it and he was a prominent capitalist he helped he was the first investor and wish he was an early investor in snap he did boom he did all these other like cool startups ups and for some reason one day he went and volunteered at san quentin at a prison and he was like i think this is my life's mission to like help reduce rec meaning wow when you get out of prison and you don't go back and so he created this thing called the last mile they now have hundreds of employees they've had thousands of people who have gone through their program and i up until recently i i he told me the stat a couple years ago so i i don't wanna like jinx someone and i don't know the update but of the thousand or two thousand people who graduated not one had ever been back to prison and that's like a huge thing and and so it's really interesting that this tech person has like he quit so he doesn't invest anymore this is all he does and i talked to another guy mike nova regrets he he was on the pod two weeks ago and that's his thing now too is reducing rec so reducing the rate that you go back to prison but i know a bunch of people who have given up their careers to go pursue this i'm on their website right now pretty crazy stats so it says since the seventies the prison population the us has increased by seven hundred percent which is not what you would expect you know that's not just like that makes sense it should grow every year like no the prison population should not necessarily grow at that rate it says that every prison every person in prison has an annual cost to the american taxpayer of seventy thousand dollars which means we pay about fifty billion dollars a year is spent on state and federal prisons isn't that crazy it's an it's it's a it's amazing the the last miles participants in the last mile who who go through there i guess it's like a education program as they get out have a seventy five percent employment rate when they come out which is good and i wonder what the non i i wonder what the baseline is it's gotta be half that well so basically what happens and i and i talked to some of these guys when they're were in there they're were like look when i got out i had been in for ten or fifteen years i was a thug like i didn't wanna associate with my old people and like my family had either died or wasn't it around and they basically gave me a bus ticket in fifty bucks and i was like sir where do i go i'm not sure where i go to right now what do i do and so they're like that's why came back here i just started going back to how you to behave by the way why does he have a this guy chris looks awesome chris red why does he have a serious radio show what does does zac get broadcast into in the prisons in some way or like is that just external thing both so he so chris is interesting so we had michael harris on the pod michael my her is his nickname he is the founder of death row records chris is kind of he i joke he's an og g he's at he's at original gangster so he knows all of these guys so he's friends with doctor dr snoop the founders of death row all these cool guys and they all have this like blend of like hip hop but also like crime like interest and so he decided to have a show with sirius where he would get get some of these cool guys on the radio show and they would talk about what his issue is but also it was like wrapped up in like kinda cool stories because it's kinda of right like hip hop and like celebrity and so he had a show for serious where he would talk about it this guys live in the dream got rich decided to do good in the world has a great podcast the triple threat love he's cool and so he actually so i became really close with them he invested in my company when i was a twenty five year old or twenty six year old in san francisco very coincidentally we both moved to this small town in west port connecticut together and we hang out all the time and his wife his her name's is beverly she's at ninety five pound woman and i've been to san quentin and we we were walking on the yard with these guys doing like bench press and sit ups and tonight of whatever and i walked with this little lady through the yard and the red sea parted and if she just walked through it and she's like tyrone how are you and she would go miss bev nice to see you it was the craziest thing that i've ever seen it was like i'd tell you if she like ran this prison yard she was the only woman there and it was the craziest thing i've ever seen and they have a joke that says if a glow you may go when you walk in to san quentin they stamp your hand and so when you leave you have to show them your stamp underneath underneath a black light in order to get out and they would do jokes where she would wink at the guy when i'm walking in and he didn't actually stamp me he just pretended and i would go to scan my hand to leave and my hand didn't glow and they're like sir you cannot leave have to get this figured out i was like i'm not staying here so like they would pull like tricks on you when you go and see this place it was wild but that's amazing chris and bev are two people when i think of how to live life it's them that that's the way to go at dope can i tell you a related story so my buddy's trevor who was writing a book and he did this crate a very smart move which i i never really heard anybody else do but i thought it was a good idea he goes hey man check your email check my email and there's like a plane ticket and it's plane ticket to go see him and he's like i'm gonna i wanna write this book and i want it to be great and i could sit here and brainstorm this on my own but i really wanna do something that i'm calling a bookstore and he basically decided to fly out the five kind of smartest most interesting people he knew to hang out with him for a day and just help him flesh out and brainstorm the book together and he's like i will owe you one for life but i just really respect you to trust you and i really want your help with this because i'm trying to make this great i go and in the room is basically my buddy trevor his brother and then there's the head of like the women's volleyball the us women's volleyball team which is like way outperformed in the olympics and one won like a bunch of gold and there was one of the person and then there was this guy larry i'm like oh i'm a professional brainstorm this is literally what i do i'm like just ready to rock and roll but i'm just blown away by this guy larry every time the guy larry opens his mouth he says something that's super wise super smart on the nose just a few words but he's always on point and so after about an hour the brainstorm around the book i was like dude i gotta ask larry i missed the intro what's your story dude because you're incredible and larry tells the story where larry is like you know i my name's larry blah and he goes i was incarcerated for the past twenty two years and i think he had just gotten out i don't know how long it had been maybe a year or two something like that and he goes yeah from the age eighteen he's now forty he's like at at age eighteen i was arrested and i was i was in for you know whatever twenty two plus years and i was like larry no offense but you just got out a couple years ago how are you so smart how do you know all this stuff because he would read all this he would have these amazing polls or whatever we talking about you would reference this thing in this book and this quote he could just recite by memory so larry i'm like larry how do you know all this and he goes i was incarcerated at age eighteen they lock you up and throw away the key right like you're basically like the lowest man on the tote pole for society they don't nobody invest in you at that point you're you're a sunk cost and so he's like i was you know get in trouble and it was a rough place and it was not a good time and he's like i made a decision i'm no longer in prison i'm in university he's like so every day i just studied i just decided to go to university for the past twenty years he's like i decided to read all the books and learn and write and better myself and he's like i would literally change what i saw i would walk in the prison yard and i wouldn't see the barb wire he's like i saw roses he's like i literally just re brain washed myself that i am not in prison i am in university and i carried myself like that and i acted like that he made the most of what was you know otherwise a very bad situation i just remember being so blown away and inspired by this scott larry when i heard that heard that story because i was like you know if larry can do that at a life sentence in prison this sounds stupid but like then i can be bored in a line at starbucks for it out or you know whatever like i you can change where you are you don't you have to be in the situation that it looks like you're in like you can literally just decide no no i'm in university right now no no i'm in a spa right now no i'm in i'm in the brainstorming session right now yeah i mean i am where i wanna be about that that's so cool yeah it's really challenging because on one hand for some reason you start you feel like sad for someone like because you beat someone like i a of the guys i met they i think they kinda had a tone for their sins a little bit where like they've changed but you're like oh i feel so bad for you like that sucks you deserve said they you like learn about what they did and you're like actually no like consequences exist for a reason like that sounds fair to me and it creates like a you get whenever i've done these things with these guys i get so many mixed emotions it's a very challenging thing it's very hard thing to be part of too but it is a no brainer right you want someone to like yeah not go back so you guys know this but i have a company called hampton join hampton dot com it's a vetted community for founders and ceos well we have this member named la von and la saw a bunch of members talking about the same problem with hampton which is that they spent hours manually moving data into a pdf it's tedious it's annoying and it's always waste a time and so la like any great entrepreneur he built a solution and that solution is called mo mo uses ai to automatically transfer data from any document into a pdf and so if you need to turn a supplier invoice into a customer quote or move info from an application into a contract you just put a file into mo and it auto fills the output pdf in seconds and a little backstory for all the tech out there built the entire web app without using a line of code he used something called bubble io o they've added ai tools that can generate an entire app from one prompt it's pretty amazing and it means you can build tools like mo very fast without knowing how to code and so if you're tired of copying and pasting between documents or paying people to do that for you check out mo dot a i m o l k u dot a i alright back to the pod so tell you my embarrassing prison story no but that sounds so awesome it's very this can go so many ways so i go i i go just where do you make a dad jokes at your first day in so so i moved to silicon valley and i'm working with this guy michael birch and michael birch is a wonderful guy michael's built a successful career silicon he's basically like a billionaire so one day he messaged me like pack it like pack a bag with enough clothes for a day i got two days and meet me like at like whatever like meet me at like eight am at this spot you're not going to work today oh my alright i don't know what's gonna happen so i go and we started having no idea where you're going i think he tells me on the drive that we're going to he's a part of this group called the inside circle and inside circle was it where they take guys from the outside to go meet guys on the inside and it was at the prison fu was it was it called fu prison yeah fu and so we go drive there it's a maximum security prison and i'm basically just a huge us right so i don't know what i don't know what i'm getting into i don't know i didn't actually sign up for this michael just kinda like trust me you'll you like this is good you should do this i still don't really understand what we're doing i i think it's like a you know like dare where they like scare you they like taylor scared straight like you're like i thought it scares excited i we're just gonna observe from like behind this like really thick glass i'm like oh cool we're gonna be like watch and i'll be like wow i learned so much today from observing tag on the glass and then they open the door and they're like alright guys come on in i was like what and so we go in and they're like alright you know pick a buddy pick up pick a partner and so i'm like and i like pick the guy and and the the program starts it basically it's like a men's group so you said to circle you talk about your feelings oh by the way when i walk in immediately my eyes are drawn to one person because it was so obvious to me like this was the hardest guy in the person somehow this guy had sunglasses and i don't know why he was allowed to have sunglasses he had a walking he had a cane which i thought like you're not allowed to have like a like something that could be like a weapon this but he's got a candidate he's got sunglasses but he's not blind by the way what he has sunglasses like up on his head sometimes black black guy and he had like an entourage like he had like two guys with him who were really big and like but they deferred to him and he was kinda older and i was like i don't know who this guy is but i've seen enough was he is somebody to know that this guy somebody here and maybe somebody on the outside don't know but he's somebody in here anyway so he's in my group and his two like entourage guys so we get in the circle and i'm like i don't know what i'm supposed to do am i giving advice is this some entry what is and it's like no you're here to talk about you know it's a there's a safe space unpack your feelings i'm like oh god and so first guy starts and he starts talking about how he's feeling pissed off he's feeling pissed off because like i mean crazy story but like he's locked up in here and his sister outside is having he's she's being abused by her boyfriend he just wants to kill this guy but he's on the inside he can't get to this guy she he feels powerless and now he's sharing this heavy emotional real life problem yeah like a grade day real life problem and i'm i of course because i'm horrible i stop listening i'm just like panicked thinking of what am i gonna say you know when you're like supposed to be listening but you're just actually just planning what you're supposed to say i start doing that because i i putting to like retail fake movie so you sound hard like yeah so i'm like my my startup doesn't it probably wear a fit this is very really grinding my gear with the hell am i gonna say i don't have real world problems right like my life's is pretty good and the we're going around the circle and it's just one crazy like real problem after another and then and then it's getting to me and i'm just like what am i gonna say and so i'm like alright i guess i go deep in the bag i'm like alright i do have you there is something it's like pretty heavy i don't really talk about this normally but like i guess thank god i have this because this is the time in place to unpack this story and so i start packing this story and in my mind i'm and also i'm like i'm talking kinda slower and dramatically because i'm like let me really hand this up a little bit like let me not let me not be me and laugh during this let me you know try to be serious here and i think i'm doing a great job and the guy with glasses just midway through he's like man i don't believe none of that shit i'm like i'm like no and i immediately i'm like no it's true he goes i know it's true hey and i'm like so what it's just to clarify you said still are we cool what's going on and he was like and he was like man that ain't angel truth though so he's like it's true but at that ain't your truth and i'm like what is this puzzle what is this riddle i don't know what this means and then the creates like really intense moment where i to stand up and he's like they they're like alright it's time to do the work i'm like what understand look at your eat up and so he's like right right he's like what's your truth and i'm like what i just feel and i'm like i'm like i'm like no but that is a real situation that has happened to me and they were like no what's your truth and i was like alright the truth is i'm just trying to say what i think you guys want me to say because i just want you to like me and i put i'm like i just want you to not hate me and he looks at he just stares at me he stares up he gets to my face he goes that's what truth gives me a big hug and then we sat down and then for the next hour i was like i don't know what the hell just happened but i think i'm you know prison gang and this is awesome but i i think i'm accepted this felt amazing that's called a breakthrough yeah i had a breakthrough so that was pretty awesome for the story that's great did you how did the end did you guys like exchange information what he do dude have you ever taken ecstasy i haven't but i i assume that's what it felt like because for the rest of the time i was just like the weight of the world was off my shoulders and i just enjoyed myself and i and i realized like oh i could just be my insecure neuro self and that's fine here okay cool i don't have to pretend great and then they were like ain't pretending anymore we like this guy whatever you whatever you saying that i don't really care but we just know that you're not pan to us what value do these guys get what a lesson learned what value do these guys get well i think you know they live out for company hard life no i think it's just in general they live a pretty hard life and they go to this meeting every week so they have this kinda like two hours a week where they get to go and kinda like as they would say like take the mask i'll put the armor down in fact like it would be a mix of like the hispanic guys the white guys and the black guys in this session but then they would like openly say like yeah but like he his friend were like shank my friend and so it's on but here it's not on but as soon as we get out it's on again and i was like this is like a pretty bizarre dynamic but they all agree like alright when we're here it's whatever but when when we're out there it is what it is that's this the way that's the way he's on i remember realize that's insane but you know understandable in a way so they have this as a space where they can like del kind of emotionally mentally which is important and feel like a human being and be able to like express themselves i think it's a pretty d feeling right when you're again locked up throw away the key and you know anybody comes in they just see you as your label right but like in that environment for those three hours that we were there you know the but nobody was there's no status nobody was better than anybody else like yeah there was us but i was worse than everybody else guess it's probably more accurate way of saying it but like there was no they got to like be treated well and be help and be just talk to one man to another man at least again these are my my this is like my interpretation it i'm sure that people who do this more have like a more sophisticated way at a better way of saying it by the way now that we're talking about this and we gonna can wrap up but jack smith i forgot this is his big philanthropic cause as well so jack smith if you ask what he's doing on a daily basis for a long time i would say what are doing he's like oh i'm i'm pals with like people who are locked up and they i have a system where they can order any book and i'll get it for them isn't he giving books isn't it a book program yeah where he created a website i forget how he did it but where they can order a book and he'll buy them any single book that they want dude most generic name jackson you can't find anything would you google for jake's smith like yeah okay well maybe we do this so there's the last mile which you could donate to so get a last mile the last mile dot org you can donate there there's inside circle foundation where you could donate there so maybe do a little good so if there's anybody who's listening to this since this is inspired either to to start your own thing or attend one of these or to donate good do it man because it's a seen it firsthand does a lot of good and i think doesn't get the type of attention that i would ever want by the the inside circle guys they also made like a movie a documentary about the program and chris red is the guy who who i who's kind of my mentor someone i look up to and you could find him on twitter he's he's super low key but he's been a seed investor of like probably five to ten different unicorns hugely successful and now has dedicated his life with this so just dm if you're wanna do whatever he's he's pretty open i think you're gonna do something like this by the way yeah i haven't found my cause for do you have like a a career arc in mind where you're like cool i achieve i climbed success mountain and then i you know parachute over to like you know save the world i that at the age of forty i'm going to stop the getting of money so i said by by forty i will no longer pursue any money and we will have a cause and that's what we would dedicate ourselves too that's what i that's that's you've also told me that you're gonna disappear off the internet i think this is badass asset you should talk more about this i said at the age of forty yeah i wanna get off the internet and i wanna not pursue any money making things ever again i don't want it to like ruin my perspective and just be a shallow capitalist and only care about that and just delete the internet and just focus on like doing something good that's that's what that's the current that's the current plan how old are you now i turned thirty six a month ago so i'm thirty six four years away dude do you think that's a crazy plan of course it's a crazy plan but it's pretty cool plan i think it sounds pretty cool i said i said about forty are you i mean what's your level of seriousness about this this is like that's what's happening or like i'm just testing this out seeing how these words sound in my mouth no i i just think that i think that i think if you only pursue making money i think that you become a very shallow person i think that there's more to life i think that there's been so many times where i've seen something inspiring and beautiful and in my head i think oh i think we could do this and turn into this and then like optimize by doing this as opposed to saying this is beautiful this is wonderful i want to experience let's let's keep it small and so i wanna like force myself to appreciate that one of my heroes is this guy named felix dennis he wrote the book how to get rich felix dennis was a publisher in england where he founded a bunch of companies a bunch of publishing companies eventually it was worth six or seven hundred million dollars and he wrote that he was diagnosed with cancer something like at the age of sixty and then at the age of like sixty one while he was like learning about his cancer or something he got into poetry and he was like i'm obsessed with writing poetry why on earth did i not discovered the sooner and he quit business partially because he was dying and because he fell in love with poetry and he wrote in his book that if i do it all over again i would have quit at the age of forty because i had enough and i would have pursued poetry because that was my calling and i always found that to be amazing because i think that oftentimes when we're doing what we're doing every single day we get caught into the make more do more optimize more when it's like kind of i wanna be in the present and i wanna enjoy the things that i wanna enjoy regardless if they make money because how many hobbies have you had where you're like well i would only do it if i could like make like oh i wanna like buy these toys and like maybe can buy like ten them turned to a money now what you're doing is actually pretty cool you but you still have a capitalist mindset to it you playing the piano and you are live streaming it which i think is amazing but in my head i'm like i wanna do that too it's like i wanna do that because i want people to see me learning a hobby do you what i mean and i like that's like taint only live once no i'm not criticizing you i'm criticizing i i was inspired to do it because i want glory do you know need yeah and well i i learned pretty quickly when i start playing the piano that nobody gives a shit if you could play the piano by the way it's not like a thing like if somebody plays the piano well it's like oh you could play the piano well they don't wanna listen to even one song nobody wants to listen to somebody play five in a song on the piano that's a very like clearer thing to me since learn to piano but it doesn't matter because playing the playing a five of the song is incredibly fun in fact i was i sent ben text so i'm gonna read you this text message because i it's very relevant to what we're talking about so pop did a a spa recently did you see this yeah i i i saw but i don't entirely know what it that means but yeah so our friend pop anthony they spa a company and the company's goal was to do the kind of michael sailor playbook which is it's a bitcoin acquisition and finance company and so what they're doing is they they raise i think seven hundred fifty million dollars they stacked it it's now public you know it's gonna be a public and they basically bought seven or fifty million dollars worth of bitcoin then they're gonna raise debt buy more bitcoin and they're gonna because just pin companies or pension funds can own pump stock but they can't own bitcoin so this is how they get exposure to it is that right company that's one one aspect to it there's others which is like it's lever so like you know you could for every dollar you put in let's let's say you buy bitcoin directly you could buy one dollar of bitcoin but like fair thing mike they're gonna borrow and buy more than a dollar of bitcoin for every dollar of equity you know for example they also want to eventually turn it into like a full financial services thing so essentially like a bitcoin backed bank i think that's a part of the vision anyways i don't know exactly what they're doing this you know they're only allowed to say certain things but point is it's like pump this guy who's very much like us i think he's the same age similarly hang out the all the time creator on the internet good dude and he's you know he's not like some uber uber uber genius that's like but he's like relatable that's what i'm saying so he's like he's like one of us and it's clear that you know this didn't just happen he's been working on this for you know some period of time maybe six months maybe a year maybe two years you don't know so he he it's like oh wow pom raised seven hundred fifty million dollars has this public company now i think he owns eight percent of it i saw from the filing so like you know theoretically pump has like eighty million dollars of value from this right some creators make courses bob's gonna make like you know probably hundreds of millions of dollars from this thing if it goes well okay and that's clearly what he put a lot of energy and focus on and did a great job fundraising for and i was texting ben i was like wow that's incredible i was like meanwhile i've logged a hundred twenty hours on the piano in the last six months how'd i go honestly no regrets though fucking love the piano good so listen you tweeted out you said i used to think jealousy was a bad thing like a sin and i tried to avoid avoid it jealousy is a wedding crash it shows up uni invited and recently i started using jealousy to my advantage advantage jealousy is an incredible signal it tells me at a very primal no logic level what my subconscious wants it's a heat signal for taste i don't obey signal but i do observe it but and helps me now and so the sounds very strange but when i saw what pop was doing i was like that's so badass asking congrats to him but then very weirdly when i saw you streaming you played the piano for some reason i thought that was oddly one of the cooler things you've done in the last year or two and i felt stronger and i'm like well why do feel that why do i think that that is cooler i don't know why exactly but it relates to that tweet where i'm like what's the signal there that that's sending anyway i thought that was really cool i thought that was significantly cooler and i said this as well when you were contemplating making a play or or starting a business or something like that it's like i don't know for some reason the play is so much cooler so i think i would pursue those like artistic things over the money thing and this sounds like a very tri you know like not everyone has the privilege should be able to do that but i do think that like it's better for your soul that way yeah exactly i you could already you know hear the comments oh must be nice for you you don't have to work another version of it is tech bros discover hobbies yeah there's more life and money but also by the way both through yeah both both of both very valid point of view i don't think it's the important point of view but i do think they're valid points of you i think the important point of view is like try to figure out what you actually wanna do and then pursue it like in a relentless sort of un una unnamed way and i think it's very cool when you said that thing i think you told me like in five seven years i plan to delete my social media disappear from the internet and and now you're talking about like you know and you know stop the stop pursuing the getting of money yeah i really hope you stick to that i don't know if you will because i think it's a very hard thing to do it's like hey could you turn down like it's like being like i no longer eat sugar right like i think those people who like like i'm gonna stop i'm a diet right it's hard to stick to a diet but if you actually did that you would like shoot up in the rankings of almost badass people i know you know what i mean i you're already top ten but you would shoot up i've got four years to go i better get i better get all of it while i can but i do think that it's also be give me a percentage how certain are you you're gonna do that at the age of forty i just need to know i'm gonna hold you to this sixty to seventy percent i mean like i feel this a lot of it has to do with family too like i feel like when my little kids start like talking and having personalities i think i would fall in love with them even and i just wanna like be a good example that there's more to life than than just getting a money yeah yeah yeah i'm totally washed went well kids are so cute i'm just washed up now i can't i can't do anything dude i'm just like the all the more personality she shows the more or i'm like oh nothing really matters except our health and being around each other right right i don't know is that does that stay linear like or does it like like does it keep getting higher the more they talk to you yeah it but i i think at least for me like there's a there is a cap it's not one of these un undo things it's don't like i wanna spend every waking a moment with you my you got like you're too annoying i'm i'm too tired this is too much but it does i do well i do have like a a it became my favorite thing for like three hours a day like for three hours a day my kids are my favorite thing in the world and that's three hours a day that my favorite thing used to be working it used to be you know reading there's other things that we're in that spot of like that three hours a day of like voluntary time i could shoot i could direct towards anything and now my kids are that right like we like jump into the pool with them and doing stuff or playing a game or whatever that that's like it is super super fun but it is capped at like a three to four hours a day beyond that i'm like like how dare my wife make me raise my own children this is too much i need to be helped and saved who's who's here to save me this is the softest episode we've ever had alright we should get off before we start crying alright that's it that's a pop i feel like i could rude world i know i could be what i want to put at all in and like a days off on a travel never looking back alright my friends i have a new podcast for you guys to check out it's called content is profit and it's hosted by luis and ph ka after years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like red bull and orange theory fitness luis and fo are on a mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue in each episode you're gonna hear from top entrepreneurs and creators and you're gonna hear him share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit so you can check out content is profit wherever you get your podcast

you've ever thought about buying a business then this episode is gonna be for you because on the internet there are a lot of people telling you about how amazing it could be to just go buy a business that's already working you just take out a loan you put very little money down and boom your cash flowing and you're working passively but those are also people that are kinda selling you the dream now my buddy dan is one of my best friends from college just actually did this a couple years ago he bought a business a very random un sexy business that he had no experience in he didn't have a lot of money coming in he had never bought a business before but he did it and it's actually worked out pretty well and i asked them to come on and tell the real story so tell us like what was it like what did you do the first hundred days how did you actually find buying the business how much money did you have to put down how much money did it make what are the downsides what are the traps all the real stuff and i love it because dan was very honest it was very open about all those things and then at the end he actually brainstorm a couple of business ideas that he saw because when you buy a business you look at hundreds of businesses he actually saw has a couple of his favorite spaces that he thinks people could go into we brainstorm that at the end so this episode i think is gonna be a lot of value for anyone who's ever thought about buying a business and then we have a fun brainstorm also at the end for other businesses that people could check out alright enjoy this episode with my buddy dan i feel like got rude world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a road less travel never bad this is a special one my buddy dan from colleges here and me and dan we've started a sushi restaurant together we've owned a pet mouse together we've tried to bring down the house at a casino together we have gone through many schemes and dreams and then dan called me a couple of years ago and i convinced him to try to buy a business and then he he's done it now he bought the business and he's here to tell the story of that whole journey of going from a guy who never could thought that he would ever buy a business to now owning one of the most random businesses that you'll ever hear about and then i got sam here who doesn't know dan it's me and my college is buddy and then sam you're third sort of the third wheel on this date are you ready for this yeah sign me up is isn't the first time it's happened but i'm gonna ask questions that it usually what what i think is what the audience think so so i'll ask some questions yeah exactly alright so sam what you wanna start just maybe first question like who who the hell is this guy who are you yeah who are you certain dan certain so i wasn't in his roommate in college i was like the next door neighbor so for the seinfeld filled references i was like the kramer i'd show up from time to time una unanswered live with this guy for four years so i go way back with sean and by the way sam the funniest part of meeting dan the first day of college i walk in and dan the way he looks now he looked exactly the same at age eighteen so dan understand and he used to wear a visor because he's like i don't know that was got from new jersey there so i thought he was someone's dad i was like this guy with a pilot i'm from the back and he knew everything he was like laundry down there yeah you have to do this know you plan it's not gonna work until you activate it you have to go he knew everything about the campus and i was totally clueless i didn't know anything about going to college and so well he was and he had a he had a single he was like one of the smart guys who like requested having a single room didn't have to have a random roommate so day has been ahead of the game for a long time and okay and what business did you end buying by the way so i bought a company called fleet packaging so it's a a packaging distributor so effectively we work with large retailers in the us who need any sort of packaging so if you know you go to a mall you know you leave with one of those to go bags we help companies buy those and then we help with warehousing distribute distribution we make it easy to buy bags overseas so he is dan the bag man now which is all you really need to remember dan the bag man but to get there i think it's a fun kind of journey right so we're gonna skip the part about me a day in college and then the company we try to start together we're gonna skip that for now we'll we can go back there later the i think the the buying a business story starts where in actually kind of a funny way so after we after we kind of try and fail at our first business we go off and do different things i go move to australia dan moves to san francisco and he goes and get the job at facebook a few months later dan calls me and he's like oh yeah sorry i like don't i know what he said but he was like yeah i was just quickly just fixing a bug and i was like fixing a bug what are he what are you talking about and he's like yeah i'm coding now it's like your coat it europe he was like a economics fine he was like our finance guy why is the why is our finance guy well what are you doing in code and basically what he did with i don't know if you know the sam but i guess at facebook they have just like oh a coding academy internally facebook dan is that how you describe like a boot camp basically the non non engineer could go like become an engineer just while on the job is that how it works it's not explicit so it's actually four engineers when they show up so when you show up and i actually think they just got rid of this a few weeks ago so this might be old news but you know for the first twenty years of facebook's existence you know when you get a job as an engineer at facebook you go to this eight week crash course on how to be an awesome facebook engineer and it's not typically open to non engineers but you know why why accept the status quo so i was actually one of the few people who early on was able to take classes there so i started in fraud do you have a good farm bill fraud story what what is an average person like us not know about like fraud on a farm like farm bill sounds like the stupidest thing in the world the fact that there's is even fraud going on it's like you know i stealing crops from sam's you are stealing crops well what you're doing is you're probably you're wanting to make a better farm than sam but you don't have time is a pride or money it's well the fraud are doing it for money so the the buyer is doing it for pride they're like i want a bigger farm than sean but i don't have time to actually spend my time playing the game so i'm gonna go online to the black market wherever that is and someone's gonna sell me whatever two hundred mushroom seeds to plant in my farm and they've procured those illegally because they've stolen someone's credit card and there's whole world of facebook games throughout that existed so so farm was basically like i i don't know is this is that the laundering part bay basically the guy steals the credit card uses it in farm sells the farm stuff to me which looks harmless and he gets cash out the other side precisely this is like a much less cooler version of the wire it's pretty much well there was also like real money laundering too where like people would make their own app and then lau money through that that one was was a little more intense dude say have one time i was like dad what have you doing at facebook dave what you mean fraud what is the facebook fraud and he goes have you ever opened up your time on a facebook you just seen a dick and i no he goes you're welcome no noah that was so no that's that that was the later iteration i moved on to community community tooling yeah but effectively preventing porn on facebook so that that was my go to line and what you do at facebook so after facebook i all of a sudden you know had transitioned into engineering i went to a startup called namely it was a payroll company and i joined as an engineering manager eventually worked my way up to be cto by that day you gotta tell sam the the brilliant so dan's dan's actually a marketer at heart he just never worked in marketing for some reason but the way he framed himself in the job market was amazing so he's he's at facebook he becomes an engineer there right so it's not like he's like mit computer scientist right like like when you think about like nam dude a duke spanish major he's a duke spanish major when he was at duke he kept he kept taking this class called le where he's going to the zoo and looking at le all day like damn that's what to do but then he trains himself to be an engineer and then when he goes into the job market he has this brilliant way of framing himself so that he ended up becoming a cto of this like fast growing startup alright so i leave facebook as you will see most of these things are schemes that sean and i have done in our lives are slowly elevated to get ideas but i left facebook you know basically the best of the best at the time like it was you know still is you know one of the best technology companies but i'd say you know i was i was i joined facebook there were three thousand people i left when there were sixty thousand so i saw a lot of things and i'm not like old school facebook rich i missed that and i wasn't an engineer in the beginning so just wanna clarify that but i left and i had you know kind of this weird amount of experience like i had whatever four five years of coding experience which is cool maybe enough to make me like an one or two at a normal company but you know i had moved into management while i was at facebook and and the way that i positioned it was you know i am a facebook manager i know how things work at facebook let me come into your startup and let me whip your team in shape let me help your team run like a facebook engineering team alright so i've built a few companies that have made a few million dollars a year and i've built two companies that have made tens of millions of dollars a year and so i have a little bit of experience launching building creating new things and i actually don't come up with a lot of original ideas instead what i'm really really good at what my skill set is is researching different ideas different gaps in the market in reverse engineering companies and i did invent this by the way we have this guy brad jacobs we talked him on one the podcast he started like four or five different publicly traded companies where tens of billions of dollars each he actually is the one who i learned how to do this from and so with the team at hubspot we put together all of my research tactics frameworks techniques on spotting different opportunities in the market reverse engineering companies and figuring out exactly where opportunities are versus just coming up with a random silly idea and throwing it against the wall and hoping that it sticks and so if you wanna see my framework you can check it out the link is below in the youtube description but sam isn't that great to just be like how to re how to re brand yourself to be like i'll make your engineering team run like a facebook engineering team and is if you're a startup founder who's you know sitting like name in new york right that's gonna kinda aspirational to have somebody say that versus just i have five years of experience right yeah i man that's great yeah it's all about storytelling so the story is so far it's like you know whatever pretty good you're you're stumbling into things just guy a smart guy with a smart guy have the dream and a little bit of steam and and now you're in a position where you're like i'm at the startup up we just raised a bunch of money at a good valuation i'm the cto i got these shares i'm gonna be rich gonna be rich what happens didn't get rich second time facebook cool really didn't get rich this time didn't get rich you know the so you know long story short we found ourselves in a place where in order to do what we needed to do we needed to sell the company or in order for the company to do what it needed to do next to we needed to sell the company and it became very clear that this wasn't gonna be kind of this massive windfall that i had been expecting long story short the company sells i find myself out of a job because as part of the transition the acquiring companies like we have a cto so we don't need you so it's like five years of hard work and kind of that dream of like hey we're gonna take something and and turn it into something else kinda goes away pretty quickly and that's kinda where things start to get interesting because you know i have sean on speed dial so had a had a fort conversation with him that day was he the one who inspired you do or did you listen to the m m or how did that insight gonna be because like it's not normal for a facebook duke facebook unicorns startup guy to buy business correct so no it was in it wasn't even like hey sean i need advice so it was just like a random like you were doing catch catch up call yeah yeah let's just catch up it's been a while wait so it's sean did you say like i use this bad company no no no we're on this college catch up call what's going on with you what's going on with you dan tells us this story got we got acquired you know there can only be one cto they they already have one so great i'm gonna be so he was just saying like if you know any cool companies let me know i'm i'm gonna be looking and then i kinda just mentioned to him i was like dude dan you're so like like ever since i known you you've been entrepreneurial and i think like neville said this once he goes you know other people sometimes see your gifts easier than you can see them he was saying for neville all he also used to think i'm gonna be a scientist and his mom was like no no you're gonna be a business person he's like what no science right and she's like oh like every time we walk by a pizza shop you're telling me all the three different things that they should be doing to run their business better like you're always doing that you're naturally you're a natural fit for a business person like that's what you're good at and so dan same thing dan was always somebody who was like shooting a shot like when our freshman year at duke all of a sudden there's like this huge package and dan has like a lifetime supply of stride gum and i'm like dan why did you buy this much company i didn't buy it i want it and he would always be entering contests i went you know one day with dan i go to i go to work and dan goes hey i gotta get off early i got an audition i'm like what what are he's doing he's like i'm going to try to get on wheel of fortune right now and so we i went with him and we both got casted on the wheel of fort well you yeah you you leave out the point we like we came we were doing the c sushi restaurant the time so we like we're both like been working all day we have the bright green headband like we have not like we came in with knives like we had our sushi eyes on our belt we come into this interview like no wonder we got cast it was like this is good tv man these clowns but he was always doing this he was always like he early on he started recording like product review videos for like i don't know two cents of pop or something like that like he was just doing random shit all the time so it just seems strange to me be that he was like going to get a corporate job like just didn't it's not like the vision i had i was like dan you ever started thought about starting a business he's like i don't really have like a killer idea and i feel like i need like a killer idea if i'm gonna like put my whole life on the line for something i go oh that's fair i said you know if do this podcast and it's not something i was doing a lot but like we've met a few people who go and buy businesses and it's honestly seems like a little bit of a cheat code like as in the business if you find a business that's already working you don't have to come up with the genius id it's already validated it's already working it's got years of profitable history you could buy it at a fair price and then if you're good at executing like you can grow it over time and you know there's retiring business owners like there's reasons these are up for sale and so i just kinda like planted that seed was like would you kinda like consider that and dan i don't what your first reaction was but i i bet it was probably just like lukewarm i don't know it was lukewarm i mean it was two part one you know i in the beginning i said sean you know always knows what he's talking about seems to seems to have his life figured out my first response like sean has no idea what he's was talking about he's never bought a business before to this day that is still my for you know my my main thing it's like you don't know matt but the second one was like but sean is a pretty smart dude like and he you know if he's saying this a good idea that's a good idea but you know my real my second reaction after that was with what money am i buying this business because let's recall missed the boat on the facebook riches miss the boat on the name riches but it actually turned out and you know we'll i'll get into this more later like don't need that much money to buy the business that's the crazy part and i think it it took a little bit of digging initially to figure that out and i'll talk more about that in a let's let's do a quick tara so let's give the ending first so let's say oh you you buy you you you ended up buying a bag business as in like literally if you go to a shopping store and you buy something and they have a custom branded bag when they check out like there's a decent chance i i made that bag so it's it's it's it's that big it's that big i unfortunately can't i like i'm under confidentiality agreements with most of my clients but if you go to mall there's a pretty decent shot that you're gonna touch one on my back we're gonna get it out of you somehow we're gonna we're gonna get out of you after i'm not bound by any commentary here maybe i can say some things alright so but dan let's give the headline so you buy a business let's what we're gonna we're gonna work backwards for like because it's gonna sound cool and then we're gonna be like here's the crazy journey of how i got alright so how much did you buy that business for i bought the business for three point four million dollars so he buys a bag business for three point four million dollars that business had been around for how long and about how much money was making when you bought it yep so it was about fifteen years old the business had been making anywhere from and it was right after covid so it was a weird few years but it had been making anywhere from eight to eleven million dollars a year in revenues in revenue and it was doing on average about eight hundred thousand dollars in profit and what's the url what what's the fleet fleet packaging dot com best bags in the business best bags you have like a do you have like a slogan yet so jingle we're we're working oh maybe we could come up with a later bring later it's like no we're working on a rethink your packaging partner or rethink packaging partnership because what we're trying to do is you know there's a lot of people sell packaging but what we're trying to do is just do it better than everybody just kinda go that extra level of like let's make your life easier out of the packaging dan explain so you said you bought this business this about eighteen months ago it was doing eleven million in revenue about eight hundred thousand in profit that the sell that the the guy who owned it was able to that was his living he's make grand a year and now last year how much revenue did it do you grew last year we had a record year i think we did we did about thirteen eight million in that was that was pretty pretty easy to get the information out of them didn't you just say can this i guess your client i just thought i can't your client names i'll share else you share own information yeah how much money did you put down to buy this business because again you talked about like didn't most people doing if i'm gonna buy a business for three and a five million dollars where am i gonna get three and a five million dollars from yep and really quick how much profit does it do now in the thirteen on the thirteen we did like one point seven million dollar profit last year so you you you've cream i mean you crushed it you've you yeah last year was twelve i stuck on that zuckerberg got on there you go more yeah you got got it so you bought a business that made eight hundred k and profit to you've more than doubled it yeah and there were lots of and you know was it every you know things that i did the doubled it certainly that was part of it a lot of it was getting out of covid and figuring out how we position it and it turned out you know the business had not kind of reached its potentially yet and back to what sean said you bought it for three million or so where did the money come from three point four million so we did it through an sba loan and we ended up putting two hundred thousand down i say we because i say me and my wife because we put our house on the line like we went we went all in on this business we spent hundred fifty thousand from our savings and then my wife took a loan offer four zero one k for the other fifty so that was the again house on the line four zero one k on the line like this is it was she just down from day one to do this or what did you did it take a lot of persuasion how how did you position this with the wife to to make that happen she was down i mean she has a similar kind of philosophy on you know we should do something that's gonna be kind of a step change in where we're at you know if we're gonna bet on someone we should bet on us and you know she knows john she knows what we've been up to for the past you know however long she knows she married stallion who just needed to run so this wasn't like oh my goodness where did this idea come from this guy's crazy it's like no that that sounds about right that this is what you're doing how much of a loan have you paid back now but but but the same so he put he put down two two hundred k he got an sp alone and then he had a seller note also which i think is is a key part of this so you're you wanna explain that where the rest of the money came from so two hundred thousand from you where the other three point two come from sure so one point eight came from the bank two hundred thousand came from me and then the other one point four came from the seller which effectively we said hey like you know we're not gonna pay this upfront over the next five years assuming the business continues to do well you know we'll pay the second part of the business oh sorry second part of the debt so it's a forgive seller note which means effectively if the business doesn't do what it's supposed to do that debts forgiven on any given year so that was part of what made me feel better about the deal you know because you run all these scenarios when you first buy it's alright we're gonna put our life savings and house on the line what happens if things go bad and it's like alright at least half of this debt if things go bad we'll go away why they wanna sell the company that seems like he retiring he just wanted he was he wanted out and and that's kind of the what i loved about kind of this world once sean kinda turned me onto to it is like the baby boomers are retiring like the past few years the next ten years i forgot what the window is but like a lot of them don't have kids or they have kids that don't want it this guy had three kids and none of the kids one of the business dana told me he goes anytime i ran into a business that looked really cool and the guy who owned it was twenty six he's like i don't wanna buy this off of twenty six why are you selling the like i want to buy from a boomer that is my goal i wanna buy from a guy that wants to move to florida and play golf like that to me is like that we this business has been great to me and now i'm am done i've made my money here ready to go like that's the type of i want not probably still answer your phone calls when you had questions exactly like and you know spoiler alert i found like the nicest buyer in the history of the world like i got incredibly lucky cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty impossible but that's exactly what sandler training did with hubspot they use breeze hubspot ai tools to tailor every customer interaction without losing their personal touch and the results were incredible click through rates jumped twenty five percent qualified leads quadruple and people spent three times longer on their landing pages go to hubspot dot com to see how breeze can help your business grow so to me there's two kind of good things out of episode one i get to hang out with my best butt alright the second would be for other people who are listening to this that they hear what i'll call like the real life take of this because dan's not selling courses he's not telling you you should do this he's not like a the business buying guru got a book and a in a mastermind mine none of that i think he's got good opinions and like a real story of like alright where do you start so to me this episode would be interesting because if if i'm interested in buying a business i kinda wanna know what is it like from a person who's smart but came in with no experience no money and no like kinda clue where to start because even though i was like hey you should do this it's not like i was there helping you every day or you know you you were wandering around figuring this out you know by yourself so he he told me this i i called in like last week to be like alright what do wanna talk about and you he had said something great he goes he goes alright i started and i was high excitement and low knowledge so i bought the book you ever heard this framework like like no you one through four it's like you start high high excitement low knowledge and then you become you know you kind of go up and knowledge and down in excitement you kinda enter into the like pit of pit of despair which is low knowledge low excitement and then you learn more and you slowly kinda get out of this this pig his quote was this is great it's gonna be great it's gonna be easy i'm gonna be rich and he goes then i started i realized this is not easy this is not going great and i might not be rich and so do you wanna talk about like how you actually like what'd did you do we have first maybe a hundred days what'd you do well first how'd do you find the company so i ended up finding the company through a broker got it so a lot of what i started to do and i'll go back to the beginning in a second but you know there's a ton of business marketplaces out there acquired dot com probably the most known for for tech biz by sell for kinda of more of the those main street businesses but there are these brokers that effectively represent buyers and kinda of put together these packets of like hey i have this bag business here's what it does and most brokers i was telling this is sean hate search because they just assumed like you know people are you know they just saw cody sanchez video they're about to buy a business like they're pumped you know they this morning they saw the video and now they're ready to buy the business so they reach out to the broker this one broker actually like understood he's like i get it i understand this jump from tech to this and then like several months later he calls him back which is rare like most people didn't he's like i got this business you know check this guy out so it ended up happening through a broker but and to go back to sean's saying the first hundred days so the first thing you hey google started reading books started watching videos started to just learn like what is a search fund if that was something that like sean didn't use that word but eventually i found it where effectively there's kind of a few models to do this one of them is is kind of a search fund where someone will actually you know you get someone to finance you looking for a business and then you take a small piece of it and they effectively own most of it like there's lots of courses now in business schools you know teaching entrepreneurship through acquisition it's kind of the the fancy way of of talking about it and then there's kind of like this other model of you know you just do yourself you know you effectively bootstrap it find the money yourself do it through an sba loan so first it was kind of like educating myself on the different models you know i thought a little bit about getting the funding but at the end of day it's like no if i'm do this like it's gonna be me i i don't wanna answer to anybody and then it was really like finding this community and there's a really cool community in search it's been growing pretty steadily over the past you know call it five ish years i think but there's a there's a there's a website called search fund dot com like those were my people during the time because search like it's a very lonely process when you guys say look at a hundred what does that mean does that mean browse a website with a hundred or does that mean actually due diligence on a hundred so it's something in the middle so you you basically see kinda of like the headline on the website it's like laundromat for sale know four million dollars like usually you'll get like the flashy headline and and not much more information then you kinda got a double click in and request information and so usually sign kind of an nda and you'll get something called a sim or a confidential information memorandum so it's kind of look at like a hundred of those because that's really gonna show you like here's it's the finances of the business like here's kind of the story that they're putting together it's like a summary of the business today and so that's the one where it's like you know play i think something a mistake as people think you fall in love with the first the few businesses you see oh this is great yeah i can i could buy this you kind of really like hey i mean you're just like a teenager that just went through puberty it ideas fall in love with the first you know the the the first that you see and you're like well no that's probably not the right way to do this let me let me actually just plan that is probably gonna take me over a hundred even find one good one and let me have that mental expectation and let me start counting how many i'm looking at and not just like being desperate to find you know the one right away and then you're saying like you you're looking at an hvac company you're like i don't what hvac is you're looking financials you're like i know which number to look at it's overwhelming but you got you kinda gotta go through those reps and figure it out before you even have any idea of what you're looking at i i kind of liken it to looking for a house because i think that's that's a pro you know or an apartment even because that's something that that most everyone goes through even if they're renting you know usually the first time you see it you have nothing to compare it to so you end up kind of getting to a place where you can you can spot the winners from the losers faster but like sean said when you when i first started it was like super exciting because it's like the ultimate career fare it's like oh cool i'm gonna be a landscape or i'm gonna be you know i'm gonna own you know a scrap metal recycling center it's like you just get so excited and again the business brokers especially like they make these things sound amazing it's like of course i wanna buy this business so what what were some of the cool businesses you you saw like what's what give us an example of one that you kinda like but he didn't end up pulling the trigger so my favorite example is i i got pretty close to buying a sausage company it did about like ten million dollars a year in sausage you know my favorite my favorite anecdote on this time is it also a fellow sausage man yeah we i i i know the kid spirits well we held an event it might also be a sausage fast we don't know yeah you're you're almost a p of fine wiener that could've been i i could've been and still maybe so you went about you you didn't just like look you didn't just read the same you're like tomorrow i went there i went to this austin i went to the talk i'm like walking through like pretending to know what i'm talking about like you know how hot does this up and get like it's like that that's the beast that you hear like figure out what questions to ask this is a really common have you get sort of the secretary problem yeah somebody talk explain this somebody told us that on the pod so i used it when i was looking for an apartment the other day and it was actually pretty magical and so the thing is is that so i'm i'm repeating for memory so i might make get wrong but basically if you have i it started with the secretary if if you hiring a secretary you'd would wanna interview let's say you had ten interviews lined up you wouldn't want to pick who to hire until you saw at least thirty seven percent of the applicant pool in in so for example if you saw ten or if you had ten to see ten interviews you'd wanna go through the first four and then after the first four you would select the first person who you met that was of equal value to or close to the highest person you saw in the first four does that make sense so for if you see an apartment let's say you go and see one hundred of them the first thirty seven you don't do but the next one after the first thirty seven who you that you see that is as good as the best one that you previous lisa saw that's the that's the one you select and that's called the secretary problem so you can't go back and buy that first one you can't go back you cannot go back but you need to like you need to spend time like exploring the first third to see what all is out there that's fair i bought the house that i found on the first day of touring so i just wanna make sure i didn't like violate the secretary problem but i did yeah you did but you didn't with the business and so you with the business and so what of the hundred or so that you saw were there any that looking back here like that was a winner no it wasn't until we saw and you know there were a few close ones where like i i think i was under lo like three or four for example that sausage company it had like one huge client they had one huge client and no contract no contract but you thought they were amazing that's kind of my point is you thought of some were so good that you're under lo yeah but then you get you know you're under and then you get you know the full amount of information and then you very quickly see like lois are also in this business is like a very it's kinda like agreeing to a first date more than it is an engagement people people make lois they'll have three lois out at the same time and it just says it's an agreement to it's we agree to look more right we agree to take this seriously to to show you some interest here but it's not like it's not binding in the way that you would that you think when you first go into this or if you're the seller you're like oh we got another why it's like well hang on i would bet the to close ratio is probably i i have no idea but i would guess it's like under twenty percent you know in terms of just lois received during a process yeah because you know you're not giving the a lot of the information you're not even getting until that point anyway so you know you're checking all the boxes up until there like this seems good i think this is gonna be good and then you know you get their financials or you go to it and you find kind of that oh this is why you know you're selling it or this is why it hasn't been bought yet that's another thing one thing you did that that was great i think i think i kind of was like the one piece of advice think i was pushing on you was like hey write a memo for every one of these deals that you like basically you would he would write me like a one page notion memo that was basically like what is the business why does it you know like how like what is the current state of it just speaking numbers only right why is the seller selling you know what's the one reason that you would buy this business what's the one reason you would not buy this business you know what what are the kind of and you would just go there and you would write these memos and i feel like that was key because i remember you would call you were like excited about let's say like i don't know what what was an example of one you were excited about that then after the memo we talked it we we beat it up and then we were like no this is not worth doing it was a clover app i remember the conversation so basically like so the the clover point of sale system like when you're like checking out of a restaurant kinda it's like you they flip and you like what's your tip this guy made different apps for it so like you know like when you round up for charity for instance i think that was one of his apps so it was actually pretty interesting it was like hey clover are growing super niche yeah very niche but he you own twenty of these things it was you know more up my alley in terms of tech but you know when i actually hash it out with sean you know it was kinda like at the end of the day it was very niche very small and there wasn't necessarily a good path to grow that business it was just something that like was interesting now but probably didn't have the longevity of hey you're you're about to swing you know this is gonna that that's another thing you said to sean were like this is gonna be you know don't don't listen to all those like blogs out there like yeah you're gonna buy this flip it and the next year you're gonna buy two more businesses like no you're probably gonna be working in this business for for a little bit of time make sure it's good make sure it's lasting and i think that first one was an example of like sure if i was gonna buy ten businesses maybe that was one of them but like that's not the game we're playing right now a couple other i thought like key points one was don't buy a job so i think early on when you go to search you see big price tags and you get scared a little bit because it's like how am i gonna afford this and like how this is too risky and so you gravitate towards things that feel like kinda safer and more achievable but it's actually a bit of a trap because it's like yeah this is safer more achievable and that's a hundred grand a year of profit i can buy it for only you know he only wants a hundred and eighty or something like that you know and and and and so you get excited because it seems cheap but the problem is it's still gonna take all of your time to own to to buy this business to run this business and you basically bought a job versus the thing you bought which was like eleven million dollars in revenue doing a million dollars real almost real real dollars yeah that's not a job anymore now that's like an asset that's like a real business and yes it took more risk and it took more time to find a good one of those but it was like well worth it so i feel like that was another kinda like key learning i think we both had during this process like became blatantly obvious yeah not rust the search and and you want to trust me like call it like five months in you know when you really hit of this pit of despair like i'm never gonna find anything everything under five million dollars is trash you know private equity scoop scoop up all the good stuff and anything that's left you know under this point like there's a reason it's there you kinda just get to this place like you're never gonna find it it's easy to want to just grab one and say like those things are fine and like we'll kind of ignore those yeah those holes in the business i've made so many bad decisions like most all bad decisions that i've made it was i could like it's like i had principles living into this and i got fatigued if i didn't stick to my principal fatigue yeah exactly exactly there was one that was like a seo business and it was actually like a good business but what what was the the situation with that one yeah so that one was it was like a competitor for like sem rush you know it was a solid business it made i think it did like a million it it was like half a million to a million here year in profit like it it was a it was a nice business but this was right as you know ai was really starting to becoming kind of the center point of the conversation especially as it relates to search i helped the friend by a company that was in the seo space and anytime an seo company wants to sell it's sort of like at any time do you guys remember bitcoin minors mh like the it's like so if these are so good why are you selling a money maybe money printer yeah and seo it's sort of the same way or it's like wait so if you're just getting like a fountain of traffic and customers why would you wanna get rid of us well that's the same thing it's like when you meet a thirty year old selling a business it's like you know why and that that was exactly that and i think going into you know let's call it to ai headwind it was like there's a lot of reasons this business might be completely different and i think sean said like unless you feel like you're the best suited to take this seo company into the you know the next five years there's more risk than upside and it's like that is not my background the you know that's not the game i wanna play and funny enough i was actually in lo with this seo company when i found fleet and i i was i almost wrote off fleet like it seemed really interesting and i like there was some part of me that you know didn't have me rejected even though i was kind of in very late stages with this other company thank goodness i you know i made that pivot so let's tell the story so you you the broker calls you says check out this business what happens from there so from there i think this was before i was under lo but you know effectively fleet looked very different than a lot of these other companies like the finances at first glance like were super clean you know the story made a lot of sense like a lot of these sims and a lot of these brokers like you know yes they're padding things and trying to make things sell but there was always like a blatant gotcha a lot of these like let let's take the sausage example they're like oh yeah this makes half a million a year oh and by the way he also makes another four hundred thousand in cash but we don't pay tax on that so like you can't see that anywhere and it's like a part of me is like that's kinda cool also sounds a little dangerous like selling four hundred thousand dollars or the sausage on the side of the road but like there's always something like that with a lot of these businesses but but fleet was like very clean like everything was kind of buttoned up the story was really tight and it kinda checked all the boxes of like this is a recurring business like people are buying the bags several times a year they have these amazing clients they have these amazing factories they're like it looked very different than than these other than these sort like general mi of bags exactly yeah exactly i am michael scott you know it's it's it's a it's a necessity that these companies need so what what'd you do you go you meet the guy i was actually gonna say no to the broker because again this seo thing was heating up i hadn't had my you know come to terms talk with sean yet he's was like hey the seller wants to meet you you know let's all go out for lunch was like alright like free lunch that's cool so we meet for lunch and like my goal was like you know entertain this business but at the end of the like i'm under lo so i really shouldn't free lunch yeah free life i should i should break up with him after this lunch but we start talking and like you know just had this instant connection with this guy like he was the most stand up guy i had met in in the past few months especially when it comes to like the business ownership you know he wasn't trying to you know pull something over my eyes like he wasn't trying to spin the story he's like this is the story like a lot of people like you know put lipstick on a pig this guy was like selling a rabbit or selling a different animal like it wasn't like he kinda