My First Million

wanna show you the perfect landing page the best landing page i have ever seen in the greatest marketing landing page of all time i want you to go to w w w dot suck my gutter clean dot com i feel like got rude to world i know i could be what i want to from at all in in like a days off on a road less travel next same today i have three businesses that i would say are so simple you're kinda gonna be mad at yourself you didn't think of them okay you're gonna be upset you're like what it just that's it and it's like yes that's it these are all blue collar in fact bringing back some of our old favorite segments the blue collar side hustle solo of the week i wanna show you the perfect landing page the perfect landing page the best landing page i have ever seen the greatest marketing landing page of all time i want you to go to w w w dot suck my gutter clean dot com we suck gutter clean fifteen hundred sixty nine reviews averaging four point nine stars suck my gutter this is dis ridiculous okay the way i'm not joking this is actually the best landing page i've ever seen so guy was driving shout out to cody on twitter cody d dm he goes hey i saw this truck driving by and it was like it was a great truck and the head his domain and i went there and i'm blown away by this landing i was kinda show you some of the things so here's some things that this this blind page gets right i gonna take you out a a tour a d construction of this landing page so you land and it tells you exactly what they do they suck gutter clean then it provides the most important thing in any sales pitch the proof so they say fifteen hundred reviews averaging four point nine stars then they give you the call to action so you can click click to call you can click to email now you scroll down you get wednesday's coupon what it's every single day they change the coupon it's linked to the day and they basically say hey this is wednesday a group coupon by the way it's always twenty dollars off but they make it feel like this is a today only special then there's then it just says gutter are sucking pictures our guys are out there sucking gutter every day for us it's normal to vacuum gutter ten feet twenty feet even forty feet high here's some pictures of us sucking gutter and a bunch of pictures from the field then it says here's the two wednesday coupons so you just click them and you know the first one is if you call before six pm the second one is if you do it over the phone you get a free quote we'd love to suck your gutter clean and then it basically says so for it says it's a painless process it's we have bookings available within twenty four hours it's quick it's easy we've done we done we do this a lot over six thousand times here then it it says so who will you talk to when you call and it's a photo of this guide it just says robert answers ninety percent of our calls he's been with us for seven years it's awesome you know he'll give you answers results of customer satisfaction and then it basically talks about how experience they are and their promise how it's risk free it's damage free it's debt free etcetera it's more pictures from the field there's reviews if you go to the about page it just continues every single part of this landing page is perfect there's a little video playing on the bottom left that says meet the owner and it's kinda like a little tiktok video where you can see like you know the service in it makes it feel real if you wanna get in touch with these guys they're like here's a phone number you can email us you could also just text us well however you want to get your gutter stuck clean we got you and then it it just continues on there's a there's a section about price and it's like look we're not the lowest price if you picks if you pick somebody who's gonna give you the lowest price here's what comes with that service here's couple of those problems but we will suck your gutter clean if you don't remember that's what we do and you know here's why you should choose us and these guys i just calculated just some rough numbers on their their website they basically say they do about thousand of these a year they're in north carolina they're in georgia and if you just do the math on kind the average job which is let's say two hundred fifty three hundred bucks for a home in in georgia this would be like a million and a half two million dollars a year business and it's just this guy who runs it it's it's kind of the amazing the the greatest is i think if you click the about page they list their their staff and they're they say they're like matt f a georgia native a loving husband hardworking guy tall greta basketball looks a lot like jim from the office exactly it's guy's like copywriting whiz like marketing wiz it just happens to be doing gutter cleaning you know the guy garrett who's the owner shout up to garrett for making the best marketing website i've ever seen i call this he's from utah he's he's from utah exactly you knew it then he's like married georgia peach moved out there i like warm weather blah blah every single pixel on this page i love just love oh my gosh this is awesome how'd do you find this cody dm it to me on twitter he's like hey check this website it's great who's cody some guy on twitter that i don't know it's a happens this is how you get your ideas some guy yeah like my next idea also came on random a person dm it today me who alright so sean hendrix out we know sean from from loop group dm me this thing about this the hill billy of the week we have our billy of the which is about a billionaire doing world conquering things and then there's the billy of the week who just takes kind of the dumbest idea you can imagine and makes successful sam you may have heard of this i don't know why have you ever heard of billy bob's teeth oh of course i know this the fake teeth everyone knows this basically this guy who has got he's got such a crazy backstory that it's either a lie and he's playing a character like bo at or this guy genuinely had one of the craziest lives you'll ever here and i i almost feel embarrassed to say what he said because i think there's like a greater than fifty percent chance he's just making this up for effect but you know according to him he grew up like with no not just no money no like power no electricity they you know they lived on a school bus with thirty sheep they used to eat road kill off the road that was their only meet like just crazy they he lived in a cave at one point as an adult and brainstorm the idea for billy bob's teeth when he was in a cave and was like what's a product i can set low price thing i can sell him over the in the mail that would you know just be fun and then he came up with this idea and he sold twenty million sets of these teeth wait what yeah is this what's guy's name billy bob i don't know jonah white yeah jonah white there's like a bloomberg feature on him there's a bunch of articles about the dude this is so funny i googled red number ty i googled the founder and the first article came up from my hometown a saint saint louis magazine the story of how joan white made millions of dollar selling novelty fake teeth it says the story as nearly as bizarre as the product exactly the story is crazy this article that i sent you it's a q and and the first question so your mom's jewish and your dad was a native american named five bears and they met in jail after a political protest is that true and his it his slide isn't that awesome exactly every ant edna that quite in that interview every single answer is more ridiculous than the one before it so again either this is the most interesting man in the world or he's lying and like religion i choose to believe here he looks great alright there's a photo of him like giving the teeth to miley cyrus alright that's cool so i'm just gonna read you a little bit about this product so the very first thing that stood out is he goes you know you know how great marketers reframe what they're doing like they can be doing something that seems totally silly and meaningless but they find like a deeper meaning in the thing he did that with his teeth they're