My First Million

the app store rating jeff was it one point eight one point eight and remember one star is the minimum so it's really zero point eight is the was the rating on the app and how are you doing a hundred million of revenue and forty five million of profit with a one point eight star rating so we look at this and we just see opportunity basically how we got here was sean and i were talking about grind i think last month and like how there was like this amazing story behind it and we found out that you were the two guys who bought it and took a public and made it this home run but sean is good friends with james carrier rick i've had a bunch of run with you early on in my career and then same with you jeff and we're were like we gotta get these guys on because you guys have been a little bit behind the scenes you don't talk that much you're just kinda quietly behind the scenes but you've had some major successes and like i i thought it'd had been cool it would be cool to like give you a platform and like tell the story because i think you guys have told a lot of these stories publicly maybe ever have you not a lot no we we we we've we've done a couple here there but no we have not been out there publicly and talked about what we did at grinder but we're happy to today so let's do story time how did you two guys end up owning grind what is the story of grind before you and then how did you guys get involved and what happened afterwards i wanna hear the grind story grind was created founded by a game a guy named joel sim ky about fifteen years ago and joel is a gay man who wanted the ability to create an app to find other gay men gps enabled kinda like uber right uber really existed once the iphone became ubiquitous and people could you know see where you are that proximity it became you know really tight so he created grinder grind took off and he ended up selling it to a chinese company called k lin and then a few years later cf the committee for foreign investment in the us forced the sale of grind okay so they were worried that that the the data that grinder was collecting could be used for you know in negative ways by the chinese ownership was that first sale a big sale like was grind considered like a big success of the time because i know some of the dating apps traded like for not that much money early on yeah so i i believe sam i'm i believe us sorry joel sold it for i i wanna say two hundred and sixty million okay so it was a great sale and he owned ninety percent of the company very others had equity so he did very very well and then cf forced the sale right true what was the chinese using it what what was that mean like they're i think read there like the accusation was that they were like straight met they were blackmail mailing straight man who are on grind i think it's hypothetically true that if you have the servers located in china and you're the chinese government and you wanted to watch it's sort of like if you know the answer to the question you can use grind backwards so if you know that you have users in the white house who are gay or using the app well then you can figure out how his users are and you can track where they are and you can say oh the president is about to leave the white house because people on his forward team who happened to use the app or using it and they're doing it well with the ukraine war we heard that soldiers on both sides were using the app to meet each other sort of between battles and you know people have talked about olympia being out in the village and so work was done a grinder to help avoid these sort of extreme cases and so gotcha i think there is possibility for abuse and there are certainly people who are closet or not well discussed in politics in the military and in high positions who yeah hypothetically if the chinese government wanted to and they had access the information they could exploit that information and potentially use it to blackmail you know our politicians okay so that's like a real that that that sounds very reasonable why a sale is forced so so so when they forced a sale what does that mean like there's an auction one day or how does they give the company one year you have one year to sell to a us ownership group k and if you do not the government will take control of the business and in the in the year the cf group which is it's partly comprised of us intelligence and us elected officials and administrators like congress people and so that board steps in in the company they they sort of put place digital steps in process and administrative steps in process to watch during the one year and mandate the sale so yeah it is a mandated sale did you just learn about that in the news or like is there like a look because you guys weren't like i mean this was like a this deal was like a pretty like level up deal for y'all right is that where you bought it or you bought it after that there somebody else bought it than you bought it no we bought it because yeah again jiffy was forcing the sale they had a certain timeline to sell the company and there was you know all the the typical buyers that you'd think about there was always someone super conservative on the investment committee that was like i can't be associated with gay sex i you know i i can't do this deal we we looked at raising money from some folks in the middle east they could not be associated with with gay sex gay dating so it really took a lot of the typical buyers out of the process and we were lucky enough to partner with another pe firm and actually buy the company it came down to three buyers in the end that put in you know legitimate bids and we are lucky enough to partner with the other pe firm about it let me just what what rick was talking about there's this weird thing where companies that had helped tinder go through all of its systems they were fine working with tinder but when it came to grind they were like oh we don't wanna touch that one and right right i didn't understand i i'd think the extent of the sort of latent homophobia that had at the time infected the whole process and we really benefit from that sort of homophobic behavior because you have this incredible company it's growing like crazy it's incredibly profitable the users love the product like it checks every box of what you would love in private equity and you love as a product person and so at the more we studied the company and the product where were like this thing is just an amazing business it's an amazing product joel really hit on something that sort of met the market's needs it was dominant in this market position and the people that are looking to buy it at this point it had gone through lots of sale processes we had heard playboy had tried to buy it and you know there were all these people that had tried over the years couldn't come up with a financing or couldn't make the deal work or they couldn't get the banks to work with them and get the deal done and so it ended up with three pretty non traditional private equity firms going after it ours being one of them as sam you said it was a step up for us we had not done a deal that was in the hundreds of millions of dollars prior to that we done tens of millions of dollars of deals and but when it came time to raise the money for the deal we raised it very quickly when we did find people that would listen to us and hear about the business people loved the fact that we had uncovered to sort glitch in the system that this homophobic thing had kept the price down and the deal available to you know sort of newcomers to the space and operators that was the other thing people love they're like i can't believe you guys have done diligence where you actually have a a a road map for the product a road map for the security a road roadmap for the trust and safety the moderation we had done sort of all this work to understand what really the challenges were for the business hey let's take quick break for a message from our sponsor hubspot who's making this episode possible listen if you're trying to build something the big and i'm talking about a hundred million dollar or a billion dollar company one of the most important things is to focus on the market where is the opportunity you are like a surfer on a surfboard board and you were trying to find the biggest best wave possible for you to go on well hubspot has put together a cheat sheet that is studying and sort of reverse engineering what's working today so they're looking at the top performing industries that you could be looking at the funding routes that work the best and the growth strategies that the fastest growing companies are using so if you wanna one pager that is a cheat sheet on the the big company playbook you can get it right now just either scan this qr code that you see on the screen or click the link in the description below alright back to the show so roughly what what do you guys buy it for and what do you think it would have been had it not like let's just say it was a straight dating app like what do you think the same business if same metrics same everything else how much of a kind of a discount or premium do you think it ended out at rick i think fifty percent off at least right the deal was for six hundred million six fifty or something yeah we we we will i mean okay so on on a multiple basis we weren't really that far off of market so we bought it for about six hundred million it was doing less than fifty million about forty five million of eb when we bought the company so you know call that kinda twelve thirteen x eb and the market was probably trading at more like twenty the public companies so but there's a private company discount so we we we bought it for under market for sure but it was really just the the the lack of competition in the process that allowed us to get that discount this is such an interesting story we learned so much in this process like that there was the other pieces to it which was normally i would say that private equity firms don't wanna touch a deal or investors that have more than sort of one problem and grind did have a bunch of problems it had a very public problem with privacy and data at least perceived problem because they were being sued for selling user's hiv data by governments in europe and in the us they had this issue with the chinese ownership which was a thorn issue and having sip dis involved and this was one of the only cases ever where cf had actually retroactively un unlocked deal cf had denied deals with foreign buyers but they had never what they're trying to do a tiktok today over the years is tiktok would be the second one after grind dis and then in addition it had a p problem and then lastly it had this sort of late and homophobic problem people just not wanting to touch the property so it had this series of problems none of which bothered us at all we just were so in love with the business and the product and how much the customers love the business and how much potential and there was customer frustration for sure but they had been sloppy on a lot of product work and a lot of customer care and a lot of modelling they had made mistakes not awful typical mistakes that small businesses where the growth gets ahead of them and they sort of get behind the ball and because rick and i had both worked at large companies in addition to startups we understood the complexity of that jump from when you move from sort of five million users to twenty million users and all the complexity and the legal you know things in the accounting and all the things that go into the difference in those businesses we also looked at some metrics that were shocking which was the app store rating jeff was it one point eight yeah one point one point eight and remember one star is the minimum so it's was really zero point eight is the was the rating on the app well like that was horrible i think you're glass store views were like pretty horrible like we said was it was the management rating was like nineteen percent i never seen anything that low before i was like hi there still have but bob at nineteen percent and how are you doing a hundred million of revenue and forty five million of profit with a one point eight star rating so we look at this and we just see opportunity we we realize this company is severely under managed you know clearly from the glass door rating iconic brands strong stable cash flow but we knew there was a lot of cleanup to do once we got in and you guys had already had success right you sold tickle for a hundred million of dollars or stuff so it's not like this was your you know you didn't have to do this you had options you could be doing a lot of different things in life and you signed up for like a big swing the biggest swing you'd taken and with a lot of hairy problems you're like oh it didn't bother it but i want you to take me in the room because before we get to the kind of the turnaround and the the what happened and how how you guys did it i just wanna go back because i've been in situations like that before and i remember feeling like man nobody really talks about this like i've read a lot of business books i've heard a lot of business podcasts but like right now i feel pretty naked and afraid where i don't really know if i'm making the wrong move or the right move because i'm doing a swing that's bigger than i've ever done i'm in the room it's unclear there's still fog of war right the story hasn't played out yet we don't know exactly what's gonna happen it was much worse than we thought to when we got into grind remember covid hits in march the deals halfway closed the users dropped twenty thirty like it just sort of this is a location based physical meat on site you know product covid hits everyone's locked at home we had plans to basically live at least part time in la from tampa so it got worse and then we got there and we started reading through all the the actual data for the business that was and we're like this is much worse i over the two and a half years i gained twenty five pounds my cholesterol went up thirty percent like i didn't see my kids like just just i it was nostalgic i look back at it so fondly i really enjoyed my time and i did love it at the time but it was mixed with incredible stress it was a very difficult role but i think for rick and for me our what we had learned in the twenty years prior was perfectly what the company needed at that moment like it was what felt so good was it was exactly the skill set we had built to that moment is exactly what that company needed at that time and so that match felt amazing and as a product manager to work on a product where the users were so engaged i had never seen anything like it and i'd probably maybe never will where the engagement on the product was so high that everything you tried you either failed or succeeded almost over i'd run mail before that and there's an anti of sort of the customers don't really care you come out with amazing features and they're like okay seven percent adoption rate over six months a grinder we would come out of the feature that was like okay twenty seven percent adoption in the beta where we hit the feature behind something in two hours i'd be like oh my gosh this this product is incredible i mean it's incredible it was so as a product manager it was the most rewarding work i had done but was there any doubt when you were thinking about buying it like i now you say like well it was a perfect skill match for us and know did you guys go for some long walk or there was a dinner in one night where you were like are we really good do this like did you have one of those that muscle the the doubt muscle like i think it comes from i saw people as an entrepreneur after you've done four or five startups from rick and i both have four or five startups in our background and technically we've probably each done like nine but we don't even count the four that didn't get sort of far enough along but i have lost my super happy gene where i feel incredibly happy when things go well and i've also lost my super distressed gene when things are going badly and the stress is high so i feel the stress you can see that physical toll took on my body over this two and a half years but i don't recognize it in the moment you said this you said in the document you said so this is jeff writing said for me i've become dis of times that feel too good and equally i am skeptical of moments that feel too low so today i'm simply more emotionally level than i was in my twenties in part because i don't trust highs or lows and that has helped me focus and persist when others might quit or get sidetracked yeah yeah i think that it's probably true for both of us rick rick feels a little bit better he'll sometimes like shake me we were we're were at the ny and grind is going public and he's like dude we're we're we're did it we're like we're taking company public and i was like yeah i know i just can't i just some i just don't i i know i'm supposed to tap into this incredible joy i remember for the first time i got i wondered what it would be like when i got a wire for more than a hundred thousand dollars i got a wire for like seven hundred thousand dollars one google bought one of my companies and it was the first wire and i thought that will change everything like everything about how i feel will change when that wire hits and so i looked the wire hits and i feel the same exact yeah i just i'm like it was like relief combined with resignation just like i i wanna ask some details about the deal so you said you raised six hundred million dollars my i'm curious is buying a company for one million ten million a hundred million and a billion is that at all similar like our are each amounts similar are they is one harder or one easier and of the six hundred million how much of it was y'all money yeah i can take that so the the deal structure the six hundred there's was about two hundred of equity that went in and you know some of that was our personal money but most of it was outside money that we raised there was two hundred million of debt so fortress was our debt provider and then there was another two hundred million that was due basically an earn out upon the exit right so really with grind only two hundred million of equity went into the deal and we can fast forward you know to or we can talk later about where the exit came out but it ended up in a very very good roe return on the equity of only two hundred million going in i think the the other answer is it's roughly the same effort and work to raise a million dollars as it is to raise ten million dollars as it is to raise a hundred million as it is to raise the six hundred million you deal with different players they may have different questions but the businesses are all in such different states when you're doing it that the questions exist there's always there's a skepticism amongst there's an enthusiasm and a skepticism when you talk to the debt guys and we talk to the equity guys and you're trying to raise money with grind the difficulty was simply most of the additional channels were closed and so we were dealing with alternative debt maybe slightly more expensive debt we were dealing with alternative equity equities so we were dealing with family offices instead of going directly with you know and we were dealing with alternative banks and lawyers and things like that people who didn't didn't in mind working on the deal and when you raise that money so do you guys as the kind gp operator types do end up owning twenty percent of the company or fifty percent or eighty percent because you've you've raised you know certain amount of equity certain amount of debt like where do you what do you target what do you try to land at in a deal like that well we we work with another pe firm so the way it ended up being structured is that they brought in a lot of the equity we have the debt that we had brought in from fortress they brought in a lot of the equity and then so we had you know we had our our piece of that but then really because we ran the company jeff and i had a a a slug of equity related to to you know to our roles as ceo for jeff coo for me but in general for an equity deal i think if a private equity deal you have carry so you have sort of back end options and you might have attrition of a fund we don't do a fund we do sp for individual deals but yeah we would want to try to depending on how much of the money we put into ourselves you're structuring these deals in order to get twenty percent equity amongst the partners of the private equity firm that you'll split you'll do deals where you're in up ten percent and you'll but you have you know you have investors they're gonna take on a big slug debt is what you don't use in startups what you do use in private equity is this incredible multiplier so even though the debt expensive it is so cheap compared to equity and so i i sort of it's it is not that different to buy a company that it is to buy a house or an apartment building the sort of math works out the same you you're using leverage you're using cash there's oftentimes you're doing cash upfront and debt that you plan on any year once the business has been cleaned up a little bit to just restructure it right away so there is more financial work being done the role of your financial partners in those deals we have an amazing lawyer advisor tax lawyer who structures deals in ways that's like artistic and right just to make the deal work because we have to say like okay we have to do this so that this this investor can bring money in this way but we have to price it this way for this investor you know so it's just and we have this layer of debt this debt we don't wanna hold on to it for more than a year it's expensive so we have another debt provider but there's all these rules so you do spend way more time in a private equity deal on the finance and it is it explains why some of private equity or majority of private equity driven by financially minded people that maybe don't know businesses well at all right yeah and sean dan answer on the economics of of the deal from a high level at least you know we took grind public and and we'll talk about how we got there but we took it public for two billion on the new york stock exchange two and a half years after we bought the company and as i mentioned as part of the deal structure that earn the first two hundred million went back to the original owner or the owner that we bought it from so that leaves you one point eight with two hundred million of equity going in because a debt just stayed on the business so we basically created a nine x return on that two hundred million right so that's about one point six billion of value created you know when you subtract out the original capital so about one point six and you know typically you'd have a twenty percent carry on that that's amazing and what what's the was there any obviously you did a lot of cleanup up you did a lot of best practices you did a lot you you executed a product road map and he marched on that way so we don't to go into all those details but i'm just curious was there any like aha moment key insight fun strategic moment that happened that like actually helped you build that value well there were some things that surprised us you know when we first got in there we knew we are gonna have to do a lot of cleanup but the that we knew that the talent was gonna be an issue but we didn't know how bad it was so culturally unfortunately the chinese had really they'd had ruled by fear i was this black box nobody knew was going on there's five people that had equity and and and really had any kind of vision and and knowledge of what was going on so we and then we looked at the engineering team and jeff can speak to this more than than more than me and we realized they weren't that good they they were not committed to the company and definitely we're not committed to the community that we served and we ended up having a fire about seventy percent of the staff mostly the engineering team we didn't expect it to go that deep but when we got in they wouldn't realize how bad it was how bad badly the tech stack had decay we realized at that point that we needed to do a kind of a three part serial process the first part was reset the talent the second was fixed the tech stack and the third is where it got to be fun and that's where jeff really shines which is rebuild the product and start to drive revenue was was a large percentage of your staff gay of those that we kept on a very high percentage was it weird like because like i mean that there's like obviously cultural things going on here of like two non gay guys are now buying grind like and then you know it it'd be like me owning ebony magazine like there's like you know there's a clear like i don't know like is the could i trust the guy he's up part of the community like yeah was that we i would say this was the biggest we sort of smile about it but i i i learned so much i went in trying my best to understand the user's needs and you're you're lucky to work in a where the customers are giving you this constant feedback so i had been i already talked to hundreds of customers during the diligence process we had read through thousands and thousands of customer care issues i had been on reddit forums going through every single post about the company and users were i would i would copy and paste into this document saying like what's this issue and i wanna find out what this is why this happening and then we get there and we had the employees had never many of the employees that were left over from joel original team had incredible knowledge but they didn't have incredible scale they had not scaled before so they didn't know like oh when you pat when you do this and you're moderating we had customers on hundred and ninety three countries so you're doing this moderation and you're doing these things in multiple languages and you're doing these things where you're being you you we i had this at yahoo so i just i just knew what to do when you have users in a hundred and ninety countries i just kind of knew what to do when you pass these issues and so i was able to bring on engineers with me from yahoo that new scale right away and i think the best hire we did was we had the head of global privacy and safety from yahoo who happened to be a gay man who had retired from yahoo and i'd known him he'd been there for eighteen years and i called them him and i said i need you to help me on this company and he goes what's the company and i said grind he's like i'm coming out of retirement i'm gonna help you i'm gonna do something for the community myself he just said i'll do it for the community he we were being sued at that point by thirteen attorney generals in the us over privacy and data leak leakage something the company had not done but it was everyone believed the company had done and it was funny something the company did that actually saved like ten thousand plus lives a year was was being sued for this feature which is what's your hiv status so and it's listed on your profile that's certainly an important thing to know before you you meet someone so he said i'll do this he got on the very first call with the thirteen attorney generals and they they said shane is that you and he's like yeah it's me i i'd now work at grind and they said you work at grind because he'd met them all and knew them all from when he was at yahoo we constantly dealt with all sorts of issues at yahoo and i'd learned about all these i'd dealt with the cia the nsa the fbi and every you know possible law agency when i was working at yahoo when i ran mail and essentially twelve of the thirteen attorney generals basically said we're good like shane there it's run by professionals we understand so simply the upgrade of talent almost started to resolve problems right away it caused tension inside the company because the same straight as they came in we're putting in people they're like oh they're just putting in their lack everywhere by the time rick and i left seventy percent of the hires from the in the company were minority hires basically we were hiring people from the lgbt q community or we were hiring people that were in in the d which is not something many people i talked about anymore but we had the most amazing ability to recruit and it was a superpower for the business because we were able to pull talent from incredible places because they believed in the mission of the company and so we actually used the the mission of the business and the impact it was having i don't think people understand the extent to which grind makes a difference in the gay community or the lgbtq community globally most of the information you're gonna get on sexual education about gay sex or people trans people that most of that information outside of english comes from grind so fifty seven languages is how many languages grind takes it safety and anal sex you know information and publishes it in fifty seven languages and when you need to know about trans health care and you need to find a doctor who will give you vaccines and you're a trans person in you're in india well that database is funded and built by grind so those things that the company does it's it creates a mission it creates all this incredible but it also is something tinder will never do tinder won't save lives nearly at the rate the grind does simply on educating people about safety and you can imagine if you're a closet trans or closet gay guy growing up and you've not been able to talk to your family and you've not been able to talk to your community about something that's going on in your life well being able to find community on grind and being able to find that information in a very uncensored way was valuable you know what i think is cool about you guys is that your og silicon valley like you know true and true right like the big kinda tech you web one point o two point o you guys were there you were in it even your near misses were basically correct you know whether it was like i drive before dropbox or you know rick you were doing branch out which was kinda like linkedin and you you were so close to like you know the big the big big exit and or the big big kind of reward of getting that that thesis right but then you guys have like switched and you play your own game you don't you're not just a venture firm you know who's like only focused on you know venture backed startups like you went into private equity which is so different than like probably most of your friends in silicon we can valley why i i guess like can you just talk a little bit about that and specifically like if there's other people who are kinda similar right i've i i put myself in this bucket i was i thought i was a smart guy i was working hard but i was playing a game in silicon valley where it's it's feast or famine it's like either i'm gonna make a billion dollars i'm gonna make pretty much zero i'm i'm gonna grind super hard and really i'm just like i'm running around with a bottle trying to catch lightning is how i felt and then as soon as i switched to these like more bootstrap businesses or private equity where i was buying just chunks of businesses that we're already working and just growing them and i was like oh my god this is so much easier what was i doing before and why was i so brain by the movies and the tech crunch and the twitter and like what the vcs thought were cool like i really should've have played my own game a little earlier i guess can you talk to that talk to that can maybe that person or you know how you think about this yeah rick don't you think one of the most common questions we get from our friends is can you tell me more about what you guys are doing because secretly i think i'd like to do that too now the way you guys describe it it certainly sounds easier than starting a company like i i don't know if like anyway the fur whenever somebody comes and says i wanna be an entrepreneur i'm like good god why like you clearly have never done one before because all it does is just cause stress and gray hair and you know you don't see your family and so being an entrepreneur is so hard and i i love it but i fear it so because i think the thing that's most scary by being an entrepreneur is the lack of control on the time you don't know how long the company will take to get from initiation to success and it could take twelve years fifteen years it's not the it's gonna take a hundred hours a week i'm not scared so much of a hundred hours a week i i enjoy even though i'm quite the man of leisure nowadays but i i enjoy the work i don't fear the work i just don't love the inability to control what my next decade will be like and so with private equity you you get a little bit of the not quite sure but the time frames definitely come way down we we don't go into a deal that's gonna take ten years of private the math just doesn't work yeah and and right out there is you know i think most of our friend group for jeff and i are either venture capitalists or operators entrepreneurs right so as we look at you know having a foot and and kinda of both of those where jeff and i have both done over fifty angel investments and you know and i've got thirteen unicorns out of that so it's definitely worked but the reality is you know i also met with a thousand companies to find the fifty that i really liked and then you know some of those worked out but as we look at our friends in venture capital it's so crowded they're all chasing in the same ai deals at inflated valuations and it's such a long process to make any money at as well i mean some of these funds can take ten twelve years before the the partners are making a lot of money once they start stacking funds that's that's great in all but you know when you're fifty you know do you really wanna go start a venture fund that's highly competitive so that didn't make sense and as jeff said starting companies which we've both done five it's just so hard right you've gotta go raise money you got the cold start problem how do you get the flywheel going it's just really hard and then private equity is a little bit of both right where we are like okay we can take kind of the best of we know how to run these companies but we also know how to invest and really try to you know multiply that money so we found this this in between and for us you know we're not looking to go raise as a big private equity fund we really just do sp we find deals that we like that we think that we can add value and and you don't have the long timeline so that that was a good place for us and if somebody's not gonna go by a six hundred million dollar company like grind but like you know there's other kind of midsize ways to play this game right to go get a to go get a win and again unlike a startup you're not playing the product market fit risk game where most of the time you're just building something that there's no market appetite for it doesn't matter how how hard you work or how much you how well that product works if there was no market need for it you lose yeah i think we could segment private equity a little bit for you but but not even like i don't want the kinda industry top down i'm more like if i'm a guy what would i be looking up what would who would i be calling and what kind of deal would i be trying to do what business would you're not trying to buy what would you trying to buy a few ways you can source so one is you use your own network there's lots of businesses out there they're profitable and for whatever reason they the oftentimes the founders or the owners either wanna retire or they wanna finally cash out of their business or they're exhausted or you know the founders wanna break apart a little bit or something so there's that it could be we talk to our venture capital friends and say in your portfolio you must have companies that are successful but not venture businesses anymore they're not gonna go public they're not gonna break out they're growing a ten or twenty percent a year right now all of them have it and some of these brands are like amazing brands and so grinder like a home run because it's a dominant market player you know healthy business profitable etcetera usually these are like it's not such and such it's the second or third player in that space and they have challenges they're having trouble recruiting talent you know at the same level they were earlier this ai thing's gonna be tough so there's some challenges coming into the business but the founders motivated i think he'll work with you or show work with you or the founding team we generally are looking for deals where the founding team wants to stick around or at least part of them when we did ji jab greg left but his cfo became the ceo and he's an amazing operator and so we don't want to have to take over the whole business we're looking to partner with the existing team that's there and then we hope we can with the other thing that's nice about an sp is sean you might know a couple businesses and you might say i kind of get these businesses a little bit i know if some friends that really get them and so with an sp you can partner we sort of put together the perfect mix of players when we did grind our friend sam y he'd had been the chairman of match group right he had been the founder of a dating service that it got bought by match like he's knew the space inside and out he had been ceo so we partnered with sam he really brought us credibility in our we were raising money from the family offices and he taught us a lot he had a great network we recruited from his network into grind that helped us balance out we weren't just bringing people in that i knew from yahoo and google and other starbucks we were bringing people in from sam's network that had been at tinder and match group and these others and you're you're almost making it sound like a it's like a it's like a big it was like a like a scheme it's like hey guys here's the deal this is happening in front of all of our eyes china has to sell this let's get all of our homie let's throw it a little bit of cash and let's do this thing like no one else wants it let's do it like you make it sound like it was a party we were on a call yesterday to talk about a deal i called them about a deal that it come across my plate and i go don't you think if we put x and y on this deal they're like they know this space so well they'll be able to evaluate the tech and really help us put together an amazing product plan the first three or four key hires are gonna really set the tone for this business if we can acquire and so we benefit from the size of our network for meeting all these entrepreneurs over the years and particular entrepreneurs that have had successful outcomes they have amazing networks they often are waiting for something to do that's like a big fun challenge so we we're always trying to figure out like who's that one operator that we know that needs the chance to become ceo or to be president or who's that person that can give us the unique insight to this industry that can help us connect the dots the other strategy sean is to take small companies and bundle them up together and make them big i think when you're looking for deals though most of the companies you'll find that will come to your plate when you're looking to do pe deals are not profitable or they're not profitable enough to make the economics of private equity really work well and it can be really disappointing the other thing is the entrepreneur has been told over the years my competitor three years ago when that we were all growing at sixty percent a year sold for blank x multiple on growth and i'm like i know private equities we give them our equation for private we can give them a spreadsheet here's how we're gonna price you it's this times this times this they're like i know but the saas business did we're like oh yeah saas businesses are multiples on revenue consumer businesses are multiples on eb and they're like and i'm like i'm not i don't do the math it's just how the math works out and so private equity in general doesn't like consumer because it's often advertising revenue it has other issues that they don't understand so there are these little sort of mistakes or glitches and how private equity works especially in the small and medium sized sometimes all the way up to the big ones that allow us to do deals but even then remember rick said he talked to a thousand companies to invest in fifty so like a one in twenty hit rate i private equity the same you're gonna look initially at twenty something deals then you're gonna look hard at five deals and then i would say the close rate on a private equity deal if it's a good deal and it's worth doing you're gonna close only one in three of them so mh they they are spread the hardest part about private equity without a fund is that unlike being a venture angel investor where you know rick and i could easily do ten investments a year as angel investors we get enough flow we meet enough great teams we can go out and find them and vcs will reach out to us and say can you help us on this deal you know the space can you invest in it and you know advise the ceo so i think those deals come at pretty high quantity on private equity they're smaller you do have a lot more work to find the businesses to sell not always the founding team or the investors don't always know they need to sell or they wanna sell you have to kinda talk them through it so it's a different set of skills it's longer between deals and we say no in private equity the risk has to be really low because you're working on a deal and a when we are a small team and we don't have a full fund you have to make the deal work it has to pay it has to pay at least one or two x so we spend a lot of time on risk reduction which is different than entrepreneurs when we're looking at angel investing or even a little bit later you're always doing the multiple on the one in ten success rate because you're gonna have a larger portfolio and private equity were instead doing all the math we do very little math on what could happen it's mostly what could happen on the bad side and what could go wrong and it feels wrong at first but it feels actually enlighten over time like being a chief risk officer instead of like a chief investment officer really thinking about risk differently and understanding how to mitigate risk it's made me a much better entrepreneur if slightly more cynical today's episode is brought to you by hubspot being a know at all used to be considered a bad thing but in business knowing it all it's everything because right now businesses are only using about twenty percent of their data unless you have hubspot that's where they take data that's buried in emails and call logs and meaning notes they become insights that help you grow your business because when you know more you grow more you see being don't know it all isn't so bad after all visit hubspot dot com to learn more today where you guys because like when i think of jeff if you talked about being a product guy i of rick like you i think you had maybe a consulting background but you kinda morph into a growth marketing or but but also product a just very traditional silicon valley ceo i don't think that as having the skill set of looking at excel and like running the math and doing the numbers but is it a just not that challenging or did you just have to acquire that skill sam might hasn't come up yet but rick has a b degree so no see background finance my my background early on almost finance so i started my career in corp dev so m and a and corporate finance then went to hp and then that's met james curry sean to your earlier call out of james and we started tickle together on i was cfo there for seven years so a lot of what jeff is talking about really is my background in being able to yeah to to you know look at look at the company assess risks and private equity you can't take zeros in angel invest you can take a lot of zeros and that's okay i on the other hand i'm like a numb i have to look up the acronyms in private equity which are just basic accounting acronyms all the i have to literally have i was like eb earnings i always forget one of the letters so i'm like the opposite i when i at yahoo and i was in charge of billions of dollars of revenue and profit i still was doing it i was always like what's that one mean again and they're like that's the profit part of my i knew it i knew that part that's fine i got it got then rick's rick's like jeff just put his vest stone and shut up yeah he literally he just he just lied actually rick and i have chats going on usually doing meetings so that he can tell me what a hug acronyms mean or i'll be like that parts bad right he goes yeah you don't want those things sean but earlier to your your question i have a thesis that's kinda of barbell which is in in the private equity deals i think ji jab is interesting and grind is interesting for different reasons on ji jab you know we we talked about we had to come in quickly the company was doing about five million of eb and we bought it for twenty million so four times eb which is a low multiple but you know greg needed to sell it quickly and and and and that's where we came out and we were able to put fifteen million dollars of debt on that so really we only put five million of equity so just those just use kinda round numbers if you had five partners and you each put in a million dollars if you could if you had the ability to put a million in you own twenty percent of the business right and with ji jab it was throwing off so much cash that we paid down the debt in about three years and then we we did a ref refill where we recap the company and and borrowed another fifteen million and then ended up buying out kinda half the investors with that and we've already repaid all of that and now we're just cash flowing the business so my point there is that if you had a you know a a a chunk of money a million dollars you could go and buy one of these companies for you know get twenty percent now with grind you know that same check that we put in to ji jab does not get you much of a six hundred million dollar business but we talked about the carry the carry of twenty percent on you know more than one point five billion of value created is a very big number now with grind it was so big that jeff and i ran it right with ji jab we have someone else running it so you could do multiple of these smaller companies and and just be a board member or more passive and create a portfolio or when you do find the grinder and you're an operator like jeff and i that's when you're like no gotta go all in and run this thing and you could do a blend right you could do like you could centralize business operations and marketing and customer care and those things and buy a bunch of different businesses more like ia right you could do the right private equity ia model and we have friends that that's that's their focus they're like i wanna buy these and by the way that can work incredibly well bending spoons out of italy has an amazing business of buying individual apps but then using a common set of back end pieces and engineers right they can reduce the cost by seventy percent eighty percent on a business and grow it because they're really good at the game of how to grow businesses and do subscriptions so let's play game rick let's say i'm your nephew and i call you and i'm like oh rick i wanna get into this business i'm looking at a a bookkeeping business you there's like a commercial brokerage business and then there's ai i gotta think about like is that gonna wipe out a business or is there a business i can go in and bring ai that's gonna make it way better that seems like something i should think about what should i do uncle rick give me i i get like generally what i'm supposed to do but give me a place to look what's a rock i should go look under what's a type of business that you think is a good one to go look at right now at answer in two different ways the areas that i'm most interested in right now would be ai and crypto but i don't know if my nephew has any real you know expertise or any kind of moat around you know the ability to to go in and do something in either of those categories right let's assume the nephew can buy bitcoin and can use ai he's just not gonna build anything in crypto or build the new ai thing right so then those are probably not the categories that i would steer him into because you really have to know your stuff or you are just not you're not gonna build compete so then it would probably be let's go find an existing business with stable cash flow that has we love recurring revenue even you know consumer recurring revenue subscription based revenue is great let's go find something that's stable where you know the the owner is ready to to exit and and be able to put some debt on that business and if you can do that if you can add debt to the business you get in at a at a reasonable entry multiple and have some thesis some way that you are confident you're gonna be able to cut let's say double revenue in the next you know three four five years and then you're gonna get out at a higher multiple i can do the math and show you why that's a five to ten x the debt the reasonable multiple the increase in eb and the higher multiple on the way out is a five to ten x that's that'd that's my advice and how conservative are you when you're thinking of the upside so for example you're saying so like the big if there's two big ips here there's buying buying it at a low price which is one problem and then there's a second problem of you just said can i grow user base or revenue that's that's very challenging yeah so the two things there would be one to ensure the cash flow is stable that you're gonna be able to repay the debt right or else you lose a whole business and and and that's a disaster and the second is that if you don't have a solid thesis on how you're going to increase revenue you shouldn't be in that company right jeff and i looking at grind we we knew what we would need to do to double revenue and in two and a half years we took grind from a hundred million of revenue to two hundred million of revenue when we took it public and what was your thesis for doubling well i mean some of it in jeff's jumping here but some of it was really just upgrading from where the company was at the time again the talent was terrible that the the the tech was decaying and they hadn't launched any new products in a long time so we knew if we could clean up those three areas and then apply the tinder playbook which matt which you know match had done great with tinder and grind had not applied any of that we're like if we just do these things alone we should be up fifty percent if we do them really well a hundred percent yeah we went through i mean it got we went down to a low level we went to individual screens and said they're not even using the right buy buttons here like there it's just patterns we know that weren't you know you can do these conversions you know you can reduce on install rates by ten percent you know you can increase your seo by blank they didn't have a web version of for grind we knew that would be important they didn't use boost the equivalent boost feature on tinder we knew that feature would be we knew they were under pricing in certain markets and over pricing in certain markets they weren't doing anything on pricing strategy at all they just kind of uniformly used pricing everywhere so that playbook allowed us to put together sort of probably a three x in revenue and all we needed was oh you know we needed to double revenue in that time frame and so same way you would do with risk reduction we put together things saying that's good for ten percent that's good for forty percent that's good for whatever and when we were done with that whole list we had high confidence that we could grow the business our first year was really hard because a lot more disruption happened in the business than we thought and we had covid hit which dropped the business by thirty percent overnight and then it recovered but we still hit our numbers roughly we came in almost with it because we came in almost within a million dollars on every quarter that we wanted to hit off that piece and by the way that included like getting rid of advertising the product they've reintroduced it since but like we knew users hated to the advertising and it was causing prompts we don't wanna get rid of advertising in the product most of it and so we were trying to cut revenue in certain areas grow revenue in other areas increase retention increase pricing on certain customers like some customers were price insensitive and they were just getting too much value out of the product this is for the folks out there who have a business that does at least three million dollars a year in revenue because around this point that's when you're able to look up after being heads down for years building your company and you realize two things one you've done something great but you're still a long way from your final destination and two you look around and you realize i am all alone i've out run my peers which means you're now making ten million dollar decisions alone by yourself and that is when mediocrity can creep in my company hampton we solve this problem by getting a room of vetted peers of other entrepreneurs who are gonna hold you accountable call you out on your nonsense and help show you the way because the fact is is that there's only a tiny number of people in your town who know what you're going through and who have been there and they're hard to find the biggest risk is not failing you have a company and it's working you're gonna be fine but the biggest risk is waking up ten years from now and saying shit i barely grew and in business and in life and for people like you who are ambitious wasted potential and regret is what we want to help you to avoid we have made so many of these groups and we have a thousand plus members and i know this stuff actually works it can change your life the change mind and i know it will change yours so check it out join hampton dot com in the doc you guys sent over before the episode you talked about like the opportunity in health that you see kind of like certain health trends or where where you know as an entrepreneur you know your spidey sense would start tingling what you know can you describe what what you're seeing and what you think about this i think rick for for me what those areas of disruption coming from crypto ai that's really our investment thesis on venture almost like so it for private equity those represent high disruption points which can transform a space they can disrupt a space they can take you know big players and make them weak players and vice versa so there are plays in private equity for these but there's a lot of unknown in those that make private equity more dangerous for the next couple years because businesses that have been very stable for a very long time have become potentially unstable from disruption on the investment side that's the perfect time to invest right even though people are saying there's bubble right now if you just take a macro level of the next decade will there be more disruption more wealth generated over the next decade regardless of like if individual prices for companies are over valued in the short term of the long run it's kinda like was amazon overpriced in two thousand sure but was it overpriced by the next twenty years now it was under priced by the next twenty years so as an investor ai does some things really well and it does things well when there's a lot of documentation and there's a lot of documentation in legal engineering and in medical and so those spaces are high value tons of money being spent in those spaces and there's high need the consumers desperately need better results from medical they desperately need better results you know on engineering engineering costs are incredibly high for building high quality software and safe software that can't be hacked and all those other things and so as you look at these areas that's why i think those areas are right for disruption it's not like an unknown thing if you talk to the major vcs they'll tell you like yeah these are the areas we see entertainment as well is one i think the downside of entertainment is there's sort of an insider and a protection of ip and a legality to the entertainment industry that's always made it a little bit delayed on adopting or seeing disruption we see it in the long run we tend not to see it as quickly like that's why naps it didn't work and you know what spotify came in for later really had been done already but just didn't happen because of some of the pieces for so i do like those spaces i think as we were talking earlier about private equity it's what makes me a little nervous if i'm looking at deals i'm like there was other disruption on the consumer side which was when facebook lost its ability to see data because apple changed its rules in ios fourteen that broke so many small businesses it literally just broke businesses they could acquire customers before and they could no longer acquire customers and so what was seen is like this it's bad for you know we're we're we're gonna fight back against facebook it really was an action that apple took that hurts so many small and medium sized businesses so on the consumer side that reap the repercussions of the inability to acquire customers that are sort of reasonable price has destroyed so many businesses and it's made private equity sort of interesting in the space now because where do you get consumer where can you acquire customers when consumer when acquiring customers through advertising on on google and facebook and meta platforms it's just so wildly expensive this and what about this agency ai thing i've been working with a number of entrepreneurs we were trying to figure out how to do some businesses that involved ai and i just kept saying but how does this work if we can't talk to the old internet like if we can't talk to tripadvisor and we can't talk to ticket master and we can't talk to n nba dot com but like if we can't do any of these things how exactly does the world transform where i have an agent that helps me plan my weekend or my trip to new york city and all these things and so there were all these companies starting that we're building agents inside websites where you would and i don't like this theory that there'll be a a million l out there every time i go to a i have to talk to an agent and it's just sort of replacing clicking on buttons with talking to an agent i assume that the world will instead end up with a smaller number of agents that act on behalf of consumers going out and doing work that changes fundamentally the internet it just means that if you have a website today that sells tickets or bicycles or whatever it is it won't be so much the customers type in specialized dot com or t dot com or whatever the bicycle company is and then go there and do it that traditional way they'll i'll talk to an agent they'll hey i need a bike i want a mountain bike i'm doing all these things that i want you do an evaluation of these things and it says okay i pick these four bikes and you say that one looks good can i get a good deal on it says great i'll go do it there is no way for the world to do that connecting right now where it's like take the old world of commerce and connect it with this new world of agents and so you need a layer in there they are building things like mariner and operator from open and google that are attempting to surf the web on behalf of consumers and click buttons it is not efficient and mariner and operator the first ones tell you it's not efficient so what agency is is ai g e n c y that ai it's just the glue between the two so what happens is is when like an open ai agent comes to a website like a travel website or a luggage website right now it will surf every page looking for the request of the consumer it can take like ten minutes with ours we just redirect the traffic to an interim agent that doesn't intend to ever talk to consumer it's not an agent that's gonna you know make you feel good about yourself it just talks to an agent that talks to other agents so agents is how can we retroactively build take the web two point o world in the commerce world and allow it to talk to this new ai enabled world and so i had learned a while ago that typically a lot of the ideas i have for startups required a step that i assumed would be there but i didn't know who was gonna do it and this time i wanted to be one of the guys that worked on the interim steps because i think those create incredible value we see it over and over again it's like the guys that are doing data centers and the guys that are doing the layers of sort of strapping on top of these l m's rep you guys talked to the founder of rep for the ai coding you know it's really sitting on top of l engines and so a lot of the values being created in this middle wear stage that's necessary to sort of put these two pieces together and so that's what agency is it's an attempt to take these old businesses that could experience incredible disruption and help them understand what's happening with the ai world and just transform their current business they everyone's not gonna be able to hire ai engineers it's just not possible right you're you're not gonna you're not gonna be able to do it there's just so few and so you need this system to sort of my glues the two together so that's that's the you someone was sean and i had tim ferris on the other day and we were talking about through that in prep yeah i was watching through it yeah dude the top comment was like oh three still looking belly rich guys just discovered hobbies like they were making fun of us for like talking about some something so obvious and it's sort of funny because you guys are web one point o like og like rick branch out when i was just getting going and that was like that was like the north star of like this guy got thirty five million users in like a year that's and you were in my mind we're kind of the poster child for like raise a lot of money go big and buy lottery ticket and hopefully it pays off but now what you're doing now does it seem like a lottery ticket at all it seems like you've like reduced risk as much as possible if you were twenty five now rick do you think that you would gone the bootstrapping running a cash flow business or do you think are you happy with the results of what you did with kind of buy buying lottery tickets i don't think that jeff and i would have been necessarily good at pe at twenty five i think grind worked because we could apply twenty five years of experience to it so i don't i don't think yeah i i i think the the right call was get that experience at twenty five i think that's when james and i found at tickle i think i was about twenty five and and you know get all that experience build that network and you know seen the movie a thousand times and know how it ends and then apply all of that to the bigger opportunity so yeah i wasn't ready back man at twenty five yeah and i think that the the risk i think it's great to go big like but i do think that there's a reason that entrepreneurs in their twenty we say freshmen and seniors make all the money in in the venture business like on the entrepreneur our business so you either don't know the rules so you go into your business and you break a bunch rules without knowing or you know all the rules and you build a business that sort of takes advantage of the the weakness of a market because of the rules and it's the sophomores and junior who kind of messed stuff up and typically as an investor i see this as like oh they're a director or senior director coming out of meta or google they have incredible experience and now they're ready to do a startup up these typically have made not great entrepreneurs but entrepreneurs that drop out of college or you know some of the group that y comb sort of focuses on that are really scrappy variance we see a lot of amazing disruption there and then people that have spent twenty years in the industry they may the risk for that startup may look not as high but the outcomes can be incredible right like salesforce dot com i mean that's an incredible but that's industry experts trying to figure out like wow this trend of moving online to the cloud with apps from oracle sort of on prem it's a kind of a boring felt revolution i guess at the time but i mean it was sort of obvious and but still incredible amount of value was created so i think value gets created at both ends and it's true we're worse experienced so we tend to be more seniors and so the kinds of things we do they look lower risk and it's more sort of wiring together pieces of the we're world that need to be wired together but it it can create a tremendous amount of value there's still a huge amount of disruption in there when i was young doing my very first startup up in online storage people you just tell me no one will store anything online i just remember thinking like before the word cloud was invented the word side load we invented that during the thing like we just didn't have the vocabulary to talk about storing stuff in the cloud but so i love the disruption on both sides as an angel i'm sort of i like to find the guys in there the you know the the men and women in their twenties that are finding big disruptive ideas and i would love to invest in those but also my network gives me access to incredibly experienced entrepreneurs that know the this market just needs this piece to disrupt it and i can put that piece in place well one of the other fun things about being in the game for so long is that you you've probably met a lot of the main characters today back at their superhero origin story so like i don't know but but like you know elon or you know you guys were pre yc so like you know paul graham sam whoever the players who have gone on to do like really interesting things suck early on you know what were can you are there any cool stories like well you what who are these what mean like i did my first deal with travis from uber i did my first deal with travis when i had id drive he started a company called scour he was out of ucla with five guys so jason dr in travis they did scour i did id drive i had the largest collection of mp threes in the world on my file system they had the largest video and music search engine built ever we put the two together it was unbelievable it was the most incredible thing travis was an incredibly difficult guy to do business with back then and you know cutting and strong and through elbows his team was really talented and their tech was awesome and so yeah i got to know travis when he was twenty four or twenty five and did he have me a factor then listen i i've met so many of these guys that you and i know now to be billionaires you know when they were very very young z was started in the same dorm room of dropbox with drew so my founders of z that i did and sold yahoo that was started with drew they both were why comb class i think two and three and so and jack do i knew him when it was audio and spent time with them and twitter was failing and we were i was trying to buy it for nineteen million dollars at yahoo like so we've met all these people they are roughly the same people some of them have become personas and characters that are sort of surreal but then when you spend time with them they're they're the same you know but when i read about them online i'm like oh that's they i i sometimes spire i'm like if i become a bill i always told my kids if i become a billionaire make sure i am incredibly interesting because the role of billionaires in the nineteen twenties was to entertain society through eccentric contributions and naming universities after themselves and doing this but not for destroying the government and doing all these other things so you know there's you're supposed to entertain and keep people happy and add social good by building things that will survive generations whether it's universities or parks or you know things like that but so yeah i i i admire my friends that have had the success but i'll tell you the difference between my my most intelligent or most talented friends are not my richest friends and the correlation between success and talent is not nearly the overlap you would think we rewrite the story the origin stories of so many of these companies i talked with brian when he was getting airbnb starts it's one of the vcs called and instead i'm trying to invest in the start all the airbnb i spoke with brian and we talked through like what he would look for in his first investor and why i like this investor and hearing from him he's like interesting guy and he had interesting things to say and i loved airbnb i was of the very first airbnb hosts but i didn't hang up the phone go holy shit that guy has it no i hung up and say guys a little bit hard to talk to on the phone like i didn't nothing again i just but i loved airbnb as a business but i didn't think that is the guy but i hear vcs talk about this all the time they're like when i met with this entrepreneur i knew and i'm like jack do is incredibly thoughtful but not incredibly well liked when he was young not by his c cofounder not by his investors but he turned out to be an incredible entrepreneur you know to do square and to do like it's incredible an incredible entrepreneur but was not i didn't walk away from my meetings with eve and jack and biz those guys and say jack's the guy and christ was like jack's curious fella smart and fun to talk to but curious and like i do accept what paul graham says which is and i think others have said this people who accomplish things in startups historically have a trail of accomplishments so they were amongst the best at things they did now the things they had a chance to do along the way might have been eliminates dan but you'll see this thing like people will point for me i sold raffle tickets for my school for something we were raising money for i didn't beat the other kids at the school and selling raffle tickets by like seven percent i beat them by seven hundred like i destroyed every record ever done in selling raffle tickets for my school i remember when the principal goes in seven hundred and seventy seven dollars of sale you know the person that had me was like sixty four real sales of tickets and i sold like seven hundred and something and they're just like i i don't know and so you tend to see this record of accomplishment in all the things they did now some of the things they may have done early on in life they just they might have come out of a small town that they didn't have opportunities to do big things so the best example of this i would say is like if you read paul wrote a blog post on or wrote essay on is a thing a long time ago about like you know the five founders who kind of stood out to him and it was like you know whatever it was like larry and sergei bill gates it was like the people who had already done it and he's like number five sam alt and it's like this guy who had done lube i think sold for like forty million bucks or something like nowhere near the accomplishments of bill gates larry sergei and he says like you know i remember when we first met him i thought to myself i realized like oh this is what it would have been like to meet bill gates at eighteen and he just he called it this is like ten years before samuel became household name and so it's very interesting to me when people you know sort of have it what is it i think as an investor you wanna be able to recognize it as often as you can i think that's a very profitable skill as an investor i think as an entrepreneur you can actually you can actually develop it you can start to steal you you know pieces of other people's games you know if you notice that somebody's really good at doing something or you notice oh i thought i was good at this now i know that there's actually more room to grow there great i'm gonna yeah keep working at that it's sort of reset the there probably is some i think paul is sort of unique in his ability to sort of put really complex ideas into simple ideas and turn those into so i think that's why comment such incredible success in identifying the right founders in its first three or four classes that was really incredible they're now like doing six or seven hundred companies per class and so that they'll probably through the numbers say that they're identifying these things but had not been quite the persistent system that they were in those first like four ten when they were doing boston and the valley they were going back and forth and jessica were going back and forth between boston and the valley that was probably the best hit rate like ron conway hit rate for esp angel in in one was unbelievable he'd like a multiple hundred x on esp angel one two's been good a minute it's good fund then three is good and four but esp one was incredible so lots of people who say they have these incredible skills for identifying talent i think in general it's like historical thing we rewrite but i you do meet some entrepreneurs who are competitive or ambitious in a way that being a soc path and being a good entrepreneur it's like the circle comes very close to touching and i realized somewhere along line i love doing startups but i just don't have the soc path jean in me i would say there's a level of success amongst entrepreneurs that it may require a level of sort of drive or or competitiveness that may be is so far out on the on the unique but when i hear about y'all success i mean that's that's like something i i i mean i aspire to achieve what you you've achieved and you don't seem you seem pretty genuine i've i've known rick i've i've i've known of you for many years and i like you seem like a you seem like a pretty on stay like if our first startups had been wildly more successful had my head eye drive had i found somebody offered me two hundred and seventy five million dollars for eye drive when i was in two thousand and i was like raising at four hundred million you know it would have changed my you know i would be a different person i would be the most annoying person you've ever dealt with today because i would have built wealth early my career my first sample would have been my first startup was a huge success and i would have told myself there was something i was told by a very smart vc that i worked with and he said the smartest people in the valley are probably right thirty percent of the time and the normal smart people in the valley are right about ten percent of the time the sample size for the thirty percent right is that they're right so much more than the smart people around them that they're basically one hundred percent right they're run thought seventy percent of the time but their sample in their own brain is i'm right a hundred percent of the time relative to my friends because they we all sort of discount our failures enough that we see only you know the small selection of failure and successes so i think that's the problem with this concept which is smart people are probably still write ten percent of the time with their ideas and their work and their effort if luck corresponds with that talent that and you get enough shots at it you know like rick i think if you wanna be an entrepreneur be successful do it commit yourself to twenty years do you know be an entrepreneur for twenty years do four or five startups because the amount of luck that has to overlap from external and internal things that have to cross over to have that success when it happens on their first startup we typically as scribe that to genius we say like that's genius and so probably half of those are true half of those like the people are really uniquely talented the other half just the luck they had for when the wheels stopped and when they got their number was on their very first one and that success multiplied many times because raising money was easier and access to talent became easier the number of things you learn in the process of building a big company or you know you learn a ton and so you're getting your learnings earlier so there is just something to had the dot com burst happened three months later i would have sold my company for hundreds of millions of dollars and things would have been different and maybe i would have had more success today in terms of what people i've had great success i'm super happy i love what i do i get a chance to work on hard problems but i think about this a lot you guys actually have the career that i i don't think i don't i don't see myself having this but the way that you describe it i'm like that sounds amazing which is you sort of have projects i think sean is i think tends to do this quite well where he finds a project and he gets in and it ends up being quite successful you guys have done that where it's like it's like every three or five years it seems like you have like a new thing if you look at your linkedin it's like there it's like a chapter very clearly chapters whereas what i tend to like is like multi decades on the same thing which the way that you're describing your life now like that sounds pretty amazing that sounds pretty fun do is there can you speak to that of like of like the because you you also said you're like what your like pe doesn't work for ten years and i'm like oh that's it ted like isn't even more for ten years and it works for only four years that's it that sounds amazing no i i think there's an evolution so that's probably why it looks like on a resume it's every three to five years what i've tried to do is find people that i really respect and sean to your you know earlier question about you know finding those people early you know i can give you three examples one would be james courier who you know was my classmates made at h hp we grew up four miles from each other new hampshire never knew each other until business school but he was someone that stood out as one of the brightest guys among all the students there which is a high bar right so and in you know james is one of my best friends jeff one of my obviously closest friends as well jeff you know brilliant product mind and and another guy naval ra and and you know neville was someone that i met twenty years ago and i give him a lot of credit he was a guy that got me into angel investing gave me a lot of good advice around that fifteen plus years ago got me into crypto eleven years ago and he was somewhere i just saw as just a really really big brain and all three of those guys i just i love hanging out with they're all good people and i've done things in my career with all three that i've been really meaningful right so for me the you know and and then i need to add value right so with jeff and james in particular both high level big vision guys and need an operator to make sure the execution gets done and that's where i've been able to add my value to you know to find these guys that i i wanna spend my time with that i have a ton of respect for and i think that that's a good life philosophy right so the five people you hang out with the most you tend to like you know take on their thinking their manner so you know the things that they say so really you know think hard about who do i wanna spend my time with and for me i've been blessed to find you know several people like jeff and james in particular to run companies with and be blessed that i can bring what was pre guru naval like like you know when he was like guru in the making it it is funny now to see how he's blown up and it it's actually funny i'll go back to naval but there's a woman mel robbins who now is a huge podcast yeah he worked for us she was our head of marketing at no way really james and i found a tickle in this crappy basement level office in cambridge mass she was our head of marketing and my wife was listening to her podcast the other day and i recognized the voice i was like is at mel robbins she's like yeah she's huge i'm like mel was her like director of marketing in nineteen ninety nine i had no idea that she blew up so it's awesome to see that success for her would you predict do that no no i mean she had a big personality and everything but who would i mean i mean that she's gotten so big no but she she's she's awesome she's amazing we had crazy team early days at trickle but neville neville has i mean neville was always really cerebral roll incredibly smart one the smartest guys is silicon in valley and that's a very high bar but he's definitely gone more of the guru thing and i still seen neville all the time and you know have a ton of respect for him and he's definitely gone more of the philosophy and and and and really you know really become this google it's awesome to see but he was someone that early days inspired me for those two areas angel investigation and crypto that continue to be you know a important part of my career what was light bulb moment for you with crypto and then i guess like did anything change over time yeah with crypto i remember early days bitcoin you know was trading under a thousand dollars and i said to naval evolve so how big does this get and he said i said what's the price of bitcoin he said a million and i said a million it's only at like you know eight hundred and i said when and he said before we die and i was like hang i said before we die he's like i don't know when but it will be a million dollars before we die and i should have bought more i bought some should have bought more so i i love the way he can look out decades and be right k that's awesome to give you a why did you tell you what what the thesis that did it click for right away because i remember the it took me like seven smart people telling me about bitcoin before my dumbass could figure out like alright this maybe is worth doing and really even then it's not even because i actually understood what they were saying i was just okay that's too many smart people saying that this is a thing for me to to just not participate and and by the way it's happening right now if a million is true that that means that it is still true that we are foolish for not being you know all in or whatever it did yeah but you know at some point i started to like get a like wrap my head around like oh okay i understand why this makes sense now like my friend literally sent me a pdf he had written like a five page thing where he was like if warren buffett if i use warren buffett own investment like framework to look at bitcoin here's the case and i read that and that the day it clicked for me yeah no i think neville saw that early i think he saw the disruption and being able to move money very much what gable coins are doing now but he saw that early days in bitcoin as both a store of value and a transfer of value and i think he was probably also looking at you know non inflationary right you've got a fixed supply and and the ability for anyone to be able to buy bitcoin no matter where you are in the world so i think there were a lot of things that he saw early days before before were were were you part of james crew of one currency to rule them all when when james was brainstorming this james yeah we talked about it a lot obviously it never went anywhere but yeah yeah i was part of those discussions you know any of these things are just so hard to get off the ground in bitcoin is that one incredibly unique technical challenge that was solved and and change the world right sean i wrote this i wrote this presentation for yahoo in two thousand six and it was about what i called the emotional adoption curve and how angry customers was the biggest predictor of disruption for these embedded spaces and that instead people tend entrepreneurs tend to focus on making customers like delight customers and making customers happy and i said we really should focus more on pain and frustration and anger that it's the negative emotions that drive behavior changes not the positive emotions and so at the end i said if this is true what are the industry's most likely to be disrupted the internet is a form of democrat that gives consumers power to overthrow the chains that hold them back and make them upset and i literally said finance and money it's a weird thing it's like controlled it's it's it's opaque they can't understand it they don't understand what's going on the next one was health care especially in the us like just disruption has to happen here the customer is getting such a raw deal it's so bad for the consumer they're so angry and it has so much power over them this disruption has come entertainment i was like just to confusing consumers they have to pay these cable bills and didn't don't understand like this is just gonna drive them crazy this is before voice over ip taken over so i'd written about tele was like one was coming finance i included like credit cards and all the other things consumer did you want the walk when when big bitcoin when you first heard about bitcoin no yes and no and i have a good story on how i screwed up on the bitcoin one but the last one by the way was the government is that the customers have anxiety and they have frustration with government and government services and things like that and i'm not a libertarian but i can see still that there's an and anxiety and frustration and so social networks adds sort of gas to that fire no it's not always good just because the consumers angry doesn't mean that we end up with like a delightful solution at the end it can be a a a worse solution but the abuse of control at the top and typically mono monopoly or oli type businesses or industries causes angry customers and those are the most ripe for disruption they're often hard to disrupt but the power of the internet was and what james recognized many people with currency was what the internet is done for a in the most easy to disrupt industries will eventually happen when you network voices together and they can multiply that will eventually lead to disruption in these bigger harder to crack spaces and so we're seeing now the internet's been around now for twenty five years and all the manifestations of it and all those things that come together it's slowly ticking away and sort of disrupting these industries that we thought couldn't be disrupted and currencies and governments are closely tied together but no i obviously didn't totally see it because i bought crypto over the years but i always buy things i can't afford to inspire myself to work harder and i bought a porsche at one point that i couldn't afford and i went to sell it and the guy office was like two thousand and eight or something and he offered me bitcoin at like i don't know well under a thousand bucks it was like i don't even know hundred bucks for or something he's offering me bid because he's like i just pay in bitcoin i was like nah he should pay me in cash i gotta pay the bills still but you know how had i taken the bitcoin for that it i was like the three hundred and seventy two million dollar porsche i did the math at one point of what that porsche would be worth today if i had just taken the the bitcoin in it so did you guys are awesome it's it's fun talk you because you're i think you're like one one one generation above us but a lot of like attributes that we both admire which is you've been in the game for you've been very very consistent but you also seem to be having a lot of fun you've done like some serious stuff but you've taken it almost at a weird light hearted way that i appreciate like you like it seems like fun is a part of the conversation and and i really respect to how of that you gotta you gotta find the right people to do this with because it's hard right whether it's pe venture or starting a company find people that you respect and that you really wanna spend those hours with jeff is clearly one of those people for me jeff keeps me laughing all day he's hilarious but also you know as you've heard today incredibly insightful and so good at what he does so go find you know go find your partner if you're gonna do this stuff because it's hard that's awesome we'll we appreciate you guys so much yeah thanks for coming on guys yeah thank you that's it i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a goal less travel never looked this episode is 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