set it as it is and it was it was very refreshing and like in that moment it was like i kind of abandoned like i'm gonna break up with you and like we kinda went the other way we started talking about well how we're gonna work together during the transition and how are we gonna grow this and then my favorite part is they you know they asked if we wanted any dessert and he's like oh do you wanna share a tart and i was like yes and we shared a tart i i don't think i've shared dessert with my wife ever but i shared a tart with this guy and like i i remember calling my wife after and i was like you know i didn't do what i was supposed to do like i supposed to break up with this company but like we shared a and like i think we're gonna buy a bad business now and it was just like this like complete one eighty but in little michael scott right it didn't even ever seen it chili that's like exactly this yeah exactly it just be like a a lava cake or something like that a tart two a tart very i don't i i that was my first tart flow i've ever had too who knows what a tar tart is i had a google and i i you're you're my type of people dad i tell that there we you go and then you know from there i you know i broke it off with the seo guy you know we ended like diligence took a while that's like the second part was like okay like now you're committed to buying a business how are we gonna do this now and like it actually took four months because again like i'm signing my house away signing my life savings away like i needed to be damn sure that this thing was gonna be solid before i did that and then like the world of search like took on kind of like that next chapter of like alright well how you actually like figure out you know are the assumptions you've made in this quick few week period of dating like are they correct and we kinda transition to that that phase of the process what what what was wrong and what was right for your assumptions and what was the difference in his ass versus the ping so we actually negotiated the price of it pretty early like that part actually happened during the lo for the most part or like ninety nine percent of it and there were actually five bidder which i thought was a lie like i kind of assumed this was them bluff because they were like yeah we got four people in the packaging industry that wanna buy and then there's you so you know it's gonna be competitive blah blah blah but again i just figured that was a tactic to try to drive the price up but to this day the you know the seller maintains if that was the case so at this point i have no reason not to believe it we ended up taking i think they wanted three five or three six for the company so we ended up agreeing to three four the part that took the most negotiation was that gift seller note so the biggest kind of red flag in the business was that one client was over fifty percent of their revenue so my biggest fear rightfully so was you know everything's great today they've been a client for fifteen years you know what happens if next year they leave all of a sudden is a very different business so what we did was you know kind of ran the numbers of the bank and said hey in order for us to finance this like this is this is the number that we'd have to have if for whatever reason we lost that client so that part was probably the you know the most intense of the negotiations but for better or worse like most of what he said ended up being true like there weren't any of these and and he said that in the same like that that wasn't news what was surprising to you or what was different than the dream that gets sold on social media so if you watch the videos and you see cody sanchez tell tone you bought just buy a laundromat it's kind you you'd be rich whatever that that type type of shit like was it in line with that was it different than that what was the difference if there was one yeah it's not nearly as easy as a cody sanchez makes it seem and i i probably went a little more overboard i think like when i think about the amount of time i spent in diligence the amount of money i spent in diligence you know i like i'm a risk taker for sure but i'm a calculated risk taker so it's like before i make this gigantic gamble on the rest of my life i wanna make sure i've done everything humanly possible and i think when you watch a lot of these videos about buying the business like they make it seem like you know you can just find one and then kind of transition right away and and the whole process is really easy like the process of getting the loan like some people like it actually i cody sanchez liken it to this so maybe maybe she actually isn't setting unrealistic expectations but it's like it's a financial colonoscopy like they wanna know everything about you and like that part's tough and then you give the company a a a colonoscopy to try to figure out everything about it quality of earnings that sort of thing and one of the things that i did i think that i'm happiest that i did because it got me the most comfortable outside of you know paying for accountants and lawyers to scour things was i shadow with the guy so every week because he he he happened to live in new york city too oh the the whole thing was ser like he lived twenty minutes from my house wow and i let the the you know before i signed the sim it was like packaging distributor in in the northeast so like you could have been in boston could have been wherever this guy lived twenty minutes for me that's how the tart was so accessible but i literally went to i went to the office every week sat with the guy for several hours and i'm just he walked me through packaging he walked me through his day to day and it just gave me it you know it started my training of like okay well how am gonna run this business but it allowed me to really kind of take what was on that paper and figure out you know okay this is these are the skills that i will need to run this business this is how i might be able to grow it this is where i might need more help it made it more real and i think i was lucky in that i was able to do that because i've talked to other searches was like you know but let's go back to the laundromat you know you buy a laundromat i would imagine day one you kinda walk in and the machine breaks and you're like oh crap like what do i do i know nothing about these machines now i need to find a mechanic like everything is a little more complicated and nuanced with regards to that even like how laundromat you know i went down the laundromat path like i spent a while thinking that was gonna be my destiny i was like well know like valuing a laundromat like actually has a number of facets and you need to kinda really get into the weeds there so you know i'd say like the biggest takeaway is like it is hard and it takes time it's not something that you can just do you know for a few minutes a day like you really gotta invest in making this happen if that's what you wanna do or you're gonna end up you know with some surprise down the road i think that's probably my biggest relief is like i've been waiting for you know the shoe to drop somewhere and like this is what i missed and like you know knock on wood haven't had that yet how many hours a week are you working on it now and how many hours a week was see working on it he was probably working let's call it twenty five to forty i think he definitely was working less he kinda had it on autopilot i think he had started to you know kind of tune out a little bit but not in a way that like he neglected the business it was just like he'd been in packaging all his life like he could run it in his sleep he wasn't as focused on kind of doing the growing or rene negotiating things with suppliers building the supplier base you know i'm probably working on in you know fifty to sixty out like i spend a like a bunch of time on us how much were you were you able to take home so that's the the million dollar question it's like okay cool your your business is making all this money know at the end of the day two years in i'm still only making you know a hundred fifty a year like i take the minimum amount that i need to for you know irs compliance because i'm saving the rest able to finance growth like i like i've made enough to pay back the loan but i'm not paying back the loan because i need that cash to fuel the growth it's a very cash intensive business and i'm not in a place quite yet where i can take as much off the table although sean has been giving me some other frameworks saying like hey you actually should be doing this what's that framework which is like if you wanna replace yourself you have to pay yourself the replacement costs no not that but basically i did this in one of my business is not right for everybody but i think it's easy to go into rainy day mode as a business owner when you play like two conservative so you know several of our business right now have just like like one of our business has just like two or three million dollars just sitting in the bank account and the bank like it goes up every month it's not like where we have this like wild swings where you need this big cash reserve buffer it's not a heavy inventory business it's like you know your your all of your operating expenses a salary and you know your salaries so there's no surprises coming next month and even if there was like one of my friends buddies so we told me i was how much you keep in there like three months of working capital six months twelve months like i think i have like twelve months of working capital sitting in the bank right now he's like no i just take it all out i'm like zero months he goes yeah he goes i own this business myself so if ever need the money i just lend it back into the business i just i can always write the check back it forces you to make a profit as well yeah and so andrew wilkins goods came on this podcast and had this book he was talking about profit first and i really like the philosophy of it which is basically with normal business you have your revenue then you have all your expenses and then it's like surprise here's how much profits left over after all that and usually what actually happens is does not as less profit than you would have guessed and it's why because expenses were a little higher blah blah and you're always in this profit comes last profit first was basically you decide up upfront you say okay i wanna have a twenty percent profit margin so you take your revenue you set aside money for taxes which you know is it's gonna be or so you you you take your revenue you take your profits you do set aside amount amount for taxes what's left is your expenses budget so instead of making profit the thing that comes last you make the expenses come last and then you have to say alright cool then my marketing budget can only be this much because i've decided to take this much as a as a profit a set profit margin out of my business and i don't adhere to a hundred i don't think it's right for every business but i do think that you know dan in this case i think it's being a little overly conservative of as to how much cash she's leaving in the business i did that too and the longer i delayed it i took away one very valuable thing which is if you have if you pay yourself every month out of the business and one month that's light or another month that's heavy the body just reacts to it if it's light you're like yeah what the hell and you will go fix a part of your business that was broken if you just leave it in and it's just like a p and l it's just numbers on a spreadsheet it's not money you actually receive you know you'll wait fifteen months before you end up correcting that problem because it's all fictitious money anyways it's not money you're actually getting and so i think that actually getting that check every month creates this feedback loop that's actually like quite valuable to a business owner it it'll it'll call you to sc unnecessary expenses or like go after it because once you taste a big month like sam we have this with m mfa we have a big month in the next month i'm kinda like look i kinda like the feeling of that again what do we need one extra episode two should we go get a guest what what's one doing today let me see what's going on over there right like you start to think about what you could do to go to go drive it back up and i think there's an unhealthy version of that but there's some healthy components to that yeah so i think i that's a a lesson learned for me i think i'm still in the very conservative you know what if i need this money and i i do have high working capital costs especially around now kind of free holiday i'm about to have write a bunch of checks but very soon i should get to a place where i can take more out and or start paying back some of the the debt a little faster alright listen up turn the volume up because it's bo sean and i got a little message for you i talk to hundreds of founders a week and when i talk to founders everyone says the same thing that's the one thing they need the most is it's not funding it's not more resources it's just having more time the goal here is to win and the way use win is you get yourself free time to do stuff that's high impact how do you do that well i'll tell you my solution the answer is gabby well you might be wondering who is gabby gabby is my assistant she is my wonderful assistant gabby lives in latin america and she helps me save about twenty hours a week so what she's doing for me is every morning my inbox is sorted and triage and the most important stuff is right at the top with draft replies ready for me so i'm never behind on email and then if as i'm on the go i'll just send her voice notes saying hey could you find my kids a soccer class hey could you take care of this car registration thing for me all these little tedious bs things that would take up time in my day she takes care of for me and so that's free time i'm getting back so if you are a ceo who's serious about growing your company do you need to get yourself an assistant the best place to go is somewhere dot com some sources the best assistance from low cost areas for you so you can get an amazing executive assistant who's got you know business experience and has supported other ceos for seven eight nine ten dollars an hour and so go ahead go to somewhere dot com tell them i sent you to hook you up with a good deal and get yourself and assistant and you could take me later alright back to the episode so sam i'm curious what's your reaction to this whole thing so i think that for people who have your personality type which is you you're a very serious person i think like like you're a person like if i was a broker and i met you i would not think you were kicking tires i'm like oh this guy's for real like it's you have the very obvious for real energy and if you have that very obvious for real energy we're like no i'm going to do this this makes sense i think that the path that you're taking is so wonderful and i my assumption is that you're gonna be wildly successful and so i think it's very wise to do i think that if you if you are an serious person where you are not willing to put your house up or something like that that's kinda like that one of the tells like if so if you're like not serious like that and you are not willing to do the diligence and say i'm willing to look at one hundred things i would say do not do this yeah i think there's also one i think you said it perfectly there is one more thing to it which is what situations do you shine the the most and so like for dan i think always had an entrepreneurial streak that was used as like random side quests in life like we would go try to win the mcdonald's monopoly game every year like we tried to like actually win it not just like hope no we thought like we thought we were gonna win we were like dumpster diving try to kinda to win this stupid right like or you know we started a blackjack club at on campus and we're running simulations to see how much money we could make if we started a blackjack club like we were always trying to come up with ideas it was more fun to come up with our own idea versus just like go get a job and do the thing and so i i feel like if you know that you actually turn up the most and you're the most version of you when you're doing this type of shit when you're like in control of your own fate and you have your own project as arbitrary as like you know bags are doesn't matter it's like i'll take bags super seriously i took you took gum seriously black seriously sushi seriously like all those things i think that that's the other part which is not only the part you said but then also if you really are like at your core more entrepreneurial and you're more switched on doing that then you're gonna have a better result doing this than you are if you you know stay in a a a more traditional job that's mine i think i think people you know when i tell them about you know first it's always like the unbelievable way you do what but then the second like their mind goes to like oh i should do that because you know it sounds great and high site right like when everything works out it's like cool of course this is easy of course anyone can do it but i think people miss the point that there's a lot of ways that this doesn't go like that and it's not necessarily the most glamorous i also think most people shouldn't do this so for agree this is not something like this does not fall within my skill set so my like if i had to guess you when you were buying the company like you guys were negotiating over ten twenty thirty forty thousand dollar things like if i had to guess you were incredibly anal about the paperwork you were asking you're like what's this three hundred what's this three thousand dollar charge what's this that is not what i do i do not do that that kills me that does not fit my personality type so i i've bought it invested and done a bunch of real estate stuff in my time and i lose on all of it because you make your money when you're buying it and when you sweat the details up upfront which is dumb that is not what i do i don't think necessarily that is what sean likes to do and i think that if you are the type of person who plays a board game and you memorize all the rules and you like sweat the details and you have that attribute then this buying a company is it could potentially work well for you i'm the guy that takes the the back out of the box that reads it to explain to everybody exactly if you have that trait this could be awesome life changing yeah so dana one of the other cool things about doing a search for business is you realize how big the universe of businesses is and i asked you i said you know we try to brainstorm business ideas with people like what opportunities do you see you said you would come up with a couple ideas give us a couple of your ideas of what you think other people could go do this is just like the the sort of random section yeah i think the i mean the biggest takeaway like from buying a business before i get into in into the ideas like everything's a business right like you walked you know go look at any store you know every little piece of that business is something that someone sells like that display that says for sale like someone sells that like the the holder for the gum on the store like that's a business like i don't think i really appreciated how random and how basic some of these businesses can be and and people make really good money doing it like even packaging it's like you don't really think about that by the way i'm pretty sure robert kraft the owner of the patriots the cr owns the craft group i think that's a packaging company it could be there are so many packaging they even make corrugated hard cardboard okay one of our best episodes ever if you wanna go list do a great episode is the sarah moore episode on this podcast and she's the i think it's called the egg carton queen and her thing was she she did the same thing you did basically she went and found a retiring guy who owned a business that's sold that sold egg cartons like not the eggs the carton they come in and you don't even think that's a business but you when you go look at you're like eggs yeah okay eggs there's a farm that's sells eggs you don't even realize that the farm has to been buy egg cartons and there's somebody whose job is to make egg cartons and they sell it at the best price and the best value blah blah and so her episode i think is amazing and and you see that the other example sam that i always given and i explained what this podcast is to people is i talk about like everything you see is there because someone sold it like if nothing gets there by accident so i was like you know even in the workplace if you go to your break room and there's a poster on the wall that's like the labor code there's a guy in minnesota that sells that he makes a million dollars a you're selling you the the poster every year once i heard that i was like oh shit it's like a physicist when he learns about string theory or assumption shit you know it's like oh it's everywhere i get it oh there's major the world of the components yeah all the components themselves or businesses too and and then you realize like if you're not making it in business it's mostly because of a lack of you know creativity and effort it's not because of a lack of opportunity because literally every item everywhere is itself you know a business that somebody is running to get it there and so you know there there's no lack of opportunities in that sense yeah so now i'm like hardcore on the other the end of spectrum of like as un as possible i wanna do that like i wanna i wanna be the guy that has like the most random thing like packaging is pretty random like you know in a in a future world once i you know if and when i'm done with this like i wanna go even further yeah by the way you would you lay you're laying in bed at night what do you think like in ten twenty years we're gonna we could be this like do you have do you do you think this could be a hundred million dollar company do you think you're you could sell it for a certain amount what's your sort of north star that excites you so you know at this point i don't have any plans to sell it i do think it could be a hundred million in sales company easily like there's so like some of these big packaging players are huge and we're able to compete with them that's kind of the you know we're small in scheme like it's a it's a nice sized business but we're small in the scheme of things but what i'm finding is as we as we work with these brands like we actually do have a pretty differentiated offering because we are small we're scrappy and people love that and you know as we've been able to kind of add clients i'm like oh this thing can really take like we can really scale this up and and you know start to gain more traction with these large brand brands and you know the crazy thing is people spend technically these big companies spend tens of millions of dollars on their packaging so you could easily get like five clients to get you to a hundred million like like that if if it's the right five so my goal is to grow it i i do think in a few years i'll i'll hire an operator to run it one of my biggest pieces of advice to people searching is like don't assume you're gonna hire the operator day one especially if you're putting your house on the line because there is not a single person that i trust to run this business when i'm gonna get kicked out on the street if it fails when i get to the place that i feel better about that like only then will i then decide okay well maybe i'll hire someone and just do more strategic work but at the like i'm loving doing what i'm doing now so i think it's eventually scaling my time so it's not like i'm very involved in all the processes right now and i designed it that way because that's how i learned you know i'd love to be able to go away and i'll have to take a call because the blue isn't blue enough like you know i get a lot i do a lot of color matching when we were doing the sushi restaurant dan was not only certain the details in the finance side but we were like dude we don't really know how a restaurant works none of us have ever worked at a restaurant so dan went and got a job at noodles and company oh yeah and he studied him from the inside and we treated it like it was like ocean's eleven like every day he'd come home and we were like what did red report yeah yeah he was like worked did like draw the workflows or he like what did you learn and what did you bring me give me the pesto capital yeah then he bring the peso cabo eddie be like trust me do not eat the tomato basil soup we're like why it seems just tomato soup like don't eat the tomato based soup and so he was like win undercover and he was like willie like the big reveal like the big undercover boss reveal at the end when i quit yeah we're we're by the way were they blown away by the fact that you're like i am creating a sushi i think i tried to hire the gm and she's like alright like that sounds better than i'm doing here and noodles was a company like she was like like i thought you'd like you'd betrayed me and it's like cool you're like oh you're trying to move next door great like we can trade food at lunch so dan you let's do let's do actually do you have that the business plan that we made do you still have that binder yeah on sec let's find it so the story here is that not only did today work undercover at noodles and company at some point also this was not a the i didn't just put that there like that's lived there behind keep that there i don't have i i need to get a copy of this i also like our sa sushi hat is right there oh nice yeah so basically the first business we me and dan and our buddy trevor had out of college was to create was a brand called sa sushi the idea was to create the chipotle for sushi so go get go get sushi the way you eat chipotle where you could just walk down the line you pick your ingredients if you get the thing this is our big idea and which i maintain a good idea i think good time been proven it's been proven it's a bad idea but like i still want it okay so so we not only did dan work undercover at noodles company we then go and i don't know how we get a meeting with the founder of noodles and company and we show up to this meeting with this binder this binder is our business plan we've been working on this for months while we were searching for a location and can you just hold up the thickness of this binder is the people say like thick let's see yeah like this is probably a couple hundred pages of a business plan in there and there was stupid things so part of it is what you would expect like here's the start of cost but part of it was dumb stuff like the uniforms and how we're gonna like progress people from from entry level to manager and what their values are and all we had not sold a single role to a single customer and we're worried about all this other shit what we think we're tricking ourselves into thinking that planning equals productivity and you know spoiler planning did not equal productivity we're basically doing a very fancy form of procrastination and so we get to this meeting with this guy from noodles a company i think his name's aaron if i remember correctly and he forgot that guy's name he's like alright so like what's the plan and we think we're about to wow this guy and we're like plan oh funny you should ask whip out that binder slam it on the table it's basically like here's our plan look how great this is and i remember he looks at it and first of all it looks like a kid's project even though even the cover is like we inserted this colorful thing of the front plastic thing and he flips through and he's like realizes pretty quickly oh these idiots were at a two hundred fifty page business plan for their sushi restaurant and they don't even have a location they don't have any customers they're they're they're starting on you know from scratch and i remember the look on his face and then i remember like the moment that was rock bottom for me in the whole sushi journey which was that he should've have just ripped us and been like guys what the hell are you doing and this is so ass backwards like why don't you get out there start testing your concept so if people actually want this and then like you know you'll learn by doing and instead he kinda took pity on us and didn't say that i could tell you wanted to say something and then he was like and then he just tried to be nice about it and i was like oh my god we're so bad that he feels like he needs to be polite about this that means we're even worse than just being bad and i just remember realizing like well i don't know what the right answer is but whatever we're doing is dead wrong i could tell you that right now after that meeting i just wanna later to wake years later someone did tell us that though in boston there you know we were talking about we're about to sign a ten year lease and we literally just met this guy like ten minutes ago and he oh he was it was a guy he like owned a bunch of boston markets i don't yeah john john pre gassed pen my i know i that call that's his name he was not he was doing a a tech company now but he was like you know early in my career i own twenty or thirty boston markets and he's like know a little bit about the quick service industry let me you know be your mentor yeah but he basically just tore the whole thing the shreds like within five minutes i was like this is wrong don't sign that lease and like trevor like wasn't in massachusetts stuff us when we when we were doing this like he was like about to sign the lease they called him like wait no yeah well this guy this guy was great because he's like you know so like he asked us a question and we gave him the answer we've been giving everybody else so i think he was something like you know so what makes you think that there's like there's demand for this and we were like well you know sushi been on the ride we gave him this like spiel hey he's like alright so this is gonna work or what and he basically cut through the nonsense and he's like how do you know are you testing this you're just gonna sign a ten release with the personal guarantee with no clue if this messed the market actually even wants this like doesn't that seem insane to you guys and he gave us real talk at i'll forever be grateful for him for giving us that real talk because he saved our ass from signing that that lease and he gave us a different plan and he was like why don't you test this rent out a comm kitchen like bakers and cater use they're what turned out there were like twenty dollars an hours like super cheap no and no long term commitments and he's like rent those out do it delivery only validate the demand see if people like your recipes people like the price points you'll learn so much by doing that and then you'll know what you need out of your first location if you're gonna go there and that saved ass that advice saved saved us and you know that if i whenever somebody asked me for like any advice or help i just remember like can i can i give them one tenth of the value john gave us is the new like north star for that that situation yeah i remember he introduced us to like lean start up and you know actually figuring out you know we we used to pull people like you know would you eat sushi once a week like how many times a week we you eat sushi which is a bad badly phrase question anyway yeah in hindsight it's like oh i'd come two to three times a week and it's like we we did this proof of concept on the cheap as as quickly as we could and like the answer was like not even once a month yeah like night day right outside of outside of like la s f new york the answer is like if i eat sushi at all like right to make a concept like this work and it needs to work in texas colorado you know at needs to work everywhere and the answer was if i eat sushi at all i eat it about once a month and i'm happy with that i'm not trying to eat at three times and i'm gonna go to the nice restaurant to do it right and we were looking for like the three people who validated us rather than in ignoring the ninety seven people who were saying no were like have see those three he also did one other amazing thing that as an entrepreneur i'd now see like this pattern over and over again so he suggested to us he's like do it delivery only and we were like but he like saw the look on our face he's like what and we were like delivery just sucks and we we started to you know he's like why so we're like delivery i mean you order food you don't even know when it's gonna come this before door dash by the way this i think the biggest thing is we we probably invented door dash and didn't know it and we were fixing we were fixated on the sushi but we really you know came up with a better model exactly so so this before all those so we were like you you know you call in an order you don't know when it's gonna come it shows up an hour later the packaging is all shitty the food is cold it's leaking out the bottom and just feels cheap and we're like that's why like it sucks and our takeaway was therefore no and his was wow looks like you found all the things to improve to make this ten better experience and like since then now i see this all the time if you talked to entrepreneurs it's like do you think about a space and you're like that's horrible that's horrible for these reasons and like the entrepreneurial response the customer response is it's horrible the response is wow what an opportunity because if i just change those four things i've now have created this huge like you know level up in the customer experience and so we ended up doing it where our delivery times were sub thirty minutes you knew exactly when it was gonna come we stamped on the food when we made it as you knew it was fresh we put a webcam in our kitchen so you could see us working on your order we did like all these other things to try to make delivery actually a cool experience and the bar was so low by basic delivery standards that it that kind of actually worked and so i thought that was the other like really brilliant thing that john did for us yeah rethinking rethinking what you know everyone kind of assumed we would make with a restaurant and kind of flipping it on its head and allowed us to fail faster so back to the business ideas you had a few here are there any that you think are cool or interesting that you think somebody could go do i i'm very into what i'm calling a fund to run businesses so i actually looked at a few of these towards the end i think i found fleet when i when i saw some of these like laser tag bowling alleys like kind of these family entertainment businesses and i have kind of two hypotheses around them one is like i think i saw like one or two p and l again do your own research don't just blindly accept that this is a good space the one or two i saw like wildly profitable very low cost there's probably a high start up costs in the beginning but like climbing gym or something like that it's like once you get it set up they have like these autonomous ones now too you don't even need that much labor but also as a dad i have two kids like i'm always spending money on these things like my son had a a laser tag birthday party there's like one person working at this laser tag thing they like own the laser tag game in town they charge you for the adult standing at the birthday party and i'm like wow like i could do this better i you know they and they have you hostage honest all the arcade games you gotta buy their food kind of these very easy to run like almost a single person but you know let's call it like a teenage business so you hire teenagers to work there like anything that they're not gonna mess up yeah like a bowling bowling alley and then how do you find things that like have multiple purposes like there's a bowling alley in my town and i you know it's you know during the day it's for kids like they have the kids activities then like after school activities and then at night it's the bowling leak for the adults and they have a bar so it's the local die bars like you know then there's like five you know five vending machines in there again teenager working like the no frills but i have to imagine if you can find the right business like this kinda great to be able to just go bowling at your bowling alley like i can't do much with my paper bags like i go and i check them out and maybe walk around with them but like not much like why family entertainment why this out of home entertainment why now like is there anything that's changed in the market why because you know these have been around forever laser tag pop gardens bowling alley whatever my hunch is they been profitable for a while like i think a lot of these are like sneaky businesses that you don't think of you know i think there's also kind of more of a trap i was reading about this as like you millennials like don't drink as much they want more like sober events i think this idea of doing more like games is starting to take on again you know small sample size of of things in in my town but like you know you go to these like unlimited you know there's an arcade in my town it's like you pay like eight bucks for an hour you can play unlimited arcade games place is packed you know that sort of thing never really existed but i think there's like this desire to like leave the house and do things maybe it's a post covid thing i'm not sure the thing that i think is really interesting about this is like and this is probably true across the country like if i think about like i always drive by like these large commercial real estate you know old malls you know these big buildings that know one wants to buy anymore and then when i see one when i see what people put in them like it tends to be kind of like these newer that you know more interesting things like pickle ball courts like i think i read something it's like they're taking all the old bed baths and turning them into pickle ball courts so it's actually like take something that maybe you can get that's not being used and you know make a climbing gym make it a ninja course boy i think he's like the most incredible marketing where they like marketed gymnastics to boys and now all of a sudden doubled they've doubled the amount of like demand for this and then there's like the climbing team and like this place is packed all the time right so that one is one so so one of my biggest investments over the past two years has been in my brother law's commercial real estate so he does what everybody thinks is dying but is actually like thriving so for example these kinda like mall like strip mall location it's not like a mall like a indoor mall but basically a shopping center and a shopping said with a grocery store you know maybe so there's gotten a trader joe's there may be like a crunch fitness there's like whatever there's a bunch of these types of locations and then how do you fill up the rest of the boxes and people think that shopping centers are probably dead because e commerce or whatever everything's on the amazon now or whatever these things have like ninety seven percent occupancy it's like really it's like higher than multi family in office like it's it's a really great category and even the few concepts that are like kinda going out of business like a bed bath and beyond or like joanne fabric he's replacing them when tram parks and pickle ball and tesla the charging networks he's like there's just new tenants that are always there and he's like the the best part of this entire model because the returns are bananas for this thing like it's like it is by far like the thing i've been most bullish on in the last twenty four months has been investing into this i basically took all my spare cash and put it over here and the reason why was a is a good operator but b there's no supply so nobody builds any new cyber shopping centers so like even though like you know every everything else people build more they build more condos they build more stuff nobody builds new shopping centers and so it's all just retrofit existing centers do you buy them usually like below the actual build cost of the of the center themselves and so i've seen this my kids go to this thing called little kicker it's in sandra remote like a little town like you know in the bay area and it's exactly what you're describing a teenager runs it like i asked to speak to the manager and the manager was seventeen years old use the switch to their yeah like a chain on and like the f boy haircut and i was like what you're in charge of this and he was great by the way he he was actually like really good good best but everybody who works there is young like he's young he's like we probably he's definitely like i don't know under twenty three years old and all the coaches there's two coaches per class that they're all they're all also like just kinda soccer players who were high schoolers probably and but this thing is packed and it's just like one large venue for kid soccer and this thing has to be printing like i just doing the rough math of it this thing has to be printing they have you know definitely over a thousand members it's like two hundred to three hundred dollars per month you know this is this is a a very big business that's basically like you said sort of like a fun business that's teenager yeah and it's you don't need to and it's ai proof right like so like if you're looking for where do i do business if i know the whole world is changing with ai well ai is probably not gonna like do a tram lean park or you know do a a kid soccer center you know like those are those are pretty safe businesses yeah and they're predictable i mean like their kids are always gonna wanna jump it's not like you're buying a product that you know all of a sudden you don't know if it's gonna last right you put a bullet point on here the least sexy business is possible touch the taboo do you what do you mean by that so this is i start again when in the pit of despair you start to you start to go crazy with ideas where alright well what are what you know i started looking at like medical ambulances which is still think could have worked but effectively you know the government subsidize medical transport for disabled and elderly from you know nursing homes to their medical appointments so it's actually government contracts if you have a fleet of you know these special handicap accessible vans you know you effectively can you mobilize this fleet every day you kinda fill up your appointments with the people and you just transport them to and from super simple you don't really think about it but like the demand is is there especially as as the population is aging that's a that's a good example of an non sexy one i would love to buy a funeral home like something that's just like oh man like you work in that it's like how do i mean all of the deal like if you wanna find a deal that's kind of like you know punching above your weight if you will like there's gonna be some hair on the deal like on at the lower end of the market like i said like private equity is gonna scoop up the easy ones there's gonna be something like if that's something can be that is just like weird and like no one really wants to touch it or or think about it like to me that's a great a great reason to buy it right because it because it might mean that you know let's say there's a really sexy business on one side right there's a business that's like maybe it's like software only you don't have to run it you know you know it's it's low operations bubba blah blah it's it's about whatever party planning or something fun the hair on that deal by be maybe just that the valuation is extremely high so it's gonna take you a long time to get your cash back or it might be some other something else like you know users are very f the competition is very intense whatever they're there's gonna be here in every deal the good thing about what you're saying is that if you choose the hair that it's not the most fun thing to run well yeah where the hair is gonna be like you gotta cr someone it's like right like i don't actually know if i wanna do that like now that i'm saying out loud like right that's i mean i hired a teenager to do it but like that's a better hair that's about a better amount of hair like you kinda know what it is it's like the hair is the thing almost right not like the p and l has hair or the the there's a lot of dead on the business so there's other problems in other areas exactly so if there's something that like like if twenty people are gonna to flock to the software only party planning one but only like too crazy enough people are like let me roll up these funeral homes try to like ag i'm sure people do this like the you know i'm not the first one to think about this but i like that the other thing i really like right now party city just went out of business who's by where are you buying balloons there's a guy the twenty minutes for me he had a fireworks store his fireworks store happened to sell balloons the day party city went out of business he rebranded man now his store is called balloons it used to just be called fireworks now it's called balloons he's taking out all the ads on the street and we went there you know for my for my son's birthday in he's doing awesome so it's like how do you like kinda and don't copy party city that clearly didn't work right but the demand for balloons still exist and long to exist exactly the supply just shrink like a whole lot right and i imagine as things change like the landscape for better or worse is changing very rapidly these days you know maybe something goes out of business because they can't compete because of tariffs or whatever like how do you think about being you know opportunistic in that sense in doing it and you can do it like you don't even need like you could start selling balloons like get a permit and start doing delivery only balloons like that actually saw a truck doing that when i went to mon p house he's he's great investor and he on his desk there's a like where you have a name pla don't you just have your name engraved on it engraved on it it just said trouble is opportunity and he just had it on his desk because at all times you know he's reading the news or he's hearing something as a reminder trouble is opportunity i love that yep that's awesome cool well dan dude awesome hanging out with you as always i'm glad you got to tell your story and congrats man blown away by what you did with the with the business that you bought you are officially dan the bag man thanks for telling the story yeah thanks for having me on that's exciting to to be here cool alright my friends i have a new podcast for you guys to check out it's called content is profit and it's hosted by luis and ph ka after years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like red bull and orange theory fitness luis and fo are on a mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue in each episode you're gonna hear from top entrepreneurs and creators and you're gonna hear him share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit so you can check out content is profit wherever you get your podcast

i'm a good guy i sit around a campfire with drinking because i go watch guess benefit this is mike nova mike grew up as a four on long island made its first million working as a trader at goldman sachs at the age of thirty two and made its first billion at the to forty is that life changing yeah we were the only company ever where five guys became millionaires in a day that's wild mike is a cowboy and his personal life and his professional life this guy likes to push it and these max wrist all the time yeah that's crazy man mike's made and lost the fortune about two different times we made a bunch of mistakes and next thing you know not only aren't you worth two billion dollars but you're going under the billion pretty quick like oh shit that sucks and what are you doing like what's the lesson to be learned here the gap really great and the next level and i put myself in that next level is i feel like i could rule to world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a road travel never look i value people who are good operators at life and who live a certain way that i like that i'm dressing a cowboy today because i'm like you're kind of like a cowboy a little bit like in the the energy that you have and that's something that i really respect but i thought one of the coolest things was how you've made and loss of fortune i think two or three times you know i certainly have lost lots of money that that narrative exists and one of my kids and a few of my friends like dude it's a little unfair because even at your lows you still had a lot of freaking money so your first your first hit was in your mid thirties at goldman right yeah listen i was i was a partner at goldman sachs goldman an amazing firm it's it's it it might be one of the firms that everyone should study because they create a culture there where maybe not good for your mental health but good for the firm people to find themselves by what their boss thinks about them lloyd blind was like the big guy goldman and a later part of my career in every single person what is life think about me you know you gave your heart and soul to this culture of goldman and it's a it's a culture of excellence it's a culture of world class people you're competing and working alongside the best and the brightest and so you feel like you're on new york yankee when the yankee are winning and one of the big advantages that is they paid you wildly less than market as you're on your working your way up because you had the right the privilege of being a goldman sachs and one day you might become a partner and so i started at twenty four because i had done the army in blue helicopters for a while and april first nineteen eighty nine i got my job and you know i moved out to asia which was a great move the asian financial crises happened and what you'll learn in a financial crises is you're either on the right side of it or the wrong side of it and if you're on the right side of it i e if you're bearish when the world blows up you made far more money than you thought you would for the firm and so goldman and me in the team i was with was very lucky that you know we got themselves on the right side of killed the asian blown and we killed it and so i became a managing director first and then a partner what age were you when you left i think thirty three when i became a partner thirty four when i left and what was your big year ninety seven ninety eight i made a ton of money for the firm now ninety seven i got paid two million dollars which was by far the most i'd ever been paid which was a it's a ton of money no matter what you look at i was a millionaire at thirty one i wanted to be a million a time i thirty but i didn't have a net worth of million dollars until i thirty one but the first job i really felt like i got pay i got a two dollars you know nineteen ninety seven now me and my team had made the firm like two hundred million dollars and so that was a one percent payout right if you work at citadel or any big hedge fund today you're broadly getting paid fifteen percent to twenty percent of what you make goldman paid us one percent but you're gonna be a partner one day and it's part of end and listen you did make it all on your own there was a huge infrastructure and goldman you know does deserve more than then i say said it all might but they had this mythology at the place that allowed you to stay there and i i one time my most quit and that the bosses would take you out and say oh you're gonna be a partner one day and listen i made partner in nineteen ninety eight and in nineteen ninety nine the company went public and and listen anyone who was a partner at goldman sachs when they went public in ninety nine was just lucky because the company had been built over a hundred and plus years so all those people who had built that enterprise value that weren't partners that day you know we got all their harder earned and effort we sold this enterprise that was built over a hundred plus years to the public was one of the coolest ipo of all time and the junior partners we all had four hundred and twenty thousand shares and the stock was a fifty five dollar ipo which traded to seventy five dollars and you can do the four hundred thousand times seventy five but we all were roughly worth thirty million dollars overnight thirty million dollars is still a huge amount of money in nineteen ninety nine it's felt a lot bigger did you have to vest the did that need to vest for the next four years if you were a partner it was automatically vested but you weren't able allowed to sell it for three four and five years i think four or five and six years or three four and five years so when you left you had to keep it yes okay good listen i i left goldman and not the the nicest of ways i had a personal i kinda of blew up personally i've been there man that was horrible that was embarrassing you know it was humiliating it was you know you're letting people down and guys had made a big bets on you it like oops one of the great conversations that will ever remember at that point i was working regarding john thornton who was the one of the two c presidents of goldman and he had taken a big risk on me and i like jive and i just feel so bad for you he took bad for me he's like i'm the president of goldman sachs i'm worth the zillion dollars i've got a house here in a year i got a nice wife of kid like you don't need to feel bad for me you need to worry about yourself and i was like it was such a nice thing for him to say and it was so true i was so i was so worried about what those other guys were thinking about me and having let him down and and instead of saying oh my god like let your family down you let yourself down like go go fix picture own shit i left there tail between my legs and spent a year you sorting myself out i had a shrink for the first time in my life i heard you tell the story that like you said it one time and it kinda got gloss over but it's kind of brilliant i think you said your brother was near world trade on two thousand one and he calls you he's like i think there's a terrorist attack i i think i'm i'm in this was was the in the world trade center he was in the building right next she's like what what what do i do and what did you say your your reply was i was like you should buy euro dollars or two year notes and he's what fuck and i was like get maybe to get out of the building and i was like maybe i should go back to wall street i literally thought that i was like well party i then decided to run that i'd i've been the army i wanna run down to help and i picked my kid up and i'm just running down the block we lived in chelsea at the time so i'm running to the west side highway so can actually see the world trade center because you couldn't see it from my roof and my kids started crying and i was about not a i didn't run down there with the kids so i ran back in and watched on tv but they wouldn't really take volunteers the police blocked it off and i was like i felt a little like no way to no way to participate i couldn't participate financially i couldn't participate like in insane your physical you you it's like when you you spend all your life like trying to make money trying to be charismatic as mad trying to be powerful and you're like the fuck it none of this matters right now yeah and so i literally remember saying i wanna go back to work in wall street and there's another chapter left in me because in between i was looking at things like outward bound or just a whole different career path i i was like you were gonna be like a camp instructor i was gonna try to run outward bound you know they were there was a you know you're looking at you head hunters like you know what are jobs that you could qualify i remember i was the president of goldman sachs latin america i was a young partner from goldman and so that's wild camp instructor was was below my pay rate at that point but i was trying to think of other ways to contribute to to my life into society of that then wall street and that that nine eleven thing was like can i go back to wall street you got another chap and that's where my search fortress i i i actually sure didn't start fortress my partner pete rigor who was a partner mine a good friend both from princeton goldman sachs and in hong kong he had called me up and said hey why don't we partner up and pete's an amazing guy he he said how about this you're pretty you have a fun life and i'm a pretty good investor and you're a decent investor decent thanks pete and he we'll go together we'll split at fifty fifty half of what i make of what you make and at that point his stock was trading at a premium to fair value and my stock was trading a huge discount of fair value of like and that he would make that call meant the world to me and so i say i'll do it and so the two of us were gonna partner up in something and pete had known west eden who had started fortress a few years earlier and at that point fortress was probably eighty people in about a billion dollars asset and it was a pe firm or hedge it been a pe firm and you were buying any type of businesses what what well it was a pe firm that west ran with a guy named randy our own and rob kaufman who still friends of mine and and and partners and some other things and they were doing mostly structured credit type pe by but they you know wes was a genius he like came up with the idea of let's buy all the cell towers and then think of sell towers as a reit and so he would look at business opportunities and literally craft companies that then then become billion dollar companies and so we thought pete has a real expertise in building your credit hedge fund i was gonna build a macro hedge fund and the three of us sat there and said one plus one plus one will equal ten no one had ever taken a hedge fund or private equity company public and we said let's build a company where we all build our own businesses and to be fair ninety percent ninety five percent of the time we spent alone we didn't like each day what are we doing today i built a company people built the company west built a company that we all put in the same box alright this episode is brought you by hubspot they're doing a big conference this that they're big one they do called inbound they have a ton of great speakers that are coming to san francisco september third two september fifth and it's got a pretty incredible lineup they have comedian like amy poe they have da from ant philanthropic dark cast sean evans from hot ones and if you're somebody who's marketing or sales or ai and you just wanna know what's going on what's coming next it's a great event to go to and hey guess what i'm gonna be there you can go to inbound dot com slash register to get your ticket to inbound twenty twenty five again september third or fifth in san francisco hope to see you there did you have to come up with any of your own capital to join i did i did and i actually it didn't have that much capital you know you you when i said goldman had you know we got thirty million dollars after goldman well that's pre tax and the stock goes down and i think pete and i put in roughly ten or fifteen million dollars all i had so you who you were worth fifteen or ten can you put all of it into fortress all of it into fortune and actually borrowed some i and you're what thirty seven you thirty seven and you know started a hedge fund and i started a macro fund he started a big distressed fund and wes continued to build his private equity business and part of our ethos was if we do what we say we're gonna do people will trust us well i learned that at goldman sachs as well goldman sachs assets management business didn't have the greatest returns but they had lots of money because people trusted them and so how do you build a sense of trust in investors it's doing what you say you're gonna do no one expects you to win all the time what was wonderful about fortresses is very cool is that over the first five years really two thousand two to two thousand seven pete's business i don't think lost money in a month he'd buy broken comp broken debt he'd give loans to people like you know i i called him a loan shark like if you couldn't get a loan from deutsche bank he came to pete like private credit now private credits is a huge business but he was early in private credit and so he built this very diversified portfolio of loans wes continued to do his stuff and literally his track record just kept going up and up and i had a very good run as a macro trader and so by the time we went public my macro fund in those five years was a top performing macro fund you know is it was in the top five percent of macro funds pete had never lost money in a month in wes track record looked like warren buffett in that fifteen million that you invested or ten at its peak what do you think was worth well when we went public we were the only company ever and i think to this day this holds where five guys became billionaires in a day so in in in roughly ten years you turned one million into a a billion two point seven two point three billion that's what the we're sitting around our office after we rang the ballot at the stock exchange and i got my two young daughters and all a sudden bloomberg puts a picture west eat and i was like oh shit west two point three billion and then a picture of pete pete b two point three billion picture of my know hey wes owed a tiny of bit more so best would have been two point four billion and then in i own the same two point three and two point three billion and my two like nine and ten year old daughters looked at each other and high find because we had never talked about money right you like you know but ten was there any difference is there any difference between making let's say thirty million dollars then from two point whatever i think that fortress frenzy of us becoming rock stars almost because we were the first company to take a hedge we're the first guys to take a hedge fund private equity company public and that we were all on such a high i didn't last long because the o financial crisis happen you get treated a little differently all else are you're getting calls from the president of university who wants to sit down and talk with you you're getting invited to cool dinners and and so he goes to your head a little bit and and you're not ready ready for the rush of excitement around it you don't feel that different i think the same friends and you know but you've there's a little bit of everyone gets a little bit full of themselves did your did your life stay the same but the the people who wanted to talk to you change or you start getting you're getting emails and and calls from people haven't seen in years and people don't even know that say they know you yeah you get this there's a especially because it was public right if it doesn't quietly don't we've known but we were like on newspapers and magazine articles and so and it goes to your head a little bit and then you know the wonderful thing about having six brothers and sisters is they don't treatments differently they're like excited for you but they well and you have six six or seven you have a bunch of siblings who are also baller too and friends and so you know and then the markets always take their pound of flesh you know we we made a bunch of mistakes o eight happened and next thing you know not only aren't you worth two billion dollars but you're going under the billion pretty quick like oh it lives a comma oh shit that sucks some goes back to and this is gonna sound cra heck but if you were a kid in high school that played sports and the girls liked or the guys liked if you were a girl and had a decent social life and didn't have a chip on your shoulder it doesn't seem like it success is a little easier to handle because you were used to it and it's not the same magnitude of success but like if you got lucky with the girls in high school you usually turn out to be okay like it it's off of you see the problems of people that really have a hard time adjusting was when they were mis or social and and that ship under their shoulder right drove them to this cray success you the reason i'm interested in in you is because you've won in a bunch of different parts of life so you're a great wrestler you went to princeton like you did a lot of amazing things but then you you what's funny is because your personality is so loud and because you're so like funny tall these crazy stories like you talk about trading and you're like oh yeah i forgot you actually had to be skilled at something what the people who are around you what do you think they would say you're good at i have a weird insight into looking at what the future is gonna be you know it's called pattern recognition i can look at the charts and say this is gonna happen or i can s information well and so i'm a good spec because i see the future pretty well you read a lot i used to i watch a ton of tv now but i read a lot of like non fiction stuff that's coming through my desk all the time right so i keep up on news in the world and talk to people most of the great ceos really lot they're curious i'm curious as heck i get a lot of my curiosity and learning from conversation from either this amazing network of people that i've met in the world and i'm learning all the time i literally had lunch with goldman chief intel her chief information officer so now he's got nineteen thousand of goldman forty five thousand people that work for him and you know that was a master class in ai and so and i'm like me some other guy in ai and so i'm learning ai from reading articles playing with it but mostly finding out the the world experts and and and learning from them and that's that's the way i've been learning as i've gotten older so you think that people would say that you're good at seeing patterns what else would they say you think they think you're a storyteller and so why that's been important is crypto in the last ten years has been about narrative right it has been about the story of understanding the world and then tell that story and i think i've been unbelievably well suited for this moment of time to be a crypto ceo because i'm a good storyteller right how do you convince someone to buy bitcoin right you've gotta tell them a story what about being a good trader because you were actually a trader for life trader that's a hard job because you have to first of all develop a process an internal algorithm that wins more than it loses you gotta be really honest with yourself am i good at this right it's not am i intelligent and am i smart but if i good at this am i good at taking this information and making bets on it and even if you are then you need to develop a discipline that allows you to make sure that your your guesses are in your portfolio there's so many people that say oh my god you gotta be short to dollar right now the us is on a downtrend right trump is pissing everybody off the short dollar is the biggest easiest trade to see every single macro investor almost every single investor right now believes that you should be short the dollar and it's a maximum conviction belief i would bet if you took all their portfolios only forty percent of them have a really big position well it should be pathological that if you're bearish you're short and if you're bullish at you're long but it's not because of fear what if i'm wrong and so so much of trading is anxiety management so much is how do i overcome my fear i heard a guy the other i say yeah anxiety is just when your brain is a lot bigger than your balls and so we listen anxiety is real right like there is this the lion that shows up and you go to fight flight in training you you see the lion all the time and you get nervous when the market's going higher in your long well earth goes back down i'll give my my money and so there are all these different reasons you get scared how do you learn to trust yourself that's a really hard process what i've learned from the best and and i'm really good at this but there's a group that's better than me and i think about this all the time say this you're good you're good being a macro trader but does that mean you're you're good at managing anxiety the whole process of seeing the world and then betting on it and making money from it and so i know there twenty five macro traders of people have probably heard of stan dr miller david t paul tudor jones lewis bacon you know alan howard chris f there's a bunch of people that are great at this the gap between the really great and the next level and i put myself in that next level is disciplined and so you have to have a set of rules that you follow well do do you consider yourself a highly disciplined person i think i'm a really hardworking working person who has and i was really disciplined at parts of my life and i think i have sporadic lapses of discipline partly because i have this really diverse group of interests and i get excited i'm a people please so i'm trying to help things out people all of the time and it's a prioritization like stan for instance who i think is the best or you know david temper pushing on it but the best trader sort of his generation temper a little bit younger thirty two years never lost money compounded over thirty percent everyone in our seats look at him as like the guy the guy a ton of integrity on how he lives his life and how he lives his portfolio when he was managing other people's money he never golf during a workday day and he loves golf but what you said you said you had this great quote you go you were quoting a napoleon or someone but you you said i hire lucky generals not skilled ones this so this was how did i learned that i was had the right to be good at this right you're i was making money lots and i was like wow yeah everyone has a bit of impostor syndrome and a hood barack had been the prime minister of israel i hired as a consultant how do you hire the prime minister one of my investors so you need to meet to hoo moroccan and who barack looking ways to make money and he had just started this business and he had two clients lewis bacon who was a multi billionaire you know one of the pant on of the greats and bruce cove multi billionaire one of the pant of the greats and mike know who was a little peanut at that point what was his rate maybe it was two hundred thousand a year or something you got the former prime minister for two credit a year to to give you feedback advice that's pretty good deal i just remember thinking i've brought the same consultant and the only had like three clients as two of the world the like literally the great trade traders of all time bruce company who build ka and in lewis bacon who got more capital and i'm sitting with the hood for lunch and he said you don't know if i figured you out he said you know you're not so smart but you're lucky and i was like that's the compliment he said don't worry about it because you know i was just with lewis bacon and i spent time with bruce coverings and conte might be smarter than you but but you know all of you guys have an intuition you know and they gave me his quote from napoleon he and of course i didn't know french she's said i forgot you're not so smart you don't know french just sort of a bitch and and bar barack at least allegedly had the highest iq of anyone in the israeli and he was the most decorated soldier in this israeli military he was a wonderful guy charming and he said you guys have an intuition a pattern recognition an ability to sense where things are like a general did and that's your intelligence instantly i was like that's why i'm right more than i'm wrong i never knew why i was right more than i was wrong it's easy to know you're being commercial right you and i could be commercial if we can if we can make these you know cups of broth for fifty cents and sell them for two dollars we're both gonna say how many can we sell right that's not hard but why should i be able to predict where dollar yen is gonna go in a year better than you are you able to do this in other facets of your life where you're like man my i met this person i predict that they're gonna face needs problems or whatever what's interesting is without being conscious of it like i've invested in a few independent movies nobody makes money in independent movies like almost nobody and i've invested in two of the top three selling independent films of all time i i independent films that sold for the top prices right birth of a nation is still i think is those the highest yeah nineteen or what nineteen million dollars it's sold for nineteen million dollars and then there's a movie called assassination nation which didn't do well in the box office has been sold for like thirteen million like those are two of the top you know five prices for independent movies at least they were and was that just luck or was it intuition i i i mean it's not luck if it happens twice right and so for me that conversation with bar baroque was giving me confidence that my decision process wasn't random that there was something in it i i went back and i thought about like how do i make decisions and it is at the intersection of lots of and lots of data and a gut feeling and there there's that i think moment and so once i understood that i was much more confident telling the investors high decisions my hedge one from three hundred million dollars under management to two billion in a and and my performance went straight up over like the next six months but mostly because investors could feel my confidence and so the the lesson for you or for listeners is spend time figuring out what you're good at and where that comes from and not everyone has the same skills where does it come from for for you though of i mean because like i remember reading about i'm not in the finance world at all but i read a black fish which is about a steve cohen and they told stories about how in the eighties with that there was a physical ticker and he like he could just hear the rhythm of the ticker and inmate and i'm like that is just so vague and it's and that's and it's a pain in the ass because i'm like you're dicks like an art but i want it to be more of a science because i wanna learn but that's what you're that's how you're describing like it's more of it's it's very it's very for me the type trading i do it's very intuitive and it's very pattern recognition if i went blind i couldn't trade you like i need to see the ballet of the charts there are other people that do things very differently like the interesting thing about training is there a thousand different ways to approach it what is steve do you're saying looking at i know steve pretty well but i don't know the the exact process but i would tell you he's one of the most competitive guys out there he's gone on vacation and and have all his screens set up and if he didn't he wasn't in in feeling things right he fly right back to get it to his desks like he was obsessed with beating the markets you you think you're competitive i'm not as competitive which is interesting when i think about like what stand and mueller and lewis bacon and like why those guys have have been in that and maybe when all catch them but they're i'm but i'm not in their category at this point they're more competitive than me they just i mean you lewis bacon i remember playing cro k against them and i'm like how's this guy killing me cro k well he had hired the world's best cro k gotta to teach him he he doesn't like to lose there's partly like these guys are ultra competitive but they also are ultra discipline and those two cross factors creates a man well creates an amazing performer yeah maybe not the easiest person to go to cocktails for sometimes they are something you know but like like an amazing performer and i i'm i don't wanna a discount i've had an amazing run of success at trading i just know myself as i compare myself to the other guys a little more disciplined now i would probably argue i've had more fun i've done more different things than most people but i we had again each person makes their own decision on what path they wanna take and i'm not i'm not making a value judgment on how people live their lives the key is to figure out how you wanna live your own life but figure out what you're good at and again that that comes from mentors it comes from sometimes chance without that conversation with brought i was miserable because i was feeling so much pressure and i remember telling my wife i i might even just shut this hedge fund down i can't have more and i was winning but i was feeling so much pressure and i think i was feeling pressure because i didn't know why it was good and that literal conversation over lunch unlocked this story in me that said hey this is why i should this is why i win and that was intuition you're just good at you you you feel certain things that you should trust it and i and and it doesn't come just like you you don't get it from sitting in a box there's a tremendous amount of information i'm shoving my brain right looking at charts talking to people understanding psychology looking at you know who's long and who's short there's tons of stuff that goes into the algorithm but it was at that intersection of the intuition