like so you just sell these like fake plastic teeth and you know you make a bunch of money off this how is that what you're doing he goes no i'm giving people permission hey he goes my teeth are a permission slip people wanna be silly they wanna be playful they wanna be they don't know how to do that just normal day to but as soon as you pop in the teeth you kinda have to be silly you kinda have to be play but we kinda have to be find i give you permission to be that version of yourself and i was like honestly can't deny the logic the logic there and suddenly this like stupid gag gift this cheap plastic stuff from china that he's like you know marking up and selling suddenly is like about making the world a better place and i totally buy it i'm i'm with you with you billy bob when i hear stories like that i almost always buy into them like it it they always work they always work on me yeah yeah i i think that's you know we had jesse cole from savannah bananas on the pilot the other day and his whole life is that story and i left that podcast thinking i'm gonna quit doing what i'm doing an intern for you yeah like he he was that reality distortion field like my he he makes you think there's nothing more important than doing what he's doing right now than playing banana out on the field you know what i mean or popping in ugly teeth not even not even good looking teeth right that's like the irony of this whole thing is like the logic would tell you it's all making people look better and then if you just well what's the opposite what if i made them look absolutely ridiculous what if i made them look silly and it turns out there's all obviously a market for the opposite that's great alright so a lot of people watch and listen to the show because they wanna hear us just tell them exactly what to do when it comes to starting or growing a business and really a lot of people who are listening they have a full time job and they wanna start something on the side a side hustle now a lot of people message sean and i and they say alright i wanna start something on the side is this a good idea is that a good idea and again what they're really just say is just give me the ideas well my friends here in luck so my old company the hustle they put together a hundred different side hustle ideas and they have appropriately called it beside hustle idea database it's a list of a hundred pretty good ideas frankly i went through them they're awesome and it gives you how to start them how to grow them things like that gives you a little bit of inspiration so check it out is called the side hustle idea database it's in the description you'll see the link click it check it out let me know the comments what you think okay my third one check out this guy on twitter so ben told me about this guy ben went to a event last year called capital camp because i met this guy named cole and cole is doing a roofing company he's a he franchise like a roofing company but he's doing something interesting and so i guess when he met him he was like you know what i'm gonna go all in on video content and he kind of is trying to do the mister beast for roofing and so if you look and he's like youtube channel he just posted the video that has four hundred thousand views on and that video is basically of this guy who lost you know his roof got damaged and he couldn't afford a new roof and so these guys go and they gave him a free roof and so the video is just telling this like feel good story of surprising a guy with a free roof and he's like no don't get down there i don't have money pay for this i can't pay for this and they're like it's on us man don't worry your neighbor said great things about it like we just wanted to do this for you so he stole the a page you know just two things you would never really like think together right like this kind of mister b style content with local house roofing and he put the two together and it's kind of interesting right and he's basically like i'm gonna make content that will grow you know top of funnel awareness of my brand again like sort of a very like blue collar marketing hustle here and at first thought i was a little crazy because i was like man going viral on the internet is so hard and you're only local so like is this really the best use to time and energy than ben goes i think he's just doing it to make it more fun and interesting for himself and i oh okay this totally makes sense like how do you get yourself excited about what you're doing and sometimes like again doing the irrational can be the most rational thing you do and in this case he's actually pulling it off where he's generating a lot of interest around one format this mom was struggling to buy groceries so we gave her a free roof free roof she paid for the roof but then we surprised her and made it free he had no idea but we gave him a free roof and fixed his car right just go and delete these kind of run down areas where people are struggling and then helping them out with a feel good video and using that to grow his roofing business and i thought that was kind of kinda cool is it working like is it growing his business i don't know i haven't messaged him but i i mean i imagine it is i think that has to yeah i i has right like the irony is i think most roof actually like kinda have their hands full with demand and it actually the supply that that can be you know it's it becomes quickly a supply constrained business not a demand constrained business i think if he was building a national brand i would be all in on this i'd be like this is genius and maybe build a national roofing brand if he's a local franchise of somebody else's brand i think it's a little more challenging and so i really hope that what he's gonna do the bet the bet that he could and should make is to try to create a national brand i think we had somebody on here is tony talk about pink cleaners and like this kinda renaissance of cool blue collar franchises so like cool branding cool merch it looks almost like a fashion brand it's like appealing to you know the sort of the gen z emo millennial audience and you basically use social media in a way that all the mom and pop or even the old school national vendors just don't know how to do and you can create a really powerful franchise brand if he did that i would be like this is genius i mean that's a that's a multi hundred million dollar play okay if i'm looking at this guy he looks like he's in his thirties so he grew up with the internet it looks like you know he's probably hip enough to sort of understand how youtube works but that's there's still a gap between like being internet native and understanding actually helping so viral do you think that he figured it this out on him by himself and what type of team do you think he has you're asking me questions i do not know the answer to but i could speculate you know just if you look at his twitter it says just had our second long form video break a hundred thousand views and this was this was you know few days ago right this is november he has shorts i i looked it up it looks like he's been doing it shorts for a while and then he went like i think the move is you start shorts and you like get momentum and then you go to long because you like with our podcast there's been times well we'll say something in minute forty or fifty or sixty and people on the street will come out to me and they'll like reference that and i'm like i can't believe you listen to that like as much as you have and then if we had to like measure the value that you and i can capture our own companies versus the audience size i have to imagine that it's the ratio is really good of listeners leadership to value you can capture because you spend so much time listening to us it trust yeah if someone and usually trust is equal to like time spent listening which is like quantity of content times length yeah and you can't fake it right this podcast is not scripted it's you know this is actually us improvised talking una edited and we've been doing it for years and so at this point you either think we're an idiot you with you think we're bad guys and we're dumb you