is possible that you know this becomes a big thing and if it becomes a big thing i i think that this is probably one of the bigger wealth creation moments in ai 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 look so we're doing a special pod because greg was on the pod where he showed me all these cool tools that he was using but then at the end of the pod he was like by the way did you see that chat between now has a new app store and i said no i didn't let's just record and i want you to show me what's going on with the new chat d store and because this is my first million if you can tell me a bunch of interesting business ideas that you see within the realm of the chat gb store because a lot of people don't know this but i guess they could they they could surmise this but when when the app store first came out a bunch of the biggest businesses came about because they were early they were first that is that is true so let me give you a breakdown of what happened why it's important and i can share a bunch of ideas that i think people should steal let me first talk about what what was announced so the other day sam alt talked it was dev day so open ai you know big developer conference he launched the chat app store and he gives us example of using fig in chat ep which is a the design tool and he says turn this sketch like something that he drew out into a workable diagram and it was able to do it wow i yeah it's absolutely crazy so the ability to use apt within chat basically turning chat into like a mini internet right you don't need a leave chat if you can just connect to apps wow the other example he one of his teams gave was like course era the course platform course era can you teach me something about machine learning it connects to course era you have to connect with it so you actually have to like log in to it so you can see here if you're watching this on video it shows like how chat uses data apps may introduce risk data is shared with the apps and then it creates this canvas where you can actually like instead you know it used to be chat t was only text now chat t has this canvas that you can actually consume content in a more visual way there's two ways to basically find some of these applications one is you add it and the other one is and the way the one i'm way more excited about is you just use chat eb normally and you say like imagine i didn't at course era here and i said i wanna learn about machine learning and it just brings up course era as a potential app and that's the opportunity right because if someone listening to this could actually build an app so that it shows up when you ask it a question one of the things that sam alt mentioned the other day was he announced that chat has eight hundred million weekly active users so you can get in front of eight hundred million people every single week and sell them something wow okay this is awesome i just typed in on chat i said how do i turn to drawing into a into a fig and then i added the fig and it told me how to do it okay that's awesome yeah or here i'll just throw it i'll do one live for for fun design a new logo for my podcast the startup up ideas is podcast oh i forgot to like i've forgot to mention who i want so i want i think can yeah canvas was was one of them so can can the forty seven billion dollar you know design tool is one of the launch partners it connects to the app and then you just log in and it'll literally design a logo within chat using canvas software alright there it is there it is you know i would give it a six point five on ten but you know it's something that i can iterate with and it's not something that you're gonna one prompt yet but it is something that you know look it says review and select one to continue editing and then the font is so weird on seven of them moment it looks like it's a misspelled but it's not i've never experienced it before look at the one on the far on on the third on the right yeah that sometimes happens with ai design is like the the the fonts a bit wonky so you do you you you have to again like not one prompt it's gonna take multiple prop prompts but like this isn't bad and that also took like two seconds like i can make this better that's awesome alright guys here's the thing about side hustle everyone wants one but most people over think about it and they never actually launch anything but because of ai you can go from my idea to your first sale in only seven days my old company the hustle they just dropped an ai side hustle crash course so basically what the hustle did was they looked at things that me and sean and hubspot cmo k founder they look at stuff that we said and they broke it all down into simple bite size steps which means you're gonna get a guide that gives you everything you need to launch a side hustle without any of the guest work so you can get it right now you can scan the qr code or click the link in the description now back to the show so that was the announcement zillow was another one which i thought was cool let me just zoom into it so you can see the full zillow experience and then you can use natural language to use the ai pretty cool dude i'm just kind of in awe right now a little bit i i think sean said something kind funny but it wasn't funny it was very real he was like every time talk about this i to realize or asked myself am i a all powerful now because i can do all this stuff or be completely irrelevant and whenever i like look at this stuff that's exactly how i feel but that's wild okay it depends on what he does with this information you know what i mean of course the people who made the shift from web to mobile crushed it but there was a period of time when facebook i'm sure you remember had a bad app and they almost didn't make the the leap to mobile now they're like a trillion dollar company so i think that there's i'm not saying it's a hundred percent possible but it is possible that you know this becomes a big thing and if it becomes a big thing you're gonna wanna have an app here okay so what apps or ideas do you think are interesting to you right now i'll tell you but i also i i do wanna give the caveat that chat gp a couple years ago launched something called custom gp do you remember those yeah it was a flop i tried to make them one it didn't work yeah and you know why i think it's a flop and why this is different no one wants to download apps no one wants to go to a gp store set stuff up download apps what makes this so much better is its contextual you just type in something on chat e and yes you know you you might have to mention it but if you don't have to mention it and you just said hey i wanted a logo design and then it pulls up can or pulls up another app the discovery opportunity is huge and it's just easier for the customer because they don't have to like set up anything yeah yeah yeah yeah no i i think it's it's gonna be great i actually invested in one or two companies where there wasn't going amazing and they pivoted into a chat gp plugin in and they're killing it and so like and we've talked about wordpress plugins ins and a bunch of different plug in businesses and and i'm on board with those and so i'm eager what ideas you have that are related to chat for both apps and plugins cool so i've got fifteen ideas that i scraped from my idea browser dot com my app i want you to pick like we can talk about one that you know these are my the ones that are highlighted are my favorite ones but i'm happy to pick and go through any of them go to so zoom in a little bit more but it looks like the ai tax guy ai tax guy so imagine if you're able to prompt file my quarterly taxes it shows a custom ui that shows deductions auto filled forms one click filing it connects your stripe plaid in google drive and someone is gonna build my tax guy and a prompt on chat and it it's it's a huge opportunity do you know what's interesting there's a guy on twitter who has a ai app that he made uploading your bank statement bank statement converter dot com bank statement converter dot com how much revenue does bank take statement converter dot com make doesn't it like fifty or eighty grand a month i think it's forty to fifty thousand dollars a month okay so it's a very very niche thing but it's a thing where if you need it you really need it and because of for a bunch of different reasons i have many k ones which frankly i barely know what k one is i know that when my wife is getting ready to do our tax she's like i do the k one this k one for that and we have like sixty or eighty of them we have a lot of them and just finding them in my gmail takes forever because what happens when you invest in real estate or you know different projects you get k ones and they don't all they come from each vendor and they come at a variety of times and they're in all different formats so k one forms the same but like it's sent as an attachment in an email what would be intriguing is you could just do this to find all my k ones in my gmail fast that's so good like k one agent that's a great idea someone should go build it this dude from bank statement and converter dot com is it's literally a dude one person look at this website it looks like the berkshire hathaway website but for consulting it's awesome it just get click a big big button convert to pdf and i think what you're gonna see potentially happen with to with with this news is apps like this are going to live within chat so if you ever saw stories about people like bank same and converting and you're like i wish i started that that's so simple if you're listening to this you're early now is the time you should be building that within chat t s sdk today's episode is brought to you by hubspot being a know at all used to be considered a bad thing but in business knowing it all it's everything because right now businesses are only using about twenty percent of their data unless you have hubspot that's where they take data that's buried in emails and call logs and meaning those they become insights i hope you grow your business because when you know more you grow more you see being don't know it all isn't so bad after all visit hubspot dot com to learn more today alright what's another one you tell me you which ones ph in g fancy the ai healthcare care concierge so here's the prop find me the best dermatologist near me that takes blue cross your app connects the z doc insurance networks then shows an interactive local map and booking options and then you just make money with affiliate like this is just or that gets acquired by z dock or some of these big companies but if you can own this high demand and then query worth a lot of money how would you make this well i'm lucky right like i i have a design firm that builds apps like this so i would just hire my own firm to build these apps like we we just announced we're building apps like this so i would just use my firm but if i didn't have a firm and i'm just a one man person i'm using you know cloud code and i'm building i'm our cursor and i'm i'm building this out how long would that take i would say realistically two to three weeks to get something that's working really well and then you need a probably well then you'd have to make sure that you get approved by open ai which you know might take some more time but maybe four four weeks in total thirty days that's crazy the other thing i would do like you know i'm talking about own book but this is i build this for myself is i would you know there's a a button on idea browser that's build this idea i don't think i've ever shown this publicly anywhere but you can actually just go and build for like the ad creative the brand package the landing page a content calendar the email funnel system the email sequence the lead magnet with all the optimized prompts and that's what i would do have you ever seen that meme of like a big meat head sitting at the computer and he's like the build me a business that makes a hundred million in revenue in three days don't make any mistakes start now yeah yeah it still need you still need a human now you know like i think the mistake a lot of people make is they'll use something like something like this or or just they'll prop themselves and they'll be like wiring aren't customers coming well it's you this is like an opt all your optimized prompts in one place specific to each l or ai tool but you still need to like review it make sure it works and optimize it from there so that's what i would do i would probably do first version on on you know idea browser probably use you know claude v zero get some emails and try to just try to launch something in thirty days my last company the hustle the year we sold i was thirty one years old and we were gonna do about eighteen million dollars in revenue i frankly didn't have a lot of peers i didn't know a lot of people who were vicious like me and this meant that i was making decisions that could cost me maybe five ten even more millions of dollars worth the money i was making them all by myself this all changed however when i got a group of peers and that's by the way how this podcast sort of started sean was in my group and we met every month it sort of became a personal board of directors and it frankly changed my life and that's why i started my company hampton join hampton dot com the entire idea is that we make core groups just like this just like the one that i had of other entrepreneurs who have been there done that and we give you guys a time and a place to sit down and have these very honest confidential conversations where you can share business ideas you could talk about hiring you could talk about all these decisions that you typically have to make all by yourself the biggest risk in my opinion is not failing you're you're gonna be fine your business is probably gonna work it's that in ten years you look back and you think damn i blew it i blew this opportunity because i was making decisions by myself i was making decisions out of fear and i did not grow i did not maximize the opportunity i'm telling you it can save you ten years of headache and of heartache and you can make better decisions so much faster and the best part is that with hampton these core groups that we make we make them in real life in your city we're in atlanta austin boston chicago dallas denver london la miami new york s f toronto and vancouver and so if you're running an internet company that does at least three million dollars year in revenue or you raised at least three million dollars in funding or you've sold the for at least ten million dollars go to join hampton dot com this is my company sam from m m i review every single person who applies so again join hampton dot com alright what else see out this is fun keep going so memes are getting more and more popular especially in an ai age i think that whoever owns the make a meme about you know x y z topic is you know probably makes a few million dollars a year can you do this now in chad or per complexity per complexities comment you could do it on chad g it's just not optimized and that's the opportunity is like that's why dev day happened right chat jb realizes that they need apps like this i think they realized two things they need apps like this to exist so that people stay on the platform more and they realize that they can do everything so what's what's ai grandma this is a fun one you know i i think that a lot of people are feeling overwhelmed right now and they might not want andrew hub advice or even great guys and work advice or sam powered advice sometimes we just need an ai grandma to give us old school warm blunt and human advice i think that there's an opportunity to build like a life adviser and you build a brand around like an eighty five year old woman who like bake apple pies have you built any of these yeah well i'm we're building like actively right now for yourself or clients for both and that's gonna take two to three weeks to get the mvp yeah mvp it depends like what we're building like you know a grandma could take you know a few days but like if you're building like your k one one you know what that's like a a little more that's more complicated so it depends which one but it can take anywhere from days to yeah for an mvp thirty days let's talk about this credit score cr score one man up until so when up until recently i had a very low credit score because i didn't use too much credit but i didn't realize that i had a apparent one time i'd like fell on a on a when i had a job years and years ago and i had to take an ambulance ride and i didn't realize they didn't pay it and so my credit got ding and so i had a credit score i never checked it of like five eighty and i was like what the hell and when i wanted to get a mortgage for a house i couldn't get a mortgage and i was searching for how do i like how do i make my credit bet better like is there a firm i can hire just do the work for me and it was impossible and it's incredibly scam the credit repair industry was incredibly scam and so i'm eager to hear how you can improve my credit yeah so i had the same problem which is why i added this here so i actually don't have a great credit score i don't have a bad credit score it's just fair but i started sold you know companies like i should have a good credit score you know so i'm not sure why but like banks don't have banks and companies like ex ex they're they're let's just say they're not at the forefront of technology yeah so i think that there's an opportunity to i think there's tons of people who are asking how do i fix my credit score you can actually go and check that keyword volume it's worth so much money and you know if you can have something that it detects that you know it detects the intent it surfaces your app i think you need to have a really good domain like repair my credit score dot com that's probably taken but something like that one of the reasons why bank statement converter dot com worked is because the domain was really good so you'd you know there is gonna be a bit of more of a start up cost here you might have to spend ten fifteen twenty thousand dollars on a domain but i think that this is one of the more no brainer examples where you know it connects to it you know equifax or ex experience there's this interactive ui with dispute templates score simulations sliders next step actions and then you just either do referral fees or you charge for it does do the dot ais do just as good as a dot com from a seo perspective from a app perspective seo dot com is like your is manhattan you know dot ai is like you're it's your it's williamsburg you know it's so cool but manhattan is manhattan well it's the dot ai is available my friend oh is it yeah repair my credit score dot ai why don't we buy the the domain and get you know give it to someone who like likes and comments on this youtube video i can do that or you know or something like that and and know just inspire people to actually go in because i want people to build apps you know that's a good idea i'll i'll buy i can i'll buy and give it to someone yeah that's fifty bucks for year one i mean and i have to use per complexities comment you to find a discount code and do you you don't own any equity you're just giving it to them for free right i for no i they can have it it's just a a a fifty dollar gift from m to them if if if they get to a million dollars a year what do they what they need to do what do they have to do for you like a hundred dollar door gift card would suffice a two x return yeah yeah a door gift gift card if i get the if i can get like like so much chick f a and i don't even want chick f a i just want the un breaded chicken nuggets if i can just get like about four pounds of that that would be that would been worth the time cool alright well thanks for thanks for having me on it and hope you're inspired thank you greg that's it that's the problem 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 this episode is 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 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

so we have with us today the king of commerce the titan of target the big man of the brand eric ryan is here i feel like i could rule the world i know i could be what i want to apartment all in in like a days off on a road less traveling before the back c found the inventor of products that sit on a lot of people's shelves there's some in my kitchen right now method soap ollie gum that my kids have every day well band aids and then your investor in a whole bunch more so you are here and you're kind of the magic man when it comes to reinventing consumer category so when we did a call before this we agreed to do two things i said i wanna know your playbook how do you do this how do you go into the category and figure out which product to select and how to disrupt it and you have just like forced that process or whatever you outlined to be and the other thing is we agree that we would each bring a couple of ideas of kinda half baked ideas of brands that we think an entrepreneur could go do and we're gonna kinda pitch them back and forth which are we didn't tell each other beforehand and so we'll see what what we came up with how's does that sound amazing that sounds great and that is way you kind of an introduction so thrilled to be here and i are way too kind thank you how big were some of these businesses just so we understand the the magnitude here they are they're both probably getting close to billion dollar brands now but would you go in and see like even ten million of soap or vitamins sitting in a warehouse that's what it always blows me away of like how many units we actually both are these products and that are sitting people homes today and i've been looking forward to this because i remember sam used to host this conference called hustle con and he would invite founders entrepreneurs come speak i didn't know your story at all i was sitting there in the crowd and i remember you got on stage and you talked about how you started method how you started ollie how you started well and you had all these little phrases you were like i walked through the aisle and i look for and i saw just a sea of same this and you had a picture of the soap aisle or the dish soap aisle it was like every single one was green and looked like you know green packaging and looked just like a a old school like my mom's cleaning product and then you had this like totally different shape of a bottle it was like you know blue or purple or whatever and it was and and it stood out and the i i remember the way you talked about it i really had never thought about how much thought goes into which category to go into how do you actually bring something fresh and new to the table and then how do you hustle to get it off the ground you had a great talk that day and so i know that was like whatever a decade ago but if we can get even close to that this will be a success from my perspective and you said it in passing just now but method is you know a probably a billion dollar brand now ollie gum is also ollie the vitamin company is is also probably half a billion to to a billion dollar brand and so that's pretty amazing and i i think like one of the other claims fame is target loves you don't they i feel like somebody told me this they go target loves that guy i i love target so it's to meet it's a mutual love affair you've liked launched brands with them like even from the start right you have like a kind of a unique relationship with them is that right i do i mean what we did back in of god two thousand t when we pitch this idea of designer commodities like no and it was at a time where no mass retail work with startups and so through a lot of hail mary passes and some some good luck we were able to be the first to kinda go in there and it's just it's been an amazing partnership ever since so can we do your your process before we brainstorm the ideas i wanna hear that the process you outlined and i took a couple notes so i can kinda prompt you but you basically had told me these four three or four things that you do when you go go in because i was like you've done this not once not twice but three times and i was like can i nerd it out with you a little bit yeah it as good to hear i'm really annoying to go to grocery store with to me it's like the super bowl of commerce so every time i'm in a mass retailer a grocery still her drugstore i'm always hunting so i came out of i have a really simple model and it was built off of this idea of what i learned in advertising which is how do you take a really deep consumer insight and translate to great creative execution time so my kinda court thesis as an entrepreneur is to look for these you know like you said these kinda white spaces where there's a c of same mess and it just kinda smells right to go in and do different and what i do is i look for a cultural shift or a big macro trend that that that category is missed and then in between that and where the category is as the business opportunity so in the case of method there was like two big culture shifts i found one was this idea of lifestyle of the home you know the this is back in two thousand two you you know you look at a dish soap more than you use it but nobody thought about these products as part of like the emotional connection to your home and you know making decorative basically looking good on your sink so like i keep my method soap next to my my faucet so just like looking good when it's on my counter exactly which is because you look at it more than you actually use it so it's it's a pretty meaningful part of the experience of buying it this soap at that time did you see what what else did you see where you're like oh that's new that's new but and then you you applied that to dish so what what else were people doing that you where you noticed the shift before you did it was really in personal care and so a lot of like i'm i always say like a bit of a thief too like i don't steal from our competition but i'd try to steal from as far away as possible so method there's two areas i still i stole from personal care so if you looked at the colors the fragrances compared to like how home care which was these like really toxic cleaners at the time so i brought a lot of that personal care approach over to home care and i also stole from the house wears i would say like i go to a department store i look at the beauty aisle and then i would look at the house wears aisle up top and so we still like all these beautiful base shapes and so we wanted these things to look like little objects of desire you know sitting in your countertop okay so the first thing you said was you look for a cultural shift that's happening that a category has missed so it's happening and it's maybe happening elsewhere because what do they say about the the the future the future is here it's just not evenly distributed so or love started to happen but maybe it hasn't hit in in the home care aisle yet or hasn't in only i gotta steal that from you that's great it says on an original that's bunch of vcs like to say that one alright so so that's the first thing you do and are you looking for a new category or you looking for a preexisting existing big category what do what do you like to do so like some people would say oh that's already done it's already saturated i need to go find something that doesn't exist yet and they're making bets on what doesn't exist and seems like what you did was you went into things that already existed and you weren't scared of the saturation or that it's already been done for fifty years no that's right i i think it's much easier to make money by creating an iteration off something already exist because then you'd don't have to drive all the consumer education to educate and explain something that's wildly new and i was living in the in london the nineties i was super inspired by richard branson as as many entrepreneurs are but what i liked about he he had a model and i think that's wouldn't inspired me to create a model his model is an entertainment model right so you're go in these really un industries like airlines and would apply his entertainment model that he really understood well and so i was always inspired by this idea and i looked at you know if you looked at any successful serial entrepreneur they typically had a model but what i also love about richard did is he went into like really well established categories that were easy to understand and just put his twist on it and so that very much became a lot of the way i thought about how i would approach entrepreneurship and then you talked about being a thief can you can you give a couple examples there so you said i go to a big category i walked through the aisle i look for the cf of saying this i look for a culture shift oh sorry you told me one other thing that was great you go you said something you go have they made it unnecessarily over over overly complicated and you go i think they're hiding something there's an insecurity there if they've made this product category feel over complicated and that they take themselves and and another one was taking themselves too seriously can you talk about those two attributes also yeah so i think edits each have a category is taking themselves too serious as you said they're they're probably hiding something right there's like an insecurity there and so a lot of my model too is going into these categories that are unnecessary complicated can i really simplify it back make it easy for the consumer and also i love categories that take themselves way too serious and so i love to bring almost like an inner child approach into the categories that are create so if you look at method it's it's kind of like what a kid would use to clean the kitchen if you looked at ollie like i got adults to take gummy vitamins you know in masses that didn't happen before with well i got adults to wear you know bandages with patterns and colors on it versus just the the nude ones that are supposed to hide away of your skin but never really do and you know what i i try to do with that the idea of a culture shift so if you look if you look at method was both this idea of of the home but also at the time you know you asked the poll when you clean is poised to make your home healthier so there was this other big macro trend of health and wellness sustainability but to your point you know it was showing up some categories but it was yet to show up here so it's really connecting the dots on those trends and bringing into new spaces that i i find is it's kinda core to my model i saw that you you said that one of your favorite ways to come up with ideas is to travel abroad we had this guy named kevin ryan on the podcast kevin has founded the thing called mongodb db which is like a thirty billion dollar software business but very interestingly he are he also started guilt which is you know gil group the the women's clothing thing and he was like i got the idea for gil when i went to france and i think i saw this thing called the v i think a i think it was called where it was basically like flash sales for clothing and so he would he talk about that as well of going abroad when you go abroad and you like travel do you like are you are you going on trips just find ideas yeah totally it's a i i think by far for me it's where i get my best ideas for a couple reasons one i just think better when i'm in motion so you know walking retail with a cup of coffee in your hand there's ideas flow better than ever sitting at a desk two is we do these like trend trips where we also take designers with us and store our goal is not only to spot ideas but translate immediately into a design idea that we can break back but also when you're you're in a you know a foreign country your jet lagged which means nobody's bothering you i think you see when you're with your jet lagged to you look at things a little bit more fuzz here which could be a good good thing but also just opens up to your pathways where you're you're walking retail where everything is for and you don't understand the language and for b like trying to connect the dots between seeing what somebody's doing in one category could we apply that to another space it's so much easier to do when you're out of your home market so what's an example so where would you go and what's an example of maybe an idea you had while you're were on one of these trend trips that turned into like a a success with one of your brands yeah i mean so i think one of my most favorite wise and this was like twenty years ago i so this was before collaborations became such you know mainstream part of building any brand but we got ole kylie who is really known for very expensive handbags and patterns to do a collaboration with us at target which as far as i know is the first ever designer collaboration and somebody who is known for a very expensive items being able bring those patterns into a product that's sold for three dollars and was the first time of the target ever did designer collaboration like at that price point so that was out of london was a was a huge success there was a building we saw in japan that we absolutely love the way with skin we turned that into a hand wash design the shape of the building or what do you mean yeah it was like the texture of the building had this side it was in tokyo and just had this incredible kinda like payload texture on the outside of it and we'd turned that as inspiration into a bottle and you're saying that like really simply like oh we we saw the texture of a building in tokyo and then it turned it into a hand wash like that doesn't even like those dots seem really far apart can you describe your actual process so you you go to japan presumably right you're then gonna do what you just around with he said the murderer of the building that's like when you when you're like on drugs you're like can you feel this building wouldn't it be great if that was a bottle of soap okay so i try to design everything like an object because it's all about creating these like little objects of desire especially when you're doing it in a category like soap that you have to buy and you're trying to turn something that you want to buy so i look at everything kind of through this idea if it's an object so i looked at a building the building looks like an object and it was easy for me to think about like oh my god that pattern that shape that texture is amazing what if that little object was sitting on a shelf at a store versus in the ground as a building so it's like trying to look for those types of patterns or the original method bottle was this camping fuel bottle i found in norway and i just love the shoulders on that that that bottle this so we translated that into our first our first ever product because we couldn't afford a industrial hydra at that point so i had to find something we could just rip off hey everyone really quick i can already tell it this is an episode that you guys are gonna be taking a lot of notes on and that's kind of a pain in the butt to do while you're either watching our listening to this and so we actually made it really easy we made the entire episode in it into a downloadable pdf so you could actually download the transcript look at the notes and this way you could just sit back and enjoy the podcast right now and get the notes later so the link is in the description below click it if you want those notes not back to the episode you told me something that i loved you said my favorite question when i'm doing these trips is what if this but for that and you said something you go you know i'm trying to take one dot over here and then say what if that was connected to this dot over here and he said something cool you go the further apart those two things are the more powerful the potential idea like this it's not always gonna work but like if you just look at your competitors you say oh we could do that too that that's not very powerful idea but if you take something from a whole different country or industry or like different genre and you bring it to your genre all of a sudden you have something right by the way an example of the dish came mine i got a little kids in the most popular show right now on netflix is k pop demon hunters and they basically did like k pop music but then like kids cartoon american kids cartoons which like wasn't what people were doing for like you were doing coco mel like a baby singing american nursery rhymes and right now the most popular songs for like you know five to eight year olds half the lyrics are in korean but they love it and it worked and they you know they connected two different dots that seemed far apart but it created a pretty powerful idea when it works yeah and first of all you make me really miss being able to watch cartoons teams of my kids because they're all older now i love that show and it i think what you're describing is really it's about creating creative tension and the more two desperate disparate ideas are that come together the more creative tension so method was really the first to do eco chic so we brought together high design and deep sustainability those were really two opposing ideas but by bringing it together it create this this creative tension and also when you have creative tension you create a deeper experience that also drives much more loyalty and people stay within the brand so that that's exactly right so i try to look for the most two disparate ideas i could come together the other part that unpack is this idea of of of finding something that lives at intersection of familiar and novel so if it's too familiar right it lacks complete differentiation if it's too novel it's incredibly foreign and it becomes harder to get somebody to try it so i look for those those ideas that bring together exactly what you just said of this creative tension but there's enough familiarity in it you can jump into it but there's enough novelty to it that it makes it a new experience and there you know it's easy to say but it's hard to find that's the art form i think finding those intersections i'm not sure what percentage of well or method soap you would say was to just the fact that it was a different colored band aid or a different shaped bottle but if it's a high percentage it's sort of insane that's sort of that's kind of a that's kind of a hard you're like this it's almost like this seems too easy a little bit right the more i try to innovate the less successful i've been where i've moved more into that space of being too novel i think i failed more times so i being too novel than being too familiar like our lot we launched the most amazing laundry detergent years ago it was ten x concentrated so it was a size of a shampoo bottle for fifty loads of laundry but because we're so small this was an idea i got of japan too where i saw they had bigger of laundry detergent but they would use these almost like the x mouth wash where you squeeze it pre measures at but we turned it into you where just pump it a pre measured dose but it was so hard to get consumers to believe that something so small could be so effective because they've been trained forever that you know a giant jug of laundry detergent what you need to get your your clothes clean but yeah i've i've always usually over innovated when i failed and under innovated it's i i think i saw a quote with you in simon city with with his honest his podcast he said if it's hard it's probably wrong and then he said i know i a good idea when i can't believe others aren't doing it and i think that when a lot of entrepreneurs wanna grow their companies are started a new company i know if fall victims this all the time i somehow think that there's a correlation between the sounds controversial but there's a correlation between how hard i work or how hard something is and how much value a customer will get and or how valuable my business can get yeah there's a kinda golden rule and this came out of a lot of apparel and fashion which is if you change one thing like if you do you know one iteration off of the the core you have a higher probability success the second you change two or three things you're most likely gonna fail it's almost like an advertising we to say if you throw a consumer in egg they're gonna catch it if you throw them two or three eggs their chances are they're gonna drop it because you're throwing too much change at them too fast whether it's communication or a product but i also i think it's such a it's we live in such a surplus world right of like endless ideas and choices that i think it creates this pressure to really sometimes over innovate to be too different and to your point of like if it seems so obvious then i would always get tripped up of like well why still be done this before if it's this obvious to me that's a really good insight that's a really good insight about the to you know just change one thing do you think that that applies across software companies or internet companies or is that just commerce or or fashion like things that are more consumable and that i touch and feel and where i do applies everything whether you're launching i mean even if you're you know within a b business arguably you're just as distracted as a consumer as you are when you're you know i think i guess a real consumer and i don't know that world as well but i would imagine again just creating simple iterations off of a successful model is way more likely to to succeed than trying to create something radically new from scratch or when something radically new from scratch it started when me think about like in the social space that would you know my myspace friends it was really the third that got it right but it's just kinda simple iterations off of that first model i did a call the other day with an ai company that's raised a ton of money and they have this huge valuation this closer to basically a billion dollar valuation and they initially grew because in ai hey i is so hot there's so much attention that people were willing to try a bunch of things but now they're like hey how do we grow from here so they're were like hey really respect your growth ideas we wanted do a growth i like i don't know guys it's not really my you know like i don't if i can solve your problem but cool i'll jump on a call and we get on the call and they start telling me all about this all the stuff and i just kept asking them the same question and i was like cool so why would somebody choose to use you like why because most people today are using tool a you want them to switch the tool b and i was like awesome so like why is tool b better than tool a and then they were like oh it's way better like in all these other all these different ways i was like awesome so just like tell me the one that like is the biggest one that would immediately convince me and they were like well well there's not really like one and i was cool okay so let's say there's three just tell me one of them first they were so focused on we're better that they forgot to say we're different like how were you better and know and like they were trying to throw four eggs and i was like none of those eggs were very convincing and they all just cracked on me right and i wish they had just thrown me one egg that said listen for this type of person here's the problem with the tools that you're currently using and we can we do it this way instead and i say you know that would resonate that would be obviously the ideal scenario so i definitely think this applies to not just consumer products the i think that comes from is just pure ego i think a lot of entrepreneurs like their ego gets in the way and so they want the almost intentionally over complicated to show how special the product is therefore how special they are and the best entrepreneurs i've always met are the ones who take incredibly complex ideas and simplify it down and it that it's easy for consumers to get it for their teams to execute and i think that that that art form of simplification is the the biggest hack in entrepreneurship and yeah the number of pitches i sit through and like i'm like you're intentionally over complicating this to to to justify evaluation or justify your special i i think it is ego but there is something strange i think that like it's easy for you to think this because you've done it some many times but there is something strange or it's like wait so if i just change the color of the band aids it's gonna win and that's obviously you've done you you've done a lot more than that but like within my company i i run a within within within my company with my employees they'll be like we have to do with this this this or this i'm like but what if we just like don't do any of that and just make better ads or you know like you just like just do one thing for some reason that's hard to conceptualize that like just a minor change on one thing can create a significant amount of value because you think to yourself i have to work one billion dollars worth of work or put one billion dollars worth of effort in order to have a one billion dollar idea but it's oftentimes it's it's it's not the reality well can we do an example here with you talked a little bit about meth i wanna talk about aldi like maybe it's because i take it every day maybe my kids take so it's like very like in my life and you went into the vitamins category so let's imagine just take you back i don't know what year this was you walked to the vitamins category you're looking there and you see you know a a bunch of sort of nature made type of looking things you got maybe flint stone vitamins just still hanging on for deer life and you saw an opportunity i just wanna give you one prompt which is he said something on the pre call that was hilarious sam he goes i went into the aisle and i saw okay cool you know first thing i observed all of them around so i thought okay i guess we're gonna have a square packaging and i just thought that literally the funniest like the funniest way of like well i guess that's that then everybody's must be spare if everybody was quicker then we would have been around like it's as simple as and there's no focus groups there was no it was like yeah okay they're all they're all round so we have no choice but to be square that's awesome and the other thing i remember was vitamins used to be like a a game of inference so you would it would say you know whatever vitamin d but you don't know what vitamin does right you'd have to then know what is the purpose of vitamin d or what is the purpose of melatonin or what is the purpose of i don't know even whatever the thing put you to sleep but you guys just wrote sleep and he wrote like you know immunity right like you just wrote the benefit instead of the the feature and i was like oh that was also quite simple of a of a change or make can you talk about take us back you go you walk into that aisle or i don't know how it actually started but yeah so i we'd i'd sold method but i still involved and i i of all like i had for the first time i like i'm pretty optimistic happy by default person but for the first time in my i like i felt a little wireless because i was like i'm entrepreneur for new or and suddenly i i was did not feel like an entrepreneurial anymore i was working for somebody else and i was also doing a project for for target to create what we called made to matter in the and the goal was to get them to have credit for having all these natural brands and so we were looking for these brands connected with millennial moms we couldn't find any we couldn't find one for the vitamin category so i just went and literally walk the aisle and first thing i noticed was people stressing out trying to choose something that was healthy for them so since i think i was studying the aisle people assumed maybe i knew what i was doing and so like people who just randomly asked me like you do what magnesium for if did didn't work there it was yeah they were just like standing here spa at us just lost people in that aisle and it was a dog's breakfast it was really hard to shop the brands were super runs inspiring the packaging was terrible so that was the clue dig here and so the first thing i try to figure out i was like alright what is you know kinda going back what is that big cultural shift this category is missing and what i figured it out was it was really millennials view health and wellness as a lifestyle pursuit and the clue for me and kinda of what you said earlier of like you start see these trends of one area the the clue was really soul cycle in the way that soul cycle had had reposition fitness into something that i was almost spiritual but i love the branding of soul cycle the name the whole identity and so my inspiration inspirational a little like i what would the soul cycle of vitamins look like and if we reimagine a vitamin as a lifestyle product so then it's to your point it's like alright well it's gotta be a square pack and then i i always wanna design everything to have like a so again it it's really designed as a product not a package so i wanted to design it like a jar so something you would wanna leave out because if you left it out you most likely remember to keep taking it but also sell like it actually had like intrinsic value and then i realized okay well we have to put a giant cap on it so we might as well make the cap the logo so then the whole idea and this flowed really within a matter of probably days the idea that it would be a square jar with a white cap and that's what would make it iconic and then it just started quickly flowing from there of like well everybody else is selling like why sell bio why don't just sell beauty why sell melatonin why s cell sleep and do these really unique blends and again it was all the spirit of really making this thing easier to understand that almost you know again turning in in a vitamin is something you have to buy and it's something you want to buy in this little like object of desire today's episode brought to you by hubspot being a know it all used to be considered a bad thing but in business knowing it all it's everything because right now businesses are only using about twenty percent of their data unless you have hubspot that's where they take data that's buried in emails and call logs and meaning those they become insights that i help you grow your business because when you know more you grow more you see finn don't know it all isn't so bad after all visit hubspot dot com to learn more today we didn't talk about the hustle that it takes to make them happen because there's like the artist brain that you're talking about you're like so then i took the the roof of the japanese you know hut i was staying in and that became the lid and then i did this and i did that but now you just have a product idea at that point a box yeah but like you the cool exactly a beautiful box though they're getting wrong the best the best box just box people love this box so you but you know the all entrepreneurs they're they they're typically not like the best in the world at a single thing but they're like pretty damn good at a couple of unrelated so you know maybe there's better designers than you are pro product product designers than you but you also have the entrepreneurial hustle to be like i'm gonna go now stand outside of this natural grocery store and then pass out samples or i'm gonna go do a thing that's like i'm gonna keep showing up in some way that like other people would have given up five days ago but i was still here and that was the thing that gave me the break you know your top twenty percent in two different things rather than being top one percent or top point one percent in a single category i'm just assuming that is that true and are there any stories of the hustle that it took to get to get into the stores actually get the momentum yeah super true it is funny it's like i as an entrepreneur i think a lot about energy flow and when i'm working on something if it's giving me energy back that i know it's right to your earlier comment of if it's hard it's wrong that's a lot of the way and i'm working on a concept right now that i've literally been pushing water uphill it's been painful as far as trying but but last week it broke i'm like oh there it is now now it's flowing like i can't stop working on it right now because this energy giving it's flowing the narrative is like beautifully coming together each insights unlocking in the x but in that case like i had to push water uphill for like the last six months on this concept trying to get it to a place where suddenly like i can see see it now and then hopefully other people will see it but to your point of execution like at the end the day like ideas are are easy like executions is a hard part so with method i think that was where we had because we had you know we're out of hour to two guys in a dirty flat in san francisco with like zero no you know zero experience on how to make or sell anything and i think where that persistence really paid off is we had to sell it in so these you know local san francisco grocery stores where the manager made the decision so we would just show up at six am and like the you know we grumpy manager and you got you know quickly you've got literally three minutes like picture idea for this new premium cleaning cleaning brand and i realized a lot of ways selling was just really this transfer of emotion like i don't think he ever believe in the product that we're selling but you gotta get them to believe in you and in in some cases believe that you're gonna keep showing up until he that's yes the that persistence but it's it's really that emotion that energy that's contagious and is finding it first than what you're building that you love so then you could share that with other people and have the energy to keep going when things get hard which of course they will do you look at a company like a project like this is my art project and i'm gonna jump from thing to thing to thing do you acknowledge it like oh or are you more of a are you more operational i i both i i'm a project guy at heart i love the start middle and finish of creating something but also to build great companies the operating side of it is is so important the kinda of my kind of core philosophy of building companies is this idea of artisan operators so i wanna build companies that have incredible imagination creativity that can innovate but also run a really good predictable business with great supply chain finance controls in doing both like if you think about it there's so few companies in the world apple nike that do both really really well at scale and so i try to build teams and cultures that have this idea of being great artisan operators but i do you know at the heart of it i do love you know like i heard tim k who who's on my board say once he referred to yahoo as a project you know which he started as employee number six the ceo scaled it through an ipo and beyond and when he referred to yahoo as a project i thought that was pretty cool do you have like an open an open check from unilever or target and they're just like whatever you got going on get after it and come see us two or three years and we'll look at the traction and we'll just buy your company i wish if was that he but dell said great in his chair with a cat on his on his arm right i mean we've had a lot of success we've had a lot of failures as well it always like every every one of them is hard and and hard in their own way i do so i'm moving over i joined great craft and we're launching a new great craft consumer brands fun so i'm moving into the the vc space and kind of what you're talking about too it's i realize like my power of working with entrepreneurs is to to to help infuse them in energy because you know i i've upset in the shoes so many times to understand how hard it is and so i i love now not being the the quarterback on the field always during in the past is but actually being the coach on the sidelines and like coaching these these young founders and it's it's just a a thrill to do that now you told me something kind of amazing he said that you win on your trend trips let's say to tokyo or wherever you're going and you took some people from target with you during this kinda like brainstorming phase but did you you had this this system that was kinda like gonna wow them can you tell this story about how you you that four hour cycle that you had that would like wow them yeah i mean a lot of people you know trend trips are quite common within consumer are especially about retailers the problem is you come back with all these amazing photos and then your buried in your inbox and meetings you've missed and usually it goes nowhere so the process that we found work really well is we'd kick off every trench trip with like okay here are you know ground ourselves these are the big macro and then we'd hire somebody on the ground where for asia europe and we would go to all of like the most influential retail that was occurring in that market but everybody had almost like a scavenger hunt you had an assignment by the time we got to that pub at five o'clock to sit down for for a happy hour everybody had to have multiple ideas that they're excited about while being in the field and then we would talk about it we would pick a couple and then as we're going to dinner i would call it into our creative team who's sitting in san francisco where it's morning and then they would have all day to work on the brief that we just gave them they would send it at the end of their day we would wake up and then at breakfast we would present like what look like polished products ideas to target and so by tab on that plane to go home we actually had sold in new products that's like how south park makes an episode if you guys seen that where like matt and tray will like right all day and then they'll like send it to the korean editor editing team and then the next morning they like oh cool thanks and they're like around with i saw the podcast version of this sam so we we do a thing where whenever we have a guest on our like especially when we do them in person we will bring a gift and because i was just like oh you know like this person took time another day there did this like i want this to feel like a great experience like what makes a great experience when you when you have when you when you are with somebody i think given a gift is a nice thing right deb bartlett who's another podcast he he was on jimmy fallon the other day and jimmy was talking about how his his experience on the show he goes you guys did this incredible thing i did the podcast with you and when we got up and the episode was done somebody from your team came and handed me this book and it's a photo book a printed photos from the podcast that they were just doing like moments earlier and he was like i've never seen anything like this and this guy's been doing tv production with hollywood stars for for years but like the creating like going a little bit extra to create a wow and in that case it's speed of the turnaround similar to what you were saying with your the speed of the turnaround i'm sure a lot of people will come up with mock ups or product ideas two weeks later at a follow up meeting but the emotions gone and the and the wow factors gone at that point doing it in the twenty four hour cycle is is that little extra that entrepreneurial juice that like i think most people wouldn't wouldn't even think to go wouldn't they would think that's that's there's an invisible fence that you can't do that well living there state of make and also i love that line by steve jobs of i trust people just not in groups and so it allows you to keep really small team that's agile that isn't overthinking things and just living in that state of make and that's that's where magic and i'm i'm such a huge student of s snl and how starting it live their entire creator process any any of the former actors on it that's written in an auto i've listened to i like i think i know it by heart now of like what they do tuesday morning through but there is something so powerful about being in that data to make and now that we have between ai and digital tools work could build and make things in such real time i think it's even more powerful and it's also where you see real talent versus people who who don't know how to actually do anything they don't how to manage and so it's a place where like builders and dealers really thrive and managers kinda just get in the way i don't i don't i don't know if we should do it right now which maybe have a a part two but it would actually be awesome i never realized for like you know sean has an e com brand and for all the people who are in the in the more physical space it would be really fun to see how you use ai to id that that would be really interesting i've never thought about about you know folks making physical products being able or not being able to use it oh i'm i'm so bandwidth with right now like last night just i use it as a whole creative team and partner it's it's absolutely amazing what you can do now i wanna get to the brainstorm so we did that we did promise i basically said outline your method and then let's use the method try to come up with some ideas which i think is fun living in the state of make on the podcast too right because how many podcasts would actually try that okay so you just to outline your your process was find a big category ideally an already big category so you don't have to educate the consumer about something new they haven't thought about buying you wanna find a sea of same where everybody's kinda doing the same thing you wanna look if there's a cultural shift elsewhere that hasn't applied to this category ideally it's something that's overly complicated they're taking themselves too seriously then to come up with your idea you'd be a thief you find unrelated things you say what if we did that over here and you're trying to come up with a single stroke that cuts through the noise that might be your packaging or your your colors you're positioning whatever it might be this the square bottle when everybody else is round and then you got a house get the momentum going alright so i came up with a couple of hap i'm calling these half baked ideas i don't think i think one might be good but the others are are are pretty tough did you have a chance to come up with some and if so let's we'll go back and forth yes yep i got a couple okay i'm gonna pitch you one and then i want you to to you know give me the the the thumbs up the thumbs down feel free to be brutally harsh it makes for better content alright alright i think this this first idea i think is genuinely good the other ones i don't really have a lot of faith then but this one i generally believe it alright so i think about products that my mom takes that i'm gonna take because humans are not if like the world you know it feels like it's changing really fast but biologically we're not changing that fast right and so when i see my parents i'm seeing a future window into what i might look like or things that they prioritize i don't really think about today and my mom was just over at my house and one thing my mom takes religiously is fiber she drinks fiber every single day and i've you know i'm in a world where i hear about gut health and microbiome and fancy stuff but she's like i need to take this to poop okay so that's what i'm gonna do and i need to take this to poop you got that i'm like yeah that's simple enough and so then i looked i looked at the brands that she's using and i walk through the aisle so preparing for this podcast i went to the grocery store and i walked through and i see meta mu which to me sounds like a disease i see ben fiber which sounds like an obamacare you know spin off and i just thought the brand the leading brands in the fiber category i think are completely outdated but i do think that there's something familiar about fiber so like i get pitched a lot of products that i don't really know if they'll work or not but if somebody said hey this increase is the fiber in your diet i would personally have pretty high conviction that that's like good for me i just don't wanna take a grandma product right because that's not really that wouldn't i would feel unhealthy taking the product so i want a fiber brand that i feel like i'm in the same way when i take you know protein or amino acids or to pick something that's like yeah i'm at i'm trying to be peak performance right now and so i wanna reinvent the fiber category that's the point of view and i have an idea for how to do that which is to to get out of this kind of grandma product category and do a fresh take on fiber shark right where do where does that land with you well let's start with this space because it's if it's the wrong category then there's it's pointless to go any further i i think he found great white space like i agree fiber is a new protein as protein gets more and more saturated in the record you know we're we're seeing huge growth across all all areas of higher fiber if you the place i would look is if you walk costco and what fiber products are available there and you're right it's the legacy brands so nobody's really put a fresh spin on it you could do it like where would you steal from i would steal from juice bars of like that wellness appetite appeal like a green g like what does a green juice a modern green juice look like as a fiber product and then you can innovate on flavors around it and the other thing is it's a really great margin category right we i have this friend do you guys know what key exercises are for men i don't know how to do it you're supposed to like squeeze something in side but it's like so like women have women women anyone the few women who listen to this they know what that is but for men or of you listening parts for you yeah for for the men people apparently do key exercises so don't like premature ejaculate basically during sex i i think that's the main thing but they're but i have a i've got a buddy who who made a that's commitment it by the way well i've got yeah yeah i'm like you must you really need it and i have a friend who created a ke exercise app for men and he was like promoting this and i was like man i see why young or any man wants this that's great it sounds like doing great for the world but my honor costs too much i don't wanna be a an influencer or a promoter for this and i wonder if there's like a little bit with fiber where it's like i don't know if i wanna talk about like you know poop more so i did think about this and i have two two possible angles we either lean in or we sw out okay lean in here's the lean the lean in path is gonna be look poop is yeah poops poops poop it's kind of could be funny and so i actually pitch this to our friend who came on the podcast hudson min hush i said listen i got a product for you because i was this guy is so funny that like his ad creative would be like would perform better than anybody else's ad creative and it's almost like you know any celebrity h a product there's a little bit of sellout out nature and so it's almost funny to sell out for something that's like so like so clearly silly and in that way that it might actually work for him like he's gets a license to like promote the product because it's kind of a silly product so one i one way is to lean in and actually have a comedian who you kind of have as a face of the brand that actually yeah leans into the fun of it you could be the dude the dude wipes right well secured leaned into that to the use case alright so then there's the sw out path which was you're right maybe it's not about maybe it's not about maybe the framing is a little more on metabolism or digestion like you you may can you work can you use a different word because i don't know if anybody that metabolism yeah like cleaner system and i've never heard really of that many products that like talk about like this this improves your metabolism right and so you get away from the sort of like the the lower intestine area and you you sort of like you move up towards more like the stomach and and you get a little away from the gross stuff and you talk about metabolism so those are my two ideas i love it and i what i would do if i were you and i would then create two very different concepts around that so i would do like like like dude wipe pot approach that just un claims that that function and then your point then i would go to a really elevated almost like beauty like a approach and then what would you do would you test those in some way or you just look at it and feel which one feels right like what would you do once you come up with the two very disparate concepts so i i like to solve the work in the creative and so i'd take those two concepts i'd work with with a designer or a creative team really bring them to life and then first i'd be like what one am i most excited about back to that idea of energy like which one am i like personally excited i would share with