it's all in the part of your brain that you're not tapping normally a lot of it's historical to too like you see things they repeat themselves yeah i heard one of my heroes is john rockefeller and i was listening to business on title and you're like when i was at fifth grade or eighth grader or something i wrote a paper on john d yeah and i thought that was cool he's a fun to learn about and you also you and your partner west did the train thing oh did the trade thing i was a cheerleader leader at an investor but but yeah that was fascinating when i went down there and i was reading about flag yeah he's a man this has are hardcore yeah this episode brought to you by hubspot media they have a cool new podcast that's for ai called the next wave it's by matt wolf and nathan lands and they're basically talking about all to do tools that are coming out how the landscape is changing what's going on with ai tech so if you wanna be up to date on ai tech it's a cool podcast you could check out listen to the next wave wherever you get your podcast i went and talked to a a bunch of friends of ours who we have mutual we you and have some mutual friends and i wanna tell you what they said they go he's max risk all the time his entire life he takes tons of risk and he lives life on the edge and another person said he's blown up a couple times and he's one a lot more i'm amazed at how how good he is at managing risk and i actually talked to some of the guys who work with and they also use the word risk constantly it's hard to be in the crypto business and not to be comfortable with risk like it's an asset that you know bitcoin went up and crashed out yeah i think it's bigger of the bitcoin i think that you got lucky that bitcoin exists when it does i think that you're a guy who you enjoy risk you enjoy i think you you were telling i heard a story about how you said like you are a thirty seven out of forty in terms of like some type of personality test of freaking rules and you're like it's funny in my kid like is the exact opposite and then you hear i read the new york or some article where they're like tea flu a helicopter down the street like during the prince graduate like there's clearly like this thing of like this guy likes to push it and he's pretty comfortable catering on like big ruins and so are you for your personal finances are you at risk often so part of it is there's this balance between like yeah i'm there's a there's an adrenaline need like i i like adrenaline like in sports and in trading and and you know it's a dopamine addiction if you wanna think about it but part of it is i like my life and i was a helicopter pilot at fort runner alabama and i made eighteen thousand a year after tax i remember because like fifteen hundred dollars per month paycheck pat tier who's a buddy mine still was one of my buddies down there and we at the time of our lives i when i look at how much fun and how much i enjoyed that in the middle of freaking lower ugly the ugly corner of lower alabama right the wire grass it was called by dawson with seven hundred other guys and almost no women around because all the women who have gone off to college and they're seven hundred guys and a few women at late school we still had one of the time our lives and so what i think was that year better or worse than the year i made lots of money i i can't tell like that was a great year and so i think if you enjoy your life it's easier to take risk if i lost my money it would hurt my ego for a while i would be embarrassed i'd be frustrated because all the money really does at one point is allow you to help other people right and that's both a a blessing it's a huge blessing it's also a lot of responsibility and sometimes it's a pain in the ass and so i actually don't think i've tied how i live my life on a year to year basis to money and some of my friends say it's bullshit bullshit look at the parties you thought you spend lots of money i do spend lots of money but i threw tons of parties when i didn't have a lot of money either i just few cheaper parties and so i think so much of being able to take risk is being okay with your life and not being defined by just your money have you met a guy named brad jacobs no i wish i have he has a book i that's item i've never i've read his book it's called how to make a billion dollars he's created i think six billion dollar companies like xo logistics is one of them if you heard of that like these like huge like ten billion dollar logistic companies in his whole stick was you fragmented industries bought all of them operate them well to took a public whatever and he talks in his book about how he was like i researched like crazy like at anytime time i get into a business i researched like crazy so i read all the books i use t or whatever else like the services and or alpha sites whatever they are in like a higher experts but then i go and talk to the employees and i just research so it's like i'm really confident that this is gonna work because i've talked to literally five hundred people in i all these notes what i've noticed a pattern with you is that you don't i don't know if you call it research but you talk to a lot of people and so like just out on the way here i was hearing a story about how like your roommate was glory of van annabel son or something like that it was like so that's like pretty magical like to be around hear stories of that family and then like your other roommate helped create ethereum and then there was like this other story this other story there was like twenty stories where i'm like what the hell like it's like it's like you a good guy sit around a campfire with drinking because they got a lot stories but there's so many times like oh i just it's like normal people would be like i know a guy you know i sat a bar next to a guy he did this you just have a story except that they just happened to be like these like wild crazy people who what was the story about how you first heard about bitcoin so pete b who had been my he lived above me my freshman year princeton and he lived in the room above this storm was amazing we had a pretty cool little group of people right is a wild this like the greatest storm on earth he lived above many billionaires are from that dorm pretty seriously at least three for really in my door yeah but he's of the reason i got my job goldman sachs i was literally wandering around bleak or street a little drunk and i ran into him and i was interviewing for jobs he he's was like bullshit you gotta work in goldman sachs and you know i was from the army and so we got me an interview of goldman sachs and forty one interviews later i they gave me a job and then we lived in hong kong together and we slowly became very good friends of the godfather his his youngest son than we did fortress and he was the guy that was the distressed debt investor well because he had promise to his wife that at one point they moved back to california he moved his entire business or the bulk of it to stanford area of california and what year was that this probably would have been he probably moved his business out their two thousand and ten or something alright good day and but in tech guy but his brother i was a tech guy and the the group of friends he had were tech guys and they all started talking about bitcoin and pete wanted to be part of the part part of the you know the clan and so he called me up he said i'm here about this thing big bitcoin all my smart friends are doing it what do you think and i never heard of it and i quickly did a google search and asked around and this was in ten this was this would been in two thousand and twelve two thousand thirteen maybe bitcoin was like ninety six dollars so it was nothing really i mean there's not there would have been like bitcoin out org like some forums there wasn't a lot but it was online the chinese and just started buying it and i made a thesis i said how we gotta buy it and we started buying some of it i'm my my friend jeff lo who's become a great investor was working my family office and he bought my first bitcoin for me and and then pete and i kept talking about it and we like maybe this should be bigger than just us buying a little bit of it so he had called the third friend did had another princeton lie who i had invested who had you know had a similar went to princeton he'd had worked on wall street it worked in go he worked at tiger i had invested in his first hedge fund and he was on the sidelines in between you know after o eight his hedge fund didn't do well he was trying to figure out what to do he done some cool stuff in argentina he researched this for a while and came back and was like guys he's gonna change the whole world and dan was really confident and was willing to put a whole bunch of his net worth into this thing pete and i were wealthier because fortress got public the day at the time we're like if he's putting that much in we need to put at least that much in and you know the story guys think and so we all roughly put similar amounts in was it like eight figures or you can even say that it was it was seven figures seven but it was a significant amount of dollar terms at a hundred but not in our net worth terms right we were very wealthy guys at the time and it's one of the reasons we were able to hold it so long because even it went up if you're a young guy and you put ten thousand dollars into something and all of a sudden since worth the hundred thousand your friends like i do job you gotta take yeah you're in by my house you can your girlfriend wants should buy you know like there's so many reasons you're gonna sell that thing and almost nobody can hold but if you're already have a lot of money it's just another investment and so we get a lot of credit for having made lots of money in crypto it was easier having started rich and it's got me thinking why this world is so off sides when you're wealthy you have assets assets are basically chips on a table you know i bought spacex when it was one twentieth was today because everyone's like you gotta buy some spacex and you looked through like elon musk is killing he's brilliant let me get some private spacex and so all of a sudden you make you know hundred million plus in spacex he didn't do anything other than make put a bet down and so getting money and and getting network makes making money so much easier it's almost unfair that's why pike wrote that book he said that there's no way the rich poor gap ever comes back in a balance because once you're wealthy you have such an advantage and the advantage isn't just capital it's capital and network and one of my strengths is i'd like people i'd like sharing people on like talking about people and it makes it easy to make friends in network and through that network you learn stuff so my i'm for our podcast my listeners will make front of me i i own a company now that's does well and hopefully that's gonna be a huge home run but my liquid net worth i just do basically the s and p five hundred and bonds you you invest like you're like like got a white guy from missouri oh yeah look it's working boring what which means i've i out florida about ninety percent of hedge fund funds so it's worked out but like listen said it's been a great yeah i've like i started making money in the greatest bull market of all time and do you for your personal finances or do you have any boring stuff or are you all are you active for the whole thing no i listen i have a chunk of money in you know these credit funds like the one pete brand which are private credit funds which you know roughly have have done ten percent plus a year compounded and he can compound a piece of money at ten percent a year for a long period of time you get rich real quick and so i have someone private credit i have a lot of my own company that i trade currencies and stuff on my own and then i have a bunch of private equity investments and venture investments i own a chunk of angles a chicken company that got announced yesterday that that they're the group that owns it is putting it up for sale so hoping hoping that sales for a high price but i i haven't really ever done bond stocks party because that's what i do yeah and my money has often been tied up in the enterprise that i'm engaged in at fortress i owned a lot of fortress stock i guess you've been ill liquid like for a large portion of i i probably have run the the the lowest liquidity to net worth ratio of anyone who's been on your podcast can you tell me more about that you know it's not necessarily what i would want always i i've always had a lot of faith that i'd make money and so i've always he's one to live a big life and also make a lot of investments and so so you spent you you just spend a lot spend a lot live large i invest large and i always think of gonna a win and so in twenty twenty one we thought we were gonna be able to take galaxy public and i was gonna get a lot of liquidity and it turned out we took a little too long to get into the sec queue administration change gary gains shut the door and so for four years no liquidity out of galaxy you know my other looked stuff i made some good investments some bad investments and didn't really change lifestyle and you slowly start burning the furniture of liquidity right and so we just did a we just did a deal we took some ships off the table in terms of liquidity did you you leave a wife on the edge i mean i think i i admire like your ability like i'm a adrenaline seeking to but i'm also way more risk adverse than you i think and i had but i admire people who are into risk because i think it's held me back i think one of the things that people say you blew up twice i listen i i had a personal shit to deal with and i lost my job at goldman sachs i actually to be fair i resigned but that was embarrassing because i was on a high flyer track there and i loved goldman sachs and so that that was painful coming back from that gives you a lot of confidence that yeah you can fall down and like you can lose money it's not the end of the world you're gonna you gotta learn how to get back up and dean a wrestler teaches you that like no wrestler wins every match kale sanders did in college but then he lost an international like you know no one wins every match and learning how to come and and i lost a lot learning how to come back from losing is one of the most important things because losing doesn't mean you're a bad guy it doesn't mean your shit that doesn't mean you're not confident when you lost that game and i thought i think the doll when he left tennis gave the best he was like you know i think he lost forty eight percent of the points he played who do you with the greatest ten player of all time or one of the top three that process of stumbling and coming back and i think a lot about how i have managed to do that myself because i often asked to help people to think through it what like a downfall and like yeah how you rebirth come back part of it is take some time off and do some work and understand like what the hell happened like how do you most people just spend enough time to figure out who they are like like literally trying to understand like who they are and why they're that who there it's always your parents you've got a relationship with your mom and your dad whatever the story was dad disappeared processing that right that's the human condition right and trying and to understand what moves you some people get there in like the whole world other people just make progress getting there right i think i've have made progress i'm not sure i've ever got to enlighten anxiety i am not even close but i keep making progress going on that journey and there there's lots of ways to go in that journey right it's through getting a shrink through meditating through prayer through ayahuasca or psilocybin journeys like there's there's radical ways there's subtle ways there's taking time by yourself but it's investing in yourself most people don't invest in themselves i would ask a room full of eight hundred wrestling coaches how many in the last five years it's been one week with just themselves in not one hand up not one you do that now i try once a year to spend a week by myself my friend chris who who has a publicly drink company he he's like i mean i'm screw all the time and i always at try to journal what's the lesson to be learned here and i thought that was like a really good way of asking himself that question what questions are you asking yourself during that done that seven day well solid when i did the silent meditation in cardi thing when you sit there for fucking eleven days meditating you can't read you can't do music you can't exercise you can't even mas i mean it literally is for eleven days your back you starve so you guys know this but i have a company called hampton join hampton dot com it's a vet community for founders and ceos but we have this member named la and la saw a bunch of members talking about the same problem with hampton which is that they spent hours manually moving data into a pdf it's tedious it's annoying and it's always waste a time and so la like any great entrepreneur he built a solution and that solution is called mo mo uses ai to automatically transfer data from any document into a pdf and so if you need to turn a supplier invoice into a customer quote or move info from an application into a contract you just put a file into mo and it auto fills the output pdf in seconds and a little backstory for all the tech out there built the entire web app without using a line of code he used something called bubble io o they've added ai tools that can generate an entire app from one prompt it's pretty amazing and it means you can build tools like mo very fast without knowing how to code and so if you're tired of copying and pasting between documents or paying people to do that for you check out mo dot a i m o l k u dot a alright back to the pod do you set goals like this like like to have such a full life where you're running i don't know how many people work here two hundred people you a lot of people six hundred six hundred oh my god i didn't realize it and you have all the you have a lot of shit going on but then you're like i do this week meditation and then this party here are you setting like at the end of the year this is what a win would look like we do we do set goals we've got a management team that's got agenda of things that we wanted to happen and i think the crypto business isn't in such an interesting both crypto and the data center business we have two businesses both are at the forefront right now of like explosive change and there's a ton to do in both of them and so when i think about my time for the next six months galaxies is gonna get a ton of my time there's been times when we first started it was a smaller business my phil got a ton of my time when i started doing criminal justice so i've dialed back my participation and phil solely because this six hundred person baby needs a lot of energy and so i do think of it that way but my brain you know like how do i have fun think of if i make this much money what are we gonna do with it so my son and i are brainstorming on like a cool project fantasy project that you would do if you actually had hundred million dollars to give away to one thing you know what could you do with to to make new york city better and so like like and i'm on per complexity i'm trying to figure out i'm working people and so i'm multitasking in that respect but i got goals there there was that do what i say the one i had to do i'm much better talking about like the meditating and the exercise and this is where the discipline my wife wakes up every day six thirty and meditate an hour and in meditate an hour at night and doesn't miss i'm just like she's like a mit and i'm like i know that would be good for me and i do i'd take once in a while but i'm stressed like i in meditate it doesn't seem broken yeah it when i break i figured out how to fix myself but no i don't feel broken yeah but on this other podcast you did you were like oh i went to a therapist the first time ever and and the thing was like i gotta love myself and forgive myself and and you're like that was like huge breakthrough and i'm like in my head i'm like well plain arm share expert here but i'm like you're doing it again you know what i mean i'm like dude like people have a hard time changing patterns stuff one of the things you'll learn as you get older is that you see very few people that actually do enough of the hard work that they they do change and most of the time you see those people is when they literally hit some horrific rock bottom that the only way to live is to change right that's the whole a cycle where they just give up and say okay i'll do what you tell me to do because i gotta change change hard even subtle changes hard and again if someone's living their fullest life and they don't wanna change right yeah i mean i love hearing about the shit because i think that i think that you know this is gonna sound pom of me but in my head i'm like i can be like you know he's you know thirty five so i'm like okay he's twenty five years ahead of me and like i and we both can't hear yeah we're both a little bit deaf and i came from a blue collar like family and i i think you talked about princeton about like like oh my i thought i was shit and then i got around people that like kinda wear the shit and i'm like sound like i've like felt that like but like i hadn't been in new york city until i was like twenty six years old hadn't been on my airplane i was twenty one and so like i always felt like these that line in new york new york if you can make it here you can make it anywhere there's nothing like new york city because you're never gonna be the guy like i go home and i'm like i'm the man and then i go to new york i'm like and i'm like looking at apartments and i'm like i'm nothing but but it's it's it's both so liberating and so awesome because let me go to a knicks game oh dude where supposed to do a podcast and you canceled and that night i turn the tv i see timothy charlemagne i see the jenner girl and then i see mike and i was like i mother motherfucker i was supposed to do a food and then i was like my my wife was like can you blame him them i'm like no i can't mix in the playoffs is his mud site city erupt when the you had like there was timothy year you we got good seats you were like demands i how much is the playoff seat cost to we're where where he i imagine seats free at if you wanna buy front row in the playoffs you know they can cost as much as fifty eighty thousand dollars thought second the guy who sat next to me i think paid fifteen thousand what yours were free well no ours we have seasoned tickets okay and so you just pay the normal whatever knicks charge you for playoff tickets that's crazy man and so you see right you ryan cohen is yeah billionaire rank cohen i don't i mean i know him but i know who he is and i saw him sitting right in front of you during a game and like ja b like fell in his lap and he didn't break eye contact from the beautiful woman he was with he just like yeah the conversation the whole time those are fun because you always have the celebrity sitting in front of you i went to one game just a regular season game in da the nigerian superstar you know there's there two guys in in a beats right da is one of them the other guy's burn a boy was there and i didn't know we was but he had a great chain i like chains and i'm like dude where'd get that changed scott and i went to get a beer and i was like you want a beer or coke or something and he did it one when he came back he turned around and he's like you know no one's effort offered to get me a beer in a long time i really appreciate that we started talking i had no idea he was this mega star and he posted a and then his uncle texted me was like dude dude that that guy does worry about crypto he get to know home him so he came on he was on our podcast no shit became friends with him that's like that's the power of gift to like the gift of ga i think it's what my father calls that he did same thing but it's sort of like it's like this weird blue collar grit or like hospitality but with like big number swag people people are scared to be nice to people i don't wanna i don't wanna i think guy i sit in front of him you know ask where out is jane like most people like to be and you end up doing some type of business with no just he came at our podcast invited be nigeria i i i've made a huge mistake he might been to his wedding in nigeria which turned out to be like the coolest looking thing of all times but it was like a week before my daughter's wedding and i didn't think i could go and i you noticed the pattern of like this all these silly small interactions have been like i think you said with the ethereum purchase you like bought a golf stream or something crazy and like it like it just funny that serendipity i guess serendipity might happen to everyone but not everyone capitalize off it and i've noticed a pattern where like there's so many like you're like oh i just happened to do this and it like i've heard that like twelve times you know what i love i love other people's stories that you must as well of i as you wanna do the podcast and so i get excited for other people like you meet da you're like that's freaking so cool and i wanted to know a story and you know i didn't know if you up a rich kid and and even the relationship with the dad and all fa me and i think if you show interest in people and you're open with yourself it opens up a lot of you know opportunity and it's not it's not a strategy it's not like i think about doing this it it comes from partly being raised with seven kids it partly comes from you know feeling loved your whole life mom and dad loves you your friends love you you know and so you feel comfortable in your own skin the gift you can give your kids the gifting you give your employees is for people to feel comfortable in their own skin what i went to princeton in my great insight you know i had this roommate who was gloria of interval son unfortunately ended up committing suicide later on in life and was so painful because he was such a nice kid but that i've been anderson cooper's his brother and anderson anderson's written about it yeah well i read anderson anderson's book on his mother is amazing yes and you know i'm a young guy i i see i'm mean gloria van building so my god i'm you know like with royalty i'm was royalty and i'm dealing know middle class guy and my mom had grown have in queens and so probably wore gloria jeans yeah but she knew the whole story and after about six months at princeton you know princeton in unique place and that everyone lives in the same dorms and they're kinda crappy dorms there's not like a hierarchy of rich and non rich and in terms of living space and even quite frankly social life and you're like damn y'all shit on the same toilet as way do you know they're he's just he's got his insecurities he's got his strengths just like and the moment you realize everyone's kinda of the same everyone's a little bit insecure everyone's got an impostor syndrome everyone's trying to figure out who that you have that realization in college had that realization in college freshman year man so but i used to host these conferences called my old company was it it was a newsletter a company whatever like this media company we own trade shows and or conferences like a ted talk and i would i was twenty four when i started doing it and we would get like the founder of like we work or like casper or bon like brands that or zapier which is now like a ten billion dollar company these companies that were like at the time obviously before we knew we work because we were we're like these like ten billion dollar whatever companies and i would play a little trick on them where i was like alright your talk is at noon but you gotta be here for mic check at like ten and like there's no mic check for a conferences right like it like it works the mic works and but i just wanted to be around them in the green room and i would hear these billionaires complained it would be i would just need sit and listening with about four or five of them and i knew like how their companies were and i would hear him i'm complain about stuff about like i've had this cfo who i need a fire but frankly like i just hate the confrontation or like you know this one company had just raised four hundred million dollars and they were like things are going horrible i'm like gosh read about you in the new york time i thought you guys were the shit and i remember thinking that that was like the most like enlighten lesson i've had probably in terms of business and how to live life probably ever and i was like these people they're they have the same downside they had the same issues i have yet they're still like just moving forward and doing it and i found it very freeing to know that the people at admire were broken milton every every everybody is is going to a similar journey like there are very few people that late i've met a couple i've met at one or two we're all on this path and so i think the lesson i learned at princeton wasn't that i was the same as everybody or is that i was no better or no worse than anybody sure i did some things better than people and i did some things worse than people right wrestling is a pretty objective this guy beat your ass he's a better wrestler and i've tried to keep that ethos my whole life it's why at my parties i got my friend i got i got a real weird collection of people because i just like them yeah as opposed to a hierarchy of people and i think that is what's brought me lots of joy but it's also give me when i got to goldman sachs i would walk into the boss's office if like dude i got this great idea i thought i deserve to be there now often he'd say that's a stupid idea like okay good and i go back to my seat but the guys are around me right dude how'd you have the courage to walk in the office i was like he shit's on that same toilet like and so part of that so where your parents confident my dad was a all american football player from west point but very quiet and stoic is the right word for him nice he's become the kind man in the world he's gotten an older but he was tough but kind my mother was very aspirational the greatest storyteller and she pushed us not in a direct way but like in an indirect way like you know which complain about some kid being able to do something and well she jumped off a cliff would you do right and there was almost this like we could be the kennedy i teased my mom all the time she looked like jackie she named by first daughter my first my oldest sister jack and her first daughter so we had jackie robert john john do you with john john but john yeah john michael like i was like mom you named us after the kennedy i did not my mom and dad got married right when kennedy became elected you know i mean it's kennedy kennedy just one of my i'm a huge history about kennedy the kennedy family i probably i read twelve books about them thank god you are the kennedy right like but it was very asked my mother was very aspirational she wanted the best for us and she was a big cheerleader leader she wasn't what you'd call like you know the jewish mom or the korean mom that pressured pressured pressure but like there was an internal sense of of course you could do this and i think all of our my brothers and sisters picked up on that are you nervous about raising rich kids i think about that all the time i thought about this when i became wealthy i was like there's nothing i can do about it and so i had one rule to my children be kind and the only time i lost my temper i had once one son who was a whip snap a few times it was like up on his brother died i like where does that come from like i would really only a few times in my whole life with my kids i lost my temper and it was always when i thought they weren't being kind but i didn't think you could fake like not being rich like i worked a ton for my when i was a young kid because i was kinda part of the labor force and if i wasn't more than grass my mom or dad had to if i wasn't doing the dish dishes my mom or dad like we had a labor force besides my kids and so you couldn't like fake you got a do this doesn't make any sense and so i thought in my wife i did a better job than me all you can do is model good behavior if you want your kids to work hard work hard if do you want your kids to be kind to people out in your in your house and the cab driver be kind of them if all you do is talk about money your kids only talk about money if you talk about interesting things around the dinner table your kids are kindergarten compartment so parenting really is modeling and you know by no means if i've been perfect model and my kids probably can give you eighty five stories on on how i haven't but that was my philosophy and they're gonna be rich kids and so so far they've turned out lovely fingers crossed you know they've all finding their own path and doing cool things and i think it's much harder to be a rich kid than a poor kid like for us our success was providing it's going from here to there it's we wanted to make money so we can go on a date so we can get laid so then we can buy a house so we can send our kids to school you wanna be better than your parents and your parents want you to be better than them yeah and with my situation i'm like i got really lucky at it one young age which means compounding if is like it's like i feel actually sorry for my children i'm like the natural state is that you need to beat me but i don't want you to feel the pressure that you need to do that but they don't need to be the the book sapiens was all about humans are people of narrative right i love historically the narrative of in america was the american dream your kids are gonna have a better life than you yeah so that got built into our system yeah at one point that's we want your kids to have good life the european ethos is i just want my kids to have good life and it as you get wealthy earth what better better i want my kids to feel self actual i would them have a wonderful life like at one point if your bill gates is kid and he he's worth a hundred billion dollar impossible like wait i don't i have five hundred but like it it becomes idiotic and then you're like talking about a dude and so i think the moment you get even half as wealthy issue that narrative shifts and it's like how do i help my kids how do i scaffold them to be self actual whatever that means i got one son he's quirky and smart and we have no idea what he's gonna do yeah my wife and i get gamble on it but like god what do you think it can go from here to there he's hopefully gonna find his niche and be successful and we will cheer him on appreciate jonas you're the man i really admire i admire your business stuff but i don't think that's what you're great at i think you're great at like living a full life and i think that there's only a handful of people who i i i know from the outside or i know personally where i'm like i enjoy if like i life is like five different facets i'm like i really admire like up to four or even five of like the way they live life whereas there's a bunch of people who are like amazing a business and like yeah he's amazing business but like i don't admire anything else about them and so that's kind of cool like they'll hang out and meet with someone who i i put on that list of people who i really look up to and how they live all different parts of their life so thanks for doing this and this is awesome i appreciate it thank you i feel like got could rude to where i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a goal travel never looking back alright so when my employees join hampton we haven't do a whole bunch of onboarding stuff but the most important thing that they do is they go through this thing i made called copy that copy that is a thing that i made that teaches people how to write better and the reason this is important is because at work or even just in life we communicate mostly via text right now whether we're emailing slack blogging texting whatever most of the ways that we're communicating is by the written word and so i made this thing called copy that that's guaranteed to make you right better you could check it out copy that dot com i post every single person who leaves a review whether it's good or bad i post it on the website and you're gonna see a trend which is that this is a very very very simple exercise something that's so simple that they laugh at they think how is this gonna actually impact us and make us write better but i promise you it does you gotta try it at copy that dot com i guarantee it's gonna change the way you write again copy that dot com

so the article tells a story of multiple eighty something year old guys who own publications that are making that are fine businesses maybe they make six figures a year in profit but they can't find anyone to take it over so they're literally just shutting it down i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a goal less travel never look at we start with this the tweet it's media gaze which i guess some media publications commentary on media companies it says small town newspapers are shutting down due to lack of a succession plan not financial issues in nearly a dozen us states this is a growing problem okay and so the article tells a story of multiple eighty something year old guys who own publications that are making that are fine businesses maybe they make six figures a year in profit but they can't find anyone to take it over so they're literally just shutting it down and here we have a tweet from matthew prince i think the same as matthew is worth i think something like four or five billion dollars he's the ceo of cloud for there do you wanna kinda read what he says yeah so he says actually this is a recipe for a really rewarding life if you're a recent college grad and not sure what to do find a small town you could love with a local newspaper whose owners are ready to retire raise the capital to buy it run it with the community's interest at heart you'll not get too rich but you'll do well more importantly you'll be a hero to the community and have influence or even early in your career you'll meet the love your life at some point at some event you otherwise wouldn't get invited to you'll have kids who will proudly call you their parent and make this corner of the world meaningfully better if anyone wants a seriously fault us recipe and just lacks the capital happy to talk so i think that's amazing insight but the true insight so someone chi at them and they say something like go ahead what do they say i can't read it all so the literally the guy's name who's replying is us some guy so i'm not not even dis discouraging this guy to some guy tweets adam and says this is the sort of un un unwilling funny stuff that wealthy people say that a hundred thirty iq guy should be content with an imaginary small town life lived in anonymity near i don't even know what this word is being a hundred eighty degrees from their own choices which deliver untold wealth and influence i don't even what what is this guy saying i didn't understand the it's basically saying like this is something that that wealthy dudes say that's so funny because it's so wrong that a guy would be happy doing this yeah what everything saying and here's why i like twitter so matt matt prince i don't he's not high profile he's not like a average like the average person no way who this is but he's worth five billion dollars and it's so interesting to get his insight so this is this is the tweet that i really care about and i just the rest was for context read this next one alright so he says i have it just replies to some guy he goes i have untold financial wealth and i own a local newspaper so i have some perspective like warren buffett likes to say surprisingly little changes when you move from upper middle class to truly rich houses or houses cars or cars and watches are stupid that's so good what's more important is meaning i feel lucky to have achieved financial wealth while chasing meaning that is super rare and feel incredibly fortunate to have gotten both but if you're early career and decide i'd rather optimize for meaning than financial wealth i think this is a better path than most would consider example volunteer for the peace corps it will actually make you a good leaving and you'll have incredible influence and meeting within your community and if you later decide to go for untold financial wealth always remember rupert murdoch empire began with the adelaide advertiser which he bought when he was twenty one how fantastic is that this is really great although you know not to be a reply guy but like cloud fairs is not the peace corps or owning a small town newspaper in a community so like is he saying that cloudflare was his meaningful thing or he did something before that dino know that's his meaningful thing but but the point is for one he has another one so he's like some guy goes how is one supposed to make a good living from a small town newspaper do you have a model a new model for profitability blah i wanna sit here a breakdown and he said matthew prince says the local paper we bought cash flow around six hundred thousand when we bought it we wanted to run it as a nonprofit so we plow it all back into the into it spanning coverage but it is not the case that these are bad businesses they're just not big businesses so the takeaway of multiple multiple things one newspapers are dying local newspapers we're talking towns that have five thousand people ten thousand people thirty thousand people they are not dying and if you read the replies you'll see people who are saying i own a local newspaper that does five hundred thousand dollars in eb like there's there there are replies here and matthew matt just said one of those replies where he explains the numbers but two it's just so fascinating to hear this guy's perspective who has so much and i actually agree with them and i also think that there is a big opportunity to buy a bunch of these but you can just start with one and i don't think local newspapers are gonna go away anytime soon to be honest i think that they have a very stable subscriber base and low and what matt says in there he says something like hospitals and other like local businesses they are dying to advertise in local newspapers and that this business while small is doing great and it's very subs it's a monopoly alright this episode is brought to you by hubspot they're doing a big conference this is they're big one they do called inbound they have a ton of great speakers that are coming to san francisco september third two september fifth and it's got a pretty incredible lineup they have comedian like amy poe they have da from ant dark cast sean evans from hot ones and if you're somebody who's in marketing or sales or ai and you just wanna know what's going on what's coming next it's a great event to go to and hey guess what i'm gonna be there you can go to inbound dot com slash register to get your ticket to inbound twenty twenty five again september third fifth in san francisco hope to see you there okay i love this one ten out of ten five good job i gave a talk at berkeley that was about starter businesses are called white belt businesses few months ago wait let's reflect on that that's pretty cool what given a talk yeah berkeley i don't know that sounds cool to me like i never got to be go to fancy it was hilarious so i i'm like i'm gonna give this talk and i i think i've told the story before but my entire life shifted because i was in a random class at duke i planned to be a doctor i taken the amc mca all of it and then i took this one class but this amazing woman lisa ke and she had she was she herself had graduated ten years earlier and gotten gotten wealthy lived an interesting life and came back to teach and she decided like what class did the kids actually need and the class was called getting rich it's kinda like this podcast my first millions like sort of a a a pretty crude title her class was called getting rich and actually it was two things it was personal finance you'd learn about like mortgages and savings and how that all worked compounding shit like that and then secondly she would invite speakers in just so that we would get exposed to other ideas of what a life could be besides doctor lawyer consultant banker which was like you know at school like duke that's where ninety percent of the students are dev voting their energy and a guy came in and he gave a talk and it literally changed my life it's not even something he said i just kind was like this seems like he's having fun he's doesn't seem like he's that much smarter than me like you know maybe smarter now but it he's you know he's saying at the beginning he didn't know shit about shit and that's where i am today and like why don't i just do what what this guy doing and the last thing he had said was like he's like look if you go try to do something entrepreneurial or interesting and it doesn't work out this america that maybe like the story is is a currency for you and look i hire kids like you and guess what you all have the same top three fourth of the resume you go to school you got a three point something gpa you have some stupid extra extracurricular activities you got an internship at some big corporation where you didn't really make an impact the only thing that differentiates any of you guys is the other section at the bottom of your resume like have you done anything have you gone in any interesting quest and so he's like go on an interesting instant quest you have nothing to lose right now you don't have kids you don't have a mortgage just go try some shit and if you fail if it works fantastic if it fails don't worry it creates a great story that a guy's like me like to hear so that like really shifted my life and so i get i get invited to go give this talk at berkeley and i'm like i'm gonna do this man i'm a change someone's life oh i'll be a life changer today and i prepped my ass off like i really tried like i like thought about it i spent two days really like full like just ten hours a day just working on this one talk two days doesn't sound like a lot but like i show up to these podcasts pretty cold like i can wing it with the best of them so for me to really put twenty hours into one talk i'm gonna give to fifty kids that didn't yeah that that was unusual for me you sound like the kenny powers have given a talk man you're like get ready kids i'm i'm gonna make you piss tears like hold hold on your butt about of your world so i go in and guess what these kids really just don't give a fuck within two minutes of the talk and again i'm trying to fire on all cylinders it's interactive i'm crack jokes i got a story i'm doing it i have a big promise at the beginning and i look around and i just remembered vividly in that moment i was like oh i remember being nineteen you're not even out of school yet like the the real world is a it's a distant land far away at this point you're just trying to you're like okay i have to be here till five and then i'm gonna go eat and then i have that paper to write three years out of your target demo too like they're indian they go to berkeley and you're like they could like alright perfect this is my demo and then you're like shit they're still nineteen i need to wait till they're twenty one until they have heard of me exactly so honestly it was a kind of a giant waste of time i don't think i shifted anyone's life i i think i changed exactly zero lives but i really tried it and one of the principles in there was like when you get out of berkeley instead of getting a job like consider you know doing a company but for most of you you don't have the next facebook you don't have the next big idea and maybe you're not even talented enough to handle that's it's like kinda like if if you know jessica alba walked through that door and she's like you it's like did you couldn't handle jessica alba right now anyways don't worry about it that's not your problem like you need to go you know put your hand under her mindy shirt in the bag behind the bleach yours over there like that's the level you're at right now and so i basically was like you need a starter business a white belt business and i giving him ideas for what simple starter businesses are but with this analogy did you just no i just did that one else now it's i i thought you're pretty good right yeah well we'll see the funny thing is i have you and i'm like sam gonna love this he's gonna love hate this and then r i'm like ari just gonna hate this and sure enough as i'm saying it that's what i got i got sam laughing but face balm and ari just looking off into the distance wondering how did i end up here why do i have this job my god no that that's a that's a fantastic analogy it's very true everyone dreams of like the jessica elbow doing that and you're like wait what do i do we're what i it in my hands you know what in my mean it's perfect exactly you were not prepared for jessica gal yet and that's okay you just need some reps and so what's what's the point of what do you gonna show me oh guess the tie to that was i think owning a local newspaper is a fantastic version this to right was that not obvious that was so crystal clear to me the connection show me this this story about steve ba and then also i wanna say the gary you one okay two great choices excellent choices off the menu alright this is from i believe steve balm goes on the acquired podcast it was really good it was so good i agree i didn't watch it but i agree and other the clips have been good and so he's telling the story and they they go do you guys know the story of key at microsoft he was one of the most pivotal things at microsoft and then the hosts go why why i my i knew is important but please tell the story and steve goes he was pivotal in a way that you won't even know si goes first of all he's a brilliant guy great guy he's at yahoo and he went to a grad school with the head of microsoft research harry and so the the the the the the setup here is that satya na mandela who's now the ceo of microsoft was running being at the time bing is trying to compete with google and harry runs the research program there and harry comes and he goes look this guy key is a genius we have to hire key i don't know if he wants to work for us we gotta learn from this guy we gotta hire this guy so he's like satya mandela steve balm and harry all fly down to california to meet with this guy k lou and they talked key and they're like dude you're right this guy's brilliant and we're learning about him and then at one point ke walks away he leaves him and goes to restroom or something and he goes satya throws out this idea he goes we should hire key and i should work for him it goes so harry who's all in because he worked with them harry works for satya and satya is like we should not only hire this guy i should work for him i should report to him like gives up power basically so they they call him and they're lady to like he listen you know he was thinking about taking a job somewhere else but he ends up joining and he goes and they the host goes so what what did he do at microsoft he goes what i just told you he told me about satya it goes i love satya and we were giving him more and more responsibilities anyways but when i saw that this guy would do the right thing for the company he would give up power to bring in a more talented person and agree to work for him he didn't have ego that got in the way i knew that satya was the guy and now satya has become the ceo of microsoft and led microsoft on this incredible run that's so good that's a great story it's up a thousand percent and for a company as big as microsoft to go up a thousand percent and now is a three trillion dollar company all you know under satya kind of regime i thought that was just a bad ass story right and later on in the podcast steve balm talks about phil and he i i don't know how rich is but i think a hundred billion or plus and he was like the acquired guys were like your wealth is growing i think twenty percent a year you know twenty billion dollars whatever he was i'm trying to give it all the away and he goes you're forgetting about something and and the host go what he goes you know microsoft pays a dividend so just my dividends are making me one billion dollars a year and he's like he goes he goes i'm trying to give it all the way and i can't find p enough people who can accept the money well steve we would love to help you with this problem we're helping much over here yeah he was talking about how he's like i don't i don't i forget the capital appreciation of of this or the stock appreciation lately it's been what fifteen percent year i i forget it's something like magnificent where he's earning tens of billions of dollars from that and yeah he corrected the guys when they said how wealthy he is he goes you're forgetting about our dividend which pays me one billion you know he's just been sitting on that by the way you know he's like he's mother out here don't know they don't know i'm ball it was a really great podcast it was like three hours long and it was fantastic and he gets made or bomber gets made fun of a bunch for that one video over where he just looks goofy but he he he's the a great salesman and he's way more technical than people realize obama's is a genius but that's cool i mean you gotta you gotta be special i mean there's luck is involved but i think it's it's so easy to write people off and he's a great example of enthusiasm as a skill i've talked about this in a bunch of other podcast podcasts but enthusiasm is a actual skill and that video that people make fun of the developer's developers developers developers to me that's like watching you know vince carter dunk or something like that right like this is a guy who probably brought a a ton of energy and enthusiasm and belief and to the team in an unwavering way and at an unusual level and yeah that was obviously funny to laugh at i get it i thought it was funny a shit too but enthusiasm is a skill and i love it because people don't even think of it as a skill but we all know it when we see it like if you ever worked with somebody who's really enthusiastic and is a believer in what you're doing and brings good energy every day and doesn't get like doesn't get worn down and doesn't get buckled by adversity you love that person that person clearly valuable to the team you would hate if that person left your team yet nobody talks about enthusiasm as a skill or something you could practice develop or at least even celebrate that you have it's something that you know seems like something sort of for dumb people this episode brought to you by hubspot media they have a cool new podcast that's for ai called the next wave it's by matt wolf and nathan lands they're basically talking about all the do tools that are coming out how the landscape is changing what's going on with ai tech so if you wanna be up to date on ai tech it's a cool podcast you could check out listen to the next wave wherever you get your podcast what's some what's this scary one yeah this is funny funny alright this is gary love gary v gary i love you this is also hilarious so they're playing a game called bullish and bearish where the host is gonna tell him a company name and he has to decide is he a bull or a bear on it watch this meta bullish reddit bullish out of that bullish w i'm not educated enough to give an answer that to be honest nvidia feel like if i spend ten hours educating myself i'm like okay this is not sustainable to be this crazy disney disney very bullish i think intellectual property is one of the most underrated businesses of the future of b and everything i don't think people understand how big owning ip is gonna be tesla bullish microsoft very bullish i'm bullish amazon very bullish bullish alibaba bullish yes off bullish even though it might be banned bullish not bitch i'm bullish okay don't before that word gets out of your mouth i'm bullish what do i could do i'm bullish how funny is this i i love gary i it it sucks because she picked like honestly like i can't hate i'm also pretty bullish on all the the all the tech companies that the all the best companies in the world am out a chat g so funny he dude people forget i think va media i track it because i like erie and i think that it's easy to dismiss them as like a guru but i you know van bin is doing something like three hundred million dollars a year right now i did out that and what you say you tracking it where are where are you getting this information from so i actually do you remember how i told you i had this document where i track companies and i like i i i i track people where i will make a timeline of their life and like at had different ages they do different things i track it with a variety of companies as well and va media i was curious about their trajectory and he was growing the company like at a really good clip like it was doubling for a couple years and it was still growing at like fifty percent for a couple years and so i just wanted to check in and add to my document and over the last three or four years he's grown it's into something like two hundred and fifty million a year in revenue if google va media revenue he actually fairly public about it lately of where it's at but it's in the two hundred three hundred range two hundred to three hundred million a year yeah and what do they do now is it just marketing services or what what's going on so va x which is now the holding company in two thousand and twenty four was on track to do three three hundred million in revenue and this was written in december of twenty four so yeah you could assume that did in the three hundred million range yeah it does they do social media this the same shit just they manage people's social media stuff i mean it's gotta be more of that manage people's social media stuff just gotta be more of than that i think that's the bulk of it they do social media advertising and campaigns so like if you're samsung and you wanna run ads on facebook and you wanna make the social really good ads i believe looks ignore get van board what is the most interesting thing that's come out of your tracking people manually year by year borderline creepy stalker thing that you're doing what's interesting to me is a few things one the ability to grow is it it it gets harder and harder but like the people who are like really big animals they just figure out how to do it and that's really fascinating to me but occasionally even companies that are growing quickly they'll have two or three years of no or little growth and the reason why i like to do this research is it helps me understand i think that it's the same way when you talk to your rich friends and you talk about money with them you start to normalize money and that's why i do the stuff where it like it sounds like it's like a almost like an emotional regulation because entrepreneurship is this long longer than you want more up and down thing than you want and seeing that the people the things you admire today either a took a long time or had you know multiple flat years it makes you not feel like shit when you're in one of those you know periods that is it yeah yeah exactly because i think i showed you the revenue chart or no the so i've i've shown you charts before a business insider which is a company i also used to do this for and they've grown like crazy but there was like three years where every single month they actually didn't grow and i was like this chart looks great because we've zoomed out to fifteen years but zoom in on those three years and imagine feeling that way for nearly a thousand days that doesn't feel great yeah doesn't feel good at all the whole life of the company right now is three years imagine this whole time just flat you know or i'll give you another example rep it yeah you know we've had omni out on the podcast and that it was one of our biggest ones they just announced the other day that they hit a hundred million in revenue that's huge right well what he kind of said like in a small comment but like in a reply is that i believe last year or the year before they're at ten million in revenue so they went from ten million to a hundred million in record time like one year or two years something like that but what he told us on the podcast is that he started the company eight years ago which means from years zero to eight he got to ten million in revenue which is not impressive that's not that's that's neat that's not impressive and what's and that's just insane to me that he kept at it for eight years and then and and tell me if i'm getting my numbers wrong but he kept at it for that long and then success was like in two years yes and no i think you're you're you're right but it's not like it was just failing that whole time because if you look at the user growth of developers and i think i tweeted this out with it i'll find it but like basically they grew they were growing exponentially in number of users who were developers so that was you know that was also happening at that same time and so it's not as it's not as like oh man you know it's just you know suddenly it starts to work like i mean look at this this is paul graham tweeting about rep before before they even turn non monetization this back in twenty twenty but like what years to go to this is twenty fifteen to twenty twenty like midway through twenty twenty like or end of twenty basically twenty twenty one and so they had five million developers programmers using their thing and he paul paul tata he says this graph is impressive not just for perfect men shape about the numbers five million users is a lot when those users are programmers imagine how many users their users will have of their apps and i think the crazy thing about rep is that basically they pivoted the entire company when they're at a billion dollar valuation i invested in rep i think at a eight hundred million ish valuation eight eight or nine hundred million valuation i invested in the fund and i invested personally because i was like such a big believer in this and they had pretty much no revenue at the time but it was this type of growth and i love the product that i loved omni judd i was this guy a savage and they have they built an incredible product that i think will have a network effect over time and then they pivoted the entire business to say it's not about like young programmer because i thought oh they're getting young programmers to start coding on rep and maybe those people have never leave they'll code their whole career on rep and then when ai happened they pivoted based the entire company to now it's not even four programmers it's for people who don't code typically to make things right it's for non non engineers to i just suddenly be able to be engineers to be able to to to write create software for software creators and now that's ramped to a hundred million at ten the ten x the revenue in one year so now i look like a genius investing in this thing but i really didn't even invest in this because they pivoted they like basically shifted the entire user who is the user and what is the use case you know afterwards yeah i mean this is just insane i i use rep probably three or four times a week it's really fun i just asked chad to make this this is sam stocking all these businesses dude i do this like crazy i'm gonna have to share this doc i just i like tracking numbers to me when we first met you were like i took every billionaire and i tried to figure out what they were doing at age thirty and i was like what and you're were like jack do you at age thirty his net worth was only what i was like do you know this and why do you know this what are doing and you're like by the time i'm thirty my goal is to have x i think we were well we probably met when we were twenty four twenty five years old something like that yeah and you were like when i'm thirty i wanna have twenty million dollars in the bank that was your number and you were like look at that some i'll be ahead of jeff bezos and jack do in these jackets i was like yeah this guy's a sick of but i like it it was the i should call like if i teach a class it's gonna be called like how to become an economic animal unfortunately like there's way levels there's as many levels to this and i'm there's many people who are way above me and i didn't understand like how exponential growth works but hey you know i think i got an the arena of what i was aiming for alright talk about the new mayor not because there's a politics podcast i don't know actually i didn't even know this guy existed until three days ago to be honest with you but you're moving to new york and you seem to know about this guy and i am following him only from business and marketing perspective i have a business and marketing take on this guy but can you first set the context for people like me who are not following who this new york city he's the mayor right that's what he's that's just became he's me the democrat who's running for mayor it was a the democrats were i don't even know the right terms but nomination and he won so basically it was hand in cuomo new york is very democratic he's most likely to win is that why people are freaking out because normally if he's just a candidate so yeah more likely than not the the issue is here the issue has a a bunch of issues basically every politician is corrupt so mayor cuomo or the cuomo is running for mayor he was previous at the governor he got in trouble for like asking his coworkers workers have sex with them and he was the guy running against this guy the current mayor mayor adams he has accepted bribes he is gonna be running as an independent versus this guy and so we're kind of like stuck with like a paper scissors yeah it's like you know south park they it's like a do short turd sandwich should you get vote for that's kinda like what we're working with here the the gist of this guy is that he's incredibly charismatic he's thirty two years old he believes in a lot of crazy things that's my opinion crazy but basically a lot of socialist things so for example he wants to freeze rent meaning you can't raise rent on on on i think something like two million different apartments right rate different rents stabilized departments he also wants to create government owned grocery stores and a handful of things like that that are very controversial to people who don't like socialism but amongst young people who are very angry about a lot of things that they should be angry about like housing costing a lot of money versus the wage growth but they he's super charismatic and so he won over young people's votes and so okay great great summary now again i don't care about the politics of this and i don't live in new york but i'm fascinated by this guy i i literally had never heard of this guy and then i watched this video killed this tweet he killed it so so this tweet right here has three point seven million views so that's just the twitter part of this forget instagram tiktok anywhere else that i'm sure he's posting this type of content but first of all the branding so like that was the first thing that stood out to me like literally the branding of this guy like the the font etcetera so what is this video it starts like he's a tiktok content creator he go it says new york is suffering from a crisis and it's called halal inflation and then he talks about how halal from like the like food trucks you know chicken and rice halal from like a halal food truck now cost ten dollars but it used to cost eight and he's basically goes and he's interviewing them he's like you know how how much do you sell worth ten dollars ten dollars to dollars what we'll play the video fuck is suffering from a crisis and it's called halal inflation today we're gonna get to the bottom of this how much does the plate of halal cost right now from this truck ten dollars ten ten dollars yeah when you're a street vendor you have to pay for the food the plates how much do you have to pay for your apartment before it was twenty two k twenty seventeen thousand and how much does a license cost if you get it from the city i think four hundred who are you paying the bear you're not paying the city no no no you pay the permit owner twenty two thousand dollars just so you can sell this food yes and who is this a random guy have you ever applied for a permit yeah i applied i no come anything it's long way number three thousand eight hundred something and after two years your number three thousand eight hundred yes these are the four bills that are sitting in the city council right now which would give these vendors their own permits and make your whole halal more affordable but eric adams hasn't said a single word about them if you own the permit then how much would you charge for the plate seven dollar eight dollars would you rather pay ten dollars for a plate of hello or eight dollars eight dollars eight dollars fifty eight dollars a way to go if i was the mayor be working with city council from day one to make halal eight bucks again oh probably day tastes like ten bucks for it should be eight so i was blown away because i have never really seen a politician doing this type of like i wanna call it like kinda natural influence content i don't know what what do you what do you even call this but this is not what politicians typically did he's making like a vice documentary but in two minutes it's very good he keys he's well you're doing u content okay that i think that's the way i would put so the same thing happened in in in business especially e commerce so sam i don't know if you remember like in the earlier days of e com right like let's say twenty twelve twenty fourteen you know you mostly did just static images okay there was not really a lot of video on let's say facebook or google at the time so you do static images for your ads and but those images you would pay a professional designer to make and they would make it looks slick and then that's what people would click and then when video came out people tried to do the same thing they would basically film professional looking videos you'd hire videographer you'd have somebody holding the camera and then you would you'd would have a good background good lighting and you would say your thing but it turns out that commercials didn't really work as well on the internet as me picking up my phone and just making something that looks very raw like i'm doing my you know it'd be a girl doing makeup while talking about a different product right and it just feels like it's a get ready with b video or it's you know a mom who's in a rush who's just being like y'all i gotta tell you y'all this is a life saver like my husband if my husband can't believe how much of a how much how how much happy i am since i got this thing and then they ruffle in their bag and grab something out and this ads that don't look like ads and they call this u user generate content and that's the new style that works best in ads for the last i would say five years that's dominated most of e commerce advertising this is the first time i've seen a politician do this so like if you compare i don't know like kamala and how perfectly manic everything was like her image her her you know pants suit her like professional photography her like fake phone call with somebody but then you see that the phone wasn't even on and it's she's just chuck to nobody like it was all super super fake and polished and this guy's doing like man on the street interviews holding the microphone you can literally hear like the you know it kind of rubbing against his jacket sometimes accidentally like it's like it's w sa dude it's the perfection in the imperfection to go full circle there this kinda of blew me away i don't know if i'm just like overly nerd out about this but from from the topic like halal chicken rice ten bucks it should only be eight to the style of the video i immediately was like i get why this got won and the on saturday the election was taking place yesterday he was so he spent the whole day of walking around new york and like doing like these very raw looking videos talking to people and i think that it this is just proof which we already have had this proof that charisma matters more than ideas in reality and this is not like takeaway that like this is a very obvious takeaway but this is just another example because he his charisma is off the charts and he has just been like killing it when when his ideas in my opinion are just absolutely insane but because of the style marketing it's it's done wonderful young people react this stuff and then and by the way this is what we need like mayor quote or a governor cuomo the guy who was running for him he's an old guy he's in his sixties baby seventies and he would never in a million years grab his cell phone and just start talking to it but that's what i need i think my friend our our friend austin reef tweeted something out and he said the next politicians and the next presidents are going to be podcast and subs and that sounds like a ridiculous statement people who write newsletters of people who have podcast podcasts that sounds ridiculous it's not ridiculous and i i totally buy into it i yeah definitely there's gonna be a podcast president why because they're gonna have a built a following before they run so they're gonna build the audience before they go run two they're gonna be trained with ten thousand hours of storytelling and communication of you know how to make a point so you you know that that's gonna be one the other one is gonna be short form video creators i think roberto our friend said this thing he goes whether this guy's agenda is good or bad for new york is irrelevant he told the best story this is why steve jobs said that the storyteller is the most powerful person in the world a lie told us a good story can never ne can never beat the truth trapped in a bad story or i think it's can always beat the truth trapped a bad story and then i had because i had tweeted this thing so when i saw this so i i saw the second video i don't know if you've seen this one but can you hear this dude do you know what's funny is i don't have to hear what he's saying and i could sense the charisma well so okay so he's speaking hindi in this video and i think he does actually speak hindi but i it made me realize oh dude to eleven labs is gonna make like a billion dollars next election cycle because every politician is gonna translate everything they're saying into all languages using ai instantaneously like you why would you not you're just gonna pick up free views like we did this we started doing this with our m m episodes ben was like hey i think i can get more views if we dub our episodes into another language so now if you're on youtube and you click the settings wheel and you click like audio track you could select spanish or hindi on on or on some of the episodes and it's gonna be all the episodes soon because we went to eleven labs like hey dude will you guys help us like translate this and immediately we now get tens of thousands of views a month that we weren't getting before in spanish and in hindi india there's probably people in mexico right now that think we just speak spanish that we're their favorite spanish podcast and if they meet us they'll be sore disappointed so that's a really good insight i didn't i have not seen this video of him is he is this video dubbed is this a fake video or real he kinda looks like he might speak the or maybe it's stuff i can't tell exactly but i guess that's the point i wouldn't know ai tools have gotten so good that i would never do and i actually tweeted you said i could a thousand percent create an ai politician that could win over you know a city election now of course you can't actually run if you're not a human being but whatever and i said here's how i do it you know i would make a likable sort of guy next door character like this guy i would create a hundred x more video content than than in my opponent because andrew cuomo is not gonna be able to keep up with my ai agent i don't know if you've seen people who do this they basically they create an ai workflow that's an agent that scrape like it comes up it's there's one agent that's just brainstorming topics it's like looking at reddit it's looking at tiktok trends etcetera and it's brainstorming topics then they have a script agent that writes the writes a one minute tiktok script then they have an a video generation agent that creates a video that does that has your your ai avatar speaking it like h jan or or a lemon labs who's doing this there's people that are doing this there's they run what they call face list channels so they run channels on instagram and tiktok they get millions of views like with b roll in narration but it doesn't have to be b roll anymore because now they use an ai avatar so they just put a person there they're like cool i don't wanna be an influencer i wanna wake up and get ready and have a nice house all this but i'll just tell you i'll just make an ai character that does this and you could just create an ai character that does exactly this and then but the the cool thing is they automated the entire workflow from coming up with the idea scripting it and recording it and