think we're smart you think we're somewhere in between you have a very you you have all the information you need to to come to an opinion about us right you know outside of actually like meeting us and being our friend like this is the closest approximation you can get and so i think trust builds really fast in a medium like podcasting or especially video podcasting because you long or or or long video yeah yeah so you need length the problem is is that that's hard to do like you you kinda gotta feel it out a little bit and it takes forever to make these things in this case with this podcast we've done set it on our episodes and so we're kinda good at it but with this guy it looks like you started with short and i think that's to move because that's what we're doing with hand little bit i'm trying i'm like relearn learning content and you start short you see what works you see what it hits you go along but the second thing that i think this guy is doing that really helps is when you have a team a staff you know you wanna like create a culture of excellence or whatever values you have a lot of times it's easier to create content for your audience and a byproduct of that is that your company starts a you recruit people who look know your content and they know what you're about and b your current staff gets influenced by and they really start buying into it and so i think that like creating content like this it's gonna blow up his business but it's it's a huge net positive for helping his company's culture totally and it's also helping his business grow right like i there's this barber who i go to get get my haircut sometimes he's you know nearby where i live and he listens to the podcast and so he was like hey man like you know he's basically got me captive in a chair he's cut my hair for an hour right so he's like can i you some questions i'm like you man go for it so he's like you know this hair becomes like a three hour haircut right like we're just like talking and he's a great dude he's got this amazing stories guys he was so he i think he like started cutting hair like just on the side you know basically he couldn't afford haircut taught himself how to cut hair for himself maybe friends siblings covid happened that's sort of so he's like sixteen seventeen years old start learning how to cut hair okay so then he goes and he ends up getting a job barber shop and the the guy who owns the shop i don't know you know how barber shops work but basically it's a it's a mini landlord model so they the barber shop owner just has chairs that's their those are their units for rent and then barber basically rent the chair for the day and they pay you you know sometimes a cut of the revenue or profits and sometimes just a flat fixed fee and they keep whatever they make on top of it and so the guy kinda noticed like hey this kid's hustling and he was like you know i wanna open a second location i wanna open it with you so so this guy i don't know how old he's exactly he's like something like nineteen and twenty years old now and he's part owner of this barber shop and he's like dude i feel like i got this really great opportunity because i'm like a part owner of this thing but i'm i mean i'm just new to business like i don't know what to do and so i told him was like look what you really wanna do is two things one you wanna learn like one core money making skill that will serve you whether you're in this in this barber shop or any barber shop after this i was like so instead of spending right now you probably spend a hundred percent of your time just fulfilling the service the thing you know how to do like just doing the haircuts and that could keep you busy but here's what you're gonna do you're gonna like basically reduce your income on the as a barber by twenty so you need to like cancel your last two appointments of the day or your first two appointments of the day you need to give yourself like a ninety minute to hundred twenty minute block and you need to go figure out how this owner drives customers to the store what is the digital marketing he's doing whether it's yelp google ads whatever else it is and you need to spend two hours a day mh just yeah understanding and studying digital marketing specifically for local businesses whether and then whether that just helps grow this business whether you open up a second location and you know how to do that now you can own it for yourself or you decide to do something else altogether besides haircut like you've now built like a core money making skill which is like online advertising that's the first thing you're gonna do i go the second thing you do is there's gonna all these areas you're green to right you never on a business for you don't know how to read p and you don't know how to do the digital marketing all these things you don't know how to and it's pretty easy to like just kinda get in a pit of despair about like how much you don't know but what is it that you know that most barber don't know and he's like well i'm good at like like i i don't i don't really know what that would be we start i was like well you're on instagram you grew up with instagram basically and you get you get it and you're actually good at making content and he's like yeah actually i have these videos that kinda of go viral that's where i get most of my personal clients from is just these videos i post i was like alright beautiful you are gonna become the best at content for this and i said you know study these other guys like there's these guys who are doing these this content format where they're like we're two college students who graduated turn down job offers and we're building you know a bar or something building a bar we're taking this bowling alley of those and we're rehab the bowling alley yeah we bought this abandoned blockbuster and we're turning it into a barber shop you know i there's the guys who who friends of the pods they they they're doing this one with the luxury airbnb in virginia they're like we're building the we're trying to build the best airbnb in virginia and we just bought a piece of land and we're gonna bring you with us every step of the way over the next two years as we build this thing and they already are like pre booked out because yeah their videos get hundreds of thousands of views and people support them and they want them to succeed and so they're like they've solved their demand problem through content so i told them was like dude you gotta do that with this barber shop and like you'd need to carve out time to do this because this is this is like how you can escape the the treadmill that it's not that normally exists with like working your way up right like you'd you can take an elevator if you if you just go look for you push the button and like an elevator the what this guy's is doing is like get gonna content because if you could go to content you break out of what was your your otherwise your constraints you're a shout out what's his handle his handle on instagram is c which is si u a cuts c t z we'll put it in the description here see what go get this guy follow and listen and just encourages guy get some content i mean he's got a kind of amazing story like just personal life lives i didn't go into it but like where this guy came from and like kinda hustling and trying to make stuff happen like he did not have any advantages you know people are were like you gotta check your privilege it's like this guy just guy needed to go go with library and get some privilege he needed some more privilege like he was in he he basically is like really grinding his way up and know i really want to raise head a hair too gray head of hair today's episode has brought you by hubspot because you're using only twenty percent of your business data is like dating somebody who only text you in emojis first of all that's annoying and second you're missing a lot of the content but that's how most businesses are operators today they're only using twenty percent of their data unless you use hubspot that's when all your emails your call logs your chat messages to turn into insights to help you grow your business because all