friends and family because if they don't like it why would they anybody else and then if i was really torn i do consumer audition not for the consumer to like choose a versus b but just so i can hear feedback from consumers that i get a qualitative focus group to help kinda guide my decision of which direction i wanna go and then i would also put it in front of retailers i don't ask the buyers i think most people go into buyers with the attendant of like i'm going to sell to you i'm here to prove myself versus i'm here to improve myself when i sit down buyers i was trying to go in and improve and and really invite their feedback into the process that's interesting consumer audition i never heard that that that sounds good i like that that sounds way cooler than focus groups alright rookie what do you what do you got a pitch eric let's hear it so i would a pitch arguably what are the most important institutions in america and arguably one of the loss institutions of america and that is the american diner at one point these beautiful you know silver and it was really that you know the first third place before starbucks and in a world where more and more i think we'll see a backlash to ai of understanding what is real and what is not we're gonna want these places of human connection and just deep authenticity and there's also no better place than to really start your day so my pitch is i'm gonna go back to soul cycle again i would create the soul cycle of the diner it would only be open from morning through lunch so it's one shift so it's a really good economic model but when you walk into it it feels incredibly vibrant so i would do probably like the other thing would feel almost like a modern barn of like white b board with yellow accents i would have a stand grab and go juice bar coffee bar but the rest of the restaurant would be how a diner is set up where it's all stool bar seating but i would have it so it moves throughout you so the counter there's no separate tables the counter of kind of flows so you can get everybody around the counter for that communal but also so it's really efficient for the staff too to move through it and then when do you pop it at seven am like it's bop like it's got great great energy it's just a place you would wanna start every morning right with that level of options the feeding is kinda like the sushi bars where you where you where they wrap around like the the you know this conveyor belt sushi bars you're sort of stealing from that but applying that to the american diner yes there's that out i've forgot the name of it that parisian restaurant that where the entire restaurant is built like a counter but the counter kinda mean so you a full view of the kitchen and though it's very communal in and out you don't to seed anybody and it's a all also about creating this amazing energy so what i would wanna do is take on denny's and ihop hop with that model that's awesome i have a since we're in a create a brainstorm here i gotta what if for you i gotta i gotta how might we for you you know what i mean i feel like i need i feel like i need a hack sack or something creative with me here but okay so in mobile gaming i tried to make a a mobile game once and so before i even made the game i wouldn't and talk to a couple of guys who made really popular mobile games and i sat down and i showed them a prototype and they go oh dude you have a t problem and i was like i don't know if that's a std i don't know what you're talking about but i i don't want problem but i'm sure i'm absolutely certain i have one based on the way you just he was like disgusted with or you're like oh thanks like i worked really hard so like you know do i have too much or too little what's the which way do i go so he was basically saying the most important metric in a mobile game success is t t time to fund basically from the moment i click the button to open the app how long does it take for me to have some fun because i was like cool open the app registration screen sign up give me your email address how about your phone number would you like push notifications you like me to remind you it's like you haven't even tried the app yet right you're like like you're like what's my t was like never the fun funny ever that it was no fun and he was telling me like you know if you open up like mario is one of the the classic examples of this like if you start mario first level there's no tutorial or there's no nothing that like mario starts and a small goo starts walking towards you and the easiest enemy to and you jump on his head you get a satisfying like yeah i squash that bug and then the next thing you do is there's a brick above your head you jump up you punch it and you get a coin you jump in and punch the next one you think it's a good coin no a mushroom comes out you're like oh my god you want this and you go get it and you grow and so in the first fifteen seconds of mario you have learned all the controls you've defeated an enemy you've gotten money and you grew bigger and stronger it's like the greatest fit for seconds of your life so i have an idea for it because i went to a diner this weekend we're hold on can we use like a time time to fund like that's a new metric i'm gonna use for everything now whether you're like it ends like getting a restaurant airline my marriage like son it's time of fun is off right now exactly but it's like yeah removing all the friction to get to that experience time to fuck get front load a little bit of the fun right i'm not gonna get you all of it but can i get a piece of it here now because i need to you know hook you and so i thought i went to a diner this weekend and from the time we got there and were all excited to get there and and my kids wanted pancakes and all this good stuff to the time we actually had anything fun like any food or drink on the table was like twenty two minutes and i get it they were totally busy but i wonder if there's some way where right when you walk in there's something because right after the diner we went to costco and right when we walked in there was like a costco sample person and my kids got something and they were like hey what is this place we like this place because they instantly got like a cracker when they walked in and so i just wonder if with the diner you could do one thing which is like eliminate the way and bring that t down which is what we want we want low t i love that okay so what i think is like you know like dunkin and down and munch skins we do like a really great like gourmet cinnamon munch skin so when you walk in like it's almost like a sample you grab a munch skin as you walk in to go sit down so you get that first like little taste do they have a smell too because that would be nice doubles to get to get two senses you but you could do a smoothie shot nexus so it's a tray of smoothie shots and munch so so gives you that little and also takes the edge off your customers while they're waiting rise well so the wait time will never feels long two i love that culinary steals maybe okay one other steel we could do five guys they have the barrel of peanuts which i think is kinda what you're talking about you go in and there's just free peanuts you could scoop again i i love that who doesn't love that the sweet theater right my first business was a sushi restaurant and in a sushi ran a traditional sushi restaurant would you walk through the door the entire kitchen staff they don't turn to you but they hear the door chime go and they go you shake like the whole crap like the whole crew is like what's up it's basically like the japanese what's up and it it basically means like a customer is here like hey like pay attention or whatever or welcome i don't even know what your it means but like that's what they all say i think you could also like kind of if you talk about soul cycle i think there's a way to make the experience of the customer interesting when you walk in like i just wonder what ritual we could have when somebody walks through the door that would be welcoming and unique and interesting as well we're just such neat we're we're we're we're so neat we're we're knee falls like you know we're gonna talk about like aristotle on the philosophy philosophy of life and all this stuff it turns out you just gonna play a bunch of nuts at my face when i walk in to get a burger like gonna love a good high five yeah you just gotta say what's up in japanese said like i'm good i mean you can picture the playlist in this place right of like the best morning music and there's something of like they hit something and like a good morning good morning comes over as people walk as each time somebody walks in the door right i love that time i'm so fascinated with time to fund out i think about like vacations like going skiing time to fun could be really low who's sc to get to the sucks yeah but everything now i'm gonna measure in t well like you know you you arrive in hawaii and to give you the lay right when you get out the door right like a hotel check in process right so that normally you the fun is when you get to maybe your room in hawaii as soon as you get out the door lay blue drink fun instant dude yeah sean do you just have like a notepad of like all load like do you have a ranking of low pieces travel so it just you know what i mean creative the arrival there's my boyfriend i say there's nothing better than arrival drinks yeah like gets the best moment of a vacation would you ever get in to a non i mean you've done the same category forever would you ever get into a a restaurant business or something that that's not what you've done well i just tried building a retail business and was i i think what we built was amazing and i was super proud of it and it was working with the consumer it was just impossible to fund in this in this current capital cycle so what i tried to do is reinvent the american jewelry restore and my theory was i always wanna do retail record you know geek out on every expression from a playlist to the sense which we did and even the way you're greeted and i i'm a huge you know student of like danny meyer the way he thinks about it at each restaurant like fifteen seconds right to be greeted in even the service manual where does a salt and pepper go and how do you think every every detail through buddy he walk into a jewelry store i found it to be like the most intimidating experience like you never felt like he be along there you had to like ask for the world's smallest price tag to be turned over and then you have to give a reaction to something you thought was five thousand but it's actually fifty thousand in the insight there was women self purchasing is driving growth and fine jewelry but nobody was really creating a experience for them so we created this brand called cast we opened up three stores in the bay area and i wanted like you know willy won a pure imagination to play in a consumer's head when they walked in and and feel like a kid in a candy store again but again get being able to sign leases build out stores omni channel we had an incredible partnership with nordstrom who put capital in the business but it was so capital intensive that like a path to profitability and then raising capital this market was just incredibly incredibly difficult so that's where those when those situations you're like alright i'm sitting at the wrong tony hs would say sometimes you gotta move poker tables and just i'm at the wrong table and you know gold pricing was spiking diamond pricing was crashing you couldn't sign a lease in these a class because l should eat up so much of the these these leases so i realized like it was just back to like if it's hard it's wrong it was a work on until you were like alright it's it's it's dead i worked on it from launch two it's dead yeah three three to four years oh a lot a lot yeah now we were we worked we worked out hard at it it was a fun business like designing jewelry in our tea you know incredible culture our team easter ray was part of it and we're on the white you know wait lotus season two the cast was we're in our product we had a you know we had a profound mark in the industry in a very short amount of time but it just was a business that nobody wants to put capital into unfortunately and there's not great the easiest pitch at the moment like okay so how are you an ai company yeah i mean it's not like very appealing i mean you know he has like great phrases he had one on on this when he's telling about the jewelry shop he goes it was like a plain made of gold like i look like it was a great idea but it was like a plain made of gold you couldn't couldn't get lift off it couldn't get off the ground as stupid and in a how fancy it went down the runway like it just cannot not get air airborne and but if you look at it it's cast jewelry our store i mean i was super probably we built but it i picked i picked the wrong space to try to innovate in alright let's take a quick break because i gotta tell you story let me tell you the first time i tried to run payroll for my team i was using a traditional bank and you know the type it's got a jan interface it's built like a two thousand and two tax form and it was open only during business hours and i hit send in it froze they flagged the transaction they locked my account they put me on hold for forty five minutes and then they told me i gotta visit my local branch and that was the day i started looking for a new banking solution after asking a few founders what they were using i found out about mercury and so now my payroll is two clicks i can wire money i could pay invoices i can reimburse the team all from one clean dashboard that's why i use it for all of my company and so do two hundred thousand other startup founders and so if you're looking at to level up your banking head to mercury dot com and apply in minutes mercury is a financial technology company not a bank bank the services are provided through choice financial group call them man a and evolve bank trust members fdic do you wanna tell more of your horrible ideas or yeah okay i got i got another one here you think you think i had one bad idea my volume guy no your first one is a great idea i would invest thank you thank you alright so now here's it's about to fall off a cliff here okay so i walked through the grocery store looking for that sea of same this and honestly like you know shout out to the grocery store there's was there wasn't a whole lot of categories that i saw one that stood out to me i'm looking for everyday products i'm looking for repeat purchase i'm looking for everybody buys this but i'm looking for something where there's not a brand i don't have a favorite brand i don't have even like i don't even couldn't even tell you the name of four of the brands in the category that's kind of what i was looking for because so i'd like you like to introduce you to my company white label chicken llc and white label chicken llc is getting into the chicken game and what we're gonna do is we're gonna white label someone else's chicken so we're gonna take chicken from somebody else we're not gonna get into farming but we're gonna put our own brand on it because they're like sam what's your top three favorite chicken brands i don't know don't know eric you got a favorite chicken brand what's there about like packaged chicken packaged grocery you're gonna go by like breast meat or whatever it's like nine bucks for the the little mini tray yeah that's a real that's a weird inspiring name well we're not the front facing brand is not white label chicken it's a it's a working title and so we're white label chicken llc and so then i i don't even know the angle yet i all i knew was i can't believe there's no like shit like there's no oat leaf for chicken no what know what i mean there's there's no there's no i can't believe there's just not a fate like not like distinct chicken brands that stand for something and mean something like whether it's whether it's about the flavor or it's pre season whether it's about like this is man's chicken and like you're gonna get your protein from this meal like this is what we do we we give you a little extra i don't know what it is but i just kinda saw that white space and i wanted to open the floor to you gentlemen to help me kinda of workshop this point this is where it goes like familiar and novel so this is very familiar so how novelty it's interesting you're right as soon as it gets like put in a dinosaur shape and bread crumbs around it it becomes you know dino like right it becomes dino nuggets becomes incredibly well branded or it gets served at a restaurant as a a sandwich chick a but the the the chicken itself i mean there's fought like foster farms did a pretty good job of this on ke in out in california but it was really not the product it's just their advertising was so good right that could be did years ago okay so i think you gotta go back i would sell i would turn it into an origin story i wouldn't sell the chicken out would sell the farm and i would that sounds great this smart right this far sounds cool i wish you said that as if don draper wore hoodies yeah don't sell the chicken sell the farm maybe i might say that's to my wife later today in any context eric do you have like a pack of sig that you could light up right now because it's very if you took out a figure right now you would be the coolest man ever had my life put that line put your feet up smoke a sig and tell about sell the far not the chicken because the because we don't wanna think about the chicken because we murdered it right we wanna think that the chicken had a good life on this farm before it was killed right that's gonna make us feel good about the quality of the chicken it's gonna make us feel good about the chicken short life and sell i would build the whole brand around this heaven this heavenly farm for chickens what if we create instagram account we actually pour all our energy into the instagram account hotel cr aesthetic farm and it's like truman show it's just totally a set because again we're white label chicken llc so i'm starting with ina authenticity here but like i'm just thinking what if we what if you started with the the social are you just made everybody's favorite farm and then from there you're like of course if you're gonna buy chicken you'd buy it from your favorite farm dude i have a i've got a friend that exited a a multi billing dollar consumer brand and i was i yeah he so he's he's he's he you're his best friend but he's just yeah he might he he might use the way a word a acquaintance and and i use you know close friend yeah close friend yeah we're a little bit different but we he was like telling me this idea for his new business and presumably he's very smart because of his previous success but he was like do you know what free range means like free range chicken and i was like i guess that means they're they're running around a farm and he was like no the definition is like they've got like a cage the size of like five by five it was i i forget the exact definition but it was like shockingly small and he's working on this thing where he's putting r is it called r tags is that what what's called yes the is that it is who's putting them yes your in cows and in chickens and as they are scant so the whole farm has like the the technology to see how far away they're running and as they go to the kill you know the kill bin or wherever everything they gotta go to their their r thing is scanned and so a consumer can on his chickens this is the real thing that he's he already built you can see how like what radius they were running around but this is his sole premise is that people which it kind of that could maybe that that actually might be interesting but you could actually see it's just truly free range chicken or were they just like in a small pen where they're just in their own feces like you know like because there's like a a correlation between now how how like healthy the farm was and how they actually filed the rules yeah i think to be area too i always say the framework of like you gotta find the intersection of alt and nurses so the case of method you bought it for very narcissist reasons you love the fragrance you love the design of it but the alt it's good for me good for the planet brought you coming back and if you can deliver on both i think is real power which i do that in all of our brands so the case of our chicken farm here we need to sell the nurses that this is the most organic good for you great tasting chicken but the ultra on that you can feel good that just chicken while they had a short life it had a really good life and i think right it was a great six weeks yeah you know it's almost like you you you steal from children's books so you you you do the whole branding like it's a children's book of this magical farm and even like you make the farmers who work there kind of you know part of the overall like icon the brand and you make them heroes in it as well whole mcdonald had a farm it's called bingo chicken is down available sure old mcdonald's would be great old mcdonald's if that's available does anybody own that i because mcdonald's you'd have to be like old you know mcdonald's you just like do something weird with the spelling do you guys ever buy these eggs yeah all the time yes so like yeah they're in my fridge right out you this morning this is like what you're talking about of like the sea of saying or like the commodities that they made like look the bottom here medium brown egg is literally the name of the product it's like a transparent medical packaging like sterile packaging and you just see these eggs and then this vital farms thing on top because they literally draw like flowers and like you know hey or whatever on the thing i'm like oh farm good arm table i'm doing good and now that he says see a save i'm like oh i do this all the time like the other day i bought yogurt the other day because instead of greek yogurt this yogurt was icelandic right like i'm like i don't know like do know what that means but i'm in yeah yeah was like for some reason it's all greek and this is from iceland and do you have a theory on naming because like you've named your products extremely well yeah how what how do you come up with names so the holy grail of naming is one word for letters if you could do it that'll really really hard naming a brand is the most difficult part of a startup because everything is taken do you use like an agency do you just sit there and think it's all different i'm not good at naming but i'm good at spotting a name so method was adam is literally my cofounder founder we were literally brushing her teeth at the same time and he's like what about method i was like that's it lawyers like he never get get method it's like way too generic then i asked my lawyer while he wasn't working over so it's was like if if he's thought this name was really important to your success what would you do he's like hey i'd go for it like where's because lawyers never wanna be wrong but they don't need to be bright ollie came from i was working with allan die who was helping me who's great director at apple and we came up with ollie slate like ali for friendly i wanted i wanted the name with each case i come up with a jumping off word so per method i wanted to represent technique right so you're breathing the gym you use good technique to get forced because this was gonna clean without force so i was like we want something that represents a technique and he's like how about that like that's it with ollie everything in the category with pseudo science like oak syndrome or was very folks like nature's garden or bounty so i wanted a name that just sounded friendly so he came up with ollie slate and then we realized ollie would just we were able to get on its own so we didn't need a slate part of it you're like looking through the story and it's like insight insight insight and like you you you you make it you you have what i call the knowledge like the chris knowledge which is you think that this is you're like oh yeah i just did this and then i just did that like i don't think even tell us that and that was so interesting and what if we had an asked question we wouldn't have known that how many more of those you got because like you're were like well i just do this of course as one does you pick a jump off word and then you i was like oh i don't do anything like that i just but like you're you know someone's a master when they when they're fluid they're fluid with this and and and and it's incredibly clear when you describe the simplest things that you are not jumping off word for for willy so for willy was i wanted something about health care and so we actually came up with night and nightingale so night and nightingale because of the idea of like night and nightingale is like she is like this icon and it's all about karen for you and anthony duty and parsons spade came up with well and i was like you're like it done most every time i've never every name like cast we came up with for jewelry for again each time we i i saw the name it was like no debate it was like that is it and then it's all hands on how do we secure this name amazing do you have a another idea one of my favorite foods and i watched my kids go through it is packaged cheese so the craft singles mozzarella sticks i have never seen anybody do anything really so there's this big delta in cheese too you go to like the cheese counter right it is it's art for and we have this place we live on schultz island summer and this guy andrew runs the cheese wagon it's literally a wagon and my wife and i will go there every few days just because we'll sit there and taste the cheese with ab and it's like wine he just romance it so the the gap is if you look at all the categories that have have taken a more digital approach and then you go shop package cheese it's the same thing as cheddar like mozzarella it has not changed and i love my favorite packaging form in the world out are the most baby bells right in the wax like little pac bands that you split apart well so my idea is i wanna create a line of gourmet cheeses in the in the you know in the prep package in those baby bell wax forms but do really like take what they've started and go super gourmet with different flavor profiles in it and make that that packaging form i'll make it slightly bigger too different colors but i would i would build a whole line of gourmet cheeses around it and if anybody wants to do this please reach out to me sorry this is this for you say it's four kids or it's not for kids you're just saying i wanna do the gourmet cheeses but in the in the in the this new packaging and in that aisle yes like my my boys love the baby bills i wanna do that for adults again taking something that's a kid product but then elevate it as an adult product and there's just something cell phone about opening up that little wax it's very sad member we're a man child where does this land with you dude i had three of these so i do what i do what i call redneck fitness food so last night i just have three baby bells for dinner and i wrapped it in salami it just piled them in my mouth i call it balls of fun ed so one's really fast how telling this name too yeah what's that you sam's mouth surprised i don't know we're still topic i'd not sure you but you could even square a little mustard at this at this ball but yeah this is great i love those cheeses and i think they only make good and like the normal one what is it about that packaging does it actually because it's kinda softer inside right is it is that because of the type of cheese or does does the packaging do that i think it's already like that but you could just like grab it so it's like i'll grab them and i'll literally put it by pocket and like as i'm walking grab and go cheese okay gotcha and it's a single serve it's a single serve so like it's like super easy but yeah it's definitely a convenience thing not necessarily it's better tasting thing but i think there's something very primal to you about opening it so it feels natural relieving back the wax like opening an orange like you feel like a little monkey just getting into your right snack and so it's in a time to fun on that is three seconds yeah it's oddly it's oddly satisfying whenever peel back that wax and then when you peel back the wax on if you ever don't ever done it the two things open up and like the top part does it fall off the bottom part of the wrapper yeah you ever seen moisture have you yeah it's like a oyster have you guys seen those new coke bottles where you twist the cap off and then it peels back if the cat like stays on the model oh no haven't seen that oh man it's kinda like that i love that just is as he can fully recycle the bottle then because the caps usually don't get recycled now we might be breaking the laws of physics here but one of the most satisfying food experiences in the world is cracking the the top of a coke can the sound and the like literally it's like like an iconic sound of of the tab i wonder if there's a way to like create some sound or satisfying crack here but but i i think i'm i think i'm making a good idea bad here you've over innovated it yeah one one yeah it just the blue bell or baby bell whatever it's called but fancy cheese i also had exactly idea so great minds think like i also had a cheese idea yours is better but i'm just gonna say mine out loud in case there's something you wanna steal out of the car of this idea that i'm about to give you this is like a dying idea ahead but so my mother came over and she's great but you know she's got mother a little bit where she's like well i know the answers to the test and you're still trying to figure out the answer to that so like let me just tell you what to do and so for example it would be like oh he'll love this rice kids love rice she'll say these generic things like kids love rice so your kid's gonna love rice like no he doesn't eat rice doesn't like rice love blah blah or you know milk like one of our kids wasn't really drinking like milk from like a milk like a gallon of milk or whatever and she was like all kids love milk your kids gonna love milk and we're like you can try be my guest but like this kid doesn't drink milk and i was waiting for like the satisfaction of being right and then five minutes later she's like oh he loves it and i'm like no way and i go over and basically what she did was she would pour the milk into the top of the cap and give him like he got to have a tiny mini cup and he was into that and so was like oh like taking shots of milk like a like a you know like a spring break basically and i couldn't believe it and she was like change of presentation and so now this phrase change of presentation become a big deal so anytime there's a food my kid doesn't eat it's not a question do they like it or not it's what is the change of presentation we need to do to get them to eat so for example bread was another didn't want bread my wife takes a cookie cutter like a like the star shape or whatever and he gets to stamp out the bread and now he likes that and we're like oh my god change of presentation so like she's you know and now your mother law's is the man of the house was i think she already was and i just denial for a period of time but i too have now bent the knee like the tech ceos like sucking up the donald trump basically like that's me an now i'm like mother love mother can we get more gold in this room love it you know so so basically my cheese idea is basically instead of just slices of cheese you include a stamp and the stamp is like shapes that they can stamp the cheese into so they can play like play doh stealing from play doh and you basically get the play doh shape cutters but you apply it to cheese and you sell it together as a little pack basically i think my kids would love that i don't know how scalable that is got it yeah what's the problem i don't know how you're gonna mother did that come through was the audio bid on that when slash when we sell ten million versions of this i i don't know if we i could afford the operations that's i agree with the insight of change your presentation i don't know if i agree with the application of it there trying to get into a toy so like giving them a little thing that they can do to the food i like that idea that i like as well again it's like it could be a durable it's your point of like how do you make it a consumable so it's an annuity so people keep buying it see he's in the cheese but he's a competitor now so he doesn't like this idea because he's like all about his like artisan cheese this is i'm gonna do this baby bella cow he's his cheese comes with a little stamp he's like yeah the haters said it wasn't scalable to charles just pitched craft singles that come with a cookie cutter exactly i think he complicated it i the story is key to the understanding of the idea in fact the label is gonna include the entire story that i said in your verbatim and size eight font and instead of buying the chicken to support the chicken you know or like the good a good farm we're gonna be supporting sean to stick it to his mother yeah what happened to the safe space where there's no bad ideas you're like watch what i do if you bring a weak wimp idea in here let me give it a wed so i wanna leave you with a big picture question you've you've obviously done it you've proven yourself so that's good you've made money doing what you you you're financially you know secure free eating and all that what is like the end of the story for you like what are you trying to dude do you have somebody in mind like i hero you're like i wanna be like them do you think like thirty years down the road like i wanna have done x y z do you not think about that at all like how do you think about your life because like you could just keep doing this sounds fun is there a big picture yeah no i'm a i'm a planner so there definitely is a big a big picture for me i at the heart of it i love building and creating and if i wasn't doing that i think i'd be really miserable but what i don't wanna do anymore is you know be a ceo were you the ceo before i've been ceo of my previous companies yes and i love like being in it with a team and building it every day in an trenches with your team and helping steer the ship like i i absolutely love that as well but i'm at the stage of my career that you know the pressures are raising capital and being able to answer to that capital i wanna be able to work you know going back to projects work across more things so i'm splitting my time between you know continue to inc innovate new ideas but then i hire ceo and team and i work alongside that team and then moving over to join great craft to to launch this consumer brands fund really now being able to you know be more of the coach and and help work with entrepreneurs we we've had a bunch of people come on here with that the the the the dream the have your cake can eat to it's like i wanna be part of the idea and like the start but then like the grind for ten years like i really want an operator to do that part and some people have come on here and told us how they do that well so other people have been like i don't know how to i can't inc my idea and my energy into somebody else that's a really hard transfer to do do you have like a talent threat like how do you how do you get the ceo to then like run your thing do you have a strategy around that or is it it's hard and this what been i've been doing more of an incubator model my last few startups where i've not been the ceo running it but actually you know create the team so really what i'd love doing is like create the concept to pull together the team and the capital but the part of that that has been really hard is actually finding those leaders and you know the reality of being an entrepreneur it's iterative right you try something it work it works or doesn't work you're you're constantly iterating your way to success in those early years which means you're running up against roadblocks and things that worked and what didn't work and what i found is there's a certain personality that can live in that uncertainty of a startup up and stay committed to it so when something doesn't work instead of panicking they quickly start taking the clues figuring out making adjustments keeping the team confident bringing along with them that that's the art of entrepreneurship that is really really tough to hire for because the ones who are good at it wanna create they probably have their own idea that they're working on and what i found is i would hire very accomplished people but their entire life had been fairly linear in their careers where like i you know i get good grades it unlocks getting in this good college i do really well at school it unlocks getting the right into like each thing unlocks the next step for them and that's always work because they're incredibly smart talented of people but that's not the reality in entrepreneurship and so what i saw a pattern like i would hire these incredibly accomplished ceos and then as soon as things would start going wrong which they always do in a startup they would really struggle to the mental games of that that's the hardest part of this model you're amazing you know every once a while we have episodes that we're like we have to have a part two and sometimes a part three and a part four and hopefully that will be the case with you no let's do it i would love to i feel the same i'm walking away a buddy morning here with more energy so i really appreciate this been such a fun conversation and if anybody loves our ideas out there and wants to pursue it please please reach out where eric ryan dot com and then there's like a contact button is that right yeah you go to jobs dot dot com gop o b s t o p dot com it's for this idea that i try to build these ever lasting go stopper and brands that continue to be able to refresh themselves stay on trend and like you try to bake that into the into the center when you create new oh you're a ridiculous human being you're awesome like you have like silly crazy ideas and yet you've been able to make potentially hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars off i mean that's the dream so thank you so much you're the best you guys were great thanks for a a lovely conversation i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a road less travel never looking back 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

i went broke many many times but the down swings are probably the most important part and typically would like a breakdown things are going badly that's an opportunity for a breakthrough i feel like i could rule to where to know i could be what i want to and put all in and like a day he's on on a role less travel we got daniel ne he's here i've been watching this scott on tv feels like half my life he is a poker player who i think you've had over fifty million in tournament caches so turn tournament winning you're known for your ability to read people for your longevity in the game for your personality and how you've built the brand around the game of poker think you've won something like is it five six realtors poker bracelets well we're at seven but it should be a lot more if i'm being honest it it he's humble to boot so area is dan grande listen people are gonna be like why are you guys having a poker player on a business podcast and the reason is hey i'm selfish i play poker my whole life and i wanted to talk to this guy and that's what the podcast is but b there are so many parallels between poker and business whether it's you know thinking about it in terms of investing around bank management around pot odds and things like there's all these frameworks that i've used for poker and business but also the the people side the human side the reading people side and you were one of the best at that so thanks for coming on dude absolutely you're absolutely right with your description too it because there's just so many things about poker poker you know you have to register as a small business anyway right you're just self employed and you know you know getting out of bed to go and work is up to you but you still have to you know make smart cis decisions invest and look for plus e situations so sam don't know if you if you followed poker like back in the day the there was sort of the famous players yeah and i watched it on tv with phil iv and daniel watson and daniel so many times and they look like a lot of his like doyle brunch and they look like cowboys right and they had these per big personalities and it was like superheroes who would come to a table and one guy was just like the stone cold you can't read him another guy was the talker another guy he just was you know had no fear gene in his body he could just risk at all and that that was the sort of persona of like these charismatic like personality per players and then if you fast forward now it's like hoodie on sunglasses on sc kid who's doing math and basically like is is is in many ways like it's a it's a numbers game and versus like the way that poker used to have this sort of guns sling mentality daniel is that accurate how i described it pretty much i mean you know the difference between and i think this is true with chess and other games too the difference scene like like bobby fisher was asked you know he's like well who's the greatest chess player all time right and he's like it's not fair you can't make this like the players in nineteen o five right brilliant people they didn't have access to the tools that they have now so with or these kids morph back in my day people had to figure it out on their own doyle b before he had computers he would run simulations by literally getting a deck of cards a piece of paper and a pencil he would take an ace a king against a pair force run out the board and say okay ace king one and he would do it like hundred thousand times right now obviously the click of a button you know you have this data available to you so it was a different type of skill set and you're right a lot of the more modern players are much more deliberate they take a lot more time because they're actually doing for the most part they're doing calculations we didn't used to do it used to be like this i'd look at sam and i'm like yeah sam's full of it he didn't have it i call right that's the equation however now people are doing what's called this might be a little bit above your audiences love understanding but counting nominations i'm just saying because it's very even for most broker players they don't understand like comb matrix okay so for example you think your opponent has ace king how many ace kings are possible right that's a difficult question for somebody doesn't play poker right with there's four aces and there's four kings right so that's sixteen k so what you're doing in your head or what these people are doing is they're counting not just ace king as one but sixteen and then using other effects to decide like you know the pod odds what they have it like i said it's kinda complex and that probably shouldn't go down to it's sort of like why like i like this idea of like babe who shows up hungover and like a smoke a sick right before it goes on to like hit evan now it's just like all jack dudes who just hit home and like fell like who are technically perfect but i'm like i want the guy who ate steak and eggs in the morning and smokes the sale all he's like he's practicing the more updated version of that is absolutely john daly right tiger woods was asked one time like why do you practice so much right like why are you up at four am he's like if i was as talented as john daly i wouldn't have to because like john you know he's really because tiger woods is getting up at five am right four am to go golf and he sees john daly at the bar drinking smoke and whatever and they tee off it like nine right and if john dale goes out there in shoot sixty three you know i i agree with you sam it's kinda romantic frankly yeah just that old sw sw buckle who just shows up and and can still you know was was there a moment like that that hooked to you because you know i i think the first poker boom that i was a part of was the the chris money maker thing and i remember the final table with him and sammy far and far try you know this kind of experience player money maker was this amateur who kinda like wanna won a mini tournament that got him a ticket to the thing was like willy won he got a golden ticket and he got in and got all the way there and i just vividly remembered that was great tv was there a great tv moment or like a poker final table moment that for you you were like this is awesome i wanna be a part of this well yeah i'll answer your question but first you know the moment you talk about that's the sort of a waters moment in poker right because it was the first time where some amateur guy who named chris money maker like you can't make this up you know he put forty dollars in on an online site turned it into ten thousand our seat sits there and now he's against the g vet sammy vet you know far out with the cigarette and the suit and the whole old school vibe you know and he ends up winning so that for me my moment was a little further back i don't know if you're familiar with the movie rounder yeah of got love rounder round is great movie so obviously in that movie matt damon is watching a scene between johnny chan the master and eric s you know i go i used to watch those tapes as a teenager and i remember phil helm me back who's a buddy of mine who i liked the needle i remember watching him as a young you know in his twenties you know he he johnny chan won two years in a row and then he was heads up with phil hamilton phil one this young kid so inside was a little bit inspirational for me i'm sixteen i'm like i'm gonna be the next fat you know right that was a big moment for me i believe that was nineteen eighty nine did you by the way sean let me let me ask a question really quick have you ever heard daniel tell the story about scott win that's the one i was thinking of yeah i was actually there for that that was nineteen ninety eight when i had won my first bracelet and i was just coming up on the scene i was twenty three years old i believe and you know i was there at the final table and scott win was that guy you know he's having mic that's what he drank he's smoking a cigarette you know he's in the hand he looks at the guy beautiful mu beautiful the moly he's got the black and white the chains everything you know and then he just gives him the you know baby you call gonna be all over it baby that's right and then he drinks his beer and it was amazing psychological warfare i can dig into what happened there so he's up against the guy who's not a professional right highly stressful moment k you're playing for days fourteen hours a day five days in a row in the smoke filled room right and this guy scotty he's fighting you he's a pro and scott gives you the out he says if you puts this little idea and is said if you call baby it's gonna be all over no more pain no more suffering you get to go right so i really believe in kevin mc mcbride ended up saying the comment what he said we call that you know speech plays if you will that did it that was what got him to call and scott won you know scott win was the world champion that's exactly shown what conor mac mcgregor did to jose alto yeah yeah exactly yeah there's a sort of mind game to this whole thing and you're you're famous for reading people and i'm curious you know there's probably some natural element to it but it's a practice skill you've done it a bunch and an entrepreneurship in business there there's a big element of reading people you're doing a deal with somebody you're selling it's really important to understand what's going on in the head of the other person and understand where they're coming from and so i'm curious like if you gonna give us like a mini masterclass class on reading people what what comes to mind what are the what are the big big factors k we're gonna start from when you're born and you're a little baby in your mother's arms right you a little baby can look at their mother and get a sense when mama is happy or sad how do they do that right that's a natural human instinct and ability and we all have that we all born with that what happens is as we get older we trust it less and less right have have you ever met someone within three seconds there's something i don't like this guy right you have no reason there's not nothing this person did but something there was a clue something about it just felt off right when you're a poker player and you're and you're you're were trying to read people you trust your instincts in those spots i used to no joke i did this as a teenager when i started becoming professional i would go to the mall okay i would sit on a bench i'd creep i'd wear a sunglasses so peep didn't think i was a weirdo and i'd watch people walk by and i get a sense of who is this person were they picked on in high school or are they confident are they you know they you know insecure are they depressed are they happy you know was this got football player and i'd make up these stories in my head to try to get an idea so when i sit at a poker table everything you everything from what you're wearing to what you do where you're from that sort of is a puzzle where i'm put profiling i'm you know essentially profiling people which we all have the capacity to do and in business of course it's super important right a guy comes and tells you all you know we had a great first quarter it was unbelievable yeah we broke records what why are you telling me all this right here the way you are so blissful for probably because it's baloney you know what i mean because because you know you know so you have to like get a sense for and and often what you do with people is when they're lying you wanna like remember what they looked like when they're lying and look for that pattern again i'll give you a simple example with poker it was in europe world series europe i played with this guy on day one and he was chewing gum okay well i was watching and there was his hand where he was chewing gum chewing gum then he he bet his money was all in he stopped chewing wasn't chewing his was gum anymore i'm like i really wanna see his hand he turned it over he was bluff k so i bank that in my memory now on day five five four days later a big spot between me and him at the final table he bets all his chips right he's chewing away i throw the hand away k later he bets all his chips he's not chewing anymore i call he's bluff you know i'm able to to to knock them out of the tournament so absolutely the we all have that ability i think it's really observation you know noticing and looking for patterns because everyone's unique and different but there are some true there's just some tried and true you know examples like people are not looking you in the eye typically like they look away or they look down to the right because they're uncomfortable about you looking at them because they're doing something that they or they're saying something that they shouldn't be saying or they're lying to you can we actually invert that so let's just say that i i think you know you've been involved in owning an investing in handful of companies if i was trying to get to you to invest in my company and i wanted to successfully lie to you what would the checklist be that i would follow i think certainty for sure you know being but again this is the thing the best con artists are also the best liars right so they can they'll fool you right like i'd say an over exuberance of confidence though is problematic like if yours just too like oh my god this is the greatest thing that ended if you actually acknowledge both good and bad right do you like listen we're good we're in great shape however you know we got we really gotta work on this so sort of admitting some being humble almost like does that shows sam honesty like wow okay well this guy why would he tell me this bad thing you know if the other parts not true so if you were gonna lie to me about a tell me the truth about b that's doesn't look good for you and now a is far more believable to to so i would be i would be confident but self d deprecating a bit and admitting to flaws what else would i do well there's honesty there i think you know looking the person in the eye you know is a is a big one and i think also like never come off as desperate alright i read a ton i would say almost a book a week and the reason i read so much is because my philosophy towards reading is i wanna see what works for the winners that i love and what strategies they use and then i wanna see what mistakes did they all make where were the common flaws that they all had and i just wanna avoid that and so hubspot asked me to put together a list of the books that have changed my life so far in two thousand twenty five and i did that so i listed out seven books that made a meaningful difference in my life and i explained what the difference that they had on me or what actions i took because of the book and then also i listed out my very particular ways of reading because i'm pretty strategic about how i read and how i read so much and how i remember what i read and things like that and so i put this together in a very simple guide it's seven books that had a huge impact on my life and you can scan the qr code below if you wanna read it or there's a link guys know what to do there's a link in the description just go ahead and click it and you'll see the guy that i made so it's the seven books that had a massive change in my life this year so far and then also how i'm able to read so much so check it out below what's an example of of not being desperate and also of being desperate yeah i'd say okay so you know desperate people they they front load the pitch too much and the ask right like if you really wanna pitch somebody you will play the long game don't even make an ask you know just be like man i'm working on this really great project it's fantastic that then at the end of it don't even ask for anything don't even say and well ask him hopefully if you've so if you've pitched it well suddenly he's gonna ask you yeah right now how much better is it when he says like well so you guys taken money for investors like yeah we are but you know we're in round one it's not that we're we're fine like we got money but like you know listen we're always open to listen to people so now you've flipped it on them right right so instead of like you selling him he's like oh man i want in on that right that's like a really solid way to you know get people on board with your vision i think you mentioned that when you were on your come up you would you know you'd go them mall you sort of practice just your observational skills like like without distraction and actually just observe people try to really like understand how you know how they move how they think you know try to build up a a profile of them what were the other things you did to get good right like you don't just become who you became without doing something that was uncommon if you just did the common set of actions you would have had a common result you you must have done something uncommon to get you an uncommon result what else did you do on your come up that that was very helpful for you yeah on that note of of observation we'll go i don't know if you guys remember a show called heroes many years ago there was a character called si and all these people had like you know you know superhero type talents right and he would go in there and he'd like pull their brain out and he would now have this you know ability himself so when i started out quite young i would play with people and let's see he's i'd start to notice the same guys are winning right so i'm like okay this week i'm getting inside sam's head i'm gonna be like i'm gonna i'm gonna sit like him i'm gonna put my chips like him i'm gonna sort of try to become him for this week and understand exactly how he thinks okay now i take all the good i leave the bad now i move on to sean and i'm like okay let's be sean for this week let's really soak in what makes him successful why is he winning right to the idea is to create this super player where i take the best skills from all these different people look at what works and what doesn't and then formulate like you know a game plan that way so really for me who it was learning from those that are already successful and that's easier to do today than it's ever been like i'm gonna be streaming later today playing for eight hours you can watch me play for eight hours and see my whole cards and hear me explain my thought process right so without even risking any money at the poker table like we used to have to you could just watch and learn that way then you start to think outside the box just from observation so i had a friend a group friend that we have ultimately did start talking poker but early on it wasn't like that early on i was i wasn't gonna go up to me be like hey would you just tell me all your strategies thanks know cool so i the listeners are gonna hate here in this story again because i say ten thousand times but i previously owned a media company that i sold and it and it was wonderful and when i sold the company i sold it via it was during covid i sold it via a zoom and so it was a lot of phone calls and it was a lot of zoom you've talked a lot about negotiating and like being able to read someone but it's very physical is there a way that you could teach me how to be better to to read or to understand what someone's thinking via zoom or phone calls like can you hear in someone's voice or just see them on a camera or do you think you have to be in real life yeah well obviously you know you can with zoom but i think frankly let's say for example when it comes to business i think and this this is like this would be my go to i think the best way to get reads on people is when they are relaxed k when are they relaxed so not during a business call not to zoom everyone's buttoned up you know and like ready to talk how about when you guys go for dinner and drinks you know just like hey you know we should go we should go check out this restaurant have some drinks or whatever and then talk about things unrelated to business understand who these people are get a sense of who they are and sort of disarm them i do this in poker all the time right where i'll give you an example of what i do often the idea is i want the person to be relaxed and i'll get more from them so i'll be in a spot where my opponent you know they bet all their chips so it's decision on me instead of looking at them i look at the dealer and i go why did i do this to myself this this is what i always do and then i see him over there the corner of my eye i see him laughing right he's giggling so that means he's you know he thinks he has the best hand right so i'm looking at the dealer and saying yeah okay what you know what i said what if he just has only like ace jack and then i look at his face and he goes hey shit that is and i can beat that so all of a sudden didn't demeanor but the thing is is he's disarmed because i'm not looking at him right so the analogy there with business is you're still at that dinner meeting at those drinks whatever you're doing you're you're in reading mode then that is when you're gonna need the best reads on who this person is and how they think and there'll be especially with a little bit of alcohol they'll be probably a little looser with the lips you know and disarmed and that makes it much easier it's much more difficult when everyone's very very stiff you know to get authentic reads because it's practiced right like if you're taking a pitch from somebody they've probably done this pitch before so they're just sort of like going through the motions and that's not authentic that's not real you need to see the real and usually that happens away from those environments is there a certain body part because you're describing this example of like poker where you say was he got ace jack and you said he stop smiling but it's never that or it doesn't someone like me who doesn't know what i'm looking for it doesn't seem that obvious yeah well there's a myriad of examples the eyes are very very telling often like in poker and i otherwise but the other one too is and i this is why like i said i like to use this as a as a strategy as a smile if you look to ten smiles right now and i showed you ten and five are real and five are fake you'd be surprised how good you are telling which ones are fake and which ones are real right like a fake smile is one that's kind of like this a real smile you see more up stuff up here like that so that that's a you know c simple but like i said everybody's unique the eyes are probably the most telling body language too body language is a big one right are they when they're talking are they stiff are they like this or are they laid back in their chair or they're talking because there's someone's laid back in their chair they're not really afraid of you looking at them they're they're they're they're comfortable you know they're you can sense when someone's comfortable versus not and like i said there's no everyone's unique and individual but body posture your eyes you know smiles a lot of guys are looking at pulse now that's like a new thing so everyone's covering their necks of course with scarves and things like that sean have you have you guys ever heard this story so in nineteen ninety one the the election between i think it was ninety two the election in ninety two it was between george bush senior and it was bill clinton and bill clinton the the reputation were entirely no the reputation eventually are gonna be bill clinton is this charismatic young guy and who like woo people and then george bush senior was known as kind of a up tight not everyday type guy and there's this famous debate where a lot of theory a lot of like political folks say this is when george bush senior lost to this up and coming guy this young lady in the crowd was asking a question about a very everyday thing like i can't afford to groceries and while she's asking the question george bush senior very subtly he looked at his watch like that boom it's over and then the the analysts go look at now look at bill clinton he grabs the mic he walks closer and he goes what did you say your name was can you tell me about your background what do you do for work man i it's so hard to hear what you're going through i'm so sorry and and look you know a decade later they did this test where what they did was they got rid of the audio of the video and they just showed you the body language of the two people bush and brooklyn clinton and then this other test they oh you could only listen to the audio and what they found was the people who only watched the video and didn't hear the audio could predict exactly what happened to the outcome whereas the people who only listen to the audio that couldn't exactly tell what happened right and so the idea being is that body language and seeing with your eyes communicates significantly more than just audio and it was this amazing story where it was literally just this like you just looked at his watches like that and that was the that was the end of the election that's what a lot of people have folks say you guys ever heard that i remember that too and it makes so much sense it's so it's so on point right because like the difference there is you know like you said bill clinton got personal the body language mattered how often are you talking to somebody like today in our age like people have cell phones right but you're talking to someone and they're just going yeah u yeah right you do you feel like you're being listened to really you know like oh yeah you know you feel like you're being ignored you feel like you're being dismissed versus somebody puts their phone down and looks and he goes u and they you know they give you a head nod or whatever like that like that person is someone you're more likely to wanna engage with or feel respected by right so that like what the the example you gave is george bush in that moment people see that is that's disrespectful that's the same looking phone what did bill clinton do oh that was very empathetic what do you do were you from you know tell me about your story oh wow well like just look at those two different people right just on that alone like it's such a drastic difference right when when you how did you get into poker so what's the origin story for you and i'm curious if it just worked right away or you hit some rock bottoms early on and and it sort of shifted you yeah so i started as a teeny i was a pool player i was playing sn in canada we placed tucker and through that you know can you make some friends over there and they say we're gonna go play some poker okay so i don't know what that is i get a six pack of beer with bring my ten dollars that i got lose that real quick drink my beer and i'm watching for the most part and they're playing these crazy wildcard games follow the queen you know always these stupid games right but i'm watching and then we started to do that a little more regularly and i thought it was a luck right and then i started to like what's going on here how come the same two three guys just seem to always win and these guys always lose and that's what intrigued me because i've always been very competitive so i actually remember buying a really bad book back then and i was like was very elementary and i was like okay well but it helped you know because it was something to make me think about the game where this sophisticated way but you took me about a month or two until i started to you know figure things out but through that you know my origin story like i was building up money but i'm a teenager and i'm in reckless so you know you're you you got money you lose it the good news was i had people around me that started to see that like okay he's he's good at poker he's good for it he's an honorable guy so when i would go broke and lose all my money i could borrow money from people whether it was five hundred dollars or a thousand back then and that you know i went broke many many times but that's part of the learning experience i think i think like the the the relation to business is essentially this like if you have like very little to lose like you you have a very small company or whatever you could take shots right because whatever you know you lose you now once you become a big company i remember i spoke at kraft foods once they had me on as a at a corporate event and actually one of the people asked is like what would you do with craft mac and cheese it's been like our staple and i use the poker analogy and i say listen if i had a five hundred dollar bank that's that's i can replicate that like i can get that but once i have two million dollars i can't really risk the whole two million dollars to go back to five hundred because it's too much right so when i was broke i would take shots like this but once i've an established brand if you will once i've got the money i wouldn't mess with it too much because they wanted to change the recipe and the packaging and all that and i said you know listen what if it's working why why mess with it you know you're risk there's a risk there and i would say that when you're taking risk you take risk when you're on the low end of the tote pole that's exactly when you take them especially in your twenties you know whatever you take risk but once you've established you're you should be less you should be way more risk ave reverse so i play poker for a living but when it comes to investing and all that stuff i know nothing about it but i'm very risk ave i have a guy you know morgan stanley guy municipal bonds i don't even know what it is right but it's safe stuff like i don't i don't gamble needlessly at this point because i've already created the dream life that i want so what's the point right there was a guy i was in college and i used to i took one class my senior called to getting rich and it was probably i was a prem med kid so this was like i'd i've done all the hard physics biology or whatever this was like my blow off class turned out to be the most valuable class i took my entire college career they invited in this guy from a hedge fund or maybe venture capital fund so this vc comes in and he he's like okay cool like who here wants to start a business someday and so like i would say like seventy five percent of the kids raise their hand like i like the idea i'd like to own my own business and he goes awesome who here gonna start a business like you're you're all graduating seniors right so who's gonna start a business this may when you graduate and the seventy five percent of hands dropped and there was like two or three hands left and he goes what just happened he's like that is and he so he started started asking people he goes here you said you wanna start a business what why aren't you doing it now like what what's coming first oh i got this great job at you know mckenzie i got this job at at a bank goldman sachs wherever i got this internship you know so i'm gonna do that for a few years get some experience and then i'm gonna go do the business thing and he goes he said you guys have it backwards he goes when you're twenty one and twenty two years old and you can live off of a ton and you know you have no no mortgage you have no kids and you have no expectations he's like this is the time to just go broke repeatedly he goes you should just try so many businesses during this era don't wait till you're twenty eight to thirty two because that's when it's gonna feel a lot harder and a lot more costly to go start that business because you're gonna have a better salary you're gonna have a job you're gonna have a reputation you're not gonna wanna be a beginner in your thirties you should be a beginner in your twenties and literally that shifted the course of my life where i was like oh he's right i should just go i can i can afford to go broke several times now similar to poker like when you have a small bank crawl is when you wanna take the most risk and like you because you can recover and bounce back quickly you don't actually have that much to lose today's episode is brought to you by hubspot being a know at all used to be considered a bad thing but in business knowing it all it's everything because right now businesses are only using about twenty percent of their data unless you have hubspot that's where they take data that's buried in emails and call logs and meaning notes they become insights that i help you grow your business because when you know more you grow more you see ben don't know at all isn't so bad after all visit hubspot dot com to learn more today you said you started when you're in your teens and you started learning the game and you would go broke but then you would boss some money get back in it what happened from there we're very good people are very good at real of thinking of all the reasons why something's not gonna work and something's gonna fail so it's very easy to be like oh i wanna start this business but i don't know the money it's not good timing into this and it's like when i'm said and everything's good then i'll do it and i remember i did a of course years ago on sort of emotional intelligence and there's think called d do have right many people think you need to like have everything in order to be something right where the truth is it's like be it right you know do it and you'll have it like no just just live like you got like go for it if a little bit more like you said as for me like to so segue into your second question that's kinda what i did i went for you know i went to vegas and i remember the first time i went to vegas i like three thousand dollars twenty four hours later i did not but i had three more to ace in vegas with no money learning experience got kicked in the nuts went back home to toronto rebuild kept going back so it was a trial and error thing where i went from being the big fish in a small pond in toronto to the top pros you know and i remember a very distinct moment when that happened it was like four in the morning and i was playing seven handed seven people at the table and i i lost my money you know when i went to the bathroom wash my hands you know came out and they're all gone and i realized in that moment i was the sucker they were only playing because of me i was their e i was their expected value and i remembered every one of their faces with vengeance right and said i'm gonna get you one day one of them was a guy named hawaiian bill you know he'd wear those hawaiian shirts or whatever and hated him you know at the table because he was take he was playing aggressive know i was like boy he was just he knew how to beat me and then about a year or two later he sort became a little bit of a mentor of mine you know because i was like this guy knows what he's doing you he's been around the block and i'm gonna learn from him instead of you know being angry and you know i just eventually i had i had persistence you know i understood that like and i had many walks home from the casino to my motel where i wondered like what am i doing you know i'm not in school i'm not don't anywhere and this is it so good news is i'd wake up in the morning ready to go really alright today is today let's turn it around there said one of my favorite scenes is from from a movie is a poker movie i it's with mark w where he's talking to john goodman and do you guys know what scene i'm talking about where he's he basically says like i was up two million and i lost all my money and john goodman like look every idiot knows that when you're up two million we all know what to do you take one million and you buy a house and then you buy a really epic car and you put the rest in savings and that's your fortress of sol you can never mess that up and then you go and gamble with the rest but you never screw that one bit up and like tells us amazing story was there a point in your life or at air or rather what point in your life or what age were you were you like okay i have a base i have my fortress of sol things feel good how late into life were you or how early into life were you before you felt some security because it sounds like your line of work it's a lot of ups and downs was there ever like a okay i've i'm at a place of safety the first time it happened i was very wrong so i'll go there and then i'll tell you about when it actually happened nineteen ninety nine at a good year i you know i won the us poker championship ten the year because i'd like you know four hundred five hundred thousand i thought okay well you know we're set you know they're we're good we're never gonna go broke again then in the year two thousand i got complacent i was living the vegas life we're going to strip joints we're going to dinners i go play poker gambling you know not taking as seriously as i should and oh wow by the end of the year two thousand the money gone right and i was like it was good learning because i'm glad it happened because i watched many of my peers who went through this pattern of building up a bank blowing it all and then rebuilding it and part of that was they didn't have a foundation like actually a reason they didn't have a why right so they wake up in the morning they got what's their goal they gotta go make money right now they have money k well what's next so subconsciously they sell sabotage they would self sabotage lose all the money so they had a purpose again you know and i remember watching my peers do that and i said to myself i'm not gonna be that guy so i started to take things more seriously in the early two thousands and probably by my late twenties early thirties i'd say he's when i finally realized like i got figured it out i've got enough money you know we're for sure not going broke anymore even though we're playing higher stakes i'm much more careful than i was but that was a very important year for me to fail the way that i did in the year two thousand to really just bottom them out in a sense and then that's a decision point am i gonna just keep doing what they do and be fifty or sixty i mean i watched the guy no joe he built up he you know i used to play with him in small games where you know he had a thousand and two thousand he's playing the big game he's got two million dollars right and then i mean he he had two million saved or he was betting that game two million was the line he had two million total like that's what he would you know that's that's his bank rolls two million now he's up there playing the big game he's got a couple ladies with him he's doing blow he's drinking whatever three days later this guy i had two million in front of him he's comes up he's said hey man can i get five hundred because he's back to nothing right so he wants five hundred and i thought all that and i was wow man you had two million and you blew all that then there's a lot of crazy stories like that and i knew i was never gonna be that guy but it was a real wake up call right guys i looked up to in a sense and i'm like what are you doing man what's the biggest or what's the biggest amount that you saw someone have and it go to zero well nah i don't know the guy personally necessary but this famous story was archie kara it was the craft player a little bit of a cheat and all these kind of things at the bin horseshoe he went there and he's went in like a million dollars a day he like forty five million he had every five thousand dollar chip that the dominion horseshoe had he had him all in his safety deposit box hit forty five million lost it all and then this for a second time he was able to build up a bank to about seventeen or eighteen million and lost it all so this is a degenerate this is a degenerate right like his whole life revolves around this and this is where i i don't relate to people that are billionaires in a lot of ways that still are looking to make money i don't get it like i can't relate to it like you a billion dollars what do you care so much about a deal that just made you twenty million that's going to do nothing to change your life so that sort of obsession of a bigger yacht or matching up with my others i have friends that are billionaires errors and stuff like that and one of them actually wrote a book bill perkins because he doesn't right you know he if he wrote a book called die zero right which essentially he talks about how money is just a tool for you know to give you opportunities to have happiness and what is happiness is it's not a bigger yacht it's not a watch it's