then actually like scheduling it posting it analyzing the data and feeding that back into the engine who what's an it's almost like if you guys applied your talents to something useful this you would be incredible i but but it's amazing that you could even do this i'm reading a book called a promised land it's obama's biography or so auto biography he wrote it but it's it's it's old as ten years old but i was at the airport and it's looked cool i'm at the point in the book where he was like i was getting my ass in the election because i was too long winded and my campaign manager criticized one of my debates and he's like dude you're answering the question he's and he's like yeah they asked me a question i'm giving them an answer and like it's kind of nuance and it's long and like a answer yeah i'm giving like a good answer it goes and yeah that's bullshit that's not how you would a debate and that's not how you win votes you're don't give an answer you you're not answering the question the question is irrelevant all people wanna know is can they trust you with their vote and like do are you a brand that they wanna get behind stop answering the question and tell a story that lets him know that they can get behind you and he was like he he goes that rubs me the wrong way but that's the game and i will play that game and there's like a distinct difference in like oh you know we know him now obama's is regarded as a a fairly charismatic good storyteller he was like that was the change yeah exactly do you know lulu no she's she's really cautious a very interesting person to follow on twitter and whatnot so lulu i think she was the head of comm at like pal or something like that i don't i don't or andrew i think it was but she does a good job but she posts regularly is basically comm if device communication device p r slash how executive she should communicate and i think was always an interesting one because like instructors trying to conform as this like boring government contractor you know they let their free flag fly so she she tweeted this out she goes it sounds so basic but he is too likable to lose friendly demeanor smiles with his eyes seems earnest being liked outweighs policies experience at nonsensical plans quote i do just have a good feeling about that person can override almost anything and then harley this ceo shop shopify said vibes it's like oh man we're we're sort of vie voting now and it's it's like actually we're kind of always we've always been doing that man we've always been doing that you know jfk was one of the most jfk have like a seventy percent approval already when he was murdered and he was well loved he was our princess diana or whatever for that generation like he he was well loved and he was well loved because he was incredibly likable that's like a his policies were fine but it was because he looked great he had a a beautiful wife who was poised he had a lovely family with really white teeth like that is why he won because he was very likable and he could and good looking hey this episode is brought to you by mercury they're the fintech of choice for over two hundred thousand companies i myself use it for eight different companies the reason why we all choose it is because it has everything you need under one roof so like my e commerce company it's super important for us to be able to easily wire transfer pay or different vendors and suppliers all around the world and the old way with our you know more traditional bank that shall now be named i tried it online it would say no it would freeze my account then i'd have to go in book an appointment speak to a specialist who try to up upsell me on something i didn't need and then finally after you know thirty minutes there then they charge me fifty bucks for the pleasure of that terrible interaction and now with mercury i just go online push two buttons and i'm done it's such a seamless experience very intuitive everything's under one place they basically took all the things any company would need for their financial tech and they made it super easy to use to put it on into one platform so highly highly recommend it if you're not using mercury i question your judgment so that's it you've heard on my first million for more information check out mercury dot com mercury is a financial technology company not a bank check show notes for detail else so i'm likable might not even be the word because you might look at trump and be like wow like is he would you say he's likable like well he's funny he's funny he's charismatic so yeah i ever tell you about the time where else so i this friend who's like a billionaire successful tech guy and he sends me a google doc one day called the president and i'm like okay what's this and i opened it and i no idea what to expect i think he might be running for president i don't know what this is and it was basically a pitch for a television show and he laid out a case and he basically said if you look at the last i forgot what it was like just gonna make up some numbers if you look at the last ten elections you you would look for a pattern you'd say is it always democrats is it always republicans is it does it always switch between democrat republican and is it based on the economy is it based on the person's height like if you tried to look for correlation where would you find it it goes the highest correlation you could find it that the more charismatic candidate wins and he goes ever since the advent of radio and television when our primary way of getting messages out scaled up like crazy the more charismatic candidate wins whether this was clinton or reagan or it wasn't reagan like an actor or something like this yeah he was looking he's going through history and basically twenty twenty was kind of the only exception where biden won and i would say biden was the less charismatic candidate than trump of seems to be like the outlier but the guy's case was basically he's like i think in his case he didn't he didn't want trump to win and he's like problem is trump is incredibly charismatic he he's able to capture people's attention he says things that are very memorable he says things that excite certain people and inflamed certain people but it's all attention that he gets free earned media so he had this idea to create a television show and he's like this sounds a little bit silly but he's like i think for the democratic party which is the part party he was a part of he's like i think we need to start no more charismatic candidates and if you look at the last few they have not been the most charismatic he's like we're we're sort of it's a captured party and we lack putting forward charismatic candidates since obama obama was the the well one of the most charismatic candidates and he said here's what i think we should do just like you american idol or the voice or whatever if there's the apprentice even there's been proven shows where you can have like let's say a eight to twelve week period where you start with ten people and then they get eliminated in in the end you have a winner he's like what if we did this for presidential candidates so you would take twelve candidates not random people off the street but people that genuinely are thinking that they wanna run and so you'd get pete butt edge and others in in this batch hey he's like week by week you know let's say they they go to a small town in pittsburgh and they're gonna actually meet with the the the car manufacturers there whenever like you know some some like presidential type of shit that they do and they have to present a plan and then it's actually like and the judges for that week will be the the car car manufacturer people and then they'll sort of pick which candidate they felt best understood them and was able to to address their needs and week by week you sort of limit candidates he's like by the end of this twelve week thing we have captured so much attention and hopefully found a candidate that's like one of the hearts of people do people will know their backstory they'll know what they're all about they'll have seen them in a more human light and we will have filtered out the less charismatic candidates for the more charismatic candidates he's like i'm not saying charisma is the end all be all like ideally at the beginning you try to screen people that you think are worthy you know candidates to lead but amongst that worthy pool give have a boost to the most charismatic candidate i thought this was fascinating and i really wanted him to do it and he had a he was his friends with mark burnett like guy who created survivor and a bun i maybe bachelor or whatever like a bunch of other major major reality shows and he's like i'm gonna talk to mark i think we're gonna do this and i hit them up recently and i was like whatever happened to that idea is he's like i just decided i didn't want i didn't want the the avalanche of problems in my life for creating this and i decided it wasn't worth i have a great life and it really wasn't worth the you know what it was gonna do and but and biden in one in twenty twenty and so you felt like maybe maybe i was wrong maybe there's not as bunch of a need for this but isn't that interesting dude yeah that's pretty fascinating i i wish i wish she would've have done that i feel like that would work too like it sounds like an it's an idea that i think it's easy to make fun of it's also an idea that i think would be effective at the the stated mission it's easy to make fun of because we don't want it to be true but it is true like you know who's a really good example this is arnold source yep he was just he's a he was such a charismatic interesting person he was good to look at like he wanted to look like he looked like even the people who aren't even the people who are become our leaders who aren't really good looking they're still sort of interesting to look at like donald trump is intriguing to look at he looks like remarkable in a weird way you know i'm saying arnold sc is a perfect example of this can i show you one last thing which way i think is funny interesting so i found this and i i don't i i think i've talked to this guy brian and he was cool so i don't wanna shit on him but i'm more so shitting on people who this line of thinking maybe this line of thinking and alright let let's let's explain what it is sky the he says he says i asked quote what company is worth less than ten billion today that you could be worth five hundred billion plus in a few decades i received seven hundred and ten answers here's the top twenty picks that have fifty x potential and this tweet has eighteen thousand likes you know was probably i don't know how many views but like what year was this over a million this is in twenty twenty one july of twenty twenty one when times were good whenever is making a ton of money in the stock market and he lists twenty companies and and these are ones that this guy who i think he has a whole youtube channel towards picking socks and i don't know if these were his picks necessarily or if they were his his audience picks but and this guy has six hundred thousand followers his bios says i teach investors how to analyze businesses as stock fundamentals and valuation teacher dm buffett for premium courses free ebook in my description okay that's that's this guy so this was in two thousand twenty one and i just was curious like how it was he right like was his deal i'm almost positive that not only did none none of them fifty x i am pretty sure that most of them are down from i from down even from this tweet but of the of the twenty that he had selected somebody somebody says this has to go down in history as the best case of stupidity of the crowds here's where we're at three years later so three years later only one company is up and it's up six percent the average company is down seventy percent on this list with several of them minus ninety five and the minus ninety five percent minus ninety eight percent minus ninety percent minus ninety seven minus eighty six minus ninety nine and of course oz which was an e ecommerce platform in russia which is d listed and i think open door is now and so this tweet that you're looking at that was even six months ago i'm almost positive that open door is d listed and virgin is down even more i think lemonade is d listed or out of business context logic i think is out of business which is wish alright we should post an update here and now we're at five years later here's how the stupidity of the crowd has done and my point in bringing this up isn't the actual results the results are not good that's the summary the results are actually really bad but it's just crazy how hard it is to pick winners it's very challenging this guy has six hundred thousand followers i assume that he does this all the time for his job and you still can't nail it it's just so challenging is it though okay i'm gonna tell you what i did back in twenty i graduated in two thousand ten and that i started my stock portfolio i think right around like senior year of college and i i bought i believe six stocks and my dad was telling me just buy the index but i'm like dad i got this right i had the the dun kruger effect i thought i knew a lot more than i knew and i think i bought five or six stocks how much money i mean i didn't have any but i had twenty five thousand dollars i i had probably sixty thousand dollars total that's a lot of money well i guess what i'm saying is even though the results were great it didn't didn't you know on a very small base that doesn't doesn't deal a whole lot for you i bought amazon google facebook and tesla what years these were it was basically twenty ten twenty eleven well oh my god about those stocks so i did the thing you're not supposed to do i picked i didn't pick with any sort of brilliance i was like these are like obviously just seemed like the good companies of the world to me at the time and you know i did make a mistake because i sold tesla early or like i sold it probably twenty fourteen or something like that so that would and that would have been a a much bigger return out yeah i i think i still i still am a and the case study of like it's really freaking hard to do even if you buy right you'll sell wrong and shit like that like i bought bitcoin early and sold some early and then bought it back again and i butt sold it again bought it back again you know i'm not saying i'm smart i'd do dumb things but i guess what i'm saying is sometimes it's actually kinda obvious i think one of the reasons that what this guy did was so hard was he was looking for a fifty x he's like what company small today that's gonna be massive tomorrow which of course if you knew that'd be fantastic but there is a simple way of looking at things like right now for example i put my money into what my own little ai index and i didn't spend much time on this and i'm gonna go back and do a little more research but basically it's very obvious i think at this moment in time in the world that ai is going to be a very big deal that the biggest winners over the next five to ten years are gonna be ones that are benefiting from ai in some way whether they're nvidia they're selling chips whether they're companies like google or facebook that are able to use ai in order to make all their services better and slash tens of thousands of employees that they don't need shit like that like i think it's pretty obvious ai as a big deal and i think if you put in the time to just think about like instead of buying the generic s and p five hundred like what's the equivalent of the ai fifty or the ai twenty and it's like twenty companies that i believe are well positioned it's hard for them to lose given the ai tailwind and again and it's a little bit naive because you might say well nvidia today they have ninety percent gross margins and that they're gonna get competed away and blah i'm not saying it's like easy i'm just saying i think it index of ai of ai focused companies that doesn't mean companies that are like you know all chip makers or whatever companies that are gonna disproportionately benefit from ai and are gonna adopt ai and get the benefits of it i just feel like that's an obvious thing today the version of me of twenty ten being like i don't know me and all my friends use the internet like crazy i think should just like own the the big internet companies that seems like a good idea the the issue is not can you pick winners because i think that like we when we saw facebook was valued at when it was hit a low i think a year and a half ago everyone who has ever bought any facebook ads was like yeah this is undervalued this is a great company the issue is the amount of times that you have lost using that same logic like and so if you were to take a lump up of money and you would buy and sell like occasionally or rather often versus just letting it sit and ignoring like if you average i'm actually gonna go back and just back test this for me me specifically and i'll publish my result i'll bring i'll bring it to the next episode because i i i'm curious i and i would say i think there's a more likely chance that i buying and selling has a buying and selling and picking has under performed i i assume that to be true i think there's a chance it's not been for me but i'm i really wanna go get the exact answer because it all i'll include i think i should include crypto because i think that was kind of like buying and selling picking and i wanna see the returns of if i had just in ingest the same amount of money in the same times in just the index versus my picking i just wanna to see for myself what i've done and give it honest be able to look reality in the face of like you know how is this working for me so let me tell you this let me tell you this crazy stat that an told me so jerry bus the guy who owned the lakers that you know they they recently just sold the lakers for ten billion dollars so he bought the lakers for sixty seven million dollars in nineteen seventy nine and he sold it for a hundred and fifty times his money at ten billion dollars in two thousand and twenty five and yeah had he taken that sixty million dollars and instead just invested it in the s and p five hundred he would have been able to have had thirteen billion dollars so he would have had more money is stupid year that's stupid it's not stupid but listen it's the top was think of all it's sounded incorrect i mean it's just a it's just math the is is acting like he didn't take money every year and gains from the business he could've have liked cash flow every year do they do most winning teams do not make a profit most money teams they they wanna they they could show paper losses i i know team owners i i talked to about this i i was like is this true do you guys actually lose money on this thing and they're like no most years are making money occasionally if we're way over the luxury tax we get we get a huge penalty then yes we can lose money in that one year but no we're not idiots we're not burning hundreds of like people say like oh they lost two hundred million dollars usually like i'm not losing two hundred million dollars every year some the top comment was like yeah but are you adding into the p and l all the women that he was able to get it because of he because of him owning the lakers for forgetting the joy of owning the lakers which is already congratulations you own the s and p five hundred versus you own the lakers forgetting that the lakers are a business that has been generating cash and so all he's taking into account is just the exit price and none of the thirty years of cash flow well i don't really look at the facts when whenever making it it did make for a good headline and it is kind stunning what i don't know eleven percent compounding over forty years actually does pretty crazy i like doing this alright that's it that's about i feel like i could rude where i know i could be what i want to from at all in in like a days off on a road less travel a looking back alright so when my employees join hampton we have do a whole bunch of onboarding stuff but the most important thing that they do is they go through this thing i made called copy that copy that as a thing that i made that teaches people how to write better and the reason this is important is because at work or even just in life we communicate mostly via text right now whether we're emailing slack blogging texting whatever most of the ways that we're communicating is by the written word and so i made this thing called copy that that's guaranteed to make you right better you could check it out copy that dot com i post every single person who leaves a review whether it's good or bad i post it on the website and you're gonna see a trend is that this is a very very very simple exercise something that's so simple that they laugh at they think how is this gonna actually impact us and make us right better but i promise you it does you gotta try at copy that dot com i guarantee it's gonna change the way you write again copy that dot com

dude manifest is out there's a new word what generative wait is high agency are we selling high agency we're selling high agency at the top right now we're we're spa high agency it's gone taking that cash and plowing it into general i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a goal travel never looking me alright what i miss how was the week week was good what do we do chris quarter that episode popped off it's over a hundred k on youtube so that's going well and dude there were so many replies to one idea that was in that episode i don't know if you listen to the episode the golfing one the golfing one yeah dude i got literally hundreds of replies of people who are like i could do this right here in my hometown people are study powerpoint decks people are doing drive by sending me videos at the lake where they think they could do it they're reaching out cold it's very intense how many people have replied to this and now we're going and what was the idea was it was about betting as to where you could hit it no so basically on the way there's a place in new zealand on the way to the golf course just kinda side of the road there's like there's a road that's driving by a body of water and if you just stop on the side of the road there's just thing called like whatever the hold of one challenge and you buy a bucket of balls if you go try to hit this whole in one of this little golf hole that's floating out you know a hundred hundred yards away in the water if you hit if you get it you get ten grand and so it's just like a fun thing for you to do with your buddies like on the way or two or from a golf course and you're talking about like you know sort of napkin and mapping what do he thinks it's making based off of the available information he's like i think this thing does like three hundred to five hundred k you know in revenue and now the costs are pretty marginal like person standing there with an ipad they there's a scuba diver that goes in once a we can fish fishes out the balls like that's it and so people got we we we basically said hey i this idea could work at more places than just this random roadside thing in new zealand let's bring this to life and who wants to do this and that a lot of people have come come out and so we're gonna we're gonna make it a m project we're gonna see what we could do with this so i like all the comments were like this is what i've been missing with mfa because like we started a lot with that and then like our interests have grown and so the content has grown to be evolved to be a little bit different attempts and one critique is like what is this my first billion because we talking about like like you know bigger ideas and i was thinking i you know we've become acquaintances with joe lo who because of this podcast is worth i don't know billions some amount of billions and i was with him recently by the way if if you need to pick that up let me know if you need to pick up that that name drop i try i drop that up here did i drop that down so much no but he and he was telling me like oh man alright i was with them when i got my twitter check like you know how you get like twitter money now like your like right for example i for some reason my twitter was a thousand dollars last payment and like the month before it i was like six hundred dollars and i was like man this is crazy i just got paid six hundred dollars for tweeting which is insane he's like yeah i got like four hundred dollars and he was joking about how it feels just as exciting every once in a while to get like a four hundred dollar thing and it does however much money he's created in his lifetime and i was wondering do you feel like when you're talking about these things so you just lit up when you talked about three hundred four hundred thousand dollars when that may or i may not i mean i don't think so that's not gonna really move the needle for you in your life but it's kind of exciting isn't it yeah not because of the money it's just i think it's awesome i think the idea the idea itself is fun making it happen sounds like it's gonna be fun you know actually i was just watching an interview with a guy who they the nba finals just ended they had game seven the thunder one and there was hey i watched it i watched it there was this interview with one of the guys so they they asked jacob up there they're like know when you look back on this year what is the what are you gonna remember what what were the high points and he goes he's like it's weird dude he's like i remember if you think if i think about this year he's like i remember being chat we would go to our hotel room we would do film sessions been back when he was coming back back from injury to get it going on or like these team dinners that we were having he's like i couldn't even he's i don't remember what happened last series like i don't remember in the the recent games what happened but those kind of like those inputs on the journey are like just like are so vivid to me and this has been a very common thing where if you talk to pro players after the careers done and you're like what do you miss the most and you expect them to be like the big pressure moments that the those big games and of course they do like those but the thing they talk about always is the team bus rides the locker of room the it's all of the like cam rot stuff that happens along the way it's like the kind of the build is the stuff that they miss the most and i think it i think there's that for entrepreneurship too i think there's that that's a huge amount of the fun of it and it's what you get excited about you need the number to sort of justify it the the number gives you some air cover for why you're acting like a little kid you're so excited about something you need the numbers help because why are you taking this silly thing so seriously but i think we would probably all do it without the numbers as well or if the numbers were half as much or whatever yeah and i noticed the best the the the people who love m msn the most and the guests who you and i love the most are folks who you know i hung out with the a friend of mine and she was like because she was from a bad neighborhood now she's she's like you know i'm so good at going really high and going really low i was like what's that mean she's like i can hang out with like my homie is from where i grew up and we could just like shoot the shit and kinda be a little like hood ready or i can go hang out with a billionaire and i i love that too i can i have so much joy doing that as well and i can blend in and get along with everyone and i think that's like the that's like what the pod is is like you like talking about these smaller things as well as the big things that it's the same type of person who loves both yeah exactly also do you think about business as like a sport because that's more and more become my mental model is the way that because i you are you meet people and a lot of people we know have now become successful but they're still doing it and obviously for many of them i i i call it they've already made the last dollar they'll ever spend right let's us say you make thirty million dollars at that point you've already earned the last dollar you'll ever need to spend especially once you take into account that that thirty million could just say in a whether it's a simple interest bearing account or the p five hundred and it'll just keep it'll double every seven years so thirty becomes sixty sixty becomes one twenty one twenty becomes two forty and that just all happened over the course of you know something like twenty five years and so you've you don't need to go earn the next dollar but why do they anyways and part of it is i think it feels good to be good at something and if you're good at something it's hard to stop doing it because the feedback loop of being good at something is strong but i think in that same way if you think about business not as a mechanism to make money but as a sport as as a sport you play then it's like of course just because your great tennis and you wanna tournament it doesn't mean you'll stop playing tennis why would you do that that's your sport you love to play the sport you'll basically play the sport till your body breaks down and doesn't let you play the sport anymore and it feels good to manifest it feels good to have an idea and to see it in the reality into reality and it's really fun flexing that model manifest is out there's a new word what generative generative what is that this is this is gonna happen a few times to me now i wait agency are we selling high agency we're selling high agency at the top right now we're we're spa high agency it's gone taken that cash and i'm we're plowing it into generative it's generative i was of podcast guess and i was like at the end i like what was that and you could tell me the truth because i do podcast podcasts all the time with guests i know it's sometimes here miss like give me the from one podcast to another what was that like for you and he's like it was great because you're extremely generative he goes what and then he goes it was also hard because you're extremely generative like what's that mean he goes i'll say two things like i'll give you one topic but you can almost like bloom that or expand that into like a story a framework of this and a related idea a simple example you just generated all that content off the cuff right away and he goes you know bo is like that apologies is extremely generated if you give him one thing and he's able to like take it from like the origin of man to you know to hundred years in the future and he could connect all those dots so i heard it once i was like okay that's cool i don't know if i just got insulted or complimented being called generative but i i'll take it and then james courier said the same thing he goes he's like he's like the reason we get along is because we're both extremely generative he's like we like being around generative people hey he's like you know why do we admire elon suck because he's rich he was because he's the most generative of all of us right and he's the least fearful and that's why he's able to be more generative he's he's like he literally generates businesses like the boring company in neuro link and spacex and tesla he's like he's generating kids he's generating ideas he generates a president he generates he's just doing so much and that's admirable to somebody who is generative and so i started using that little lens started looking at people being like how generative is this person meaning if you could give them an inch could they take a mile and what is their overall level of output in their life you know like how generative are they with like for example james k it's not just businesses he's generated you know at one point you also started a church in san francisco i started a new religion and you know then he created this like sort of incubator this fund then he created a podcast he's just constantly creating things because it's extremely generative and it's whether it's with his kid's life or it's his business life or whatever so i started to realize oh yeah i'm really attracted to that i like people who are like that and i i i wanna be like that and figure out a way to make that work is is a fun challenge it's a generative is the new work alright this episode is brought to you by hubspot they're doing a big conference is that they're big one they do called inbound they have a ton of great speakers that are coming to san francisco september third two september fifth and it's got a pretty incredible lineup they have comedian like amy poe they have da from ant philanthropic dark cast sean evans from hot ones and if you're somebody who's in marketing or sales or ai and you just wanna know what's going on what's coming next it's a great event to go to and hey guess what i'm gonna be there you can go to inbound dot com slash register to get your ticket to inbound twenty twenty five but again september third the fifth in san francisco hope to see you there have you ever heard of this book called the inner game of tennis i've heard of it but i've never ran it is it again yeah who's who's the pro who's it about okay so the inner game of tennis i randomly discovered it because i was at the airport and i was just looking for a book to read on my kindle and i wanted something short and i for some reason feel like i'm in a bookstore we're looking for books to download separately no i'm like i i don't remember what i was just like i think like i was on amazon on my phone and like a sports psychology book came up and i was like okay that's intriguing what are what's like the top sports psychology book there is or something like that and i randomly came across the inner game of tennis it's about it's written by guy named timothy gal and it's one of these books that it's about life and it just uses ten tennis as the analogy and the premise of the book is that you have two self self one is your person so like when you say like when you're playing tennis and you hit you do bad hit you go why do i suck so much or like like that is self one the critical self and then self too is like your animal self who doesn't who doesn't think too much and it's just your body and that learns by observing and it's all about how to be generative and by by ignoring self one and letting self too do all the work and it gives you all of these tips and tricks on how to listen to self too and this sounds very voodoo woo and it is a little bit woo but the book was written in the nineteen seventies and the coach of the sea h writes the forward what's his name pete carroll pete carroll yeah and like every new edition they still are like they're still releasing new additions where all these like who's who of leaders are writing about it and i think i i didn't realize it but after i started start reading was like oh wait tim ferris talked about this book as it's one of his favorite books of all time and i've been reading it a whole lot and it applies very much to business i think it's only a hundred and fifty page book i've been reading i'm i'm almost done i read it in like two days the the it's very similar or very applicable to business which is what you said about elon of he's not fearful and things like that if this book actually gives you like a set of frameworks in a way to communicate yourself in order to not be fearful when you are coming up with new ideas is incredibly fascinating dude this is awesome i love this type of book it says the game of tennis the classic guide to peak performance introduction by bill gates and forward by pete carroll and that's crazy i didn't know that i didn't i don't have i don't have the bill gates one so i didn't know that so he wrote the the introduction that's wild and so have you used any of this or give me like has it have you found a way to kinda apply any of these yet well so like the a very simple example is like for looking weights or for going for a run when you were lift weights you're like okay i have to lift this weights for three times and it's the heaviest weight that i've ever done so i'm really scared you don't listen to that at all and instead you just get under there it and you go i'm gonna let self too do all the work i'm gonna trust self too and if i fail i will not be judgmental i'm not gonna say you suck i'm said i will say if you know your knee moved in a strange way so i'm just gonna objectively acknowledge what's happening and then i and then i when i went lift three times i get it up on me and i just observe the weight on me and i only go for one rep i'd be like alright how does that feel self too let's just do the second rep so i basically am talking to myself sort of like an objective machine not an emotional person so the whole i'm fearful i'm fearful fearful you just set that aside and you go itself too time there is no room for that it is only room for objective alright i did something similar to this in this in this vein that i didn't even plan to talk about but i'll i'll just tell you this i think it's it's kinda similar so one thing i noticed is anytime i go into a project you know i obviously have a lot of excitement and i have a lot of hope at the beginning correct that's obvious and then the second obvious thing is that i'm going to hit some sort of obstacles walls plateau something that i don't want to happen is for sure gonna happen i've never once experienced a project that i just simply started everything went as planned and it had a happy ending like this literally just never happened for me to expect that to happen would honestly be a little bit foolish it's like why would i think that that was the case yet at the same time as soon as though i hit those obstacles on those walls i'm like shit like i wish this didn't happen i don't want this happen why is this happening and i waste all this energy on something that was inevitable it's like playing mario and being like oh my god i can't believe these goo are walking at me it's like dude that's the game like what you mean like you wanted to play this game without anybody like trying to bite you you know i i don't understand what you thought this was gonna be and so recently i was doing a project and last week i wrote out a thing in advance i'm just gonna kind of read you this so i basically wrote like a a simple letter to self for like two months down the road and by the way three months down the road according to tim according to the inter game tennis when you have that feeling you don't you do not judge it as positive or negative you'd say now this is a challenge okay noted and then you just keep going do you what i mean there is no like this is horrible this is awful why me that that that that there are no emotions you do not judge you're you don't judge the the emotion you're feel you don't judge yourself for feeling it or you don't judge the thing both so you you you only objectively acknowledge it so you say like so the ball was out okay right noted the the ball was hit too hard and then you're you trust self too to adjust but you don't you know don't you don't you know what i'm saying you do not acknowledge or judge it as i hate this i suck this is bad it just the ball was out so i just gonna give you a little sense of how i wrote it so i was like i was okay it's me from the future randy i've i eat this to you three months from now first congrats thing you did so good turned out amazing i'm really proud of you slash me and i said this is a letter that is guiding you to some of the entirely predictable upcoming road bumps that are headed your way not only is it predictable that there will be road bumps could probably tell you right now what they're going to be alright because like that's true so for example i was thinking about this isn't what i was doing but just to make it a simple example let's say you're trying to hire ahead of sales there's some entirely predict like you know you wanna do it you know you'll you'll be able to it but this is entirely predictable road bumps which is like you know you're probably gonna procrastinate starting it a little bit because it's the idea of finding that perfect of person's a little bit hard and you might put it off a little bit then then you'll talk to some candidates who are disappointing you may even run into a candidate who's really great but the offer doesn't work out maybe maybe they don't take it maybe it's not the right time in their life etcetera etcetera so you could basically upfront tell yourself yeah these four obstacles are probably gonna be here played this level of the game before or i could just see what's what's coming and so when they come it takes the emotional edge off of it because it's like yeah i know there's no i don't feel betrayed by this had a feel surprised by this like i i'm you're just hello to it here you are right you think i thought i'd be seeing you soon and i all i also i had already kind of thought about like what i would do to get around that before it hits me and i'm in like an emotional state so it's like yeah i'm probably gonna meet a bunch of people who are kinda disappointing and it'll probably feeling in the moment like kinda i ever gonna find somebody great but of course i will only need one and it's a numbers game and i i should probably just expect that i'm gonna talk to about you know thirty to forty people and that twenty five of those people are gonna be truly just a waste of time you know in terms of the interview but that's okay that's so that's part of the this if you tell yourself that up upfront and then as it's happening you're like yeah well i already i already addressed this i don't need to like react to it again because i already kinda pre it to the whole thing and what is this project that you're doing like big or is like you recommend doing this for a small thing or only a big thing i don't know this is my first time actually doing the like the corny step of like writing it out to myself of like dear sean yeah and is like ps you're pretty fucking lang for right this yeah yeah yeah exactly i was like alright that's three pages now this was cool when it was a paragraph i think it was it was very helpful i i'll do it again i will i will do it again i i mean i know how much this actually like it doesn't it sort of blunt the pain but the pain is still there you know what i mean it's like when you get a shot at the doctor it's like if you really are looking at it and hyper fixated on it and you start hyper about it yeah it's kind of a worse experience you look away you might still feel a little prick but it you know you took the edge off of it i think that's what this has done for me alright so we're talking about like big and small do you want me to tell you about a small thing and a big idea that are to me are equally fascinating okay go to patron view dot com so i was in view okay yeah so i was with nick gray this weekend so i did this amazing or we did this amazing vacation where my friend david owns a home in utah and about eight of us or maybe six of us plus our spouses and our kids all went and hung out and it was amazing and nick was there and i was looking at his computer and i said nick what are you doing he goes let me tell you and it was very fascinating and so it's called patron view patron view dot com and so nick used to own this website or sorry own this service called museum hack where it was kind of amazing that it existed but you would pay a hundred dollars and nick or one of his tour guides would take you to the met and give you a sort of gorilla tour of the of the museum and it was amazing and so that's where he got really into museums and he became buddies somehow somehow got in with the guys who do the fundraising and because he's a business person he was like oh wow it's so fascinating that one person is dot a million dollars ten million dollars twenty million dollars to these museums and they do it every year into tons of different museums that's really amazing and so recently with a a mutual buddy stats in blake they built this website where it's pretty amazing where all he did was if you go to the met or one of a dozen or hundreds of other museums they every year they have to put out a pdf that explains who donated money and how much money that person donated and so he's aggregated all of them hundreds or maybe even thousands and he used ai to upload all of them into a database so if you are fundraising for a museum i believe if i had to guess you're gonna be able to pay his service money to find out who the whales are you know whatever and it's crazy that because of ai he was able to make this he told me for two thousand dollars it i was gonna read the about page it says we're a research platform doc a dedicated documenting cultural phil i've never actually heard that before which is just shows how like much of a new by about fl but that that makes sense so people who donate to things that are about culture and then it says where and then it says the data our research is pulling from annual reports nine ninety tax filings institutional publications official documents and proprietary sources this lets us present donor information that's never before been displayed we like to think of it as celebrating phil and enabling development departments pretty cool awesome it's great right like this i was i was like nick what's your deal here like you went turn this into a business and he's very nick is happy like he's not looking for anything he's like don't know i'm just tinkering and in my head as someone who is probably less you know content than him i was like oh man like nick you could do this you could do this you could do this and that's like how the entire conversation came about but isn't this pretty cool that he's like building this and this is his hobby and the fact that ai has made this so easy yeah dude this is great i mean nick i've already you know really shattered him out on here a ton of times because he's somebody has made a big impact on me just seeing the way the schedules rolls through life i'm like he just does things for his own amusement he does things on his terms and i think he does things with high intentional and he's doesn't seem and he basically resisted the rat race i think those are the people i admire the most of all is the people that resisted the rat race like i think he neither chase his money nor status and if you think about the people who are talented to successful in your life how many do you think actually truly are resisting money and status it's very very few i know probably two people him jack smith yeah it's pretty crazy and so you just sort of watch their moves and then you look at them and you you know you can kinda learn from them so this is this is extremely cool like and what's funny about nick is every two or three years or something like that he likes to find a publicly traded company that he loves and he'll make a big bet on it and right now his or for the past probably four or five years actually his bet has been cloudflare flare like for some reason i don't know he all this analysis he like loves it to the point where like when he hosted an event he specifically hosted his event in the cloudflare event space because he's like so loyal right wear cloudflare t shirts whatever like one time there was a a race like a like a five k or a marathon through austin and whole like hold up a sign that says like cloudflare rules like this because he went you told me like at his birthday party he had his birthday party at the cloudflare office and then midway through the birthday party he ran upstairs and got like two like like a product manager and like a marketing area yeah to come down and be like hey everybody quick word from jack from the marketing department why don't you just tell about the great things you got going on at cloud the guy's like yeah so even before and before he brought that guy in he goes i need everyone to treat jack from cloudflare player like a celebrity and so when he walked in we go oh my god is that jack are you the vp of engineering at cloudflare oh my god he's here he's here stock his the stock is up four hundred percent in the last five years so you're done pretty well he's done well and if you click the about page i know for a fact so he lists an area that says technology patron view patron view is built with modern web tech to ensure fast reliable access to data and he only did that so he could list that he uses cloudflare i know that's exactly how he thought but the reason i'm bringing this up is i think that if you're like just starting to build a business or something you should follow patron view or like go there like go there once a week and i and i would bet that you're gonna see like it evolve like you know it's sort of like measuring your kid on the wall like you're gonna like the measuring like like that's what's gonna happen cool too i think another another cool thing about this is this fits it to like a a genre that you know personal software so or maybe social software so basically when the internet came out before pre internet the only people that made media or media companies you know you got your media from the new york times and the huffington could post whatever like newspapers magazines tv etcetera and then when the internet came out and you got facebook and twitter and instagram and snapchat then social media became everything thing and everybody became a little broadcaster right everybody broadcast of little moments of their life or their content or their their interest whatever it was and there was this explosion like you know a sort of like one billion x increase in the amount of media that was created because everybody was doing it and like one clear thing i see that's happening in the world today is that that's now happening with software so software used to be something that only software companies and software engineers could make and you know there's only like i don't know there's less than a hundred million of roughly software engineers like proper like professional software engineers in the world so you know a hundred billion out of eight billion people could do the thing and you know if in terms of software companies there's even less maybe a hundred thousand software companies i don't know it's order of magnitude roughly and now with like rep and v zero and all these different tools it's gonna be like social media where we're like oh i have i carry in my pocket a thing that can make media it's like i carry in my pocket i think that can make software so a guy like nick who before this probably couldn't have taken his idea and made it into an app because he would have to either a learn to code or b go higher like expensive programmers to make this happen like he did most of this with ai and so you see personal software this like you know this personal software category which was like didn't exist three years ago or five years ago isn't outgoing to have the same sort of like one billion x you know increase just because anybody who's got an idea can now make their idea now today it's like broken three fourth of the time doesn't quite work but like every six months that number goes down by fifteen percent and so you know within two or three years that number is gonna be like zero right it's gonna be that do you have an idea you make your app everything that i've been making on rep in lovable and cursor it's basically just like a fig replacement like i'm just like it's basically just like drawing on paper yeah it's just like a mock up i do still need someone till i actually do the work but it but it's a sick mock up yeah like it looks yeah so somebody called it minimum viable promise so it's of minimum viable product it's like it's not really a product but it's like it kinda has like you make a promise you you'd see the promise of something and i think that's what a lot of these tools are able to do today this episode brought to you by hubspot media they have a cool new podcast that's for ai called the next wave it's by matt wolf and nathan lance and they're basically talking about all to do tools that are coming out how the landscape is changing what's going on with ai tech so if you wanna be up to date on ai tech it's a cool podcast you could check out listen to the next wave wherever you get your podcast have you heard of a guy named edwin chen edwin chen i mean there's like you probably have probably six thousand of on facebook fee yeah i went the school at beijing i i think i got a few edwin chen in my ro edwin chen might be the like if you did like a chart of like richest slash unknown slash youngest person in the world i think it's gonna be edwin chen is this the guy who's doing surge so yeah so edwin chen in like two thousand eighteen two thousand nineteen he worked at facebook and the story is is that he was tasked with like making some type of yelp style product and what that meant was he had a list of fifty thousand vendors or and he needed to figure out which of those fifty thousand was a restaurant and which were a grocery store and so he went and hired a firm some company to like parse it out and it's like manually you you you had to do it manually like you had to like hire some firm that had a lot of offshore talents to go through and do it all manually by hand and he was like it took us four months or six months something like that which basically just meant we had to sit and wait like we couldn't do anything until we had that data so i just had to sit and wait and so he had this idea where he was gonna make a better way to do data labeling and the data data labeling is important now because that is what a lot of ai companies use which i had no idea they they did that and i'll explain how they do that but basically when a company like open ai wants to figure out if a certain reply is unethical so like for example asking like if it is it okay to like hits someone on or i don't know like whatever like questions you would ask it a real person and and actually not just a real person but like really smart person even someone who like does engineering or philosophy needs to spend time going through all the potential answers and to tell open ai i think this one sort fits what you're going for but anyway edwin had this idea of i'm gonna create this massive workforce of philosophers of engineers of ivy lee grad grads who can go through and label all of these answers as good or bad so ai companies can kinda of i can be like their offshore talent and so he's done this and it started in two thousand and twenty now he has a hundred thousand people who are in the marketplace working for him and as these data label and this company is completely unknown so if i think it's surge ai i believe is the url so if you go to search ai it's a landing page with one paragraph that's an amazing paragraph if you want you can read it you wanna read it yeah i was just reading it what bay people like hemingway hollow and von neumann so extraordinary their life the books they read the stumbles they had the reinforcement every time friends laughed their jokes and every time they didn't it's the people that met the police board at every decision they made along the way data does for ai what life does for humans it elevate the neural networks that know nothing about the world into the intelligence capable of providing new art sending rockets ships mars etcetera our mission is to shape ag with the richness of human intelligence curious way do you imagine if it unexpected brilliance we wake on maybe they trying to produce the data that makes this possible amazing way romantic it's romantic and then this guy made like a giant fleet of overseas data label sound like the the army from three hundred yeah yeah it's it's the best and in the real website i believe is data annotation dot tech that's the website where the that's the website where the where the ann tate go to apply but the way that the business month the way the it's much more traditional and that one there's like a brown dude staring at a laptop with a reflection blurring his eyes and it says get paid to train ai in your schedule and so the way the business model works is they have a hundred thousand of these folks and they train them on different standards and whatever and then they've also made software so they can show the the the basically homework or tasks to their folks and a company like open ai or google whatever whatever is gonna pay a surge millions and millions of dollars and surge is ain't gonna take something like thirty or forty percent of it and give it to the ann to do the work so this company is only five years old and it's it was leaked that they did one billion dollars in revenue in the last twelve months and this guy edwin chen he's only thirty seven years old and he owns one hundred percent of the company they have not taken any outside funding now listen their biggest competitor is a company called scale scale is run by this guy named alexander wang i think alex wan i think same is and it recently sold for something like thirty times revenue i believe it they were doing like eight hundred nine hundred million in revenue they just sold half of the company to facebook i think it was for twenty eight billion or thirty yeah thirty which me which means this guy edwin who's thirty seven and has a five year old company presumably is worth something like thirty billion dollars and you can't find him on twitter he has no blog you can't find photos of him hey he used to have a blog but you have to go to web archive in order to find it because he took it down and his customers are like edwin is not online you can't find him anywhere and we like it that way his born his business is very boring the branding is basically not existent and it just does a very good job and compared to scale who's like you know the hottest kid on on the black like alex wang was just on theo von podcast he was at the inauguration he's kinda like kinda like the the guy right now the these guys are the exact opposite you're not gonna find them anywhere they only have a hundred employees they're totally under the radar and it's super super fascinating dude this is this is wild i i did not know that he bootstrap the whole thing i i also had never heard this company until scale got bought i'd had never heard of this company so they're they're the company is is is killing it now because scale got bought because scale got bought is now owned basically by facebook google and and a bunch of like them they go we don't wanna we don't have with you anymore we go straight search but they were already winning they were at a billion in revenue and scale was at seven hundred fifty billion and the reason why they're winning is because they are they charge a premium and they're they he's is like i don't we got scale but he's like i wasn't trying to get scale meaning i wasn't trying to grow big i was trying to hire the best people and to train them really well and i charged for it i charged three times what scale charges and the results have been better and people really like us because of it and this whole data labeling industry i had no idea about this i i didn't know that people were behind the scenes making these decisions it's kind of wild i mean this is one of the best like picks and shovel businesses so if you've never heard picks and shovel it's a the idea is like anytime there's a gold rush who makes the money yes the the few people who find the gold but the more reliable way to make money is just to sell picks and shovel to everybody else who's rushing into the gold rush and scale its surge where the best picks and shovel businesses maybe besides nvidia because what they were doing saying cool everybody want everybody wants to compete to become the you you wanna make you wanna make ag you're all raising billions and billions of dollars well all of you have the same problem and i will sell the data labeling service to all of you and this is so funny that now that facebook is buying scale it's like there's all that revenue has to find a new home like this that is crazy that that's the best news ever for this guy and there's another company called handshake so if you could go to join handshake dot com previously or it still might be this but they were known as a company that helped recent college graduates get jobs and so basically they're a job board job network for twenty two year olds dude yeah this was for college kids okay well listen to this they noticed a few months ago that surge and scale we're using their service to find these these data and so they go we're gonna do that now and so in a very short amount of time they pivoted and that business that they have is gonna be at a hundred million dollars a year in the next couple months in a very short amount of time because what they did was they went and just said oh you are looking for a data annotation gig we got you let's let's go ahead and get you training and and we're just gonna provide that service to folks and so handshake is building that business now dude that's so crazy i remember using this because i was like oh it's interesting that nobody's really built the the kinda like one place to go higher college interns or college like fresh grads and they built this like marketplace where you could go post on a job board at my local college here and i could get but it was like kinda crappy dude it was like it wasn't great it was very like little liquidity in the market but i remember thinking like this is an interesting idea somebody like it's a marketplace i like marketplace is somebody should do this right and i remember they were kinda like putter along for a while it seemed like and this is so funny that they pivoted to this and now we're gonna just explode yeah and if you google handshake data annotation you can find the blog post that they that they wrote on them announcing that they were doing this and so it basically just says that for the past decade handshake has change how college students started their careers and then it goes on to basically say we're changing the company to like just hire just do this thing and it's already making and they don't actually say that this but like it's now making a hundred million dollars a year and you know i don't know how long this stuff will last like you know this might be a business that i think in like seven to ten years you may not need this anymore like it seems like the way ai is going you may not need this kind of human into the loop to label all this data either either they label they label enough data where then the model learns how to label data you don't need humans doing this or they use a thing that doesn't have our or rl jeff right you you you it's just do reinforcement learning without human feedback and i think some people who were kind of pure believers in ai i think you won't need the human feedback at a certain point so this might be a get get while the get good type of business so let me let me tell you a a potential counter to that so tim west founded the company called pandora and i think he started it in nineteen ninety maybe ninety eight so it was like both pre iphone wait when the item iphone come out oh wait zero six yeah so it was like probably like two thousand two then and anyway he told me this story because we had him talk at one of our events where he was like i raised seven million dollars and all seven million dollars of that went to hiring basically ex musicians or musicians who are teachers and didn't to make a lot of money and for two years i had about a hundred and fifty of them listening to music and i gave them basically a scant of all types of attributes that a song can potentially have and so if you're listening to the beatles you would fill out like okay it sounds like it's at like ninety beats per minute it sounds like there's guitar like it's mel it's light hearted whatever and after two years of doing this he put all of the data basically scant trans into this algorithm that he built and he started playing like he told me a beatles song and then and then he clicked next and it would suggest new music that was similar to the one that the the beatles on that he originally played and he said the bg came up and he was like the bg and the beatles they're not similar at all what the hell and then he kept clinic next he's was like wait they have the same melody or they had they all like have the same like they made me feel similar and he was like it's working it's working and so originally his idea was i'm gonna create kiosk at best buy so you could say i'm interested in beatles but here's like five of their songs that best buy could show you and you will buy those cds while you're there and then the iphone came out and he was like oh my god this is actually the exact way to apply this and so this idea of data data labeling has been around forever and i didn't when i was reading scale or about surge i was like oh my god this exactly what tim was explaining to me how pandora started and so this has been around for twenty years and so you say don't know if it's gonna be around or not but i don't know it's been around for twenty years so far yeah that's true but it's kinda like like self driving which is coming out now i've taken the way in san francisco and robo taxi in austin the tesla the tesla self driving just launched in austin i think like two days ago or something but they took two different approaches so way basically has this really expensive car i i forgot the all in cost but it's something like a hundred fifty to three hundred thousand dollars is the cost of the car with all the sensors on it right so they this really expensive car with lidar and in addition to the lidar they hard code and hard map the roads so that you know for for years they would drive around and basically like map the road physically and they could only launch in cities where they had mapped the roads and tesla took this other approach which was basically cameras only no lidar and we're knocking gonna hard map the roads we're gonna let people drive around and then the car needs to have a brain that's smart enough to figure out a road even if it's never been on that road before and here it was this interesting bet because elon was like lidar is not only we're not doing it it's stupid and that's a dead end path and everybody else was all in on lidar everyone's like lidar makes it safer it's better you can't do this to that lidar and elon point was we humans drive with just eyes we only have cameras we don't i don't have a lidar in my brain and i'm able to drive safely right and lidar is what lidar is like you're shooting some type of signal and it bounces but you can see through things so i don't know exactly what's the difference of lidar radar and all these different things but like it's another version of basically scanning that allows you to do what a camera can't camera can't see through an object lidar can it could sense that there's another another object behind it so look the classic example is like you know you know maybe you're gonna do a a turn there's something obstructing your view it but then there's a little grandma walking on the crosswalk you couldn't see the grandma until you you started to turn visibly but lidar would know that there's something there's an object there that's that's moving point is other sensors besides cameras whereas elon was like no we're just gonna put like whatever eight cameras on the car and that's gonna make it work but and for a long time there was a big debate some experts thought elon is wrong some were just like elon is correct and the elon we trust and very smart people were on both sides of the debate and it was like a very high stakes debate because self driving cars is one of the most valuable prizes that there is like self driving cars i don't people really realize it i think because it's i think because people talked about it for a while they got kinda numb to it it's actually happened with ai too people have been talking about ai maybe machine learning deep learning for a long time people didn't really realize when something actually had changed and then suddenly like wait it it's actually here and the same people who had been tracking it for a long time were almost late to the party because they mistakenly wrote off as yeah yeah yeah i've heard this before and so the same thing's happening with self driving cars we're sort of like yeah yeah yeah but it's like wait a minute it's actually happening now it's because it's an extreme game changer both like for society for tesla's business right like tesla's business is now gonna be if you own a tesla when you're instead of ninety five percent of the time your car just sits parked you're gonna just tap a button and say go make me some money please and like a dog it's gonna go fetch it's just gonna go out there it's gonna start doing rides for people and this is gonna start earning you money passively all the time dude i think i think morgan stanley or chase one of the big banks like last week was like rot wrote this report where they had to say what the world's gonna look like with self driving and it wasn't like it it was far more grand they're like the economy is going to look radically different because people are going to have so much more time like it was like at a macro scale it was like oh like the world will change because of this but it was also like there's sixty i think thousand car deaths a year like what's the world gonna look like with with more people like like everything was like i pretty meaningful like it was like a very grand way of thinking about it it wasn't just like oh wow i could play on my phone while i'm walking or driving to work was like no everything changes i i asked last night i asked cro i said what are the second order effects of self driving cars here's what it said so it's like cities are gonna look completely different right now parking lots itself occupy thirty percent of all urban land in some cities and this is gonna you're not gonna need parking lots because the cars aren't gonna just sit park they're gonna be rolling around you're gonna need way less cars in a city plus they don't they're not gonna sit still so you don't need all of the space just look around the city how much space is dedicated just a parking like we're gonna look back and that's gonna look sort of like a caveman men style thing it's like it's in the future those are gonna be parks and gonna be like it's gonna be smoking in a restaurant yeah exactly and so like the good version of this is that's like you know green spaces and affordable housing but like knows maybe maybe it actually gets c opted for some other purposes they all just become like you know drone delivery you know parking units where where amazon keeps like ten million delivery drones the next one is labor so right now there's three and a half million truck drivers alone let alone all of the like uber and taxi drivers and you're just not gonna need that job period like and i don't know what happens to that but there we go the next one is you know basically i think the average person for spend something like ninety minutes a day just commuting and so you get you know of your wait time let's say you're awake for sixteen hours you're gonna add you know what is that so let's just pretend it's two out of sixteen you're gonna add like you know thirteen percent more time to everybody's day where they can now sleep eat work play right you're gonna have sit in a car and you're not gonna have to think about the car you're just gonna be able to do one of those things which also means the car becomes a new place for entrepreneurs to build experiences right like today there's no one out there being like i build car games right there's people who build mobile games and xbox games is but there's nobody builds car games well car games is gonna be become of a thing because people are gonna sit in cars and play video games people are gonna sit in cars and they're gonna relax recover they're gonna work and so you're gonna build tools that that go in them another one is insurance it's like the whole insurance system like you know buffett big bets and geico and all those things it's all based on human driving and so if humans aren't driving anymore like both the risk and the the the risk reward ratios change but also who are you ensuring you're ensuring the software company versus like individuals like how is this all gonna work and so that whole end all the whole insurance industry changes and then basically like car ownership so today owning a car is both like utility but also status symbol so it's gonna be kinda interesting like you're a car guy like i wonder when they're self driving cars and basically transportation is just on tap like flowing like water right you just you push a button in in thirty seconds a little car the car of your liking pulls it's gonna be like it's gonna be like people who like horses now like it's gonna be a small group of people or questions yeah i just like oh you're passionate about it and you are lucky enough to have enough room or enough money to like afford it but like maybe i would like buy a group on and can go experience that once in my life like that's what it's gonna be yeah or like you know like horseback like therapeutic people like to like brush a horse or pet horse it's gonna be like that with a car it's gonna be like male therapy to just like get in there and just be behind the wheel yeah control over something in your life yeah it's gonna like like hun yeah you get like feel the noise and like smell the gas like it's gonna be it's gonna be like a hobby yeah it's not gonna it's not going to exist i don't think i think it's gonna be a lot longer but like in twenty it could be twenty years twenty five years it's not gonna be in the next five years but yeah it's gonna be a hobby you sure about that why do you think it's exactly me the next five years way boss are now doing twenty percent of all the rides in san francisco because that was zero like twelve five like have you ever like are a large percentage of people of americans have to have to drive let's say sixty miles one way to to work or they have to like pull stuff or carry stuff i just don't think i think that for the urban there's it's not oh there's good there's gonna be like there's probably gonna be like four sections of users so it's like young urban nights and it's like yeah you guys don't need a car at all like you're you're you're doing already there with uber yeah and then like the far end of that spectrum is like rural people who have to actually tow stuff you know even though everyone has a truck very few actually use it but there's like that section and there's like the people in between and there's gonna be a timeline because like if you ever you can't really tow anything on electric car right now it's like it's they you say you can but go talk to someone who lives in rural texas when you had to like be driving shit around all day it's like impossible so i think that there's gonna be like it's gonna be like for you know what's that early you say it's not gonna be five years are you saying it's not gonna be meaning self driving is not gonna work it's gonna work it's just not gonna just the user adoption it it's like it's gonna it's gonna take a minute for that for the whole spectrum of people i think for the urban nights and people like that it's it's tomorrow we we're gonna do it i i mean that guy towing probably still doesn't still has an aol email address right yeah yeah like so so i think it's pretty safe to say that that person's not yeah it might be forty years before that person it's gonna be a long time but then like you know there's like a lot of you you know people like i'm one them like i'm romantic about my gas vehicle i had an electric car and i got rid of it and i'm like in my head like i acknowledge it's better i acknowledge that like it's the future but it sucks i wanna like our vegan friends it's like i get it yeah it's like we should kill creatures but it just tastes so yeah but would you dip them in ranch but i'm excited to do what's crazy is in austin i think or s f people are actually paying more for the way most yeah yeah it's not it's not that much cheaper yet that was but people are people want to not be around someone and that was unexpected so like when i was when i drive my my i a bmw that has self driving stuff i feel way safer on that than if it were just me and i think that there's like twenty percent of people and it's usually meme i've noticed i've noticed women tend to hate everyone i've talked to hate self driving and every man i've talked to likes it and like have you have you do you have any self driving now no well i don't i don't have it so i haven't had that that level of a i haven't had a sample size to to i've noticed that i'm curious that that's common or if you're just like indexing out three people no it's well yeah i am but yeah it's like five of my friends like the husband's use it and the wives are like nope i don't mess with that i don't use it right but i feel way safer with it well guys when it comes to banking the only time i feel truly happy is when i'm using mercury and that's today's sponsor for the show that is the banking product i use for not one not two but actually eight of my business and i have eight mercury accounts i just went counted i use it for every one of my companies it's an absolute no brainer over two hundred thousand other fast growing ambitious companies be use mercury it's one place you can go where not only you