that data makes all the difference learn more at hubspot dot com did you hear this interview with ari emmanuel from invest like the best i didn't actually watch it yet no i talk clips let me give you guys a little background so patrick o's i've been a couple of times he's an amazing guy he's got this austin podcast called the best like the best it's been blowing up he's been doing it for years but lately his guess have been amazing the jesse had recently was aria emmanuel so for those who don't know we've talked about him a bunch about try to get a background the easiest way i can describe it is ari gold from ent entourage that was based off of aria emmanuel if you don't watch ent entourage he's a power player he start out as an agent in hollywood he worked his way up to starting his own agency and at this point he owns as he called endeavor or i g they're two of the same companies that don't is it's called endeavor but they own everything so at this point they own u c they own the bull writing pb they own wwe e they own movies they just everything the guys the guys guy's a player and he recently took the company private at like a forty billion dollar valuation now the thing that makes him special is a few things one his brother is ra ra emanuel i think it's ra or ram he was the mayor of chicago and he hinted that in the podcast that he's gonna be running for president and then his other brother is zeke who's like one of the most famous cardiologist on earth who like did like helped invent like the artificial or heart replacement or something like you know like crazy like that so just like crazy family now the podcast is great because ari is a ten out of ten energy and when it comes to business but he had a like one or two lines that i wanted to read to you he listened to this quote he was talking about buying live event businesses he said ari said i don't know how to build a data center i'm not the chip business i just know how to create really great live events how to monetize them and i know how to make a great user experience he goes i'm taking the opposite of an ai bet he goes the opposite of an i bet it's not building business center the opposite of an ai bet is building live events live is gonna last forever it's not gonna go out of style and so he talked about the ingredients that go into a great live event and he talked about all the businesses that he's recently bought and what i didn't realize was that endeavor which is this massive conglomerate they own dozens of event businesses and i wanna talk about like two or three that they own but i had no idea about so the first one have you heard a freeze you've definitely never heard of i don't know why i that okay freeze f r i e z e yeah freeze so freeze started in nineteen ninety one i believe and it was a monthly magazine on art like i guess i'm not tar so it's kinda like the blind leading the blind on this one but i guess like cool paintings that people like and like the latest happenings in the buying and selling of art well they eventually launched two art festivals where you can go and like look at art and like buy buy a bunch of it and ari was like we bought that business for two hundred million dollars and patrick o's was like why you do that he's like because they only had an la event in new york of event and patrick was like what do you mean was like well we're just gonna do the same thing but in dubai in miami here like he's like all we all we're gonna do is do the exact same thing but more and he goes we know how to monetize them and when i ran my first it was called hustle con i think we had fifteen hundred people come let's say in year three or two and i only made thirty thousand dollars in sponsorship i hired a good sales team the sponsorship ten x it went from thirty thousand to three hundred thousand nothing changed say amount of people the same people the same venue nothing changed just just better operations and ari was like look i know how to make money off events we do this we do this we do this and what he said what it seems like we have lectures go happening around the event the events we know how to monetize know how to get a dubai to pay us ten years worth of cash in order to host an event there and we're gonna do that with twenty different cities and he broke it down it was very very very fascinating this positioning is pretty genius right because you basically either wanna say we are an ai enabled company like the ai ai is gonna help us explode or if you're just if you're just not ai that's not that interesting right or you say we also win with ai because ai is gonna destroy all this other stuff and it's gonna make live even more valuable right and so he's somehow using the ai tailwind in as a narrative for his own business and by way i don't i'm not saying narrative as if it's false so i just think like it's more narrative to it's smart to position it that way to investors right so i think that's that's one thing this roll up that they've done with endeavor is pretty wild i think this was my we did an episode a year ago called stock of palo where both me and sam we'd played pretend warren buffett and we both picked the stock my pick was tee which is the the public part of endeavor it's really complicated how they how they have it all set up yeah it's very complicated because endeavor private i think but tee is public which is their just their fighting and entertainment side of that and if i look let's see what where it so one year stock chart tee it's up forty percent so that's performed like you know really well you that that was quarter sort of that bet was was correct in that in that sense and and i think it's because the same thing like what's scarce what's scarce is what's valuable and in an ai world what will become really really scarce is live human entertainment right a place for humans to go to have a human experience with other human beings that thrill them that is away from away from the keyboard but still generates content that does really well on social media and it and benefits from social media at the same time and i think you know their brands have done a very good job of doing that i was listening to tom h heard from p and rec what was what's the really great az sorry he was on theo von podcast and he was talking about how he was like i went quiet for a minute while i was writing and then i went back on tour but it was like a six or seven year difference he's like now it's so much harder to find venues because everyone's on tour he was like podcast go on tour authors go on tours just like a interesting professor like talks or or like there's all different types of experiences you know your buddy has hassan son min h he's a comedian but his show it's not really a comedy show if i if i understand correctly it's like performance it's it's far greater than that right and so like he was like there's just so many shows now and people can't get enough of it alright so the second business have you had a barrett jackson barrett jackson sounds like a kid i went to college with and alright go to as little duke dude if you are in the midwest and you have a dad who's sixty five years old this is actually the time of year where you're gonna experience it you're at home my dad would do this all the time twenty four hours a day during this time of year barrett jackson was on the tv barrett jackson is a car auction that happens i think in arizona it was owned by i think two guys one was barrett one was jackson and they auction off cool cars mostly old stuff from the sixties and seventies but they turned it into a tv show and it's basically running i'm not joking if you look at the programming it's gotta be twenty four hours a day like on a handful of channels and this company for one it's awesome like if you read about the guy who owns it i think his name tom barrett he's kind of a badass he's you'd have to be pretty cool to start a car from website and he sold the company to endeavor for three hundred million dollars and ari was like talking about how this has been exploding and more and more people are coming to the auctions so what are you watching you're watching the