not a car it's experiences right so he talks about spend your spend your mouth think about that like if you think if you look back like in your last ten years of your life you bought a watch a while did did that give you happiness that was long lasting what about the trip you took with your boys when you went on a golfing trip and you went to like the south of france like that's something that's valuable to you now like you still have those memories and you know a life that's worthwhile so material objects material things i think that's where frankly the opposite it happens you'll it'll it'll do the instead of making you happy it'll make you vehemently unhappy if that's the only source of happiness that you find yeah it's it's also funny like if you it it's almost frustrating because it's like i keep going to this well just trying to scoop up some happiness and there's just none there right if you if if you keep trying the same strategy and it's not working it's actually not just but you didn't get happiness you actually get frustrated because the diminishing returns right you're getting diminishing returns k exactly like you get that and you take but i don't do kick i've never done cocaine but the more you do it you know you have that little s dopamine hit but the more you do it the more your body becomes government doesn't even have that same effect same thing i think with material objects you have six cars okay now i'm gonna buy the seventh car and this eighth car what now like you it's it's becomes like unimportant so what motivates you then because you're you know you're playing a game that's literally for money is chips on the table the goal is to get the chips from the other guy into your little pot and so you know why do you do you've made plenty of money and you know you don't have to keep playing so what is it for you well that's the hook really that's the trick i think the most the majority of or of larger percentage of successful people became successful doing what they're doing because they love what they're doing right most if you don't love what you're doing and you don't your chance of being successful are very slim so if you just say i wanna be rich and famous okay but you wanna do the work you'd like what do you like to do that gets you and if you're doing something because you think it's gonna get you money but you don't enjoy it you you don't have that passion for i always did i love come i love competing i would love to be an athlete but i'm like five nine and like a buck six i'm just there's no i'm too tall to be a jo and too short to be a basketball player right so i didn't have any talent in that regard but poker was a a battle of wits right and i love the game and when i started playing it i wasn't playing for money money was a tool i wanted to play in bigger games i wanted play with the best right so the only way to do that was money so money wasn't the end goal right ultimately un you know what money up provided me was and i always ask this whenever i would coach people like what is people say well what do you what's your dream i wanna make i wanna be rich okay but what's for what to do what like what what are you going to use it for because money itself is just a pile of notes or a number on your screen it doesn't do anything what do you want for and for me it was to provide myself the freedom to be able to do whatever i want you know in my thirties forties and fifties if i wanna travel if i wanna relax i wanna stay home not have to go to a day job and be my own boss so that's what i looked at as far as money goes like the truth is my bank account if it was ten x what it is now my life wouldn't change much at all like right you know maybe i'd have a plane but but bit funny is it a funny how the lime between d legitimacy and loving it like we could be we could describe very similar things like for example i i'm a little bit of a work alcoholic i i i love it but then my wife or someone else be like well well well you're just a degenerate like yeah i have a like you you're we're calling yeah like there's it's kind of interesting when you describe it in the way that you describe it i'm like cam wings awesome and then when i like think of it like oh you know larry the greek or whatever archie the greek he's he's a degenerate but couldn't he describe it as the same way i loved it yeah you know joel b had that famous quote once it was on a tv show where they asked them and he said you know we're all really just to degenerate gambler we just found something we could beat right yeah so he was you know a lot of the old school guys they gamble on everything you know poker players they didn't just play poker they play you know golf for big money bet on every game bet on everything you know some really famous bets from back in the day some really cool ones but they're always looking for action or e and a lot of it is because it gets their juices flowing you but i found like i said for me that's not the be all end all like it doesn't do it for me i'm not really a thrill secret in that way like people say oh you know you should bungee jump or jump out of a plane i'm like zero interest in that zero it's just dumb for me because it doesn't do what it does for other people like some of people go oh my god it was a thrill of a lifetime whatever i'm like for me i just look at and go oh you might die so what's the point you know like if i believe that it would give me that through you know i would you know maybe take it on but it's yeah i don't know it doesn't do it for me you mentioned loving the competition who's the best poker player you've ever sat down at the table with has there ever been anybody you sat down and you're like wow these guy's this guy's better than me yeah for sure several one of them is my good friend who i've been friends with for thirty years and he did what i didn't i'll tell you we we sort of split in terms of like our focus he's the best player poke player in the world as far as i'm concerned when he count all the games and that's phil ivy okay so phil iv and i took different paths there was a time where poker started to get popular on tv you know and there's all these opportunities and this and that phil didn't he was not about that he didn't like that he was nose to the grinds zone i'm gonna sit my leather ass in this chair and i'm gonna play for ten hours gonna make all the money and i had that one when i younger but then i saw these other opportunities to be you know sort of a name in the game and potentially get some money through sponsorships or different business side the business side of poker and i was more well suited to that than he was because i enjoyed it you know i when i was a very young kid i wanted to be an actor so being on camera speaking these types of things that was comfortable for me so i felt like i give was a position myself to do quite well that way and i did you know and he went a different path and you know did did well his way but the difference is once i start doing that my focus is now diverted right he's focused on one thing one thing only just this game of poker right i'm playing poker but i'm also doing this stuff too right so the intensity with which he plays at i can't reach right because i've got other things going on you know what i mean which is fine i don't regret it you know looking back but yeah i think that's part of why you know what made him so successful he was completely consumed by poker and nothing else so he was he's completely intensely focused on it what's his kinda like superpower so like if yours is the ability to sort of like get inside the mind of the other person and read them and try to try to be able to see through the cards what's he what's his super superpower he was a very like he was quiet he was a quiet assassin when he played but he's paying attention to everything he sees everything right so he'll sit in a game for cash and he'll see like fifteen twenty minutes in the wrong guys are winning k what does that mean the wrong guys are winning k well the wrong guys are winning means they're gonna play well because sometimes when people are winning they play well and when they're losing they're gonna go off for a big number so sometimes he'd go down there and he place a fifteen twenty minutes see there's nothing here and he'd leave he'd go home or other days he's there for four days without well you know leaving his chair because he sees that they're vulnerable right often in that environment it's all a bunch of sharks so let's place to all sharks right so every real shark is circling each other and then they see one shark is wounded oh one shark glass is tail we're gonna rip this shark apart right it's a doggy dog world in that sense and he was the king of that and still you know still still has that killer sign of intensity yeah i would say it's just his ability to like dial in and have like uber focus if you had to teach me someone who frankly i've never even been to a casino really how to like keep calm under pressure in these high stakes games you and phil i have you as by my coach we're gonna spend like three days in a hotel before we go down like preparing not not the actual like math or the cards you know what would you teach me what would be my checklist on how to be calm in a stressful situation yeah well first of all virtually impossible it's okay like in three day span because here's a thing it's an emotional thing right i mean i you know you can do like a medi retreat a yoga retreat learn to get zen you know looking to get centered all these types of things but in three days entering an environment you've never really experienced before dealing with that sort of stress that's a you thing right kin like we could like set you right with you know explaining like it's all part of that you know there's there's things you could probably do but over three days somebody that's completely new i would say that you wouldn't be an easy easy person to help in that regard just gonna have to go through it on your own now that's different for people that have played the game for years right you know i can you know get them to focus on the fundamentals of what they're doing right are you making good decisions k let's focus on that k let's not become victims to the idea they're like oh man i'm so unlucky that that does you know good there's no value being input focus not output focus being yeah focus on the journey right so in poker it's it's not like other things where if you make the right decision you make money that's not how poker works i can go all in with a pair of aces right and sam could say i'll i have a nine and a four i'm gonna go all in well that's a good situation for but sometimes i'm gonna lose but did i make a mistake no in the long run i'm gonna be okay so for you or for anybody else i would usually probably ask like what your expert life experience with other things right like so let's say you're somebody who plays the market okay i would maybe make an analogy like okay so sometimes you make good investments and then something completely uncontrollable happens and you know your investment goes to nothing doesn't make your decision bad right your decision was good right so focus on that instead of like woe is me go okay well or alternatively if you lost and it was you you made them you didn't see something you're like oh i missed this you know that was important okay so use that you know you you've used that mistake or that breakdown if you will to plug the hole you know and me better prepare the next time you see it poker like essentially like a big puzzle right where you start out and just make all these mistakes and now you start to like go okay i've got this one figured out and you continually plug leaks or you've seen them these situations so many times when you go aha i made this mistake before but i'm in the same situation now a very similar one this time i'm i'm gonna do the right thing what are the most common leaks because you've coached people and people ask you for advice for years one the most common leaks that like a smart competent player still has that kills them that's really hurting their their game so like you know they're they're not at that beginner level but they're sort of like you know intermediate and they are a smart person they have enough talent what leaks did they have i'd say a pretty common leak for ninety nine percent of poker players or gambler in general is when they're winning you know everything's great or whatever they don't play as long k they'll be like alright i'm gonna take my winning i'm gonna leave whereas when they're losing you know they're there for for days i'll give you a perfect example my friend evelyn who used to what my ex girlfriend we go and she win like every day almost you know it's like how how'd you do well i want a hundred i won two hundred i won three hundred then i look at like day nine and it says i lost thirty seven hundred k so you won nine out of ten days right but what's the difference you want a hundred two hundred three hundred so over those ten days because of your mental state when you were winning the situation was good and you should be pressing and pushing right that's when you like you know little lot of people just like i'm gonna i'm gonna just take my winning that's the opposite what a phil ivy you would as i was sort of describe and but when she was losing she wasn't there for i because i looked at the length of play the first six days one hour two hour three hour nothing more than a four hour session that one she lost thirty five hundred she was there for thirty one hours right so the biggest league people make is they chase losses in the short run right so like i have to get even today it's not to this game isn't today this game doesn't end today this game is all year all you know all all month all year you have to be able to say okay well you know because the thing is is when you're losing your mental state is going to be affected you know there's very few robotic minds that can play poker without having that affect them to some degree so you're better off playing in situations when your mental state is good you're winning versus when you're bad have you ever read the in game of tennis daniel no we talked about it on here and what you're describing is exactly that so it's this amazing book i don't play tennis but it's about how to play tennis but it's one of these books where it teaches you about life and the concept of the book is basically that you have two self self one is like the conscious critical mind where you like judge yourself like oh that was a bad hit that was a bad hand self too is like you don't think you feel your body and that when you like listen to your body and you don't judge yourself that's oftentimes when hot streak happen so i think about i don't know sean i forget the phrase but the call it in basketball where you're like oh street yeah yeah you're like you can't miss and people always say well don't pull them out like let them just go and that's that moment where you're listening to self too and you're just feeling it and what you described is exactly that golf too like i don't know if you guys golf but like when you golf most people when they go they have a swing thought something they're working on you know like i'll get to like it's always a swing thought but i remember the one time when my swing thought was this my swing thought was nothing from nothing is nothing which means nothing swing would literally go over the ball and in my head i'd sing this on nothing from nothing is nothing you know just let the body do it because when you're over technical over analyzing and all that kind of stuff it can actually be a detriment and that's not funny you're describing this you're this off saying the exact same thing that's so fascinating to me yes and it's drew and poker two like you're like you see a move and you're like oh i don't know but i i need to take this risk i mean i don't know it seems kinda crazy it might work what might not i mean instead of just being like and frankly and this is a secret weapon that i don't use too often but it really helps is alcohol okay i'm not i'm not i'm not saying you should drink and play but there was a guy named bill smith many years ago they said when he was sober he was the easiest weakest player in the game when he was drunk he was just a sloppy mess he could win but when he was a little buzz just a little drunk they said he was the best player in the world frank why would that be because with poker alcohol can lower your inhibition a little bit so you're gonna just all trust wrench again and what i know whenever i've done that i feel like it's almost like a superpower because it allows you to sort of get past the the fear and the rationalization for why you shouldn't take this risk and that's all going against what your instincts are saying is gonna work right so having that little bit of but enabled learning to to create that and trust that without alcohol is the ideal goal and that's what we all strive for and i've i've actually gotten a lot better at that just naturally just by just saying okay listen if you think this is probably right you know forget about all these other reasons it's not just do it man just do it i'm writing this book right now on on creativity and getting into creative flow and in the research i'm looking at i mean in writers and authors it's amazing these guys are drunk these guys are all drunk and they would wake up and they had this disciplined part which is wake up and immediately start riding but they're like yeah our best work was also when we added this other habit where we wake up and right before we start riding we do the whiskey part or you know we we we start drinking and and there's another analogy to this which is actually kind of an interesting thing about napping and so there's this there's this famous study that was called the paris sleep study and it's similar like you get in a state of mind where your inhibition is lower and you're basically you don't self sensor so we all have this sort of editor in her head like in a game of tennis like the guy the pump sitting on the the tower we all have that sort of who's calling balls in and out and when you say something is sensor if you're if you're doing a golf swing you start to think you start to censor what you're what you're doing and if you can get that sensors just shut up and trust yourself you actually do a lot better and so they did this thing in the pair sleep say they gave people a very complicated pattern like a math pattern like a number pattern and you know let's say ten percent of people solved it right away great you guys are done congratulations here's some chocolate you guys are out the rest of the people they basically let them work at it for something like an hour and they were all like stuck there like i can't see this pattern i don't know what the hell it is so they split the group into two rooms so like hey we're gonna take a quick break you know sort of twenty thirty minute break you guys go over here and hang out in the waiting room do whatever you want and they take the other group the other half and they put them in a in they said hey we'd like you to go ahead and take a nap so you're gonna lay down in a common environment you're gonna take a nap they took a nap for about twenty eighty five twenty six minutes and then when they woke up they all went back in the room and the group that had nap basically had the a three times higher rate of just solving the problem right when they got in and they there's a state that and there's all these great in you know edison used to nap and einstein used to nap and all these guys used to nap and they would they would famously nap with like a spoon in their hand because they didn't wanna to sleep for a long time they wanted to get into that state where you just start to fall asleep and then when you fall you drop the spoon it would clan and then you'd wake up and they would use that state which is called a hypo state where you actually are way more creative when you're you're in a you can get into a flow much more easily than if you were just in your normal pattern that's super fascinating yeah that's wow i mean i i'm i was my first thought was that just like obviously sleep in general for poker is the most important thing it's like it's the it's if our mind is a computer it's the time we're it shuts down and it reboots and you know you downloads all the information so that you're ready to do it the next day i remember hearing that with some they did similar things where they they did some tests with people where they had them you know do this test morning night and then sleep and then next morning and you know next and that the the the results the next morning were always better than you know the previous night or whatever so i don't i i didn't know that napping could do that or this flow state or the state idea that sounds cool because i like i'm a big fan of naps you know go to europe and play you know the jet lagged thing sometimes i'd be at the table with my like a head down and i keep a hand out and you know that i could feel the dealer throw the car to my finger and if it's toy cup this is for the folks out there who have a business that does at least three million dollars a year in revenue because around this point that's when you're able to look up after being heads down for years building your company and you realize two things one you've done something great but you're still a long way from your final destination and two you look around and he realize i am all alone i've out run my peers which means you're now making ten million dollar decisions alone by yourself and that is when mediocrity can creep in my company hampton we solve this problem by getting a room of vetted peers of other entrepreneurs who are gonna hold you accountable call you out on your nonsense and help show you the way because the fact is is that there's only a tiny number of people in your town who know what you're going through and who have been there and they're hard to find the biggest risk is not failing you have a company in it's working you're gonna be fine but the biggest risk is waking up ten years from now and saying shit i barely grew in business and in life and for people like you who are ambitious wasted potential and regret is what we want to help you to avoid we have made so many of these groups and we have a thousand plus members and i know this stuff actually works it can change your life the change mind and i know it will change yours so check out join hampton dot com you you mentioned it at the beginning you said i went to a course or a seminar about emotional intelligence and that's not what i expected you to say that sounds like you know i don't know i thought you would talk about poker and math and stats and all that stuff that's pretty fascinating why did you go and what did you get out of that yeah it was in vegas i did it in two thousand thirteen my manager brian who's a like just a you know super healthy perfect wife three great kids like lawyer guy you know all buttoned up he did it right and we're playing golf and he said you know you should try this thing and i thought it's myself okay well i trust him right so he thinks it might have some value i'll say i'll go you know what's the world i'm always looking to learn and do different things it was nothing like i expected it to be this was no business seminar if you will this was a deep dive into what makes you tick where you decided certain things about yourself you know what works about you what doesn't work about you and it was a life changing experience in a lot of ways for me right i hated it in the first couple days but because i had faith and brian i'm like alright i'm a stick with it it was it's transformational in so many ways and really like you know some of the key tenets of what i learned there was just the difference between being a victim to circumstance and responsible completely for everything and everything you've ever and for where you are and all the decisions you make right you're not responsible for the weather you're not responsible for a car crash you know that then but you're responsible for your response to it right and the word responsible when you break it down is essentially response able so the difference between those that succeed and those that fail often or how they respond to things and as one story i remember that they told and true actually there were two mothers that had the same thing happened to them they had their child killed in a car accident horrifying experience right the first mother was grieving obviously you know expected she you know she drank she had other children she has husband been and you know she stayed in that depression six months a year later and lost her family right which is sad and you can you can look at that and you and empathize well we have of course right the other mother had the exact same thing happened to her she grieve took her time and then she started an organization called mueller's against drunk driving so she said okay i'm gonna you know what i'm gonna take this i'm gonna respond to this in a way i'm gonna help other people right so the event was the same right it was a neutral event the event was you know happened to both people but the response to the event led these lives in a very different trajectory because of how they were responding to it so learning that with poker is incredibly important right because you're gonna have bad luck sometimes good luck how you respond to it is gonna be the difference between you being successful and you being a failure one of my biggest things that i've learned from sean is i i for years i thought well i'm very good at that i know that i am responsible for my own outcome so i i believe that fully and one day i think i was in a bad mood and he was like well why are you in the bad mood and i said this person did this at a pissed me off he's like well so you're you're not responsible for your mood what's going on like this person just the and and i and it that's when it like clicked and it and frankly it's so really hard but it was like the this being having the internal lo of control isn't just for like making money or starting a business it's also for how do i feel on the inside and that was the biggest thing sean what do you say like you have some like different version of someone living rent free in your brain like i you have all these like phrases where it's like the the one that stuck with me i went so i went to tony robbins thing is very similar like i i kind of intuitively new hey like i'm a learner i'm i'm be curious guy why i always want to improve why would i not invest in this then i get there and he's like everybody you stand up i wanna hear you and i'm like oh god i i'm here just for the learning part i don't need the dance right and then like five minutes in i had a choice a fork their it's like you're either gonna play fall full out here you're gonna like do the experience or you're gonna have to do the experience and get half the it's like whatever let me do this nobody here knows me i could just where in let me dance and then of course you know forty five minutes in i'm dancing i'm like this is a amazing amazing this is no good and he says this thing in his talk he's like and he's like i'm fucking tony robbins and he's like he tells a story of when he was on his trip with his like platinum they like like you've you bought all the up upsell you're at the like you're paying him at two hundred million dollars here to go on vacation with him and he was with them in india and he meets this guy in a mountain some groove guy or whatever and the guy said like you know tony so like how much are you suffering nowadays he's like sorry i don't know if you know i'm tony robbins you know suffering isn't exactly how people describe me typically right and the guy was like i can see like you you know you got upset because the the guy didn't know the schedule and then that and then you got upset about this like these were small things he's like well no i wasn't upset i just he starts to be defensive and then he calms down he's like he's like what are you like what's the what's the observation you have here he goes basically he's like how cheap is your happiness because all it took was this guy for forgetting one thing on the schedule and you lost it that was so cheap he it he took him nothing to take your happiness away and so this idea of like your mood is essentially you want the louis ton of moods you wanted to be so premium like for somebody to affect your mood to take your mood away from you it should come with a very very high price and so i started to reframe like when something would happen i'm like that's too cheap i don't i'm not gonna take that deal why would i ever and why whatever ever trade my good mood for that small the that small thing no i actually love that that's really good because i think we we all strive to be like you know be above that but we're human right like i get the annoyed by the dumbest things i'm gonna use that today because i just like i said i do streams where sometimes to the brain and you get comments i get thousands of comments like while i'm streaming and you know the brain i've already known this but like we naturally gonna gravitate toward the negative comment the one who calls me a bald idiot or whatever so i mean so instead of like i've learned this a long time ago but like allowing that to affect you and to sort of you know divert the stream it's like kinda like what they're wanting to do but i've learned to just like sort of respond to positive reinforcement and good stuff and ignore it but when does let's say for example i play a hand and i lose and i'm already frustrated by the fact that i lost the hand but i'm comfortable with how i played it and then you read a bunch of arm cure quarterback saying oh would an idiot just gave all is money away that it was terrible you're you're the worst and i see that and i wanna oh really sam six five nine three four come here and say that to my face how about that i would bust you i'd take all your money dude and i i to do that but it's silly like you said because why am i allowing this well it feels good like i tricked myself to thinking it feels good and and reality is it doesn't feel good because i like check refreshing the page i'm like let me see the reply let me see no i can't go the dinner yet this guy to facebook says something i gotta wait for his reply i will say this though i am a big fan of venting like in the sense that like rather than hold stuff in you know and let it bubble and let it faster i laugh at myself sometimes when i act like an idiot i'm like i get mad about something dumb and i'm like okay was okay and then i can lick very quick so quickly after okay that was stupid but i got it off my chest you know what i mean like i see the river card comment i i'm like the hell is going on here how i lose this whatever and i can laugh at how un hinge i was behaving is but it's not gonna be you know it's not but it's now not something that i'm just going okay everything's fine sure right better than value and sometimes just letting it out like sean you you had that thing in in the in the five tweet tuesday the other day where it was what was the name of it start with a case something theory which states that like if you write something down if you if you have a problem you it kill was basically like like a problem well defined like if you write down a problem you've already have solved it right like if you actually can write it down inaccurate accurately what is the problem and you are already halfway to a solution at that point daniel i wanna ask you about this one thing from that seminar because when i was thinking about the tony robbins experience they'll tell you something but it's usually like an exercise you do there's some like thing you do that you wouldn't have wanted to do but now you're sitting in the room and you signed up to be there and you paid the money and now you're here so you go ahead and you do it and you kinda have this like moment of alignment that really only happened because you were actually immersed it you actually did a thing versus just listening to like an idea and you know it intellectually but you didn't get to actually feel it did they do anything was there an exercise that stood out to you there's tons so yeah the one that i did is called choice center and there are plenty of people there's a lot of crossover between anthony robbins himself and people that have done both and there you know there's a lot of similarities and sounds like and what you know what you were doing but as far as you know one specific one i think sort of the root of that whole victim responsible idea the concept is that i remember you know there there's a girl but i wish she was young and she was partying in and whatever and we you know we were together i was i loved her or whatever but like we broke up okay and i had a story about how i was victim you know about how she did this she did this she's was bad and all these types of things so one of the exercises we did was we tell the story as a victim k now you must tell the exact same story or you're one hundred percent responsible for everything that happened whoa right so now i have to tell it and of sudden well she did tell me this she did say this and all of a sudden you're i'm freed i'm freed of this victim story that's been a label me is like woe is me poor me i'm like no neither there the signs were there the choices were not you know the choices were there and i'll say this after i did the course in two thousand thirteen this woman who i was in love with in two thousand ten eleven okay she came back to las vegas in two thousand even bought her a ring back that i never gave her in two thousand ten eleven and i kept i kept it in my safe for some reason she came back to vegas in two thousand nineteen this and we're married now six years yeah we're married she's yeah so but a lot of that came from me sort of re evaluating the story that i had told myself right so you know that was probably one of the more impactful ones and it's like it's a long price it's like a hundred day process this course you know you go to one weekend and you know it's pretty intense another weekend and and you know that's pretty impressive you're doing coaching calls you're doing all you actually learn how a coach other people you know you started with speaking to this about writing down stuff because that's part of it you know the idea behind journal as well but one of the things you you know on that note like sometimes when i would coach other people you find that like one of the questions you asked is like i say you came to me for c for coaching on something and i said well how would you coach yourself on this mh right so then as you do that and you're like well i would probably tell myself this this this and then i'm just looking go there you right you already know the answer right you know it's just like but a good coach what they do is they help ask good questions that's sorta of help you know get you to a place where you may i don't think a good coach is one that tells you what to do a good coach is to set you up where you see you tell me you know i'm i'm i'm helping you see what's possible so that you get there i like that a lot what when you one of the things about poker is handling down swings and i think that's not just a thing about poker that's a i think about life now in poker it's just very immediate and it's very quantified i lost this much money just now my buddy back in college when i used to gamble a lot my me and my buddy dan we would go to vegas and we would go lose a bunch of money and we you know every once a while i would make enough money to keep us coming back vegas but most of the time i would say we we didn't do well and i just remember him the psychology of losing money is so it gets you to act so strange so one thing you were talking about was like you chase the loss you know i remember going back up to the he's going to the atm machine it's like bro don't do it but he wants to do and then then he would lose money and then he would try to get the pit boss to like comp a breakfast or the room to like just salvage some dignity out of it or he would come back to the room and he would use all the toiletries and wear the robe as if he was getting the value back out of what he just lost and he would look in the mirror in the hotel i remember he thought we were asleep hey he just goes five iphones you lost five iphones he's just hating himself in the mirror and and i just remember thinking like man we focused so much time me and him we used to focus some on the strategy of how to win and what actually we needed to be spending time on is the psychology of how to lose because there were always gonna be down swings and we handled them so poorly that our strategies went out the window and so i'm curious daniel you're like what is the strategy of handling adversely are these down swings what do you tell yourself and what what do you think is applicable to to people outside of the world of of poker mh the down swings are probably the most important part of like how you deal with them is the most important part of becoming a professional poker player and for me i learned over the years you call them a breakdown right and typically with like a breakdown things are going badly that's an opportunity for a breakthrough things are going fine right you're probably not really delving that much into your strategy you're like okay things are good you know but when things are going badly and things are going wrong it requires you to be more intros you have to go okay what is really happening here let me dive deep is there is what i'm doing working you know is my is there anything i can do better what strategies can i adjust what strategies can i chase and those usually come from breakdowns whether it's in poker band down or life right like when you're in a downs in in your life whatever else that's an opportunity for a breakthrough you either say okay this is a point where i'm at am i gonna accept where i'm at you know and just woe with me or is now the time to reinvent myself to try a new whatever you you know a new angle or or or try to do things differently to get myself to a better place and often you know people call it rock bottom right so if you're a you know an addict or something you know that's getting by people look at that and say well this person's not gonna be able until they hit rock bottom because what's rock bottom rock ba is the decision point this is it right i mean they're gonna die here like this or you know some change has to happen there's a a quote from jk k rowling about this i have have you guys ever heard the her talk about rock bottom no rowling wrote harry potter and you know billionaire author right so she said this thing about when she was i think she had been rejected and so she said i was set free because my greatest fear had already been realized i was still alive i still had a daughter i adored and i had an old type writer and a big idea and so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which i rebuilt my life that's beautiful that's so well said and yeah essentially cap what we're sort of talking about where i think like the most impactful stages of your life and like for me too even with the like going to that course right it required me to be in a place where i had that lost love that breakup up that painful experience of you know losing someone that i loved and i was at a at a low point so i went out and i said okay well let's do something and then boom completely shifted my relationship with that event and then eventually became the man that could look past you know our differences back then and realize like i'm responsible for this relationship working and now we're happily married you know and i and i constantly think of those things like it was one of those courses i don't know if it's similar for you with the tony robbins thing but i still use in practice a lot of the things that i learned there on a daily basis like i'm not perfect by any stretch i still have my bad times but i i recognize them more quickly when i'm being an idiot or jerk or arrogant or whatever i noticed it faster you know and i'm able to shift out of it it's like i remember thinking afterwards i was dude i feel like neo and the matrix but out but i thought that was like you know a new matrix he's seeing everybody else but it's actually just seeing yourself it's like you see oh i'm just acting this way because of this thing oh i'm saying these words instead of saying i have to go do this i get to go do this right little shifts right a little like two or two words schiff right like i gotta go i have to go pick up my kids now i get to go pick up my kids from school right now on this bike and we're gonna spend time to like this is amazing you know me five years ago what killed for this and now it's a now it's a have to i what what's going on here and so you get curious about those things so i totally i i totally agree with that and you know i think we came on to this podcast thinking like hey there's gonna be some poker lessons you know and isn't like we can learn about you know poker and the the art of bluff and reading and all that but you know this turned into a a a a podcast about the mind right right can i ask you about your content diet what do you read and listen to on a on a daily or weekly basis because i i find your attitude interesting and i wanna like i wanna be inspired by the same things that inspire you well i'll tell you i mean nothing recently but one of the books that i loved it was such a simple book it's by don miguel ruiz it's four it's called the four agreements yeah i've heard a lot of people talk about it it's such an easy read you'll read it in five seconds it's four basic principles number one be impeccable with your word to yourself and others number two you know don't take anything personal and number three don't make assumptions and number four do your best doug do your best is the most important one because the idea behind it is those three things you're gonna fail at sometimes right but as long as you're doing your best you're in a good place and the one being impeccable with your word dad i take so seriously not just for others and for myself to the point where if i said to you guys i'm gonna be here at nine am if i was here at nine zero four i'd feel like it's a broken agreement that i did not keep my word right many people go through life and like they just show up at nine zero four it's like hey what's up guys don't acknowledge the fact that we had an agreement you failed on this agreement and you didn't even say anything listen sometimes it's gonna happen you're gonna be five minutes late right what does a response person do listen i acknowledge i'm late very sorry about that no excuses don't tell me about your kid and the hair dryer i'll i'm committed to in the future making sure that i'm on time you know that's you in respect right but somebody who just always fifteen twenty minutes late and thinks it's no big deal they're disrespect your time and i don't trust their word when they say to me i'll be there at nine i'm terrible with that not just the timing thing but the keeping your word to yourself i'm pretty good actually about keeping my word to other people but keep my word to myself it's like well i'm i'm the judge the jury and the execution you i can always let myself off the hook like i i have a i have a food coach so i'm trying to get in great shape at you know obviously i had a personal trainer but most of getting in great shape is controlling you know what you eat and so she calls me every day at you know ten forty five and she says like hey like how did yesterday go we'd have to talk through it's food therapy basically for ten minutes a day every morning and in that there's all there's all these little things where it's like i tell her hey i'm gonna do this i you i'm deciding i'm gonna do this i'm gonna have this at this time and then tonight i'm not gonna late night snack or anything i'm gonna get to bed on time next day you know i did see the thing but there was all these at crackers out and like i didn't even actually think about it but like i was actually kinda hungry and is all these compromises and she was just like the amount of energy you're especially like let me kind of realize like men it's not about the crackers of the chips that you're having sure that's just not gonna kill you this chips are not gonna kill you but being the guy who breaks his word to himself all the time like that actually will kill you yeah you you you will you will let let yourself down and not even trust yourself because you don't believe what you say and that has been like like ironically like what are the things that i've struggled the most at and like i'm trying to overcome this year and if i do that it's like wow then i do learn to play the piano better and i do do better with my companies i do better with this because i become a type person who i trust myself that if i say something that's what it's gonna be and that i won't renegotiate and lit these things myself and the problem is i'm very persuasive person i can persuade myself back into anything but i don't wanna use that you know use that that skill against myself we have a bunch of guests on the pod like sean and i aren't particularly like big big investors or anything but we love having investors on like you know the we haven't had a mom but most famous example this is warren buffett and how he really can teach you about life via investing and it's very evident that you are in that same category where it's not necessarily the poker thing that is the interesting part about you poker is just your vehicle for showing that you have mastery over your own emotions in your own and you you're you're a master in emotional intelligence and so it's really cool to hear your perspective on these things because i'm not gonna play poker but you've said of many many things that will change my life just in a non poker field well i appreciate you saying that and like i said i i'm a big believer instead of what you're saying is like looking at successful people listening to how they got there there's value in there this isn't me telling you this is what you need to do with your life i'm sharing what's worked for me right and if you hear some of those things and you think oh you know what that would be something that we've you know something beneficial for my life that's kinda how i look at other successful people too but we we didn't get to talk about this but i do and the research came up and i was like that was really cool of him so it's a compliment to you which is you were talking about the young players and you're like i never wanted to be that guy who was the old head criticizing the way all the young players are playing now and how the how it's ruined the game and blah blah blah and you you've talked about i you said something like you know i get really curious wanna learn from them i want them to coach me as much as i'm coaching them and i thought man that's a great attitude i i see that in so basketball that happens it's sort of always criticizing the younger generation and just saying like they you know they don't get it they ruined in the game that it's all changed it's not the same anymore and i thought that was a pretty cool attitude you had and i wanted to give you a compliment that appreciate i remember where it really happened when i was like twenty two twenty three and i was really grinding and i'm working hard and i'm playing with some big names you know like established guys and i could see they were sc at some of the stuff i was doing and in my honor my breath i'm like buddy i'm already better than you by a you know you got that cocky young energy and i remind you myself in that moment never be the guy who's you know the older guy who looks at the young and the different things we're doing in sc and go hey look at these dummy so every three to four years i'll update my own software my mental software by learning the things that they're learning now i combine that with the wisdom that i have of thirty years and i become really powerful as a player but the it requires humility because let's say you're in the top in two thousand four you think you still are today just because you rest on your lawyers no the day you stop learning is the day everyone else starts to surpass you because they're gonna continue to learn you're stuck here new new ideas new solve new approaches they're always gonna advance and if you don't advance with them you get worse by by definition because everyone else is getting better that's awesome daniel thanks for coming on man really appreciate it you got a guy's who's was fun alright we appreciate you that's it that's a pod i feel like i could rule to world i know i could be what i want to put at all in in like a days off on a road travel never looking back

the last night i downloaded an app that blew my mind and it's called so and i don't say that casually i'm not trying to be a ai thought leader who's like holy crap the new model is so and unbelievable they just changed the game no no this app was weird and weird in a way that i haven't like hasn't settled yet i feel like i could rule the world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day so on a goal less travel ever so basically open a the makers of chad gp have released a new app called so and when you hear it the i think the first reaction is a big eye role it's a feed like tiktok but hey all the videos are made ai you don't have to worry about like this is a fake video they're all fake videos okay and so the initial reaction from the smart guy community was like literally like oh good pure ai s in fact there were some great tweets about this that i just wanna call out for humor and excellence chris ba had a great one he goes sam alt you know open ai we're gonna cure brain cancer opening out today we created brain cancer like like the worst thing you could do is just a feed of ai ai slump basically but when you go in it's not ai i think that's a i think that's a thing that gets you cool points on the internet i don't think it's what's going on here and i think you're gonna be on the wrong side of history if you try to resist this and so you open up the app the way it works is like chat gp you can type anything and it's gonna create an video but the very first thing it does the camera's on and this is not like any onboarding i've ever done in any other app the camera's on and it says say these three numbers out loud you're like alright twelve seventy four eighty eight it's like cool stole your voice got it like what it's like yeah we can use ai i do your voice from those three numbers got it and it's like hey just look to the right real quick there's something over there you look over to the right it's like got your face alright now we could put with those two little actions you saying three numbers are you look looking at the camera and they're looking to the side it now can create recreate your face i didn't mine last night in bed i made one that said i made a few actually the first one was put me in a ralph lauren ad which is hilarious but the really shocking one i said make it look like i have a ponytail and let me so alright share that tail one it's scary now let it grow out over the last year it feels completely different but i kinda like it it's easy enough to keep in shape just to rinse in some conditioner and let it do it thing i when i'm working your need out of my face and just pull it back like this simple feels good so this app is unbelievable i did one where i said me ding dong ditching somebody used like the ring camera footage and then i can't wheel away to hide alright here we go quick knock and i'm out perfect how does it know your height and stuff it just inferred my entire body from my face which is disappointing in its own way that looks real yeah and so okay so you could do it for yourself now watch this one i just sent you could also use other people if they let you so this is so sam alt the you know the founder of open he's like available to be used so you just if you just tag like you just like me talking to sam alt or whatever but in this case somebody was like they used sam alt and they were making fun of the idea of the ai slot have you seen this one are my pig enjoying their swap this is crazy this is one hundred percent i think better than tiktok actually i think it's better than tiktok and it's it's this is v one i a v so good so there's a couple of kind of so i think this is gonna be here are a couple of predictions i think there's gonna be the most downloaded app in the history of the world it'll in a short period of time so i think it'll be like the fastest to get to a hundred million downloads because i think it'll happen in like like right now it's gated by you need an invite code but as soon as they open that gate or if they open that gate in in short order this thing would get you know a hundred million plus downloads very very quickly to the app store last night and i just click download and worked i didn't know you had same other people couldn't do that they all needed they would hit a wall that said you need an invite code because i was i was like dude have you seen this i texting people and they were like i can't get in and i was like i didn't have a code i don't know why i got in into another student i'm not sure so that's my first prediction second prediction is i think this opens the flood gates of something that matt m talked about on our podcast so i did a episode with matt about ai matt's totally like he's so far down the rabbit hole i'm like matt it's like matt matt matt it's like echoing going down the rabbit hole and he was talking about ai and he goes the crazy thing about ai is we are so early and i don't mean in just in terms of how smart it's gonna be we're so early because every ai tool right now is single player he's like chad is just a tool you use yourself and same thing with the image creators and same thing with all almost all of the tools are still single player but the internet has showed us that like all the most powerful apps they're multiplayer the things you do with other people whether it was facebook and social networking whether it was uber connecting you with drivers or airbnb connecting with other people slack where you chat with your teammates like it's crazy that none of the ai tools are really multiplayer today and so he's like i'm waiting for that like that's the next wave that's the big thing this is one of the first ai ai native things where i'm like oh yeah i'm gonna be using this with other other people like last night me and my friends were basically like creating videos of each other making each other laugh it was like so easy just to do that back and forth and get there you know you get a tag you got tagged somebody made a video of you it's like do have to go look at that i can't not look at that like so hey here somebody holds baby i gotta look at this video somebody made of me right it's like one of the most like strong poles and if if you remember one of the big growth levers for facebook was when they introduced friend photo tagging so they made it super easy word not just you could upload photos that's a solar player experience but when you could just click on somebody in the picture and write their name and then you would get an email whether you use facebook or not that would say sean just uploaded a photo and tagged you it you're like oh i gotta go see what this picture is like that's out there for everybody to see that created this insane growth loop for for facebook i think that's what's gonna happen with this when you lived in china did you i forget what they column but what are the apps that are like is i think it's whatsapp is one of them whether they're like an everything app where wechat apps wechat so like with the wechat it's it's hard to understand in america but they call it everything app because you could like you chat with your buddies you order groceries and you send money like what is that right you pay your electricity bill you could buy furniture you do anything you want on the app so i downloaded this thing or i send up for chad pro or whatever the most expensive one is because they have the student thing called pulse have you used pulse dude no but i i love this idea i haven't used i can you can anybody just turn this on you have to pay money so it's expensive it's i think it's one or two hundred dollars a month but yeah basically like i tell it what i'm into or it gets to know me and every day when i wake up now now me i'm i'm on chat all day and anyway now in the morning i pull up pulse and it's sort of like my news feed except it's all tailored for me so like i'll tell it i'm interested i'm reading this particular book that interests me and i see like relevant articles that it has written so it's it's the journalist and it's so it's like you know apple's news feed except it's also the journalists or like i'm into like greek philosophy right now and like i'm seeing like it's telling me about philosophy tailored towards me or like youtube like you know we're trying to like learn more about youtube it's saying like i'm like i wanna learn how to get more popular be better at storytelling or whatever on youtube like i wanna like perfect that craft a bit more it writes articles based off of the conversations that i've had with it so when i we do this podcast we'll use chat to research and come up with story ideas it's i'm giving me daily articles based off that which is insane and so like they should've have just called this ben levy because this is what ben levy does ben ben gets to know you he knows what your interest are what your dreams are he knows what you're what you're working on right now and he'll every day he'll just text you useful interesting things and celebrate your success and like help hey here's a tweet i saw that's relevant to the thing you're talking about hey here's an article that talks about how to do that thing you you're were talking about now ben has could be with ai because is doing that and this is the first example of a super app now i'm starting to get it where i'm like everything's going to be on here and frankly like i'm a free market guy this is scary this is like every quarter i'm like okay now i am a little bit more fearful what's gonna happen in five years because how is this company not gonna take over the world it'd be the biggest company the way that like i'm using it already the why is that something you're fearful of there there is always was a biggest company on ours why is it scary that it would be open ai because i think it's potentially gonna be significantly larger than every company ever and we'll know more about me like well will it it will be ubiquitous ubiquitous in more ways than it has ever been you know like nvidia is the third largest company in the world i don't particularly interact with that every day and i don't know if it knows anything that it could like ruin and right ruin my life but now open does i just think that open ai is gonna be like the combination of facebook google every news company ever and then like five of the companies combined into one i wanna talk about this for second this is pretty fascinating so i sent this to my sister sent to her one of these videos she was like oh what ai sean what is this and i'm like oh the makers of chat now have this app you can make any video about anything using anyone and you just use your face and then they just do it and i was and she's was like oh my god being your sister so tiring you have so many cool things that i now need to like know of and like i was just getting settled in this couch of life here and now i have to get up and go do things and like what is this and i feel that i actually feel that in a big way right you feel exhausted yeah because like even when you talk about pulse it's like oh another game changing thing i need to go learn dude try oh my god am i irrelevant now is it my about am i super powerful or irrelevant i can't tell so i think there's there's that angle which is i think some people feel exhausted by the rate of change and i don't know what to tell you it's like it's like saying i'm so it's like on i'm survivor when they're like i'm so cold it's like well you still got thirty more days out here and it's gonna keep raining i i don't know what you're gonna do just you sleep every night in the rain now that's what happened you're gonna be drained you just summed it up perfectly am i now super powerful or i irrelevant i don't know what yeah because dude i mean i i'm looking at this thing like oh cool so content creation everybody can just do it easily interesting hi you know i was watching this interview with steve bartlett and steve as is podcast called da the ceo and i think it's basically like the second biggest podcast in the world right now it's pretty pretty insane he was talking and he was like you know he's sort of like i you're either the hunter or the hunt it was like you are either gonna get disrupted or you're gonna be the one doing the disrupting and he's talking about for his own business he's like yes so i have a team that's just working on ai podcasting so they're making like ai steve or a i guess and then we're creating all ai podcasts and he's like we are testing them with ad spend to see do people watch the ai podcast as much as they watched the no guys he goes before it was like no it was really bad he goes now as bad as a sounds like the average watch time is the same on the ai podcast versus the human podcast he's like so that's gonna be a thing and i'm like i don't even know if that's true i don't know i believe that i don't know where that is i don't know what he's exactly saying just that idea of like oh so like again if i'm a content creator maybe i'm just irrelevant at the stage like who knows maybe maybe i'll be completely obsolete or maybe i'm ten times more powerful right there's two different perspectives so i think there's an exhausting reaction to it i think another reaction is sort of the dystopian of like you y this is all too powerful and you guys are getting way too powerful when it took my face and my voice in three seconds and now like if i you know if if i toggle the button on you can make a video of me doing anything saying anything and if you use chad you could just upload all of my writing ever in all of the transcripts of this podcast and you could be like hey let me just have sean as my coach and i don't get paid for that that's just like a thing that people can do like this is all like a little insane right and it's all quite powerful and some people don't trust me a moment so i there's that dystopian of like you know where is the world going do i want this sort of all powerful technology of this company to be all powerful i think there's that fear too and i think there's the third reaction which is the one i'm trying to lean into which is just be curious go how fun go play wow what an amazing time to be alive that like you're seeing the birth of this thing and you get to ride these waves and like the whole world's gonna change hopefully for the better and you can kinda impact that that i think is the only useful reaction of the three alright guys here's the thing about side hustle everyone wants one but most people over think about it and they never actually launch anything but because of ai you can go from my idea to your first sale in only seven days my old company the hustle they just dropped an ai side hustle crash course so basically what the hustle did was they looked at things that me and sean and hubspot cmo kit founder they look at stuff that we said and they broke it all down into simple bite sized steps which means you're gonna get a guide that gives you everything you need to launch a side hustle without any of the guess work so you can get it right now you can scan the qr code or click the link in the description now back to the show dude what's gonna happen in the next couple years is pal it's gonna we're all just gonna be in a pal cage you know like cooper just gonna be in a pal cage and sam hoffman is gonna be throwing stuff at us like our slot that we have to eat the cage and this is just how it's going to be i i do think the haves and the half not it's just gonna separate even further so can i tell you some of the some of the more positive uplifting exciting versions of this so i think learning and education is getting way better there's a few examples of like people who are making ai tutors that are incredible we've talked about alpha school google just released this thing called like for i was call like personalized learning where you could basically tell out what you wanna know and then it just like develops this incredibly personalized curriculum for you and feeds takes you down that path which is really cool and i think the idea of like just like you have a a therapist or we talked about a a you know a therapist in your pocket a sponsored your pocket you're also gonna have socrates in your pocket what's it called you know google sucks at naming everything so they're like google learning and development trees it's like i don't know what i know what it's called get something when all these companies just they named their thing like maps like it's just like what it's like that it's like this is ava yeah eva you're your cute friend who's all knowing hey ava i want you all you have to do is out in public just say hey ava it's like i don't wanna say hey eva in public you know hey how much is that that house worth i just like that's what i'm gonna be saying i dave does she have only fans thanks ava while your glasses are on yeah hey can you hold still for a second yeah eva real cool forward hey can you turn this i'm out of range hold on we get closer your face do you ever go like you ever see like a crime and i'm like like whatever i see a police officer doing something i just him i'm just like sara let's go go like i'm just like like hey could you guys yeah i just overestimate myself you guys need to hand any could you guys explain what's going on like what did he do what did he do i'm just like i'm just like shameless i'll would just go to someone like could you give me a playback by dude by the way that's one of the best horror prompts is use body cam footage to show me doing x and it's a car body cam that's falling you it's okay let me tell you a story and i wanna ask you a question i was with someone recently this past week weekend and we were watching a baseball game and in between each inning he would like look on his phone and like start messing around and doing stuff and then during the game i would hear like c or like a like a buzzer a buzzer noise and i was like after four innings i was like what are you doing and he was like oh i'm betting like three dollars or five dollars between each inning on what's gonna happen over the next inning and i was like what wait talk about he's like well have this app where like it uses ai somehow and it like makes you it comes up with different micro bets that you can bet throughout the game and i was like you do you do this all the time like what's a situation he's like oh like literally every time i watch sports i do so i said how much do you watch sports he like go day i was like wait is this a thing and i went and like talk to like ten other people in this room and i was like tell me do you do this do you do this do you do this in almost every single person in the room they if it was a man they did it if it was a woman they're like my brother or a husband or boyfriend does it right well if you watch any sport now like every ad is basically like the sponsor of every podcast is you know fan draft kings and then if you watched games like you know the leagues used to ban this they didn't want gambling as a part of it but now they basically realize like that's our premium sponsor and so they're like heavily using it but it's funny because like there's been all these situations i don't know if you've seen where players are caught there was probably like five notable thing not five notable cases of this last year across like nba and f nfl let's say and so like one guy for example you know he owed a bunch of people money owed like a car dealer money and his jewelry guy money and whatever and then they went back and they looked at like a pattern of his games and they're like like that's weird that he didn't shoot the ball there at the end of the game or like yeah it just last week even this football player there the quarterback they were winning the quarterback wanted to run out the clock so they're just trying to hold the ball and so they he took the snap and then to make sure that he used all of the clock he just started running backwards which you would never do normally if you wouldn't run backwards but he's like i just need the seven seconds to expire he ran all the way backwards into the end zone and took a safety so a two point swing to the other team which didn't matter they were up by seven anyways but the line was six and so it went from a win to a loss now he wasn't cheating but like the gamble you know you get these guys get like death threats in their dms every day now because they're like dude you messed up my par like you messed up my over under like piece of shit blah and they just dig it like harassed the players don't really like it who are you know just trying to play the game because like all of a sudden people take it uber uber personally if they have a bad game or if they missed that shot or if they scored one extra time or didn't score one extra time when they could have swung the line you know but by the way there's another angle to this that's kind of fascinating in the sort of sports betting murder so i don't know if you've seen lately but there was this great tweet where it showed robinhood hood stock going like this and draft king's stock going the exact opposite way in the same time frame sports betting which is like a pretty regulated thing like i can't do it out of california for example right i think you can do it in texas but i can't do it there i don't know what states there thirty states in america allow it yeah and it started with like just new jersey and then it's michigan and then it's been expanding since then but it's a pretty regulated thing and but but all these other apps now do sports betting but they call it prediction markets just and prediction markets are legal so robinhood hood now has sports betting in its app even though not not a casino you could just go and robin it right now and bet on sports you could do it on ka you could do it on poly market you could do it on all these prediction market sites and their volume is like exploding because they now added basically sports wage because there's like a technical loophole in sports betting you're like okay yeah here's the the the distinction so sports betting you're wage during directing on the outcome of the game you know a hundred dollars on the warriors to win so this is regulated under us gambling laws by the state gaming commissions prediction markets are seen as a financial market where you're trading the future like trading features of stocks not a bet so you are buying and selling shares of an outcome that's insane don't know why that's any different but it's basically calls it like it's almost like a a commodity basically so you're so all these apps were able add it as prediction markets rather than sports betting and so now it's now it's in more places than it was before and it's easier to access than it was before listen up the old playbook is slowing you down ai broke the funnel loop marketing fixes it it's a new era for marketers ai is capturing search traffic channels are fragmented and generating leads feels less predictable than ever before hubspot loop marketing playbook will guide you through this unprecedented disruption it's the system your marketing teams should use to move faster connect deeper and gross smarter the modern growth playbook for the ai era built by hubspot designed for today's marketer get the loop marketing playbook at hubspot dot com slash loop dash marketing to find out more and leave your competition behind alright back to the pod i think once you become like a famous podcast like scott gallo or you and i we have to take on the cause like we automatically get interested in saving young men which is like all the rage right now out right like young men are getting left behind but in all because ironic because i spent like most of my twenties gambling on like river boat casinos and like indian reservations but yeah yeah you guys shouldn't do it even though i did well you know i i don't like gambling at all but i think that there's a there's and i don't particularly like outlaw stuff but i think that there's a difference between like going to a casino and that being your night out i still don't think it's great but i think that it's different than what i've experience in my short amount of time being around guys like betting three dollars every game and having draft king's account manager calling you and being like hey do you want a five hundred dollar credit to try this new bet like like right you know it's a little bit more isolated and and so it it's it's it's it's strange to me to see this i talked to this guy go to birch health dot com so b i r c h e s so birch health dot com this company they just raised twenty million dollars from general catalyst and kevin ryan from ali court i i don't know this guy at all and i've got no involvement or anything i just thought it was cool but it's a company that raised twenty million dollars and their whole thing is helping particularly young men get cured or get help from gambling addiction and the reason i thought this was interesting is i brought this up about three years ago where i was like i'm shocked that there's not more alternatives to alcohol anonymous because alcohol anonymous is a massive it's it's not a business but it's a massive organization and one of the reasons now that i run a community in in real life community is that i realized that alcohol anonymous is all based around you and like twenty other alcoholic where you're sharing and like the connection is what matters and doing that online it doesn't really solve the problem the same way that doing it in real life and so that's one of the reason why there has been alternative however with the rise of better help and like all these like telehealth health psychiatrists or whatever which i've done and i've tried like it does actually help solve the problem i don't know if it does it as well or or not i don't i don't know the research behind there but it definitely like helps it it it it is a fine alternative to in real life therapy and i saw that these guys had just raised money i think he said they're only two years old they grew like five x in last year and i was reading the new york times about this all my betting it said sixty percent of guys between eighteen and twenty two do sports betting and are she in a large percentage are not problematic gambler i'm like oh this company gotta take over the world like this is like now like i was seeking earlier like years ago for like an alcohol anonymous alternative as like an interesting business that i could do good in the world this birch health and i'm sure there's competitors it's a very interesting business that i think could take off someone on the pod brought this up a long time ago they were talking about how like physical centers basically they were like oh you could repurpose like i forgot what it was there was some retail concept that was just dying like a blockbuster type of thing and they were talking about how their prediction their idea that they brought on the pod was to repurpose those for gambling addiction they're like oh at that time there wasn't even the sport the prediction markets it was just daily fantasy and they were like you know there's there's gonna be a big need for this can i tell you about m list who's doing something really cool yes alright so there's guy who i think this is the pod dm me and he's got a very interesting app so if you go to sunflower sober dot com okay that's cool check this out so this guy kobe created this app called sunflower sober and it's a ai based version of what do they call like a sponsor yeah so i think i don't know exactly how a works i can tell you i could tell you i could tell you you did you go yeah were you remember i was a member of a yeah so what did just me the experience so you go to you went to a physical place and i was like hi i'm sam and i have a great newsletter she's just subscribed to you also i have a problem like what just say this is pre newsletter but basically i think before i met you like i was like i didn't make a lot of money and i was like i don't have a lot of money to like go to rehab or anything this i need help and i went and like googled aa near me and i lived in trail hill and i go to a meeting and there's thirty or twenty of you sitting around in a circle and they're famous for having everyone smoked six because that's like when you get off alcohol you like your your addiction transfers like a new thing okay and so there's everyone smoked at six and everyone drinking black coffee at like pm at night and you basically you go around the room and you say your name and your issue which is basically i'm i'm an alcoholic and and i have been sober or i haven't been sober for this long and you tell your story and you don't have to share if you don't wanna share but and after a certain amount of time you get a sponsor which is someone who you're supposed to rely on and you're supposed to call and you say like i'm at this party and like i'm feeling like i'm being tempted right now i don't feel great or i screwed up like can you help me you're supposed to like go above and beyond for this person and that's how you pay it forward in the community right and that's free all of that's free or you pay a it's free a free the sponsor thinks free it's a just a community of people helping each other yeah and there's a a weird story about it so there's a phrase so have you heard the phrase are you friend of bill that's the secret phrase so like are you friends friends a bill gave it out it's not really like that secret but it's are you are you friends with bill that means like are you n a yeah because i believe the founder is name bill w they say are you a friend of bill w the founder of about calls dom anonymous was this guy named bill w and he started at in