can of course have your money there but you can send invoices you can pay bills you can create reimbursement for your team pretty much all of your financial needs can be housed under mercury and the product is beautiful to use and the reason why because it's a product that was not made by finance people it was made by a founder mod he's been on this podcast before and he used tons of products as a starter founder and this is the one that he wished he had and i actually reached out to them to become a sponsor for the show because i'm such a big fan of it so if you need a banking product for your startup use mercury you will not regret it it's amazing for more information check out mercury dot com mercury is a financial technology company not a bank check show notes for details you wanna do one more thing or will you have something well i have a so i tweeted something out that elon replied to over the weekend and how did that make you feel did you like did you like clap like scream no so i first of all i played it so cool you wouldn't if you had seen me you would thought i might be under the weather that's how cool i was playing it and actually what happened is i just tested my wife and i was like not elon replying to me and and then i just i forgot about it next day david anything think about it i i moved on my mom calls me she's like sean what did you say i'm like what she's like sean what did you say elon what did you say to you on and i was like what my wife put it up on her instagram story and i was like oh my god i'm trying to play cool over here and then you made it like you know lame city so that felt interesting that i got like multiple phone calls from people and i was like the only time your wife has shared something that it is when another person that replied to you yeah exactly and so i thought that was interesting how big of the reaction reactions but the thing i had said was i wrote within a couple of years not using ai while you're doing your job will be the equivalent of coming to work without a computer someone just turned up and they're like not and bring it today you'd be like what the hell dude like what are you planning to do but what well what is the what's the plan here that's how it's gonna be if you're if you're trying to do your job and you're not using ai constantly did you just do your job yeah and that was given he was like you know sooner probably and and and so that was like and and so i started thinking about that and i started thinking about somebody else said this thing they go pretty soon being a doctor who's not using ai as a c copilot like let's say a radio and you're just trying to eyeball every every mri and you're not also running it through ai that'll be considered malpractice because like you put the patient at risk by not at least including the second layer of ai diagnostics and i thought that's pretty interesting it's like the flip is gonna go so much from this doesn't work you know you something we don't do we don't even use it too if you're not using it it's considered malpractice whether there's corporate malpractice or medical malpractice my doctor friend admitted to me the other day he goes open ai is a better doctor than me and it he was like and i knew this was gonna be popular because for years it's been a doctor for ten years patients come to me and said well google says this or web mds says this and he says over the last six months the only people who have used that reasoning it with open ai and i said well i'm according to open ai yeah cha petri said this and he goes and they're right a lot of times the diagnosis is right dude i got a fight with a doctor recently about this tell you this what did they say my mom had to have a surgery and but she was on a trip and so i'm like calling in to the doctor every time the doctor would make her rounds she would like facetime me in she's on those the other side of the country and so the doctor would come in and like doctors his doctors are very hit or mess i love some doctors but a lot of doctors i'm like wow this is an extremely under overwhelming experience and so this one doctor comes in and she's like yeah your levels were fine and then i'm like i actually read the test through chat g and the levels were like high for this and she's like well which level and i'm like i tell i'm like whatever the thing the not that whatever the the term was and she's like yeah that was hot but you know it depends on the exact number so like what was the number i i would have to check i'm like you're the doctor so yeah you would have to check like you what are what are you talking about i'm like you know they i basically chad said if it's above this then you should consider doing this like additional additional step like do you believe that that's like do you agree with that like do you think we should do that that step she's like well i i mean you're putting me on the spot here and i don't have the number and i'm like and she basically was getting pissed and she's like if you're gonna ask me questions then i'm gonna need to go look at the number and literally was like yeah you are gonna need to go look at the number like gonna ask questions like what are we doing here i don't understand like why are you offended by me asking if you if you have seen the data from the test the test you just said to run and now you're coming back to discuss the test results and you don't want to look at the test results i don't really understand what's happening here well i think what's gonna happen is that you know how have you noticed so have you ever been to a doctor now with an ai scribe so like they have like her okay so for a long time oh i was humiliating her in front of her ai scribe is that what happened well for a long time they could've have been human scribes and so like i have you been to a doctor and seen like a person on an ipad like literally it looks like the doctor's face timing typing notes yeah yeah and that's like a scribe now they have ai scribes and i think what's gonna happen is like the i the ai is gonna like talk up i'd be like actually ma'am he's right like like i think that's what's gonna happen and if i was an entrepreneurial doctor i would one hundred percent start a new practice all centered around we are ai first so we work with ai you know and i don't think that you we aren't we aren't at the point and maybe we we'll will never be at the point where you totally trust it just like you always want the pilot even if autopilot is still a thing right but i would like go heavy on that of leaning into like we have all of context here we have all of your files uploaded to us our chat or whatever it is and have an ai first because i think that a lot of people like you and me and people listened to as podcast they have the similar sentiment where they're like oh no i trust a computer way more than a human being the but i would also want the human being to put their stance on it it's also dan i wanna see the difference because it's not even that like oh the ai found the problem and the doctor didn't sometimes it's just as simple as like cool the doctor came in they talk kinda fast they didn't fully explain i i still have more questions and so you go and you ask chad explain it to you maybe simpler or you ask for follow questions maybe you're not as embarrassed to ask questions you feel like you're not like you know the person's not like in a rush to get out of there like a lot of doctors are and so sometimes it's not even that the ai doctor is better because it's smarter sometimes it's because it's infinitely patient or is an infinitely better communicator or you know it knows you know maybe other things about you or you know you could ask some follow questions you don't feel silly doing it like those are other components of the doctor experience essentially bedside manner that ai is better at yeah and so i'm like very eager to see how this works i go to i go to a a a doctor now a concierge doctor and it's not very expensive but the reason i go there is the average at most doctors they have to see four patients an hour so they're at fifteen minutes right and is that insane i remember i when to a doctor and like i had an ear i'm like my ear is killing me and like he spent no time like trying to like help me like figure this out and i went to a concierge doctor and the average time is forty five minutes so we can like thoroughly walk through things and so if i can just use all the information that they have and then go and ping chat to further the conversation it is pretty brilliant i'm very eager to see what's gonna happen i like people act like ai is amazing for a bunch of different stuff and it is but the what they're doing with medicine and drugs and cancer and things like that is like pretty astounding and i think that's gonna be the major breakthrough there in the next couple of years to the other one lazy ass parenting so your kid's a little young for this but it is amazing dude that i'll open up gemini and it has like a camera mode why do you use different ones you've said claude or sorry you said g and now you're saying gemini and then we also referred check to use different well it's like you know you you go to your different friends for different questions you only ask me certain questions and sometimes you go to jack's and sometimes you go to your you know you go to jail you got to different people for different things so like if you want to be if you want something that's a little bit more real and objective i think rock is better if you want something that's either code or creative writing claude is better you know the the catch all is chat gp and then gemini has some like advanced features so this is i saying like gemini has the thing where you just turn your camera on like facetime and i think it's for like maybe you're supposed to like show what your car and be like how do i repair this and it like tells you what to do but i just pointed at my kids and i'm like hey we're playing char aids guess what they're doing and then my kids will like get on the ground and start like crawling and it's like seems to be a boy crawling maybe it's a snake are you a worm and they're like tries to guess it and they love it dude and so i'm able to just straight up chill and let them play with ai it is amazing another one i'll do is i'll just be like hey i have a five year old and a four year old here and they want trivia questions they like animals they like pop trolled they like you know they know a little about about pokemon but nothing too complicated ask them a bunch of questions cheer them on when they get it right if they get it wrong tell them the right answer keep track of the score here's their names go that's the prompt and it plays trivia endlessly with my kids and they love it because it's all audio which kids can do they don't have to like be on screens to be able to do this and so i'm just discovering like game after game i can play with them like i'll do like basically replaced k coupon with hey i need advanced kindergarten math which like i don't even know what that means but it like gets you for whatever reason those three words give me the sweet spot of like the question that that kinda works for my kids and it's like a tutor right it's a infinitely patient tutor with them and it's not perfect in the sense of like you know sometimes it like starts and stops its audio because it if you make any sound it thinks you're talking but dan it's pretty it's pretty good and it's like already usable for us i'm not seen i i didn't even i didn't know much them i'm and i gemini live i had no idea what this was is this google this google gemini is like after summer break you know that one kid who comes back it's like they're kinda like hot now but you still have the old image of them like their reputation is still being at like not hot yeah but objectively they're hot now yeah nobody's really on it yet that's what gemini is gemini was basically out of the game it's google's ai tools out of the game like i it's just chat g she changed yeah and then she changed and she like it's like wait like she got contacts and like she learned how to do her hair she's she like walked makeup tour it's like her roller bla which was like surprisingly good cardio and now suddenly gemini could do things that like the other ones can't do but nobody's on it yet which doesn't really actually give you any benefits wait so gemini is hot now gemini hot now google's hot google's hot yeah i don't know man that's hard for me to buy into but yeah because you're one of those jo at schools just stuck in seventh grade for that what happened over seventh grade summer alright i'll use this yeah i'm just stuck on chad gb and i don't use g because i i i'm shot when people say they use grunt i'm like so you go to like twitter dot com to use brock dot com that's just is that the same thing as that's the twitter one yeah because steph smith just got a job at this other one what was that other one called oh no she she got it at g with a queue it's stupid name unfortunate unfortunate i'm a shareholder of g with the queue also but unfortunate naming situation yeah and it's ai as well they're making chips okay well they should change their name changed their name because yeah that that doesn't make sense or at least a pronunciation right like i don't like i don't know how you all see needs to be g or completely bro i don't know what they're gonna do they could be g i guess but they yeah g is so it's the same use love you put the end in there like is rob ko wait what did i say you're saying g oh what is it g g yeah like the shoes cro yeah like cracks yeah wait and so what is the twitter thing what do you mean what is it all that's oh that's not g oh i thought it was g yeah there's no anne any of them that guy's a football player he's a retired football player i went to my montana to visit a friend last week and i wore overalls because they're like the best i saw a photo of that and i just did thought to myself holy shit this guy has gotten this guy's got no no limits it's wearing overalls is standard standard wear it's the best clothing because you could put your phone in your wallet right there on the chest and so you're like holy kids and like you just have so many pockets that you've like this right here and i love it and she was like oh you got these do did you think that we're all cowboys here and i was like which she's like you wore your overall samantha are you trying to make front of us i was like what you talking about i i've worn these three years like i am not pretending no i actually just got the way i was very inspired by your instagram post you wrote something the caption of your post you go from now on i'm only taking photos that if my kid looked at it twenty years from now they'd be like my that is pretty cool that it's great that's that's because you you have that photo of your father right of him when he was in his thirties and you're a baby and he's like doing something cool he's wearing a cool shirt and you're like oh wow dad was sick or like oh yeah the most at at all right like they're don't hair anymore they're like fat now or whatever and so you don't you don't see that side of them but like it lets you put a little respect on their name when you see like oh damn young they were actually kinda they actually kinda fly what they're wearing so i was smoking a cigar and they were which i never do but i'd like was smoking a cigar and like they were gonna take a photo with my kid someone had a camera i was go take photos and i put this cigar i used to hide it i would hide it behind my back and i'm like not fuck this she's gonna be proud and i'm like put it back shit smoking is gonna be cool in thirty years that's gonna be like you had like a slave with you or something it's gonna be crazy that you were just smoking with a baby on your shoulder brother have you seen the photo of the eight guys sitting on the the beam of the like i have the empire state building it's great i think i think it myself those guys are crazy they're dangerous but they're fucking hard that is awesome and so i will never be on the beam of the empire state building a thousand a feet above the air but at least i can smoke at cigar and look remotely cool dude we should print this out i want this framed do three of them have overalls very similar to the ones you were wearing yeah what's up same make model yeah you just need this like bra hat probably have this don't know i talking about it of course you have this hat yeah and the courage to eat lunch a thousand feet above the ground which is like even back then the coworkers workers are like guys what are you doing there's a cafeteria like right here off like it's a fox yeah alright that's it that's a pod i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put at all in and like a days off on a travel never looking back alright so when my employees join hampton we have to do a whole bunch of onboarding stuff but the most important thing that they do is they go through this thing i made called copy that copy that is a thing that i made that teaches people how to write better and the reason this is important is because at work or even just in life we communicate mostly via text right now whether we're emailing slack blogging texting whatever most of the ways that we're communicating is by the written word and so i made this thing called copy that that's guaranteed to make you right better you could check it out copy that dot com i post every single person who leaves a review whether it's good or bad i post it on the website and you're gonna see a trend which is that this is a very very very simple exercise something that's so simple that they laugh at and think how is this gonna actually impact us and make us right better but i promise you it does you gotta try at copy that dot com i guarantee it's gonna change the way you write again copy that dot com

alright we got ben here and this is the real deal ben this has ben the business partner if you listen to every single episode this podcast you hear me two hours a week i probably talked to ben twenty hours a week yeah pretty much i feel like you have a hundred times more great stuff that never makes it anywhere it just goes into our text thread and dies immediately we gotta bring it out i feel like i could rude to world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days on on a road less travel never look can bag but i was counting before we start this episode so together we've been working together for five years now we've created nine different things i know if you've seen this we've created nine different projects that have made more than a million dollars each so the very first thing we did together is the all access pass which was a pretty batch shit crazy idea where i was like what if listeners of the pod could actually see what i'm doing every day to build a business and i basically was like for three months i'm i'm ninety days i'm gonna send an email every day just showing you what i worked on each of those days while i try to do x thing whatever the thing i was gonna trying to do was like one of them was like start an income e com brand one of them was raised a fund one of them was start a course whatever and so that one did over a million dollars the craziest part about that one is you were basically like hey dude i just met you or we barely work together wanna do a ninety day spring where we just figure out what we're gonna do and then tell everyone in the world what we're doing but we've never basically never worked together before then we've that worked together also we have like the what's the opposite of a romantic comedy first meeting you know like in a romantic comedy they're like walking down the street then they're like bump into each other and then the papers fall on the ground that they scoop up they look they make eye contact their whatever they're like it's a thing ours was completely different you i think you you were just a listener to the podcast and i was testing out an idea that was like these ceo mastermind group so i basically i said hey i need five or six people who have a business that does over a million dollars a year come join this group which basically became hampton by the way i sam sam had turning that to a a real business called hampton i did one group and you were in it and the funny thing was you had a business that was doing over a million dollars a year and ben how many how many customers did you have in that business one one customer been had a business with a single customer that paid of a million dollars year can you say it's over now you could say who it is yeah i was an h bush at the time bud budweiser so ben is basically like yeah my customers bud budweiser there are no other customers they pay me a million dollars a year to do this like very simple thing where you were like i don't know you were like building their sms list for them or something like that but you seemed bored out of your mind and also like you seemed bored out of your mind and i was trying to do new things and i was like hey i like this guy's got a good vibe you wanna try some stuff with me is that is that the summary of of how it went down for you pretty much i mean the only other thing is like pete covid i specifically remember like it was those mastermind and watching the jordan dock and those are the highlights of the month why did you say yes because you had a business that was doing a million dollars year i was not offering you more money than that why did you say yes to the to the offer by way i think there's something you have good instincts and i think there's i've never asked you this but what why did you even say yes to begin with i mean at the time i felt like i tried everything to figure out how to grow that business and i just had zero answers i'd been like you know it's it had been a year and it was like i've tried literally everything i can think of not one thing is working like this is kinda going nowhere i'm running i'm hitting a wall every time that was one and then two you know i thought you had a ton of juice now i feel like i text you this all the time which is tmj i just feel like you have too much juice which i felt then i feel now which is like you know this guy's a beast this guy is like you know the next joe rogan is it tmj like the thing where your jaw hurts it's like when you too much draws to me yeah that's what i have i i i got i got a bad case of tmj too much juice so you know i just had belief in you and i was like i'm gonna take a bed and also i had felt like i just ran against the you know i'd hit the wall a hundred times in a row trying to grow that thing and it gone nowhere well i do appreciate that you you do have a shit head of belief in me which is cool we actually have this phrase we call what do we call your first believer which is basically everybody i know who's successful in life at some point had somebody who irrational believed in them right bill simmons calls at the irrational confidence guy i think there's that for the entrepreneur for entrepreneurs too which is before you've proven anything before you've actually done it and honestly when you still kinda suck somebody is just like no i believe i'm in blank check belief in you like for me that was this guy michael birch initially when i was twenty three twenty four years old and he kind of like recruited me for a job wasn't really qualified for and then he gave me he'd named me ceo he gave me his job as ceo i was the youngest person in the company and that was irrational like there was really no proof no logic no nothing but like i will never forget that and then we've actually taken that where if we believe in somebody we don't believe it in private we go tell them we're like and man will text them and be like dude like this is guy billy oppenheimer who i think who i think we both are big believers in and we'll just text billy be like i'm buying all the billy oppenheimer stock on the market right now like i'm corner the billy oppenheimer you know market right now i'm trying to build a huge position here because i am a believer in you and your talents have you seen that and who else are we kind of first believers in you know yeah i think george max says that you were one of the big one of the first believers and telling him he should stop doing an agency he should just go all in un betting on himself ish sean your old in turn yeah i was a first believer in him for sure yeah he was like probably eighteen years old to start working with him but i think everybody needs that and if and whoever was that for you you should send him a note today just be like by the way thank you for that that was huge for me and he did you had no reason to believe me but you did but i think i think more people need to do that it's like an angel investor but before money you need at least belief that you can do something right like it's actually more important as a starting ingredient than than cash initially and i think people more people need to have that like belief angel investor you you need someone to give you minutes in the game yeah know i just wanna get give me two minutes don't leave me on the bench a coach that puts you on the floor dude you were just do speaking of a basketball you were just at this fantasy camp thing can you hey explain what this was like two week two weeks ago ben goes hey i'm gonna be offline for a week i'm going to the duke basketball fantasy camp coach like the k academy can you explain what this is because i think this is kind of amazing yeah so two weeks ago i basically decided to go to k academy which is coach k obviously you know who he is sean famous astute coach every year you host of basketball camp for people that are thirty five an older spoiler i just turned thirty five like six months ago so first time i could go i immediately decided to go i took my dad with me so it's me and my dad we haven't hung out for five days in the row in years without kids so we go to we go to north carolina and it's unbelievable it's basically rich dude fantasy camp it's like summer camp for for rich dudes right yeah it's basically rich dudes they wanna go back to high school where they were on the basketball team and they're competing like their lives depend on it and every other hour someone's that's an amazing pitch because i would i would happily pay ten for that right now if you could take me back to when i was on my high school basketball it like the happiest days of my life you know that's what i thought and then immediately when i got there in the first game i got way last minutes than i thought and my dad was like cussing under his breath that i should have got more minutes i was like i don't know i don't know that i actually wanna go back to high school again where i literally had the same exact experience but so we so we get there and it's a hundred and fifty people and everyone there like one for me actually it's do the math of that a hundred fifty people what is the price of this thing it's thirteen thousand dollars alright so it's a two million two million dollar kind of five day camp basically for them revenue wise yeah two million dollars but i think everyone there like basically becomes a part of their fund and help support duke athletics so it's great for that it's like great top of funnel for key people for a booster or alumni a sort of like a supporter of the program yeah but what i wanted to do when i went there was like yeah i love basketball it's gonna be awesome but i just wanna meet every single person that's here because if you if you're spending thirteen grand a hoop for five days you're probably rich and interesting or just rich maybe and not that interesting that's also a possibility alright this episode is brought to you by hubspot they're doing a big conference this that they're big one they do called inbound they have a ton of great speakers that are coming to san francisco september third two september fifth and it's got a pretty incredible lineup up they have comedian like amy poe they have da from ant philanthropic dark cast sean evans from hot ones and if you're somebody who's in marketing or sales or ai and you just wanna know what's going on what's coming next it's a great event to go to and hey guess what i'm gonna be there you can go to inbound dot com slash register to get your ticket to inbound twenty twenty five but again september third or fifth in san francisco hope to see you there we should explain this like i always say we're business partners what does that actually mean what do you actually do i i just got you know the way i tell people but you'd probably tell people differently is like three things i say it basically just try to make try to make whatever try to make the main mission happen and the main mission change very often which is everything from make great content to make money to just have fun then i add the last part which is like well also not working that hard you know like i think i work hard but i think in general like i wanna have a good time and wanna also be there for my friends and family and i i'd say the fifth part is i probably spend twenty percent of my time playing basketball so i added that in last year which is you know i wanna play i wanna spend twenty percent of my time playing basketball so i i spent a lot of time just trying to find interesting things that we can attack that may support the main missions so whether that be buying a company an investment some interesting content ideas meeting people so so here here's some examples one of them was let's raise a fund right this is back in twenty twenty one maybe twenty twenty we decided hey we wanna raise a fund to invest in startups we have all this deal flow let's do this and so that became the main mission for like a three month period and we raised i think something like twenty million bucks to invest into start okay great then we did grow my e com store i think at the time you join maybe my e com brand was doing five million a year in revenue and then now it does twenty five million or thirty million dollars in revenue and so for for twelve months like that was the mission and so the funny thing is we'll just like pick a main mission roughly every i would say three to six months we pick a main mission the longest we've done is probably a year or two and we just do whatever it takes to figure that out so for example when we were doing the e comm thing neither you know nor i knew anything about e commerce and one of the things ben does is brilliant is he's basically very very good at getting insights from the audience and so what you did was you created this group called club lt tv and club lt tv was basically you put out a call you go if you own an commerce brand that does more than five million in revenue right we were at five million you're like it has more than five million in revenue come hang out in this thing i'm not selling you anything it's free to join but you gotta be legit you gotta be the owner and you have to do over five million dollars of revenue and we're just gonna hang out every other friday i'm gonna host it it's like speed dating you're gonna be a bunch of other e comm founders we're gonna share what's working in our businesses and then every week one guy gonna stand up and say like oh here's what i'm doing with tiktok here's what i'm doing with email marketing and you're gonna learn something that's gonna instantly make if you just implemented it it'll make you more money that was the the general idea and you got like i don't know a hundred and fifty comm business owners in there and like you know the first month and then suddenly we were just getting we whatever problem we had somebody in that group had already had that problem and could answer it and so it just accelerated our business learning so fast from doing that and that's kinda where i figured out this model of like i create the content i attract interesting people but i'm kind of an introvert i just like being alone like i like doing stuff like this podcast just me in my bedroom like i don't really like going out and doing meetups ups or hangouts outs or doing calls ben loves that shit and so ben would go meet people talk to them see what they're up to find a way to help them introduce them to people make connections be useful to them and in doing so they would you know every one out of every twenty of those people would do something that's useful to us maybe we invest in their company maybe they teach us something whatever it is that's an example of of how it's worked in the past yeah and i think that's two things i think about a lot like you know i wanna be useful like you know a lot of this is i don't wanna take from people it's like hey i wanna help you and like when and if we ever need anything i know they'll take my call but it's not really about that just like hey i i talked to a lot of people i might know something that you might wanna know i might know someone you should know and then two i think like i think this is a warren buffett thing which is like you can't connect the dots looking forward steve jobs steve jobs alright a lot of this is you've you know a lot of it is creating serendipity and luck and you know i just never know it's gonna connect you know something that someone might have said a year ago might randomly hit that i never thought of for the past year well we should explain because people don't know how we do this so first explain who this guy i think his name is nick d or nick theo explain who that guy is and then how he kind of inspired us to do to do stuff on our side yeah so nick d let's just call them nick d i like that better than d but essentially he's gary vs relationship guy i think is the way i would say it so gary v obviously has tons of access owns a huge agency but he can only be so many places at once so he's basically built this guy nick and what he does is he manages all gary's core relationships so from what i've heard he basically will host a dinner every night anyone that wants to meet gary he connects them he's the main guy that's the face of gary he's front forward he collects everything he helps people and sometimes and i think a lot of times gary's is not even there so it'll be like gary really likes this person or these people or he wants to get get to know certain people nick will go and host an event or take them on a trip or hang out with them almost like on behalf of gary right like gary's is not even there some percentage of the time i think i think a large percentage of the time i think like ninety nine percent of the time gary is not there i think it's literally an but the guy knows he's just like yeah gary thinks what you're doing is dope we just wanna get to know you if we can ever be helpful let let us know i heard this and this was like in sports there was this thing that came out several years ago that was like lebron james spends a million dollars a year on his body like on just treatments you know trainers food all of it like a million dollars you're just fine tuning his body and other athletes heard that and they're were like shit dude i'm not doing it like i just kinda go to the gym or like i just use the team's guy i don't i don't do that but it makes total sense like if you're a athlete your body is your business like it makes sense to spend money maintaining and improving your body so lebron did that and i've always had this question which is like what's my version of spending a million dollars a year on on my body right and so when i heard that gary v has this guy nick i was like oh that makes perfect sense gary is like building a magnet to attract people who like what he's all about right that's his content that he's putting out there but he can't and maybe he doesn't even want to just constantly be meeting people that he's attracting because it's too much this audience is too big so of course it is it sounds crazy to be like he hired a guy that just hangs out with people in his in his orbit and i was like yeah that sounds a little weird but actually that's obvious and logical and we should totally do that and i didn't hire you in that way that's not what but you do you would do end up doing that because you're extroverted you actually like you get a lot of energy from texting people talking to people like like today how many people are like in the last twenty five hour twenty four hours how many people have you texted i mean you know probably like seventy till it's a ton like if i look on my phone right now how many people do i actually text on a day day basis there's my wife there's the lady who were getting our mortgage loan from my dad for father's day yeah there's like the seven people max that like i'm talking to in a given day and even that i'm pretty bad at replying whereas you just love doing it and you do it all the time in fact you had this like little phrase you're like i was i was you know what's the secret you're like i reply bro most people just don't reply i reply ben he replies that's what he does and he also check with people and see like what they're up to and what how it's going you congratulate people all the time on what they do you have these like the little things that just kinda keep people in our orbit so that's one thing is is learning from that the other is we took luck and we actually made it like a business metric that you measure could you explain the the luck system and how we do that yeah so the core idea i think was basically okay if we're gonna spend a ton of time creating look that's gonna you know surface in a ton of ways maybe it's gonna surface in content maybe it's gonna surface in an investment maybe it's gonna surface in a future business you gotta track it you know i got i it's really easy basically to say oh i'm every day i'm gaining weight but i never get on the scale because i just don't wanna look at it and then i just gained ten pounds like it happened so fast but if i'm on the scale every day i'd never gain any weight and what i mean by that is i basically decided okay i wanna track what i'm actually doing and what i mean i wanna track what i'm actually doing so every day i wanna say okay here's like the five or six things i did today that i think will create some look and then i wanna actually see did anything ever hit in any way looking back so an example might be okay if i pull up my spreadsheet i found this tweet that then became a great piece of content for m m so you know another example might be okay we ended up getting into this deal that was because i chased this guy pretty aggressively to get into this round and then we wired him so like you know an example would be you know one thing you're great about is you're like happy for other people i think a lot of people on the entrepreneurial game get better as other people become successful you see that oh they hit this revenue and your actual reaction is either like fuck you know we're we're way less or or or you know whatever that's not gonna last i think there's a lot of that bitterness people don't really say out loud but in general i think that's a a pretty common reaction for people whereas i've i've been around you a bunch do you actually have the opposite if something awesome happens for people you you literally are like oh that's awesome congrats so you'll do something like somebody hits a milestone and you'll send them a cake with like the number on it and and so you do these like random things that seem to be like i don't know unproductive in nature like you you took fifteen minutes to like design a cake to send this guy but then that guy calls you thanking you and and you catch up with him and he tells you about this thing that he's doing and you realize like oh for our basketball event i didn't realize this guy actually knows the owner of that team we could ask him for an intro and like you create luck through just a bunch of these different activities that you're doing other simple examples would be like you are pretty willing to just refer people like you find out that somebody's looking for x you'll take an hour and go actually like hunt down or referral for them and go find them the the agency they're looking for or the person they're looking for and like make the connection you'll do it same day for that person it doesn't seem in the moment like there's anything to gain in that for us but it builds so much goodwill that of course like there's business karma it comes back around and so what we did was we looked at alright in the last two years what are all the best things that have happened and then if you kinda trace the the twenty three in me that the ancestry dot com like what led to that so we have this one business that's just going gang buster right now it's we haven't announced it yet but it like you know it's we just crossed ten million and in and arr profit bootstrap in like less than you know eighteen months and that business is amazing but if we look at well where did how did we get the key customers for that where did we get the intro for where did we hire that key talent for that each one of those came from basically been doing random shit so we decided the peter trucker mantra what gets measured gets managed let's actually treat luck like something you can actually manage could you measure it if you could measure it would you would that encourage you to do more of it if you did more of it would more good things happen the answer so far for us has been yes even though this is kind of a nerdy thing this is like when when sam talks about how him and sarah do off sites and have like o okay rs for their relationship and you're like dude you're kinda killing the romance here it's like most people treat luck the same way where it's like dude just let it happen and we actually treat like creating luck as a skill like luck is a thing you can actually influence how much of it you're gonna have in your life and and then we we kinda celebrate you doing things that generate more and more luck for us also think it makes you just think about the things i'm learning or seeing because it's like oh i write it down if i just keep it in my head one you never hear it it never goes anywhere it's pretty easy for me to forget but if i write it down it's like oh that actually was interesting or this story someone told me would actually makes sense to tell in the podcast or we should follow up on that so i think that helps a ton to it also changes your decision making like sometimes she'll be like oh should i go do this like you you went and flew out and hung with jesse for like a couple of days there was really no like we weren't trying to do a deal with him we weren't trying to sell him on anything there's no there's no agenda he's awesome we thought he was awesome he was like hey you should come hang and you were like you know people just say that as like a figure of speech like oh yeah if you're ever in town hit me up whereas we were like well i think doing that will generate some good good things good that increases our luck quotient if you do that versus if you just sit at home for the next two days so ben books a flight goes hangs out with them for two days sure enough while you're there the conversation leads to different like you know different good things different either learnings insights opportunities whatever it may be and i don't think we would maybe have the the green light to to shoot our shot as we do now now that we actually like made it one of our like kinda of goals is to create more luck and and actually our goal for the year is ben's gotta create a hundred lucky breaks and so he keeps track of the hundred lucky things that go our way and in order to do that you gotta do like five hundred or seven hundred just interesting things that might generate those hundred lucky breaks yeah i we'll say jesse there's a proud member of the tmj crew too much juice so if you're in you got too much juice you know you get a round trip flight for me immediately if you're in that class this episode is brought to you by hubspot media they have a cool new podcast that's for ai called the next wave it's by matt wolf and nathan lands and they're basically talking about all the do tools that are coming out how the landscape is changing what's going on with ai tech so if you wanna be up to date on ai tech it's a cool podcast you could check out listen to the next wave wherever you get your podcast explain your your barbell thing because i like this this i think more people should should do this in the way i operate is basically two things either i'm constantly i mean you know my phone is just constantly texting people with things i see so it's either okay we're constantly talking via text or i'm in a very lightweight wait right like it's very light communication you're not sitting on a a forty minute zoom call with them yeah and i do say i do go by the i reply thing although since i told you that and since i think you said on the podcast every time i don't reply i feel very guilty because yeah know sometimes i just sometimes i forget or sometimes it's just hard when you you know when you have a lot tax and then and then you know and then the barbell is just go spend more time in person with people i haven't done it as much as i want to but i i think longer hangs i think this is also a david center idea which is you do longer hangs i i think k was the one who told john k from technology about the t vpn he was the one who told us this idea or he said it out loud at least to me and it was like the middle zone is death it's death by a thousand zoom call so like a forty minute zoom caller or the forty five minute zoom call it's basically the worst of both worlds it's like kinda takes a lot of energy to do it but you don't really build up much of a bond or relationship in it you don't even get into much depth you would rather be like just quick funny memes and texts or sending tweets to people just to kind of like it's very lightweight takes you ten seconds or go hang out with them for you know five hours just go fly to him them and hang out with them five hours or go drive up there and go go go grab lunch go for a walk and then you know have a coffee and like if you do that you actually get like way more of a of a connection and a bond and more insight more it's a different type of hang and it's actually it sounds like it's you know it's the equivalent of ten zoom calls but no it's like the equivalent of like two hundred zoom calls when you do it right and so you wanna spend your time on either end of the the barbell the lightweight side or like go really in depth there's a good example of this by the way chris saga used to do this i don't know if you know the story but he he was an angel investor and he moved out of san francisco which at the time made no sense it's like all the angel of western in san francisco that's where all the start ups were but he goes you know what if i'm in san francisco i'm just i'm constantly playing defense i'm just taking all these random coffee meetings and kind of feels very surface level it's just does it's not differentiated so he moves to truck which is near lake tahoe he buys a cabin he he gets a second cabin like a guest house right next to his cabin and what he did was he would if he found somebody who was interesting he would like make a bigger effort he would invite them to come to stay for a weekend in his cabin and let's hang out and founder was like oh that's cool i'll go to like tahoe that like that sounds like fun and then he would spend like forty eight hours with this person they're in the hot tub together they're skiing together they're talking they're drinking they're eating they're they're cleaning up they're doing all those different stuff and by the end of that like they actually feel like like good friends not like you would get at a coffee meeting plus he would really understand their business and this is how he got into the uber deal and how he got into the instagram deal was he invited that founder of uber the founder of instagram to come hang out for the weekend and it was in that weekend where they kinda like solidified the bond he understood the business in depth he knew really how good this founder was and what they were really made of which you couldn't get in a twenty thirty minute coffee meeting and he knew to to back up the truck and invest and i think it's also cool that just go out people and see how they live i think we've talked about this a lot it's like you know you go see how someone like mon p bra lives when we go to his house and hang out with him and you can taste their lifestyles and decide whether or not it's actually interesting right by the way i'm looking at the luck sheet right now this is a great example your mission was to grow m m at one point so you're were spending a couple of months trying to grow my first feeling and you were like dude you guys don't bring enough guests on the guest episodes do well you but you and sam are pretty lazy you don't like to reach out to guests and so you're just like you know it doesn't really happen so you went back you looked at the archive and you're were like alright let me find somebody who was awesome on the pod before bring him back and so you found that jesse was on a year or two ago you tried to get him on he didn't reply he didn't reply again and then you saw that he had like i don't know his his calendar or his book was coming out if you basically bought a hundred of them proactively and you were like hey i think your calendar awesome i bought a hundred of these i'm gonna give him away on my first millions you know just keep doing what you're you know keep doing what you're doing this is great he replies to that because he's like oh dude somebody just came and bought a hundred of my product because they think it's awesome like thank you you know i appreciate that and and by the way yeah like i'm happy to come on again and then he comes on the podcast and it reign ignited maybe a relationship that was kind of dormant and you've done that a bunch where you'll like somebody comes out with a product you buy it you hype it up you celebrate it and then that makes them feel good and that leads to like good things but all this stuff is like pretty unpredictable when you're doing it but it works out yeah i i think like you know it is important to say none of this is transactional you know i kinda do this again goal is to be useful i wanna help people again i think we all win together like this is not a zero sum game we help people they help us etcetera so it goes yeah yeah exactly and also you know for every one thing i'm saying that led to this there's eleven other things that didn't lead to anything and we're totally fond that it was just fun to do it was nice to do so we did it you know that's all there was no expectation of something happening except for you just know like hey if i do a bunch of great stuff with great people like good things are gonna come out of that so that's the that's the luck thing you sent this doc with other stuff on it i wanna let's talk about some of these other things alright i know normally basically you always do business ideas but i feel like you and i talk business nonstop it's just constantly business ideas so i made a list of things that i wish existed basically stuff i wanna be customer number one of that i wanna talk to you about and show you and see what you think so things that things that don't exist today but you kinda wish you loki wish existed yeah and you know i'm an early adopter so someone someone makes these i'm gonna buy them ben tries weird stuff you'll be like oh i'm eating this peanut butter that's made out of caramel only and i'm like what and he'll buy any product that's like weird but there's a chance it's amazing most likely sucks but there's a chance it's amazing so i'm guessing these ideas are gonna be like that probably weird probably suck but there's a chance it would be amazing am i right on that yeah mean one out of ten hits and you know hey i'm glad i tried ten random of peanut butter protein things you know alright so this is ben's random wish let's go so i've got i've got three ideas i've got ten ideas but first one i'll give you is courts side seats so whenever you obviously you know what courts side seats are whatever you're watching an nba game they always show you know if at the knicks games they show timothy cha every time going nuts with kylie jenner but i just think there's way more to do around cord side seats let me give you three i'd i have three cord side seats spin off ideas so one okay i wanna make a youtube channel or basically all you do is buy cord side seats and you interview someone courts side every game goal is figure out what do they do how much money do they make how do they make their money and all you do all you have to do is buy a court side seat and you immediately can get someone every single game what do you think okay so the upside is you get to be court side so worst case scenario youtube channel fails but you got to go courts at a bunch of games it does use that that thing that seems to work which is on tiktok people go like stop like a rich person in their car hey just nice comment man i just wanna ask you know what do you do and then they say something and it creates like you know this one minute thing that tends to tends to go over viral earlier people like that stuff so you're basically piggyback off of that but the investment here is pretty substantial right like how much is much are our courts side seats anyways like how much would this cv cost to do forty there's forty what four forty court forty home games a year so what do you spending to do this it probably depends where you're doing and i if you're doing it in orlando you're probably spending a hundred grand if you're doing in new york you're probably spending four hundred grand five hundred grand which you could probably go get like a fan dual or seat or somebody upfront to to sponsor you for this and be like hey look i'm gonna you know this is the this is a concept i bet you could pitch them enough to be like this is gonna be kind of like a a show where you're the main sponsor and i think this will do really well i i kinda think you could get it paid for for you don't need you don't need all of them paid for it but like enough to do four or five and then once you get some views then you can kinda go from there there's not a bad idea and then the the tangent the tangent i have on is like why are they're not courts side seats at the apple demo day y c demo day open ai like why is timothy cha may not sitting courts side there like they should definitely have timothy cha may or whoever sitting larry the be concert right like you know like pretty much any event it is kinda interesting to know who's who's up upfront who's there who came i i i'm kind of interested in that you know what i want is not the interview though i just wanna know literally like this is my version of linkedin like whenever i'm watching a warriors game i'll basically pause the screen and i'll try to say like do i recognize anybody or who are these people that are sitting there because it's kinda like my first million like all those people have some interesting success story right you don't get to be courts side without an interesting success story and i wanna know who those people are like i were to pay i'd be yeah i'd gladly pay tony bucks a month if somebody was just photograph who's courts tied at the games and then just telling me what those people who those people are and what they do like it's my version of like paparazzi or tmz that i actually give a shit about it's like this weird mix of like business and basketball very niche but i would do it yeah the other day it was like a highlight of my week i was watching the thunder pace game and i saw a guy that we know on twitter sitting court side fist pumping mike beckham from simple modern i was like damn that's cool all yeah saw that that's cool alright what's your next half big idea alright so the next one i call lunch bounty before we gotta buy lunch bounty dot com so the idea is basically this you've seen things like you've seen these social networks where basically you can buy all your tokens are available and to claim them you get a hundred thousand dollars right that was bit cloud right yeah and then we've heard these stories of people where they spend you know thirty thousand dollars a hundred thousand dollars to go get lunch with someone like i believe warren buffett warren buffett or i've heard stories where people used to pay thirty five thousand dollars to get dinner with peter heel and it changed their entire life but there's no real marketplace to find those opportunities like maybe you'll occasionally find them on ebay or their twitter i wanna create a marketplace that's basically like okay if there's a hundred thousand dollars sitting here and bill ac all you have to do is hit yes and then your lunch is you know ben is willing to pay a hundred thousand dollars to get lunch with you and just to have a marketplace where it's just one a one hour lunch and someone can basically preemptively bid on how much they're willing to pay for lunch with x i like this this is when you first said it i didn't know where you're going with this but this is actually kind of an interesting simple idea by the way i think the right the right lens for this is these are non serious business ideas like we have a bunch of serious more boring business ideas but these are just like fun ideas and the key to this one by the way is a charity the key is like everything is a charity yeah exactly so you need basically and are you saying do it permission so like are you saying you'll go you'll just put up bill ac lunch new york you get it to fifty thousand dollars or somebody who wants to go have lunch of the black one and then you basically are telling the black one hey by the way we're auction this off it's at fifty thousand the proceeds will go to your favorite charity would you be are you willing to to honor it oh you willing do the guy doesn't charge anything if you don't do it and you're basically gonna like publicly pressure them to do this to get it off the ground yeah exactly that's the exact idea you know it's sort of a gray area but how mad are they really gonna be you're raising a bunch of money for their you know charity of choice i think you could do this i think you get away with this i know will gets to did this not not long i think it do like a twenty thousand dollar lunch or something like that we know that mon provide paid six hundred fifty thousand dollars to go to lunch with warren buffett if you just think about like if you had let's just pretend you had two of these a week right maybe you have it as like a successful person and then maybe a either an actor celebrity musician or like an athlete something like that but even two a week and let's say the average one of these would go for what like you think twenty five k ten to fifty yeah twenty five thousand dollars get ballpark so you're gonna raise basically two and a half million dollars for charity if you could even just do two of these every week yeah i think it's i actually think it's a good idea it is a crazy idea but i think it's a good idea yeah exactly i think you for trying to do like fun slash social impact this is kind of an interesting idea and by the way you would end up meeting all these people because you created this like whatever this thing is the the the lunch program yeah exactly if that's my idea yeah alright what else you got well do this one everyone needs their bi bag i'm surprised you even know what a bur bag is what what do you what are you thinking here i don't know much about working bags other than it sounds cool and i think it's really expensive so what for me what that was is one of my buddies started this company called stock x and he called me i don't know a year ago and he was like dude i'm starting a new company we make these awesome collectible and what we do is we basically the website is i think go straight dot com and what we do is we basically make a figurines of fame we do licensing deals and we make figurines of famous people very similar to this thing called cause k aws so and by figurines are these like small figurines or they big what what are like the plastic i think he makes both but for this specific one he calls me out of the blue six months there i think they're class plastic a mix of everything but six months ago he calls me another boy goes dude i know you're a huge phoenix suns fan i've got something just for you i was like what is it you you're calling the right guy and you goes you know we're we're doing a special run of six foot tall figurines it's like oh i have no idea where i'd put a six foot figurine that's i think made out of like nut cracker that you put at the door right like like like i have no clue but hey you got the word phoenix suns and like honestly you might have sold the already and he goes so it's we're doing a special run it's only only a certain number of nba players and we're making a devin booker so a six foot tall devin booker figurine and it was like alright how much like you know i guess i've been looking for my broken bag so how much and yeah it goes ten thousand dollars which you know i i don't think i've spent ten thousand dollars on myself really on anything you know outside of like you know investing in bitcoin i can't think of the last time i spent ten thousand dollars on something yeah and i don't even think about it i said yes immediately and then later i told my wife and i was like and by the this like a one of one or there's like gonna be thousands it's a one of one so i'm the only guy at the devin booker and you know i don't know what i'm gonna do it i mean it's so i'm the only guy the devin booker and i was like okay it's gonna be cool because maybe one day he's gonna call me he's gonna be like dude i respect that you own the other one of one like that's cool devin booker gonna call you that's the dream the dream is that devin booker he's gonna call facetime one day and be pretty fine hey man i heard you bought that six foot figurine of me yeah exactly you wanna be friends that's what you thought it was gonna happen i mean that's a terrible for you now that i say it but that's what i was hoping before right small part of you and then i told my wife i was like yeah so i got this thing coming in six months i don't know when it's coming but like from a buddy but you know here's the good news here's here's the good news it's a six foot tall figurine and even better news is that it was a gift but the yeah unfortunately like i left out the fact that it was a ten thousand dollar gift it was a gift so you know it's kinda letting me know my new take which is like like you know everyone needs their broken bags so you know the idea is basically like empower everyone to make that crazy purchase it makes absolutely no sense and just you know the it's just called a gift you know tell your wife it's a gift i'll tell you why it's a gift it's a gift that i bought for myself you know you i think you might be honest of right so collectible bulls is now a bigger bigger base right we one of the investments we missed on which i think still kinda eats it us a little bit is whatnot we had the ability to invest in whatnot pre early on we tried to the guy was like i don't know there's not enough firm in the round and we didn't really push it we're like okay well we hope you know let's we want we want to and then we don't we didn't really follow up it's now how much is what not worth that i think at the time what i was like valued at fifty or sixty million dollars i it's five five i think it's five billion dollars now five billion and i think they just said that they they've done five billion in sales on their thing if you don't know what not is it's basically you open an app it's a live video of someone basically opening up like a pack of pokemon cards or nba trading cards and they're you basically you buy it so you push a button and you apple pay you could buy the pack and he'll be like oh sean alright sean you bought the pack right man good luck it opens up the pack in front of you shows you what it is and then it it mails you the cards after the fact so you kind of like you just shop live and then they opened the pack you see it's like a lottery thing you see if you win or not and then they mail you the thing after the fact it's kind of like a crazy idea but it's all collected and they've sold five billion dollars in the last i don't know twelve months or something like that of collectible so like people are getting their bur bags for some people it's pokemon cards for some people it's nba trading cards for some peep for you it's your statue of of deb booker for you know for your wife it might be an actual bi bag i think the question is who doesn't have their be yet so like basically what niche does it and we have a buddy that is going pretty hard at tech collectible so he's trying to buy like the original macintosh or like you know a piece of the first spacex falcon stuff that there's not really a market for now it just feels like random memorabilia but i think over time tech has become so much more important in culture right like growing up tech was a side thing but now it's like you got movies you know like the social network and everybody knows who these ceos are you know who zuckerberg is you know who elon is they're like the most followed people on the planet in some cases i think that tech collectible is gonna be a big thing and our our friend who's doing this i'm i'm sort of jealous that they're doing this because i think this is a smart idea yeah i think that's a great idea but i am curious what's your working bag like what what did you buy do that's insane what is the definition here so it's gotta be something that's totally irrational right like it's not about the utility of the product like i bought a piano but like i bought a piano i play the piano it's an instrument like yeah i could've have bought a cheaper one but i bought a more expensive one i i think that doesn't count i think it's also gotta be kinda like status or collection driven and i don't know if i'm a collector i'm not a car guy not a watch guy you did buy a crypto pony like you know three years ago i did i did but i didn't buy i mean we bought we bought that just as like a marketing gag for for mil crow we didn't really it's not like i actually was like oh my god i love the art yeah it's never been a thing for me yeah you know what i would do i would do if musicians did their version of be so like if a musician was like hey we have like a kind of like a one of one collectible maybe it's a recording or it's a freestyle or it's like a a variation of the song and they're only gonna know they're they sell one of them and you get to collect it as a piece of art that's music i would be pretty into that i think that's pretty cool maybe m family needs to come with its own barking bag that we can offer the biggest number fans you six statue of you dude alright episode is brought to you by mercury they are the finance platform of choice for over two hundred thousand companies it shouldn't be surprised because i use it myself for not one not two but i have eight different mercury accounts i have seven for different companies that i i'm a part of and then i have my own personal account because now they have personal banking which is really cool feature i highly highly recommend it like i said i use it myself the reason why is because the way that mercury works is beautiful it's very intuitive and you could tell that it's actually made by a start it's an entrepreneur you could tell it's made by somebody who used other banking products in the past and didn't like all the different rough edges and and annoy and decided to you know actually fix it himself and really any type of entrepreneur you are let's say you're an agency well one of the things every agency has to do is be able to send invoices easily create them send them to customers and stay current on your balances with all your customers well you can do that inside mercury and so i think that mercury is great highly recommend you check it out and thank you for sponsoring the show for more information check out mercury dot com mercury is a financial technology company not a bank check show notes for details alright what else you you got any the other good ones what's your best one what what's your what's your best idea okay i think my best idea i've got a bunch of good ones but i'll give you a great one so i think yeah i've been thinking a lot about when you're post economic which i am not but i hope to be at some point in the future the define post economic what does that mean people don't know that you know basically if you've made over ten million dollars and you don't have to work what are you gonna spend your time doing like i would say post economic is when you no longer make decisions based on money that's both spending decisions like you decide what you want the price doesn't really matter right and this happens first at like you buy guacamole at chipotle you don't care that it's two bucks then you buy you can go to any restaurant by anything you can go to any store by anything it it just levels up from there you travel first class you don't even think about it you travel private it you don't even think about it right like spending is one side and then the other side is earning meaning you decide what to do with your time not based on how much money it's gonna make you that's to me that's post economic yeah so like once you're there you could you basically you have all these nice things and you just quickly get used them right it's like you move into a nicer house after a week you totally for you just don't even you know for lack of a better word you don't even care right it's like yeah i'm used to it get a nicer car so i've been thinking about like what are actual experiences that change every like you people want i think when you're there one you wanna feel you wanna feel pain again like you kinda wanna go back to where you were when you were starting something but when everything was hard and you wanna feel pain so my big idea is survivor so we all you know obviously you know a survivor is basically tv month long tv show where you go in the middle of nowhere and you have to compete but imagine a world where we basically created in the island where you have to pay a hundred grand to go compete in a real life survivor so you get dropped in the middle of nowhere for a whole month you pay a hundred grand to be there in the winner you know the winner wins money but the whole idea is basically an actual survivor that you pay to be there all your friends and family can watch it's live streamed and it's purely for when those people are post economic and you know they're sick and tired of flying over the world they're sick and tired just staying at random hotels like you know it's just not that interesting like go back to square one and go be beyond survivor you know i think when you first said it i was like oh this sounds kinda dumb but actually you know we have so many friends that basically sell their company and immediately start training for iron ironman right or triathlon and actually if you wanna get in great shape like or like an ultra race right where or you're like gonna run a hundred miles or fifty month fifty miles or something like that and you know like marathon and ultra razors like they're in good shape in one dimension but it's not actually like good for your body like they end up just kind of shin influence and just sort of destroying their body a little bit they don't get in like very good aesthetic shape to do it right you don't like put on muscle you kind of like skinny yourself out but they do it because they wanna do something hard and you're right you kinda feel alive and you feel tough and you got a story to tell and you challenge yourself and like you do this like voluntary hardship cold plunge same thing voluntary hardship that you get to show and so i actually think that you're probably right that there's a number of people who would sign up for like a combination of it's a digital detox right because you're not gonna have your phone internet you're gonna be totally disconnected it's hard and so you're gonna get that like hardship experience without having to like train to run a long race and i think it's like transformative right of passage type of thing which it seems like people need more and more now that like the whole world is so easy push a button and someone will like literally deliver a platter of nacho to your door from door dash right the life has never been easier in one sense which creates a craving for hard but if hard is not natural then you have to sort of create an artificial hard and i think that's what this is it's an artificial hard i think that's why people like this david go jo willing like think that's why people gravitate towards that type of stuff because there's some itch they're trying to scratch and it seems like you're saying here's a version of that pay fifty or a hundred grand and you're gonna go for what did you say thirty days i yeah thirty days that's all it takes thirty days and you have to survive just with your own bearing necessities on an island yeah and you know this works you take to other franchises here right like love island it's like don't go on match so he's match this is actually just like branded as part of the game as part of the show is what you're saying i'm just saying you take all these i all these popular through the reality tv shows and people just go pay to have their own versions of them because it's better than you know dude love is blind i swear i can't believe there's not just like a love is blind tour going around city to city where people who are single and see love is blind they're like alright i wanna do it i wanna go the pods i'm gonna meet somebody that way and i'll spend you know basically three or four days doing this and then come out and then night date that person trimmed the like marriage park because that's the drama for tv that doesn't make any sense like oh we propose we have to get married in twenty days like you could take that part out but just the like the pods experience if i was single i would want to do that and that's of an insane thing i can't believe that's not on tour i mean i for realized survivor i'd pay a hundred grand right now to go there and you know basically like was just like you failure grand i could just drop you off somewhere dude now i'll pick it for thirty days yeah know i i think that i think like reality tv done well for people that wanna pay for that is a great idea it yeah it creates the desire and the curiosity of like could i do it how would i do it right like and so if you just made that accessible to people yeah for sure for sure people would wanna do that and and by the way is this like are you saying this a business or what do what are you saying here i'm saying it's a fun fun maybe it's a business you know maybe it could be like the new tough mud it's like you know back in the day when tough mud was pretty big maybe it could be the new tough mud it's just a five ten day experience you know maybe yeah yeah i think you gotta bring the price down i mean a hundred thousand is really it's it's very high i think you really i think if you did this for ten thousand dollars this might work not to not to cheap in your idea but i feel like you could get some scale with this thing because does it cost you to run it it's like you just need like a medic then they're gonna be like twenty people doing this together they can live as a tribe in fact it's probably better as a tribe and not you on your own right yeah probably way better like your five friends as a tribe in there are you doing the whole thing or are you voting people off or no it's just thirty days of survival now you got you're voting people off i think you guys the whole thing okay gotcha think it's the whole thing alright awesome you got some more on here so let's do cool carpal tunnel brand oh i know what this is yeah so this then put your hands up right now if you're on youtube so ben right now he's powering wearing the i've never seen ben's right hand because every time i get on a cold with ben he's wearing this michael jackson glove this absolute o j str glove on his right hand at all times and it's because you had like a carpal tunnel issue it's just wearing that all day honestly i don't even know if i have carpal tunnel anymore and i'm used to wearing the glove and i like to fit so i'm like go you know people make cool batting gloves for baseball just my thing now you know now we just need cool bat cool gloves for working like where is the cool carpal tunnel brand so okay so so i just like to explained this you started having pain you ruled how to fix it and then this came up i mean i think it's like one of those web empty things though it's like oh one day i was like my hand feels kinda weird when i'm typing maybe i've got bad form and then you just go down this whole thing and you start watching youtube videos about oh maybe i've have carpal tunnel and then i went to amazon and i probably bought it's spent five hundred dollars on fifty pairs of these gloves that i now wear every day we were talking about a touch the other day with harley from shopify and the thing about touch is they took a very boring sterile category hand sanitizer literally sterile and the founder rebranded it remade it into