actual auction take place so a car is revealed and then people are pat paddle up bidding is that what's going on yeah but they have like ten thousand or twenty or thirty thousand people they're just thousands of thousands of people and they have different warehouses at any point and there's gonna be a theme so like this one's gonna be like famous cars from old tv shows or it's gonna be like american hot rods so it's gonna be like european nineteen thirties and the programming switches from warehouse to warehouse to warehouse and you're like oh cool the old motorcycles are coming up like that's gonna be awesome let's watch that one and you're watching it and each bid is probably five maybe five minutes long and you're like oh my gosh this one might sell for sixty thousand oh my god it's gonna be eighty thousand this is gonna sell for eighty thousand dollars and they show the person bidding and you're like nobody everybody does like what's his name what's google i'm like and so it becomes like an event where you're like guessing what's gonna sell for and then the announcer on tv are telling you the background of the thing like this car was built here it's special for this reason this one and is in particularly good shape because it was stored in florida and ford is the best for storing cold cars because you know like like tells you the cool story so ari bought this business i didn't know he bought but he bought it for two fifty million dollars pretty cool right this is great do they i feel like something like this could explode you know how some sports are basically producing like the journey of content like f one famously did this like how to get more people interested in f one it's kinda hard to like just get into as a new fan but they created the f one show and that like made it feel accessible to get into it and you know we're both fans one of the reasons i'm a u fan is it's because they used to have this show that was like a a reality show basically about these fighters leaving you know tough it was the the name of it and basically these amateur guys coming from you know just like one guy's is a mechanic right now and the other guy's homeless but he's they both have this dream of being a fighter and then they go through this reality and one of them gets contract and there's this is big and then but they fight the last the lot the finale is part of the actual u card and so that was the first time i ever watched of cc card was for the finale of this reality show and so i feel like something like this you know it's these closed off worlds that have high passion and if they just build an on ramp which is like find a find the right kind of like human interest show that would get me get me just you know start going down the rabbit hole with this stuff i feel like these things could explode if if they get that right and i be by way you i think you see this now with any company too right like companies used to do content marketing just saying like let me tell you about our product and the case studies and here's what's going go well with it then it got to like here's kind of some working public type stuff we're gonna post our numbers or blog about what's going on and now basically like it feels like a lot of these b to b businesses are basically just building reality tv channels along the way they're like oh we're gonna have a youtube channel that's showing you a bar stool did this amazingly well right like bar stool content just as much about what was going on inside bar stool as it was what's going on in the games and i think that's the table stakes this table stakes for now which is crazy because that's so hard to do it's crazy that that's table i i don't i even think it's table stakes but i do do think those who pull it off get handsome rewarded and i just but it's so hard to do that well and i just sort of like who was the second person to walk on the moon you know those buzz a and fuck i don't know no one knows who's the second person who broke for in the mile you know what i mean like who who who was at columbus it just doesn't matter the difference between first and second place is the difference between who got second place when you say bolt won the gold medal like the difference between who does this well and who doesn't do it well is like yeah you're still like you ran really fast and you got take a place and you broke for the mile but like come on like roger fan is roger ban like number ones number one for a reason so i think the difference between first place and second place when been when when it comes to doing content well it's not one place it's like a thousand x in the results i did a so every morning i write i do like a two hour writing block for my book and i think i could write about whatever i feel like it have to be good it doesn't have to be on topic i just have to write and so i wrote one today that's called nobody wants to be samsung and i wrote everybody knows apple everybody knows steve jobs we all love apple we all love steve jobs we admire him and sam who who's the founder of samsung is it samsung who who is it right is the c samsung it's like here's a company that's got i don't know twenty two percent marcus share of the global cell phone market makes billions of dollars successful but does a difference between successful and loved and admired right and it's like we all want love and admiration and it's like nobody wants to be samsung in this situation and the same thing that where i i use the usa same bolt example it's like i think some create like five hundred million people watched you saying bolt and the beijing olympics like break that records like five hundred million humans were tuned in with ten seconds where you did not look away and nobody could tell you got second and the difference between first place in second place was point too i believe exactly if but i remember that right it's point actually it's infinite fame and like respect and complete obscurity and working at wendy's like that's that's the result gap of that point too right and so like there's this disproportionate rewards for being insanely great that you just don't get for merely being good or even great and i think that's content is one of the reasons i mean and i don't know if content the right word who have story is the right word i mean steve jobs had stories i mean and he was magnetic he had charisma have you ever looked at old photos of him when he was like in his thirties when he was dressed like tuxedo doesn't shit like he just looked awesome he was so the hand chip of the stuff yeah yeah he just looked great naval ball has a great quote on this by the way he says the internet democrat consumption and consolidate production meaning the internet gives everybody access like a you know a five year old that's got a little like you know half on the internet ipad has access to more information than you know kings of prior times right so like everybody's got the same access to the same information now so that democrat the information side but it consolidated the production like i don't know how old your educators or if you let them watch screen time or if you're a good parent but like if you know who the if you know who miss rachel is she's basically like the world's preschool teacher it's i go she's the best at doing kind of preschool ish stuff so all of our kids go to her right and then there's like you know all of the you know the winners of whether it's music or tv or art it's like all the rewards get consolidated into the best producers but then they get distributed to everybody else and that's kind of like the internet created that dynamic which is pretty cool did my kid goes to like in central park this like singing class with this lady that's like a miss rachel knock off like she wears the suspend and for some reason she went down to my little girl and was like you're so cute and then she said like a you know isn't it crazy you never know who you're gonna meet like i have miss rachel's phone number in my cell phone it's that nuts you told you that no my kid dad i was like is your can't even speak no i was like did and then i went driving to a toddler