nineteen thirty five and he's got this crazy story where he was trying to overcome alcohol addiction and he and he created this twelve step program for himself but he's a wild character where like he like took a lot of lsd to help him like overcome his addiction and it's a whole like cowboy story behind his guy but the the phrase in aa it's a secret phrase it's you you friends to bill w okay that's amazing so check this out so this guy makes this app and he's like he basically uses ai to do this so he's like okay you can go to rehab and can go to therapy you can but like what if in your pocket was and always on helpful and you know compassionate non judgmental person who's there to you know who's there to help someone to talk to and it's not just for i think he started it i think he had maybe in his family like somebody who had alcoholism and then but it's not gonna be just for alcohol like it'll be for gambling it'll be for any type of addiction and this app is kind of exploding so in the last six months it basically went from zero to a hundred thousand users so like look at this revenue ramp like to you know get getting getting to you know fifty thousand plus in monthly recurring revenue from subscriptions and what's interesting is that people pay you know whatever some low like dollar a month plan and this is gonna happen in therapy and any other any field where somebody's charging you you know a hundred dollars an hour or plus you're gonna suddenly be able to pay nine dollars a month and have unlimited access to that level of you you know to that it won't be a human but the ai might you know in some cases might be better because again non judgmental always available you know infinitely patient that sort of thing and in some ways it might be worse you might think at to ai i'm not accountable to this person in the same way not not sure exactly how this complaint up but very interested and he's grown it and if you go look on reddit people are talking about this it's a very big market for this and one of the things that this business does where where some of the revenue can come from is he passes the leads on to like anybody who's looking for like if you're looking for let's say like a more clinical solution because i think there's like drugs that will help you as well if you're the right if that's the right treatment for you and so you can actually and you know he can he might be able to go vertical so he might be able to start his own clinic underneath and all of a sudden you have this kind of either free or you know ten twenty bucks a month type of consumer who suddenly is worth ten times as much to you as a customer and so he's passing you know you know hundreds of leads a month to these tele clinics who are looking to you know speak to a human slash like be able to have you know medicine for for for their addictions this is pretty cool you know what's crazy is alcohol amongst young guys is like plummeted i'll like people drinking like when when you and i were at college like it was like wednesday thursday friday saturday like that's that's drinking nights or like or you know something like crazy like that young guys do not do this nearly as much which is good have you seen them twenty one jump street yeah they're like daily when they go back to school and they're trying to be cool and they're basically like you know they're like twenty nine or whatever new one bali guys for first they go with like one one strap on the backpack right like this is like all these like little things are like we're cool then but they're not cool now and they're like punk a kid try to like make themselves cool like y that's not cool man it's bullying they're like gay and like it'd be so insensitive exactly and so they're like well like shit's changed and that's that's kind of what the drinking culture you know from what from what i read i don't know it's actually true i don't know if you go to college campuses and they're all dry now but like it it does seem like it's much less than it was when we were in college you know a lot of years ago it's way less is this sunflower sober are they did they raise funding yeah they raise funding so was looking at invest i there's gonna be a very successful company you know that doesn't always make it a great investment because valuation matters a lot but i think an app like this i think you know the way that calm and the head space came in and did something on an app they did meditation on an app something that was previously kind of like a a little bit of a touchy feely sort of thing that you did offline and they made it like a daily habit you know daily ritual in your pocket i think that basically getting off your addictions whether it's porn whether it's gambling whether it's alcohol whether it's we you know whatever it is there's there's a plenty of things that screens you know just did just social media there's a bunch of things that you could be addicted to nowadays and i think help people get off that is gonna be a bit pretty big deal have you been to therapy i have like an executive coach i don't know if that would count there i would say probably no i mean cousins have you used had do you think that chat g could potentially change or have you used chat g to supplement and or replace an executive coach or a therapist definitely on the executive coach on the therapist i mean i never went to i don't even know what you would what i would say i'd be like hey like yeah like life's pretty i i don't even know what i would go into so i don't even have the skills to like it's kinda like lost when they find a hatch and they're like how do you get in and i'm like i don't know it's like that's my emotions they're the hatch and i have no idea how to get into it i don't even know what the problem i don't even know what i'm supposed to say what i'm supposed to do it's a foreign language to me i have used it as a like for example it'd be like i mad at my wife because of this reason like can you help me make sense of this like am i wrong is she wrong why am angry like right help me like figure out why i'm pissed off or like this person wrote me this email help me like figure out how not to react in a negative way and get what i want still right i have found that it has helped me tremendously chad like crazy amounts yeah it's really good really really good and i think the ai is only getting better and so using ai to do these things that humans we're we're otherwise doing whether it's therapy or you know your sponsor or other other things i think is gonna help expand access to more people you know who otherwise maybe they didn't maybe they didn't seek it out because they felt embarrassed maybe it was too expensive maybe they live in some random in on on earth where that's not as common you know they don't they don't have it available in procure a hill where you're living at the time right like there's there's sort of like there's like multiple ten x multiple you know sort of order of magnitude jumps you can get when she just look at those those three variables alone cost access and and sort of the taboo nature of it hey quick message here because you know that feeling when you send a wire and it actually works no friction well i've used mercury for years now and let me tell you it just works and that's why i use it for not one not two but eight of my companies from credit cards to invoices i have everything in one place there's no gen dashboard i've never told please please visit a local bank branch none of that tom fu and a few months ago i landed a big client the first thing i did i sent them a clean branded invoice boom deal close cash in the door that's the kind of banking experience i want and that's why i use mercury so if you're running a startup and you want making that feels like it's built in this century well go to mercury dot com and get started in minutes mercury is a financial technology company not a bank bank the services are provided through choice financial group call man a and evolve bank trust members fdic so i saw something on i saw something that like sort of got passed up on that i thought was amazing okay so there's a podcast called acquired we've had them on here they're amazing they're awesome they were talking to toby toby i actually don't know toby last name toby is the ceo key what what is it luke key i think he's the ceo shopify which is you know like the tenth or eighteenth or t largest company in america or in the world huge thing and he made this small comment so toby is a guy who we've had his partner on before and he kind of explained to him a little i know what you're about to say because it unbelievable what do he saying it was unbelievable i was like guys deck i just said something insane over there are we just moving on like what's happening so basically he's like this guy toby i gotta at the stage a little bit he's a nerd nerd like he's like he's like all about this and so he tells a story where he very casually mentions well about twenty years ago about fifteen years ago i created this program where it logged every letter i ever tell typed on my machine and you know when something called a computer machine that they're like the shit he was asked extra tell yeah that's the tell he goes i created this program that looks at every single letter i've ever typed in my keyboard and then every ten minutes it automatically takes a picture of my screen and there's a screenshot and i have an archive now of roughly fifteen years of every single letter and ten minute screenshots and like he just mentioned it like as he was getting to another story where he was like and what and what i noticed what i was building this program is x why i was like whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa reverse right and so i'm like i want that give me that and so for for context i think shopify is probably fifteen years old and so basically the whole founding of a shopify he has shown you could see like exactly how he how he feels there's just one book where it was like i forget the title of the book but the premise is like google knows more about you than anything else because you could whenever you type in google something that's when you're saying your real feelings so now in this case when you're when we're talking to chat that's where we say a real feelings not what we're saying and telling people and this guy has all of it right there and so we could see i just a i think it's amazing i wanna like see this and b i wanna do this for myself i wanna like log everything i've ever done so i can look back after years and have an archive of like seeing my personal development and things like that i think it's so cool what did you think when you saw this i mean like you i thought that was one of the most just sort of like what what what did you just say you did that you actually did that and i was like wow what a also forward thinking thing to do because now in the world of ai it's all about data and this guy might have the best dataset set that you would want to create like a very very the the best data for himself yeah because if he wants to create ai that thinks like him well we'll guess what he logged every key stroke and took a screenshot of his screen every ten seconds so you knew exactly what he's doing it made me think of i don't know if you've heard people talk about meditations by marcus aurelius of course and like the the remarkable thing about meditations is like here's the guy who was the ruler of the roman empire and which was the most powerful empire in the world so here's the most powerful man on earth and then he rode in his diary every night he never thought it would get you never plan to publish this so it's his true inner thoughts and then we sort of like a you know like a little brother jack is diary and you know publish it for the whole world to see but wow what what a one of one type of unique event where the most powerful man in the world logged all of his inner most thoughts that he didn't think anyone to read and now we all get to benefit from it and that's meditations i'm like well this is way better because this is like that for a ceo because he didn't even have to write it which is already one filter right maybe one maybe sometimes you don't write maybe you you right but you're not sharing the full context maybe you're not maybe you're being a little generous to yourself versus every key stroke every i looked at every distraction every tab i open i can't believe that he did this and also he didn't say what he's doing with it but i'm pretty fascinated to find out what that is me too i think it's amazing so like i i'm a i'm big into this i so like i have a secret i call my secret youtube where i make like a i i you know how like in your phone when you like film your kids you typically only do like a ten second video of them doing something cute i love home videos so like remember when your dad like you just keep the cam recorder on wait to keep it on for like ten minutes and then like i don't know if you've ever experienced that magical moment where you're like eighteen or you know rh age now and you're like oh dad one let me play it one and you'll just sit and watch it for like fifteen minutes like it it does feel magical and i only have i think i only have one video of me as a kid because my parents didn't have one and i'm like oh man i long for that i wish i had that and so what i do is i film like five minute videos where i'm just walking around the house having a conversation and we're not performing we're just like hanging out and i upload it every day to my youtube and the reason i did it is there this app called one second a day or one i figured out is that what it's called one minute a is it one day no one second right one second but it's actually i think three seconds we actually changed to three seconds where when my little girl was born the day she was born all the way up to her first birthday we did a three second video every single day and and and whenever i watch this video it makes me cry like it's like so emotional because like i'll see my dog who's not alive anymore or you'll see like family members or whatever and it's like a very emotional you'll say like wow i that that was amazing i'm gonna tell me you're there and so i was inspired by that and i was like i'm gonna do this every day now but for like a ten minute or five minute video and it's not like a youtube thing i'm not or it's not like i'm editing i literally just record home video and i just upload it and like i'll just we'll scroll it at one day when she's all there and so i love doing archive stuff and i remember there's this thing called the rescue time do you remember rescue time i remember the thing but what was it was it just bringing was it like time hop it was just bringing back at old photos so rest time was the thing that tim ferris promoted and the whole premise of it was it's gonna tell you track the time what you spend your time on and i remember using that and i'm like i wish you could tell me more like i wish i could like track my behavior on the internet and tell me about myself but back then this was fifteen or ten years ago we didn't have that technology now because of my obsession of like i do like tracking i love tracking i i wish that i could like do this for more facets in my life and when i saw like toby thing i'm like i long for that i want that so bad yeah yeah that's interesting i i i go the other side on the over tracking everything i only track when i'm trying to make a change so if i'm trying to make a behavior change or like let's say maybe whether it's in myself or in my company so right now what do i track i track my kind of food and weight and i exercise habits and right now because i'm writing book i tracked did i write this morning for the first you know the first two hours of my day did i write yes or no right and so i'm just tracking those two things is that's a new behavior i'm trying to implement and sort of what gets measured gets managed i find that the tracking just tracking generally tracking everything is somehow like nervous energy to me i i said this once about sleep tracking i was like good sleep is obvious how'd did you feel when you're woke up you'll know you didn't need to check the number on my resting heart rate my oh i i went into you know deepgram four last night for forty eight minutes it's like what do you i know what you're talking about like you it's very obvious if you slept well or not then again i think aura has sold like twenty million rings or something like that right there's obviously like a sort of insecurity or nervous energy you can tap into of people who are hobby who enjoy knowing more about them themselves just talking about that quantify trial i'm talking about tracking as in memories like i like looking back like for example i have closed from when i was a kid that my girl my little girl wears now and i'm like god that makes me feel special i'm so happy i saved it like i like i'm talk about like memories like got like memories i don't i don't wear it or ring it a your talking about like rescue time right that's more time tracking that rob du neck right when rob du come on i track every minute of every i'm talking about is what i'm saying is i wish i could have used that but in a different way and what toby is doing it is a kind of a cool example where like i'm logging things to like i can look back six or twelve months or ten years later and i'm like let's see my evolution like did i like it i just think that it's very curious and and interesting do you use the meta glasses no are they awesome should i get them they're awesome they're really great if you wanna do the kind of one second a day v dhs cam quarter thing it's kinda perfect it doesn't go the ten fifteen minutes length that's like too long we're gonna be gonna you get two minutes out of time basically if you just get though and it's your point of view and you don't have to take out your phone like first all when you take out your phone you're out of the moment and then they're like okay i guess i'm supposed to dance now what do do like i'm not sure exactly what what to do especially once your kids are playing sports it's like the hand thing of the world like is it is like the soccer mom's dream is to be able to just push the button and now you get to watch the game but you also get to record what's going on very easily so these things are amazing i think they're about to make them good bad and what good bad is they're they're putting like a screen in it so it's like and while you're walking around you could scroll instagram and i'm like oh yeah like you can check your email it's like okay cool like i can see why that's useful but i don't think it's like wise to do that right whereas the version they have now the version i have is just camera only so it's just a capture device i we'll don't do anything else capture device and its headphones so if you want like if you don't wanna wear air airpods it's an amazing set of headphones that just like sit over your ear but you hear it and only you hear it other people don't hear it pretty that's think a third time you've you've mentioned this i'll get it i'll get it i'll buy these is actually great a great thing for parents because like you know you your kids on the swings and you just like like this is a moment right now i think this is a moment and it's like one second like less than one second away and you're capturing it and you're still in the moment that's cool yeah i'll get them i'm in they used to be five hundred dollars now they're way cheaper yeah and they're just getting better every time they do it there's one more but i don't wanna bury at the end of this episode i wanna actually leave with the next time because i've been dabbling with a different ai tool that i think is incredible and it's been such amazing positive experience and i feel so empowered like you know i feel total total empowerment and my body and i wanna tell you about that in a in in the next episode and i show you what i made with it i'm my god that's a really good cliff hanger okay yeah alright turn that's pod like and subscribe go to spotify please oh by the way the gentleman's agreement the gentleman's agreement which we've talked about before now listen you you think you may have heard this spiel before but i've decided on the spot to improvise and change the way we're gonna do this spiel because if i just say the same thing again and you feel like you've already heard this may not work as well but listen we are just simple creatures and imagine that your friend sam and your friend sean they needed a little bit of help but you get to decide it's like the trolley car problem you could decide are gonna let the train run over our bodies and we stay stuck at eight hundred thousand youtube subscribers and only three hundred thousand spotify subscribers are you gonna let us be at a me one point one million subscribers or are you gonna pull the lever and move the train off the tracks and go hit that button on spotify for us just show a little love show a little support we've entertain you we've been we've trained you we've we've educated you we've been here with we've been there for you when you needed us are you gonna be there when we need you be a good friend be our what's it called be our emergency contact right now i'm putting you i'm putting your name down as my emergency contact go to spotify follow the show please because we're growing like crazy on spotify and spotify has got video spotify has got audio and it also has comments and there's a polls feature we're gonna put up a poll with this episode answer the poll we're answering all the comments in in spotify right now that's that's the new platform where where we're excited about what do you want the pole to be i think in this it's the your react action to the ai to the ai ideas we have on here and the the options are gonna be oh my god this is too much or may i have some small slot please those are two options alright or it could be like a shit where fuck or shit this is awesome yeah yeah those those really the only one two and somehow i'm having that reaction at the same time which is a very weird feeling alright that's it that's the pun i feel like i could rude world i know i could be what i want to pump from at all in it like a day's off on a gold less travel never look back let's take a quick break because as you know we are on the hubspot podcast network but we're not the only ones there's other podcast podcasts on this network too and maybe you liked them maybe you should check them out one of them that wanna draw your attention to is called nudge by phil ag whether you're a marketer or a salesperson and you're looking for the small changes you could make the new habits you could do the the small decisions you could make that will make a big difference that's what that podcast is all about check it out it's called nudge and you can get it wherever you get your podcast and

alright this episode is with will gu will is the author of a book called unreasonable hospitality he also is one of the writers for a tv show called the bear which is very popular and there's an episode in the bear it's called forks i think it's since season two and it's an amazing episode so you guys have to watch it and it's basically all about excellence so how to have unreasonable hospitality there's a lot of people listening to this a lot of the m audience you guys run internet companies and so this book that he wrote it's about his restaurant called eleven madison avenue and how they went above and beyond to treat their customers amazingly and how it actually helped their customers and help their business maybe this book hasn't come across your table because it's not about the internet stuff and that's one of the reasons why i wanted to have will on so give the episode of listen i loved recording this and one of the big takeaways other than going above and beyond for your customers it's about being excellent being excellent in life in business and fitness and family i hope it inspires you i loved it i love recording this episode inspires me so give a listen i feel like i could rude where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a less traveling i i'm i'm happy to talk to you i read a lot and there's probably two books that are not meant to be business or at least my type of internet business books one of them is the game of tennis it's a book about how to be great at tennis but it's it's sort of like how to be good at sports psychology but life psychology how to handle stress and not be down on yourself and then the other one is unreasonable hospitality because when i read the book i sort of wanted to become unreasonable at the rest of my life i remember reading the book and i was like this guy's an animal like he's he's he's really up tight about things that i am not up tight about and to be the best that i can be i need to be relentless it's interesting i think that the dichotomy of what's in there is to accomplish what we did there require this relentless pursuit of excellence right i mean that's that's kind of an in when you're trying to become the best at anything but what's wild was it wasn't the pursuit of excellence that actually took the restaurant over the top it was the relentless unreasonable pursuit of hospitality right like you push everything to get every detail so unbelievably perfect and then you do these messy things at the end to make people feel so very seen whether that's ob over every single garnish on a plate of crazy uber fine dining food and then recognizing that the thing that people will actually remember is a hotdog dog or whatever other random thing we did for people and so it's this quest for perfection and the acknowledgement that the most human moments are perfectly and imperfect and those are the stick of all and what what what's that story again exactly so it was a busier than normal lunch service i was clearing tables to help out the team and i was at a table of four there were foodie from europe in new york just to eat fancy restaurants since they've been to like you know l and danielle is jean george and per s and for anyone listening who does not know what those restaurants are just trust in how fancy the name sound dude the very ones and and this was their last meal they're going straight to the airport from the restaurant to go back home and and you guys just overheard that and while i was at the table they were raving about the trip and then one woman said yeah but we never had new york city hot dog and there was just one of those light bulb moments and i ran to the hotdog cart bought a hotdog dog brought in then came the hard part convincing my fancy chef to actually serve it and our in our restaurant but he cut up the hotdog dog put one little piece on each playable sw of ketchup up one of mustard a canal sour crowd one of re ish he like topped it off of the micro or or something to make it look all cool yeah and then before their final savory course which at the time was our honey lavender glazed musk duck i brought out well we in new york called the dirty water dog and i explained it i just said hey i ever overheard you before we didn't wanna let you go home with any culinary regrets here's that new york city hot dog and that they freaked out like i've been working in restaurants my entire life i'd to that point served tens of millions of dollars worth of wagyu beef and lobster and caviar i'd never seen anyone react to anything i'd served them like they did that and this was at eleven madison this was this is at eleven madison okay and for the the non new york non foodie audience eleven madison i think you guys wanted award that was like the world's world's best restaurant was that what the title was yeah yeah which is just that's that's that's a crazy thing that that even exists but you don't want it you won that such a ridiculous award and the book i think got a huge bump in the in the tv show of the bear because of the episode forks where the kinda loser cousin goes to one of your restaurants and he learns how to be great and he he learns how to be great in the most strange way when you're watching the show which is you polish the forks and if you polish the forks really well you're gonna be great at this other thing which means if it's gonna lead to this other thing and this other thing and then eventually it goes to when you're talking to a customer and you over here them i'm saying i love this restaurant and my visiting york has been amazing but i would really just love a hotdog hot dog i still haven't gotten one those yet and if you over hear a customer say that you run outside and you get them a hotdog hot dog and you present them in such a way that brings memories yeah and that's that that's the the point of the book and also a little bit about your background were you at eleven madison as up tight as or as like hardcore as the show the bear kinda of made it seem like do you do you have to perform and sort to be a dick to your staff in order to make them buy into this stuff listen i think to succeed in a restaurant as a leader the same lessons are true when it comes to succeeding in any other business i think the greatest leaders are those that when they walk into the room the people that work for them like check themselves a little bit they wanna make sure that everything is as it's meant to be and they smiled because they're happy that person's there right like when you when you're a leader that acts like a dick people are just scared of getting yelled at when you're an attentive leader that is thoughtful in holding people accountable people don't wanna make a mistake because they don't wanna let you down but can you walk me through a scenario because as a leader i have a bunch of employees i have this weird feeling of like well i don't wanna be like dislike too much and i i don't know if i should call this person out on this particular thing i don't know if i wanna pick that battle right now and so for all the listeners who i think i'm pretty average in terms of a lot of people feel that how i feel yeah can you walk to through like a conversation as to like a productive leader conversation that relates to holding people accountable you first of all yeah i i i think too many leaders focus on wanting to be like the people that work for us don't need another friend they need actually someone who's willing to step up and lead them and if you focus on doing that consistently they will invariably like you not dissimilar to when you try to build any sort of business if you focus so much on making money you're probably gonna do mediocre whereas if you just focus on building something great you're gonna end up making money yeah i i believe that the great cultures are those where feedback is normalized and when i talk about feedback obviously i'm talking about praise when you set crazy expectations for people in your team you better be there to celebrate them when they meet or exceed those expectations a on because it's the right thing to do but be because praise is addictive and when you receive some you wanna receive more but sometimes i fear that we focus so much on praise and think that that's the only way to build a great culture that we forget about how powerful criticism can be because if praise is affirmation criticism is investment the people that work for you definitively are there because they want to grow and become better versions of themselves and that means that if you aren't there to hold them accountable when they are not being the best versions of themselves you're not actually doing right by them i i don't think there are many things a leader can do that are more beautiful than being willing to step outside of your comfort zone for long enough to invest in someone else's growth now the only way it's an investment if it's done thoughtfully and i i have rules of criticism before you you say those rules just so i understand how many how much staff did you have in in some across all the restaurants oh eighteen hundred wow okay and was your retention better than industry standards dramatically so yeah do you you killed it there yeah we did well okay and what are the rules for criticism and by the way any of these individually they're they're pretty simple right a criticize and private you can praise as in public but criticize in private the the moment you criticize someone in front of their peer ears a while shame goes up they're not gonna receive the information you're delivering them two criticize the behavior not the person people inadvertently end up talking about the person's there's shortcomings as opposed to just focusing on the behavior itself that they're trying to correct three criticized consistently two often worry we don't we don't have the energy to call someone out for having done something and so we wait until the moments that we do but when that's the case two things become true one people aren't sure what right looks like because you only call them out every other time they do that thing or perhaps even worse people think you only criticized them when you're in a bad mood which brings a negative stigma to the exchange never use sarcasm and criticism a lot of younger leaders do that they think that if they make a joke out of it it'll be easier to swallow but joking around about sling as beautiful is investing in someone else's growth i think makes a fool of both of you i saw like like what's like what's an example yeah you know like when people are like hey maybe stop being so late like d like whatever trying to like so what would you say and said they said i you don't we said we we're gonna be here eight you aren't i don't like that can you please be here at eight tomorrow exactly without emotion yeah which brings you the next rule there's no there's no place for emotion in criticism it's emotional yeah the moment you bring emotion into it you're listening emotion in the other and the more someone is emotional when receiving criticism the more they shut down and then finally you better be praising everyone on your team more than you are criticizing them because if you're not one of two things that's happening one you you are just the person that has tendency to see all the things that are wrong more than you have the ability to see the things that are right or you have someone in your team that's just not doing enough things well to praise and in case you failed as a leader by letting of them stay there as long as they have alright so a lot of people will talk about how you need a million dollars and three years of experience to start of business nonsense if you listen to at least one episode on this podcast you know that it's completely not true my last company the hustle we grew it to something like seventeen dollars or eighteen million dollars in revenue i started it with like three hundred dollars my current company hampton does over ten million dollars in revenue started it with actually no money maybe twenty nine dollars or something like that nothing and so you don't actually need investors to start a company you don't need a fancy business plan but what you do need is systems that act shall work and so my old company the hustle they put together five proven business models that you could start right now today with under a thousand dollars these are models that if you do it correctly it can make money this week you can get it right now you can scan the qr code or click the link in the description now back to the show while were some early stories when you were figuring out unreasonable hospitality and then you implemented it and you're like oh man actually something is here not only does it make them feel good actually might make me more money yeah i mean the hot was the origin story you know you always hear your athletes go to the tapes when they've made a mistake to see what they did wrong to make sure they don't continue to do that thing what i don't think anyone does often enough is go to the tapes when they've done something right to make sure that they continue to do that thing that's how you put intention to intuition and in the hot dog we we did something as silly and simple as it was that was significant and it required being present enough to actually pick up on that it required realizing that we should stop taking ourselves so seriously because sometimes the sol things can be the most connective and it required acknowledging this idea that the gestures that are specific to an individual will always have the greatest impact and i i say one size fits one and and with that we put a system behind it so we hired an additional person to our team someone who was in the dining room with only one responsibility to be there as a resource to help everyone else bring their ideas to life and what was the what was their budget tell me everything this is where this is what i'm what i wanna know is the operations and in particular a lot of people are sitting we own internet companies or some type of a digitally company not necessarily traditional like a restaurant or traditional service industry so that this is where actually what i really really wanna know is operational this so tell me yeah so listen in the beginning we didn't put a budget to it it was just like hey guys just start doing it and like be reasonable don't like get like be unreasonable with the thoughtful but like we're not spending a thousand dollars on an idea for someone and what was this person's title the dream waiver the dream waiver okay and when were they making i don't know what restaurant salaries are they were probably making twenty five dollars an hour okay and their whole goal you said you said i don't know if you wrote out in a memo and the job description you said help everyone you're just there because okay so here's the thing having nothing to do with unreasonable hospitality like everyone has great ideas the difference between like the people that i think crush it in life and those that don't are the ones that actually decide to bring their great ideas to life right now the reality is is in the workplace in most high functioning organizations people don't have a ton of bandwidth this is this monthly true in a restaurant it's not like people have an extra thirty minutes in the middle of saturday night service to go work on a little art project this person was just there to create bandwidth so they were there anyone on the team had an idea they could go to the dream waiver and be like hey i need you to go out to the store and get a dvd for the movie seven on the fly or hey we need to find sled immediately or hey we need to go get the cotton candy machine from downstairs or hey does the toys to sell super soak can we get any of those right now whatever it was and that person was just there to execute now over time we started hiring the dream weaver from art schools so they could actually like do see their own craft work in the moment and we just let it fly there was one dream waiver the dream waiver was responsible for execution everyone on the team though was in their own way a dream waiver because they were the one responsible for idea yeah right it's the people on the front line that are actually connecting with the customers they're the ones that are picking up and the little things that you can run with the dream waivers were never given a set budget although every once in a while like one two months a year i would look at the dream weaver line item in the p and l and i'd say to the team hey guys let's rain in in a little bit what was the most expensive thing gosh the most expensive thing we ever did i don't know like we had these pictures of miles davis these giant photographs of miles davis in the kitchen one time a guy who actually worked for us because i always wanted to spend the most money on our own people because if they received this stuff at the highest level possible they were gonna be more inclined to turn around and come up with these things for other people right like until you know how good it feels to receive something you're not necessarily as inclined to wanna put in the work to to give it to others and he loved notorious bid g so we like reprinted all these giant framed photos in our kitchen a biggie which i mean that was probably six hundred bucks or something okay so it's not that much money no okay and how and what was the average i i don't i don't remember what it costs what was the average table spending two grand i was like four hundred a person okay and how many a night were you doing or how many per customer maybe well so here's the thing i just still unreasonable hospitality yeah the gestures of the the philosophy into three categories one size fits all one size fits some and then one size fits one and i think it's important just to explain this because we'll fit in the conversation one size fits all man that we looked at the entire experience every single touch point and identified how we could make as many of them as possible just a little bit more awesome so i'll give you an example the check write the check millions of restaurants in the world at the end of every one of those meals someone is bringing you a bill and yet spite of the fact that everyone shares that touch point i've never seen a approach with any creativity or intention yeah and it's a hard part of the meal to get right because a everyone gets really impatient the moment they ask for the check if it takes you too long to give it to them you've ruined the meal at the same time i can't drop it on your table but free ask for it otherwise you think a really you out it's especially hard to find dining restaurant because those are big checks the moment you realize how much it cost it's a little bit harder to just still love what you just had for that reason no innovation that we saw that as an opportunity to do something an overlooked touch point so when i knew you were done with your meal you hadn't asked for the check but i knew you were done i'd go over to your table with a glass for each person at the table and a bottle of cognac we pour just a splash of cognac and to each class and i'd say this is with my compliments in fact i'm gonna leave the entire bottle here please help yourselves to as much as you'd like and then i'd put the check down and say your check is here ready whenever you are it's a small change with a profound impact one no one ever had to wait for the check again b no one could ever think we were trying to rush them out i just gave you an entire bottle of free booze it didn't cost very much rarely do people to drink more than that splash and yet at the moment where we brought over that big bill we matched it with a gesture of profound generosity and by the way i've talked to people who dine with us back then we're serving some of the best food in the planet they don't remember a single thing they ate but they'll never forget how we made them feel when we gave them that bottle of cognac there was have you read the book influenced by robert cha no oh man it's like in this podcast with like a an entire reading list it's like considered the the the gospel when it comes to like influence which is related to marketing but like i read it as like a fourteen year old try to make girls but like and in that book robert chow tells a story where he he's basically like says like a a variety of principles for persuasion and he has studies and experiments to verify or or or or tell the story of each one and one of the stories is basically he had a waitress give someone the bill he had waitress b give someone the bill and a piece of chocolate and he had waitress c go here's your bill walk away five steps goes oh i almost forgot i got this chocolate for you and option c got more tips by a significant amount wow a huge amount and you know frankly i don't even remember which principal this this falls under i read this like fifteen years ago but i remember that one thing and so when you did that i this may not apply because i don't think you accepted but did you you if you if you did did you notice ra maturity for the weight weights out went up to the roof because of this just for sure for sure and by the way that's well documented cornell did a study they did one where they had they compared a thousand diners that give that little mint with the check to a thousand diners that didn't and the ones that did on average had eighteen percent higher tips i i just think general a city biggest generosity that is the rule of reciprocity by the way it's called the rule of reciprocity and and here's and here's how it states it basically to if i do a favor for you you will do a favor for me and it can be significantly out proportion but because you now feel like you owe me and humans hate owing someone and so i remember reading about this and i went and bought a motorcycle back then it was a very cheap motorcycle i think it was they wanted three thousand dollars or twenty five hundred dollars and i showed up a two cans of coke and i go hey yeah i'm ready to here at motorcycle i i met the guy on craigslist by the way like i was i just there's was a gas station here i got myself a coke you want one i thought you might want one and and i we had he had basically said like it's it's three thousand dollars that's the firm you know and i was like look the best i could do is twenty five hundred what do you say and he's like well here in nice guy you got me a coke you got my i'll do twenty five hundred dollars so that four hundred and ninety nine dollar win on the yeah yeah yeah yeah and that's sort of what it appears as though you did with the cognac and that's why was asking about if it went up because of of that gesture do you know was just on the on a zoom with do you know rory sutherland do you know who that is the marketing guy yeah yeah add add add agency executive yeah we were talking about this exact thing earlier today he he was talking about how he ordered a new mattress and pillows from some company and got they they just included like a duvet set or something and he's like honestly i'd feel guilty if i ever ordered a mattress from anyone else again but we're j that against had that same company said if you order a mattress and two pillows we will give you a duvet set because then now he thinks he'd earned it by virtue of having done what they said he needed to do and it's the i think it's reciprocity combined with surprise and delight you need to do it without saying you are going to do it in advance for it to have the impact you wanted to have did you call unreasonable hospitality back then what was like your mantra within the company unreasonable hospitality yeah did you notice that profits and revenue went up and do you think that was because of that yeah i think this is the okay yes profits and revenues went way up i think the everyone i've ever seen embraced these philosophies have seen financial benefit and yet there are some that are re to because it's that old adage what gets measured gets managed and it's hard to measure the impact of these things in the short term right you need to be willing to commit to ideas for long enough to see them really truly come to life because a the more of an emotional connection people have to what you're doing the more likely they are to return b whether it's the hot dog or sled or all these different things we did you are giving people stories to tell and every dollar i ever spent on unreasonable hospitality was far more impactful than any dollar i ever spent on traditional marketing because when you give them those stories to tell what do you think they're gonna they're gonna tell them over and over and over again well what did were you guys seeding those i mean like i the hotdog dog story like it got out were you the one who told everyone because if i am i gonna if i'm gonna do this i'm telling everyone i i've done it no we never we never told anyone we did the things in the moment the hotdog dog story got out when i wrote the book got it but i think if you do these things you can be pretty sure that people are gonna tell the stories themselves listen up the old playbook is slowing you down ai broke the funnel loop marketing fixes it it's a new era for marketers ai is capturing search traffic channels are fragmented and generating leads feels less predictable than ever before hubspot loop marketing playbook will guide you through this unprecedented disruption it's the system your marketing teams should use to move faster connect deeper and gross smarter the modern growth playbook for the ai era built by hubspot designed for today's marketer get the loop marketing playbook at hubspot dot com slash loop dash marketing to find out more and leave your competition behind alright back to the pot okay so that's one size fits one one size fits some is effectively using simple pattern recognition and the reality is in every single business there are things that happen over and over again they're not touch points they don't happen always for everyone mh but they happen sometimes for some people if you've ever gone to a casual dining restaurant with a kid and they give you the little pack of crayon and the coloring matt that is effectively pattern recognition they've realized kids come in if we have these on hand it will result in a better experience for the families as well as the children did you have a unique twist on that particular that think we did so many different things we had lego sets for a while we had like sketches for a while we we just cycled through different things but we did like full proper exercises where alongside the entire team we'd come up with list of these recurring moments and then get creative on how to make our reactions to them more awesome and by the way you you can't do these things effectively unless you do indeed involve the entire team there's the i call it famous because i think it's famous but the quote by david mark that in most organizations the people at the top have all the authority and none of the information while the people on the front have all the information and none of the authority in order to brainstorm like truly significant things within this space especially you need to bridge that gap between authority and information so were you holding like weekly all hands with all eighteen hundred people or sending emails no so eighteen hundred people was across the company we would we would do strategic planning restaurant by restaurant quarterly we did one big one a year but then there were all sorts of little meetings that would kinda be scattered through the but at the end of the day the number of ideas that came out of one day long strategic planning at the beginning of the year would generally take us about a year to implement all those ideas so you could get enough out of one day to really keep you going for a year and so you did well and and so one size fits some that is that that's the second one i'll give you an example of that there's my favorite a lot of people got engaged at a restaurant if anyone's ever got engaged at a re reasonable restaurant they poured you free champagne mh if they didn't you got engaged at the wrong restaurant but that's reasonable hospitality now that we'd had identified this we had an opportunity to make it as well more awesome this where we came up with tiffany and c had their offices across the park oh my god one day i whenever over there and knocked on doors until i found the chief marketing officer convinced her to give us one thousand of those iconic tiffany blue boxes yeah each with two champagne flute in them and put them in the back next time i'm so getting engaged we poured them free champagne and like we always would have but they wouldn't notice that their glasses looked a little bit different from everyone else's and at the end we'd give them the glasses they toasted that's awesome that's awesome again three things on that one was it less special for them because we had a much more in the back no two i have talked to people who got engaged with us who don't remember a single thing they ate but they will never forget that and three that one didn't even cost us anything i mean it cost tiffany a reasonable amount of money but i guarantee they've more than made up on that investment with all the tiffany things that have ended up on regis dude that's so good and then of course there's one size fits one which is the dream weaver stuff the reason i say all of them is because at eleven madison we would serve a hundred and ten people a night i couldn't do a dream weaver thing for every single person that came in there but between one size fits one one size fits some and one size fits all you better believe that everyone was walking out of there having had an experience that well i felt at least a little bit magical i used to run this company called the hustle it was the first company that i sold and it and and it was a pretty amazing company and i'm a self taught copywriter that's my that was my passion and the company was built on copyright and one of my philosophies was to alter what i called the forgotten text and what that means in practice is of a very specific example is when you would sign up like for your your conference website when you enter your email more often than not and ninety nine percent of cases customer will get an email from mailchimp or bee hive or convertkit whatever and it's gonna tell you thanks for subscribing click here to confirm and that's it it's just like the stock email yes i wrote the world's greatest welcome email and i'll have to remember it but it said the subject was look what you did you a little jerk and and the body it said i don't think you realized what just happened you just signed up for the best business newsletter on earth and immediately after doing that a bell went off in our office in say in in in san francisco and when that bell went off sarah wet and did twenty five push ups because she was so excited david went and took a shot for some reason and kevin is outside right now hugging an old lady because he's so excited look the i gotta go stop kevin but i just wanna let you know how excited i am that you gave us your email we are tirelessly working on tomorrow's edition i hope you love it and just know that we are working really hard to please you and it went viral that that went viral and then we took it a step further so when you unsubscribe from an email you often just see you are now unsubscribe and i stole this one from group po i'll tell you what group coupons was but group po which was an emailed letter company there was the intern sitting right there and it says here's what just happened when you unsubscribe and it was the ceo fake throwing coffee in the in the entrance face that said and it said like our intern kevin must have done something bad to make you unsubscribe i'm punishing him don't worry i'm on it if you wanna res subscribe and give us another chance that would mean a lot click here and so the point being is that we worked really hard so our pop ups set oh no not another pop up well look while you're here this situation is this this this company it's called the hustle it's my company i run it and we did this we did this newsletter give us your email if you wanna get the next day and so the whole website forgotten text i worked really hard to you forgotten text and we got so much backlinks or you know press because of it two first of one that's brilliant and in my like the way i see the world there's two reasons why i think it's especially brilliant one is obvious the one is well they're probably both obvious one is i believe the smallest enhancements to the most overlooked touch points and a guest experience can have the greatest impact on the experience as a whole because it is you saying very clearly to the people you serve we're are willing to care about things that no one has ever paused for long enough to consider i spent time with a an auto dealer group in california right when the book was coming out and i was talking to them about touch points and they thought i was you know when you think about like a classic car dealer and then i'm talking about unreasonable hospitality it was like oil and water in the beginning and i was like alright hey here i have question what happens a week after someone buys a new car when they open the glove open for the first time what's happening oh my god and they're like nothing i was like it's a touch point that's a part of the experience they did link super small they started after that putting a starbucks gift card in the glove compartment of every car that just said thank you so much your business you ever need anything give me a call and then whatever kevin the my gosh that's great they call me a year later they're like we have never seen a return as big on any marketing investment in the history of our of our or with it just like five dollars it was a fifteen dollar gift card tim but oh my gosh so the like the the smallest things to the parts that no one has ever thought about really make a difference and then b what i said about the hotdog dog like so many companies have become so focused on perfect brands that they've stopped pursuing people everyone is taking themselves too seriously and the moment you just let yourself be a little ci a little more human a little more connective it never fails that's so good i think you guys like this podcast for two reasons one is if you are building a business it's lonely and listening to sean and i we're sort of like your friends and the second reason is you know that we are builders we love building companies it's kind of our life's vocation so if you have a business that does at least three million dollars in revenue i think i know exactly what you're experiencing you've built a great business it's working and you finally have a second to look up you're young you probably run an internet company in your town there's potential that you're a freak that you have no one else to talk to about growing your company in fact when you even go out in public you probably don't even like telling people what you do for a living because you don't feel like explaining it if you fall in this category that means you're making the biggest decisions of your life ten twenty million dollars decisions all by yourself alone and without that push in my opinion the risk is not blowing up it's drifting into good enough territory into becoming mediocre and the worst thing that can happen to you is ten years from now you look back and you realized i missed this amazing opportunity i didn't grow i plateau in life and in business my company hampton we change that if you're running a company that does at least three million in revenue you can apply at join hampton dot com we vet you we curate you and we give you eight handpicked founders who have similar businesses similar sizes as you who will challenge you who will hold you accountable and who will give you perspectives that you cannot get anywhere else and this all happens in real life so check it out join hampton dot com slash network what are some other interesting stories of people who have implemented this and had almost like a turnaround because you're telling me these stories i'm i'm sitting here taking notes on and i'm not taking notes for this podcast i'm taking notes and what i need to tell my team because i'm like i'm so bought it like i get so fired up whenever i hear about this but the discipline of following through and and making it part of our culture that's it's quite challenging because you said you don't see results necessarily right away it might take a minute you're taking a little bit of a leap of faith so mean here's another one that i heard recently and this has been one of the one of the most fun things for me over the past two years is getting notes from like people that run funeral homes and prison systems and insurance companies and banks and nfl teams and everything in between about all the various ways in which they've manifested the ideas but i think this one's quite brilliant and it and it focuses on the beauty of making things mandatory just like the word criticism has been given a bad rep and i think it should be des so has mandatory we feel like if we make something mandatory for our people to do that it's a bad thing but i think when you make sling mandatory it's just a meta signal to everyone that works for you that this matters so there's a guy who owns two ups stories in sara soda and he read the book really fell in love it tried to figure out how to bring it to life in his space and i don't think anyone's ever woken up saying you know we're the most hospitable people in the world work ups stores right but he a big that's a big opportunity right exactly exactly so he made a rule he mandated that everyone on his team all the people that worked the register at the ups store had to one time per shift comp a customer up to call it forty dollars worth they had to and they had to write it when they were clocking out who they comp him why it was like a win win win in the most profound of ways a your customer you go to ups store and randomly you get comp for like shipping something you're copying something it's gonna blow your mind right you're gonna tell that story a bunch b it ended up being really good for the people that worked there like when you're working at a place like that you are not accustomed to being on the receiving end of profound appreciation and enthusiasm and yet we are all human beings those feelings energize all of us and when you get them it makes your day better full stop i don't care how too cool for school you present yourself as being but third and this is what i thought was so fascinating and when he explained it it made sense because it was good for the team they went from having to do it to getting to do it mh but only got to do it once so now they started engaging and getting to know everyone that came into the store so much more deeply to decide who deserved it the most who was having a hard day and needed something to go right who was having a great day and needed a cherry on top so even all the customers that did not receive the comp started having genuinely enjoyable experiences in those stores and i'm hearing about things like this all the time and it it's just it's just awesome that's great do you have a lot of the people who listen to this maybe they own an e com store so they run like a shopify site or they have a a a small software company it's only two or three guys do you have any examples of in particular website that you've gone to and you're like they nail it i mean i think the story of chewy and what they do is is just my favorite do you know do you what i'm about to say yeah so like chewy you know it's funny ryan cohen and the founder of chewy he's now more famous right now because of games and he's being there he's that's crazy the investor but third chewy and the premise was like amazing customer service and i think an example would be like if they heard that your dog died they would send you flowers or something like that yeah well certain i mean this is how it works you go into chewy you subscribe for your dog food right you set it up recurring order you never have to think about it again but eventually your dog is gonna die and the first thing you think to do is not to go on chewy dot com and cancel your dog food order so invariably a couple weeks later as you're mourning the loss of of your dog and now another bag of food comes yeah the worst the worst so now you call chewy then you cancel it and this is what they do every single time they obviously apologize for your loss they credit your account for that last bag of dog food they can't take it back for health code reasons they encourage you to give it to someone else who needs it and then two days later you get a bo k of flowers saying sorry for fear your loss now that's pattern recognition which would be what one size fits most some some some and maybe those flowers cost them fifteen bucks thing about dog people when lose a dog is normally just a matter of time before they get another one and the same way that rory isn't never gonna buy a mattress from anyone else i'd be hard pressed to imagine anyone ever buying dog food from anyone else ever again listen i think that unreasonable hospitality it happens at the intersection of creativity and intention it's being intentional enough to pursue relationships to seek out opportunities and to well care enough to find them and then to do something with them once you do and then creativity to just to try to figure out what is the most awesome way you can possibly come up with to respond i think it's just as much about creating an environment where your team feels energized and rewarded and appreciated as well because it's a two way street i i at least for me anyway there is nothing that energizes me more than when i get to see the look on someone else's face when they receive a gift i am responsible for giving them and when you create a culture like this you're giving everyone on your team the gift of just being able to give gifts and they don't always need to be lavish or expensive they just need to be thoughtful are there any other digital brands that i can go to and and and document or become a customer up and see how this is implemented well i consistently drawn to the in person examples but you asking me this makes me hey i feel like you're asking me what is a good movie that i've seen recently i never have the ability to remember them off the cuff but yeah i'm putting you on the spot and i can give you an easy out if you wanna needs easy yeah let me think are there any that i have the fact that we can't come up with any off the top of my head is kind of insane i think yeah which if i'm listening to this i'm like oh so the bar is low because by the way i will i'm gonna like i would call you out actually i would say so you run the thing called the welcome conference okay i'm gonna go to the welcome conference dot com i'm gonna go to your website i feel like we can make this un unexpectedly hospitable and make this even funny we're like we're like two weeks away unreasonable hospitality dot com the welcome conference dot com of releasing an entire new website for both of them because our website website's is kinda suck right now i'm not gonna lie it's it knew when i'm thinking about all this i'm like alright i gotta go implement into all this stuff but it's like shoot i gotta like go and like design the side and write it's it's it's hard it's a marathon seems a lot more fun to give someone for ups no but this is what i'll tell you like hey i i use the word magic a lot because i do believe when you do these things you're you're creating magic and there's this quote you know penn and teller my my favorite quote about magic comes from teller he says sometimes magic is just being willing to invest more energy into an idea than anyone else would deem reasonable nothing about this stuff is hard it does however require being willing to work harder i i was talking to a a buddy mind who's a magician and he was doing training for like the greatest friend ever to hang out with dude i have a lot of magician friends i got really yeah i dude they must have read the pickup up artist books that i used to because back that all those pickup artists books they tell you learn magic tricks their everyone says that works but i don't think for many of these guys have worked until more recently but he he was hired to go train paul rudd magic i think for ant and so it goes to the director's house hey and his assistant code to hang out for a day with paul rudd and and the director and they go through a bunch of magic tricks they're showing him teaching him about to do it the whole thing and at the end they're about to leave the directors like come on show me your best trick he's like well i kinda just showed you all my stuff and the guy's is like no come on your best trick and he's like alright do you have a backyard and they go on the backyard and he says to paul he goes hey can you just point into the yard any direction in this yard kinda like ge behind the house and name a card ace two three four five six seven eight nine ten jack queen king and the suit so like paul said like eight of hearts and pointed so they walk out that direction they says to his assistant hey give me the shovel the assistant reaches into his bag gives him the shovel he digs into the ground pulls out the ada hearts out of the ground oh my god now he's not just there to do magic tricks where paul ready is there to show him how to do magic so he shows him a video of them at the guy's house the night before digging holes and bearing all fifty two cards in the the lawn no shit he did it as a grid so no matter where paul did he could figure it out there was a lot of work that paul's reaction when he pulled an eight of hearts out of the ground made all that work worth it why that's what magic is and that's what i think hospitality when pursued unreasonable has the capacity to be man that's awesome do you love being an author significantly more than running a restaurant because one sounds way easier than the other it's interesting i i don't know i mean i loved what i did like i loved it like i love working like a man act to build a world and then getting to stand at the front door of that world and welcome people into it it's one of my favorite things i don't get the gratification now of like sitting in someone's living room and watching them read the book like there i got the gratification of watching people experience the thing that i'd built but i bet you it's it's been a nice seasonal of life i mean i don't know the finances is i bet you it's made a really good living and it's been nice to so that's my point end i love this it's hard for me to compare which one i love more but i certainly don't miss it like i don't miss what i did because i'm so loving what i'm doing now right and what are you doing now you're you're you you wrote the book you i imagine mentioned you're speaking and you had the conference so i have welcome conference in new york we do an unreasonable hospitality summit and nashville i write a newsletter called prem that comes out every other week so you you own a media company kind of yeah i'm also a writer and a producer on the bear now which is fun i didn't know i thought it was just for that one episode was i started riding and producing the following season is that awesome man that's sounds awesome dude so fun and that whole team is just the best and what's that mean what's the actor saying jeremy ellen white i mean he seems awesome he is a awesome then just be wildly talented and exceptionally humble so do you get to hang out with all these guys and do see how it's made we might think of when john i'm in chicago on set with them and maddie madison i think he's fan fantastic he's the best he is a ridiculous and incredible human being that's so cool there's a whole in there's all these instagram there's this idea in men's fashion or men wear and the idea is like for certain people if you try too hard it's like the clothes are wearing you you're not wearing the clothes yeah yeah yeah and there's all and it it's called expresses sp yes f and then there's manny math in who's always wearing in the club like he's and there's and and he's the example so press spreads i've talked about this pod it's a italian where it basically just means efforts effortlessly cool which is like it's like two thousand dollar beautiful soup but you're wearing like dirty boots and because of that you're cool i'm not i don't have that by the way i'd like i'm not i don't have that grasp on men wear i wear like a two certain jeans at this clinton yeah yeah yeah yeah you you kinda had it in a way because of because of your company and and maddie madison already when listening in the bear he's i don't what's his name the bear fact and he is kinda they kinda portray him is this kinda silly goofy doo guy but in reality he is like a like a very quick area guy and he's huge she's a he's a big person but he's got tattoos all over his face wears the coolest is clothes on instagram yeah but it doesn't look like clothes that he went and bought from a thrift shop it looks like clothes that he's own for twenty years and they got this beautiful like wear on it and looks like he just wakes up and magically a new outfit was like draped upon him in the middle of the night by some theory yeah he's got it so he he he's like that in real life no yeah he's he's amazing he's so he's so sweet well and what's crazy is i'm sure you could speak to this and would like to hear some stories in this but people in the restaurant industry if you own a restaurant it seems like most of them who are quote successful they're actually still kinda broke and they're working their asses is off yeah i mean here's here's the problem i think there's a couple problems a lot of people that open restaurants didn't like work their way up through the business in a way to make sure they really understood the business side of restaurants it's like anything i don't think you can succeed financially unless you are willing to be as creative in pursuit of making money as you are in pursuit of the experience you're building for people i think a lot of restaurants are just too small and the economics of a small restaurant are just hard to really make work until you start opening so many restaurants that you're running around like crazy and you're so distracted that the quality of the restaurants start to suffer now there are some people that have done it extraordinarily well and have figured out how to balance art and commerce and who who do you put in that bucket i mean kevin va and rob cad they have a company out of chicago called the boca restaurant group i think they have like thirty six restaurants or something right because here's the reality okay you need a good general manager to run a restaurant right like you need someone that's great at taking care of the guest and managing the team and honestly the skills that are required to do that well are not that different whether you're working at a forty d seat bi row or a sixty seat three michelin star restaurant and yet and then the cost of that person these days is is somewhere between depending on what market you're in ninety thousand dollars to a hundred and eighty thousand dollars it's not that biggest swing and so you can be doing five million dollars a year paying that or twenty million dollars a year paying that right and the margins just become really really really hard when you're not doing a volume and so like you can do volume if you're doing fast casual chick f a mcdonald's over the course well what do you say volume do you mean like the number of seats at take like literally just the number of customers number of seats and times in average check gotcha so just the the we we to a ao so like the the average customer yeah yeah a value and so and like it doesn't take that much more work to run a fifteen million dollar year restaurant than it does a five million dollar a year restaurant and so like what's the difference so like you're just saying it doesn't take that much work to get the average customer order to be a hundred dollars versus or the difference between running a hundred dollar head restaurant versus a twenty dollar head restaurant is not significant the amount of work that goes into it is not that different nor is the amount of work that goes into running a twenty seat restaurant versus an abc seat restaurant you need the same number of general managers the same number of chefs do you need some more obviously your variable expenses are gonna be higher but most of the fixed costs are relatively the same your rents gonna be higher on a bigger restaurant but these are all such small percentages compared to the top line that i always encourage people when they say they wanna open a restaurant to work in one for long enough to actually make mistakes on someone else's time before they go to open one and then to open one that's big enough that it actually is worthwhile doing if i had to guess you have a notes on your iphone where you have all of these interesting restaurant concepts or angles or sound bites that are interesting to you and you don't wanna do that now and you may never do them but they they fasten you is there any is that true and if yes is there anything on that list that you could talk about i mean listen i i think that the fashion of restaurants is not dissimilar to the fashion of jeans right like we want skinny jeans then fat jeans with skinny jeans then fat jeans and it kind of the pendulum shifts back and forth i think for a little while their restaurants started getting way too complicated and i'm excited about the return to simplicity that's happening right now where people are realizing that with everything going out of the world the human moments need to be as human as humanly possible and the places i'm drawn to like there's a restaurant in new york city called res and it's just unbelievable pasta in a beautiful room served delight well i'm i'm drawn to more the kind of restaurant that creates the conditions for genuine connection i was just with my wife and six friends and we we rented a house meekness in greece last week and the people that own the house every morning we'd wake up and they'd set this long table for us with breakfast so there's greek yogurt and fruit and some bacon and eggs and a fresh loaf for bread every morning and we'd sit down and no one had to order anything and it was like this beautiful moment i feel like that's a restaurant that doesn't exist yet and i would love to see it exist like where you just sit down with the people you love and the food just there and just get into it i i want i'm drawn to go to and perhaps and my imagination when i have to deal with the realities of actually doing it dream about building restaurants that are less about impress people by what you can do and more just extending an invitation for them to reconnect with one another last couple of questions did you i've heard stories and i am i respect the food industry but like i that's not my passion you know i i'm a very i'm a much simpler eater and what little i do know is like i've read stories about like the the michelin and star thing and and how like some chefs will like end up giving it back because they play to the critics sometimes and it kinda becomes overwhelmed overwhelming for a variety of reasons did you ever feel when you're when you were building a restaurants did you ever feel the tension of playing for critics and awards and playing for customers and also doing things that you just think because they're dope yeah it was attention that i felt more acutely earlier in my career and and our journey towards success than i did later i think in the beginning lesson you have to play the game a little bit of course i think is the same no matter what industry you're in the you can't get people to pay attention to you unless you've achieved some level of critical success and that means doing the things that you aren't necessarily inclined to want to do in order to get to where you need to get so like give you an example i my first big goal was i wanted four stars in the new york times there's only seven restaurants in new york with four stars we needed to get that that was the starting point once you're a four star restaurant then you're gonna be full all the time and if you wanna be the best at something that's the first stop along the way especially if you well not especially if you are in new york now when i looked to the forest star restaurants at the time they were all on like the upper east side they're were all in midtown they were like fancy places and so i don't believe there should be a dress code in a rush restaurant i think that you're there to invite people as they are but we had to have a dress code we had have we never were jackets required but there was like a proper dress code no hats no t shirts whatever it was the day we got four stars the dress code went away like there were certain things we had to do in order to get a seat at the table and then once we were there we had the freedom and the confidence to start doing things our own way over time what i learned was that if i consistently was delivering the thing i wanted to receive it was always gonna resonate more with the world and so playing the game got us to a pretty good level but starting to just do what i wanted to do and not what i thought other people wanted us to do was the thing that ultimately got us to the top one of my kinda joys of this podcast is finding people who our listeners don't already know and we kinda like you know we we we said like this this we we put our stamp like this person's is amazing and and hopefully hopefully in some way we're like a little bit of a pacemaker because we have we have shown them something new yep you're already a huge deal and you are you've been circling around the business circle and everything for for a while we definitely haven't it discovered you but it it would give me so much joy if someone listens to this it feels inspired because they hadn't previously heard about you and and and and now know about unreasonable hospitality just for the sake of excellence of pursuing excellence and that's something that i'm very passionate about right now i wasn't always passionate about that and now i i don't think that comes naturally to me for for a long time my attitude was it's good enough move forward aggressively move forward and i'm trying to fight that now i'm trying to be more excellent and i hope that the listener because i know i feel this way yeah whenever i talk to you whenever i read about you whenever i listening to a podcast with you i feel that i feel the need to be more excellent than i currently then i've currently been behaving thank you ma'am thank you and i and i hope we've given that to to our audience well anyone out there listening who this is the first time we've run into one another it's good to meet you kinda do yeah what do you what do you wanna promote do you have anything where what do what did you what's your social media platform mode preference if any yeah the the two things i'm excited to promote are a the newsletter premium which is one of my favorite things to do like it is the stories that i shared today it's me sharing one of these stories every couple weeks just things i'm seeing out the world that inspire me you can sign up for that at unreasonable hospitality dot com and then second my next book unreasonable hospitality the field guide which is like my version of a workbook to really like go through with a team and bring these ideas to life comes out april of next year but is available for pre order now and i'm so excited about it i just sent it up to prem and i'm absolutely gonna buy that i would love that that seems to be the thing now in the book industry is having like a workbook to a accompany of the book we made much harder on ourselves than we needed to it's like this four color it's almost like a graphic novel version of a workbook i did it with this design firm called invisible creature they've done work with like nasa and pixar and oh i love the i love workbook i'm i i fall for it every time and the i just had it for prem you're welcome email i'm actually i don't even wanna to say what it is because hopefully you'll get more subscribers you're welcome evil fantastic thank you like i've i've only obviously doing this i can't read the whole thing but like i'm seeing like the i've i've read the first sentence i'm hooked and i'm scrolling i'm like oh this is a whole story here's the background this is awesome there we go dude that's that's high praise yeah the website sucks but the welcome email is okay but the website absolutely does not suck i would just i just messing him with you this is awesome we appreciate you thank you so much 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 it like a day's on on a less travel quick break because as you know we are on the hubspot podcast network but we're not the only ones there's other podcast podcasts on this network too and maybe you like them maybe you should check them out one of them that wanna draw your attention to is called nudge by phil ag and whether you're a marketer or a salesperson and you're looking for the small changes you could make the new habits you could do the the small decisions you could make that will make a big difference that's what that podcast is all about check it out it's called nudge and you can get it wherever you get your podcast