something that was kinda sexy kinda cool smelled good and then they started collab mid made the designs look good they started branding collaborating with disney and others and licensing the ip and i think about like actually all kinda like braces like you know basically like you you're talking about your wrist brace your wrist glove i have like a knee thing there's like arm sleeves there's like you know a lot of people wear these because they have pain and they're they have plant fa they have knee pain they have elbow pain they have wrist pain they have frozen shoulder whatever it is and actually all of those are very ugly and very sterile looking similar to hand sanitizer and you're you're probably right that somebody could just make a cooler brand in that space charge more for it but like if you wanna it's it is fashion it doesn't have to be ugly it is a thing you're wearing why not make it look better and see what we what comes out of that yeah i mean i think it's a note i think it's a no brainer again i kinda wanna hide this glove when i wear it but you know hey like it's no brainer yeah but although i don't know what glove would look cool on you like well what i do to that glove to make it not look like you're wearing the michael jackson glove i i really know and if it was a different color would that really change anything it's hard to say i think it needs johnny iv like you know if we had if we had five billion dollars we you could get johnny iv on it alright what else should we talk about i've got one more that i think we should hit which is seeing at the top of this episode we were talking about how i went to k academy you know basically when spent a week at duke basketball competed really hard and c deal the cool thing about it is coach k was there the whole time he's sitting there he doesn't talk much he doesn't talk much but he does give like two or three speeches and you he said one thing in his speech that i wrote down that i thought was really good i said two things one of them is part of the half idea the other was just interesting he said you know at duke we pursue moments which i wrote down because i think and it's really you know basically he's like everything's a moment i wanna hold these moments that are awesome so you know when i kinda took that said alright i wanna pursue moments i think that's what does that mean sounds cool what do you really would mean but like what's what's the example of that what do what we mean by pursue moments i think it's basically just like be present and like you're looking for like very and enjoy very specific things and remember those things but also i was just like that sounds cool it's like a cool thing to tell me mom i do pursue moments i think that like yeah i think about like whether it's with my kids or it's like you know yeah you're gonna do a business for five years that's a long time and like if you just if i probably just told myself that like alright i'm just trying to pursue this moment what's the moment i'm trying to pursue or like if i'm in the moment really pursue it really go really go for it and lean into it i think i kinda like that alright i mean i buy that go ahead and then the second part i was like you know he was talking about how he worked with kobe and you know he he was basically talking this story about how he he made kobe cry before they played him like this usa gold medal game i think in two thousand eight when they beat spain and he was talking about how he motivated him so i went around and like you know at this k academy everyone there is like an ex duke player so like there's fifty ex duke guys just kinda walking around that you can talk to so i went and asked like five of them like you know what what was coach case so good at like what what was the a plus plus that and everyone says motivation and i know you're like a motivation guy i know you're at tony robbins disciple and you know everyone talks about how he just made these incredible custom videos so it'd be like alright if we're before this game he's gonna bring me in and he's gonna have this custom thing that he built just for me just a focus on you know my hustle or my intensity so i kinda had this idea which is like coach k in a box which is with ai could you essentially make something that does custom motivational video based on all these inputs that exactly you need today so it's like okay if i wear this device and a knew everything about me i just wanna a custom motivational video right now for this work and i'm about to do or for the sales call i'm about to take so that's the idea like coach k in a box and i know you have a bunch of thoughts let me hear him well when i was at duke my roommate trevor was trying to walk on to the basketball team and he ended up being the last guy cut so he didn't end up getting on the team but he was a manager for the team for few years so he would tell me all the time about coach k like yeah what is he doing all that and i had the same question like you right like this guy's the i think he's the all time winning ish college basketball coach he was the men's he's the olympic basketball coach for for a long time so okay he's a goat okay so you know think you asked the right question like what makes this guy so great because i wanna learn from that i wanna learn from the goats and trevor told me he's like dude he would do this stuff in the locker room so what he would do is i thought when a coach gives a motivational talk it's they walk in alright everybody listen up like we got a big game we wanna you know get out there give it a role are you gonna give it your all yeah no let me hear you say it yeah i thought that's what it is no no no here's how it worked he was like before coach k enters the room they dim the lights they would turn on the the big screen that they had in the locker room and it would be edited video like kinda like what a sixteen year old kid on tiktok would make and it's basically a splice video that was like let's say it was them playing the last time they played this team but then inter splice was like footage from brave hart it'd be like with the speech at brave hart the war scenes splice did with the game and you're like oh kinda cheesy to but they're like no trust in the moment the shit hit hard it's like the music the sp saying the speech the the footage of you and then at the end literally coach k came out face painted like brave heart roll the ball onto the ground and c is old like he was like in his seventies he had like double hip replacement and he would dive on the ball and like basically like like you like the the ultimate sign of hustle and basketball is diving for a loose ball and he would he would run the locker room face to dive onto the ball screaming and be like and bailey like let's fucking go kill these guys right now and people would be like whoa like it was total shock value for the team and he would really light into them and get get into them on that so he would do the motivational up videos and then last time we did or two years ago when we did our our basketball camp that me and you do we call it hoop group but we basically take twenty five or thirty of the most like ambitious founders we know like this just like i don't know half people there of billionaires but they loved a they love basketball and we went to go visit duke campus and we played in duke stadium cameron stadium and when we were there we were asking one of the the x players who's now a coach we were like can you tell us a great coach k story and he did he goes i was on the team i was a captain and i had a bad game and after that bad game the next day at i practice i thought maybe coach k would kinda like rip into me a little bit or tell me i needed to play better that's kinda what i expected and you know if you do what people expect you don't really get much of a response right they're they're ready for it's like somebody who's they've they're tense up you can you can't really like you know push them over they're they're ready for it and so he he he's like he doesn't say anything during the practice to me doesn't talk to me and we're practicing i'm kinda like he didn't didn't say anything and then he calls me over to this room and they have this film room where they normally like review game footage and he's like that room has like six tv screens or eight tv screens in the room and i walk in and it's on my faces is on every single one of the screens and it's just me and him in there and it's it was a basically a slideshow of his facial expressions from the last game and it was just his face kind whining i didn't get a call being bet being i missed that shot kinda of being bummed about it i got taken out of the game i had bad body language there and then in the second half start i was having a bad game so was just kind of you know i was checked out when we were doing the team huddle and then again i foul this guy and i disagree with the call and i'm po i'm doing this with my hands being like oh come on man if they froze it on that screen and it he goes coach k looked at me and he goes if i ever see the palms of your hands again you will never play for this team again he's like i don't ever he goes you're a captain you're a man you're a leader leaders don't look like this they don't beg and wine and po for something you know like you need to carry yourself like a leader he goes i don't care what you do i don't care if the ball goes in or not but you will not act like this again and he goes dude that burned into my skull like he's like i just i would never do that again and i thought that was an incredible story i was like dude this is a whenever i talk to people about like oh what's it like to work with el elon or steve jobs i'm looking for a story like this what do they actually do that's different than something i would never do that i would never think to do but it makes sense when they do it that like holy shit yeah that would actually like shift the way that somebody operates to somebody works i couldn't believe that story do you remember that one yeah it's insane and that's a like that's what i want i'm like okay he's a good motivator but like tell me the stories that he like i wanna like i'm a go we should just go write a book where you go get twenty five coach k stories that are just about how he motivates because it's insane yeah exactly and also just kinda makes you think like damn i wouldn't even think to do that like i'm how much you know there there's no rule against something like that but like what a it just feels against the norms but i guess like as you build up your own credibility it's almost like lean into that power and basically use your credibility like he could kinda say anything he could do anything kinda crazy and get away with it because he's coach k i guess there's a method to the madness i wonder like i wonder if he was doing that stuff early on and i wonder if he got more bold about it as he went along but i'm with you dude if i had a coach k my wife life would be good i don't know if i could do the mode motivational speech because like i think part of it is you need like to b roll needs to be me like planks like the b roll of me just like typing emails like like writing a document like i don't i don't think there's any you you could play fort minor on that track it's not gonna do anything for me might it might i don't know yeah and also there was this one story like you know a few years ago the heat had that miraculous round of the finals and i specifically remember this moment where this guy bam at bios was like up there at the end and taught you they're like interviewing him because he's the eastern conference finals mvp and he's just he gets on the mic and he goes dude donna has had this insane video for us that changed how we approached game seven when they beat the celtic and i spent the past two years like trying to figure out what that video was so at this camp but the last thing about k academy is i i went up to justice wins low who played for the heat i was like dude what are the heat do to motivate like what was in that video he's like i was on the team then but i could text him guys he's like but i'll tell you now it is exactly like the thing you heard from coach k it is gonna be something so custom it's gonna be brave hard it's gonna be fort minor it's gonna be like they're pulling out all the stops and you know it's like in that setting and ever since then i'm like dude i just wanna like next hoop crew but i just wanna experience that for like ten minutes that's my only ask yeah that's too good i love that story yeah i i really love that story that's like that's in my like hall of fame hall fame of like you know motivational stories what else you do you wanna to do anything else we we're gonna wrap up let's see i think i think we should wrap on one final thing which is you know earlier you were talking about club lt tv which is awesome you know i think we had a hundred fifty two hundred people in it back in the day meeting i think once every other week to talk business meet each other you know i think we should bring that thing back in some way what do you think what would we do so we don't i don't think we need to do the e com version of it anymore i so here's my here's my thesis thesis is a very fancy word for from what i'm about to say so let me let me ring that expectation down in m mfa has roughly a million people who listen to it maybe not all regularly but that's like kind of our reach is a million people who are all entrepreneurial they're all what i call like entrepreneurs with a sense of humor i who i think we attract people who are entrepreneur entrepreneurial with it and they have a sense of humor and so my my thinking is i'm never gonna meet all those people honestly i don't really wanna meet to a million people that's not really my goal however the top one percent of our audience is is like a fascinating group of people right they're very interesting they you know it's gonna be like people who are like ceo is a public companies it's some dude and you know wichita who's got a forty million dollar like chemicals plant that he runs there's a guy who's got this like tutoring business side hustle thing that's whatever there's a bunch of interesting people in that top one percent i think what would we dope is if we did club lt tv again which was like your thing you would curate it was a curated group i think that's key because you you want everybody else in there to be somebody you're happy to have met right like that's the goal take the top one percent of m i'm listeners and then basically do like what like a happy hour kinda like a speed dating thing that's kind of the way we did it before which is like you meet once a month roughly and ben kinda puts people in groups and then you go you talk with a specific prompt and then he switches that he shuffle the groups and so you in an hour you're gonna meet a bunch of cool people that's and you're gonna learn one or two things and i think that would be awesome we should bring that back yeah we should do that by the way people don't know club lt tv stands in in e com lt tv means lifetime value it's like the key metric there so we made it club lt tv which is basically the the name the gimmick of the thing but the the funny thing was ben would always do these like he would pursue those moments he would make these little things that would make it fun so like you would send everybody like custom zoom backgrounds or like the start of every club lt tv because it was what we called it a club was like a club he would have like like dj call would record a cameo and you would play it for the whole group at the beginning it was awesome it was a lot of fun i think you should keep doing those things because that i i still remember that and i think we i think we read the five i think we had red i think we had meth man and red man too i think yeah every time there was like some washed up rapper who would hype the shit out of us for like the first thirty seconds of the of the thing ben's just burning like five hundred dollar cameo to make that happen yeah man we mean to me it's like you know it's like when you meet someone that also likes m even for me and youtube it's like oh i i like this guy or i like this woman and i like this girl i mean actually you mean you like that person no i know what you mean it we're not for everybody so if you like it the odds of you getting along with somebody else who really like likes the podcast are pretty high it's kinda like one of those things where if two people were in the hat you would do the nod and be like okay we i'm sure we would have a pretty fun hangout if we hung out and that's kinda of the idea here yeah and it's not hanson and it's not out group it's just like very lightweight meet some other cool people you know gets to know the other people name it's it's free by the way this not not like a paid thing so what do want how do you want people to like apply because you're gonna curate the group so what do you want people to do to how how should people do it let's see we put a link at the just put a link let's try a link in the description alright if you wanna do it if you think you you're in that top one percent of interesting fun m listeners put yourself down there and tell tell who you are and then ben will kinda curate a good group every every month for us alright and if you wanna follow me on twitter ben m levi i don't tweet much but i you know i will was when was your last tweet dude it was like in twenty eighteen it's been a long time it's been a long time so that's that's ben thanks for coming on dude i'm gonna talk to you probably right after this because that's what we do and call you after every podcast guests so i'll see you in a second yeah alright thanks guys i feel like i could rule the world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a less travel never looking back alright so when my employees join hampton we haven't do a whole bunch of onboarding stuff but the most important thing that they do is they go through this thing i made called copy that copy that is a thing that i made that teaches people how to write better and the reason this is important is because at work or even just in life we communicate mostly via text right now whether we're emailing slack blogging texting whatever most of the ways that we're communicating is by the written word and so i made this thing called copy that that's guaranteed to make you right better you could check it out copy that dot com i post every single person who leaves a review whether it's good or bad i post it on the website and you're gonna see a trend which is that this is a very very very simple exercise something that's so simple that they laugh at they think how is this gonna actually impact us and make us right better but i promise you it does you gotta try at copy that dot com i guarantee it's gonna change the way you write again copy that dot com

alright sam why are we dressed so festive it's casual friday baby it's casual friday and the best stuff is always in the group chat and these are the things that i sent in the group chat that i wouldn't post publicly but decided you know what is casual friday it let's air them out alright can we do the first one the first one here it is okay this is a tweet from dylan dillon says at long last any app can be your alarm app apple has finally introduced alarm kit this is at the the apple announced with the app this week that lets any app have the same privileges as as the clock app this is long overdue dylan you are absolutely right dude i did not understand this is this a joke no this is real so basically you know like apple gives you certain permissions right if you're an app you can send push notifications you could use the camera you could use the gps but for a long time no app could become your alarm app it couldn't access the same features of an alarm app which is like now any app you don't just have to use the apple alarm app anybody could build it an app for alarm sounds don't understand yeah this does sound small so change my mind why is this important so think about it this way there's like two billion people with iphones and you know not every app can address all two billion people but an alarm clock can basically address like a billion or two people who actually have the need for an alarm clock so what happened was two weeks ago or you know a week ago as an app developer you that was not a category you could be in and now it's a category where you could be in where there's a billion active users that might want your app and there's been no creativity and no innovation so like the app store has been been out for you know the years now so a lot of stuff is solved right camera apps are pretty good map apps are pretty good with google maps and ways and you know ride sharing apps there's all kinds of apps and there's been tons of innovation but this has been basically artificially blocked wait really quick do you remember the the joke of peter t where you said you wanted to flying cars but you got a hundred and ninety characters like twitter wasn't even but forty one forty this is the even worse version of that you wanted find cars now you can make alarm apps you wanted ai instead you got a snooze button by the way i met the guy who wrote that line for i didn't beat it by i i i i found out who wrote that line for peter till if you you wait wait wait you met him okay you met you mistakenly said you met him versus you heard i met guy who was like that's the guy who wrote that that's peter's guy he he comes up with those and that was his job was basically follow peter around listen to what he's saying and then try to like transform his sentiment into something really punchy and that guy came up with that line which became the basis for like founders fun and like a rally cry that's cool well tom them a good job alright so check this out easy idea david go would you like a million dollars because david go today should pay some kid to make the alarm app that's basically the david go skinned alarm app like i wanna wake up with david go just saying wake up bitch there's miles to run and i just wanna hear that when i wake up and not like you know the default alarm sound for the for my phone are there when is this going live when when's this alarm kit thing so they did the developer preview that's what w w dc is they tell you what's possible and you could start building with it but it's not like available yet customers but usually i think it's just like a couple months it's like not not very long this is low hanging fruit my friend it's a good idea it's good idea yeah this fruit that might just be on the ground actually this might be rotting fruit i don't know i'm not entirely sure alright next let me go by the way we're totally stealing this gimmick from our boys at tb vpn shout out to don and geo part of the brotherhood but i gave them a shout out later on one of my one of my photos or tweets is from them which yeah they basically had the the true innovation of the podcast industry of printing out the tweets and we decided that we too shell out print out tweets but i've been doing five tuesday for a lot longer than those guys i i think i'm okay alright this one comes from chris ba he says this is a is chris ba bang he says in twenty twenty two mckinsey paid fifty five million dollars was paid fifty five million dollars to advise warner brothers when they merged with discovery they charge them thirty seven million by advising them to change hbo to hbo max then to max then back to hbo max and in twenty twenty five they build them an additional sixty three million again to determine that warner brothers and discovery should be separate brands again did you see that mckinsey last week laid off of fifteen percent of their staff because of ai because now like ai could do half the job or what is that work yeah for sure this is this is absolutely insane what did you say you're allergic to lack of common sense this is ridiculous to this this is exactly the sort of lack of comments since i was talking about this tweet has seventy thousand likes by the way i don't know if you totally made up these numbers or if these are true but directional correct there were some good reactions to this greg greg tweeted don't be the problem be the solution that creates the problem that is my takeaway yeah it is pretty ridiculous and have you ever had friends that have worked at mckinsey yeah yeah my buddy rom romaine who i do a bunch of business stuff with he was a former mckinsey guy they're easy to make fun of because you're like what is a a twenty three year old know about business but like i have a friend that there and she had some pretty amazing like basically a pe firm in her case identified like a bunch of dairy farms that they wanted to like roll up and so they bought a bunch of them the pe firm did and then they hired mckinsey folks to come and figure out how to make it more efficient and so she literally would go to iowa every single week for about six months in devised interesting things like for example we're gonna change the bucket size that we like use that the workers use like like like have you seen land man yes yeah when like the lawyer shows up on the like on the oil field and she's like got her high heels like stuck in the mud basically that's what i'm imagining the mckinsey consultant showing up at the the cattle farm it it was kind of great it's like i learned about this whole this whole experience she had there is value that it is created from these consultants even though we like to make fun of them have you did ram remain actually work on anything interesting well they deserve to be made fun of because they're incredibly smart they get paid very well so you know that means you're a punching bag yeah so so that's basically the criteria for like yeah that's free game right that's it's like what a nerd was in middle schools like the opposite traits right like the person you could give us swirly to in in and sort of junior high would be like somebody who sort of weak and powerless but would you grow up you can't make fun of the week of powerless you only make fun of the powerful and yeah so yeah romeo romeo was like basically he would tell me things that they would and i'm like that's really smart i i was kinda hoping you guys were a bunch of idiots but actually that sounds pretty good but what i did come away with was they have huge brains but small balls is generally like the person who stays in consulting and that's like which by the way that's the definition of anxiety is when you're the definition of anxiety is when your brain is a lot bigger than your balls so that's probably why there's is a bunch of anxious consultants running around i like how you just i like how you're just saying something is the definition of is absolutely not the definition of and that's hilarious i'm gonna start doing that just well well you know the root word of that and then you just to make it not even the root word alright we got a couple more reactions our boy ty lopez comes in comes in hot off top ups a good gig you know it's you know it's a good scam when ty lopez is giving you giving you respect oh these are all replies to that original one okay i didn't even i did been following that yeah we're we're learning that that's insane and what about this one this is the consulting meme consulting if you're not a part of the solution there's really good money to be made in prolong the problem there's this thing that happens in sports and i've always wanted to be a part of business so you know and you have see how they have press conferences where they really talk shit about each other and i know felt like that's the best part you know i wish business people would do the same like i wish right now i've gone doors they're awesome you've been to the press conferences i've been one time i tried to sneak in when i ran the hustle like i try to like get i couldn't get credit i i was like let me if i can get credential to this and they didn't give it to me and so i showed up anyway if they kicked me out so i i went like they maybe walk to the back and like sit with the crowd and i and i watched it yeah it was great they didn't respect the hustle as a newsletter as a media brand dude the not the hustle is the worst name ever when you're trying to hustle someone like i was sure do know what i mean it was just like some random security guard and she i'm my name john scam yeah hoping for you tell me your coinbase master it was the worst like the lady like giggle at me and it was like a it was a laugh it was like so no i got kicked out it did not work but if anyone's listening who works with the u if you and i could get credential to go to a u and ask a question i would do that in a heartbeat and i would take it incredibly seriously arguably too seriously might ruin all of it alright this episode is brought to you by hubspot they're doing a big conference is that they're big one they do called inbound they have a ton of great speakers that are coming to san francisco september third two september fifth and it's got a pretty incredible lineup they have comedian like amy poe they have da from ant dark cast sean evans from hot ones and if you're somebody who's marketing or sales or ai and you just wanna know what's going on what's coming next it's a great event to go to and hey guess what i'm gonna be there you can go to inbound dot com slash register to get your ticket took inbound twenty twenty five again september third through fifth in san francisco hope to you there alright what what do you have next do the frank s one oh okay this is good this is related this is actually related to what i was just talking about so frank lu loop who is the man's band ceo he's the david go of the corporate world would you agree yeah i mean he's pretty baller he's he kinda says like it is for people don't know he took over he's been a he a bunch of he's ceo a bunch of companies but he took over at snowflake and he has all these famous memos that he wrote on linkedin and it was basically like don't be a bitch work hard like that's like how he summarizes everything yeah but it's a little bit different so he's got this book called to amp it up but if you really you could just read his blog post called to amp it up and get eighty percent of the idea it's not even just about working hard is like pick up the pace pick up that there's his his basic point is that in every organization there's an incredible amount of slack that's just built up it's an expectation of timelines of rigor of of effort of everything and then another one of those is common sense and like his approach is just to cut through all the bullshit and so he has this quote where he's like talking about the man and the you know that famous like man in the arena quote yeah it's i kinda i i kinda think that that quote is super lame now it's been hijacked by people i don't like i know cha off is what saying yeah yeah we're was people a singular word alright here we go so here's what frank lu says he says there's lots of people in this world who are not really in the arena they're either observers consultants or agents or vcs that just provide capital but there are some people in the arena they're very special people and then he says he talks about he was asked to speak at a business school where they always ask for his advice he says you all have elite education you'll have many job offers paying you big bucks your parents at siblings will be incredibly proud of you but they're all consulting jobs for bain mckinsey and companies like that you're gonna have an easy path to pretty quick earnings but you'll never know whether you have what it takes to actually build something new in roosevelt words you will be those cold and timid souls who'd neither no victory nor defeat i had actually never read that part of the of the quote and i thought that part's way colder than the than the the rest of it you know what i mean imagine saying this to a room full of stanford kids it's like that's i wonder what that what do you think the reaction would have been like i think the reaction would have been like god he's so right after i finish up this first four year tenure at mackenzie then i'm totally gonna do that i think that's the real the true reactions like he's so right i'm not actually get a res send the demon actually withdraw the job offer i'm i'll i'll finish up i'm gonna make sure i get the few years and then i'm gonna go do that thing someday i've hung out with like my friend's children or you know people who are like in the applying to college age right now it's way different than when we were younger like when we were younger not going to college for a huge majority of people for anyone that's like a middle class on up it was like that wasn't even a question now it definitely seems like the smart people are saying i'm not sure what my i'm weighing my options i'm trying to look at all that's available have you noticed that no is that like and when you say that they're thinking about like trade school or dropping it out or everything's on the table yeah so for people are their parents entrepreneurs or are they the people people the peep the people who i know it's just like let's say cousins and nephews and things like that and they're mostly like well to do or at least like have a household income of two hundred thousand dollars and it's basically like this and these are smart kids so typically when we were younger sean the smart kids like always went to college now the smart kids are like i'm not sure you know i i've been in contact with this company about just going getting an insurance internship right away right at nineteen years old other people who are less of the academic like they're they're not like the geniuses they are considering trade school and it's not nearly looked like if when i was younger if you said you're going to trade school it was like it was like is that like punishment for getting in trouble you what i mean oh you're dumb yeah now i think there is a there is one hundred percent a change in sentiment so that's and i wonder i wonder if like this whole mba are dumb that's a new feeling ish that's like peter t was the one who popularized that where he said for you he goes the valuation of your company take a million dollars off for every nba employee you have and so now that's popular and i wonder the nba people who are there now and who would hear something like this how they feel if they acknowledge it or if they don't right that peter too closes like how that's like my parenting style i'm like one more word one more word and we're not going into the pool for two days oh three days and i just keep going i'm just like you say one more thing if you lose a little bit more do you stick with it there's all kinds of re trade dude i'm i'm trump i'm trump in the china deal right now wait you let your kids trade by i raise the tariffs and then there's a temporary pause for ex circumstances while we negotiate and then we have some really good interactions and then we start thinking and then they come back again and they do something you know they just throw their spaghetti on the floor and then we're back at a hundred twenty five percent terrible what age does punishment work because right now when they do something i say no it's just like they laugh at me they can start to understand like cause an effect or consequences somewhere between two and three years old i think you start to get it at a very basic level but you also have to time it so like if the kid is emotionally upset or is feeling something they're not gonna learn the lesson in the moment or they're having to fit whereas like i think as adults were like well this is why they we're try to like explain the thing while they're like you know having their meltdown down it's like you have to have let the meltdown happen and then if you wanna have a teaching moment it's like i gotta come after which is probably true for adults too but it's like very obvious with kids because they're literally melting down and we gotta figure this out because yeah i've trying to like punish her not punish or be like no you can't do this right and i just get laughed at alright read the next one so this is one of yours so it's a david sen tweet it says charlie mu told me flex charlie mu told me to read les schwab auto automatically i'm glad did because les says things like this quote success in life is being a good husband a good father and you end up being a second father to hundreds of other men and women last night i attended a wedding of a young man from our office and the young man told me that tube man had influenced his life his father and me that's worth more than money so this guy at les schwab is amazing i haven't completed his book but i'm in the middle of reading it but let me tell you about those guys i jump dumb question is less so there's charles schwab no really okay he's he's he he was a hill billy in oregon basically he was like orphan at the age of like thirteen or fourteen was like a plumber and then started a tire shop at the age of thirty one or thirty two didn't know anything about tires but started a tire shop eventually over the course of fifty years it grew into a multi billion dollar operation and he's famous for being really great at incentivizing employees and he's famous for being very good at managing and leading to the point where warren buffett charlie mu looked to stories for from him on how to proper lead and incentivize and then go to the next slide look at what he looks like so he was a hill billy he was he was a he was like from the streets type of guy i've been thinking about how i can describe these types of people because i love them and i think the best way to describe it is small town grit with big number swag something like that like these guys that you and i love who are these like blue collar so small town grit with big city swag no with like big number swag so it's like these big city swag right but what i mean is is that they're like these kind of hill billy who build these massive companies and so they can they may like for example one of our friends kevin van trump is one of them where you see this guy and he comes off or he's like hey what's going on i gonna go write my newsletter and he like he like talks like this but like turns out he makes like twenty million dollars a year and like the people who read his newsletter he'll you know kevin's this big guy from kansas city comes off like like a hill bill because he talks funny but his work is read by like world leaders and he makes twenty million dollars year and in the background of his video zoom call is like a picasso so like i love guys like this and this guy's is one of them so les schwab started a tire company he died in his nineties but ran the company up until then grew a multi billion dollar organization and i wanna go go to the next one i wanna read he wrote the his own forward to the book and i highlighted my two favorite sentences from the forward read that alright so as far just says this book is mainly written for the two thousand families that make their living selling less schwab tires and for the thousands of families to follow the next twenty thirty forty years alright so he says this what you highlighted i wrote this in november in december of nineteen eighty five i did write this a hundred percent with my forty year old tie rider and then at the bottom okay i do think jan nolan my right hand gal lo our word our word processing operator for helping me correct misspelled words and helping me with punctuation i didn't have a growth writer i wanted it in my own words and then it says basically in this i'm gonna pass on my theories of business to our people and he says should we fail to follow these policies towards customers and employees going forward i would prefer that my name be taken off the business and then it ends with you he basically says if you're not interested in business this book will bore you and if i were you i wouldn't waste my time reading it how great is that how much of a simple mi that is just here's you wanna win me here you go push me away it's politics takes oh oh you think i won't like this book watch me read every word it's called already buying a second copy trade a mean keep them keen yeah it's so easy to manipulate how how beautiful is this guy i so you read this book is it like i'm in the middle of reading it yeah so far seven out of ten fine and forget eight out of ten i'll remember the big idea but that's kind of i didn't need three hundred pages nine out of ten really enjoyed it good book ten out of ten i'm giving this book out as a gifts where is it at i'm only a quarter of the way through and it's between an eight and nine yeah and eight and nine yeah he quite it's the big idea so far he just treats people well and if you treat people well you get rewarded in return so it's it's it's it's a very simple thing which is you said there's a lack of common sense he's a very common sense rational person but often rational means cold and he is he is rational warm oh warm rational okay that's cool that's a good like because as your started of your answer was kinda boring but the end of your answer was fired there that was good so it's sort of like his original quote which was i went to i i became a father to all these people and i go to their weddings and that makes me feel great that is a rational thing to say and and it is warm versus you know what a mckinsey consultants would say which is it's all just about these numbers of a spreadsheet that is also rational but is rational cole yes so do you honest question do you think that you're you kind of are doing that do you think that you have that kinda like i'm a father lee influence a man influence on other men and is that something you think is true or take pride in are you like yes i to double down on that from this podcast because like remember when we were at this dinner or you were but i was at dinner and i told you about it like this guy came up you know at the end of the dinner he's like hey sorry i wanted to say i saw you guys over here just wanna bother you but he's like because i always asked if i say what you know what do you really like about the powder like what is it you know what's stood out to here your what's helped you and he was like he had basically mentioned he's like me and my girlfriend got pregnant we didn't plan on that but hearing you and sam talk about like kinda how fun it to have kids and build your business and they're not like either or like kinda nudge me towards deciding like you we should keep this we should do this and i remember being like whoa that's like a lot of responsibility a lot of weight on the words that i didn't really sort of think about do you feel like that yeah i do i i think it's hard to feel that way because if people knew how we record this we're just in our rooms like by ourselves talking to each other on a screen so it's hard feel a presence but i think i view this podcast as well as my company i view it a little bit more as a a very tiny way to decide the life that i want to live with others and just make that reality in my small corner of the world i also think that like i thought about like we are not even remotely like this so it i don't even love saying it but like when lebron james or some famous athlete does something bad and they're like i didn't sign up to be a role model i think about that all the time where i'm like well i used to like tweet some something that was a little bit mean and i'm like i don't care if this influences me is just me this is this is just my opinion and then now i'm like you know it holds a little bit of weight i wanna make sure that i i'm right about it and not hateful right right and you know the best thing that ever like the best thing about a podcast is that it feels like i'm just talking to you and we're just goof off here and there's only two of us but like you know let's say this episode on average these episodes get like you know three hundred thousand people listening to them i mean that's bigger than the biggest college football stadiums you know what i mean like if we if we were sitting in the in the fifty yard line and they were three stadiums stacked on top of like it it'd be like almost three or four stadiums of people stacked on top of each other do you know differently we would do this like it would suck i would i would be so nervous in thinking about every word and the show would honestly suck if it was if if it felt that way and so i think one of the real blessings is that that's not the case you don't you don't know it you're blind to it we rarely record in real life and one time that we did there was a the studio manager was a woman who was really attractive and i noticed that one time one of us or maybe i forget who said something that made her laugh and i was like oh that's felt nice i wanna i wanna make you laugh again and then and then she didn't laugh and i was like i didn't feel good started like performing really poorly i'm like i can't say the the presence of one person let alone three hundred thousand in real life that's crazy alright next in that next story i wanna show show you did you see this did you see this tweet no here here's what it says so this is from at restructuring which is a it's a good account by way do you follow this account no is this all about the companies that have gone out of business no it's kinda like pe it's like a pe a type of account they retrieve private equity type of stuff anyways we talked about this a while ago i believed didn't we but so i i think we mentioned it but i didn't i didn't know the story so the the headline here is man steals a hundred and twenty two million dollars from facebook facebook and google simply by sending them random bills which they agreed to pay why is it a crime why is that crime exactly this the tweet here is this remains my favorite path to wealth exploring exploiting the big company inefficiencies should not be illegal i agree it it all fair love war if if i said you at invoice and you pay it am i at fault or you hold on what's going on here but there is a little more to the story so have you read about how this actually worked no well wasn't he like legitimately a vendor for them no no i think that was a little bit of the problem okay so here's the story so there's a fifty year old dude of the guy who's in cuffs here and he was impersonating a company so there was a company called quan computer that's a legit company that was a vendor for facebook and google he sets up a company also called quan computer but bases it out of latvia and so he just copies the same company name the same logo but it's incorporated in a different country and he starts making fake invoices contracts letters corporate stamps corporate seals and he's sending these to facebook and google for over two years and he got paid out a hundred and twenty two million dollars across the two companies so ninety eight million from facebook and twenty three million from google if they then find him in latvia extra eyed him and here's a great quote from the us attorney so the guy's name i guess it's rim rum sal so rum sal thought he could hide behind a computer screen and halfway across the world while he conducted his fraudulent scheme but he has learned the arms of the american justice system are long and he now faces time in a us prison dude how hard is this guy this this us attorney this easy by the way i think he still made out good he had to give back he had to forfeit forty nine million and he had to pay another i think twenty six million in restitution that doesn't add up to a twenty two million so he he might have still made a bunch of money like conversation do you have with your wife or your like so what do you do what do you do guy how today i kinda wanna get him on the pod gel pod a rare category of illegal but impressive no yeah yeah yeah yeah which like it's like the like the bernie made off scheme not cool and impressive like you know what i'm wanna like i wanna learn more about it right right and if you judge us for saying impressive in illegal like do you like oceans eleven is that those guys are like you're rooting for the guys who robbing anyways this episode brought you by hubspot media they have a cool new podcast that's for ai called the next wave it's by matt wolf and nathan lands and they're basically talking about all the do tools that are coming out how the landscape is changing what's going on with ai tech so if you wanna be up to date on ai tech it's a cool podcast you could check out listen to the next wave wherever you get your podcast alright here we go so what else we got oh i i have something here on chat gp have you seen this okay so chat product retention curves is a product manager's wet dream their one month retention has skyrocketed from less from less than sixty percent two years ago to an unprecedented ninety percent youtube was best in class with eighty five percent six month retention is trending towards eighty percent and rapidly rising generational product okay so this little line chart here if for people who don't really recognize this imagine when you're at a hospital and they hook the patient up and you have the heart monitor and you see that heartbeat that line and it's gotta keep beeping for the patient to be good right and mean you have all these these monitors with these little lines well this is the equivalent of that for a company so what this is is a retention curve so the the line at the very bottom here would be like the oldest cohort so that's like people who signed up for chad two years ago and as you could see it starts at a hundred percent of people using it on day zero or month zero but then even by month one it's at sixty percent by month two only fifty five percent are still using it and by the time you get to a year you know less than it looks like thirty percent of people are still using the product so that means more than two thirds of people just stopped using it after they tried it and that's the sign of a product that won't win as is because the bucket is too leaky you know you're getting too many customers in that are that are churning up they're not finding value in the product and what this curve or the what the other lines are are the next month the next month the next month and as they improve the product you can see that the drop offs are way less so now what he's saying is that basically the one month retention is now ninety percent so people are finding so much value the first month that they use it that a month later ninety percent of them are still using it and so this is how this is like the key metric for most businesses is retention that's the thing that tells you if your business is gonna be around for a long time or if it's just a leaky bucket and seeing this with chad gp is pretty stunning and it kind of leads into my next tweet here which is that open is now at ten billion n arr so that's two x since the end of twenty twenty four so they basically doubled revenue from five billion to ten billion and it's been less than three years since it launch so in less than three years they've grown this product to ten billion dollars in recurring revenue which is just stunning and it highlighted to me one one very big takeaway from this which is that open ai is the facebook of this current generation maybe more twenty years ago it was google and amazon we're the big deal that was that was like thirty years ago was like microsoft twenty years ago at google and amazon maybe fifteen years ago or so you know it was that was the facebook era and facebook was the thing that was like oh it's a billion dollar company a fit ten billion dollar company and now it's a trillion dollar company well the one right now is is open ai for the next decade it's gonna we're just gonna mean you were probably gonna look at ourselves to be like how were we doing this podcast how are we looking at these tweets these charts and just like why didn't we go buy open ai stock like how how dumb do we have to be like it was on sarah's list three years ago or something like that wait wasn't it really did we talk about it then maybe not three but two for sure like i think i think the very first sara episode we probably had them on there and it's like i was like what what kind of do is already that we don't own any of this stock don't can you own it yeah you can buy it in secondary i i had a buddy of mine about two or three years ago he was at my house you know who this guy is and we were talking and he was like yeah i have a job offer from neuro link and open ai and was like wow those are both pretty promising what do and he was like what should i and we just had a conversation about it and i didn't know anything i mean the the at the time that was really hard like they're both like run by typhoon they're both really interesting they're both the hot startup and right he chose open ai and he has made so much money just in and chew like tens of millions of dollars in the in like two and a half or three years just from being like the one thousand employee something like that like like that's like it it it's just astounding at how big the is this his job yeah he's not like these kinda like the rare ai phd type dudes right is he a pro he a programmer or is he a product person what what's this what's the role product person yeah product person sorry sorry sorry programmer a programmer okay massive difference yeah and i was gonna say if you're a product guy and you made tens of millions dollars of opening i how's that even possible if you're just like it a random a person engineers okay i guess i can see it you know you get a you get a stock package that's worth two million dollars over four years but you got it when opening i was valued at sixty billion and now it's valued at four hundred billion right so it's it's up you know eight x or something like that and so your two million dollar stock package is turned out to actually be a sixteen million dollar stock package it's crazy that that's a normal thing that happens that's happened to like a thousand people right now are more in like in a in a like thirty mile radius of where i live this was sort of an un we kind of like glazed over this but basically harley from shopify i was on the pod and he at one point they were worth two and fifty i think when we recorded with them there with a hundred and fifty billion dollars and it's basically like the hundredth largest company in the world right now which means it's like the whole like the hundredth largest company probably ever ever created it's like around the world like so if every business ever created it is the one hundredth most valuable which is a which is astounding right that's a that's an astounding number to think that open ai is a lesson it's a it's a decade old or something like that company and it is already like the fiftieth or twenty fifth largest company ever created isn't that astounding not even from a like a product or the technology but literally how do you organize that like to organize the people who are work there organize the investors just the organizational you know they say like just the idea of like you know you have your heard new stories about china building like a a a fast railroad in like you know six months like it's it's it's it's sort of fascinating like that it's definitely the number one most valuable profit ever is it still really a non profit i think said they're not gonna he also said they're not gonna make a profit until they hit what did he say he goes we can't make a profit until we get the ten billion in revenue or something remember thing earlier about like just push me away their investor thing which is like listen we have to put a cap a hundred x cap on your returns because this is gonna get bananas so dude that pitch the balls it takes to have that as your pitch which is like instead of promising upside saying listen we're gonna need to cap your upside because it's gonna be so insane how much value we create so i just need to make sure you're okay with that i'm gonna start using that just i was starting using that form formula in my life skip to the this el elon one yeah alright why don't you frame this one up alright so the breaking news president trump comments on elon musk's apology i thought it was very nice that he said that trump says and elon musk has a tweet that says i regret some of the posts about president trump last week they went it too far insane this is insane you can't do that and apologize right there is you don't apologize like dude if i call you a a a pe file rap in front of literally the entire world right i can't say i'm sorry there's you there's no sorry big enough you're saying dude would angus khan doesn't apologize like when you do like can you imagine napoleon being like hey that one it went a little far do you wanna like shake it out like oh you're saying conqueror can't apologize that's the take that was a such a crazy thing to do and say and he tweeted it out very casually where he said have a nice day donald trump do you wanna me like it was so it was it was such a a dagger you can't apologize for that i i i don't see how you can come back from that and i don't see why you would even try right well i could see what you would try which is like you know you there's no winners at war basically is what what's gonna happen here with these guys fighting but and then look at the next one dude the the the next knows i love him no hold on i'm open to rick rick reconciling with elon after seeing his latest suppose elon knows i love him jd d knows this too that's just hilarious by the way i don't even know why that's in jd knows this too i give the best and biggest reconciliation everybody knows this that is incredible i don't even know if this is fake by that this could totally be a fake truth post because there's nothing easier to fake than a truth social post because nobody has nobody i know has an account on there and so you you could just write anything and make me to tell me that he tweeted that and plus he's he might say he might he could totally said this but dude how funny is this elon knows i love him jd knows this too what's that i don't know i think it's because jd d was on if theo podcast talking about it i mean are they not talking day to day and then he goes i give the biggest best dude it's insane melania knows this it's insane man it's a crazy this is a reality show this is by the way we need to clip in you calling this on the podcast that they would break up you were like how long do you give this and it was like a couple months or something and i was like well i don't know they're both like pretty all in on each other it seems like it's gonna be really hard to it'd be really messy if they try to break this off and you're like rule number one from the forty eight laws of power right that is that what you're were quoting you're were like never outs shine the master yeah and i also said they're gonna break up in june i said it's gonna only last until june wow frankly like what a waste of an incredible prediction yeah i mean this like being in the tallest image like it's not that interesting but like it was a very easy prediction this was i we knew that it was gonna have they were gonna have a falling out and yeah i had you know a eight percent chance of guessing the month it was very predictable but i this was sort of one of those moments were like i remember where i was when it happened when i saw that when i saw that tweet we were my company had a meeting and everyone said oh my god it it it it it was pretty crazy how elon and trump fighting it brought down the stock market did you see that yeah it was absolutely ridiculous that my finances were impacted by this spat and i thought that that i thought it was kinda funny it was a it was a wild day the the memes that day were incredible i think i tweeted that out i was like listen this is a sad day for america but the content is outstanding right now let's talk self driving real quick so self driving cars are on fire in la they're the riders are beating up the self traffic cars not sure exactly why it but i like this one from andrew ackerman knot it at the way in downtown dc so it would know i'm one of the good ones so you guys know this but i have a company called hampton join hampton dot com it's a vet community for founders and ceos but we have this member named la von and la saw a bunch of members talking about the same problem within hampton which is that they spent hours manually moving data into a pdf it's tedious it's annoying and it's always waste a time and so la like any great entrepreneur he built a solution and that solution is called mo mo uses ai to automatically transfer data from any document into a pdf and so if you need to turn a supplier invoice into a customer quote or move info from an application into a contract you just put a file into mo and it auto fills the output pdf in seconds and a little backstory for all the tech out there built the entire web app without using a line of code he used something called bubble io o they've added ai tools that i can generate an entire app from one prompt it's pretty amazing and it means you can build tools like mo very fast without knowing how to code and so if you're tired of copying and pasting between documents or paying people to do that for you check out mo dot a i m o l k u dot a alright back to the pod have you developed a relationship with your ai i mean i don't like to say that but yeah like my voice changed on my chat like the talking voice and i had like i was like i felt uncomfortable talking to her because i had gotten close to the other one there are you i had so i had to change it back and so he's joking but not really right i mean this is kind of like the sometimes i pray to god even though i don't believe but just in case there's definitely an element of that with ai well i'm like i'm gonna say please and thank you you know just in case just in case things get a little crazy have you taken away moe yeah they're amazing have you no they don't have them in in connecticut it's not exactly like the best place to try it out but no i i i i think they're amazing everyone says they're amazing go to that one go to the the eric one i think this is like an inspirational one so check this out so i i met eric so eric eric's the ceo of a company called ramp which like has grown to like a six billion dollar valuation in like four or five years and he was telling me about t what does it what's it called tb vpn was what stand for the tech bro podcast network i don't know what that actually stands they tried to change it so it's stop bro technology brothers i think it's called like the business podcast i think they that's what they change it but it'll always be technology brothers to me what go on so it's this guy named jo and john k they're fantastic they have this new podcast it's more like a like a daily news show not even a podcast but like a video show it's not even a show it's basically bay new stuff but you don't even need to watch the show it's all clips for twitter go so it's like twitter is like short shorts and clips is what they what they make they're hilarious and i was at eric's office and i said what's this and it was a little booklet and apparently they had made like a twenty page book that they sent to potential the sponsors people they're according to like you know be their sponsor and they wanted to get like a big check and i turned the page and on one of them the was this this piece of copy in the deck and it said our hope is that this partnership is the domino that bankrupt your competitors and grant you a monopoly so powerful that you are dragged in front of congress and i read that line and i was like that is the greatest opening line for a pitch check that i've ever read it was fantastic oh yeah and i read that lime and i was joking with eric i'm like this the greatest thing i've ever i read and and he he it made him giggles so i guess he shared that and it's wonderful how good is that dude they're so fucking good i love those guys also i have a funny eric story i met eric when i was in college and we both got picked for this trip to go go to the alibaba headquarters it was like a free all expenses paid trip to china courtesy of jack m for fifty of the top college entrepreneurs and i was on this bus and eric was right next to me nice guy he's kind of a baby faced guy at the time i don't know if he still is you said you better him in person but yeah he's like he's like he doesn't come off like a ty tune like he comes off of very kind and warm yeah he's exactly and at the time i think he was literally in an ml i'm not a hundred percent sure but i'm pretty sure he was selling products that were part of a like a like an ml lab sort of ski or he was i don't remember exactly like a essential oils it was like a creams or something like that and i i i'm vaguely remembering this so i could totally you wrong sorry eric if i got some of the details wrong but i swear if it's not that it's in the zip code and i just remember thinking like oh this guy's kind of cool is a hustle a really nice guy i don't know what he's doing with these you know what whatever was creams or whatever he was doing at the time and then i've seen him build ramp and i'm like is that they dude from the bus in china who was trying to sell me creams and it just goes to show anything is possible dude when i talked to him it was him in his part it was like me david sent eric and then eric's partner all in a room and we were just r and then hanging out i was wanting to beat up with david because david's a buddy he hey i'm gonna be hanging out at ramps office if you just wanna come to see me it's right down the street from your office so i go to see him and i walk in and it's and it's and it's these guys and it was so it's pretty cool and the partner of c cofounder of ramp a kareem i think his saying was he told me the story he was like yeah like we had this idea and our goal was to get to a billion dollar valuation in twelve months that was the goal and we did the math and we thought that was possible and i was fl acid i was like what i was like did you hit it goes no man we didn't hit it took like eighteen months and and it was just really cool to be in a room of people who thought like craziness like that and it actually worked well you know what's crazy you know i think they were a massive underdog when they started if you remember back when they were were early b was already out and early as well and b was the san francisco based company ramp new york brexit had the yc network and connection they went through yc and they were all the yc companies were kind of like you know yc is kinda of like this network effect this little mafia that they have that can kind of king make certain companies if you get enough momentum and i just remember i would have bet like the the odds bet the betting odds were that breaks given those advantages given that they're the s the tech tech focus on like really was is the new york startup could beat the the silicon valley startup but it didn't really seem like that was usually the case and add ads everywhere brexit they were advertising everywhere they were a hot name they were nyc like they had a lot of things that would have made you think they would be the winner here and ramp has thoroughly kicked the shit out of bricks they're are worth way more and have done a much better job i use ramp it's a great got a great product so you know that is very impressive to me i think that that was that's not how i would have guessed that that would have played out one hundred percent i agree with you apparently the story is that they ran a company called par bus which is something like you get rebates online so you buy something and you can get like they help you find a deal and you get a little bit of money and the brand saves a little bit of money something like that like you know something hundred dollars you pay ninety bucks and they give you a little bit of cash back whatever they sold the company after three years for forty or fifty million dollars and he was like it was nice like we like but we got a lot wrong and when we sold it we sold it to capital one and in capital one we learned about the demand for all these things and like the the demand for like a good bank account system demand for all these business services that people needed and we ran the math because we saw like how big capital one was and we thought that we could build a billion dollar company in the first year if we did one or two things right and it was amazing to hear that story that's pretty cool we should get eric on this that would be well he should come on and but i'm i'm i'm working i'm working with them on it they have this like huge like event they're basically what they're doing doesn't sound like it would work but it's working so they're like doing all those goodwill stuff sponsoring podcast they have this huge office that seats three hundred people and they just host events there like these things were like people are like oh but like what's the attribution to that and and it's like i don't know it but it somehow it still works right okay we gotta do one here this is oh hold on my my text is gone here but i have a new segment sam rich guy h alert what happened alright i saw this tweet about some event it was like a event i think for like san francisco like kind of like like set policy maybe and i was like oh okay cool hundreds of people went to this like san francisco policy thing and then somebody goes but the tweet said overwhelmed but the standing room only crowd at gary tan house i just sure thinking can gary hanson house and i see this tweet this says this is jerry sands house big ass house dude gary had told us he lived in a neighborhood of the city of san francisco yeah so we're gonna try to try not to talk him although he set he came in and he goes hell is my house and this is the house so have you seen this it is a old i remember that yeah across the street from daughter's park yeah exactly so so he lives at something here he owns this thing called the house it's a townhouse condo at a hundred year old restored church right across from dolores it's four best basketball but it's got thirty foot ceilings it's crazy so look at this house do wait he lives there or is that like an event space he owns it i don't know he full time lives there i you know i don't wanna don't comment that on but like how insane is this i've always by the way i've always dreamed to doing this buying an old church because old churches have like sometimes amazing locations and really like unique bones and structure i didn't know you could convert them to housing so this is kinda interesting here but dude how crazy is this house i remember when this was for sale in san francisco i it was i still live there and i remember being for sale and i remember there was a another person living there not living there it was like a rich it was another rich guy who was using it for events and they put it for sale and i'm amazed that he bought this this looks awesome oh my god look at this bedroom dude i don't want on steal cage i don't wanna yeah that's pretty sick yeah i don't i don't want that you know if i was like brock lester or someone like really hardcore to core like that looks cool but like when you watch too much j you you're like okay killing the cell bedroom look look i'm about a tough guy i'm not brock really i mean how hardcore is this bedroom dude this is amazing i love i he's got like the plush carpet right outside like a like a waiting room lobby before you entered the the the bed the bed zone alright do we wanna do anymore are we we out oh yeah two more i wanna show you guys my my oldest bookmark from the year two thousand and eighteen in preparation for this podcast sam like let me just go look at my twitter bookmarks and see what good tweets i have and you found this your first ever bookmark is this in twenty eighteen yep this so it's a is this this group of kenyan men the sam bar men or describe this like you know because there's people who listen to this only on audio by way if you've been listening to this out audio the whole time please get to youtube please go youtube and watch this because this is that this whole thing works if you see the tweets do you remember that movie with kevin bank bacon where he went to africa to play basketball and he found this like tribe of like really tall guys and they would jump up and they would wear like like very traditional what you would think of like an african tribes person wearing right they have they're shirtless and they have like amazing beads and and whatever and they have the red hair just like the guy in the movie that's what this is it's a group of guys in kenya and the tweet says that these men are often considered to be the most stylish men on the planet and it's a photo of these guys and so look honestly agreed first of all the account is called at ken pics is that an account you just follow yeah i love kenya because i've i like i like runners and so my goal has always been to go to the r valley which is this area of kenya and see kenyan runners i've i've always admired like running and particularly there's like this group imagine like a suburb and like something like ninety percent of the distance gold medals have been won by this group of like ten thousand people in korea this and that's always fa me and so i've always wanted to go and see these guys and this is like nearby in that tribe and so then and then it just says hashtag international men's so that was cool black when hashtags were worth thing and then there's also a picture of the guy jumping and he's guys easily five feet off the ground i don't know how this is is this this is incredible what is this no i don't i don't know what that is i don't think this i i i don't know that much about ken yet but it looks dope to me should we wear this for next casual friday dude look how like yolk those guys are i get my photo for commenting on people's cab and like guys bodies but like these guys are are just jacked right yeah yeah what about the theo von one let's say the last one because i actually think this is amazing so a picture of theo vaughn smiling like how my son does when i we try to get him to take a picture he's with ava ivanka trump and who's was at jared right yeah jared kushner and ivanka trump and he says y'all posture is so good what the hell are y'all are y'all in spine club or something i'm built like a damn raccoon thanks for the hospitality had a blast it's pretty amazing dude well you and i okay so when sean and i started this podcast sean started it and then i joined a little bit later and i said do you like fighter in the kid and was like i love fire in the kid and fire the kid is a not so much popular podcast anymore but it was two guys bread sc and brian call who would talk about ifc fighting and their friend theo von would occasionally come on the pod he was just a guy he was a he was a character on the pod and that slowly has developed into they had another pod together called king and sting it and he rose further and further and further dude look at him now he's like he's talking to he the president the vice president he's hanging out with these guys how crazy of a career has theo had in the last decade it's amazing it's his rise is great i actually knew him from what he was on like road rules years ago like because i like real world road rules and the challenge or stuff like that and so yeah it's pretty wild to see kind of the the crazy growth but even more while is this this is what i appreciate about this because this tweet it's funny but do you know how hard it is as a man to put up like a a kind of like a thank post or con post but not be lame and theo did it you know what i mean like think about what this post is this post is basically like had such a good time at brunch but if you just posted that dude you know that's the lame thing that you could possibly do but to go with this y'all posture show so good what the hell y'all spine club or something just that's how it's done and so i'm studying the art of how how how men can express themselves while still being stop being cool about it you know i dude he's the best he's one of the few podcasts that i listened to i listen to him and ti tim dylan have you listened to him and tim dylan i'm not a huge tim dylan guy but he it's an acquired taste yeah yeah it's very much acquired taste it took me about two years to get into him he's it's pretty ra it's he's these guys are like my two favorite podcast right now it it's pretty amazing how good they are alright that's it that's the bob i feel like i could rude wear i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a go less travel never looking back alright so when my employees join hampton we haven't do a whole bunch of onboarding stuff but the most important thing that they do is they go through this thing i made called copy that copy that is a thing that i made that teaches people how to write better and the reason this is important is because at work or even just in life we communicate mostly via text right now whether we're emailing slack blogging texting whatever most of the ways that we're communicating is by the written word and so i made this thing called copy that that's guaranteed to make you right better you could check it out copy that dot com i post every single person who leaves a review whether it's good or bad i post it on the website and you're gonna see a trend which is that this is a very very very simple exercise something that's so simple that they laugh at they think how is this gonna actually impact us and make us right better but i promise you it does you gotta try at copy that dot com i guarantee it's gonna change the way you write again copy that dot com