yeah i was like looking at my daddy of like did you just hear her name drop that she has a miserable and she even saying she talked to her she goes i have her cell phone number prompted and then and then and then further she was singing and she was like well if i knew how to copyright my music like miss rachel that i'd be rich too like like she was like i was like i was like miss katie are you are you like at rachel what's going on you working through something the next season gonna view like like hey am i allowed to file a restraining order on behalf of somebody else yeah if it was nuts i it was very very crazy my point bring up all and endeavor stuff i made a mistake so i used to own of a an an events company and i hated it i was like this is stupid boy i was really i was really dumb because i think that if i okay so if you're like a twenty eight year old like operator type meaning you're like type a you're incredibly well organized you are a perfection but you're not creative what i would do is i would go out and find a niche that i like for example if it was clothing you would find fashion influencers if it was like fitness you would go find like a runner and then i would bill events so a running event or a flea market or something like that for some of these people and i i think that the demand is greater than it's ever been i think you could just absolutely knock it out the park it was gonna be hard but i think it could be very rewarding because when i hear already talk about these events so we just had jesse cole from savannah bananas he's running out events business i think it's just so much greater than i ever realized yeah do you remember when all those emails leaked i think speaking of was samsung i don't know who somebody got hacked it's i think it was sony it was sony sony it was the sony hack exactly somebody was on a flight and they just go hey hey amy a couple random thoughts from thirty five thirty five thousand feet going from l la lax dot jfk such a such a la way to start an email a rising training we're seeing with millennials is really extreme forms of experiential exercise like tough mud it's sort of a filthy triathlon or the color run even things like hot power yoga vegan millennials want something to post with a sort of no no big deal vibe on their social media as a no big deal humble brag i'm wondering i'm and they're talking about promoting spider man they're like i'm wondering if we could do something with the new spider man movie to promote promote this some sort of weird extreme thing and then it was talking about ed is like he's like also ed is growing really fast it's the defining music for millennials i wonder if there's an ed angle dude this is like a like one of those viral things where it's like when your boss who makes a whole lot more money than you ask you how like x y and z works it it's like this person nerds three million dollars a year she's like just do an ed yeah but but the there was another one i forgot but it was basically like they were explaining like out of home entertainment is gonna explode and here's why and basically it was the combination of people are spending so much time online it's gonna create a craving for offline so that's number one like the offline craving will grow and two offline is just a scenery it's just a landscape to create humble brag content that they wanna post back online and so if you can create something like a tough mud like a music festival like like a savannah bananas like how do you how does the twenty two year old say they're cool hot and have friends how does the thirty four year old mom show that she's a good mom how does this person show that they're a good and you could almost work backwards from that and create something like we've talked about museum of ice cream as an example alright these are all like they all sound different like what does museum of ice cream have to do with savannah bananas what does that have to do with the music festival like they're all the same thing it's basically a place you go where you have you have an out of home you know offline experience that creates incredible social media content for you that says something about you that you wanna portray to the rest of the world that you're tough that you're cool that you're fun that you're hot that you're whatever 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 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 in business and in life and for people like you who 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 it change mind and i know it will change yours so check it out join hampton dot com alright let me tell you one more it alright i wanna tell you okay so we've talked about on this podcast the importance of marketing and like you'll see one or two lines and you can use those lines to start a movement or to make it really easy to sell an idea and just so happens that your product is related to that idea k i saw one of those the other day so listen to this so i have six bullet points i read the study but i just wanna like bullet plate for this show so a barcelona study looked at twenty seven hundred kids and found that noise at school slows down their cognitive development have you ever heard of this study no okay so they studied twenty seven hundred kids they basically put the kids in two identical environment so they looked at the public school system who were teaching the same curriculum they looked at the same grades and they noticed that the difference between the decibels of a school so the quiet or this of the school made a drastic difference and was fun where there's a train outside on one of the classrooms yeah i think i did hear this so listen to this for every five d increase in traffic noise made the children's work working memory eleven percent slower and their complex memory which is what you use for solving problems one's recall one's problem solving so it made their complex working memory twenty three percent slower then scientists looked at a meta study so other people who looked at who did twenty one other studies like this they found a negative point four six effect size on attention memory and reading meaning this is a medium to large hit on a person's memory based off of noise exposure and so the real problem they found it wasn't like if your room has like a home like a light humming it was trains going by honking outside things like that and it made a significant difference we're talking about a twenty three percent difference in a child's development and so i was thinking i should be careful with my kid and i was like i should be careful with me in my office people are interrupting me all the time like what like should i wear ear plugs i have ear should i have noise cancelling like headphones is that enough should i pay money and ins my office so people can't disturb me like well that make me my memory twenty three percent better is not having like noise and i think that this is a really cool study that you could use as the backbone sorta of like claude hopkins who we talk about here one of the best copywriter of all time he may he single handedly made tooth toothpaste popular in america because he like used this one quote where he says rub your tongue over the front of your teeth you feel that film that shouldn't be there you need toothpaste in order to get rid of it i think this study it can be the basis of like launching some type of sound business it's great it's a great insight two hours ago tweeted this out i just saw this right for the pod you said the best five thousand dollars you'll ever spend sound proof your entire office make it so quiet you can hear your heartbeat if kids next to noise pollution achieve consistently lower grades and those quite areas and no one is immune noise destroys it sounds like he's you read the same study yeah i think it's the only viral so i think we all like sell the same stuff at the same time but yeah yeah it was great yeah it'll be all the same it was it was a very clear takeaway yeah and so i it's interesting you thought about this for for yourself and for business i thought about this like for for studying literally