alright this episode is a billy of the week me and sam are so inspired by this one story this one entrepreneur i'm almost like slightly intimidated sam by the story it's like oh my god the bar has been raised of what i need to go do the person who we talked about i pray this makes it to them and i pray that they come on the pod and after listening to this you're gonna agree that we happy to get them on man also the last two minutes of this podcast we need you guys to listen we left you guys a message yes alright enjoy i feel like i could rude where to i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on the roll this is the most inspiring business that i saw when i was looking in the world to sports so there's a lot of things that made a lot of money this one not only makes a lot of money i literally in my notes wrote down in all caps this guy deserves a billion dollars and i wanna be like him i don't even think i've ever had that thought before right like you know there's a lot of people who hate billionaires there's i don't i'm not like that at all i think it's great you know create successful business but i've never heard a story and thought goddamn we need to give it's like if there was a nobel prize for business we need to give it to this guy this guy we're gonna talk about it's one of these stories that i think i know all about it and then i go in like deep dive and i'm like so much better than i thought yeah so much more to know it's also another one of those stories where i almost didn't wanna talk about it because i thought that like everyone has talked about it but it's just too good and there's more to it than i even realized and i wanna have them on so i was like should we sell the whole story but well whatever gotta do it okay here we go we're talking about savannah bananas so this is a business in baseball this story is pretty incredible so should we tell it from beginning middle to end or where where should i start here yeah let's give a let's give an origin story than where they are now okay actually i'll start with the where they are now that we'll go to the origin story so the where they are now is the most impressive metric they have a three million person waiting list to buy tickets to their events you can't buy it if you want to you basically have to win the lottery in order to go to their event now and that's kind of a you know this is a business that's probably worth close to a billion dollars i would say based on what i could tell and it's about a hundred million in revenue i think they do between seventy and a hundred million in revenue it's my guess i don't know what that would be worth but it's definitely plausible that it will be worth a billion dollar soon if it's not already it's got more social they got more followers on tiktok and social media that follow their their brand their team than every single professional baseball team including the yankee of the red sox and the dodgers combined all combined these guys up more more engagement so the it's is a very very impressive okay so what's the origin sword of the savannah banana so starts off with this guy jesse and jesse the founder he's himself like a college baseball player he wants to go like you know he wants to make it and i think he gets on to like a college summer team or i really cape cod it's called the it's called cape cod summer league it's like the premier like summer league for am based premier is so generous like that's like saying we're the premier podcast of of the world like premier so there's majorly league baseball then there's like triple double single a then there's like another thing and then there's college summer leak under all that does me filming this from my bedroom not screen premier yes i'm like his mother's bedroom or something i don't know what's going on so so he he's playing and then basically as he moves up in competition he's bench basically he's like not good enough to play it's like better players and he realized realizes well he's sitting on the bench she's like man to swore i loved and i've you know built my life around had so much fun doing like man when you're watching it's pretty boring like guess it's really fun for the ten guys out there but damn baseball pretty boring to watch he said one story he goes i'm on the team and i'm supposed to be like in it and this is so boring what is going on yeah so he just has this t this realization and anyways he gets his first job as a general manager for a college summer league team it's called the gaston g not not we're not even at the savannah bananas yet he's he he gets to manage this team now you might think about how this young kid get to be the gm of this college summer leaked team well the team averaged two hundred fans per game and had like two hundred and sixty eight dollars in the checking account so you know this team was basically on the brink and was struggling he comes on he's not even gonna get paid at the beginning and he's gonna be a manager team and so he immediately starts hustling like any entrepreneur does he starts thinking alright how are we gonna turn this we gotta get fans to come to the game buy tickets we gotta sell some you know merge we what are we gonna do how we gonna actually get this to work and so he starts doing a bunch of things that you know he starts getting innovative so he by day he's working this job and by night he's reading books about disney and pt barn and you know the wwe and the u c and apple and then you know even things like the grateful dead and the beatles like how did they build their fan base and he starts trying things and he starts trying all kinds of fun you know hey how about a fan comes out and throws out the first pitch hey what if we what if we do this you know this this promotion where you know dollar hot does what little things like that and it starts to work it so i'll fast forward through this party basically starts to turn around the gaston g turns it from a team that's about to go out of business to like you know small amount of cash flow but again this is a summer league team they're basically like you know they play thirty games it's only in the summer there's only so much they're gonna be able to do but he's yeah he's doing well he's doing well with it he had like good ideas there was like a dig to china night and i read about this or listen to it on the acquired podcast and they're like so you what did you do he was like well i put a ticket to china or like a gift certificate or something like that to buy a a one way ticket yeah and they're were like so danny would ticket he's like well no it was a one way ticket and there was no accommodation so no one actually went but basically after the game came like got come out of crowd and dig to china yeah so he does things like that that he had like a grandma beauty pageant contest he did like cute stuff like that yeah and it it actually starts to work and so he turns around the attendance and he's like i'm gonna do anything i can to make noise so he's like how do i hijack existing new stories so in baseball of the time there's a big scandal around h g h so human growth hormone and he's like okay we need to get in on the story so he's like we fired our mascot the the bear the g bear he's like for taking bg for bg bear growth hormone and he's just doing anything you can to drum up any kind of interest in this stuff and it starts to work and he basically spends nearly a decade this is one thing i didn't understand i didn't actually know he spends about ten years tinkering and experimenting with these things before he ever he's like i had one media story cover me in my first ten years he's but i got to experiment you know i got i got to do things and along the way what happens so he ends up meeting his wife so he he ends up meeting his future wife how did he do that well he's like i need to he's like i wanna a network and i wanna get to know people in minor league baseball the one rung up from where he was so he decides to host a free seminar and he gets smiley league baseball people to come and he's telling them all about grandma beauty pageant and bear growth hormone and the dig to china and they're like what the hell this guy talking about he's like hey we turned attendance from two hundred fans a game to like a few thousand people per game right like we ten next we ten plus art our average game attendance and they're like okay well maybe this guy's not so crazy and there's a woman there from ka rip and baseball and she calls one of her employees and she's like hey i think her name's is emily she's like emily i just met your a future husband and she's like what she's like i just met this guy he's as crazy and passionate it and like nuts about baseball as you are look you gotta meet this guy just call them talk to this idea and they do and so he he ends up hiring her and for the first year they're just like you know like totally whatever the they just keep it professional whatever but eventually they end up dating he ends up proposing to her at one of the games on the field she says yes and she's as like part of the like proposal they're happy she's like oh i'm gonna play a weekend trip to savannah and we're gonna go savannah georgia we'll just have fun there and so they go from i think they're were in south carolina they go from south carolina to georgia and while they're there she's like hey you know this is their idea of romance she's like let's go check out this minor league baseball stadium and they check it out and they're and they're just blown away they're like wow this is it's like field dreams they walk in and they're like this is an incredible place i could feel the history i could feel feels like babe played here like this is incredible we gotta have a stadium like this and they approached the stadium owner and they're like hey is there any availability they're like no no we rented out to this minor league baseball team so like okay if anything ever changes they ever leave you call me and they're like aren't sure buddy and sure enough like i don't know a year later or something like that the minor league baseball team goes to the city and demands like we want a new stadium we need like a thirty five million dollar stadium and the mayor was like dude you're minor league baseball team we're not giving you a thirty five million dollar stadium and so they pack up and leave and they call this guy and he comes and he basically cuts a deal to sign a twenty thousand dollar a year lease to create a team in savannah georgia alright so a lot of people they'll talk about how you need a million dollars and three years of experience to start a business nonsense if you listen to at least one episode on this podcast you know that it's completely not true my last company the hustle we grew it to something like seventeen dollars or eighteen million dollars in revenue i started it with like three hundred dollars my current company hampton does over ten million in revenue started it with actually no money maybe twenty nine dollars or something like that nothing and so you don't actually need investors to start a company you don't need a fancy business plan but what you do need is systems that actually work and so my old company the hustle they put together five proven business models that you could start right now today with under a thousand dollars these are models that if you do it correctly it can make money this week you can get it right now you can scan the qr code or click the link in the description now back to the show have you been to a minor game like this i've never been to a mind have you yeah i i went to been to the cape cod league the games that i've been to to say that like you're buying a team that's like a little ambitious like it's it's very grassroots it's it's bleach you're missing the things that high school and call high school has my kid is playing that's a pretty strong draw that's why you're go right that's why i'm going and in colleges i go here it's us that's we minded league baseball doesn't have either of those advantages right yeah no it it's like pretty wack it's like i mean you really have to care about baseball and like while all this is going on we've had dan from overtime on yeah and he's kind of explained that basically like basketball and football has killed it lately because they understand highlight reels and they understand action and they're doing a really good job of telling some stories baseball doesn't so over the last like fifteen years the social media has gotten popular baseball has absolutely gotten left behind a bit ran you know it's supposed be america's pastime time it's not really america's pastime time at at the moment in my opinion and like it's like go add past it's definitely the past it's the it's it's a past the time for sure just like push face like five times between those two words and so yeah it it's ambitious to say that he was like buying to me i think he said when he bought the team that he was like we bought it but it's really just like seller financing meaning the guy like gave it to me and i gave him a small percentage of some profits which there was basically none yeah exactly i think that was maybe the first team and this team they they kinda like it was they didn't buy an existing team they created one as part of like the coastal plane league but they owed the league like a few hundred thousand dollars to to like start this expansion team basically but he had a little reputation from the g release right he a little he had something which is why he was able to convince the stadium to give him the lease and the the league to give him a team but now he's gotta make it happen and so he starts and it doesn't start well i think in the first few months he said he sold literally two tickets and he's like it was awful like we couldn't give away the tickets and so he he tried to like hosted a fan event and he i promoted it he's knocking on doors he going on radio and he's trying to promote this fan event for the new team of savannah it was called like the savannah minor new league baseball team it was not called the savannah bananas yet he's like so few people showed up to our fan of event that the conference center they like didn't even charge me for the food they felt so bad like they felt so bad how poorly the event to went it and basically these guys run out of money so they're like they're on the brink guys being the husband wife and his wife sorry the and his wife they're they're running out of money and his wife is like alright let's sell the house and he's like what and she's like yeah let's do it we are all in and so they sell their house they move into a garage that's kinda turned into a studio apartment they sleep on a twin air mattress and he's like dude we were sleeping in socks every night like he's like you know nobody sleeps in socks we had to sleep mattress twin air mattress at a twin mattress they use all their savings they they just try to keep the team alive and he's like i dude i kept going because he's like i would read books and he's like walt disney went bankrupt with his like i forgot i was gonna like laugh mat or whatever his thing was called he's like pt barn and i'm struggled like this is just our struggle era like this is our struggle season like we you will do this we gotta coin that term this is our struggle season yeah exactly the pain cave he's in the pain cave and he's decides he's like okay first thing we need to do is we need to come up with a team name and so they do he's like alright we're gonna go to the community because he's trying to get the community on their side community didn't didn't rely really like them they had lost their mind a league baseball team and instead they had this like college like this like this other team that was like you know the savannah baseball team and so he's trying to get them on board and so he has like a naming contest and a sixty two year old nurse submits the name and it was mostly names like the pirates and like just like standard baseball team names right like nothing out of the ordinary the sixty two year old nurse submits bananas and he's like savannah bananas i like it everyone's like no you can't do that he's like he's like and we have he's like we have the the bananas that's our dance team it's a it's a bunch of grandma bananas he's exactly and then we have male chew the man bananas and he starts coming up with all these ideas about like how he's gonna use this and he ends up like i think he goes to a design agency did you hear this part like there's a lot of this by the ways from the acquired podcast that did great job with sitting down with him so shout out to her to our friends at acquired podcast but one of things he talked about is like he they were skim on everything right sleeping on the air mattress but he's like the brand is gonna really matter for this and so he goes to an agency they quote him twelve thousand dollars he's like cool me and my wife live off forty dollars a week right now so i don't have i don't have a thousand i don't definitely don't have twelve of those thousands like i don't really know what i'm gonna do here and so they're like dude we can't do that just make simple logo we'll just do it ourselves he's like no like this is gonna be the logo that we print on everything like i gotta find a way to do this hands ends up paying for it he gets the logo and he's like so proud of it which is kind of amazing because now you know years later days they do like tens of millions like twenty thirty million a year and just merged sales right like the brand is totally taken off is it the same logo i don't know if it's exact same or if they like touched it up but the the core if it's this the same so anyway he starts doing and and he starts basically coming up with all these different ways to to make baseball less boring right so like what does he actually do so he's like alright he studies at the end to end experience of an event so he's like first of all when you buy the ticket you see the ticket price is whatever eighty dollars but then when you check out it's like ninety eight and because all these fees and taxes or whatever so savannah bananas here's what we do it's a flat twenty five dollar ticket and we pay your taxes so you will you it's twenty five dollars and you pay twenty five dollars so that and they pay out millions of dollars a year just paying the the sales tax for their fans which is like kind of amazing but it says something like about what they represent and you know i think their company name is even called like fan first in inter you know llc a fan first entertainment or something like that that became the north star he's got this quote where he was like i read that like in order to get big muscles you gotta like you know flex your muscle and work out every day and i needed ideas and so i had this thing where i was like i think he said starting in two thousand sixteen right when the savannah banana got going like i'm gonna write down ten new ideas every single day because it's easy to do five or three a day but once you get to six seven eight nine ten you really have to start working hard and i needed to flex that muscle every day because i needed really good ideas all the time to figure out how to make this great and i think around this time when he's doing me give you the exact quote on that so he goes i started an idea book in twenty sixteen at ten ideas a day a lot of bad ideas seventy eighty percent terrible but you gotta work your idea muscle and by the way this is everybody says the same thing wait go listen to the mister beast podcast we did he's like every day i would wake up and it would come up with twenty thirty forty youtube video ideas he's like i just realized that the idea of what the video is about is the most important thing so i'm gonna think of more ideas i'm gonna open up a dictionary at the source go to a random page whatever word i pick i'm gonna a brainstorm and on the podcast we did with him we pulled up a random more generator and we started pulling up or putting random words and he started coming up with video ideas on the spot he's like i've been doing this since i was twelve dude this is awesome and i think what i didn't realize was around this time when it got going it was a real baseball team so they're they're still playing normal baseball but then he was like okay what all is boring about this he's like can you believe that this is supposed to be an athletic sport and you can walk someone like they just get to like walk like they could walk to base that's ridiculous or he was like he said i brought my stopwatch and i timed how long it took a pitch to like get to you know the picture to like get going and then for a strike or hit to happen and i noticed that the the the batteries can step out of the box ridiculous such took twenty seven seconds every time and like starts like nailing the experience down perfectly because it's sort of like when you own a baseball team you're like oh no it ain't broke we're not gonna fix it like just don't worry about any of that nonsense and he was like no no it's all broken everything is broken just figured actually the the more accurate thing is it's broke but that's always that's the way we've always done it exactly it's very drives like ninety percent of the world right now yeah broke it's the way we've always done things so he comes up with all these crazy ideas and i didn't realize all of the rules but it was something like file balls caught by fans count as being out walks are or or or the fourth ball is you still have to sprint and i think you can get called out games you and the defense has to they throw the ball amongst all the all the defenders have to basically touch the ball in order in between a walk you know what i mean that's great if you put you're ejected because there's nothing wimp beer than a bun and then he also says games have to be capped at two hours and on that podcast he was like everyone said it had to be two and a half hours it had to be this and was like no but children need to be home at bed by this time and it's gonna be a family event therefore it has to be a strict two hours and he called the whole thing i didn't realize they had a name it's called bin banana and so yeah first it was like now they have that kind of their own format of a game basically and now they're have their own league and all the so it definitely elevated over time but yeah he did he did all those six he also would do things like they he has a team his team would basically i started off with he would watch security footage after the game so he's like oh i could use the cameras in the stadium and i can see when people leave i could see when they get bored i could see when they go to the sea i could see how long the concessions take and so he started furiously watching security footage to understand the fan experience and now today he has a team that basically they take a snapshot of every all the bleach every like i forgot like what interval like every ten minutes fifteen minutes or something like that in orders so he could see when people get bored when they get disengaged when they leave and he uses that then he reversed years okay what's going on in the game right now and how do i like do that better not to mister disrespect again but he did remember when we were sitting there he was showing us the same thing about his videos right he's like here's the retention curve and like see this dip and we're like yeah so what a was a little wiggle he's like no no that dip is like three million people stopped watching the video he's like the dip this dip this is horror he's like this is the worst thing in the world is this dip was like what is that that's the ad read because he's like so we need to make our ad read as entertaining as the content and the takeaway that i had with mister beast then as well as when i have with this guy is you say to yourself when i get big i'll worry about that stuff it's the other way it's the other way around you were you worry about that stuff and then you get big yeah the there's you you remember like the steve jobs quote about like what his his product strategy basically and he used to say everything had to be insanely great if you've talk people who work with steve jobs they say he used to always say this phrase insanely great and normally when people hear insanely great hell yeah i'm gonna do that because they're focused on the word great and nobody can disagree with yeah who doesn't want great i want great you want great we all want great fantastic it's the insane part that's the part nobody wants to do that's the price tag when you go look at the thing like are you willing to be like kind of insane about the level of details right steve jobs basically saying we're not shipping the macintosh because the inside casing of the machine is not finished and they're like steve nobody's ever gonna see the inside he's like but we saw it it's you know like so we're not shipping this until that's finished it's like it's a little insane right you you you're gonna try to do insane things you know when when they were doing the iphone i remember there's like all these stories about the touch keyboard or so they were like steve like we'll put a little keyboard on there they're like the blackberry he's like no we're not doing the keyboard they're like well but steve you know blah blah like you know we could do this digital keyboard but it's not so great and he's like no we need to make it and it needs to be standing the great and they thought like we don't even know if this is technically possible we're not just we're not trying to be lazy here but he's like that's what we're doing so you gotta figure it out that's the job and you know it's it's the insane part of insanely great that actually matters listen up the old playbook is slowing you down ai broke the funnel loop marketing fixes it it's a new era for marketers ai is capturing search traffic channels are fragmented and generating leads feels less predictable than ever before hubspot loop marketing playbook will guide you through this unprecedented disruption it's the system your marketing teams should use to move faster connect deeper and gross smarter the modern growth playbook for the ai era built by hubspot designed for today's marketer get the loop marketing playbook at hubspot dot com slash loop dash marketing to find out more and leave your competition behind alright back to the pot well i had two takeaways from reading about this skype but the that's the first one which is so i i mean i i run a business you run businesses and the hard part is whether to be a dictator or like an elected official like do you just tell people this is what we are doing get on board or do you delegate and say let's surface some of the best ideas and we'll kinda figure out what to do and this guy does not seem him like he takes the first route he seems like he has a vision and he says this is what we're doing how wonderful is this let's do it and oftentimes when you have a company i will say ideas and people shit on it and they'll say here's all of the reasons why we can't do it and you know the phrase like look do you just wanna a yes man or what and i'm like yeah i do i want a yes man i just that's all i want i want a yes man and that's what this guy kinda did like dude have you heard some of his other stories like there's there's this guy jesse he's got so many like layers and layers of little stories like for example i think at the game i'm i've actually never been doing a game but i think at the game they have like the eleven rules and he's like we did he's like what he said we picked eleven because k which is stands for strike out and potassium which is what is in a banana that's the eleventh letter in the alphabet like there's like all these like weird symbolism where if i told that employee that they'd be like dude can you just like leave my office it let me like design this logo yeah dude i feel you when you're like you have an idea that's like a little either it's just i can't prove that this is right like nobody can prove it's an un unfavorable thing or it seems like a little much right and you know may maybe it's seemed maybe it's even something that's un serious like maybe we should be focusing on the sirius things and this is like this is extra in some way but you're convinced that later you know you feel like this will be cool if we do it this will be special if we do it will be unique if we do it and the amount of energy that it takes to kinda like bring people on board is so hard that you know what i did i basically changed my criteria of who i hire i realized i could not change myself to turn that switch off and i can't change like the process where i'm like no i will just like magically change people's minds like i so i basically changed my criteria for hiring where i you know i i used to have the buffet thing which is like energy intelligence integrity like those are the three things you want and i just added the fourth one which is like are you down and i'm basically like are you just down where if we just have an idea you're down to do it that doesn't mean you say yes to every idea that's not what that means it just means like look sometimes there's no evidence sometimes this is extra sometimes this is unproven and sometimes this sounds bad but like we gotta try and have some faith that like we're gonna figure it out as we go like sometimes this sounds way out of our league and we're punching way above our weight but like why not they wait why not try this and so like and which is you've met ben ben is like the most down guy in the world i don't know if you've met diego diego is the same way where it's like there's probably more skilled people than them about the like certain tasks sure but i know they're down which means i can bring a fragile new idea like a newborn around them and they know how to raise that baby they're not gonna be like oh what is this right like because those ideas are so fragile that if you know the other people on your team are not down what happens is it's not that they even shoot your ideas down it's that you censor yourself you're like i'm not even gonna bring it up right like there's a part of you yes sure that just doesn't even bring the ideas to the table doesn't have the conviction to say it because you kinda know where they're at right like a friend it's easily offended you're like i just not even gonna bring up bring this up because i kinda know where this goes it's hard to convince people to do stuff just because so at a company like predicting i mean obviously in tech where you're like show me the data and i'm like there is no data brother it's just soul like like it it just feels like the right thing to do and it's hard to convince people to do that and in fact we should have this guy cole come on the pod and really just talk about management that would be quite interesting well how do you was gonna ask you did a pod with the guy from the what's unreasonable hospitality what what's it going it's gonna be yeah so it ends gu it's gonna be such a good podcast so this guy will he actually started he was a chef but he was most famous for owning eleven madison avenue which eleven madison avenue yes it's called so it was awarded the best restaurant in the world but then he was famous because of two things one he wrote the book on reasonable hospitality and two that book and inspired one of the best episodes from the tv show the bear where the kinda dummy cousin goes to this restaurant to learn how to be a good restaurant frontier and he starts by like polishing the forks and the next step is like doing the the second lowest job and then the one up one up and they just sweat the details on everything and will was amazing and we had this whole podcast is gonna be out i think in two weeks or so and this whole podcast was about how can tech companies do that and so his story was he started by over hearing a tourist at his restaurant say you know this this trip was amazing i got was famous food but i didn't get to do one thing i just wanted to get a new york street hotdog dog and will the owner overheard that and he ran outside and he bought a three dollar hotdog dog and he chopped it up in a really pretty way and put a pretty garnish and he served it to the tourists and they were like mine blown and he was like that emotion that is what we are doing from now on and so he gave he had a budget at his company at his restaurant to do crazy stuff and so instead of coming in and giving children's cra he would give them an etch a sketch or and he would have like the etch sketch waiting at the table for them just all these little small details that people normally forget to do and he would just sweat the details on them and that's the idea of unreasonable hospitality which is good to go above and beyond your customers which is exactly what savannah bananas is all about our friend george mac has his great phrase which is they only remember your weird and i i love that because you basically what he was what he means by that is look if you just do the expected norms you it's it like table stakes things you get literally zero credit for that if you don't do them you get docked but if you do them you didn't get any points on the board yet it's still love love right like you have not actually done anything until you've done something weird now weird can be really good it could be just it's i has to be out of the ordinary and that's all people will remember about you so whether you're building a personal brand or a product or yours the savannah bananas and you say we pay your sales tax that's weird that's memorable that's something i'm talking about it enables was a decision he made ten years ago to do that it is a decision that cost him money but how much did it build in goodwill and brand how much did it show not tell that hey we actually give a shit about our fans because every single sports team will say fans are the most important thing we really care about our fans as they gauge the shit out of them right like the actions of the words go in two different directions and just by doing something weird like a statement that was made by let's say like paying the the sales tax for or the fan or you know being like hey if this you pay this one ticket price and then it's all you can eat concessions when you come in right like doing things that were remarkable worth worthy of mark is is what gets you the credit so you're got you only remember remembered for doing what's weird did you peel put pick anything else up from that guy will the like did it give you an idea of something to do in your quota well he did a couple he said let me tell you two things he said one thing that was amazing he said i think the exact quote but it was something like every mistake is an amazing opportunity to blow someone away because he was like people will remember the mistake mistake that you make and then they will remember you going above and beyond to fix it but then when he talked about the customer experience i had this idea and we're implementing at this at hampton so at hampton the way it works is you apply to join and three days later we'll review your application and invite you if you on paper if you are in one of our cities and you have the revenue threshold we will send you an email and say you can sign up to interview with one of our folks to see if you're in good or or a good fit and so we have this idea what if everyone who applied on hampton which is dozens and hundreds of people a day sometimes what if within ten minutes we phone call them and say i just saw your application come through here's the process i just wanna let you know we see you and this isn't just some form that no one pays attention to i see you i'm gonna take great care to like handle you may not get in but like i'm here and i pay attention and so that's an an an example of what it inspired me to do but the idea that will have that really inspired me was how you train your staff he was like i just have to train my staff like crazy to care about this stuff he's like basically i'm like a prop where like i have to repeat the same phrases over and over and over and over again to get them to bind to these ideas and so this is where the idea it's so funny you said insanely great that's the exact same thing with unreasonable hospitality he was like everyone likes hospitality right but the unreasonable part is the hard part so that was actually really cool that was actually really wise of you to catch that insane part that's actually the the brilliance with him it was unreasonable and so this is like the part that we're actually describing here with cole which is like it's easy to say these crazy ideas it's actually hard to be wacky enough to like follow through on all of them that yeah dan porter who's who's probably our closest friend who does this who's like actually done this and he did it with time when he was on the pod last time i think he were there but he said a very simple thing he goes if your strategy is something that everybody agrees with it's not a strategy so he's like you know anybody's like you know we're gonna have great customer service he's like cool you and a hundred other companies in your space would all agree that's a good strategy so he's like it's therefore not a strategy at all he's like you have to have something that people would disagree with so he's like for example for overtime in the first year we replied i think to a million comments on social he's like that's a strategy that people would disagree with some people would say that's a waste of time right like people would say like that's not worth and he's like i was doing it myself the founder the ceo like that is a strategy you could disagree with you could say that's stupid that's foolish and he's like it doesn't have to be that it is super foolish it just has to be not something that everybody already agrees is is the thing to do and so you know same thing unreasonable which is like yeah all agree that we should have great hospitality how many people would agree that we should be listening for when the guy says man i'm on my flights out tonight and i haven't tried the new york hot dogs i really wanted one to then be like leave the kitchen go get a hotdog dog from a street vendor come in break the food code cut it up you know serve it on the dish that that's the part that others it wouldn't even think of let alone and and you know definitely wouldn't institutional lies as like part of their core strategy to do things like that and we'll we'll give a really tactical bit that i i would be curious to hear cole opinion the a founder of savannah bananas i was like okay so walk me through the profitable the profitability of this like it sounds like just like cole is that his name so this jesse jesse jesse cole jesse cole i'm sorry you're oh you're doing the last name thing got it not on purpose i wasn't try to be that cool jesse his name's jesse jesse cole he had two last names or two first names will said something i was like well much of your money do you spend on this he was like well i basically allocate five percent so if i'm a twenty margin business i'm willing to go down to a fifteen percent margin business i'm use that five percent to do wacky stuff and i anticipate that it will take most companies six to twelve months to make that money back and for it to prove to be profitable and so i'd be curious what this guy says did it take twelve months to become like some of these weird norms that he was trying to create within his organization did it take twelve months for the customers to catch on and for that story to get out to people and then to start coming back via more tickets i mean how do you measure show shit because this guy this guy's pure show shit and if anyone listens to a podcast you know me means sam we are we appreciate good show and that's what literally this guy is he's like a modern day pt barn so where are they now so they're at like what a hundred million in revenue and they're like i i live in manhattan and that that one of their buses drove by yesterday give you a sense of what's going on so yeah the revenues let's call it like our estimate somewhere between seventy and a hundred million i believe that the company is probably worth five hundred million to a billion they own one hundred percent of it if you just take their low so last year two million people came to their games two million fans so it's it's basically doubled it went five hundred k one million two million this year should be you know over three million if you just take the lowest possible ticket a price they could have twenty five dollars which their normal tickets are thirty five to forty you know but but if you just take the the lowest ticket price twenty five bucks two million that's fifty million in just ticket sales then you have tens of millions in merch they have a three million person waiting list they are now doing a world tour so it's been up till now just like kind of a a north america thing big but they've been you know they went from like these minor league stadiums to doing the biggest ballpark in the country i mean in a two day span they did a hundred fifty thousand people watching their games like it's insane what's going on like we talked about savannah and was two years ago or three years ago it wasn't this and and you know he started this thing i think i think he started with the gaston g or whatever like in two thousand and eight or something like that like it's been a long time that this guy's been doing this which is why i had an all caps this guy deserves a billion dollars you do you do what you do what he did you deserve a billion dollars it's very inspirational because he definitely has like that everyday guy type of vibe i kinda get emotional like reading about a story i'm like i like i'm i'm on your team i don't care what you do i'm i'm bought into you yeah and then the husband and wife bit is really great like i'm all in on this guy yeah he's amazing like my last company the hustle the year we sold i was thirty one years old and we were gonna do about eighteen million dollars in revenue i frankly didn't have a lot of peers i didn't know a lot of people who were ambitious like me and this meant that i was making decisions that could cost me maybe five ten even more millions of dollars worth of money i was making them all by myself this all changed however when i got a group of peers and that's by the way how this podcast sort of started sean was in my group and we met every month it sort of became a personal board of directors and it frankly changed my life and that's why i started my company hampton join hampton dot com the entire idea is that we make core groups just like this just like the one that i had of other entrepreneurs who have been there done that and we give you guys a time and a place to sit down and have these very honest confidential conversations where can share business ideas you could talk about hiring you could talk about all these decisions that you typically have to make all by yourself the biggest risk in my opinion is not failing you're you're gonna be fine your business is probably gonna work it's that in ten years you look back and you think damn i blew it i blew this opportunity because i was making decisions by myself i was making decisions out of fear and i did not grow i did not maximize the opportunity i'm telling you it can save you ten years of headache and of heartache and you could make better decisions so much faster and the best part is that with hampton these core groups that we make we make them in real life in your city we're in atlanta austin boston chicago dallas denver london la miami new york s f toronto and vancouver so if you're running an internet company that does at least three million dollars in revenue or you've raised at least three million dollars in funding or you've sold the for at least ten million dollars go to join hampton dot com this is my company sam from m i review every single person who applies so again join hampton dot com i have a question though do you think that this is gonna be like w e w f where it becomes like a sustained thing where it lasts forever or is this gonna be like a harlem globe charters where like ic the stick gets tired i think both i think it is harlem globe otter not wwe but i don't think it needs to end so you know because like i take my kids to all kinds of like we took my kids to monster jam last weekend can you explain monster jam to all of our foreign listeners please this is by the way this is amazing because this normally the type of thing you're explaining to me oh yeah please do it alright so what is monster jam m is basically the best day ever for any little boy that loves like hot wheels and trucks which is from my count at my son's school like fifty percent of all young boys love cars and trucks and so what you know you're normally at home playing with these like little like two inch hot wheels cars right or maybe a remote control car and then suddenly your parents take you to the oakland coli and you walk in and it's literally a circle of like it's a dirt like it's like a pitcher mound it's just a dirt mound in the middle of the arena there's nothing else there there's not like it's it's just one dirt mound and then they have like these characters like the w they have these like eight or ten trucks that will kinda like come out and there's mega don he's the shark one and all of the kids are doing the shark shark yeah but for halloween ones yeah mike son has like a grave digger thing and i mean grave digger is like the their undertake so he's like they're like star you know star star thing and they're basically the trucks come out and they're you know like like two times the size of a hammer i would say like maybe three times i is not it's not that big it's like you know big but not that big and they basically do tricks and trucks like that can only do so many tricks it's like they went on their back wheels they went on their front wheels do bad for snow yeah like they try to do like a flip and then the halftime time they crashed out then the they're like a crew comes out like with fire ex and like toes the truck away and now you know you're not gonna see a grave digger for the rest of the show but they have like then they have like guys come out on like dirt bikes and do tricks which are way coolers as well so it's this two hour family event you get your kids you know us like a what's it call like a snow cone popcorn and they get to see crazy trucks and they're sitting there with the ear on because it's too loud and then they leave and you buy the merch or you buy them a car and they're like super happy and you're out four hundred dollars okay so that's that's what monster jam is dude a grave grave digger when he goes it rattle your soul that's how loud it is like it's not just a loudness it's a it's a feeling dude that's how on too it's so loud to you the kid you feel it you've it's like a train when it goes by you like you feel the rattle it's amazing and i'm just googling it so i'm just you know it's great as all but i think it it says it sells four million tickets a year there's no way is that true yeah i believe that i believe that i mean it there was probably ten thousand people at the event i was at and you know they're doing that they were there for three days and then they go to the next city and it's just a traveling circus of monster monster so i don't see any reason why the traveling circus of of banana can't be a sustained thing so i do think what it is the category is more like harlem globe charters it's a family show you're gonna come you're gonna have a great two or three hours you're gonna be entertained you're gonna laugh you're gonna have the dances is it's gonna be some catchy things in your head you're gonna remember a few of the characters and then you're gonna go home and like you're not gonna you're not it's not something you're gonna tune into you know three nights a week like the nba that's fine it doesn't need to be that it's an amazing live touring show man so the guy who owns monster jam he also owns the barn bin bailey circus and he's on forbes as being more of three or four billion dollars who is he his name it's called the fe entertainment so fell owns ring brothers barn bailey circus they own the monster jam they own monster energy super cross and they own sesame street live and the owner's name kenneth fell and it's just a huge three thousand person company according to wikipedia yeah unbelievable and this is also stuff that's like super ai proof right like live out of home entertainment it's only gonna go like up you know you know what i mean like because people are always crave something that's different than what they have in abundance which is like digital online entertainment and so and you know and then these are these things are scarce like there's not that many and especially if you could do the what wwe done or what know m moshe anderson amazon where you start to like become fans of certain whether it's players teams characters in the show that's you know that's always gonna be you know entertaining thing by the way his father started ring brothers circus and his son kenneth eventually took it over and that's now they're the ones months just imagine like it's like the family business the family business is like we run monster we we we started the ring brothers it's like the dinner table like what's going on it's so much better than what we do can you like or the baseball like i so i wanna the coal family the owners of savannah in i'd imagine they have children now i wonder how awesome that is to see your parents do a job like that yeah it's also tough i maybe you're on the road like all the time it's live it's it's messy right you don't get to just like push a button and like we send the we sent the newsletter to three million people like oh i pushed the button and like the ads are running all night and then the what i ran the hustle we called the send button on like sale or whatever we we said we're gonna click the money button guys ready we're gonna click the money button click the money button and we would just caught the money button because i know every time i hit send there was at one point we're you're making like thirty or forty grand a day i was like alright click the money button boom right and this guy does not have a money button he has a a money bus where he has to get on the bus for two weeks yeah exactly yeah it's a little different a lot more money probably than what i made but yeah it's a money bus alright we we ended up spending the whole episode on this fan bad house but that's cool i think we just call it that alright is that is that the pod then yeah i think we should all go and just brainstorm ideas for the craziest marketing things we could do at our business now i think we should all go write down twenty totally out of the box ideas and do that every day for the next sixty days until you have like you know three three ideas that are gonna be like you know attention getting and unreasonable in some way and i here's alright so we did this thing called the the gentleman's agreement by the way where people would click like on our youtube page if they've ever watched more than one video of ours and that was that was the way of paying it forward i have a i have a request sean for our listeners you and i have well this we'll do it we'll do a two part one the first is if you have a connection to jesse cole i want him on the pod we want him on the pod i don't have any connections to him do you no yeah so i would love to get him on the pod if you get if you can help us get him on the pod we will that that's that's you fulfilling the gentleman's agreement and we will thank you but i think we gotta do a second one now with spotify right yes people don't know this because you know you're busy you have lives and you eat food and you sleep but we doubled on spotify last month spotify is growing like crazy as a podcasting platform and it used to be like five percent of our streams then it became ten percent of our streams fifteen percent it's like twenty five thirty percent of our streams now it is growing it is exploding we added our video to spotify so if you have spotify you can watch the podcast there there's comments there we're replying the comments that we're really investing in spotify we think spotify kind of amazing for this and we would love to grow more on spotify and so if you like to listen to spotify if you listen to music on spotify if you got a spotify account get on there it just type my first million and click follow it's just a follow button it's totally free nothing else but you will have reserved your space in the gentleman's hall fame which we you're creating and here's what we'll do the gentleman's all i know where that says is going and i just a legitimate roll of fame it's gonna in my head when i think of a gentleman bit tele fame it's a little bit different at a bunch of nerds clicking a button on their spotify burning a gentleman's club you might say gentleman's club it's i i thought was gonna look a little different that does a bunch of deck beard clicking and like on spotify but also leave a comment on spotify for this episode and we'll actually reply to all of them so long as it's not like five thousand as long as it's less than five thousand we'll reply to every single comment even if it's just like what's up just say hold on would jesse cole say as long as it's less than five thousand were you listening to the podcast sir what kind of what kind of not not savannah worthy comment was with it's not called reasonable hospitality sam yeah we're gonna tip to our way in this is me getting of the pool the pool party this weekend and half an hour in i'm still under the nipple line and i'm just like hey i just take my time okay i just need my time to get in i will get in okay every comment seriously make a comment on spotify because that actually signals i we're testing something we know past five thousand just so sam gets to taste this that signals that you're listening on spotify and i think it said to go make us go up in the rankings i think last week or two weeks ago i think we over the thirty fifth or something most popular podcasts in the world on spotify all categories all categories not just business and so we're gonna we're gonna game the system in front of everyone so just comment on spotify and we'll reply alright that's it that's the pod i feel like i could rude world to know why i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a road less travel never looking back alright let's take a quick break because as you know we are on the hubspot podcast network but we're not the only one ones there's other podcast podcasts on this network too and maybe you liked them maybe you should check them out one of them that wanna draw your attention to is called nudge by phil ag and whether you're a marketer or a salesperson and you're looking for the small changes you could make the new habits you could do the the small decisions you could make that will make a big difference that's what that podcast is all about check it out it's called nudge and you can get it wherever you get your

this little black book right here is very important to be it has all of the rules of money and they're very simple that not that complicated to learn but once you do you can actually start to stack cash i was in my twenties and i really didn't understand how to make money i was trying hard i was working hard but i really wasn't getting anywhere and once i learned the rules of money i started to understand oh that's what i'm supposed to be doing so the next fifteen minutes i'm gonna tell you exactly what these four rules of money are when i did to go from broke to ended up making my first million at thirty and then being worth thirty million dollars a few years later and i was an idiot i was running around with a fork and i was sticking into different outlets i was learning my lessons the hard way and i wanna save you a lot of years and a lot of pain by just telling you what i did and what actually works so if you're somebody who today you don't love where we're at financially maybe you're not financially free and you wanna get to that magic number you wanna get a million dollars liquid in your bank count well this is the video for you i'm gonna tell you the four money rule rule number one you need one money making skill a money making skill is a very specific term here so when it comes to building wealth there's really only four money making skills you need to pick one of these the first one is selling so this is persuading people marketing closing deals the second one is making which is products apps websites videos books the next one is designing so having really great taste understanding form and function like a steve jobs type and the fourth is hunting so selling making designing hunting hunting is spotting opportunities it's finding great real estate deals or angel investing or figuring out the right stock to buy you need to pick one of these skills and mastering pick the one that's of most interest to you now mastering it is the hard part so you're gonna need to do it every day and the way to do that is let's say you wanna learn sales right selling is the is the master skill the money making skill you're trying to learn you need to go to a place where selling is what they do it is how they bake their money and when you get there you're gonna get a job and you might start at the bottom of the toe pole and what you're gonna do is you're gonna look around you're gonna ask who's the number one producer who is the number one salesperson here your job to go sit next to them and then double their input so if they're making a hundred calls a day you're gonna make two hundred they're not gonna be as good at the calls as they are but you're gonna double the input they knock on fifty doors you do a hundred you get the idea and you're gonna sit next to them and you're gonna study what they do you're gonna observe the difference between what they're doing and what doing and then you're gonna double it every single time that's what you're doing by day and at night you're reading books you're watching videos you're ob obsessed over the art of selling so you're nine to five is where you get your practice reps and then you're five to nine five pm to nine pm that's where you get ideas on how to improve i got to be friends with mister bi over the last few years and he's today the number one youtuber in the world every video he puts out gets hundreds of millions of views and he showed me and he told me he's like dude at the agent twelve i decided my skill was gonna be making youtube videos in his case so he he wanted to be a maker he wanted to make youtube videos and every day he would open up a dictionary and he would flip to a different random word or whatever word he got he had to force himself to think of twenty video ideas using that word not all of them were good but he would force that muscle of idea generation because for youtube videos the idea the concept is done of one thing and then he would go try to make that video and he would suck at it he'd have a crappy thumbnail and a crappy lighting crappy audio each day you would try to make one of those things better in between every video it took him like i know hundred plus videos before he even got to ten thousand subscribers before he started making any money off this thing but he mastered the art of making videos warren buffett is another example he a hunter hunting was the money making skill he chose and if you ever you know learn about buffett you'll learn that buffett used to take the entire moody's manual so a four thousand page book and i'm not talking about like a harry potter book this is a four thousand pages of just corporate financials essentially and he would read it cover to cover and he was all he was looking for was a single stock that he thought was mis price high value low price in his career he's looked at you know literally hundreds of thousands of businesses and in this most recent shareholder letter he said all of my success i can boil down to making about twelve good investing decisions just that out of hundreds of thousands of things he looked at he became a master hunter so you wanna master one of those four money making skills and that's a path to millions if you master two of them that's a path to billions so if you look at a steve jobs he had designing and selling he was one of the greatest design minds had great taste in design and then he also had the ability to tell great stories and be extremely persuasive and come up with marketing campaigns elon musk he had making and selling and that combo of sort of i can build and i can sell is one of the most overpowered combinations you can have because you don't need to become the top one percent of anything that takes a lifetime to become a true master what you need to do is become top twenty percent at two things that are not common so for example an engineer who's good at marketing you find a lot of engineers and you don't need to become the best but you need to become an engineer who's pretty good at engineering and pretty good at marketing that's rare enough and you are super super valuable so your money making skills are the foundation of your ability to make money not just once but anytime you wish it's like a money button you can put then push at any given time so focus on skills before you focus on wealth alright rule number two don't rent out your time own equity what people to get wrong is they take the skill they learned and then they get hired for it and then if they're good at it they get promoted for it and they get a raise for it it sounds like well i guess i'm moving in the right direction i'm getting rich actually you're moving the complete wrong direction as nas tell says the two most addictive things in the world are heroin and a monthly salary if you do not want to get hired to provide services where you're trading your time for their dollars renting out your time is not a path to get rich even the people who rent their time out at a high price if at a lawyer thousand dollars an hour they cap out you know the rich lawyers they're all partners in the firm meaning they own equity in the firm meaning they get a cut of other lawyers work not their own so how do own equity well two ways either you're gonna invest but you don't have the cash to do that maybe or you're gonna start a business and so then the question comes what kind of business should you start how do you take that money making sale and turned into a business there's three things three words to know they all start with the letter c code content or capital so code is like making a website or an app i'll give you an example my friend was a designer he used to make two hundred thousand dollars a year as part of a design agency he was employee he was making a good living and he was designing websites for clients client walks the door asked for something he would design it well he figured out he needed to turn a his skill into a product or a business and so he quit his job and he started making shopify themes so he would make a theme and he could take that same theme and he could sell it to two thousand different customers and by the way he didn't have to go in hand sell it to them he would be asleep and they would be coming to his site finding a library of themes and they would buy one and now he pulls in two billion a year of cash flow he leaves half the here in bali half the year in japan is living his dream life because he understood the rules of money how to first make create a money making skill design and then how to turn it into a business because he doesn't want rent out his time he wants to own equity i'll give you another example content well let's take someone who's pretty big at content in the business world is a guy named alex mo he took his master money making skill which is selling and he turned it into videos youtube videos books and courses his last book launch she just did it about a month ago his last book launch sold three million copies and with all the add on courses he added to it he made a hundred million dollars in a single weekend a hundred million dollars as one guy because he understood that he didn't need to sell his time in hourly chunks of consulting he needed to turn it into a business the last example is capital so what does capital mean well this is really for the skill of hunting usually but it can be used for any any of these so this is where you wanna take the money making skill you have and you wanna use it in the art of investing my cousin did it so my cousin had a job making six figures but he was sick of he didn't wanna report to the office he didn't like all the politics he didn't like the boring meetings and so he quit his job and he decided i'm going to learn the art of hunting multi family real estate so like apartment buildings he spent two years mastering that skill under somebody else who had been doing that for a decade so he went and he learned and he looked he identified the highest output person and he doubled their inputs and then he left to do his own deals and in his first student you're doing zone deals they bought about forty million dollars of real estate using down payments that are equity from other investors who were happy to give him a cut because he was doing the hunting he was finding the killer deal the deal that would perform above market that had a good margin of safety he became a great hunter and he translated that into a business using this method of capital so takeaway away here is if you only rent out your time you'll never get off the treadmill equity is the way alright let's take a quick break because gotta tell you story let me tell you about the first time i try to run payroll for my team i was using a traditional bank and you know the type it's got a jan interface it's built like a two thousand and two tax form and it was open only during business hours and i hit send in it froze they flagged the transaction they locked my account they put me on hold for forty five minutes and then they told me i gotta visit my local branch and that was the day i started looking for a new banking solution after asking a few founders what they were using i found out about mercury and so now my payroll is two clicks i can wire money i can pay invoices i can reimburse the team all from one clean dashboard that's why use it for all of my companies and so do two hundred thousand other startup founders and so if you're looking at to level up your banking head to mercury dot com and apply in minutes mercury is a financial technology company not a bank bank the services are provided through choice financial group call them man a and evolve bank trust members fdic alright rule number three this is the hardest rule of all of them okay you're ready for it four letters wait you can't plant a seed in the soil and then the next day egg come dig it up and scream at it why aren't you growing yet right that's not how a plant grows you need to water it need into something like need to wait let the thing actually grow because if you're doing what i've said right you have developed one of the four money making skills you have not just developed it you've spent two years really grinding and mastering then you have turned that into a business that you own equity in well now getting rich is actually inevitable but inevitable is not the same thing as instantaneous so the bad news is yes you're it's gonna take trial and error it's gonna take a couple years for you to get it all figured it out but the good news is you only need to get rich once in a lifetime once you get rich once as long as you're not you know totally idiot and you're gonna blow all you can just let that compound from there so the secret here is you have to be willing to wait now waiting doesn't mean just sitting around doing nothing that a phrase i heard that i love best this comes from naval ball he said be impatient with action and patient with results that combination patient with action patient results is a killer un combination i would never wanna compete with somebody who was like that and that's a good test for if you should become a ps before i go to the next one if you're liking what's in this video and you actually want the notes from this the team has actually written everything down from this video so you don't have to write it down yourself you can get it it's in the description below alright let me keep going the final rule rule number four proximity is power even though i told you to wait you know that good things take time you're still gonna hate waiting i hated it you're gonna hate it too the good news is you can actually speed up the result how you can make the plant grow a little faster and the way you do it is you move literally you move so if you wanna be a tech founder you need to move to san francisco if you wanna make movies you go to la now it's not that you had to do it but if you want to increase your odds and you wanna go faster that's what you would do because proximity is power meaning you wanna be as close as you can to the white hot center of action you wanna go join the network of people who are doing what you do you wanna be around people who have the same dream as you who are in the same game as you maybe they're a little bit ahead and they can share what's going on maybe they're right where you are and you can all go grow together and learn from each other's mistakes so that you don't have to learn every single mistake the hard way yourself and when i say move i don't just mean move to the city i mean you move to a house with as many like minded smart ambitious interesting people as you can when i move to san francisco i moved into a house with six other tech founders who i didn't know and they weren't the best roommates and the bathrooms were stinky and all that good stuff but the more important thing was i was around a group of really smart ambitious people chasing the same dream as me and those became great friends those became connections those became you know a warm introductions to investors you don't know exactly how it's all gonna play but you're creating luck for yourself you learn faster it's like osmosis just being around them will make you think a little differently work a little differently you know if you hang out with a bunch of broke complain you'll become one you if you hang out with a bunch of killers you will level up too there's a cliche that's been around for long time you know you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with well it's a cliche but it's true and it's been around for a long time for a reason so if you wanna change your life change your zip code i'll tell you a little story i was twenty four years old i was living in australia trying to talk start a startup up i wanted to be an entrepreneur and i went to a local meetup up for other founders i thought i should get around some other founders and at the meetup they when week they asked me they said hey will you be the keynote speaker will you give the the talk this week on stage and i think i was supposed to be flattered but no i was horrified i was like me twenty four year old dumb shit me i haven't done anything if i'm the smartest guy in this room i'm in the wrong room so the next week i literally pack my debt bags i bought a one way ticket san francisco with no plan i didn't even have a place to stay but i knew that i needed to get around people who were smarter and at you know the most ambitious smart group of people that i could who all had the same dream as me so let's recap if you've done these four things you've picked one of the four money making skills and you've done your two years mastering it you've then don't rent out your time and fall down the career trap of getting hired and getting raises you take that skill and you start a business based on code content or capital then you wait and you're impatient with your action but you're very patient with your results and lastly proximity power you speed up your development by moving to the white hot center and getting around like minded people well congratulations you have flipped the odds the best advice in the world is to take actions i would make it absolutely unreasonable for you to fail let's take an another example weight loss dieting right i've been a type person who's tried many diets failed many times and i think that's pretty common i would say that dieting probably has a failure rate of eighty or ninety percent let's pretend with your diet you just decided to do four things right you made four decisions so you ate clean whole foods high protein you exercise daily and you slept well if you actually did those things and you did the weight process where you let it let it unfold it is now actually unreasonable for you to not lose weight to get into great shape you have flipped the odds from ninety percent failure rate to ninety percent success rate and that's what we're gonna do in the world of business and getting rich is we've all heard the stats right ninety percent of new businesses fail well that's true startups individual business ideas do fail but founders don't if you keep going and your learning is how you follow the full rules i just told you you will not fail i'll leave you with the steve martin story that always inspired me steve martin the great comedian he wanted to learn the ban joe and when he was young and he started learning the ban joe and he couldn't tell the difference in the c corps a g chord and his teacher was like adam let i'm not gonna lie it's not like you have a huge natural talent for the ban and he was getting frustrated and impatient because he wanted to be great at something he wanted the result but it wasn't happening and he didn't seem like he was naturally like on track to get there but he he made a little mindset shift he said you know what instead of trying to be great at the manager today let me just make a decision he said i'm gonna play the manager for forty years because i can't imagine that somebody who's been playing the manager for forty years still sucks at it and just by taking that long term time horizon and understanding that he could flip his odds of success from probably gonna be one of those guys who tries it doesn't happen for and i give up too well if i just stuck with this for twenty forty years i think it'd be great at and by the way it never took forty years within a decade you see see weren't actually won multiple grammy for his songs where he's playing the ban he changed his mindset around the ban and years later is actually winning grammy for it and so this is the formula this is the way i hope you take this i hope you'd be successful with this i have nothing but love for you i really rude it for you and so if this was helpful leave me a comment below and maybe i'll do a follow video it's a little more detail but these are the high level the four money rules 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 travel never looking back alright let's take a quick break because as you know we are on the hubspot podcast network but we're not the only ones there's other podcast podcasts on this network too and maybe you liked them maybe you should check them out one of them that wanna draw your attention to is called nudge by phil ag and whether you're a marketer or a salesperson and you're looking for the small changes you could make the new habits you could do the the small decisions you could make that will make a big difference that's what that podcast is all about check it out it's called nudge and you can get it wherever you get your podcast