alright this guy might be the king of side hustle he makes about three million dollars a year off of six or seven different side hustle different streams of income and normally all the advice you here is about focus focus all in on one thing this guy is like mister shiny object syndrome so i love to having monty he's very fun and he comes on he tells you the side hustle ideas that he loves so things that you could do it's kinda weird businesses but you could do them really in any local market and on this podcast sometimes we have really brilliant people but they talk about stuff that's for most people not something they could go do it's interesting to hear but you can't really do it this is an episode i'm gonna send to my sister you know my brother because i think they would like to do these businesses i think these are things that anybody actually can do and get to where he's gotten where i think he's making eight thousand dollars per day of free cash flow off of these side hustle per day that's pretty crazy so enjoy this episode it's all about the weird crazy side hustle that anybody could do if you just got a little bit of hustle i feel like got the rude to work to know why i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a road travel never looking back alright what's up we got chris here chris you are a crazy guy you a mad man and one of the reasons i wanted you on here is because most business advice on the internet sounds like this you gotta focus you gotta lock in you gotta grind do you have to just go all in on one thing focus focus focus and you're like the exact opposite you're a dude right you see a shiny object you chase it and you're not a ashamed to say it that's actually your strategy we were talking before this and you're telling me that you have i think started thirty different businesses that crossed over fifty thousand in revenue maybe thirty five and you said you have six different revenue streams right now that each produce over a hundred thousand dollars of cash flow for you and i was the math on some of your numbers and i think basically just on your side hustle you're making like eight thousand dollars a day of cash flow and i think that is amazing i wanna hear what your side hustle are i wanna hear what other side hustle you found because you find these like random simple businesses that are cool i wanna hear which ones do you think are cool that other people couldn't go do for their own side hustle and i wanna hear your philosophy as you go because again i think you defy some of the odds that sounds perfect absolutely let's do it so tell me about some of the ideas you have that other people could do dude i think you should pull up that video of the hole in one golf challenge this is one that i can't get out of my head alright there here we go look at this freaking thing right here and i see a basically a golf putting green so like the the we're just the part where the hole is and it's just floating out in the ocean and you said that this driving range in new zealand pays out ten thousand dollars if you hit a hole in one it's a hundred and eleven yards away you get this like plaque if you hit the hole in one and so what what is the business here they basically they it's like a carnival game they charge you a little bit to try to hit a hole in is that it yeah it's kind of like think of like un bundling a carnival it's the business is math they're just using math right and here's the math the the average amateur golfer and i don't golf i hate golf has a one in twenty five thousand chance of getting a hole in one on a part three which this is k and and so this company in new zealand it's right off the road on this lake they have announced multiple times that they pay out on average once every two weeks so i can use math to say alright these guys and i know how much they sell balls for it's like forty bucks for twenty five balls or something and they have a sensor in the hole and they have divers go get the balls every couple weeks yeah there's like a scuba diver yeah swimming around the thing he there all the time or he just does that once a week goes and gets all the balls just once a week and so i can surmise based on math and statistics that this place net profits like three to five hundred thousand dollars a year which is there's nothing to see there it's a little stand with a floating green one guy just standing there with an ipad so why isn't this all over the place wait so you said this is just roadside in new zealand there's one there's one of these in the world that i know of off the side of a road new zealand but it's off the side of the road it's not even like mir golf course or tourist attractions you just think this is just in a random area right now yeah alright so let's say we wanted to do this those brainstorm to run this together and maybe we'll actually do maybe we'll find a a listener to run this for us to make it happen but like we'll make this a mfa k study alright mh so how would we do this in order to make this happen you know quickly like get momentum and then have it actually work have it actually be successful so to me it's all about piggyback right i don't wanna guess where the golfers are like right there are no golfers where this place is but how much better would they be doing if there was all already a captive audience right there and so i would just find one golf course you know how you you go you go to golf course in like after the eighteenth hole there's just like a putting green where you can sell it would be like that okay take your nearest pond put a floating green out there put a tea and have a little ipad with a stand and say here's your ball just like a driving range twenty balls twenty bucks or whatever ten thousand dollars if you get a hole in one and it's a way for a golf course to earn additional revenue they're not about to build a floating green and work out the logistics of the point of dollar so you yeah you could do this as a service and say we'll install this you're gonna have more net income without doing any work we're gonna take thirty percent of all your revenue as a fee okay i kinda love this idea but you need the water for this floating thing right or what you what are you suggesting so like how would you do this if the golf course is not situated by like you know like in this case it's like the ocean whatever like i think i'm glad you brought that up because i think the water is a key point like as men we wanna throw rocks in the water yeah just i think usually there's a there's a there's something that it like my testosterone went up like fifteen points just looking at this like i could i could do this right like it if it was literally just like oh like here's just like a whole here's those the nineteenth hole right you could try you could brandon oh this is the nineteenth hole just having that obstacle of mother nature there yes there's something to that i mean you went either way so you get it on the green you feel awesome you get a hole in one you win ten thousand dollars you really feel awesome you miss you see a splash you can't lose or worst case scenario you're just playing golf you're paying you're paying money to play golf which is why you're there in the first place and you're gonna get content out of this also you're gonna have your buddy film you or we set up a camera here where you like an instagram worthy story for you know for for this thing how much how much do you say people pay to take a swing at this or you know they buy ten balls or thirty it's like twenty bucks or like thirty five bucks for twenty balls or fifty bucks for forty balls something like that oh so you get like twenty to forty hacks at it to do the home yeah that's pretty good every guy thinks he can do it right of course or that today by be and also golf you're already like i don't know what the average spend is of a golf day like of a of a golf outing i don't like golf personally but like there's the there's the actual like the cost to actually play that day on the course there's all the clubs investments you've done there's the there's the tips there's the food there's the the beer along the way there's all this like money spent do to spend an extra forty bucks to have a blast with your buddies at the end or to have a story or to like you know do something at the end that's an absolute no brainer if you actually did this with the golf course i thought you were gonna say though that you would do it just on the route to the golf course you know there's a lot of golfer for traffic who's gonna take a roadside stop here and and try to do this do i mean you could do that too like i'm picturing like a freeway with a a lake over to the right and an exit nearby you rent the billboard right above it arrow pointing down ten thousand dollars for a floating hole in one and people can just pull off and do it like it doesn't have to be a golf of course i like you could use the same principle and to me the principle is just math as a service right we're calling this a mass business okay right and it's like let's say you have a one in a hundred chance it's a it's a it's an outdoor casino yes exactly exactly what what is a solution and what is ro what is crap what are all these games these are games or the house just said cool we'll take an edge we'll take a math edge and you get to play and have fun right yeah but we we take the hedge and that what you're saying is to do the same thing yeah even like a putting green in a mall or something or or a walk outdoor shopping area let's say you've got like a one in five hundred chance of making a thirty foot putt right so you say hey thirty foot putt you get it we'll give you five hundred bucks and you just do the math and you say alright i'm you you know every three thousand dollars i get i'm gonna pay out five hundred bucks statistically speaking dude it i love this idea if you if you wanna do this idea email me sean at jean and then me and chris we will we will help you do this and we will document the journey we'll put it out there in the public will kinda make it a thing because you i think part of it is the branding and the novelty factor and you wanna see this online first and then people will actually drive out to do it or they'll plan to stop not just whoever happens to see it and understand it while they're driving fifty miles an hour down a road you know what i mean yeah i like the name nineteenth hole that's a good one it's good right we might need to snag that domain name before this goes live alright this episode is brought to you by hubspot they're doing a big conference this is their big one they do called inbound they have a ton of great speakers that are coming to san francisco september third two september fifth and it's got a pretty incredible lineup they have comedian like amy poe they have da from ant philanthropic dark cast sean evans from high ones and if you're somebody who's in marketing or sales or ai and you just wanna know what's going on what's coming next it's a great event to go to and hey guess what i'm gonna be there you can go to inbound dot com slash register to get your ticket to inbound twenty twenty five again september third through fifth in san francisco hope to see you there alright so i love the whole one one golf course alright give me the next side hustle idea okay well i wanna talk about facebook marketplace i feel like there's an entire economy in facebook marketplace there are seven figure business owners let's say fencing business all they do is post to facebook marketplace organically once a week to get all their leads by the way facebook marketplace has one billion monthly active users just that tap crazy and no one's talking about it what are we doing so i've gotta start i've got a story for you i've gotta and by the way explain the thing you just said real quick before you go to your story so you said there's people who own like local fencing companies their entire sales machine is posting on face fencing services is that what you're saying or answering the request for fencing server what are they actually doing yeah like they're just posting hey i put up fences cedar six foot eight dollars per linear foot and then people message him and he goes out and gives a quote and he has the seven thousand dollar job like there's nothing paid there's no paid ads this is just one organic post that takes him five minutes and he'll refresh it every couple of days dude i don't know if you saw this we did this episode with high schoolers i think it was like a high school version shark tank i saw that yeah and there was a kid who was i think seventeen eighteen years old and his entire business forget even what the service was it was home services of some kind i don't remember was like window washing or something yeah was like window washing or like gutter gutter cleaning it was there there there's their highlight thing it was like gutter cleaning and his entire business model was off of next door so he's yeah i just started this in my neighborhood where i live i went on next door and i said that do this and i serviced you know the last year i serviced sixty homes in this neighborhood of six hundred homes or whatever it was four gutter cleaning and that generated i'm making up the numbers now because i don't remember off top of my head but it was five hundred thousand in revenue and we were like what he's like yeah i just post on there that this is what i do and then it's people in our neighborhood i was like so could you post in the next neighborhood like yeah i'm trying to figure out how to get around the you know like yeah i can i just haven't done that yet it's like wow just as everybody should do this it's like you know yeah what is my kid doing you what are they teaching you in cr k right now we gotta get after it with this next door you know next door lead gen basically and so you're saying the same thing's happening at a bigger scale on facebook marketplace yeah both great opportunities okay great so tell me the story you're gonna tell me yeah this is this is an outlier example k results not guaranteed but twenty twenty twenty one china had canceled bitcoin mining right twenty twenty one was a crazy year lot of money being printed and we started a bitcoin mining facility and people were selling bitcoin miners and hosting services on facebook marketplace and so these miners cost ten thousand dollars so you go type in the name of the model and you see them listed cool but i thought the the hosting price because if you buy a bit bitcoin miner you have to host it at like a data center and it's usually like two hundred bucks a month for the hosting fee so i just posted organically a facebook marketplace bitcoin mining hosting service but instead of putting in the price of the minor which turns people off ten thousand dollars and thousand dollars wait yeah i put in the price of the hosting two hundred dollars and then when you click into it in the description it's like it's actually two hundred for hosting here's the cost of the minors i'm not exaggerating that one ad and i had it going on multiple accounts we would refresh it but no paid like no paid did nine point eight million dollars all on facebook marketplace in three months profit like this isn't like you're oh and we spent nine point eight million in ads like right profit that's like the potential and kind of an extreme outlier but i have other more you were just you were selling minors that you had that you already owned or what were you doing we were pre selling them and then ordering from them china so we had a positive cash flow con conversion cycle in additional alright so you went on facebook ads you specifically did the marketplace ads is that right not even ads we just posting just posting just organic posting and you're posting every day you're posting it and you're posting it in every city did you set up like a farm to post these how how'd you do that yeah we use vas and multiple facebook accounts and we posted in multiple cities because most people wanna buy from someone local and the funnel was you know va answers response then they pushed them to a sales call because it's hard to sell something so expensive over the internet once they got on the sales call we would close like half of them right so and so and then you would close them and then you'd go order that same thing from china because there's like a knowledge arbitrage here of like mh i don't know how to go or i don't trust spending ten thousand dollars on alibaba or ali the express and so you would then do that and you'd have a margin what was the rough margin on something like that call it thirty percent thirty five like high ticket so and this one i'm guessing didn't last in the sense that like you know in twenty twenty five maybe the same market dynamics the demand the supply are not the same is that true yep really the biggest variable here is like the fro ness of the mining market which is not good right now so i think this would work again if the mining market turned around more when the time is like like would you do this like are you planning to do this again if the mining market you know gets gets hyped again yes yeah and how do you spend your money dude so let's say you make a few million dollars doing something like this what do you what does chris like to spend his money on oh man on my family we go cool vacations and starting more businesses i invest in real estate but i just i like starting businesses is my it's the only thing i know but it seems like you start businesses that don't take a lot of capital yeah that's true but i like investing like tripling down on businesses that are more mature along the way where i can see a clear path to growth with more capital what's another facebook marketplace idea that somebody could do like is it as simple as hey i noticed that there are garage companies they're not currently active in my area i go talk to ten business owners i say hey if i bring you a customer give me three hundred dollars or whatever it is and you do lead gen because that that business owner doesn't even think to do facebook marketplace activity to to drive out most most service people most small business owners don't even think this way right oh yeah yeah i mean you could literally build an agency to just post facebook marketplace for business owners sells them the leads right right but you mentioned shelving i interviewed this guy named alex on my podcast the k office and he has a six figure business just building not shelving but garage shelving on wheels with costco tote like that's it only with organic facebook marketplace post and he net profits hundred and eighty thousand dollars a year that's the whole business right garage shelving on facebook marketplace he has a three hundred dollars saw and he goes and buys two by fours and he he didn't even have a truck for like the first year and a half right okay what are your other ideas i see a list of ten here and we've probably done two or three so give me give me more alright any idea or you want you want no no any idea you wanna just call out one of these just team me up yeah take local tourist traps and put them in your home market is this like the whole in one challenge are you talking about something else different yeah this is a good one so i went you've seen a arrest development i assume of course okay so there's money in the banana stand we all know that we i went to first day we at harvard that's what they teach you yes so i went to ba island with my family last year and we went to the banana for whatever reason this one street it has like seven banana dance and there's one that's supposedly the best and i shelled out like eight dollars each for these bananas covered in chocolate and nuts and i made a video about you know how much profit these guys make because as i went to the window i had to i asked her how many of these do you sell the day what's your busiest day ever what's your slowest day ever all these people are behind you do you want nuts or no nuts in banana people before but i had to know and then to make matters worse i pull out my phone and make a video about how anyone could copy them so i'm a great guy but exactly i don't i don't remember the exact scenario your girl over here steal your banana this one little shop that's like three hundred square feet is doing like seven million a year in frozen bananas like and what's the margin on an eight dollar banana with chocolate and peanuts and so i just thought like why isn't this like why isn't this a thing i didn't go to ba island for the bananas once i was there i i got them but there are ba islands all over the world and most of them have no banana stand like so it's this idea isn't just about banana stand it's about taking something really unique and novel maybe it's like the old western tiny photo booths that you see in pigeon forge maybe it's like funnel cake or like the mini donuts that you see in ga berg like take something like that and just test it i'm not saying it's gonna work but you could test it very very cheaply in other tourist markets or in non tourist markets yeah that's interesting i wonder if that would work like i wonder how much of the appeal is that oh humans just like these kinda frozen chocolate bananas or is it that in that area on that street it's kinda known for this and you see a line and so you see the line you start doing it like i wonder if that like it's kinda like an organ transplant i wonder if there's like that you know donor reject shares or the the host rejection of the of the organ when you put one of these in a new in a new area it could be but i think the the greatest chance you've had you would have for success is taking specifically a tourist trap and putting it in a different tourist trap where it's like right this is a unique novel thing that people don't buy when they're home but like for instance i have a friend in pigeon forged tennessee that owns an indoor sled facility you can't tell me that wouldn't work in other tourist traps they have the same type of demographic there you know yeah yeah that makes sense okay give me another one how about toasted tours what is this this is a alright this this is a northern california by you this guy took a a forty foot shipping container put it on the back of a semi truck cut out the walls put hand rails on there put tables in their chairs in there and he takes people wine tours it's a party bus but it's not even a bus it's a shipping container that is open air open area yeah they like cut out the sides yes and so i'm swiping instagram one day and i see this video that just broke my frame it's the shipping container and people are like dancing inside as it's going around a bend at a high rate of speed and it's like dangerous what am i looking at but this guy crush it like his first year and he had experience doing like wine tours but nothing like this i think he did like over a million bucks this first year with like sixty percent margins what i like about some of these is that they are visually viral so you know but the definition of viral reality people get it wrong people think it's word word mouth is actually a different thing word mouth is i like this so much i wanna tell my friends about it mh viral is actually more like a sneeze you spread a virus without even wanting to spread it right this was like back when you know hotmail started i'm just sending you an email i'm not trying to tell you to use hotmail but because i'm sending you an email from my hotmail address and at the bottom it says i sent this via hotmail you know they they added that to the bottom of the email it spread like a virus and that's how you know a lot of the big viral services actually spread facebook was like this right i'm i'm uploading photos i'm just tagging my friends i'm not trying to tell them hey you should join facebook i'm having a grand old time here they tagged a friend it sent them an emails if you got tagged in a photo and people can't resist being on somebody put a photo up of me on the internet i must see this and that's how facebook grew early on i was like this this one viral loop and then there's this other types of viral one is like this visually viral where it's not like the people on this truck we're trying to go tell everyone about it but it's so novel looking that i can't help but look at it learn about it you know and and i think the the whole in one challenge has the same benefit which is like you see it it's super interesting to look at it you get the concept right away and it's worth remark on you're talking about it with people you notice it you wanna do it the act of somebody else doing it made you wanna do it and so i like these things that are sort of walking billboard style businesses because you know they market themselves once you get them going this episode brought to you by hubspot media they have a cool new podcast that's for ai called the next wave it's by matt wolf and nathan lands and they're basically talking about all to do tools that are coming out how the landscape is changing what's going on with ai tech so if you wanna be up to date on ai tech it's a cool podcast you could check out listen to the next wave wherever you get your podcast dude i i have some really good good examples of visually viral stuff to have you seen that guy that does like he'll mow people's lawns for free please you is this guy okay this guy out of kansas or something young guy he owned a lawn care business a small kinda of struggling business and one day he sets up his tripod sb b mowing and sp b pressure washing he sets up a tripod and big youtube channel now right so this guy has forty five million followers across platforms combined forty five million and all he does is he sets up a tripod he puts on a mic he walks up to doris says hey your long looks like crap mind if i mow it for free what's the catch i publish this to youtube and make money cool and then he mo it for free with a time lapse video visually it yeah yes we wanna see the outcome the retention is there so the platforms push it like what is it gonna look like when he's done and this guy i mean what is the value of forty five million social media followers versus the value of a local lawn care business right abe dude look at this by the way like if you just sort by popular you know he stacks the thing so there's the visual viral part of before and after which humans wanna complete that they want to know the the solution then you have the sort of novelty surprise factor like oh this guy is doing for free that's interesting why i wanna know what's the answer here but then he stacks on drama so the top videos are angry home homeowner confronts me while i'm mowing this vacant home he cop approaches me while i'm mowing this deserted home and tells me this homeowner stunned at had how wide the sidewalks are right her tears said it all my prayers have been answered so this guy has this he works skill stack where he's got you know the the lawn care this sort of that's one skill that okay he's worth you know only x dollars in the market of of the economy but then he stacks on being really good at content and those two together created the how many lawn care guys are really good at content i don't know zero like you know the numbers less than a dozen and so suddenly he became rare and when you're rare you're valuable exactly yeah that's really cool okay so let's jump in side hustle and the ones that you currently let's do some of the fun ones the one i met you want on is about buck and so for people who don't know could you explain just how crazy of a business buck is and then the side hustle you created off the back of buck yeah buck is like your redneck neck disney gas station they're about half the size of costco there's fifty one locations and they do like sixty to eighty million in revenue per year each and it's just if if you haven't been there there's nothing like it's like a real the math on that is like three billion in revenue on fifty gas stations yeah yeah what yeah what i've never been to a buck what what makes a buck so great is it even a gas station or is it just something else would that happens to have gas it's a brand with a gas station they have over a hundred pumps you walk in there's just things happening everywhere you've got tacos being made you've got people shouting about brisket you've got beaver nuggets t shirts like beaver walking around the the cleanest bathrooms you'll ever find there's nothing else like it you just walk in in your your maze from the get go okay before you tell me your side hustle off the back of that what's the quick kind of origin story of this has this been around for like a hundred years who started it like why is this so successful i mean i've never heard that three billion dollars in revenue on fifty one gas stations they founded like forty years ago this is guy named arch he was called buck as a kid and he opened a gas station and then they just started going bigger and bigger and bigger they just kept pushing the envelope and their whole signature was this mascot just this cheesy looking beaver that people just loved and so once they started selling merch t shirts and and tumble and all that they just exploded and they're really unique in that they put themselves in far flung areas they're not like in the city they're on the way to a vacation or close to a vacation destination oh so it's like the perfect rest stop right because yeah if like i was just on a road we drove to tahoe and it's a three three hour drive roughly but there's these patches where you need to stop in the middle and the bar is so low for rest stop experience right it's like you know it's basically a porta potty in a in a good scenario and then you get like the trucker rest stops and you get a gas asian then you get like maybe a little strip mall with the starbucks and what you're saying is they build something actually like really cool out and that's on those drives and that maybe is like one of the golden insights for them yeah it's just they you walk in in your a captive audience you can buy lunch you can buy gas most people just park at the pump you can buy t shirt and the average ticket i don't know what it is they're privately traded but people spend hundreds of dollars there you're not just like buying a celsius and and hop out alright what is this business you created on top of buck or like your side hustle for buck yeah so back to what you said about me not being able to focus i was in the middle of running this business that was growing and demanding all of our time and attention and i took my business partner to buck and he was from utah first time and on the way home i distinctly remember this i remember the overpass i was driving i'm ashamed to say i pulled out my phone and i said kirk these guys must kill it online and i said do you know what disney does like x billion just through their online merch store these guys must kill it so i go to buck dot com i looked for the shop button and it wasn't there they didn't sell a line anything not food snacks shirts anything and i just like i just sat there in silence i felt like capitalism was being murdered like what is why what like what good reason is there for this and this was like six years ago and so then we just started talking and we're just like what if what if we launched a website for them what if we went online for them because we're running a three p third party logistics business at the time really hard business and we thought we could launch this business for them as like a permission way to get their business end to end and get them as a customer and maybe they'll try to sue us but worst case it'll be a great story and so what you do so the first thing i did was started cold emailing the founders the executive team everyone and saying hey you need to be online we can do it for you we'll build a shopify if store we'll do everything end to end we have a warehouse shelf space etcetera no response just crickets so at that point it's like alright let's take this into our own hands so most people give up there right try partner most people won't even call cold email but if you do cold old email you give up when they don't reply yep exactly so we bought beaver snacks dot com because that's their mascot it was a beaver and i went to thumb doc and i hired a photographer for like two hundred dollars and i i documented all this i have pictures of all this i took my four kids and wife to the nearest buck and my wife and i split up i said you get merch i'll get snacks if it has a buck logo on it buy it like i don't want the doritos or the coke it because they white label a bunch of stuff right okay i only want something with a buck logo so we spent like three thousand dollars we had a receipt this long we took it back to the warehouse was the lady like wow what do he what do you doing they were everyone was looking at us and i'm like an introvert i hated it i felt so weird i'm like don't look at me just let me do my thing so we're bringing all back to the warehouse we put it in this office hire this photographer and she takes pictures of everything we upload it in a csv to shopify we launch a website beaver snacks dot com and i say launch like nobody knew it existed so the first thing i did was start scraping and cole emailing every texas reporter i could find eater southern living texas monthly fox news thirty eight you know san antonio district you name it and i just start saying like here's who i am here's what i'm doing here's who am here's what i'm doing and so you weren't afraid because most people try to be laying low doing this because hey we don't have an official partnership you took the opposite about you're like hey can i use this story to get some attention whether it be good or bad is that right yeah because i thought like okay worst case scenario cease and desist we have great story for a podcast one day best case scenario we get them as a customer or this is a standalone business somewhere in between is gonna be interesting right maybe i have to fill my pantry with snacks like three thousand hours with the snacks and my kids eat in the next seven years we had a guess come on and he said you know do what makes the best story women in doubt like when you're at a fork in the road do whichever whichever path will make the best story you chose the path that'll make the best story here okay so yes and i heard to get prior that episode and i thought that's me i agree with that so i also did my research and it's called first sale doctrine which means anyone can sell resell whatever they want they just can't pretend or imitate that brand right like the there's a guy that imitate trader joe's to do what i did but he called himself pirate joe's the logo was similar the store layout was similar and he got sued out of existence and so i thought okay as long as i say i am not buck i'm a third party reseller and i'm clear about that they really don't have grounds to sue me so i started cold emailing people they loved the story and i started getting on the phone with reporters and any tips on that so you know i've learned this split with with p r which is that there's p is this very specific niche game and once you understand how a journalist thinks you can reverse engineer what you need to actually do so like for example our buddy ramon did this recently he went mega mega viral because and he knew this he texted me he called a shot he's like as soon as the tariff news came out and some people thought this was gonna be horrible for businesses some people thought well why don't those missiles just make it in america we'll buy it if it's made in america and so he launches an av test on his website so at fe dot com it's like a shower a clean shower heads so he was he runs at ab b test and he says you can either buy buy the one that's sourced out of china or you could buy the one that's sourced out of america and the american one costs a little bit more because it costs more to make it at america but you know here you go you have a choice the results were something crazy twenty five thousand visits or something like that and there were literally zero checkout on the american product there was a few hundred on the on the on the asian made product and he goes to the journalist he ran the test because he knew look either the results are gonna show people will buy made in america or they won't in either case i have a very strong story and he goes and he gets it written up it's been written up in like forty major publications now and he got tons of traffic to the site tons of backlinks his seo went way it was a genius quick acting move on the back of the tariff news when most people were playing defense like me in e you're like oh shit i just need to survive he went and played offense so i was i'm curious do you have any tips from your experience about how to get people to actually write about you yeah i mean you have to understand that reporters want something cool to write about i i get dms all the time from people wanting something from me and ninety eight percent of them they have nothing interesting to talk about but if someone dm me and said hey i did this cool thing will you post about it i would because i wanna post about cool things yeah you know my job is to post interesting things but yes please send it to me so once you realize that like do something interesting something cool and then go tell as many people as you can about it and a small percentage of them will post about it reporters included how how did you frame it at the time i framed it as i am doing a viral marketing stunt and i wanna get buck attention and if i don't then i'm gonna run this business as well as i can oh so you told the reporters that upfront yeah oh okay gotcha but by the way give us the headline because you know we're talking about the titles we haven't mentioned how well it's done can you give us some numbers that give us an idea of like the success of this i mean i'll tell you what the headline literally was and it was like texas man makes two hundred grand in his first thirty days resell buck goods online that was it and so texas monthly reach out to me they're the biggest texas news publication and they were like we love this we're gonna make this a feature story give me everything you can so we talked to we talked to talk and then later that afternoon they're like chris good news buck in house counsel would love to chat and i'm like what's good about that like i'm dead i'm dead in the water and so i was like okay you you told bucky he's great i'm glad you were able to get a hold of them so i get on the phone with him and he's like listen we actually don't mind what you're doing i don't like the name beaver snacks where beaver it's kinda confusing i don't like that your colors are yellow where kinda yellow change the name put a disclaimer in your logo that is persist throughout the whole website put a disclaimer on every product page and you have our blessing like we're not gonna sign anything but we're not gonna come after you like we will support you and so we did we made those changes and then they link to us what a cool last general counsel either that's pretty rare yeah yeah and then if they link to us in their faqs which is like the most amazing backlink ever so on one hand going viral meant we got a million competitors and like all these copycat cats but on the other hand we have like the biggest seo mode that we could ever hope for so wait how do you skip a step you said their headline was two hundred thousand dollars and thirty days but you didn't say how you got the two hundred thousand dollars and thirty days we're how did you initially get that traction it was all based on those viral articles we didn't do any paid ads we just went viral we put everything as in stock you know on shopify you can do that whether it's in stock or not and we just started selling out so the articles initially must not have been doing a thousand the articles initially were just like texas man starts shop to sell buck stuff online correct yeah yeah they've written about a sense then but in the beginning it was texas man they called it text pat instead of expat they're like texas man launches online buck store for text pat that was like the big headline that's whole like a a a person from texas who's no longer in texas but misses their stacks missus and that that was the whole thesis because these buck are in like en texas like these places that you'd never heard of because they're on the way to the beach and so if you fell in love with this random bo behemoth garlic jerky you could never buy it again right and so that's where we came in like buy it from us and so how's this business doing now was this a flash in the pan or is it still doing well this business has grown twenty to fifty percent per year every single year steady eddie we just we are completely riding on the coat of buck and we are not ashamed to admit that so could you say how about revenue do you guys are doing on this thing we're doing between three and five hundred thousand a month profit with very very little paid spend and the funny thing is here you go buy it retail right you don't have like a wholesale discount they're not giving it to you at a cut so you you buy retail and then you just mark it up what ten twenty percent or something what do would do you do we mark it up a hundred percent oh okay because you're like you want twenty if you want it that bad here this is the you know this is your way to get it honestly we mark it up as much as we have to i mean you know e commerce to make a fifteen twenty percent net margin and that happens to be about a hundred percent markup right that's amazing okay so that's one of your side hustle we said that there was you know like six that were each you know six years i don't know if we get to all six but give me another one so what's another of your side hustle right now they're contributing to your your cash flow so we started a pet cremation business and that's a fun one that one's actually very profitable that's a fun one is fun for you fun for you maybe yeah okay so it's so explain how'd you get the idea and then what is it and have how'd you do it okay so it all started with a relationship that my business partner had with a very high volume veterinary clinic here in d w they do as much business as five veterinary clinics and he learned about the industry and how pet cremation has like ninety plus percent net margins it's a very old school business and so there's a but you know we've had this puppy boom during covid so all these puppies are five years old now with there's more dogs than children that's that's like the whole thesis there's more dogs than children only getting crazier and cremation has ninety percent margins most of the operators are sixty plus years old they're doing great they're doing fine they don't need ads they don't need organic and if you go look at the google keyword tool we saw that the search competition was low the ticket size was high and the the the search traffic was high so we launched the business around that thesis sorry to explain you went you went to the google's ads keyword tool right that's where you went to to kind of diligence the the the demand for and you found obviously the holy grail low low competition high ticket and what was the third a growth or demand like volume high volume low competition high ticket yeah holy grail and so you start one of these and you're you're actually the service that does it or you're the lead gen we are both we have two different businesses one is a programmatic seo site that generates leads for cremation facilities all over the country and then the other one is we're just a middleman we have refrigerated vans and we pick up the pets frozen from the facilities and deliver it from the veterinarians and then we deliver it to the cremation facilities and take a margin okay gotcha and so tell me a little bit about this business i don't i know nothing about the pet cremation business what did you do in the first ninety days to make this business come to life because i like the speed with which you operate we're gonna talk about another one in a second that i think is like a quick off the ground version of these ideas and you very much are a zero to one kind guy like i like that you do a lot of different things i like that you're high energy and you're basically like not lazy there's a lot of people out here who sell this kinda like side hustle passive income there's nothing passive about you i feel like you are mister active actually in the sense that you get after it once you have an idea you know i have this phrase like you know inspiration is perishable ideas are avocados they go brown very quickly and i think what's great about you is that you don't let the ideas in the inspiration of perish you actually act on it very quickly and you have you have a high high bias for action so what are the first ninety years ninety or so days look like when you have a new idea and maybe you could use this one as an example or not you could use a different one yeah i focus most of my energy on validating the idea with like some ad spend or a couple conversations or whatnot i i don't do any like extensive market research i don't talk to any potential customers and i'm not saying there's not value in that that's just not how i roll i really really like using tools like facebook like general publicly available tools that most people are know and love stuff i could do from my boxer at home that's what i like right yes and a lot of times by the end of the day i realized oh this is dud let's move on right but also a lot of the times by the end of day i'm like oh wow there's something here my thesis was true let's let's put another day into this so so like what what would you do in this pet cremation business what did you so the thesis here started with this relationship that my business partner had and the pitch was let's get the the cremation facility owner and the veterinary clinic owner in the same room together and pitch them this like win win hey we're gonna get you more veterinarian clinics because we're really good at sales okay and then to the vet hey you need to raise your prices you're way too low you're gonna make even more margin working through a middleman believe it or not because we're gonna be we're gonna only do one thing we're gonna pick up pets and we're gonna drop them off and so there was a big conflict of interest interest here because the cremation facility owner was about to lose some margin but he was like we were selling him on the fact that we would bring him a lot more customers and so basically this was a good like example of what i normally do if that conversation doesn't go well i don't launch the business i just move on and you weren't afraid that when you put those two in the same room they're like great yeah we should do this who's this guy what is it do we do this guy did you see any risk in putting yourself there as the middleman with this and and actually connecting the two dots the really high volume vet clinic with the information service that you thought they should be using well the thing is is that they were already working together right and so what you're saying was correct that was the risk we we insert ourselves you're saying there was some friction there was some friction that you were offering to remove is that right yeah and the friction in this case was what it was that the the veterinary or the cremation facility owner made all his margin on the actually doing the cremation and he was losing money on all the logistics okay but this customer we were talking to was one of his biggest customers and so we were saying hey you're gonna lose some margin on this biggest customer because we're inserting ourselves we're gonna take some of it but we're gonna more than compensate for it by a removing that logistics off your plate and b finding you more veterinary clinics and then for the vet clinic you were saying hey raise your price a little bit and yeah we we need to be able to do that for to make this work yep and so our thesis was if that the conversation doesn't go well to the business there's no issues right it's eight and an asymmetric bet but if it does then we have you know the the hardest part we have customers in revenue through the door from day one if if they're if they're if they agree to this exactly yeah and then you went and try to recreate that with know getting fifteen other vendor now most of them i assume would already have had a partner or some vendors for cremation services and so what's your sales pitch to them how did you go and get more customers on board yeah our sales pitch was like our competitors were very sophisticated like they would literally walk through the front door of a veterinary clinic get the frozen dogs put them in a bag and then walk out the waiting room and so our pitch was like that's our competition we will never do that we'll pull out back unmarked van will be very caring and respectful in some cases they don't even have to pay anymore and we'll just be beat we'll just pay off the phone and be reliable that was the pitch and is there something to learn here about like you know there's so many of these simple businesses where the bar is really low or people are simply not doing any outreach they're not doing any door to door sales like have you made a killing in just you know warren buffett has said this before he goes the secret to winning is low competent is is is weak competition right like he's not looking to prove that he's a genius the hardest games he's looking for very weak competition where he can simply be competent and he could just do best practices oh dude like it is so true we see it on twitter all the time like just go go find a a business with the fax machine to compete against him like yes that actually works i we own a tree returning business and a big bottleneck for us is stump grinding so we thought i thought man there needs to be a business that's just self grinding but b to b not stump grinding that goes through homeowners but only the ones that goes through the other treat me companies because we own a treat company and we could see it from the inside so i had a thesis i i hired a virtual assistant and today i would just use a an ai voice agent and i took the city of houston and i scrapped every single tree business in houston there was about a thousand and i had this virtual assistant call every single one and not take did they answer did the number work if they did answer say do you use grind stump if yes then would you ever outsourced that if yes then how much would you pay so i spent like two hundred dollars getting this i i'd i'm not familiar with the tree trimming business surprise surprise so why it does a tree business not also do the stump why is that a separate problem that they don't like to deal with yeah great question so a tree business needs sometimes a bucket truck to get up high and a chainsaw right but that's only half the battle then you gotta get the stump out of the ground or else you know you can't grow grass there and so it's a a stump grinder you've gotta pull on a trailer whereas before you don't even need a trailer it's just a whole different system and they gotta go rent it they stand in line they pay three hundred dollars they rent it they put gas in it they drive it back to the job site they grind it then they gotta bring it back and it's like it it eats into their profit and so i thought okay if a tree trimming company could just outsource all of their sump grinding b b only is there an opportunity there so the assistant goes she calls everybody she asked and would they be willing to to outsource that and our people just saying yeah yeah we we'd be willing outsource that is that like a can you get that clear of a signal just off of a a va phone call so only twenty two percent of people answered the phone that's it and of the ones that did almost half of them said if i could outsource this i would gladly and then we then we even got further down the script and said would you pay seven seven dollars per inch or whatever of diameter yes and then i published all that info on my podcast and people went out and started some grinding businesses with the exact thesis and we learned yeah pick an industry where people seem to be doing well and call all of them see how many answer their phone you can cross reference that against like the google keyword tool and you know publicly available stuff and see how much demand for supply is there in any given market so you guys know this but i have a company called hampton join hampton dot com it's a vetted community for founders and ceos well we have this member named la and la saw a bunch of members talking about the same problem with hampton which is that they spent hours manually moving data into a pdf it's tedious it's annoying and it's always waste a time and so la like any great entrepreneur he built a solution and that solution is called mo mo uses ai to automatically transfer data from any document into a pdf and so if you need to turn a supplier invoice into a customer quote or move info from an application into a contract you just put a file into mo and it autofill fills the output pdf in seconds and a little backstory for all the tech out there built the entire web app without using a line of code he used something called bubble io o they've added ai tools i can generate an entire app from one prompt it's pretty amazing and it means you can build tools like mo very fast without knowing how to code and so if you're tired of copying and pasting between documents or paying people to do that for you check out mo dot a i m o l k u dot ai alright back to the pod okay i like that you did one recently you had this instagram video i'm gonna actually play it here but i love this video for a couple of reasons one just the ideas is fun but but two like you know your energy and what you're describing here is is pretty great so here love this this is you talking about starting a pickle ball facility but this freaking thing right here i'm right here in my warehouse slash shop it is twenty one hundred square feet and i'm putting a business here it's called secret pickle ball and it's gonna be ninety nine bucks a month i'm on the cap at two hundred members twenty thousand dollars a month there are seventy seven hundred people within ten minutes of here that play pickle ball every week and i just need two hundred of them to make this a six figure business no employees twenty four seven key card access right there cameras bathroom vending machines already in the next sixty days we're adding drywall we're painting lines adding the bathroom back there if you wanna watch me fail or you wanna watch me win follow i'll document the whole journey we'll get the the business plan here basically you're standing into this warehouse and it's and you're like look at this freaking thing right here which is how you start all of your videos which i think is hilarious little hook so can you add some color to so where's the what's the orange of this idea how's is this going tell me tell me more about this idea yeah so that shop that i'm in in the video is in my back backyard basically it's at the back of my property historically i've rented it out to landscaping businesses for like twenty five like a ranch or something but what is this it's three acres and it's very like yeah it's at the back of my of my property and so i was just thinking like what is the best and highest use of this property and have you ever been to secret pizza in i think it's the cosmo in vegas yeah yeah i love that place yeah that place does like nine million a year in pizza and they don't have a google pro really no website yeah if people haven't been there it's like five feet wide it's like a tidy hallway like in high school if your locker was like on the side it's basically that and they just sell sliced a pizza at the cosmo hotel in vegas yes so i was going for that like i call it secret pickle ball and i i just thought okay i'm gonna run some facebook ads i'm gonna go to my shop i'm gonna take three videos i'm gonna abc b to test them on facebook ads instant form six mile radius sorry what was your ad a video like this or what you're saying i'm gonna build this here or was it like a a mock that was one of the three yeah the one you showed was one of my three ads yeah what what were the other two were they like finished product like a rendering or what what did you do two one of them had like an ai really bad ai image rendering like overlay for a split second but that's it i'm just standing this empty warehouse and when you say i ran some facebook ads give people a sense of how you do that right everyone in the again i know who does this they have you know a certain budget like hey i'm gonna run five i'm gonna spend five hundred dollars and i'm looking for maybe this cost per click or i'm looking for this much net conversion to people signing up to my waitlist list or or they even have a fake checkout and then they refund people afterwards saying like hey sorry this doesn't actually exist yet or you know i'm yeah we got delay eight but it'll be out soon i refunded you for now but you know it's coming and they're looking for that funnel the metrics to to sort of validate that hey cool if this works at five hundred dollars i think i i'd be able to spend maybe a thousand or five thousand dollars in order to get my two hundred members or you know fifty thousand dollars to get my two hundred members whatever it is yeah can you explain your method for facebook ad testing this yeah for sure so i used one campaign and then three ad sets and three ads one video for each ad set and i started it at twenty five dollars a day per video so seventy five dollars a day total my ad was a facebook instant form asking for name phone email then after the instant form it it forwarded them to a type form with nineteen questions that are very granular what is your skill level at pickle how often do you play how much do you do doubles or singles because all of this is gonna determine how many members i can take on and the whole the whole thesis is to be one pickle ball court indoors nice private air conditioning that people pay one to two hundred dollars a month for so i don't want the pros that play twice a day i like it's a very finite resource i want people that hardly ever play like the plan to fitness model except expensive so i want i you want my cake eat it too yeah yeah yeah but i knew five percent of americans play ball weekly and i knew within six miles of me there's two hundred thousand people so i needed like there's like five to seven thousand people in my tam my local tam right and i was hoping that i could convert someone for a hundred dollars because my guess is that the lt tv the lifetime value is gonna be about a thousand dollars but i think it's actually a lot more because no one plays pickle ball alone so i get one customer they're gonna bring two to three or four right what i learned was i'm converting like i don't the lt tv is still to be determined but i'm able to convert new customers at twelve dollars each so how many members does this secret does this exist now like this i don't know when you post building it out i'm i'm literally putting a septic tank in the building right now like it's being built up but i'm expecting gonna cost you to do this so you already had this there how much are you gonna put into making a pickle court to bring this idea to life on the low end twenty thousand realistically thirty to forty that's it wow i would have guessed it's more yeah well it has air conditioning i i need to expand the building because i need room for a bathroom and then i need to add a bathroom so if if i didn't need a bathroom it would be much less and then i need to paint lines so anybody could just google maps pickle ball court in your area right like wherever you live you could you could just take a map and you could be like where is there not space and then you could go drive them and just see oh wow that one's kinda shitty or it's outdoors right or this one over here it's always overrun it's always packed and you could literally just map out that oh wow i just need to take an industrial space and convert it to a a private pickle wall gym a membership right one core two court three court whatever and so the math you're saying here are you charging a hundred bucks or what did you end up charging i'm gonna end up charging one forty nine alright so you're so you're charging one forty nine are you still charging two hundred members or did you find out that that assumption was too high or too low it's it's i can accept around a hundred and fifty members if i accept the right members alright and so you're talking about twenty two thousand a month of top line revenue from this and you're saying it might cost you in this case twenty grand thirty grand to to build i think somebody else let's just assume if it's even seventy five thousand dollars let's triple the price mh it's build out because maybe their space needs it or just being conservative so you got twenty two thousand coming in top line is there any op x here do you need a person there is it like do you have a key membership thing like that you need what is your monthly cost in terms of like you know roughly you think utilities everything else yeah key card entry twenty four seven online booking system through a third party app cameras no employees cleaner that comes there i'm gonna use the cleaner i use for my house she'll go go there like two to four times a week depending on how dirty it gets insurance utilities internet it's like we're talking including cleaning fifteen hundred a month two thousand a month alright so talking about like you know ninety percent profit margins on this but let's be conservative let's even say eighty percent mh that would be roughly generating about seventeen to eighteen thousand a month in cash flow off of pickle off of one pickle ball court yeah that's pretty crazy to be yeah and it's actually pretty unique i used deep research to to see if are there any other private indoor courts that only have one to two courts because there's a lot of franchises that have fifteen courts and a lot of the haters on twitter were saying that like no one no one would pay for this because people they want multiple courts they want other people to see and play pickle up i'm like dude nobody wants to be seen playing pickle oh no but maybe they just don't wanna wait right you know they want available they're not able to get courts and so there there are very few of these and anyone this is something anyone could do like with some facebook ads you don't need to buy a building or have a building you could go rent a building and and run some facebook ads before you even sign a lease like what we're talking about what are we doing here alright now let's be realistic because you know there's a lot of people on the internet who will say it's so good so easy look at this the math is the math is math where does a business like this actually suck you've done enough businesses now to know that there is no such thing as these like perfect businesses so in this one realistically why would this fail what might you be getting wrong here or maybe at least like why would the numbers not be as rosy as they sound right now yeah it's gonna be like customer support inquiries like that are a lot higher than i thought things breaking the ac going out in july and texas zoning issues it it's not the type of business where you're gonna have a hard time finding customers but pick your problems there always be problems i think it's gonna be customer support and you know getting calls at three in the morning from someone that's playing this random game in the middle of the night and the ac went out what sort of problems do you like to pick i would love to not have to worry about customer acquisition and operations like i am terrible at operations i i would much rather try to sell or market something than operate it so if it's marketing heavy and i don't have an issue finding customers that's my business and then the operations either being simple or you offload float it to somebody else yeah exactly give me some of your beliefs here so what what like you do all these random things do you have all these random ideas actions come from thoughts thoughts come from beliefs so what are the beliefs that are leading you to do all these random actions like starting this pickle ball secret pickle ball court or going and and you know being like buck sell online i'll do it for them and now i'm gonna do this as a publicity stunt maybe a partner with you maybe this work i don't know maybe it'll just be a good story and i'll get sued out of existence like what are some of the beliefs that you have we talked about one at the front which is like focus is overrated mh talk about that one and then give you some of your other ones yeah i think focus is overrated because compounding doesn't care like the the principle of compounding does not care if we're working on one thing or a dozen things as long as we stay in the game whatever that game is for us and keep going compounding is just gonna keep going with us right so if you're curious about something like let's say you're you've got a side hustle and this going well and you're like what about this this eye hustle test it like answer that question now if you have a side hustle and it's like you're not sleeping because you're just cashing all these checks and customers are beating down your door you're not gonna be thinking about oh what about this shiny object like you've got product market fit that's a signal right so just chase the signals chase the curiosity because you're gonna learn something over here that you're able to apply over here that no one else has ever thought of because they weren't doing these seven other things like you were so mh net of net i like if i gun into my head i think you will be more wealthy if you do one thing but you're more likely to be miserable and not have an enjoyable life yes the focus actually does work but it's not the only way and it's a lot of fun to not focus is actually what i'm you have a similar thing i'm gonna read you this i want you to to give a little take on it you said say yes to everything take on way too much increase your capacity for stress and let parkinson's law do its job most people have no clue what they're are capable of because they don't take on too much and they never stress test their life and you had something called the restaurant hostess an analogy can you explain that a little bit you know let's say you're you're a hostess at a michelin star restaurant in new york manhattan you're slammed twenty four seven people coming in and out people yell whatever and then you gotta host us in des moines iowa in a diner and they're usually pretty slow and then you know soccer team pulls up and like oh table for fifteen and she's was like oh my gosh table for fifteen oh jeez what do i do like to to the woman in new york like that's nothing that's nothing because that's her norm that's her her new baseline right so most people that i talked to are like oh i couldn't never run a facebook ad campaign because i have to clip my toenails that afternoon like what like they don't like they're not doing enough they they think that like the barometer is down here and they think people like elon musk are just he's an alien that's not even realistic and it's like no he's just like took on way too much and and now he's able to do way more than ever before because the less important things just kinda fall off the plate that's parkinson's law you you you bite off way more than you can chew and if you forget about it then that's a signal that it was worth forgetting about yeah i think that if you ask people honestly you said what percent of your potential are you tapping into i think that's a pretty scary question for most people because the answer is not gonna be what you would want to be very few people i know right like you almost have to be very low self awareness to be like a hundred percent right the answer is not a hundred percent right i think david go has said this about when he trains and he says like you know the moment where your brain is ready to quit when it's over your body still has thirty percent left like the brain quits before the body and the brain will stop you as a safety mechanism third when you still have thirty percent left to give and i don't know if the numbers right but i think directional he's correct when it comes to like what you're physically capable of and then in terms of what you're you know creatively or ambitious create capable of i think it's kind of the same thing i think it's probably even a worse ratio than that i think most people are tapping into less than thirty percent of what they're capable of doing and it doesn't do necessarily need to work a hundred hours i think it's just like your capacity to output and to be creative and to go for it and go for it with full force on the things that you're trying to go for and maybe it's maybe it is take on an extra project or maybe it is but sometimes it's just go faster sometimes you just think bigger and the you know these all sound cliche but there yeah they are they are cliche for a reason they've been around for thousands years because i think humans tend to have this problem where you know we don't actually tap into you know how fast we can go how big we can go you know what what's truly going for it looks like without you know the fears doubts and hesitation that people have and so i i agree with you you know are you are you a family guy as well like i guess like you're doing a bunch of these businesses is that because you're you know the count argument is well yeah you're twenty one years old and you don't have a a kids and a mortgage you that would be the way that somebody would maybe try to discredit the amount of output that you have yeah i mean i've i've got four kids i had all four kids between the ages of twenty three and twenty nine and i was building all these businesses throughout that time i never miss dinner i travel very rarely i never miss a sporting event and i'm in my office you know from seven to four give or take working sometimes i pop out to hang out with the kids but i think it's important that my kids see me work but it's also obviously important that i spend time with them so we go on a lot of vacations four to six a year we've seen all fifty states we go all over the world you can do both period right i think it's important for my kids to see me work unfortunately my work just looks like me talking and laughing with friends and so i don't think they i get it i don't think that's actually yeah what what what about what about you know you said you're building your family and you worked let's say the seven to four what are you doing during that seven to four to make those hours count for more than maybe the average person is doing so like how what do you do to have more productivity or more effect in those same number of hours like how do you structure your day what are some things that you you've noticed you do maybe better or differently than the average average entrepreneurial bear yeah the perfect day for me is nothing on my calendar i definitely time batch like if i have seven calls that week i'll try to put them all in the same afternoon i think a lot of people kinda feel and insecure about having an open calendar because it's like it's kind of like a comfort blanket like okay now i know i'll be productive today right right but when you have so many ideas like so many ad campaigns i wanna run or newsletters i wanna write like i don't have time feeling i i i don't have problem filling my time and so i i don't use any fancy crm notion or anything if a tab is open in my browser it's a to do list when i close it it's done my notes app a lot of caffeine admittedly and i don't worry about context switching i used to really stress like alright this we could do this for thirty minutes do this don't context switch like i feel like with anything in life we we can evolve to it we can become a lot more acc acclimated to it and so i'm always context switching always and right i feel i feel like i'm good at it because i've done it so much another one of your beliefs you said the long term roman in business the more i realize this to be true if you wanna be a billionaire you gotta innovate and focus but to be a millionaire you simply need to copy paste don't even try to copy something that works to put your own twist on it no twist stop twisting just copy what's working and organically over time you'll discover the tweaks on your own but you don't have to lead with all the twist or you'll just screw it up yeah i think there should be like there needs to be a school or something on reverse engineering like it it is an underrated skill i'm in like the meta ads library and the web archive all the time let's say there was this taco restaurant that just in my town that had a line around the corner twenty four seven and they all they sold were steak tacos that's it and you said alright they've got more demand than supply alright this town could use another taco shop alright i'm gonna copy them i'm a do it even better people want more variety they want steak and chicken and there's no drinks you can even get drinks there you i'm gonna do gonna do that every change you make is another variable to like to screw it risk risk you yeah like you you're gonna you're let's say you copy them for verbatim and you open you're gonna learn really quickly oh oh they're probably using that as their point of sale and not that oh this is why because the onions they have to separate them from the meat oh like you're gonna learn all these things that are gonna force you to have to change things but if you do that before you know if that copying works or not you're just gonna increase the likelihood of of screwing it up and thus not being successful that's interesting you know mon who's come on this podcast a couple times has this phrase he he calls it being a shameless a shameless clone and so he says you know i'm a shameless clone of the buffett and mu philosophy i you know i claim to have no no good ideas except for one which is you know to copy the good ideas that already exist out there if i hear a good idea i i take it on is my own right and he talks about you know the dumbest person in the world is the gas station across the street from a more successful gas station he's like because you know you see that guy and that guy comes out when a customer's there and he washes their windows for them and he prices it a certain way he's uses certain bright lights so that he's more visible at night you have to be a idiot to be across the street see that guy doing it and then for your own stubborn ness not just do those things implement those best practices and so pride yeah yeah pride and i and i think there's like you know a version of that in business and like you said you will organically end up putting your own twist on the business but you you know you bring up an interesting point which is that baking in all those twist up upfront is a bit of unnecessary risk i think there's a view that entrepreneurs are risk takers when actually the risk minimize and you know they're trying to take as little risk as is necessary but but are willing to take the necessary risks in order to do something unless there's like you know a a big asymmetric reward for it they're not gonna do it and so you know i think that you're right and i think that this is very true for especially at like the local level and service level like is it's not through if you're trying to be a founder go through yc c build the next big thing the next breakout app which is gonna be you know the next social network you can't just copy facebook is not gonna work right the next of the next ride sharing service can't just be uber right they do have to innovate do have to do self driving cards like way or something like that so this advice does not apply to people who are playing what i call the business olympics where they're trying to do this stuff that's like global greatness move the world forward disrupt a totally in industry yes you absolutely do need to be innovative there but in terms of people who are trying to become financially free you know working backwards is not a bad way to go i i have a very annoying phrase i say a bunch which is in my companies any anytime we have run into an and people are bitch pitching and moaning about it i just say well we're probably not the first ones to have this problem right because it's so true in it you're in e comm business to suddenly you have this supply chain problem well guess what a thousand or a million other e commerce business have had that same problem and they figured out a way to solve it so what did they do let's start with that now i was talking actually a friend yesterday who's yeah this guy's almost a billionaire and he's in the real estate game and he's just crushed it real estate on his own and now for the first time after fifteen years he's raising money for his projects it never wanted to do it always i wanted to use his own capital but you know finally sort of lent and realize okay i could do bigger scale and do more projects if i if i raise capital from other people not just to use my own personal balance sheet and so i told him i was like you know he's giving me all his ideas about how he's gonna raise money and i go dude every real estate guy no raises money have you first looked at what they did like why are you trying to figure this out on your own that's the hard way there's no bonus points for doing this the hard way like let's just start by reverse engineering what other people do like go talk to five to ten other people who've already on this see if there's a common blueprint go try that and only innovate where needed along the way when you run into some bottlenecks or some walls that you hit along the way of trying to implement that plan because for most business problems you can just ask the question like has anybody else ever solved this and what do they do and turns out it's almost always like it's very common this there's a common problem there is a common solution and we should try that first yeah like we we place our innovation on the wrong thing we place it on the features and the benefits when we should be placing it on being innovative about copying how they're doing what they're doing we had a three p and you know three pills right and it's like the worst nobody likes their three p it's it's impossible and so we saw all the other three peels out there when we launched and we're like oh my gosh they charge for storage and pick and pack and this and that and they mark up shipping these guys are idiots it's so confusing so we set out to like innovate the industry simple flat pricing and like at the end of that two year experience like we look like all the other three p because like okay oh oh they charge for storage because some companies go out of business and then they're left with this big bill and they oh that's why like so that's another signal if you see other competitors in your industry and your first thought is like they're so stupid why are they doing it this way probably for a reason like you just haven't learned that reason yeah especially if they're successful right don't copy somebody who's failing but if they're successful you can start with that and say alright can i do that as well yeah and you know the reason i like this idea is because this is not the only way to win i spent most of my life playing in the innovation space and i really love that it's super fun to be creative and to come up with the idea it feels really satisfying when you've you're the first to do something that's i mean that's amazing i'm very proud of that whenever i've tried to do that but it that gets talked about a lot because again it sounds super noble and i think that does work but there are many ways to win and i what i like about what you're saying is that it is another way to win you say oh wow those guys did that gutter cleaning service using next door and their neighborhood in massachusetts i should do that in my neighborhood in california let me start with that and and i and i think that more people should do that if they wanna actually like be successful in because that is another way to win it's not the only way but it's another way yeah it's the mid with meme all over again right right my my first business was yeah i i read about this iphone repair shop making thirty grand a month and i thought i can make thirty grand a month fixing iphones in my city but like it's kind of an ignorant thought but it worked and i did you know so you you gotta you gotta gotta be done like a like i chris this is what man i we you still have like half of the dock of other ideas in small business in like you know random businesses that you've come across that we could go for it i think maybe maybe we do a part if people like this one to have chris back if you if you like chris either tweet at me or put in the youtube comments will be best that you know bring them back because i think this is lot of fun i really love the little nooks and cra of the economy that you go looking in to find these you know stump grinding or the hole in one business or the shipping container for for wine tours like you know this is fun stuff that i think you know sometimes on this podcast to be honest we have brilliant people talking about what you can do with ai and what you could do with x y z and that's great i love that stuff but those aren't in episodes i can send to my sister or my mom because those businesses are kind of out of reach for what they wanna do but i i think what's cool about you know the businesses you talk about you know your pickle ball court this the stuff that anybody could do chris thanks for coming on maybe can people shout shout out your your twitter your podcast whatever you want people to go check out yeah the k office podcast is where i published three times a week spelled like my last name and it's on your hat so that's right never miss dot com yes always be promoting that's right alright man thanks for coming on thanks sean i feel like i could rude world i know i could be what i want to put all in it like a days off on a goal less travel never looking back alright so when my employees join hampton we have do a whole bunch of onboarding stuff but the most important thing that they do is they go through this thing i made called copy that copy that is a thing that i made that teaches people how to write better and the reason this is important is because at work or even just in life we communicate mostly via tech right now whether we're emailing slack blogging texting whatever most of the ways that we're communicating is by the written word and so i made this thing called copy that that's guaranteed to make you right better you could check it out copy that dot com i post every single person who leaves a review whether it's good or bad i post it on the website and you're gonna see a trend which is that this is a very very very simple exercise something that's so simple that they laugh at they think how is this gonna actually impact us and make us right better but i promise you it does you gotta try it at copy that dot com i guarantee it's gonna change the way you write again copy that dot com