for students so i wonder if you could basically re brand just headphones but like you know what if you had headphones that didn't have to play any sound right you can make them a lot cheaper you could make the the the form a totally different and if you basically created like steady years and it's like hey just doing this one thing is gonna make you smarter and you use tiktok to distribute these like i think that's a if you could change the form factor and then you change the positioning which is this is not for sleeping it's not for loud concerts it's not for listening to music these are things you put on your ears to make you have better memory and study better right like your one hour of focus is gonna be you know whatever twice the productive as as somebody who who doesn't have these in as a hack as an advantage i think you can sell a lot of a product that already exists as a commodity you can sort of re brand brother study years dot com it's available in godaddy for five bucks right now not anymore i mixed i i come i like this is one of those things that sounds ridiculous it makes total sense to me when i think about my own behavior i use my air airpods and i just put noise canceling and i a lot of times i play nothing or just white noise when i'm working and i'm in my office right now so i have an i'm filming this in a small office in my dig office and i have a sign over here that i keep up that says don't disturb the animals because i cannot stand when i'm like trying to write and people are like coming in my door hey sam can ask me about i'm like no don't ask me about anything wow i got i have when you see these headphones in don't talk to me yeah because the noise it does bother me terribly i think that that's a really cool idea i love it alright is that it i think that's it i think that's the pod you didn't say that's the pod last time and i you all that youtube comments were a little upset edge edgy you about that so can you do your job that's my that's the one thing i do here that's it that's the pod 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 travel never looking back hey let's take a quick break i wanna tell you about a podcast that you could check out it is called the science of scaling by mark robe he was the founding ceo of hubspot and he's a guest lecturer at harvard business school the guy smart and he sits down every week with different sales leaders from cool companies like cla y and van and open ai and he's asking about their strategies their tactics and how they're growing their companies as you know head of sales or chief revenue officer if you're looking at to scale the company up if you're a cro or a head of sales just look at to level up in your career i think a podcast like this could be great for you listen to the science of scaling wherever you get your podcast

alright today we're hanging out with ben h the cofounder of a sixteen z these guys managed forty six billion and assets they've invested in stripe coinbase open ai a bunch of the big hit tech companies but today we're talking about stuff that you don't usually get to hear from ben so things like how do you actually have a high confrontation conversation the advice he actually gives us founders things like when he met mark zuckerberg and he was really young what he noticed about mark that was different and what makes him such a great ceo that you can kinda steal our copy from mark zuckerberg playbook sam what else we got dude we also just hung out with him which is like the best part and so he tells the story about how he helped catch box killer and we also asked him what interest him right now what books is he reading what content is he consuming what rabbit holes is he going down and it was incredibly interesting awesome conversation with ben h enjoy i feel like i could rude word i know i could be what i want to put my all in it like a days off on a travel never i have a good two story for you oh my gosh alright i'm incredibly excited to hear it so my wife is like a biggest las vegas evangelist in the world and she was talking to quincy jones on q three and said you know you need to move to vegas and he's like fuck that i'll never move to vegas they didn't solve the murder yeah and you know his sister kid was dating tu i was like let's have dinner with the vegas pd and see what happened and so me and q three and nas don to dinner with the las vegas police department and they bring the whole case file and it turns out the lap lapd really filed the case like almost on purpose it looks like so the end of the dinner i say to the chief of police mike jane arrow i'm like mike you ought to reopen the part case and he goes i'll talk to the sheriff and it'll next say call me said whether the sheriff save he said ben wants us to open the case for opening the case and they reopen the case and they caught the guy that's insane so shit sean like i don't know sean if you know the story but basically like you know poc and shu gotten a fight at a at a tyson mike tyson fight and then like thirty or forty minutes later he was shot right in the strip on las vegas and it was a cold case for years but everyone knew who did it they knew is this guy named more orlando anderson like that was like the random orlando pulled the trigger q told him to shoot no sucks and like everyone knew this but for some reason like it didn't happen in orlando and ended and ended up dying a handful of years later and the with the craziest thing ever is there's this guy named dj vlad who does these interviews with all these gangster and he got him to like tell the story of about the murder in this idiot like went on a podcast it just said yeah here's what happened so here's why he did that he thought he had immunity because the lapd profit him which means basically in exchange for testimony we grant you immunity but they granted a immunity in la mid not vegas what is the were life oh that doesn't count here and then the little do we know that beds behind the scenes getting it all done that's pretty awesome i like i filed that case religiously i thought i thought it was riveting i did not know that you you were involved that's pretty cool alright well i don't know where we wanna start but i just thought you know usually ben you don't know this but we have a little tradition here we we'd like typically start with our interim music but for some reason stop playing i'm trying to get this cassette to play but it's just not playing what are we look at at here oh boy that is that's the blind and death crew so my friend seth clark this was back in eighty seven or eighty eight i or maybe eighty six got got shot and was blind so we formed a wrap group called the blind and death crew d e f and you know we had all kinds of crimes about being blind and being deaf you know i have one here it's like blind deaf crew you know fly three of us but we got four eyes you know like that vet you know where did you grow i mean like i your dad was like a i know who your dad is and he was like he was like a well known academic but where were you growing up where you were around guys who got a shot and rap well so i grew up in berkeley california which you know kind of is either like an academic town or part of oakland depending on you know where you are and i was in the kind of more part of oakland berkeley and then you i went to school in new york and so i got him to rap in new york and then seth got shot back in the bay area and he was very very depressed because he's blind he was only he's a kid you know so i sent him these dj red alert check chill out mixtape tapes you know were tapes that i taped off the radio show which had the brand new hip hop which was you know really new at the time and that kinda of cheered them up and so that's how we got to wrap when we camera around it will we didn't succeed but we tried real hard well we wanted to just hang out with you because this you'll do you've done fifty thousand podcast podcasts i think asics z now has fifty thousand podcast podcasts and so yeah yeah yeah you know i could sit like hey ai bubble right like we can kinda do that i will probably ask you something about ai but i