he's back part two we called him to side hustle king last time which by the way pretty sick nickname we gave you pretty good you're welcome i don't know anything about anything other than business ideas so let's get i feel like i could rude world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's all on the road less travel never first episode did almost a million downloads across all the platforms and when you get a million downloads across all the platforms is that's the best way to get back to the five different part two we gotta do part two i wanna queue like the chicago bulls ninety six bulls intro music for you because you came on you had a legendary first performance do you feel the pressure of following up right now no pressure you kidding me got and the reason people love your business ideas is because you have that girl next door energy you have that relatable i could do that that seems that seems in my wheelhouse and i can get to fifteen thousand a month i get to ten thousand a month off that doesn't seem too hard and i love that sam loves that we all love that so if you've been if you're one of the listeners who is looking for that kind of relatable achievable nothing side hustle idea i thought that these are all easy i mean easy i just mean like it's not rocket science those are the types of ideas you got chris welcome back to the pot thank you for having me man so i wasn't on that i i was off that day and i get messages from people trying to use me as the middleman man to get you or sean asking to do the driving range thing yeah the golf thing okay the golf thing got on we're to talk about that later alright a bang so chris let's start you brought some ideas we're gonna bring in some we're gonna r off these we're gonna react to these so where do you wanna start give me let's start with the bang give me give me one of the best businesses that you've seen that you think wow some anybody could do that somebody else could do that yeah you wanna go porch pumpkins okay so explain the idea and then let's talk about it alright so i'm on instagram i see this woman decorating porch of the pumpkins i thought that's genius that's brilliant it's just all visual it it sells really well on short form video i reached out to her where we spoke i learned about her business she's doing seven figures a year across three months it could be seasonal people want her to decorate her porch for christmas thanksgiving flowers in the spring so but she doesn't want to she just wants to do pumpkins and so over the last couple years i've learned of other people doing you know quarterly flower delivery like front porch flower decorations christmas decorations christmas lights this could be a year round business that starts with porch pumpkins who who is the lady can you say she just give a shout torres heather torres sean is this the same person that we've we talked about we did talk about this was before but there's actually a little twist to it now so originally and we we can pull up if fear on youtube you'll see the we should see what this means so what does pork fun means basically during fall halloween season people want their house to look festive they hire this lady and she comes over with like you know like throw pillow overload of pumpkins and we'll just decorate the front of your house cool you pay her how much does it cost roughly for like a well so five hundred of fifteen hundred and she's there for like an hour you hired you did this you porsche my wife saw and she's like i need that in my life and okay and the was it her who came or was it like a minute she hasn't come yet my our week is like two weeks from now and it won't be her it'll be someone for her team okay amazing so someone for her team comes out they put push on and give me give us a sense of how well she's doing what do you know about the business this one woman in dallas who started this yeah she's doing between thirteen hundred and two thousand orders per year average order size is eight hundred twelve hundred dollars called a thousand bucks okay so that's something like a million and a half to two million in revenue mh and what's her cost so she's got an inventory of pumpkins yeah it it's about a twenty percent cogs twenty percent cogs that's the labor and the like and the pump is which she reuse i'm sure yeah she takes she takes it away after what how long is it like well she charges extra to take him away so as people don't know what to do with them so that's an upsell okay so okay so you can pay to have them removed it's basically the christmas lights business but she's just done it not on christmas lights it's actually a much easier you don't have to like scale the roof and you know do all the dangerous stuff okay amazing and so you know this woman might be clearing a million dollars a year doing this do you know the origins story of this like how did she start doing this you stumble into it was she like to stay at home mom what's her story yeah she's just a mom she did it for herself she posted it on instagram and her friends freaked out she wasn't trying to start a business so she started doing it as a favor and then she monetized it okay amazing and so you well one thing that it wasn't there last time we talked about this now same if you scroll down to the middle of the page it's one on one business coaching for your pumpkin business and she's no way got the boss lady pose she created degree angle with her arms crossed which i think is also the pose i had for this podcast cover art you they put her the boss lady pose and she's selling one on one coaching now so you get two sessions an hour each for five thousand dollars so youtube can become a pumpkin there you go and she owns the trademark so people can't start businesses with porch or pumpkins in the name without talking her first interesting no way what say her i i'm looking at your instagram what's her instagram again yeah it's it's just porch pumpkins one word oh my god forty three thousand followers now is this now more successful look it's so on her like linked like her link off thing she's linking to your video that you did with her oh i think know that that's funny yeah do you have any association with her other than you just cool nothing no she's just awesome and so is this coaching thing doing better than her actual main thing i don't know i haven't talked to her about it but she also started to fa a business during the same season as porch pumpkins she's got like two retail locations where she cooks the he to go only and she's crushing it at that to go fa fa yeah alright questionable decision on that one okay so so what would you do let's say you're you live in sam what's like some middle in nowhere place like we wherever your kansas in city missouri right you're from kansas you're in kansas city missouri and you're staying at home mom you're entrepreneur entrepreneurial you got that itch what are you doing and how you getting this business off the ground chris i'm gonna go buy pumpkins for retail at the grocery store i'm gonna like basically sorry heather but i'm gonna copy heather's design based on what i see on instagram the same colors in the same places the same sizes i'm gonna film a time lapse just using my iphone and i'm gonna post it to all the local mom groups buy sell groups facebook instagram everywhere and then just watch the comments come in and start doing it for people in the comments by the way not to be dismissive so really me show and my own lack of skill but you say design dog get to pile of pumpkins dude it is this a design apparently there's something to it i there's some you're strike flower arrangement like if you rush the hay go where does the halo you gave if you gave sean a pumpkin patch in a in a in a empty porch it would look nothing dude i don't do this as a challenge okay like you wind torch pumpkin my own porch and i'm gonna post it just to see how i do with my some there's some it's a pile of pumpkins no there's there's a little like you're drinking her cool aid she's got you all under her spell alright so so crystal you're gonna go buy a retail you're not worried about your margins you know on that front yep you're gonna make an instagram account you're gonna name it something not porch pumpkins because got the trademark for that so what do you patio pumpkins what are we talking sure front patio patio cords okay and now how do you go how do you go get customers because that's the hard part of any business yeah i mean you post she's five to ten organic videos you see which one pops off the most then you push paid ads spend behind it to people in your zip code okay so you're gonna post or organic content just as testing your creative and then you're gonna run paid on this yep yeah because you're you're basically selling a five hundred a thousand dollar ticket item yep so you have you you you you have a lot you have a lot of room to work with so you even acquire customers for free note yep fifteen thirty bucks hundred bucks yeah and then you can worry about wholesale pricing and going to a farm whatever like this just unnecessary friction if you do that up upfront okay so what you said that she you said that she was able do something that prevents us from being just a october thing is that the course no she could other people are she doesn't want to she's got kids she's like this is her busy season and she doesn't wanna work in on this business during the other seasons she got kids she got fa he dude she's got her in and how what what do think her take home is what's your guest i would guess forty to fifty percent net that's again do you think she's she's working her ass off for two months out of the year and then she's like she's like in deployment mode like she's like i i i'm getting up five am getting home at eleven pm and just ran in her ass off for two months and make six hundred thousand dollars yeah yeah dude so we have a a lady that you know like if you took my families like you know life expenses they'd be like oh whatever rent utilities you know insurance and then not that far down the list you'd be like who is the balloon queen and that would be this lady that my wife leads to hire for every kid's birthday for every you know special occasion that we're through and you're like her patron you know you're like the you're you're like the king of italy and this is like you know michel angelo and you're keeping her a afloat because the world needs more balloon dryer he shows up and i'm just like oh twelve hundred dollars just you do knocked on my door and twelve hundred dollars just left my bank account because this woman is gonna make a beautiful balloon arch and a backdrop that we need i guess for every part we need we need for every part i have it okay and so i got three kids but we're spending like seven grand a year ten grand here on balloon arches she she's the she's the porch pumpkins of my neighborhood basically and one thing i've noticed with this is that you can kinda set a norm in any area so like christmas lights is one of these things where like there's almost like a visible peer pressure and in a visible and invisible peer pressure right like the more houses is on our block that do something we feel like we gotta do something yeah i think gonna about this in like peter teal tweet it's called meme desire yeah it to have an balloon decorations keeping up with the jones is it's so rose so right now yeah and the my my life is so and so you got it's birthday birthdays you got graduation so all the stuff where people are doing stuff on their front lawn to kinda like if it's your special day you wake up and you go outside and it's like oh you guys did the thing for me and so i think there's almost like a porch pumpkins like birthday skew and a graduation sku that she could create which is basically just like y we dress up your lawn so that you know you have this moment your family did something for you and everybody knows it's your special day today and so i think you're right chris that this is not that that the the sort of fall halloween season is really like not where this thing is limited to it might still be you know forty percent of revenue but it's not doesn't need to be a hundred percent of revenue but yeah how cool is it that so my my mother is like the she has a a pillow company and she's killing it she pays herself a lot of money and i'm like smith you know how many spending how much are you how much are you spending on ads and she's like well i spend like a hundred dollars a month i'm like what's that turned into and she tells me you know a thousand or something and i'm like okay so why aren't you spending more and she's like well because i work three days a week i'm happy and i'm like but but but and that's kinda what this lady is so she's the same thing where you kinda have your lane and and you're happy so it sounds like she's winning yeah you know i think for the rest of the us about the the banker and the fishermen yeah and i was like those bankers on to something y'all know might dick from that story hey real if you like a episode chris and you want more he's actually agreed to give away his entire database of two hundred business ideas just like the ones he's talking about on this podcast and he's given it away for free so if you just go to the qr code that's on the screen or the link of the description below you can get his database of ideas and these are like his blueprints for companies that he thinks can work and this guy's done it before he's built a come a bunch of businesses that are successful so go ahead take advantage of this resource and now back to the episode alright chris give us another one what's another idea you think pool small niche cash flow type business yeah so i'm gonna take what you just said about like meme desire keeping up with the jones is and it goes perfectly into this next one so we we just got a sport court and i think sport courts are the next pools k explain what a sport court is sport court is a multipurpose purpose slab a concrete that you can put tiles down on or you can paint lines on it and do pickle ball a volleyball soccer basketball you can do multiple sports on the same thing right it's the thing you put like in your backyard concrete and then they have this like almost like what do you call that like kind of the the mesh looking rubber thing on top they're just like a tile sport court tiles yeah like so then you can play like any kind of sport you know on on top of so you turn your backyard into some fun okay go yeah yeah so like three five years ago during covid everyone was getting pulls out here they're all getting pulls and pulls were like seventy five grand there now they're are a hundred and fifty but now it's all about sport courts if you wanna keep up with the jones is and i'm i'm trying to keep up with the jones too so we just got a sport court this year and i got a bunch of quotes and half of the the companies wouldn't even call me back the ones that did they were just dudes like me they look like me wrap truck and i was like i know you're not gonna be putting this sport cord in you're just seven it all out you're just a dirty marketer like i am and so they wouldn't told me like how did they respond i wouldn't tell that them to the face i just i only go on podcast podcasts and say that about so they would quote me now we're talking at thirty by seventy foot sport court which is good enough for half core basketball and and pickle k that's what i got what i wanted they were charged me fifty to sixty grand k i can't do that i can't do that so i start getting quotes for from subcontractors going on facebook marketplace looking for a concrete guy a painter fencing guy because you wanna fence it in so the ball is fly everywhere and long story short i got quotes to do all of it it's in my backyard right now for about thirty grand half right so then i start thinking okay there's a business here i already have the subs they're all affordable so what i'm i'm doing is took my trees company and my operating partner and we're pivoting we're going away from trees with a one thousand dollar average order value and we're going full time sport court oh my gosh what's they called well there's no website for it's not like a you need to though i do have a q name i got the domain name there's just nothing on it it's called backyard fun house because we're selling the dream we're we're not selling sports courts we're selling you want the backyard that all your kids friends wanna come to we're selling the drink so you start with the sport court get your foot in the door then you go putting green then you go pool then you go fire pit outdoor kitchen and pretty soon they green what you're doing is you're taking the business model of pool installation which is a popular business model and you're basically saying look that's a pretty saturated market probably now you know at any place that's kinda pool weather friendly they're gonna be multiple pool installers and and and and builders in that area but you're noticing this trend where some people are like hey instead of the pool or in addition to the pool we want our backyard to be fun in a different way maybe maybe for us the right market the right thing is pickle or basketball or or whatever soccer and you're like okay whatever that pool market is there's gonna be this new market where there's not established players and i can come in and basically do that in my town and then you anybody could do that really in their town is that the that the right right this idea if you look at google trends if you look at the keyword tool the search searches are exploding for this and the supply is not keeping up with demand yeah i've i've seen this a bunch because i was house hunting and saw a bunch of these and i had the same it's funny of you were like you're selling on the dream because i saw it and i was like oh so me and my wife were gonna we're just gonna play pick a wall have we ever played pick up all the other no but obviously we'll start obviously that'll be the new us and then my kids and their their friends will come over and it'll be so cool and it's like this like almost like this it became a wow factor for certain houses that we were looking at they were trying to sell that as a as a bit of the the the the the x factor for that home so i kinda believe this we also sam we have some friends c and xavier who have a a business called enduring ventures where they buy businesses and one of the businesses that they bought is a pool construction business the same you have you looked into ever you've heard them talk about how great of a business was for them yeah i mean the one in arizona yeah they have a business in arizona i think it's called dolphin pool so you're in arizona yeah they'll get a dolphin pool and it's just been this steady compound i think it's like a twenty thirty million dollar a year pool business that just serves that one geography so and it's a very you know it's a profitable business i think it's cash flowing let's call i i mean i i don't know the specifics but i wouldn't be surprised if it was four million to five million dollars a year free cash flow generated from from this pool business and then obviously you know and and and they're able to just serve and that's just one market right so like i think the sport court alternative to pools it's scott got some legs dude i i'm mean i'm already generating lease for it like this isn't just hypothetical okay where where are the leads coming from facebook net yeah i mean where do all leads come from sam it's all meta it's all meta right that's where we're all get our leads from i don't know but where the leads come from facebook that's it that's they're going one place short form video fifteen seconds selling the drink sassy little bitch i like it blush you're making me blush alright what's another one boy wait saying i want your grades for these first two okay i love the pumpkin lady on the sam scale what is it yeah so for a very particular type of demographic who wants that lifestyle i honestly think that's a nine out of ten k for sports court i think that's a three out of ten i don't wanna work with some contractors like i don't wanna deal with people who are hungover what how's that been where how's that been like working with slammed i'll tell working there i use it i start to do landscaping i could tell you i could i know what they're like for like you know what i'm saying like there's gonna be pill bottles all over the place you just gotta work through some bad ones to find the good ones just like employees right oh well there's like different ratios of like how many gotta work there yeah it's like we talking about company is a bo company called hampton okay yeah he he doesn't know the first thing about this he's got a different different brand to pill bottle for them to to quote to quote harrison ford sam that's what the money's is for okay that's that's what thirty thousand dollars net profit per job is for it's for dealing with annoying sub subconscious to show up with meth in their system so you got a nine you got a three hit us with your next one chris alright so right next to my sport court we put an in ground tram k why in grand tram because our tram blows over into the neighbor's yard every two years like clockwork and i've dude you're a great dad you you got everything we're we're working on and we wanna be the backyard fun house you know what sam yeah so we put in this in grand tram sam i want you to guess what it cost to put this thing in the three grand ten grand yeah okay ten grand really yeah forty forty five hundred for the tram itself from a shopify store that i found from facebook ads right of course and then five grand for the digging for digging it out and so this dude with an ex escalator that he didn't even own he just rented it shows up with another dude they spend four hours digging it out putting down some weed barrier and they walk out of there with five grand so i saw his dads are keeping the economy of telling you telling you so i start talking to him on the job side and i'm like where are you getting all your jobs and he's like from this e commerce brand they like they they can't sell tram unless they have someone to dig them out for him and he goes which the e commerce it's tram dot com believe it or not so no but they they can only sell tram that are in ground if they have someone to dig them out and there's not like the guys that own ex escalators are too busy digging pools they have no interest in tram so you don't need to go buy a hundred thousand dollar back you rent one when you get a job you dig the sucker out and you get paid five grand sorry i i i kinda zoned out because i thought this might be the same idea score court but actually it sounds like this what is what you're saying that tram dot com gets demand and they sell the tram but they don't wanna go do the backyard dig and you it the leads from them is that what you were saying this yeah and how does the get the leads from is it like you're saying like you gotta know a guy who knows a guy and go get do some biz dev with them or there's like a portal you sign up forty you like in this area yeah and i reached out and they're like yeah we don't even have our paid ads turned on right now because we can't sell like we don't have enough people digging these things out for us dude tram dot com by the way is owned by someone who's part of the tribe of mormon or he went the by you guys do all the all the best stuff what can i say brad mills owns tram dot com that's a that sounds like a pretty fun job i mean you can't drink you can't smoke you install tram yes so they have this mask on the thing where they got certified installers and premier installers in all these different areas and then you basically if you're on trip dot com you get you get a quote from the installer and then they do all the work yeah something like that yeah so you're saying become an installer yeah or just like like we have a an ex guy for our tree trimming business and we talk to him about other jobs that he does and he gets paid five grand to dig out pools and it takes him a day just him you know playing with controls alright those guys listening he's like he's fucking the hell chris in my four old son's dream job i can't let him hear this podcast my my overall point is like high ticket home service in general in a strong economy there's way more demand than supply in any of these little backyard businesses okay i like this backyard business theme you've given us a bunch of those let's do a non backyard business so you wrote something in our notes stop gonna give it a four that one's a four man i don't wanna dig holes so i don't wanna dig holes so like you do wanna dig holes hobby you would actually have yeah on my time yeah yeah i don't wanna get paid to do it that ruins so far yeah sacred your art yeah don't meet your heroes alright so you have this sentence on here that i don't understand but i i'm it's provocative it says what starts dubai will make its way to america what does that mean so i've been there twice and they just live ten years in the future they experiment with all this stuff they're very entrepreneurial and a lot of stuff they experiment with never takes off but if you see it in dubai for like one to three years it's probably coming out west and we can get ahead of the trend well were examples of other things that like kind of dubai was early into that thin propagated do you know of any others dubai chocolate for one you familiar with that no what is device it's all the rage right now and i've been getting i i've i've fallen victim i've eaten so much like chocolate right there i don't know about what is this what's different about dubai oh my gosh i have no idea but it's just like a chocolate bar stuffed with like pistachio that looks cool on instagram you know how like three years ago the theme was pineapple and like last year it was like i think it was like pear like there's always like a theme in food and in like wrapping paper and like the two big categories the america's two largest exports and right now for some reason it's pistachio flavored chocolate and if you go to like a bo yogurt or ice cream place you get yogurt or ice cream with pistachio like crush up and chocolate on it and honestly it's amazing it's great so i'm all i'm on onboard the hype train they got whole mall kiosk selling just do dubai chocolate now like it's a whole industry will it be around two years i don't know i don't care job right right but another thing perfume vending machines started in dubai now they're everywhere okay and what's this one that you're referring to this manic thing yeah i mean they're in airports in dubai and like outside of nightclubs and you just stick your hand in there and it gives you a manic here so it's a little it looks like a printer almost so it's like if you basically put your hand in the robot printer and you get a manic here is it cheaper is it faster what's the like kinda core edge that this has over you know going into like a nail traditional nail salon yeah it's like a one third the price and a lot faster alright that's interesting by the way what speaking of have you guys seen r robot what's that i could chat you up what's a r robot alright so you've seen like tesla's like humanoid robot sam i think you invested in figure you know people like the next big thing is based on these artificial intelligence and super cutting edge robots well somebody made r robot and it's going super viral on tiktok right now so what the robot does basically like runs up to a human and the run is hilarious that the robot does and then it'll like stop in front of a girl and then it'll put out its hand to like kiss their hand and then it'll like from its audio from its speakers it'll start playing romantic music and this person in public this woman is just like what's happening hear right now what's what's the what's the outcome of this the owner is like sick i no idea my robot just speakers i'm just gonna reaching the views on their last ten videos thirty seven million fifteen million eight million nineteen million eighteen million like the robot just seduced the lady it's just this funny lovable robot that wears a little like cowboy hat and he runs around like trying to like spit game at at people it's it's amazing it's just this is amazing viral thing that's happening like i yeah i think the what's gonna happen here is that you're gonna have like before you have the humanoid robots that can like do warehouse work and like assemble cars on the assembly line you're gonna have basically like pet robot you're gonna have just like a goofy robot that's kind of fun and like a little party trick that you can make like that doesn't have has like you know one one hundredth of the functionality but can make you know a hundred million dollars know off of an idea like that dude you guys wanna see a sick robot i have nothing to do with this company i just think it's cool go to mat robots dot com so it's the new i see okay yeah let me tell you the story i met this guy and i just thought his robot looked looked awesome so i started dm him and i got one and it's basically like a twelve or eleven hundred dollar roomba but it vacuums and it mop your house but it there's a bunch of like really like nifty features on there and this is only like cool if you're new gadgets but it looks you know how roomba like you'll hear like bumping into shit because that's how it like tells if it's like it like uses cameras and it maps out your house but it has always tiny features like when i got it and i turned it on the battery was fully charged and it said hello par family i'm here to clean for you like like it like was like like a little bit accent yeah like these little tiny features but the guy who started this company he's been working on this for eight years and he raised a bunch of money and he's just like been in the lab now for eight or nine years and after eight or nine years of tinkering his goal was to build the perfect roomba and he has it i think after like nine years i'm working on this and it's finally for sale and i thought it was really cool chris what do you think i'm thinking of how i monetize it well by selling a twelve hundred dollar vacuum you might think that they come on i can yeah i would go to cleaning businesses and rented it out to them for a hundred bucks a month and they show up to a house to clean it and they could just hit play then they could do everything else save an hour on every crew imagine if you hire a cleaner and they show it up and then they just like roomba down push play and walk away or they just sit on their phone for like two hours be amazing listen up the old playbook is slowing you down ai broke the funnel loop marketing fixes it it's a new era for marketers ai is capturing search traffic channels are fragmented and generating leads feels less predictable than ever before hubspot loop marketing playbook will guide you through this unprecedented disruption it's the system your marketing teams should use to move faster connect deeper and grow smarter the modern growth playbook for the ai era built by hubspot design for today's marketer get the loop marketing playbook at hubspot dot com slash loop dash marketing to find out more and leave your competition behind alright back to the pod what other ideas you got this is the sam idea is this the one that says doll houses for men parenthesis sam will love yeah that's the yeah what's this idea should we watch it yeah let's watch let's watch the video freaking and guy right here he's tapping into a billion dollar market that nobody is serving right now ask yourself real quick what's the male version of doll houses day three of genius business said he has follow for more there isn't one and that's the opportunity men are builders we want to create with our hands but nobody's selling us the materials to build miniature homes and structures like this look how many you've views this thing has there's your demand grown men would pay serious money for high quality miniature building kits myself included i'm calling this the guy doll house market full business plan here yeah i'm sold so it's basically art so we're watching this video it's base it's exactly how it sounds you are literally building a home like framing it with like the drywall wall and everything else and this guy is crazy he's using a proper nail gun and you're building a very real life replica of a house i'm in this sounds awesome nice spend my time doing this with engines like when when my wife's is pregnant we like you know you can't like do too much you gotta like kinda sit around a lot we got into legos and now we like to build like replica va eight engines it's very nerdy thing but it's kinda like what we like to do instead of watching tv this seems so much better i would love to build the house is this a company that's making this or is this i this guy just did it wow yeah you're right because this is basically like you know people who love to play you know flight simulator and it's like oh you're playing a video game they're like this is not a video game like i'm flying this plane right now for real it's like it is so realistic that it like moves into another category and it seems like that's what this right so like instead of like lego or like overs simplification this is almost like just miniature complexity it's like no this is like as real as the real deal but just on a small scale we don't have to actually do all the like the true work and so it's like this like escape it's a is this is this a whole new category basically does this video have a lot of when this guy posts this does have a lot of like organic traction like people like yeah i want this oh yeah and that video that you just watched of mine got like twenty million views like there's demand for this yeah that's cool so you you would basically just create these as kits and then the sales process is just to do this over and over again like you just make content of you building more and more elaborate you know elaborate or funny or like hey i'm gonna like make the house from full house so it's like yeah that's the tiktok con subscription too yeah just buy the kit and and make the thing like be yeah be a man but kinda not for real yeah yeah be friend it's called be man kinda this is pretty cool there's a store near my house it's called tiny doll house dot com and you walk in and it is tiny doll houses but it is the most meticulously made dolls and dal houses that i have ever seen so for example instead of a dal house they'll have like a a store a replica store and like the little bags of lays potato chips are like hand painted or like you know like the reese's peanut butter cups that you can buy at the counter and like each human bean or doll is like a perfect like re enactment of like whatever period it's supposed to be a replica of and as everyone listening it's one of the things to be like like oh it's so weird into that whatever everyone who sees this is like this is amazing this is so cool i get it now i'm not gonna buy my daughter a three thousand dollar doll but you'd buy one for yourself but buy one for myself i earn money this is crazy i mean do the police just like oh there's a murder let's just stop by the tiny at doll house because those are the creeps who are definitely find all these murder like if you walk in you automatically join a watch list yeah like yeah we're not saying you did it but we're saying there's a it yeah that's the point of a watch list is you haven't it yet but maybe you will and and you definitely sign one of those when you walk in okay i like this business this is my this one sam you gotta give it a strong score on the sam's scale so i think i would give it and seven or eight it's these this is hard have you guys ever put together a complicated like i said it's amazing how they think of all this stuff it doing the directions for something like this is so freaking hard but i do think you could you could charge a thousand dollars plus for it so yeah it's pretty cool yeah i i like because you know the hardest part of any business is how are you gonna get customers i think that's unless you're doing a hard tech startup where it's like we're gonna try to create a robot or a machine that does something that no machine has ever done before like that's one class of business where the hard part is can you make science fiction a reality for most businesses if the hard part is great how am gonna get customers and i think the like sort of amateur approach is always like oh this product is cool i think i would like to make and sell that product and say cool you know that most of your life ninety percent of your life is gonna be spent just doing the marketing to try to get customers for the thing and what i like about this is that you can work backwards from the content that would go viral like this is content that would go viral repeatedly and that will be your sales engine to sell your kits is it a huge business no but could you basically have you know three skus and charge you know a thousand dollars per each one of these kits and just get this like hobby market that people other people have you know sort of ignored or overlooked yeah i i definitely think you could do that i think and you could do it with just viral content i mean really any of these ideas you could film yourself doing and so right digging out in grand pools porch pumpkins what would you do for this gov deals dot com so there are these liquidation marketplaces where you can buy costco returns and everything that the tsa con skate you can buy for like pennies on the dollar well chris you wrote good headlines you should start with the headlines so the headline here you wrote was how to make a thousand dollars a day selling tsa liquidation items yeah okay you have my attention so tell me more yeah so i mean you go through the tsa and they take your pocket knife and then they give it to this website it sounds like a non nonprofit it's not a nonprofit it just has the word governor it's very much a dot com and they sell this crap and then you you you you're in the liquidation game you buy palettes worth of crap and then you split it up and sell it on facebook marketplace so if i go to gov deals dot com this is where you go buy the stuff right so what should i you go you go by by category here or tell you what to do yeah so the other website that does this is beast stock beast stock dot com they have like a a contract with costco to and this is the government by the way who who who is like gov deals who who who heck making this how do they get the inventory some freaking dude that has a friend of the government i have no idea but okay the the the alpha here is setting filters for your local area and finding things that are too big too expensive to ship right like own police cars or something yeah and i'm bitch i've been on this website by the way to try and buy and school bus a hu i wanted to buy like you could goodbye like military equipment yeah i've definitely been on this site okay so i'm looking near me and let's see i gotta a i got a ref a vaccine refrigerator an electric scooter what am i looking for what's the what are the needles in the haystack stack that i really want here chris well what you should do and can do is build an agent right like just five code an agent that finds items for sale according to your filters right like let's say under three thousand dollars within a hundred miles of your zip code and then it just post them all for sale on facebook marketplace at a set mark call it like eighty percent and so you just list all these things on facebook marketplace and whatever just starts taken off getting a ton of hits and inquiries then you actually go spend the money to buy the thing gotcha okay okay so you're just gonna re list all of these things and then yeah and then basically ship on demand buy you know you sort of drop ship the the government confiscated items yep dude this is fantastic i'm looking gonna at vs stock vs sac dot com has raised eighty million dollars from a pe firm and they do something like two hundred million dollars year in sales i wanna like i'm gonna shop on this i love i love like going into ebay and looking for stuff this is really cool there's a twenty twenty mc for a hundred fifty thousand dollars sam right now based on b suck or on gov deals on gov deals dude if it's on gov deals that means it was like repo or like you crime yeah it's got a good story to it yeah look gta six is not out yet this is the closest thing you can get to it have you guys heard of a two two sixty sample sales dot com no what is that so two sixty sample sale dot com so basically do you guys know how like tj j maxx dude the like tagline says i y k y if you know you know i don't know i in fact i don't know should i just leave the site is that the headline like that's obnoxious so so two sixty staples sales so in i think it's in miami new york and la and so you know how tj dj maxx what they do is they convince like nike or whatever to give them last year's stock to stuff that didn't didn't sell and right they don't wanna put in their store because they don't wanna like look bad whatever these guys do this but with typically nicer brands not like significantly nicer but nicer stuff so like todd snyder i've them do it with buck mason i think you know brands where like something might cost two to three hundred dollars for a sweater these guys do it all over new york city and what they do is they rent out a vacant space and it's very bare bones it's just racks of clothes like portable racks of clothes and you walk in and things are dirt cheap and it's amazing and every time i see a two sixty sale they have these pop ups so you sign up to get alerted and then they do a pop up for a week at a time the there's the line is out the door it's crazy they are getting they're are doing so much volume the demand is huge i thought sean you actually told me about two sixty sale so is it like significantly cheaper basically significantly cheaper yeah like like ten percent of the price so a three hundred dollar item will literally be thirty bucks it looks like they're kinda doing a membership model right so like you pay is it you pay to be a member and then because of that you're gonna get to shop early i think you get early shopping access but it is really cool i've bought so much stuff from these places and it's it's great it's great it's like one of these businesses were you had no i had no idea that this existed but it makes sense like where what have you bought because every patreon website it's like a very extreme looking piece of fashion just like nothing crazy like like boxer cargo shorts from tu snyder like like and i and and what happened was i i fall victim oh this said it's it was three hundred dollars but right now it's fifteen dollars i have to get this that's like that's like that's like the energy and i'm leaving money on the table like yeah yeah but i love two sixty sale let's do another one what's a what's another fun one you have how about this mobile fuel delivery you see this one yeah i've never seen this now mobile fuel delivery what is this so people are paying to not have to go to the gas station anymore and the churn is next to zero people get addicted to it the guy just kinda you you have an app you set up an appointment he'll come top off your tank you pay a mark on the gas and then you pay a monthly subscription fee his i think his lifetime value or his his revenue per year per customer is five thousand dollars and his lifetime value is super high that's insane so there's a door for gas pretty much yeah you know how people when they get they get an electric car and they're like oh it's so great not to go to the gas station i hate that how long supposed to get like a like a like a diet pepsi to slim jim do you know what i mean like i i need to go to the gas station same i i feel guilty when i pulled up to the gas station in my tesla like everyone's judging me but so how by the way one of the comments on this video is dubai has this oh so by the so what how much more expensive is gas like so if i let's say it's a hundred dollars normally for me to fill up my tank what would it be with something like this so he'll take the average price of all the gas stations within like a five mile radius of the customer's house and mark it up like twenty percent alright what what about this like novelty ice cream thing because my kids go nuts for the ice cream truck whenever it comes around yeah and i just can't believe he doesn't come around more often like it's like a once a month thing i'm like dog we bought we all buy every time you're here like why you just does not hear more off where do you go i just come here every day like at the park basically as soon as the truck pulls up every single cake goes and gets an ice cream and the truck literally looks like it's nostalgic like the idea of ice trust nostalgic but also the truck actually looks like it's from nineteen eighty eight also and like the menu does too and so i'm just looking at it thinking like this is nostalgic but actually it's just old this which is not what you want so chris what's your ice cream idea so this is like a three or four hundred dollar machine and it's basically like a frozen cylinder that you pour flavored cream over melted ice cream and then it scrape it off and you put it in a little container and it's it's ice cream it's viral very visual ice cream that sells itself you can do it on a busy straight corner or farmers markets you prove out the demand in like an affordable way and then you scale from there it looks like a stack of like hey or something yeah so on your it's on your instagram i'm i'm just reading the or tiktok it just says that you're doing are you saying like a different idea every day because on here it says you're on day fifty seven and apparently someone makes fun of you because the top quote was does the ice cream taste good i don't know and i don't care that's just the hack to get more people to follow me i mean which is what it just just say this is day fifty seven because then they follow like oh i wanna see day fifty eight it but what no day did you ask the big secret there's no doing this for like two years come on wait really so this isn't actually day fifty seven you just made it up well i mean i post three ideas a day and my editor will add day whatever to any of them i don't we there's no rhyme of reason it just helps it works it's too ga come on what do you want it could be day fifty seven it could be you've posted all these ideas and you know you you find something that somebody's doing and you're like oh genius this could be a thing boom genius this could be a thing what's kinda like if you step back au you have a takeaway from from this whole thing maybe the takeaway is about the types of ideas maybe the takeaway is what you've seen in the comments are people's reaction or maybe it's the take maybe the takeaway is in you know the action you've seen some people take off these like what are the actual lessons you've had now after posting i don't know how many you know hundreds hundreds of these videos people are very creative in coming up with excuses and reasons why they won't do something right very creative if you look at my comments some of the most common things are yeah what about insurance what about liability you buy insurance that's what insurance is for oh this is so good why don't you do it okay why are you i have like thirteen businesses like i can't do all of them i'm sorry for giving you an idea people like we will if we were as creative at actually starting and executing on things as we are coming up with excuses why it wouldn't work like we'd all be millionaires by now yeah the comment section of instagram and tiktok on any viral video is like where i would send my worst enemy if i was like you should learn the adopt this mindset this will serve you well and i would just send my enemies there and one by one they would all become incapable people who focus on the absolute wrong things right on on the viral videos not on like you know niche small community videos or things with like a a strong loyal audience or whatever i'm talking about just stuff that just pops off okay you got ten million views this the top you know it's like oh this person made it and it's like well people who've made it a ruining america i was like what what like what what that's your takeaway from this like success story is like success is bad or you whatever like just the the amount of oh just like poor poor quality thinking and attitudes in the like sections or in the comment sections is is pretty pretty wild on a big video do you do you guys read the comments i read the comments on our youtube videos i don't really read them to get like feedback though that makes sense like i read them and i reply to people because i'm like oh it's cool that you care enough to write so i'm gonna like i wanna talk to you that's cool but i don't like look at it and think to myself oh i'm gonna do that because that would defeat the purpose of what i'm trying to do you know the rick rubin quote which is the the the the greatest thing the nicest thing you could do for your audience is ignore them completely if you're a creator or an artist you're trying to make something like you should make the thing you wanna make and then let the chips fall where they may that has become like much more the the philosophy i have if you want feedback on like a specific thing cool you go ask certain people that you respect for that feedback but like you don't just you don't just react to what's in the comments yeah it's it's i i i agree with your philosophy and also it's hard hard like psychologically to avoid it you mean well you get a huge dopamine rush so like if we do something that hits and you're like i didn't even have fun doing that but a hit you still get a dopamine rush and you can record something that people love and it falls flat and you're like that doesn't feel wonderful right now even though it felt great when i recorded it i like to say like you can't go viral without half of everyone thinking you're an idiot right it just comes with the territory or also wouldn't go viral does not seem like a pretty like toxic game to play if you're reading the comments yeah but not just toxic for your mentality but like almost toxic in the sense of like you know like i'm a sports fan and i used to love growing up watching sports center that sports center used to be a bunch of people who love sports showing you the highlights the coolest shit that you missed and making some jokes along the way and then like if you fast forward to espn today it's basically like debate shows for one guy gonna say the craziest shit ever and the other guy's gonna fight him and you know and they're like cool do you believe any of that shit you're saying they're like yeah yeah what does that have to do with yeah what does that have to do with this so you know like the key differentiator is do you believe it and everything i post like i that's a that's like a checkbox box in my mind before i hit publish is do i actually believe what i'm saying sometimes i believe something is controversial and the people think is idiotic and i post it and it usually does well but i'm not in the game of publishing things that are just bombastic to get to get views if i don't believe it hey quick message here because you know that feeling when you send a wire and it actually works no friction well i've used mercury for years now and let me tell you it just works and that's why use it for not one not two but eight of my companies from credit cards to invoices i have everything in one place there's no junky dashboard i've never told please visit a local bank branch none of that tom fu and a few months ago i landed a big client the first thing i did i sent them a clean branded invoice boom deal closed cash in the door that's the kind of banking experience i want and that's why i use mercury so if you're running a startup and you want mailing that feels like it's built in this century well go to mercury dot com and get started in minutes mercury is a financial technology company not a bank bank the services are provided through choice financial group call them man a and evolve bank trust members fdic chris have you done anything else cool in your businesses since the last time we talked so you pivoted your tree trimming business last time we talked on here you're were like alright i got like a dozen businesses mh that are doing in total like you know two or three million a year in free cash flow has anything cool happened in your your portfolio i'm almost ready to open my secret pickle ball club that we talked about last time okay what what's been so that that's been a little while so it seem like you were gonna like open that up quick have you run into like real world bumps doing that yeah i have to expand my metal building and it's really hard finding a company that wants to do that because it's a small job there's companies that wanna build metal buildings and barn dominion from the ground up but that was the what was the idea again like you had a space and you had like a a shed or a big big kind of barn in your backyard yeah and you called it a secret pickle pickle yep yep and you were like i'm gonna have a hundred something member or two hundred members or something like that who pay me what was it a hundred bucks a month yep hundred bucks a month and i'm gonna base and all i gotta do is like basically run this kind of like no employee backyard pickle ball club for people yep and it's almost open well chris i see one thing in your little i'm i'm on your tiktok feed right here you have it's like kids gym equipment and i just bought a little bit of this for my home gym because like my kids always come down and wanna like be in the gym with me or kinda bug me while i'm working out like they just think it's like playtime and i need like a thing to occupy them and so i've bought some of this like fisher price looking gym equipment and there's there's a couple of problems with it one is like kids get bored of it fairly fast two it's really ugly so like you have like red yellow green blue suddenly like all over your gym which like was is not that color so it kinda like trash up your gym and i actually like the thing that kids like is basically obstacle courses and so i think the kids gym equipment to make is basically like a easy to set up like little course or like the equivalent of like a few very like it comes with like like a mcdonald's menu of like twelve different courses you could just set up and that would occupy my kids for thirty minutes and it'd be really mean i do this manually every day with my kids obviously like create obstacle course of my house and like chris have you seen the nugget no sam do you know nugget oh yeah i i'm i'm a nugget owner so yeah i yeah these modular yeah so the nugget is this incredible business where they created kids furniture but it's not doesn't look like furniture right because if you if you thought of kids furniture from first principles as elon would say then you would make this you would make something with no hard edges no corners that they can get cut on it would basically look like a toy which is what the nugget is it's like you know a a couple of foam kind of base pieces and then foam triangle foam circle whatever and so you get these like shapes that you can just set up as a couch when you're not using it or when you wanna just sit or you can fold them up and create like basically a jungle gym and moms go nuts for this thing i don't know if you're seen like the nugget owners like facebook groups it's like a hundred thousand members of moms who just like love the nugget and they want the new colors of the nugget or they want like ideas i'm like oh if you buy two nuggets you can create this in your house kids love the nugget parents of the nugget and it's basically this like modular piece of fur it's like a mix of a furniture and a toy and i think like you know there's there should be more of that this business a scaled i think their plant is like i think they started in like north carolina or something but they do you know fifty sixty seventy million a year in revenue on on the nugget it's like a real like legit business actually i think that that estimate might be actually actually dramatically low might be i it might actually be double that by now i looked into it for the first time like a couple years ago and and was thinking about potentially competing with them yeah i bought one after i if you told me about it it seems it's amazing and do you think the revenue is now let me see they they had posted i remember it was like seventy five million a while back but i i imagine it's over north of a hundred million now as would be my guess and profitable business that was bootstrap no investors as far as i as far as i could find and so they but there was a there there's a bunch of opportunities like one the nugget was quite expensive and so making a lower cost nugget was like you know one option two you could always like but basically like if you could do the nugget but get into retail because they weren't in retail and so like i remember thinking like somebody should do the costco like costco basically has like knock off versions of everything so if you see peloton you walk in a costco and there's something called like i don't even know what it's you know what mh echelon it like looks exactly the same the name fucking rhymes and it's like this is peloton cool like there's aura ring which is like the kinda like fancy fitness tracker and they're like boom we have the like whatever the z ring and they they they'll have like the costco brand partnered version of these they costco doesn't make it they just find a company who's like plays at the right price points for costco too that's exactly like that's pretty much what my company to also do with the scam we just aren't gonna raise at vc and i could can sell for less and make more money i mean it's it's the same thing that's what wanted did i mean that's the difference what's the difference do you guys different well we didn't raise vc therefore we can make less profit get are different the spelling i can't do read i'm i bet i can tell you where the nugget found all their customers from facebook ads yeah yeah it's all facebook ads that's it everywhere you look is it's just facebook ads and and they did have to be clear like insane word mouth like you know like people really love this product and we'll ship data to like when would do play dates it's like inevitably the parents are like oh what is that hey right like we we tell people that it has some viral to it as well it's a great product and they did a great job but you know there's i i think there's more opportunities like that in the kinda kids space where you make something that's like functional that kids find fun but like doesn't clutter up and make your house look ugly at the same time no i wonder if you could do like the the casper mass mattress version of this and build a nugget competitor that like you can like shrink down to make shipping costs cheaper make more isn't it yeah it does come like that it comes like rolled in a thing and then you like let it expand for two days when it gets to your house chris what's your favorite business of all the businesses that you own i'm curious oh man of the ones i currently own yeah yes oh man but what's the best business one you the one one that you're like oh this rv parks i like my parks same same more words i just i don't understand why people invest in single family or multi family right with a mobile home or an rv park you don't maintain the units you just maintain the infrastructure under the ground it's a hedge against the economy when the economy is good the millennials and the boomers are traveling you got short term stays when the economy economy tanks you got people living in your rv parks full time so you hedge it both ways what what's your rv park called well i have ownership in nine of them so what's like one of them moose creek near glacier national park why don't you just buy more of these then i well i am okay so i'm looking at this moose creek what a stream side that's our holding company that owns all of them we have twenty nine and then i'm looking there's is very nice websites so when i think rv park i thought like trailer park but this looks like fancy thing what yeah in my dumb or there's just like no i've done both you yeah this is more like k this is for short term stays they're near national or state parks people stay one to three nights at a time trailer parks people live there full time month to month or year to year so you went near a national park you buy a piece of land you get it zoned and permitted i assume and then basically people bring their rv there so you're not building mobile homes they bring their their rv there and they get to park it and they pay you fee to park their that's what this is yeah we we don't really build we'll expand but we're usually buying existing parks and adding value okay great so that but that's what this is and then how do i if i just wanna come short term stay you have stuff sitting there that i could just go use or i to bring i have to bring you bring your rv yeah okay so there's no just has like a a way to a a way to easily change the water it has electric hook ups and it might have a pool or like some type of like lounge that you can walk through the business on these so you said you buy them you don't build them so you you bought out whether it's this one or another one so like how much you buy this for this one we bought for eight million dollars and it was doing seven hundred thousand a year so like a nine percent cap rate give care so you go you put down two million three million would you put down we put down twenty percent so one point six million we raised forty percent from investors and we finance through a bank the remainder okay so you okay so you put down one point six and then forty percent of the eight million you also put out as equity so you have like less debt than than typical so you have forty percent debt on this thing you buy it it was making well you said seven hundred thousand profit at the time and then you said we add value so like what was the play to add the value to this one so this one was open five months a year whereas it could've have been open six months a year so it it opened on may fifteenth closed on like october fifteenth we opened from may first to october thirty first right so we added a month of occupancy sounds pretty simple right yes okay so and and by the way you talk to the owners and you're like hey guys how come you don't do that and they were just like we just definitely what no good happy we yeah we we're good it makes good money and then we bought an acre next door or two acres next door and we expanded into it so the rents were under market we raised rents we added more pad sites we expanded the season and now it's doing like one point two million a year of never gotcha it and it'll would be maybe still an nine cap rate or you know or was that like a sign of the time we bought it under market it was probably worth an eight cap when we bought it so it like seven and a half cap it's like a it's an eight figure park now yeah so that's like a fifteen million dollar thing now so if you went and you sold it today if it's stabilized and it's working well because you did raise the rents you add more pads you extend the seasonality by fifteen percent or you know either the the open window and whatever else you said you did and so now let's say it's a fifteen million dollar thing you go sell this you will end up turning you know one point six of equity into something like you know three point two or maybe more because you have carry on the investor thing something like that well more because we're packaging it with twenty eight other parks we so we have a hundred and fifty million dollars worth of parks under management and then we have a portfolio worth a hundred and eleven million under contract right now so by the end of the year we'll have two hundred and sixty million worth of parks under management that way our cap rate comes way down and we could sell the whole thing first a six cap to private and how do we me and my partners i'm a c gp in this fund so you have two or three three partners do you operate in this or you're just you don't you don't want me operating sean come on what value what would i do i help with marketing and with fundraising an idea guy with a great personality somebody every something everybody wants important that's it's usually my pitch strategy quote strategy okay so rv parts is your best business yeah but i've been doing this for seven seven years so i've been doing it with this company for two but i was doing it with a couple other partners seven years ago did you ever have a job or you're always doing your own thing always doing my out thing which of the eight things has been the biggest financial success for you this will probably end up that when we exit which will probably be within a couple years but i had i've had two different e commerce brands that were eight figure businesses one i exited and one i did not which one did you exit it we sold wholesale iphone parts for seven years to iphone repair stores okay and so if you were if i cleaned your slate if i took away all your businesses gave you all your free time back right you know everything you know today about the world but i give you all your time back what would you go really hard at if you if i was like hey do something like you're gonna go do something now just starting for scratch mh one do you know everything you need know but you gotta do one thing yeah well where does your brain go not like what would you do like specifically maybe because maybe you don't know that but like what immediately comes to mind when i ask that question i would wanna ride a tidal wave and i would wanna ride what i know and i know small business right medium large know nothing about it i know small business inside it out and so the tidal wave is ai and i would want to implement ai in small businesses for free to get my foot in the door earn their trust show myself as an expert and then start charging and i would just have a simple ai automation slash implementation agency for small to medium sized businesses what do you think is an example like a what would be like a hero example of like small business here's a here's an example of a small business and here's an example of about how ai would help that small business like clear no brainer or like you know like that's the one i would kind of try to rinse a repeat yep the simplest thing is setting up an ai voice answering agent twenty four seven for small business owners that don't pick up the phone after hours because they're with their family right it's just an ai robot and you can plug into other you know software services that already offer this you don't have to have any technical knowledge you charge a flat monthly fee and if there's an emergency then it would patch the call through to the business owner like if it's a plumbing emergency otherwise it would just it's just like a smarter voice mail system i would start there we've had a lot of people say that i've had a couple friends do it i know alex we've been doing it sean i i don't know if you know grant wilkinson branch one of my good buddies he started this thing i'm looking at the website now so originally this guy he was like hey i wanna work on something do you have like ideas like i work on and i told him my three things and all three failed miserably and he's he's a he's an engineer and he was like i'm just gonna do this agency thing it's called the rose scale rose dot ai and like he's just doing agency work that automate a variety of tasks using ai and like customers are just begging for him to do shit for them and there's like a dozens and dozens and dozens of these services and i'm seeing this firsthand what's going on with grants business and people are just begging like they need exactly simple these you think these businesses are doing well like they're go gang bus like these ai kinda people implement mentor for businesses it depends what you define as gang buses but can you make can the owner make seven figures a year one million dollars a year for sure can you get to two to three to four million dollars a year in revenue for sure is it a lot of work yeah it's a service but if you're like your goal is to like make money and work forty hours a week and have a a business yeah i think it's like there's massive demand for it now how does that scale beyond to be as big as you know maybe a hundred two hundred three hundred million dollars a year i'm not sure but like some people will figure out and agencies that is a scale people always say agencies are scalable no definitely scalable you're just gonna have to have a thousand employees like it's it'll work it's just gonna be really hard but that's that's not bad at all yeah yeah yeah it's scalable do you like pain yeah it's what is your pain tolerance answers the question not is this scalable but yeah i mean you don't have a bunch of friends that are doing this right now i met a few people but my my understanding was that like you know for a lot of these businesses they don't really know how ai i can help them so you basically have to kinda go bespoke and figure out like oh what's your problem said my how do we use ai to do this and like the ai part is almost like the easy part and then it's like how do get like the adoption and the buy in and they're like you know all of that stuff and so i think there is like definitely desire and demand to like i think i everyone generally feels like oh i should probably be using ai to like admit do stuff bet but when the business owner themselves is clueless about like where the ai i could plug in you need something like what chris is talking about which just is like hey here's the generic problem that i can see from the outside that's that you see as a no brainer for you and if if i could find that match i could do that specific implementation i think beyond that's a little bit harder the more interesting place to me have always been you understand where like ai is changing the game and then you basically go buy a business at a fair price today and then you're like cool my value add is that i'm gonna use ai to like drop ten ten points of margin to the bottom line you know i could take this from a ten percent eb of business to a twenty percent eb of business just by doing this right i just been doing this one thing you like i can get rid of all these people who i have doing stuff because i can automate all of that at of you know higher accuracy higher speed using ai so i think like the play is you go figure out how to how to what's the right type of business for that is a bookkeeping business is something else and you basically go and you say alright i can buy this business for twenty five million dollars is established business with a book of book of clients already and i know that i have this lever of ai that they're like fifty five sixty five year old business owner wasn't gonna do and i bought it at a fair price but i can make this thing more valuable and i can capture ten twenty million dollars in two years of work you know without the without the hustle of scaling an agency so i like that play of i like that that version of this play much better personally do you know anyone that's going after that now there's a lot of people that i think there's like full funds that like private equity funds that are doing this there where they're like cool we're gonna do private equity but typically the private equity play was like you know maybe we offshore things or maybe we just cut head count or we centralized certain things and now they're like the play is ai we're gonna go in and we're gonna add ai in these three ways you know kind of what chris said like ai on the like sales automations side ai on operations automation and ai to just like you know maybe reduce head count across the board on product or whatever you know maybe it's engineering something like that and so there you there's a lot of people trying to do that i don't know how well it's going because they're not like you know talking a lot on twitter about like how great it's going yeah we'll see chris what do you wanna be where do you wanna be in ten years i just wanna keep certain businesses man i just chase product market fit that's what i do but why because i just i'm chasing dopamine and like i wrote dopamine like yeah i just my focus my version of focus is focusing on my superpower not on one business and my superpower is seeing and executing on opportunities really really fast mh well don't you get worn out having to like manage or work with people who run your shit and not as good as you want them to yeah i mean i've had like fifteen different business partners and so nowadays i i'm much more likely to to find a business partner that takes the vast majority of the business so i could have like more slices of small pieces of pie so there's low expectations from me and i just go into a partnership eyes wide open saying hey gonna be super distracted fyi if if you think i'm gonna put in ten hours a week it's probably gonna be two so adjust your expectations and equity accordingly and it took me fifteen years to learn that but that's just how i prefer to do things what do you think ten years from now what's gonna make it a huge win for you it's probably gonna be a a saas business that i launch and promote with my audience with that has a big exit that's where i see this heading what kind of saas well i mean i'm i'm building like a quickbooks competitor right now and i when i say i mean my brother law who's like a ten developer like an ai enabled quickbooks competitor so maybe that'll be it but maybe that won't even be a thing in six months i don't know yeah that's pretty cool i think and that's good like product product audience fit for you yeah that's a super competitive space unfortunately know so that's interesting me no i think but listen i you know i've got almost four million followers that like me you know and most people hate quickbooks they hate zero and if it's ai enabled and it's cheaper and i use it and i talk about it i'm not trying to beat quickbooks or beat zero i'm just trying to build a cool business that cash flows you what are you gonna call it lazy books bookkeeping for people who hate bookkeeping lazy books i like that you start with names you see like a guy you starts with a name you you get the name early yeah yeah i start with the annoying domain name and the market that makes it real for you it kind of like forces clarity of thought around the the the product like what why i do you think that's important it's it's more that i start with a marketing channel right in mind and then i build an idea around that and oftentimes the name and the brand goes hand in hand with the marketing channel right i i don't like building ideas and then see if people will want it you know i wanna see if they will want it and then build the idea what was name number two and three there was there was none i mean lazy bucks i tried thin books i couldn't find that domain lazy books was one where i was actually able to convince the seller to to sell it to me but i i i i was really just thinking of like a slim down quickbooks competitor that had you know the twenty percent of features you only really need that never breaks you know that never disconnects from your bank account that was the thought process there you and der man you're all about the domain names did you guys did you see sean he gave a the country of anti i think it was did see what happened no what do you do it was a very small article a tech on tech ranch dot com i saw that it's a da shah founder of hubspot i don't remember exactly but i think it said he gave them ent ti dot ai and paid them eight hundred thousand dollars to make that their official domain name i don't understand why he paid them to make that it's official their their official domain name but they at ti dot ai is now the country's official domain name well dot ai is actually it stands for dot anti ti like most of their revenue is coming from yeah all of those registrations yeah and so but i don't know why da bash is just like slowly making making inroads with a a variety of countries starting with domain names and before we know it the next twenty years he's gonna have an army is like is it out of this isn't it out of the realm if you know da mesh chris hopefully you had a great time if we like having you on is a blast thanks man for coming man thanks for you're an interesting guy with interesting ideas and we appreciate your big time you go ahead promote it t k o pod dot com it's the k office podcast i didn't wanna talk about it but here i even know i had this on figure t k o pod dot com chris what your shirt what is your shirt say it says look at this freaking thing right here that's your line short from videos yeah you're committed to the and i appreciate that i respect thank you commitment to the bit thank you that's it that's the pod thank you chris i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a road less travel never looking back alright let's take a quick break because as you know we are on the hubspot podcast network but we're not the only ones there's other pod on this network too and maybe you like them maybe you should check them out one of them that wanna draw your attention to is called nudge by phil ag and whether you're a marketer or a salesperson and you're looking for the small changes you could make the new habits you could do the the small decisions you could make that will make a big difference that's what that podcast is all about check it out it's called nudge and you can get it wherever you get your podcast