so today we're talking about a very specific topic that i never thought we would go there sam did you ever we'd go here maybe by episode two thousand but i wasn't sure if it's gonna happen into it's a little early today's episode is about the business of butts and guts cue the intro music i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a goal travel never looking back so sam i've ever seen this story about how honestly actually it's not a it's not an active desperation to talk about this it's actually this is us flexing on everybody it's like dude we can take anything and we can make it entertaining and about business i don't if you ever seen larry bird one year he was playing against the the atlanta hawk and he decided in the second half he was just too good and he decided to only shoot with his left hand yeah i saw that and for the whole second half that's this this is our shoot only with our left hand to to try to do a full great business episode on with the constraint of everything's gotta be related to butts and guts dude we actually we you know we've done an episode in rose now a uni with the fighter when she was doing like her walk out because we thought that was inspiring we actually should have done a whole thing on larry bird trash talking it doesn't relate to business but just as ego i love also one one of the greatest nickname ever and in fact if i was white i would try to steal this you to try to steal this the hi from french lick is is one of the greatest nickname i've ever heard it's the best i love like stories where he walks like the the all star room and he's like i'm just looking around to see who's gonna get second in a three point was like alright so we're gonna do butts and guts that's a that's a framework that's that's something our youtube team was like hey you guys we've analyzed the data and you guys need to do themed episodes you know pick a topic guys don't just show up and just shoot shit randomly you gotta pick a topic that gets more views and so we were like got it and i think they met like three ways to make a million dollars before the age of twenty five you know like youtube type of things so we're like i don't what no worries we got it we're gonna do a butts and gut said it's gonna pop off it's gonna be great do you have the first first butts and guts story i have some butts and goods stories let me give you you go one and then i'll i'll give you a good one okay i'm gonna give you a quick one this actually my wife taught me about this so a few years ago and maybe seven eight years ago before kids my wife is like i'm like hey what are we doing this saturday what do wanna do you get for a hike you wanna a the farmer's market what should we do and she's like i gotta go into the city i'm taking a class and i was like a class in the city what do you mean and she was like kinda of being eva about it she's was like i'll be back later don't worry about it and her sister comes and picks her up and i'm like what's the class that she's like it's called the torque out and i go home and at google and i see that there's this amazing business i don't know if you remember when t kinda really came on the scene like ten years ago there was a woman who basically made it her business her name was i think called le workout and i her name is lexi and this woman was touring the country and she was making millions of dollars touring the country teaching women in every city how to work and so there would the class would be full it was like sold out months in advance and he would go and there'd be hundreds of women and she's like alright ladies put that dump out and then she's like and tori let me see here and she's like i get a baseline the point was i couldn't believe this and i started googling it and actually there were several stories of women who jumped on the trans it's like those businesses that started selling ppe there in covid when the torque trend started there's another story of this woman who was a kindergarten teacher who decided to take up you know torque training as a as a side hustle and ended up making millions of dollars and it became a big issue because the parents were like that's whatever that's miss miss henderson i get out what is she doing and i just thought it was amazing that you could make millions of dollars literally just teaching women how to work where are they now so she initially she was like this is the next z and like she did all these interviews being like this is the next zoom but like z was this kinda like latin dancing thing that they translated into a fitness class i'm doing that with working and she started getting all these celebrities to come to her stuff so like christina billy was like a huge fan of it and then there was like you know other famous people that i really fully know who they are and she was approached by investors it's like let's blow this up take this concept nationwide no no international and then i think it kind of fizz she's now like an aspiring musician so she's like a female rapper now so she's she made her money during during that phase when the get was good i don't think it it didn't turn into like a a nationwide franchise concept like they had hoped but i don't know if she just got bored and moved on or it fizz out and the the the numbers started dropping but at the time it was like you had to you the these tickets were hard to come by it was like the hottest ticket it town so did your wife learn how to work the funny thing is already knew how to work she was just going for a refresher course you know what i mean this is just a lifelong learner a student of the game i saw my friend josh he had like the most like precious instagram story the other day he was like my you know five year old wanted learn how to play piano we took to these classes and he was getting a little nervous so because at the end of like the six or twelve month class you had to do a rec recycle and i said screw it i'm gonna do it too so he went and learned how to play piano alongside his kid and i see a video of his kid playing twinkle twinkle take a little sars at the and the josh goes up and sits down in place like the same thing and i think that that could be a good mother daughter bond that your kids have right they could they're good they could have a play play yes generational working alright so that's my that's my first one doesn't is just appetizing by the way this is just like this is like warm up stretching for me here alright so that's just i just kinda got my shoulder loose and gave you that one go ahead okay fecal micro microbiota transplants you haven't heard of that word you ever heard that term those are four words i never heard together yeah well it's three it's three words but yeah you you haven't heard those three either this i came across this in two ways the first way was i was listening to a pod with shane smith shane smith was the guy who found advice and for a little while about ten years ago he was like the big man on camp is big shot and he told the story about how he had colitis or something like that or cro some type of gut issue and he got surgery where they took another person's poop like a healthy person's poop and they put it into his gut have you ever heard of that no so it's called that's what it's called it's called fecal microbiota transplants and there's a ninety percent effective rate it's it's poop or it's not even like the bacteria it's actual poop goes in well i don't know where you draw the line like i don't know like is it like the a minuscule amount or a tablespoon i'm not sure like you know wipes how much do you have to like zoom in on the microscope before between poop from bacteria but ultimately it's still like poop you're putting fecal you're your fecal matter you're putting into someone's gut and i was talking to this woman recently and she was telling me that she was working on a startup and it sounded actually ridiculous that this was a thing but it was kind of brilliant and it opened up my eyes and she was working on the startup where they found a handful of people that have amazing microbiome and they were taking their poop and you could actually replicate it in like a petri dish and sell it to people and so you can get a surgery or get i don't even know technically if it's a surgery i don't know what if that would be defined as a surgery but you basically are taking someone shit and you put it up in their colon and it changes their microbiome and it has like a ninety percent effective rate and what she was telling me was that their premise is that there are thinking about working in a way where people work with fitness influencers and so instead of like someone selling a workout plan or an ad plan you can sell someone else's microbiome and let me give you an example so a few amazing ways that using someone else's poop and get one of these like fecal transplants is for depression for crohn's for colitis and even anxiety and some people even it think like it could help with autism because people who have autism something that is funky going on with their microbiome and you can actually like use this to improve those conditions however they were doing a study harvard did a study in two thousand and nineteen and they have found that elite athletes specifically endurance athletes they they have something special in their microbiome so in their gut that allows them to have slightly better endurance specifically meaning a like different lac take threshold so like without getting too gritty like your lactic threshold is like how well you deal with lac which means how well when your muscles get like really tense and really and you go through straining its activity how well your body can recycle that asset in order to get help you keep going well anyway they have found that when they have when they took certain endurance athletes microbiome basically their shit and put it up into another human being their endurance is better something like fifteen or twenty percent longer they can like let's say run for a marathon and this woman's premise was that she can take hypothetically a lance armstrong and sell his microbiome and i thought that was insane and incredibly fascinating and i went and looked up a lot of the research i think open bio dot org it's a a nonprofit that's like leading a lot of this stuff this all seems incredibly legitimate not today but in the next five or ten years and i thought it was so weird and so awesome you ever do this yeah yeah for sure dude i like sure for sure like when someone talks about pd performance enhancing drugs they talk about it like it's a bad thing and i'm like i i want my performance enhanced i would love that yeah inject me with everything i i tried so many pee maybe performance and enhancing poop this is pretty wild so do you know like roughly what stages is i sat like people are doing this people do i think it's a wealthy person thing i think it's like like plastic surgery where it's like a a you have to have money to do you have to be like in a certain category to justify this but no like people for sure are getting this right now for crohn's and colitis so so hold on so you said i would for sure do this and this is available so does that mean your appointments booked or what does that mean well soon what it means is they are doing the so there's like for example colitis that's a colon illness have to have a condition to do it you're saying yeah like that's like one of the reasons now if you do it for like anxiety or to make me like run a faster five k i think that's a little bit more elective and like you know the money is not in that area at the moment like studies are showing that it's incredibly promising so people are doing it but it's not like a common thing that's interesting okay let's move to move number three before we do it you wanted to take a quick little walk through history here the the history of butts and yeah it's pretty interesting so back in the olden days it was a highly attractive trait not for the aesthetic part of it but because it was like rooted in oh if somebody has a strong glut or strong pelvis area they're gonna be able to run they're gonna be able to hunt they're gonna have a a very long and healthy life and so people have studied this they have a a waist to hip ratio you know that you have you this what ways to hip ratio point seven is the ideal wait i think certain mix a lot wrapped about that denny yeah you was it that i think point seven was one of the latest philosophy first makes a lot also po get on this and actually it was a thing more for men than for women so the the the appeal of having a a nice butt was more important for men because they were the ones who needed to go hunt and gather and all that but then there's also this statue i don't know if you've heard know how you say it but it's the venus statue it's literally translates to venus of the beautiful butt ox have you have you seen this statue of before let's see okay it's a roman statue that was where this woman was just worship for having a great butt okay so i'm zooming in on this the statues butt i mean it's fine but imagine back in the roman days this was this was as good as again it's back there right like they didn't have like that kardashian genetics yet had this surgical enhancement so this was like this was it by the way the comments on this are so funny on reddit like literally the top comment just said what am i on stone hub it's so good so dude this is this is very like this is mediocre not even in the same category of someone worthy of having a statue that last two thousand years to ob access over but just think about the honor at the time to be immortal in this way the average first that was was had a pancake ass and if this was considered like art worthy right right and then and then there was this this era so this is not now the victorian era so you might think oh that was just a phase no no it's all it's just translated from one era to the next so this little thing back here this is called the bustle and the bustle is basically this artificial enhancement to make to make it look like you have a big butt and so this was kinda like this this sort of like victorian age or whatever so this it sort of lasted then as well and so this has been the thing for a very long time and then there was a brief period in the nineties were actually flat butts and more slim women became the thing the kate like the kate the kate moss era i not a fan of that era not my favorite era well luckily the world came to a census and then with jl lo first at beyonce i i i was i asked ai i was like hey could you explain how this all shifted and it was like honestly jl lo jl was a huge influence here and you know it led to now what's kind of like gone overboard i would say and there's a new business and that business is related here so sam do you'd know the number one fastest growing plastic surgery that there is i probably guess i'm guessing it's the the poop diaper kim kardashian what's it called a brazilian but that's right the the brazilian butt left the b and so this is a cosmetic surgery you basically transfer fat it's actually a double win so you take fat from the belly and you inject it into the butt and it is the fastest growing cosmetic procedure it's growing it's grown eight hundred percent in the last decade so it is growing very fast do you wanna see the guy's face who invented this by the way yeah yeah can i interest you and looking at this dude's mug alright here we go oh this is the guy it's a happy man this guy evo so evo invented this and he's actually kind of a legend in the medical profession in fact when the olympics were in brazil in i think twenty sixteen he was one of the guys like who's holding the torch for like a period of it right you they only like like eight people to touch the torch he was one of them and so he he was the inventor of the procedure it didn't get as popular though until later when they sort of improved it because it was kinda dangerous it was kinda painful and they they've improved it since then and now nearly a billion dollars a year is spent on bb l's just in america it is the fastest growing cosmetic surgery and there's a whole business around it actually that's pretty interesting that people have popped up of recovery from your b surgery how how much is a i don't even know how much these things cost how much does that cost about twelve thousand dollars on average but if you're in miami and you want the best doctor you're you know you're more like thirty forty thousand dollars to get a big bill doesn't doesn't seem crazy at all right to get like a huge ass that you have for life like i like something you just call it a diaper dude well but i'm just saying if you want like your body to be altered for of all what are gonna look like when you're a elderly woman yeah i don't know but like they've done a long term study on this but no i i think they're like i've i've gotten tattoos that have cost like you know a quarter of that so that seems like a steel that's funny yeah i don't know i think it's yeah it makes sense think it seems like painful and dangerous so there's like a pretty long recovery and actually there's like whole business of recovery centers recovery pillows like check this out so like there's this whole brand so like this is like their pillow that you because you need a set a special pillow to sleep on so people have looked at it and said alright if there's a billion dollars a year spent on the b every one of those people is gonna need recovery and they started selling recovery products to them and i've actually seen this trend happen now with like pretty much every big macro health trend right so like we talked about this with oz how when oz zen as oz zen trend rise or or start rise people created auxiliary products so there's sc z which is an app that helps you track your usage that story wild right that's like a multi million dollar subscription saas business that's a an app to help you manage your semi injections and there's there's more too so there's people who are selling drinks that are like oz epic plus plus so it's like oh you're on oz zen take this to manage the like manage your gut health while you're on on this or to so actually accelerate the benefits of it and so they're piggyback on the trend and creating you know sort of like these like trend surfing products have you tried it yet by the way was that big no that's shocker man i i still i micro dose every once in a while just a little bump biggest slam of slam of the week right there new segment slam of the week no i just i meant because it's like pretty amazing have like it's said tell someone it's shocking you haven't tried to z you know what that means you know that beats still a fat person i i am not i'm not alluding to that at all i'm just saying that everyone has dude i have the funniest funny thing so i did this blood test and i got back this result and it was like oh dude like your ts levels was really high your thyroid levels high really high you gotta like work on time mine was how do and i was like oh sweet i got a thyroid issue that explains it i was like it's not me it's not my own lack of discipline and self control that's the problem it's the i got a thyroid thing and i was with ramon at the time ramon was like do to every everybody wants to have a thyroid i was like it's so true i do you think you'll ever cryo oz i don't think so i don't think i would mostly because i've heard such mixed things about it some people swear that it's like one of the greatest inventions of mankind has all these other benefits and it's like you know kind of a no brainer other people like it's gonna kill you and like sort of mess you up for life i have no idea where the truth is in the middle and if you have a way to solve the problem without it seems like you should just do that right like you know if you don't if you don't need to intervene shouldn't and i'd like i'd like to prove to myself i could do it with that is kinda of where i landed yeah yeah i mean i'm okay taking the shortcut it so yeah signed me up okay i think there's a good transition for you to tell me about this research you did on on our next butts guts business alright it's a big one the big one you've been researching the one the one you've been been a big fan of for a while i have been a big fan of this one for a while okay sean zoom in zoom in on those guys for me these guys are are are are the man that's who they are so your banker banker you know what i mean yeah they do well you know these guys they got it going on so the guy on the left is james fu bin liu also known as just james liu james i think he started c the the textbook company where he got wealthy and then he worked at amazon and a couple other companies but he's like one internet web one point o og g so he made a lot of money being early on the internet and he just crushed it and now he runs this thing called long view capital the guy on the right is ra age so he raymond ray runs a hedge fund and he's also a big shot he lives in singapore so he must be incredibly wealthy because i'm sure he's there for some type of like tax reasons but he's definitely a billionaire there so those two guys are responsible for one of the best turnaround in a long time so those two guys are the largest shareholders in an app called grind an app that is beloved by many and an app that i had to download for research purposes only which i need to put that disclosure there because every single financial analyst who i saw talk about this app they put the exact same thing and i found it hilarious i thought they put like a a disclosure and they're saying i only downloaded that this for research purposes but anyway do you know your buddy james what what's james last name james courier so james carrier had a partner named rick marine yeah and and these two guys created a bunch of apps they created tickle which like got huge it was like one of the first viral apps of all time and then they helped create monster was that another one or no branch out do you remember branch shout it got it was built on top of facebook yeah they created these like viral apps right they were kinda like the og guys of going viral actually and that's actually where your partner from the guy who found be i believe he worked there so it's like this whole like silicon valley viral mafia yeah so rick mar in two thousand and nineteen so i hung out with rick because he spoke at hu khan rick is just like a very corporate looking guy and rick mar made this announcement that him and this other guy named jeff with the backing of ray and james bought this company called grinder and i'd had heard of dr but i was one of those things when i'd heard about it i was like i forgot that it was even a thing and they bought this app for six hundred million dollars i believe wasn't in public or was a private there it was a private and interestingly it was owned by a chinese company so it was started by just like a guy like a gay guy in la who was like trying to solve his own need he like wanted to meet dudes and created this app and it just grew organically but it wasn't like that well run very interestingly a chinese company bought it a chinese company who helped make clash of clans and they were accused the chinese company was accused by the us government a blackmail mailing users so for example on grind you can say they have like weird features where you can like be a closet gay guy so you can like not give away your full identity to other users or you can even like say i i do or do not have hiv and they were accused of blackmail their users so basically the us government accused this chinese company of using the user's information nefarious and then they said you've gotta sell this thing and that's where rick this guy named jeff and then james liu and ray stepped in and they bought this company for six hundred million million dollars and right away they basically fired everyone so in one of their like proxy statements they said they replaced something like ninety percent of the staff and they rebuilt this company and i think when they bought granger at the time it had like two and a half stars on the app store and these guys stepped in with a rick marine and jeff being the the guys at the home and they turned this thing around and they turned it around so much that if you google grinder stock it has outperformed every other dating app and so basically if you look at bum bum has a billion dollars in revenue they're not worth nearly as much i believe as grinder right so it's it's worth four point six billion right now and the stock is up thirty percent this year a hundred fifty five percent year to date and over the last five years a hundred and twenty percent it's been a very steady increase this app like since they're back they're actually one of the the handful of spa kind of like good stories you know spa got popular when and what twenty twenty one and like they all sucked these guys have absolutely crushed it and i was reading about their turnaround and what they did and it's pretty freaking amazed how they've they've turned this business around to to be as successful as it is now and i thought it was interesting that like when it went public this dude named james who's a i think he studied like literally rocket science from like university of michigan and then race a age who runs a hedge fund out of singapore is the first billionaire of the crew the first guy who's involved to become a billionaire does rick still run it or no no no no i think they're out i think they like did a proper turnaround and they bounced and like it's pretty obvious like why it works like you know it's sort of like giant like have you ever played call of duty or james bond and like have you ever seen like on the top left there's like a map with like red dots and you just run to that like dot for immediate action that's like pretty much what writer is yeah it's not true so way back in the day i think twenty twelve twenty thirteen we were what i was at monkey for and one of the apps we're were trying to build was a a dating app like and we had this idea we were like i think it was called like and it was as horrible it was like get out there or something like that it was basically like a a dating app or inside of messaging people you actually go on dates that was the premise okay this is before tinder had come out and the iphone there weren't there weren't any mobile dating apps really popular because like again like i said even tinder hadn't come out there was a couple that were doing okay but i'm downloading a bunch of them for research and the most popular mobile dating app at the time was grind download grinder okay let's see the you know i'm here for the i'm here for research again i'm here for just find out what is the user experience and dude i don't know if anybody ever seen this it is a very stunning user experience not like any other mobile app you ever download you as soon as you load the feed the feed is basically pictures of people's you know private parts and there's not like a there's not like a profile picture of their face it's just that and you're looking at that and then you you like you said do you click the map mode and it's like oh here's a dude over at nordstrom in the dressing room right now he's like you know his thing says like green he's he's open he's ready and was like what is like point three away right everything was based on a distance away from you where there's a dude who's d t right now and i was like this is the most aggressive thing i have ever seen in my life i couldn't believe it like there's no other there's like you know this you know the sara goal my thing is a perfect analogy is the only other thing that ever works that way it's like a imagine the stereotype of like twenty construction workers like cat calling a girl as she walks by and like the woman being into it and cat calling back like it's like immediately yeah like so they were talking about and they're like in one of their reports they were basically saying they're analyzing the onboarding time of hinge and tinder they said it was like fifteen minutes and twenty two minutes and they're like with our thing with grind once you sign up within a hundred and twenty seconds you can go and meet someone and so like they're they're optimizing for speed so like it's it's really i mean it's it's just a hook up app basically like i was reading like a funny article ever seen those articles where it was like it costs you know eighteen hundred dollars a month to be a woman you know we gotta get our hair done we gotta get nails the guy a guy did that he was like cost twelve hundred dollars to be a gay dude to manhattan you gotta like do this thing and then this thing and then you need your forty dollar a month subscription to grind like it's like become like a it cost you business to be a gay guy and like like to to to to have this app like it's it's table stakes and they they nominated the niche i'm on rick's linkedin right now so he's a four time founder twenty five years of operating experience the guy is a harvard business school graduate blah blah he built tickle dot com they sold her for a hundred million dollars and then it says he's the managing partner of catapult capital it's a private equity firm that focus on consumer tech and then says in may twenty twenty they partnered with those guys that you talked about and they bought grind for six hundred million he became the coo they rebuilt the team and every single system in process grow grew revenue and eb about eighty percent improve the app rating to four point six stars blah and after two and a half years of hard work it went public with a market cap of more than two billion so in two and a half years they turned six hundred million into two and a half billion it's wild right and this is something that interests you i i know in a lot of our guests which is like buying companies like we talked we've talked about that a bunch and i know it it ent you it definitely trades me too and but for some reason you don't hear about the in silicon valley a lot dude we gotta have rick on rick is a rick is kind of a legend we need to have him on the podcast rick is a le legend he's real low key i've i've hung out with him only a handful of times he's got he's got a lot of like style you know what dude he it looks like patrick d he looks like d from grey's anatomy he's a he i was about to say it looks like is that the guy's name your name yeah yeah he looks just like and like i'm my friends with him on a i'm friends with rick on facebook and he just like recently posted a photo of him and patrick meeting and he said finally we meet because everyone says that to him he looks very much like him that's he's he's cool this guy's cool and this someone was joking and they're like one of the reasons why this stock confuses a lot of people is because financial and bankers and stock analysts it's all straight dudes like they aren't like this isn't like well it's not it's not something that they're like potentially using in their life on a daily basis and so it's kind of like been a little bit under the radar oh yeah i dude bum only five hundred million right so yeah so ten times bigger it's ten times bigger because it there's a bunch of reasons one being like gay guys earn like twice as much as straight straight men dude all of match group is seven point eight billion grind alone was four point five and they have way left and and they're working with the population that's like ten percent of america you know what i'm like it's like they're everything about this it's sort of like bumblebee aren't supposed to fly women sort of another underdog story you're out of inspired right now yeah man they've killed it or i go inspiration grind thought it's wild though right that's what i'm saying you don't hear about these turnaround at all with like a lot of silicon valley in internet companies and they've they've nailed it yeah that's wild okay i have one more it's not really good one to end on but i'll do it anyways well first of all i'll do two quick ones dude wipes oh my god great idea who it's insane right you're gonna say you're gonna say this a nerve something you need to say the stat this is so here's an example so one time we had this guy messaging sean and i and he had a company called hostage hostage tape yeah and it was where you put tape on your mouth and you go to bed at night and it's supposed to make you like breathe better sleep better or whatever and i think sean i think you and i had said you know he messaged me a ton of times he both your an idiot or an idiot and then he texted us like updates and it was like eventually scaled like twenty million in revenue in like two years and it was like the initial the initial gut reaction we had was like wow this guy is so stupid and then you know texas he's like hit a million in revenue and it was like oh my god people are so stupid and then it hits the twenty million in revenue and you and i go we are so stupid that is exactly how i felt when i saw the dude wipes number their revenue number can you say what it is so twenty twenty four they did two hundred and twenty million dollars in revenue insane insane who would have thought and but look at this actually i gotta show you this this is hilarious as you're saying this so there's a i'm on an article and this is this must have been made by the team itself but it it's literally a chart of their growth so we'll check this out it says dude wipes now over two hundred million and it there's a slide it says twenty twenty forty million and it says there's a call out when the experts said our growth was done but said when sam said this is stupid no i even yeah i mean i would have said it was stupid the all the time yeah pretty amazing right back when we started the podcast i don't know if they sent you they sent me a giant yeah package of dude wipes that has i it's now twenty twenty five we started this podcast like in twenty twenty or twenty nineteen or something like that it's been like five or six years i'm still living off those like a prep you know rationing out dude wipes i've i've these things have flat they sent so many it's lasted for so long and so so everyone know it's just a it's what you wipe with and it's wet it's like a like a like a baby wipe right yeah it's like a wet wipe i don't actually know i know maybe that's why they've last long i don't really used i actually use them only on my baby but it's flush right i think that's the key difference is that a normal a normal wet wipe is not flush you're not you know not supposed it'll best up your toilet i think dude wipes you can and it's basically like an alternative to the bj day right you don't need a day if you use this i think is the idea man this is a great story idea we definitely should have focused on this one i cannot believe how they grew so fast where did they did they go through retail or online i mean i think these things become everything story i don't know their exact story i just know they did a lot of like gorilla market they're sort of like landscape and that they they use the disadvantage of their brand being kind of seen as a joke as an advantage to be able to do sort of like shocking or you know like interesting marketing in order to like you know basically like bro marketing right it's like how do you do grow marketing to grow like like liquid death did this landscape did this and i think these guys are another one dollar shave club was another one that that did this so pretty impressive so they're they're impressive tu which is the actual day company is like also a nine figure in over a hundred million dollar a year business it's basically like a attachment you can you could turn any toilet into sort of like the japanese kinda like fancy toilets by attaching this thing so is one but there's also another interesting one this is less less fun to talk about but i guess like i found it producing can you go to gas maryland dot com my buddy diego and his wife used to work at this place and he was like dude these like it's like a clinic that's just for doing like colon and gut cleanse colon cleanse the sort of thing and it's a kinda like a stand practice that's just focused on colon health mh and he's like dude they're booked up like you know they booked out like you know months in advance and he's like i think and i we were talking about like this is actually like a really good like franchise concept because everywhere you see locations of these is one in san francisco not not the same brand but i i looked up one san francisco also like very popular and i just thought oh wow this is interesting in the same way that these like med spas have become a big deal and med med spas have become a big business which is like these kind of like places you go for all these different aesthetic procedures i think you're gonna have the same thing i think you're gonna have basically gut spas and i think more and more people are gonna go here and they're gonna look for help with their all their you know gi issues and their digestion issues and their health that's wild and are you you're a year older than me have you gotten your first colonoscopy colonoscopy you done anything that yet no am i supposed to what age you get that i don't know i haven't done it yet either i think we're forty so we're four years away we have a few years not looking forward to it you wanna do it together we whole hands do you guys allow doubles like a couples a cup colonoscopy that we could do like put us out like testing like all the this is really fascinating i they're there's another one that's in this so was like oh this is like interesting as a franchise was a private equity play of course too late they're their private equity guys are always on top of these trends so if you look up this company exact sciences they do something called the c guard tests and they could just crush it and so they do c colon cancer screening they have like a a non invasive way to do the test two point seven six billion in revenue last what from this this private i equity be back play have you seen the guy in instagram that just asked like he's he's like the most challenging person to talk to you about a party and he's was like oh that's nice are you guys pe backed i worked at a pe firm no but that's hilarious just it just everything is are you pe backed oh yeah i just because i'm a partner at a pe firm who owns you this is insane so this is billions of dollars in sales yeah oh my god this is wild i mean just in this episode we've basically talked about like ten billion dollars worth of guts and butts and businesses which just really shows like you can if you if you can't figure out a way to make it it's on you the opportunity is literally everywhere either there's products like dude wipes and stuff that seems like jokes there's things like bb cushions for after bb surgeries right like where you just had to spot a growing trend and say okay what what's the next product that they would need right the warren buffett question then what what happens after the bb l you know that that was a question that you could have asked you know the grinder turnaround these guys who who made this huge play isn't it like doesn't it kinda blow your mind when you when you realize like oh man there is like an infinite set of possibilities that i could go into if i wanted to you know go to successful business it's really years my in laws live in this really nice building in new york city and they're really successful you know they my mother law's a haitian my father law's a high school dropout who started moving company that boomed and had killed it and allowed him to acquire this really fancy apartment and i'm sitting in their lobby and i'm like how many units are in this apartment he's like two hundred and then i'm like well there's like ten thousand buildings like around here like i don't you know so many so many buildings and i it's just amazing i'll be in the lobby and i'll just start having conversations with random people and every person you're talking to you're like well you must have had many millions of dollars to buy this apartment meaning you're you're you're very successful and now you hear about what they're doing for work and there's just a million ways to make a living and there's so many of them i remember thinking like well my in laws they're they're one in a million right they're they're the they're the barry dream the success story but everyone around me is one in a million and it's just absolutely astounding to hear like all these stories of these people who just kill it in the most random ways that you never would have guessed it yeah yeah it's like this you there's like tiktok channels where it's like hey man i just wanna ask you what do you do for a living as they get into like a nice car and it's like really really shallow but the the general idea of actually what that person is doing is correct which is you could basically go reverse engineer what people do you can ask them people are generally pretty open about what they do you how they made it generally they had help along the way and they're willing to help somebody else who wants to be helped and you know success leaves clues you can actually either go and start to see patterns or see opportunities and say oh okay you know just like the way i saw that after the oz epic trend people built these like know auxiliary side businesses is now i see the same thing on the b side right then when the next procedure the next health trend or you know health and wellness trend happens you could do the same thing right you because you've seen it two or three times before so you're ready to act when that moment arises and that's kind of what i hope that like you know if people listen to podcast just listen for the laughs i'm flattered but if they listen and sort of start to see the trends that start to see like you know dots they can connect actually go and do the things like you know be be that listener there's probably only one out of a thousand that actually mean like what do you think actually how many if a thousand people listed podcast how many do you think go from not having their first mail to making their first million during their like ten year listening to this podcast well we've had dozens or maybe even hundreds of people us say we inspire them to do x y and z sometimes i think a large percentage of them we're already doing something amazing and they're just using that as an excuse to like right but i would say that i would say there's at least fifty people of the don't know how many people have listened than tens of millions millions who i think there's gonna be at least a hundred people that have made a million dollars from what they've learned from this podcast what do you think fifty to a hundred at least i mean that number is shockingly low right let's just say on just a full episodes i think we did a somewhere between twenty five million roughly roughly twenty five million views and downloads last year maybe thirty million i don't know how many that obviously there's a bunch of repeats so let's just even take the low end let's just pretend for just math that it was just a million people it was a million individual humans who listen take out to people who were already successful maybe that's the top ten percent that we're already very successful so now you have nine hundred thousand people left of those nine hundred thousand how many do you think actually like end up making it achieving what they wanted to achieve okay i have nine hundred thousand achieving like for example being worth fifty like worth one million yeah get get get to a couple million bucks life changing money you don't nothing to two million dollars in the course of four years i think the threshold probably two or three hundred maybe what do you think is that too low yeah i think it's a little low i would say it maybe a thousand but maybe maybe a couple thousand but but you're right a lot of them would have got there anyways we're we're just you know a little bit of wind in their sails were not like the the we're not the tide you know that's actually like pulling them there so i think it's higher but i think it's because the type of person who would listen to this probably was already gonna be they're probably seeking knowledge and inspiration and and and trying to make shit happen and so they were gonna make it happen either way so it's gotta be i think it's actually probably a much higher number there's some sometimes there's people who messaged me and they will like i don't know if they're saying this to like win favor but they'll be like you guys inspired me to do this and that and may have made more money than i have off this podcast have like shit i should have just done that but there's ten like two or three or four examples have ever had one of those but yet we'll do the other day there's a a guy who listed a podcast he's probably worth i don't know fifty to a hundred million of bucks and i find out his new startup up is an idea i said on the podcast not long ago and i was like dude let me invest and he's like i don't know i was like i gave you the idea that's the that ideas is my idea actually i should be letting you run this company i know that they're so for example mixer andrew warner buddy mind i attribute a lot of my success to he used to interview people and i learned about newsletters via mixer g and andrew warner and a hand and there was like eight interviews that he did on that topic that i literally used to like plan the business model and so i have done that with other people for sure of course i've did it with mixer g and you know what i do it with now is founders david sent podcast founders i use that like a crazy amount for inspiration and also education who do you listen to now actually i don't listen to founders regularly like once in a while i'll put it on i like what he does but i don't play that game james curry had this great phrase because some people are you know you gotta decide what game you're playing and i've got the couple of options he said but one of them was like the you know the great life it's like you're trying to be able a great life for yourself and the other is the global global greatness game and it's like you're actually trying to compete like like a sort of global level to do things that impact the world and he called it global greatness and that's like what a elon and and and that's what the the people on founders played whereas i'm actually playing the great life game it's like how do i create a great life for myself and my family like that that's the number one objective not proving myself or you know like becoming this like extreme outlier of success just objectively only in the career space so who do you listen to to to fuel help feel that because even like i've always wondered like you know i'm there's a lot of people who look up to us and then i grew up and i still look up to like way more people who are away above us and i've always wanted out what what they what they listen to or where they get this motivation from because even like the biggest a big shots have some type of like ra ra listen yeah so i i think everybody does it's a lot harder to find somebody in the great life bucket because usually part of the great life bucket is you're not going around and you you're not you're not as famous and you're not because because it's not that famous to be yeah he's a great he's actually like you know every day at four take some time goes place you know tennis i put just in there though jesse is it's content that's exactly what i was gonna say so but it's not from his content because this content really is more about like kinda how to make it in life but i can't hang out with them all the time you know i gotta like well you don't have to hang out all the time like so for for example me and ben we made a list we said who are the five people that we think we kind of really respect we admire we love to hang with them and we wanna we want our world to look a little bit like to be inspired by their world that they've created for themselves jesse was one of those guys and i said let's make an excuse to go hang out with him so hey let's just wake up and do whatever you were gonna do let's hang out let's talk i wanna meet your kids like you know that's sort of thing and he did jesse was like oh yeah anytime and and bend and then he kinda like shared his impression of and he was like and we pick up a lot from that you pick up a lot from going to someone's house so what did you pick up ton of energy so like a huge part of it is how much energy the guy has and like like what do you want out of life so it's not just the things you achieve it's like the type of person you are and what it's like to be around you jesse ever in super high energy laughs a ton like very funny guy and always like you know doesn't take himself or life too seriously he's got his hands at a lot of pots but in an interesting way so for example he has this one business because i have this attention all the time i have more business ideas and i have time so like how does somebody like jesse do this and i really like that his career was really varied so he you know he had his jingle company he was like a rapper for a while then he did z coconut water than he did his private jets startup up that was like his big intense one was it linear like this than that than this or is it blended love your pronunciation of that it was like like finance yeah look bob okay it was who linear so yeah he did him one at a time not not all in parallel and then over time now like you know he's got more things in parallel so he's got his calendar business his speaking business he's got his twenty what is it twenty twenty nine or twenty nine zero twenty nine yeah so that's like his kind of like his fun races where it's like people get to run or they get to do the equivalent of hiking everest but you don't have to go to mount everest to do could do it in all these different cities all around the country and so we looked at that we're like okay so what is he actually doing there you sort of reverse engineering like dude i he's like i take the things that i already wanna do for free right like my passions like his one of his passions is like out being outdoors running doing these races he does that anyways for free uses business savvy to wrap a really interesting brand around it so instead of just being like it's just another race naming it the height of everest and letting anybody have that sort of bucket list the semi bucket list item of hiking everest like that little branding thing that positioning was genius and with that he had the way he started that business i guess it was like his buddy who was like oh i wanna do a business with you and he goes alright we'll do a business but here's the rules i'll help you with it but the operations of this business i wanna work one day a year and i need to make a million dollars so that's the constraint we're gonna work backwards a business that has to has to satisfy that constraint and i don't know if literally it's one day a year and it's a million dollars don't know if that's the literal definition for for jesse's involvement or his like level of how much he has to work on the business but even just hearing how we approaches that changed the way i'm approaching some of my businesses because i have i've also people who wanna do things with me and i have a bunch of ideas that i i used to think it's all or nothing and it's like no there's some other ways to do this you know like z the coconut water brand he was not the operator there were other operators he was just a certain type of energy and household that opened certain doors that changed the directory of that business and so i have a business right now that's like i have operators that run it and i just did a certain set of activities these door opening activities that change the directory of that business so i'm trying to learn from him how you have at all how do you have the he's got you know you've got four periods i think and he's he's very involved as a dad he has his own fitness he's got the good marriage he's got the fun life he does these adventures with his friends and he has the businesses and he does interesting investments it's like okay i wanna go hang out with him download his group blueprint and i can't get that out of a youtube video or a podcast right now the way what i can with him that was such a long answer and it was so good i wanna keep i'm sorry and you're welcome i i ask you what podcast he was to do get you could've have said like you know like how stuff works or like cereal but there is no podcast for that in fact i would hope that this is the podcast that's closest to that right because it's the thing i'm trying to achieve so if i'm just talking about stuff that's relevant to me along the way that the great life you know by by your own definition then this there should be but like i know where would i who who has a podcast like that i yeah i don't know know like i like i don't i don't watch a lot of modern wisdom but i watch clips for modern wisdom chris with williamson podcast because i think he pulls wisdom out of people and i think wisdom is what's lacking not knowledge for for me and so like i'm trying to avoid knowledge based things and look for wisdom on how to live a like a life well lived chris and so actually the real answer your question is it's not podcast i read a lot of books now and i i really i really wasn't reading books at all like two years ago i'd like two years ago i just distinctly remember us assuming a podcast and i asked you you're were telling me about this book you read it and i asked you a question about it you're like i know i'm i'm absolutely only ten pages into it you did a whole spiel on this podcast cat or on this book and how amazing it was and i was it's is a great book and so now you read books now i read books that's great so put respect on my name and i what you tweet is what you're interested in and i noticed that you have been saying you wanna spend time with dead people and dogs or something like that and then you also tweeted you said why do you why do people like history like you couldn't it was like something where you're like you read something historically and you're like wait i kind of like this but do i like this why do i like this like what are we doing and then someone like had a great answer that you put in your newsletter you said it's knowledge wrapped around a story or something like that and it just i was like oh finally sean is clearly like was starting to read historical stuff right is that right whatever you're doing i tend to do about seven years later so so what i i would probably give you getting the a fecal transplant or whatever in seven years i i should just book that in now wait are you reading history now i'm reading anything that's interesting still like right now one of the books i'm reading is is the the warren buffett biography but that's for a specific reason but which want snowball or the other one i'm reading snowball right now so good it's really long it's a thousand pages in order to read a thousand pages you gotta like really love the person yeah yeah that's good that's like three months that's cool i'm happy reading now i'm happy you like books can tell you some other books i'm reading yeah i would love give i'll give me one more that's good let's see have you ever read seneca letters i think it's called like fifty letters of a roman stoic that that's pretty good i like that so you're reading stoic that's pretty cool so meditations and marcus aurelius and all that stuff just just the book i mentioned that's just the one that's right now oh i read this book called killed cat and it's about how to write a screen play and i found that pretty fascinating of like how people write movies have you ever read five dysfunction of a team yeah by patrick leo patrick l yeah i think that's kind of an underrated book it's that book and i was like did this book really describes an experience that i've had in like you know the core in corporate life in in sort of management life and like i think charlie mu he stole this idea charlie mu had to give us famous speech that he's stole from someone else which is like i don't know how to live a happy life necessarily but i'm gonna tell you how to live in unhappy life right step one have envy and like like explains like all these like attributes you should have to be unhappy and just avoid that and that's what that book is cool he tells a story about the five teams that you know every or five things that losing teams have it's pretty good yeah exactly anyways yeah i'm reading books now that inspires me to reread that books i don't remember the five dysfunction yeah especially you're operating a company now i think it's like very useful when you're operating a company because you'll be like we're doing that oh yeah i did that so what i do right now is whenever i read a book i go and i download it and i convert it from a kindle to text so a text file and then i upload it to chat gb and i can reference it and so i'll like for example with those five dysfunction of a team i'll type out like an interaction i had with my company or i will screenshot and email interaction that i've had and be like what would patrick say about this can i show you something amazing yeah so i told you that i was like did i convince diego who my buddy diego who to live there we hired on my team i convinced to move out here and i didn't know what we come i but i just need working in person could obviously be more fun and i don't wanna have like i'm not trying to have like an office like i still work from home but he that comes over and we don't have a big team it's our teams very well me diego ben and my assistant and so how do we actually like work this is something amazing he started doing so he just drops off like once a week these binder so it just says scratch the itch and in this he just pulls a bunch of like super interesting either blogs or articles that he knows that i'm gonna like that maybe like we even have a channel where we put stuff like i'm gonna read this later but he prints it out for me he marks it up and so i'm going through it's basically say like our own book club but for blog posts and so it'll be like oh it's a you know an annual letter from nineteen ninety nine bezos when the market crashed or two thousand when the market crashed and then it'll be like here's like it actually like a really interesting in a very interesting ai explained it's technical explain but not too technical about how like chat gp actually works and so i have these which are not books but it's just amazing brain i i have two years ago i almost launched a business that would sell that what i what i thought about doing was instead of doing a newsletter like in your email i thought about doing physical newsletter and it was literally going to be a binder and things that i read and my notes on them and why they interested me and i think that that that tactile experience of doing what you're doing right now is wonderful it's it's a total game changer plus it's curate i mean this is lucky right like it's he curate it he marks them up for me he organized it he delivers them to me like you know like this is this is like my version of luxury like what's a gucci bag to me this is a gucci bag alright like this is like right up my alley thank you so much i can you believe he does that once a week he doesn't just like get random there's not even like a schedules like once roughly once a week or every two weeks he'll he'll drop onto these off that's amazing that's super pretty cool hold it up i actually like how he like makes it look scratch the itch and what does he said at the bottom alright then it's said this is a charlie mug quota he says go to bed smarter than when you woke up at the bottom and then that's amazing it's amazing right and colors he makes it look like an eighth grade like an eighth grade like binder that's awesome do you wanna see something else he's doing hold on one show you this soon so you might see just like this box of little truffle little chocolate truffle here so we call like what we were trying to just we do we we're trying to describe what we like to do like what what do we what do you really do what are what are you really good at like what's the common thread across all the shit you do and one thing we we were like somebody had this analogy of a truffle pig they're like you're like a truffle pig like this you go and you just sniff out these little like these little like truffle he's like high value like things and so he delivered this i thought it was chocolate but actually it's this little thing you un it and inside he's printed out like just like a a a a golden nugget just like something it's diego you're coworker or does he run the day because there he's my arts crafts we're dig into like as the world goes ai we're just super like tactile everything it's like no no gonna do everything like very analog we're either gonna be extremely ai and digital or extremely analog and ideally we take the things from the digital but we pull them out and make the analog like if you could see on my wall right now we have like things that are printed out that are like of this month's kind of like different things that we were learning we're diving into what are the biggest you know one are the biggest things we wanna not just read it nod and say oh yeah like okay that's gee that's cool and move on in fact could i just tell you this real quick that's the number one takeaway i have so far from the buffet biography is that when he was eight or nine years old he read the book how to win friends and influence people and he knew he was like socially pretty awkward right at the guy's is like buying stocks at age seven he bought a farm when he was fourteen years old like he wasn't a normal kid and so he wanted to be better socially he didn't know how he reads this book and there's this line in the book which basically says unlike most people who would read this book not along and say gee that makes sense and to put the book away and then forget about it like never do anything warren made it like his like religion to study this book so he would read the book he would go immediately try to apply the principles he would regularly come back and reread the same sections again because it was like really important him to actually like get the wisdom out of the book and not just the information he even taught a class on it exactly and i thought if there's one predictor of success it would be that and i think if there was one superpower to have over the batch of other smart people who are also listening to podcasts also reading books also on twitter etcetera it's i think most people do exactly what he said most people just read something they nod to say yeah makes sense and then they just move on with their life they don't actually like internalize it or do anything with the the thing that made sense and or if something's like kind of obviously true to they're like yeah i get that i know that versus like yeah you know that but do you do that no you don't so you don't actually know it and i i i find that that one trade about buffett is so important and that's like one thing i'm trying to do is is whether i'm reading or learning anything is like can i develop the skill of noticing the big idea and then not just moving past it like taking that big idea and being like i'm gonna work on this idea until it's like playing a piano piece like until i could play this you know fluid from memory then i then i actually know the song and there's not they didn't act on everything but they did a good job of final they had like a like a bank of stuff they had like their bank bank for for investing and so basically like a there's a story about how mu had a barren subscription and this guy who worked for mon was like yeah he read this freaking newspaper every week for fifteen years and he told me that he got an idea from it he goes this is the one idea i've ever gotten from barron he goes i've been reading this constantly looking for this one idea and i just found it and it took me fifteen years they did a really good job am i not supposed to call it can we not say ideas bank bank no that's was beautiful i loved it i saw our roller guys that's what it is sorry if i just decided a bacon of ideas everyone's gonna be thinking that dude did you wash the actually the second mona episode that i did because yeah in it he pulls out the moody's manual he's like when people say buffett read this this is the thing he was reading he showed me it's like size four font it's and he reads page by page it's like not even a it's not a book it's not something you're supposed to read page by page and he did and he was show then he's like oh and then he read the japan company handbook it's like the version of moody's for japan because he wanted to look for companies in japan and then the bet that he made was insane so he reads that japanese book and he noticed this he's like so there's these exchanges in japan like the stock market exchanges and they basically have a monopoly like nobody really builds new stock markets and you can't really get a new stock market off the ground and he's like there are these incredible businesses that are kind of undervalued and then he went and he borrowed like five billion dollars in japanese yen and bought all of the exchanges are bought like a a chunk of all the exchanges at like a zero percent interest rate just like this unbelievable asymmetric upside trade that has just paid off in spade and i feel like people don't even talk about that like if you talk about beth buffett bets it's all just like geico coca cola he's can be like that japanese trade is unbelievable maybe i should read snowball why i i've read hit the shorter one i don't even think that's in snowball because that was more recent but i should read i should read snowball we can have like a book club talk about it because i yeah he he interests introduced me he he doesn't even interest me always like i don't wanna trade sucks but i just love his i think that i think he i think that just how you describe jesse that's not quite how i would describe warren him because he was he his personal life was a little wacky but there are so many like philosophical things that you can learn from him totally totally by the way last night i or i was watching on saturday night at like on the east coast it's like freaking at midnight and i opened up my living room door to let like some air come in because it was kinda hot or whatever i just wanted like fresh air to watch you know as one does and i i was sitting there and i saw i thought i saw off like flying around i'm like damn get that mouth out here like kinda like swat it and then i saw it again i didn't really pay attention and then it took me about forty five minutes and i was like oh my god there's a bat flying over my head in my living room right now and i jumped up and i flipped out because that's that's a weird pho like bats just are one the scariest things for me and i run out of the room and i wake up my wife i go sir that's a freaking bat in the room i have no idea what to do and i i put like a hoodie on and and like all these gloves that i run them there and i open up the door again to see if i can like get this bad to go outside and the next day i had to go get a ra shot so last night i was in the getting a freaking ra shot me my wife and my little girl had to get it and it's insane it didn't even touch you right why did you have to get the ra shout ra has a one hundred percent fatal rate so if you get ra you die okay and do you know how many ra deaths there are in america a year no idea love three three i was just gonna try to low baller with a hundred three there's there's about as many shark attacks that i at a killing that i know what you're dying there's like none in every doctor i called they're like you have to go get this ra shot you have to go get this baby shots and i was doing the math and i was like well let's say that there's like first of all like the odds are that a bit you and you don't know about it is like super low right like like so it i had to a bit you and i had to but not realize it and i'm like okay it's like you thought a moth was a bat and they're very different sizes so you know yeah but i imagine sitting in your living room and seeing something in like your peripheral you're like it's like a moth just fluid and i was like oh my god it's a rat with lit arms so you know it was just it's freaky and so i had to go get the stupid shot and i was thinking of the odds and i was asking chad tea and they're like there's probably like a point zero zero one percent that you have ra right now but i had to go get this shot and it's incredibly painful and you have to go four times so i've gotta go back in the next three days for the next four four like four get it two four times dude it's ridiculous at my kit kid no she's gotta get it twice and it's a very painful and like my kid wasn't even in the room it's just ridiculous and i just realized i gave into so much fear mon three because like the like sixty thousand people a year or something like i die from driving cars right and i'm like i'm not afraid to do that but i and there's three people die a year from ra and i went and got this freaking ra shot and my arm is killing me it was such a painful shot and it costs twenty five thousand dollars if you don't have insurance these shots are twenty five grams so was what's that seventy five thousand dollars worth of shot that i had to get last night for freaking ra is that ridiculous you know i don't know if you ever receive those like memes where it's like they have like a silhouette like a ghost of a person's face to make a transparent like we just need rf k's face just shaking his hat at attitude for for what you just did but like it's it's such a like there's so many cognitive like there's so many like biases or whatever like flaws that i have made like thinking flaws like regarding whether i should go and get this or not but there's the idea of like me foaming at the amount because they say that when you the thing about ra is when you show some dumpster that means you're you're going to die it's too late it's too late yeah so maybe maybe it was not a bad decision maybe you know you avoided potential ruin for a pain in the arm that's okay have you ever gotten that no no no that's never happened to me he said this super absurd scenario you're like is it happy to you no dude people get baby shot all the time first of all i'm not from like the nineteen tens i don't like open up the doors to create like a breeze i just turned the air conditioning on if i need if i need dude do you here's the truth i didn't even tell my wife i wanted to pee in the yard dude they need ra to get away from you so that you live this feral man i deserve this butts and guts that's it best a pod i feel like got could rude to wear i know why i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a goal less travel never looking back but