so after scott came on the pod and was like i have my distressed guy in europe i'm like ben find me the distressed guy in europe i feel like i could rude world i know i could be what i want to put at all in in like a days off on a goal travel fine so sky was on our podcast he's and we asked him we say you know we heard the story that you were buying distressed f t x claims after f t x went into bankruptcy and everybody hated it it was like that it was a disgrace it was the the symbol of a bad bad business a bad investment i heard that you were buying up claims on the cheap and that those claims are now being paid out you know in full or even more than full because sam bank freed whatever he was doing his thing he had owned enough assets that would would make all the creditors whole and so he tells the story about how he's got this guy who's brought him into a couple of deals and he was talking about distressed investing and when he told the story he like he like kinda dismissed it he was like i bought ten million dollars of f t x shares or something like that two million two million i think was i'm sorry whatever it was it was like a seven figure bet and he sort of just said like yeah i did this one thing and sean and i were like rewind what and that's what called this story also it was a moment where it's like hold to put some respect on the podcast name but i mean i think a lot of people make fun of scott there's like the inverse scott gallo index and stuff like that basically about his bad calls he's made in his life and i think in general people don't really realize and sam you do a good job of this you're like actually you weren't on who sold a company for a hundred million dollars he never really talks about that much and then he done some interesting investing stuff and i just feel like because almost he's so good at the gift of dad i think people sort of bucket him as all talk no walk yeah so it was interesting to hear one of his interesting walk stories then i got in touch with tommy and we i say tell me about this i'm interested what are you doing and what are you what's going on and he had some interesting stories so i wanna invite him on the podcast to do two things teach us about this category of distressed with both both me and sam are pretty much novice in this like we are we're missionary guys we we are we're we like vanilla like we we do we do very basic stuff you know when it comes to a business and investing this is more exotic and it's gotta be interested i want you to start with a little crispy description of like what's the big idea with distressed investing what are you trying to do how what how we wrap minds about this and then i wanna play a game called first best worst weirdest which is where we go through maybe the first play you did the best play that ever worked out for you the worst deal that went sideways and then just something where shit got weird while you were doing it but i went first just can you just make us a little smarter teacher so you distressed investing one on one we talk man okay so i am the bottom of the food chain of distressed investing so there is a whole industrial complex of large distressed investing firms out there you have oak tree and silver point and fair and you can you guys apollo everyone's heard these names or maybe if you're if you're for all business and investing i guess so for myself i kinda came up a different way which is my parents were bankruptcy lawyers and i sort of learn i knew a lot about bankruptcy and generally what you're trying to do is you're almost like value investing in the toolkit is you know a lot about the legal process the trick that i've from studying a lot of distressed investing is you know and there's his famous michael pricing which you guys have probably heard but if you haven't it's sort of he says when you're investing you always want like the stake in the sizzle i think what where the okay investors in distress do right is they find steak you know you find something and maybe it's a double but where the guys that really knocked the cover off the ball and have outstanding returns generally are looking for that sizzle as well stake is the kinda of the known the known value that's there it's the substance it's the thing that will make give you a margin of safety when you buy the sizzle is the upside of how good this could be if things go right but you but you still have the stake even if the if things don't go great exactly and that's even what the whole pitch on with what scott was which is you're buying a stake you're buying twenty cents you know you're gonna get thirty cents in cash back plus you have all this crypto sizzle and unless you're you know i don't wanna say a but unless you're just really really aggressively against crypto there was a lot of optional built into that and if you look at the history of distress some of the best ones have been financial service bankruptcies po scheme cases as well as like the dot com cases were actually pretty good you think of things like comm disco which was a famous large bankruptcy and a lot of those actually they kinda peter out because it wasn't as much debt was just equity values went to zero so so if you look at the history there they can be pretty good and that was kind of playbook was as my friend would say who's a pretty smart investor he says you avail yourself to the optional you know so because you sort of set yourself up to either buy that for for free you get it for free or buy it extremely cheaply so that's what we're doing at t and that's what we're really try to replicate in almost everything they do no a matter if it's crypto or just general dis distressed is your company just you are you just a guy or do you have a team i'm just a guy i mean i have a small team i think scott calls me a lifestyle business guy but i would describe it as what's nice about what i do is i to choose when i work how hard i'm working if there's no deals i don't have to work on stuff and also because i'm in a low cost jurisdiction you know that passed through to my clients so you know as scott ping the usual fees that you would pay if you went to a big distress firm probably not i mean maybe because they want scott as a client but but the most part the fee structure would have to be higher your cost structure higher can i dumb this down like in a way like i'm kind of a caveman man and you can tell me if i'm right but basically you find distressed deals you convince rich people to buy them and you take a small cut is that right yes or i mess my own capital but yeah or you mess your own money and you're so good that people come back over and over again well if you lose money for people they generally don't return your phone calls yeah they they might call you but they don't they they don't they don't pick up when you call so let's walk through an example together and i think we should use t x because it's a pretty well known company it's kinda what we were already talking about so walk me through the origin story of of the f t x deals so that we can kinda see like a we can get like a a blueprint of the type of thing that you're gonna try to what is the type of thing that you do so where does the story start with your t interest yeah so we were our i had already been involved in a number of crypto distressed situations and i should back up to just say as a as a backdrop like have having studied so many different investors throughout my life and kind of that's what i was really always interested in is principally just being an investor one to the things she'll realize the guys have really good returns also invented a category so i was very interested in crypto distress as a category and i thought hey crypto the future no one's willing to touch crypto so back in two thousand fourteen fifteen i was already looking at m go you know myself and at the time my partner we were the largest buyer of claims in m ox but before you tell the mount go story i just wanna double click on you said some of the best investors they ended up like actually now when you look back they kind of had invented a category can you give a couple of examples of people of guys who did that so like howard march is the is the pro typical example right like he kind of invented the whole idea of like institutional not just him there were other people of course but he was and in you know a very earth early really and basically him in a a group of people and invented the idea of institutional asset class to distress investing so what that does is it compresses it lowers you know cost of capital and and and really brings a whole pool of capital that we've never vested in this so a long term returns might go down but because the the actual the actual cost capital is coming down and so you're your your tailwind returns are just enormous and what does that mean does that mean that like institutional investors they they were like normally afraid of us and howard i was like no this actually makes a ton of sense and it's actually kind of safe and here's why and so he convince large institutions to buy into that so what you're saying to allocate and the same thing with like early venture guys i mean i guess before you have like the seventies eighties i mean alan pat and people like that these were guys that really invented the category and of course they have huge firms now and you know the valuations for startups but it it's like the it's this wall of liquidity that creates these kinda of tailwind returns which are fantastic you want it i mean you kinda like that's the most amazing thing it's got more of those ways like yc is a good example of this or yc basically created the category of the the you know the accelerator right it created the category of this so pre seed pre everything pre pre product pre revenue pre retract investing and so that really wasn't a popular category now it's a whole industry there's angels and they're super angels and their seed funds and pre seed funds there's a whole industry now that specialize in that category but it really started even paula said this as an experiment he was curious like how early on could you fund somebody could you fund a student could you fund a grad student and you know he sort of thought it might be too early but he wanted to go see what happens when you do that yeah and even you know for me when i was start starting my hedge fund my right first when i was really a kid some of my early investors were goldman partners that were partners when it went public and they were all sort of early l guys like lever buyout guys before private equity became a institutional asset class and their returns were just insane like insane returns hey real quick our sponsor for today hubspot actually did something pretty cool if you like money stuff like this you're like investing wisdom like warren buffett or mona per bra well they actually put together a nine investment principles document there's a free document you can have of frameworks that they shared when they came on the podcast you can get it right now it's actually just a mental model that separates i guess the elite investors from the average investors you can get it right now scan the qr code or click the link in the description alright let me get back to the episode okay so let let's go back to your story so you're saying you got excited about potentially being the first in a category of crypto distressed distressed already was a thing but nobody most people were afraid to crypto in general so especially the institutional guys weren't gonna go there so you're like okay maybe i can carve out a niche of distressed crypto we're all looking for a thing this could be my thing and you're saying like story actually started before that the before it was mount go sam are you familiar with mt do you know that the rough story here yeah was sort of coinbase before coinbase but it had some nefarious characters involved yeah and so there was a huge kinda like sort of hack problem with with mount go so tom what what happened with with m go what did you actually do there let's yeah so so m cox was really the fur it was almost eighty percent of the volume at the time in two thousand fourteen when it went under and it was the largest exchange i mean other than going peer you know peer to peer and going to starbucks and buying bitcoin like that was where you traded bitcoin and they had a pretty aggressive hack they tried to cover up the hack which was the real crime was to cover up eventually a filed for solve in japan and what's called a chapter fifteen in the states that's kind of irrelevant that just recognizes the foreign proceeding is the main proceeding and you know you could buy claims for a while you could buy them for about a fifth of the the the market price of bitcoin this is when bitcoin like three hundred dollars and then in two thousand eighteen the estate actually sold some coin to have enough to pay people the cash value their claim at the petition date when i say cash i mean fiat so i'll try to use fiat and so you could buy below the cash you get the bitcoin for free sorry so just just to just to slow this down for a second when you say buy the claims what you're saying is i was a customer let's say of m cox and boom i lost my money it's ins i don't know what's gonna happen with this it's gonna go through a bankruptcy process i'm hoping maybe in a few years i'll be able to get something out of this and guys like you knock on the door and you're say i'm so sorry for your loss you know what i'll offer you something today for the rights to that claim you have as a customer as a creditor in this bankruptcy thing it's gonna take a long time it's little uncertain you know so i'll give you and in that case like for every kind of dollar worth of claim what were you buying the claims for at mount knox yes so the original trade bitcoin was at about three hundred dollars and we were buying the claims for about eighty dollars per bitcoin were you a bitcoin person or were you just a a dis a distressed person i would say yeah i started economics i remember reading about bitcoin when it was like ten dollars i like wow that's cool if it works but other than that i had no i was like this is pretty crazy alright so dumb question they get hacked yeah so they don't have the bitcoin so what is underneath i get in the in the f t case because he'd invested in all these underlying companies and they still had there some assets what did mount ga have that made you think that the claims would be worth anything so so just if you wanna if you wanna do it in in bitcoin terms so there's was about eight hundred thousand bitcoin that was supposed to be there what within a first like month or two they basically found two hundred bitcoin found two hundred or two hundred thousand two hundred thousand okay so they found two hundred thousand of the eight hundred that's supposed to be there yeah right so now you know you know this is this is you know just distress actually the math even though i study math the math and distress is always super simple like two hundred over eight hundred okay you got twenty five cents so guys are gonna get back twenty five cents we're basically offering them five cents this is on the bitcoin dollar you bought the assets after you learned and that he magically discovered so you're course so you're like minimal downside potentially high upside that was so the stake there was they got two hundred thousand bitcoin sitting there today and it's three hundred dollars a bitcoin i can buy it at twenty five you know for for for twenty five percent of that value so that's your steak and your sizzle was maybe they'll find more baby bitcoin price will go up is that right is that the right way to think about that basically yep maybe they'll find more and and you get a five x return on bitcoin that was the original bridge and i remember the first headphone i pitched it to the guy literally laughed me out of his conference room and whenever i saw him around town he would just be like bitcoin i mean it was like two thousand and fifteen to be fair but look the bitcoin loser i'm imagine like the big short here because i don't know anything about the world so my only reference point is movies i'm imagining your michael brewery you're sitting in your room by yourself you're pouring through the papers and you're like you're like pen and you're like you doing the math you're like two thousand hundred thousand and eight hundred thousand twenty five cents we get a five cents the equations are popping out of your head and then you go to the hedge fund and then they sort of laughing you out of the room and they're like listen do you wanna just get lunch because we're not doing this if you wanna make something out of this hour were you just getting laughed out of the room in that way well i remember the name of the fund i won't mention them they're out of business now that's the he this isn't any he got but there big names yeah they're dance on the graves i the guy won't remember but the the firm was south paul i don't know what happened to the guys at the south paw it was like a two billion dollar hedge fund anyway it doesn't really matter forever ever go and to be fair or fair to guy like i said oh this crypto exchange my claims were fifth of the market value he's like crypto you mean like bitcoin and i said i said yeah yeah bitcoin and he's like you want me to buy bitcoin and i was like well you know the claims get five times your money and he just like he starts slapping his knee he was like tyler that is the funniest shit i've heard all week he was like he was like what else are you working on and i was like wait real idea food and pets were you an employee some and were you on your own on small hedge fund okay so had a small hedge fund so i bought about two hundred thousand dollars worth like literally nothing but for my small hedge fund that was like i was like well was like ten of my money i gotta like you know i was only like i i only i hit so i was a really small hedge file i was running i said okay i can't this is like you know i could get in trouble i can't like make this too big so i'll like to call some of these guys i know and when you're when you have a small hedge fund the nice thing you can do is you kinda have a somebody out of relationship like you can do a million out like if you find a ten million dollar deal you can get i don't i'm just making up a name oak tree you call oak i mean they won't to tim million dollar deals but you say hey you want nine of this i want one a million dollars it don't even have to pay me anything thing i just need you because i need the money so you make friends and you kinda figure out ways to get some relationships with some of these cats i'd be similar to probably in industry like the coop competition you know if you wanna dress it up and make it sound fancy but i mean that's how i spent my whole career like coop coop with like all the big distress firms so they call me with tiny stuff that they can't do and i call them with big stuff that i can't do and i asked for either allocation or a fee or something but generally i'm asking for allocation because i'm not like a registered dealer broker what did you end up making on the mount got trade how much did you end up getting in and what was the and what was the animal what was the out yeah they were across a number of different sp and we had a later like hit i'm i'm gonna get to the answer i we had a later hedge fund that like was buying all the way up so they probably made like two three times their money because they were literally buying all the way up through the distribution like they'll still buy claims to this day but our original investor made about thirty eight times as money or actually it's more than now it's over forty times as money over what period of time oh yeah like seven years yes and is that because bitcoin price appreciated basically yeah so some of it about five of it is the discount and then the rest is their appreciation right but he put it on in two thousand the big the the the guy i'm describing was our real first outside lp outside of the fund which which liquidate and we sold the claim and i think that claim we bought the original claim we bought from a google actually was pretty funny and i always joke because i was a kid and you know i had my standard documents but i didn't have documents for like in japanese court and he was like so how do we do this time and i was like you know i don't know and he said well why don't i ask so i always joke at google wrote my original purchase documents for for the purchase of you know like i don't know the name of the firm step shoe and something or some some firm that for google because this guy was like a big up at at at at google but yeah about forty forty plus times but a lot of it is appreciation but the really interesting thing about that guy that originally did the deal with us this family office guy is we were buying the bitcoin for free because he we put you put that trade on in two thousand eighteen that was the the big short moment because you were getting it for free i explained that why'd did you get it for free okay because the the rough math at the time in two thousand eighteen bitcoin is like ten grand twelve grand and the trustee sold the fifth of the bitcoin so i sold about forty thousand bitcoin and brought in about six hundred million dollars of cash and so there was six million million dollars of cash and it was about three billion dollars of crypto or two and a five billion dollars of crypto we were buying the claims for below the cash value the clash looked through value on the claims so so we're were buying for about a four hundred million dollars dollar valuation there was six hundred million dollars of cash and there was about two billion dollars crypto so that was the time when i was like really banging the table because before that there was all bitcoin and it was it was cheap but it was quite directional why do they sell it for below the cash value at that point is it because there's still a time delay or an uncertainty like what yes and the there was uncertainty around whether who got the uplift in value so in two thousand eighteen there was a big argument who is the uplift in value does it go back to mark capella like the guy that kind of didn't do us right or does the up listen value go to the customer account claim the same thing happened in f the same thing happens all crypto bankruptcies who gets appreciation and value post petition petition meaning the date the company files for ins consultancy as you know i'm i'm i'm an absolute outsider i'm learning about the all of all about this right now but like mount go and particularly f t those were pretty big news headlines and as an outsider when i see this i just think oh i'm sure like there is no opportunity because everything is being taken care of like they're gonna catch the bad guy but then also all the big dogs are already after this like there's no way to make it money there's no opportunity not me someone else is probably like on top of this but the way that you're describing yourself maybe this is like you're under selling yourself but you're kinda describing yourself as like just a smart guy who just like kinda gets in the mix and figures it out take out the smart part was you're doing it good there that you just you just did it good but you like how many like literally how many human beans like how many human beings are actually getting after this like for the mount go and and like who do you who do you phone yeah a lot of questions in there okay so you're right in some sense all the big firms have a corner on the like the bond if you wanna try to play the bonds and stuff like that you can't open up a fidelity account and trade distressed bonds you call them and you say oh can i get a quote in this bond and they're like well that's in default you're like i know it's in default i'm asking what the quote and they're like we don't trade in defaulted bonds they're way too risky for you to be looking at so they're you'd have to have like real prime brokers and you know you have to have serious money to play that game also you have to worry about getting run over by big distressed firms sort of actually just like in in the big short were the two guys who had the garage hedge fund which one it was big i mean big for a regular guy it was twenty million dollars of there their on money they're were playing with they were like laughed out of chase or something like that yeah yeah the same thing with the derivatives markets i mean you have to have serious setups ups and serious like comb lines is to have lines with your with your pbs to be able to do this stuff and so i knew the the other side of the market or the kind of the that's why said in the lowest rung of the tote pole which is the claims market so there are probably like ten firms out there that really do trade claims and you know i say this lovingly because i'm one most people in space are not super smart it's kinda like the the the the i don't know in nineteen maybe it's where like the oh gosh i'm gonna offend somebody like the network administrator i don't know like the kinda like the lowest level of it person this is like the lowest level of the distressed person yeah like the rejects a little bit yeah and so but i kinda like hanging out with the rejects what can i say right anyway so so you're you're kinda like a like what's such you know there's trevor shark and they have a thing that like lives on the shark the food like a antibiotic yeah you like that little thing that eats the stuff that falls off the shark and the shark kinda likes you because you keep the barn off it or something and that's you as a trade claim buyer if you prefer some of these largest firms the the the cases weren't largely talking them out when you have cryptocurrency changes going under and things like that your talking about customer account claims and customer account what's nice about that like both in f t and then if you go back to mount cox the docket was largely customer account claims and so it's all trade claims there's not a lot of structured debt and so certain setups are just not appropriate for a small person or home gamer to be trying but you know you can literally buy claims there's no nothing that stops you but do you go do you do you put out a press release and you say hey all one hundred thousand f t x or mount ga claim holders or okay please email me and let's talk right yeah if you've been wrong by this curly haired man call me here so okay so yeah so so in okay mount ox is a good example fortress was my competitor on that docket and they were buying up claims too pete rig is a big big bitcoin and he's one of the founders of fortress and they were buying up claims and they work on my competitor on that case they were the only two people really buying claims we almost worked together but but we're still friends and everything and here were still friends and they actually did do like press releases and tried to get people that way for myself this is gonna sound ridiculous but the entire fourteen thousand credit you know fourteen thousand creditors or customers was a legal list so of things about the yeah so you were able to use the leak list to actually find people my favorite is when you find somebody and his name's like some random name like spin eric and i don't know makeup some and he's in tech and he on linkedin he's like you know he he's he's part of the bitcoin group and then you ping them and you're like hey do you have a amount gosh claim if you do like we could buy it from you and he's like how did you find me and you're like well let me you're under thirty five you're into tech and you're part of the bitcoin group i just and they're there are only three with people with do the same name so that's you're hustling doing like this is work yeah yeah you're hustling there's a lot of work the work here is you find the person you contact them you get them interested you five their ownership and that they haven't already sold the claim to somebody else there's like a whole bunch of work that you do so that guys like me could just invest in in by just buy the claim and we feel like alright you've done the diligence on this you've done the cleanup work on this that that's what we would have to trust you and that's why you get paid carry or fee that's lot people from investors yeah and you know what's interesting is so it is a lot of grunt work that's why i think sometimes it gets like the more like you know guys holding football who you know played played hockey or something in college you know there's not it's not like the the brain side of distress but actually there's a lot of intricate like call them corner cases like claim corner cases where you really do need to know a lot about the legal side i mean with it helps a lot but still it helps have a ownership experience and you know prompting chad is just as important as anything so the more you know the more powerful is but it seems like a good life for you you're you're hanging out in italy it seems like you work project to project and what's the upside here for you like can you make tens of millions of dollars in one year yes i mean i don't know not i mean seven figures definitely eight figures is pretty hard what happens is you get people to push back on your fees they say like oh you're not in new york you're not a real firm like just a few guys like you're just a broker and but you know you build a reputation over time and then people will pay you more and more and you can definitely make seven eight figures especially in a good year especially if you have something work out and you promote on it so let's let's walk through that game i talked about first last best worst weirdest or whatever so what was the first life you know maybe you were a kid maybe you're in middle school or something like you know sally you didn't want her bike anymore and you you're like oh your trash is my treasure you know so what what was your first tate four am to buying distressed assets okay so my parents really more bankruptcy lawyers or lawyers my mom specifically with consumer bankruptcy lawyers so i used to hang out like at the courthouse as a kid and like hang out with me the clerk office and with like us trustees and stuff so i kinda grew up like really did you like it or she just like didn't have day you had to go yeah basically didn't have day a single mom basically like no day tom's got the clip on tie and he's in court with me so a lot lot of clothes on pies yeah my this is my associate yeah so and this is like paper files everywhere so no so i grew up kinda hanging around it it we'd always hear about stuff from i remember when i was a kid first about hud house and like what's a hud house what's that like oh you can buy these houses and you know they're really beaten up but you can get really good deals to remember my brother and i flipped the hud house my mom put up the capital i have no idea what the numbers were we probably bought it for twenty or thirty grand that you know my mom put up and we probably sold it for sixty we did the demo demolition ourselves which was a you know i have to say god my parents i'm glad i wasn't injured severely you know doing demolition when you're fourteen is probably a bad idea listen up the old playbook is slowing you down ai broke the funnel loop marketing fixes it it's a new era for marketers ai is capturing search traffic channels are fragmented and generating leads feels less predictable than ever before hubspot loop marketing playbook will guide you through this unprecedented disruption it's the system your marketing teams should use to move faster connect deeper and grow smarter the modern growth playbook for the ai era built by hubspot designed for today's marketer get the loop marketing playbook at hubspot dot com slash loop dash marketing to find out more and leave your competition behind alright back to the pod what was the story of the baseball card shop ben told me there was a baseball child story so these are the kind of things i was talking about when i was a kid these were these these deals would come up you know there was a whole thing where they the baseball card industry went through this this they were they were printing cards they said they weren't printing i don't know if you're moving this sean and and there was a bit of fallout and like the collection market for baseball cards and i'm sure if you them went under probably like the micro thing whereas people were made micro breweries and then i've seen a bunch of micro brewery bankruptcies and i remember seeing it was a fucking the entire shop was three thousand dollars which is a lot of money when i was a kid and my mom was like you want mean to put up the money and need buy the whole thing i was like we can do that i was like wow so i would hear about these things as a kid and i guess it probably colored my my imagination for what was possible and then i kind of like between that and you know i was really obsessed so i started i guess i bought my first stock when i was eleven or twelve i can't remember but i sort of obsessed with warren buffett as a kid but and then and then what happened guys is over time is i sort of mel the two things together it's like what would buffet do if he had the specific knowledge you know the of all term like specific knowledge of bankruptcy plus what he knows as well which is like you know valuation and started of like deep value investing or value investing so i kinda mel those two things together yeah it's almost i i actually think there's three there's you have knowledge of the law and not a not a not as fearful it's like i speak the native tongue of bankruptcy court so it's like okay i feel i can get more certainty than the people who hold the claims right i i have a better idea of where how this will play out and how long it'll play out take to play out and where the puck will land so it's like knowledge of the legal code deep knowledge about deep knowledge and interest in deep value investing which i like admire buffett and and and and howard marks in a bunch of these guys and and really learning from their playbook and then the third is just the entrepreneurial hustle to go cold call knock on doors raise the capital get the claims do the verification go travel to you know wherever and and and make it happen right so you kinda needed that venn diagram to be able to do what you do that's what i'm hearing and and i think for me like i got kind of obsessed with the adventure of investing like for me you know like my very first like real distressed investment was this thing called ethnic x energy where people had all these restricted physical shares and so like i literally drove around like the northeast and bought shares off of people and like would go into local bank and get things medallion t guaranteed and i was like oh i'm just like buffett and snowball or he's like going around and buy and shares of the hunting lights he's like knocking on the door of geico like can you give me a tour of the office and like like lake figured it out yeah if someone hasn't read snowball could you tell us a a sort of a buffet hustle story or buffet dev value distressed story cash i mean i must have read it at least ten years ago so yeah i mean he was famous for there was some security i can't think it was a a hunting club that he joined just so he could buy stock in this i mean maybe you guys have heard the story but there was like a hunting club that also had oil on its land and so it's probably a pocket story where he like you know gets all the hunting gear and like joins the hunting club you know buffet doesn't give shit about hunting hello fellow hunters hello there it he's got his rifle on his you know don't like it'll suppose you wanna sell your some of your shares do you so i can't remember exactly what the story was but it was something are all in those lines and i think i was like you know you could you know now you know one of the things i took away from buffett is you're always using your unique competitive advantages just like in any business right and and and every all the lessons from business kind of apply to in just pure investing and you you know using those in new competitive advantage of the time there's all this informational arbitrage that's probably less and less now they're still sc butt like making phone calls and channel checking and like getting out the field and hustling and hustling goes a really long way but you know now you have other advantages like you can invest in japanese ins solve buffet invest in japanese and solve because you didn't have google translate so you know you just have to keep pushing the boat out to me that's the real lesson of a joel green black or a warren buffett joel green black was like a famous special investor which is you know you played a field and you use everything we just talked to howard marx and both sean and i have read a bunch of buffett stuff you're doing something i have i you know i don't wanna i don't know how great of a investor you are other than like this one topic is is really fascinating to us and you seem wonderful but you're doing something that they do which is you use really great language so you've used a few phrases you've used a few really good phrases that helps me understand things a little bit more effectively so you're like i just you just gotta keep pushing the boat out or you're talking about like sc butt like you you've used these words that i've done a really good job of explaining what you do which in my head means you have done a very good job of creating a framework on how to think about this type of stuff for me i think it's all about valuation just how you manufacture the valuation is like the sauce and like how you you know you're making your sauce like you guys are doing venture deals like so much of it is probably access and connections and reputation and being able to get allocation but also being able to vet founders or vet vc firms and like you know and also knowing what the docs look like like all that kinda like or not a vin diagram but that that whole like soup that makes it work that's that we have the same thing and and what we're doing i mean howard marks is an absolute legend and you know he has a very famous i mean i'm sure he talked about bruce carr who was did you know a lot of the investing and howard marx is like the great communicator i mean the guy i mean that's one of the things i think people don't appreciate is you can still work on investments make really good returns but those guys are like monster communicators like they are great fundraising raising and and and they're great at what they do so it's just it's a it's they have like multiple skill sets or you know or they have partners to back them up you you sent us a a list of your like core philosophies and you've told us the first one of the stake in sizzle philosophy that you live by tell us about some of these other ones so one is shop madison not canal what does that mean okay i stole that one i like it because what what deep value and distress the mistakes they make is they sometimes buy like value traps they give out real crap the idea is you wanna buy real stuff that is cheap that that could be good so like the the the phrases you know you don't buy you know handbags on canal street because those are all fake you buy you try to get a goods price on the madison avenue when they're discounted not you know because you know fool goal is a is a real problem in the trust you guys us say oh this the guy put two hundred million dollars and it it's only ten it's like but it's worth zero so you you gotta be careful of of this kind of bias that runs into like oh it's such a good deal you're like is it so i mean right you know you assets become liabilities and liabilities can become assets when you get in a restructuring situation alright let's do the next one you said start young the first decade is tuition i love this this could apply to any field by the way i think that's a great phrase just in general when you guys come on y'all y'all know a lot of the stuff but for me i i started when i was twelve i was terrible i think the first the first i can tell you the first stocks i bought i bought home depot because bob nor delhi who was passed over for whoever i think maybe jack walsh for maybe inmate whoever became the ceo of ge came over to home depot and he was gonna ge home depot well that didn't work at all and you know so i wasn't investing in all evaluation i was based on a story in h b there was a huge article in in a harvard business review and i was like twelve years old like reading this being like oh yeah eat ethos i don't i even know what sw means he's gonna change the ethos culture i was like the first duck yeah i was like i was like ethos what's i never heard this words sounds smart just performed so that was like the first duck and the other one i bought was inc which was a large nickel producer in canada that actually did work out it was based on like the rising price of nickel i read about in foreign affairs and the third one was from a forbes article it was emc which is a chip manufacturer which i can't remember what happened to that one i think i the the thing is like you didn't thing about stocks especially when you're young and you never done anything you buy and you're like okay i bought them alright then day two you're like now what do we do my kids are i have a one year old or four year old and a five year old and for my four and five year old i just like they were trying to earn something they wanted like ice cream or a treat or a toy or whatever like if we do this can we have that and i was like here's what i'm gonna give you i'm gonna give you a hundred dollars they're like a hundred dollars i was i'm gonna give you a hundred dollars each but because i was teaching about like were at the we were like waiting in the parking lot and i was explaining what a grocery story i was like yeah so somebody owns this business and then they buy the stuff and then they sell it us i was trying to explain what a business is and i was like failing miserably i like oh my god is this so hard to explain what a business is but i basically told them i gave them a hundred dollars each and i this weekend i'm going to present to them five stocks of products that they use and buy so like we bought a nintendo switch that's like here here's nintendo stock here's and i'm gonna let them pick and let them invest it in an account where they're gonna start to see whether it's going up or down and i'm gonna have them explain and their whatever their logic is of why they picked you know either nintendo or whatever you know yamaha or whatever what whatever whatever stock that they pick and then they're gonna get to like ride the ups and downs of this so i'm i'm with you on start young even younger than than than you you would guess well you yeah i just think that you know i don't know i'm you know my own experience like you know you'll meet guys this is a common thing i'll meet guys i don't know when i'm here on holiday or wherever and they'll have an exit like i'm met a guy who's like a very early employee at at airbnb and he had probably eighty million dollars or a hundred million dollars but he's never actually invested money so now he's forty five probably fifty and now he's like you know i'm so good at this like i'm gonna buy some duo lingo and i'm gonna you know do this and do that and i'm like well you just need to respect the fact that you actually never invested money i mean you you are amazing operator and you got a rocket ship that's all we say that all the time on here which is there's a huge difference between investing and earning like via a company not just a difference it's almost like the opposite yeah it's like a power lift that then goes and tries to you know do ballet or something it's like oh yeah operator it's all about action you know it's all action action actually gotta do stuff right you're trying to do as many things as you can't be super productive as an investor it's like sit on your hands in inaction is your friend all the money made in the holding the waiting the the observing and as an entrepreneur who was rewarded for taking action you get punished as an investor for taking too much action yeah and i'm you know just it just it takes a ton of experience to be good and well even to be okay a question that sean has asked people before that i love which is like basically how do you invest your own money and and i wanna ask you the same do you since you are a professional investor do you have one hundred percent of your portfolio in a variety of deals like this or are you doing any passive stuff or is it all active this all pretty active yeah i don't i don't you know like you for me it's like tax advisers great people that like you know state planning advisers is great guys don't wanna manage my money no thank you partially because i enjoy it but also i don't think that i've reached the capacity where i have more money than i know what to do it you know i think that i can still find a a lot of deals i mean you know your opportunity set when you have you know a million or ten million or whatever is just a lot better than if you're you know if you're at a hundred or for it you're you know the optimal the optimal the optimal strategy changes based upon your capital base so when you say active do you mean it's all distressed it's like your specialty that's where you're putting most of your your network worth the majority i most of my money and them are on deals right when you you were saying like early on with your hedge phone you were putting five percent into that deal you you weren't allowed to because you have a as investors to get like you know as crazy as maybe to match your own conviction in the deal now that that's not the case anymore like how concentrated have you gotten and like do you have have you gotten to andy have you ever been at a point where you're just like in insanely concentrated i kinda like it when it hurts a little bit because it's so con i'm so concentrated but maybe that's me i don't know see yeah i mean that is i think it's a little bit an entrepreneurial bent like you kind of if you're not pushing yourself then then then i i wouldn't feel comfortable with it i mean i understand you have a big exit yeah for me i'm constantly investing into other deals friends deals i have pretty i feel like i have pretty good deal flow in the distressed area and then the claims work i wouldn't say it's free money but you can almost reliably compound your money on a small base you know like a few million bucks or something you can reliably compound that at at pretty aggressive rates what do you mean by pretty progressive rates what is that is that fifteen percent is that twenty five that thirty percent what do you say talk about just i don't know probably thirty to fifty depending on the year you can you could probably easily get higher than that there's these guys sean like in i used to live in texas and their guys who like i didn't know what their job was i'm like i don't know what you do but you're really wealthy and i just started calling them capital men they're just capital guys where they just like do i like call them capital men it's a good phrase i think you're you're a capital guy maybe i don't know i guess for me i've i i've i i feel like i spent my entire life studying like the history of sort of like modern investing like guys that bought banks out of bankruptcy before you you know before you know when you could do that you know guys that have mint in enormous fortunes with you know like there's there's a guy that bought a tobacco company around the time they were doing the settlements with tobacco companies who made a fortnight so a lot of these things and i've always wanted to be to do just one deal like that so i guess i've always inspired to do that but i mean if you there's that phrase you know what is it a position well bought is already half sold and i do think when you're doing sort of very special sit sort of deep value distressed stuff mh if you're selective the problem about the fund and the big institutional money management firms is they always have to constantly me finding deals the nice thing about being a little bit of a home gamer is you can kinda select you can be very selective you can literally do nothing in a six month period or a year if you just can't find anything and you know there's still no claim work and bring an income but you don't necessarily have to swing i mean we've seen deal over my lifetime i've seen deals where guys have you know turned you know twenty twenty million into three billion and you know six million into eighty million in one year i mean you see some incredible deals in the space and you know you're getting high optional low risk because the price you're paying but it's a ton of work and a lot of brain damage for sure and a lot of hustle it's not necessarily the claims alright let's take a quick break because i gotta tell you a story let me tell you about the first time i tried to run payroll for my team i was using a traditional bank and you know the type it's got a junky interface it's built like a two thousand and two tax form and it was open only during business hours and i hit send in it froze they flagged the transaction they lock my account they put me on hold for forty five minutes and then they told me i gotta visit my local branch and that was the day i started looking for a new banking solution after asking a few founders what they were using i found out about mercury and so now my payroll is two clicks i can wire money i can pay invoices i can reimburse the team all from one clean dashboard that's why use it for all of my companies and so do two hundred thousand other startup founders and so if you're looking at to level up your banking head to mercury dot com and apply in minutes mercury is a financial technology company not a bank bank the services are provided through choice financial group call them m a and evolve bank trust members fdic we've kinda hiked up you know what you do verb glam it a little bit in this episode we've memorized you and what you do give us a little bit of the ugly so first on the asset class in general so for example start up investing i could tell you it's amazing you meet these entrepreneurs they're telling you about the future these are the smartest of the smart young ambitious creative people and when it works did you create the next facebook next airbnb you create you can create you can get ten thousand x and then you go and start doing and you're like oh and also you know you're gonna be wrong most of the time you think you're gonna learn so much from these people like you hand them the check and then you kind of don't hear from them that much after that you're not actually gonna learn that much nor do you have any control or say and and that all what's going on in your investment and by the way even when it works it's gonna take ten years for to get liquid you might be rich otherwise you know this is not the way you're gonna get rich is the way it's a hobby for people who are already rich and that's like if i was gonna say what's the real talk of angel investing that's how i would describe it what would you say is like the ugly side or the bad side of what you do what's the downsides of this asset class well this just stressed in general as a small player you can get totally hose so don't like ever now and then they're i'll hear someone even smart friends will say oh well you know k is gonna make sure everyone's taking care of because they don't want the bad press someone i'm like what are you talking about it's not like w they're are gonna walk all over you and bankruptcy court so i never understand this logic and and it's all like from many years of being like oh they're gonna play nice and no they're not gonna play nice and don't ever assume that and sometimes you do get a gift they'll do you know things that'll that'll be a a little more gift like to wherever you are if you're in a preferred or if you're an equity god forbid equity but if you're even claiming things like that so that's one of the ugly sides i think also one of the ugly sides is you know it's very transactional and financial so doesn't exactly you don't get people who are like giving you the starry eyes of the future a lot of times you're you're sitting across people arguing over a pie that ain't grow and in fact maybe the pie is bad apple pie that's already gone off so it's like they really arguing going over over you know something that could be either dying or shrinking so i think it has an emotional toll and you're being in distressed investing also you are actually hearing people's life stories like you know i i i i will not mention names but you know companies will go bankrupt and this will be someone's entire life's work and they're they're picasso and they're spending two hours telling you about their picasso and you just can't you just gotta let him you're almost like a guidance counselor walking them through you know maybe doing a dealer transaction and try and be as respectful as possible the fact this person might have just lost their life's work or their families fourth generation business etcetera etcetera so you you have people in they emotionally are in distress so it is it tax on you but also you need to be as respectful as possible and right i don't think let's like what else i mean i think as a small player it's very hard i think for me i i would say that investing isn't i would i wouldn't say i'm good i'd say i'm okay investor i'd also say that it's a bit of a disease so i kinda like feel compelled to do it even though sometimes maybe it's not the best thing for me so i always joke that it it you know it's it's kind of a disease like i'm looking at this stuff on nights and weekends on sunday morning you know i'm you know just like you might be look do you having another call to start up that you think is interesting or trying to get on an allocation for something like i'm doing the same thing with my deals like i'm trying to learn a little bit more and see if i can find something so yeah i know if i answered your question no you you did the second part of the question is we've been clamoring you a little bit but you called me you know before the pod and are you called ben and you were like hey like just in know you know like to google me you're gonna see some stuff i wanna be able to you know what do you guys wanna ask me any questions do you want me to talk about that on air like do you want me to clear the air about this so like hey here's an opportunity because if if somebody google's you yeah there's like a settlement case i don't know what's going on with this like what do wanna say about this yeah so and and i that's why i said i said ben i got i you haven't said anything about this and i'm wondering why you haven't and i just wanna put it out there which yeah i was involved in this receivers ship in delaware and i guys are pretty nasty headlines and i have to say you know as i've gone through my life i've had a lot of ups and downs like any need anybody or any entrepreneur for sure and this was a down one and i'm i i'm glad to have it behind me but basically it was a receivers ship that i was in charge of you know we hope when we made a lot of money for the shareholders so the the court didn't like some of the way i went about you know my activities and sort of aggressively slap me on the wrist or maybe in the face and i'm glad that everyone in the is called fun dot com is getting a good recovery and i'm glad to have it behind me but yeah it's like once something i wanted to pull bring up because i didn't wanna act like it was that we didn't happen okay but what you do you're like and that not my best to do so the biggest thing is so i was running this receivers ship and of course because of that i was in charge of doing everything whether it's like administrative work or like running the bank accounts and doing the taxes and you know while i dumb question what what is doing the receivers recipient mean you're taking it through bankruptcy is that what that is so you're it's kinda like a bankruptcy but it's a state in state court so this was in delaware transfer court because a company was a delaware court and so my job was to sort of marshal all the assets there were no assets when i showed up so this is a basically a pump and dump penny stock i bought up twenty percent of the company and then i went to delaware because the guy who was running it actually got arrested for a different fraud that he was doing this guy named jason gal goliath and so because of that i was like oh because i knew all along with this company likely own the domain name fund dot com plus they own this ownership of a an etf company called adviser shares so i wouldn't got myself a appointed of receiver there was no assets in the company and my my goal or my what i was my remit from the court was as a receiver almost like a bankruptcy trustee was to marshal all the assets and then try to pay out as much to to shareholders was as possible i think i did did that the court we and i did do it but we had a i had a shareholder who was very unhappy with the way i was going about it he complained to the court the court looked into my activities they didn't take kindly to some you know some of the things i did whether it's the tax position or where how when how how i was moving money around and the fact that i was investing the money in deals that i was doing and so you know they pretty aggressively slap me and that's where the headlines come from i of course of the whole time feel like i did my best to cooperate with the whole thing and well i'm glad to see that we have a good settlement with the with the new receiver of the receivers ship and again the outcome for the all the shareholders who were involved is pretty darn good which i'm glad about because at the end of the day i didn't want it all just go to lawyers fighting over this and you know that's that's kinda what happened so not my brightest moment i would say because i feel responsible as a person in charge to do everything and do it properly and i don't think i'll be being university anything anytime soon don't think i'll be doing that again okay well you know sorry to make it awkward i just had to ask trying to understand what no i'm glad to hear i just and i've you know my thing is for me reputation computationally as someone who does what i do it's important that that i try my best but i think in the end over time i'll be able to talk about it more and more sam you you look highly amused by this that i this question and answer what are you thinking the headlights aren't good yeah i saw the headlines i understand why you'd wanted addressed it's not it's it's not a good headline yeah i'm reading it as you you spoke so did you admit gil is that what is that no what's what's implied with the settlement so the settlement is just well the fault the the settlement in addition to the fine from the court does the court fined me two million dollars so i paid two million of what they considered were constructive trust profits in plus i played for the special master that was another seven fifty or eight hundred so it's basically three million then the settlement was three point six million plus eight hundred thousand that was in escrow plus about ten million dollars in claims so i gave them claims and they say were comm ming within my personal investments do you did do was of liability yeah so i don't know how to even ask this question i can ask this there's no of liability you can ask because you should and my only thing is i don't i've never i'm glad that is a good outcome for shareholders and i wouldn't want anyone be inflamed by the stuff i say like and you shareholder to be like oh he's not like admitting you know in my estimation it's a lot more gray than the court tries to make it out to me but at the same time like i respect the court you know like i was raised by lawyers if a court says that you know i don't care what you arguing going i just agree with you we've we've had a bunch of people who who've come on this podcast before that i think have had stuff i mean i think it's fairly common in the world of business you do business for thirty forty years that at some point something can you know it's it's extremely common for something to to go down where you get sued or you sue somebody or whatever happens that person on uncommon what is interesting like sam i don't know if you remember when we had martin sc on and he sort of got this character which is like he's the bad guy and he like leaned into it and like inflamed it and like did a bunch of stuff which was like really crazy and you remember were it he got trouble and then he had the issue where you got trouble and he was like hey i already made money and then they're like yeah but like you went to jail so like you know something happened he made any price and remember you were telling him were like and this was this is now like years later he had like literally like done his time and again he's quite a character like sc is like an actual he's an actual character he i think he plays a bit i think he plays up that character and i think he likes it he likes mixing it up in that way i remember just thinking like it's so interesting how to handle something like this it's such a such a tricky spot to be in because there's many versions of things like this like there's i did something wrong not knowing or in unintentionally i did something wrong intentionally then there's like the sc case which is kinda like i did something wrong intentionally but everybody like made money and so who's you know so so it all worked out right and even for example like elon right now i think he's getting sued and like you know you know fifteen different courts by fifty different people like publicly feud with the president and sam alt and others right he's like there's a lot of people just like constantly mixing it up and i i don't know it's just it's very interesting to see how that side of that side of entrepreneurship that side of business that side of investing i definitely think get it has to have you know and maybe not as aggressive as mine was but i definitely think people think over time you're gonna have scrape with with certain stuff and the whole bad guy thing and i know scar did kinda lean into that i guess even now i feel like it well i don't know if it does now but kinda i don't know it's a it's a different way to do it i for me i kind of like don't view it as a good thing for me i kind of view it as like something that if someone's gonna be a business partner me i need to be able to explain and and you know frankly probably more candid than on air but at the same time like try to respect the the outcome of of the whole thing how long did this last gosh twenty twenty two oh wow three years something to know that has to feel horrible i've gotten in trouble before when i was in college and just like waiting to hear the verdict i remember like that feeling and my was not i think your your your consequences are significantly worse in my consequences and i can't imagine three years of what's gonna happen joe for me i tried to resign my fact it's resign myself to whatever happened like i have to accept responsibility for that that was a big one for me i so like really was you know bracing for the worst but trying to do the best also like even even with the settlement but like way before the settlement with different things that went on the case i was really trying my best to be constructive and cooperative with what the court wanted me to do but at the same time like you know not everybody's gonna love your decision making i guess it's like you know in a weird way it's like you know it's it's you know i grew up in the south where people are way too like i don't know maybe maybe some you know maybe my upbringing was a bit too like people please but this was like you have to do the right thing whether someone likes it or not and you have to do with the what you think is the right thing so that's what i really a lot of it what i got out of this and i try my best and people might not like what you've done but or you know what you've made a decision like oh you're doing this you're trying to hide this or you're trying to do this and you're not cooperating here but you're still trying to you're still trying to to to find some middle ground so but it was a big one big big one over me i wanted to ask you we can end with this i wanted ask you for a bit of a reading list like if i was gonna try to get you know smarter about the stuff or what are like i don't know the the most influential books or blogs or people that are are worth checking out like give me your kinda top three in no particular order but what's your shortlist list on stuff i would get read just if i wanted to get smarter about the stuff so i think on the list because i shared like a a book list of course you have people like accept and margin of safety it's a hard book to find but if you google around you might go to find a copy that you can isn't it like a two thousand dollar book now yeah it's was like a thousand plus it it's it's good he talks about different stuff i just think that he's of a goat in the in the kind of deep value being bowel post and stuff carmen are pretty influential but you know a are easy guy to find you know anything by marty not marty lip but now trying to think his named from third avenue value he's written a few books on distressed investing and he was the one i kinda stole the idea from him where it's like an asset is a liability and a liability can become an asset in a bankruptcy and it's so true and you think about it with a lease if you have fifty leases and they're all below market well the debtor a debtor can assign assume reject leases so if you're all below market rents you can just you can you can assign them and they come become an asset even though leading up to the bankruptcy you know they can be a huge liability to make those payments you like kirk cor sean have you ever read about kirk cor you've told me about them but i haven't read anything about them oh my gosh that is one of the best biographies of all time kirk ko oh you're like that one that's a all my god yes the gambler that's one of the best buyer basically he's a our arm mini i think i think our armenian immigrant yes ray raised in central valley california went to the army when he got back his first little business was a small airline which basically just means he somehow convinced someone to lease him a small su and would fly people back and forth from like i don't even know all around california like it it sounds more glamorous than it was but he grew that over something like fifteen years and have sold the business to t which was the large airline company at the time and he made a little bit of money but he part that into buying the what would now become the las vegas strip and then he partly that to bind this other thing this other thing this other thing and he works its way all the way up from being a nobody pour no running water immigrant to owning what was the car chrysler and i think he also owned like warner did he own warner but he for sure owned chrysler mgm i believe sorry mgm and the biography is basically his thinking he's very calm he's very methodical he's very like kinda traditional immigrant like where he was like straightforward it is what it is i don't stress about it but he was a total kinda degenerate gambler and he died with a net worth of something like fifteen or ten billion dollars thought about right yeah well you know what i actually love you asking about books john it's like i actually think the entrepreneur like biographies either auto or biographies can be amazing there's one called z which is by a guy who's was like a big real estate guy in york who like made a billion lost a billion there's like one it's like how to lose a hundred million dollars and another valuable advice by arthur little like there's all these kinda like entrepreneurs books they're like some are out of print some are still out there and of course those like you know special investing joel green you can be a start market genius these are these are great books for term securities markets but actually think the best investors with people you've like never heard of because you know they make a hundred million bucks and then they're like i'm out peace like you know you you you might and and then their their stories aren't recorded like i think i put ep p taylor in there so you wanna hear the taylor story real quick that's a really great one so you'd taylor during a prohibition he would go up and buy up breweries and his whole thesis was like one day this is gonna be done back like we're not gonna we're all gonna start drinking again so so you would go around and buy up like you know manufacturing distribution bottling that was a play on that and he would roll them up because like capacity was so low he could buy him for peanuts and that was it that was just one trade like you know of course it took him twenty years to work to trade out but you know he may he mint himself you know with some serious dough and and then you wrote a book about it so i think these these guys you know you can do the biography of edward p taylor said him yeah that's him edward p it and he found the life or key club i don't if guys ever been down there but it's like a famous club in the bahamas like p watson and well sand freed was across the thing in a place called albany down and down in the bahamas but do you ever you ever bump to san could freed any any goods sbs stories know funny is like so i was in crypto and then sam came like this like rockefeller of crypto like john rock crypto i was like who the hell is this guy like i never even really never really ran across in passing and a lot of people that work for him were like you know whatever ea or ea effective alt yeah ea people so you had a lot of ea people around i just didn't know any of those folks they weren't like hardcore crypto people yeah this kind of a weird thing when i phone him coming up i was like man how did i miss this where this got come from we had robert greene from forty eight laws of power on the pod like two weeks ago or something like that and yeah he kinda we we we have you ever read forty eight laws of power it's like the book is what it sounds like forty i own the book i got breeze through of event read all that forty he's great on acquiring power whatever it's very soc path but that's like kind of the point which is like it's the yeah soc but it's real and one of the laws is like to reinvent yourself and and also we so em me had talked to him like we're like when you have social media you can like talk to your people or talk your audience like while you're on the toilet like any any hour you can tweet anything how do you deal with that and he was like basically like you wanna have you wanna have planned silence so you like you know the best way to be loud and in everyone's face sometimes is to just shut up and and and and not say a word disappear for a while and disappear for a while and he was talking all about like powerful people who kinda come out of nowhere john rockefeller is one of these guys who he was one of the richest men of the world before everyone like no had seen a photo of them and it was all part of a plan i think and it sounds like sam beck freed we didn't give him in a credit because when at least when i saw him coming up i was like oh he's just an artist and he's just this typical silicon valley type of like he just doesn't know he doesn't have any manners this is all but it turns out it was probably all planned where he was like i want to appears though i slept on this bean bag i want to here though i'm playing video gains while i'm talking to sequoia over a two hundred million dollar deal and it it was straight out of robert greens forty eight laws of power which is pretty funny i mean i met a ton of people that work there of course and a ton of people that were like in the orbit and it's kinda crazy to see the different i guess like mu does it best right the la is effect of like the whole thing like everybody's getting drunk off the money with straight the dollar in yeah like almost at all the people all these employees they didn't know anything that because on anywhere they're just normal circle nerds they're just normal workers just normal they weren't part of i think they no i mean like i'm met the lady she was ahead of payments and she was like an expert to getting like payment licenses so basically like banking licenses around the world and she had worked for somewhere and then she got then c z pulled her over to to to bin and then she she got poached by sam she was just the best of course he had to pay her like she was the best who's was making millions of dollars a year but like some of their contracts were in the scene i mean sam was giving out ten year contracts to people guaranteed ten year pay contracts you know like million dollar contracts to like salary employees a little bit like the a you know like ai you know meta thing i mean it's a little bit like that because he had so much money coming in from vcs and of course he had an unlimited you know while not unlimited but he had a big customer base though to to dip into so between that i mean he was making unbelievable like whatever you wanna call it un un uncomfortable contracts to dude just to put this in perspective i think z i think the news about this stuff kinda came out you know let's just call it even three or four months ago okay so let's just say that's been going on for three four months the the a researcher stuff if you go look so four months ago the stock was at about five hundred let's even let's go april first so five hundred and eighty six today the stock at seven eighty four so he's spending this money or he's making these offers which has a you know a multiple effects right first it raises the price for all of his competitors so he's like cool even if they don't take my offer now they have to pay one hundred x what they were paying for talent before like way to screw up their business in his own business this the stock since then it's now at seven eighty four so it's up thirty three percent so what's thirty three percent of if it's oh it's almost two trillion dollars stock six hundred billion dollars or six hundred billion dollars hundred basically offered the equivalent of twenty billion dollars for these for for this talent right maybe maybe forty billion max and so he's basically said cool i'll put out offers and try to spend twenty thirty forty billion dollars already made back six hundred billion in the market just in that time with by strengthening my story of us being all in on ai right like it it's not like the facebook business changed that much in four months where it's up six hundred billion dollars because of the actual you know like user base growing or or even even revenue or earnings yeah they beat they beat by like you know a small small like maybe eight percent beat or something like that but the reason it's up is because believes ai is the future and who do you think it's gonna win an ai and you can punished if people think you're not gonna win apple stock is like going down right now because people are like apple has no ai strategy they're gonna lose and then somebody like you know meta at least the story is z is all in gonna win poaching great talent we'll see you know and so there's leave ability to it so that it's crazy that you can spend so much and somehow net out way ahead like he did it's crazy that's crazy that is took of the market hey tommy appreciate you doing this brother oh guys thanks for thanks for having me on it so good to meet you guys in chat alright that's it and we appreciate you that's the pause i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a less travel never looking back alright let's take a quick break because as you know we are on the hubspot podcast network but we're not the only ones there's other podcast podcasts on this network too and maybe you liked it maybe you should check them out one of them that wanna draw your attention to is called nudge by phil ag and whether you're a marketer or a salesperson and you're looking for the small changes you could make the new habits you could do the the small decisions you could make that will make a big difference that's what that podcast is all about check it out it's called nudge and you can get it wherever you get your podcast