think yeah more than anything what we try to do on the podcast is give people a sense of what it's like to hang out with ben h right like what is it if they could just be a fly on the wall hanging out and obviously we come from a business tech background so we got a bunch of questions around that but i think for me and sam the most interesting part that i feel like you've you've contributed to the collective wisdom of founders right is your stuff on leadership so you've written two books i feel like that really i don't know like top shelf on how to be a leader and i think it started with a general philosophy so so tell me why most management books are terrible let's start with that you know the problem with management generally i would say is it's very kind situational any emotional and so it's like oh here's the book to teach you how to play nfl quarterback and you can read that twenty times you go out on the field like things are extremely different if there's a two hundred and ninety pound guy running at you extremely very fast i'm gonna kill you like what you feel like what you think how you process that is just different and i think management tends to be like that and that it really has to do a lot with your situation and the feeling you have at the time it happens and so these management books are written like at some step by step you know like you know you're anybody with a basic like eighth grade education can understand the of management there nothing they it's a cookbook and you could just follow the rest yeah it's like oh here are the five steps for building a strategy or the three steps for like you know setting objective it's not actually very useful at all because yeah know that stuff is so simple so i always thought like well the the difficult thing you know you're either gonna like run the risk of renting completely out of money if you don't fire half the company but like you don't wanna have that conversation because you promised all these guys the company was gonna be successful when you hired them so like the level of inconsistency that you're gonna have to go through the level of like you know i i was completely wrong about everything and i'm gonna fire half of you because i of the mistakes i made they'll just cause you to hesitate in a way that could cost you the company itself and like how you get over that and then like what do you actually say and how do these conversations work and all this kind of thing is is the actual thing that people need to really kind of getting understanding of like what are the words you know they get me out of this thing at least temporarily and you know nobody had been writing like that the last guy who kind of i thought wrote a book like that was andy grove back when he wrote management and yeah know that book was really old at the time so i was like well somebody had write the sequel you know we're now it's spent thirty years do you think that it's like when it comes to leading do you think that it's mostly just getting your mindset right i mean is that what you're saying where it's like no no no it's far it's more complicated than that you kind of strive to get your point of honesty like true honesty where you're actually being true like you're not lying to yourself that's hard you know that it it's almost like you know like if you're you guys are kind of creative on the pipe but like to be a like a great creative at some point you have to get all the way to that very vulnerable point where you've exposed to yourself and all your issues and weaknesses and and everything and like leadership is a little bit like that and that you're kind of pushing and pushing and pushing to get all the way to what's true so that's you know that's part of the process but the other thing is just you know you you don't really necessarily completely know what you're doing particularly when you start and you're building a company and so you have to kind of have like it's a confidence game where you have to talk yourself into okay you know like i i think i know enough you know to do this and you know it can be very little things like i had conversation with an he's like ben like i need your help and i was like why do you need my help he says by cto is an asshole and i said well okay but you know like he's a good cto i know that from i'm talking to before so you're you're not even asking me said you fire i'm are you and he's like no i'm not asking me that and i said well tell me why he's an asshole and maybe maybe i can help him he goes well you know he made a like a young woman in our on our finance team cry yesterday and i was like okay yeah that's kind of mean spirited for a cto to do that and i said well you know so you're really kinda asking me like not how to fire but just how to have a conversation with him about his behavior without him quick that's what you're saying and he's like yeah and i said well here's what i would say to him i would say hey you know you're a fantastic director of engineering but you're not an effective ct and you know if you wanna be a director of engineering forever like we can just run just like this and it's no problem you do a great job in managing your team you get stuff done on time you're great but you're not effective with the rest of the organization and that's what a cto is the cto has gotta marshal the resources of the whole company to get what he needs to get the job done and if you go to like a junior person you're like five levels below you and make or cry you know you're probably right but like you're never gonna go what would you want out of her so like you can't be effective with her like how you gonna be effective with like execs so if you wanna learn how to do that like let's learn how to do that but you know and if not no problem but just know at some point i gotta bring in the cto that's where i would have the conversation with them and that kind of got them went okay now i can talk him and so so much of like the mistakes that ceos maker are like they just don't even know how to have the conversation and so it's it's a little bit like the mindset part is correct and that there is a like a confidence part about it where you have to be able to kinda do things when you're not sure that you're right but there's techniques and there's ideas and there's things in there that yeah you know it's just harder than it looks and the problem is the mistakes like not talking to him is gonna multiply right like because now you're gonna isolate engineering and nobody's gonna like them and you're gonna politics in the company and like ann and and n and then pretty soon people are suddenly even wanna work there and you have high attrition and then you know well why the fuck do we have high attrition and this and that and the other and then the board's all upset in this so it kind of snowball on you if if you can't deal with these segments man this is so cool because i just read this book called the motive and the whole book is how to have a conversation like that so basically like someone showed it and it's like small stuff so it's like someone shows up to late for a meeting they're not prepared they made someone cry and i remember reading this and i was like i wanna talk about this on the pod maybe because i think i feel stupid that i'm happy to learn like a scripts on how they that someone that i hear you talking about this on yeah alright i feel a little bit better because why why is this conversation hard for me i feel like this just should be easy i i don't know what to say i literally don't know what words to use to for this to be the effective confrontation and so i had to read a book and so it's actually really cool to hear you describe that other people i think you even said i saw other of you about z and i think you referenced sam alt and you're like i've seen inside these companies they all face these like challenging situations but they just don't know how to like communicate yeah and know people get sick and and you know like not nope but there there's no way to learn like how to be ceo of like a big company without kind being ceo and so you found a company it starts growing and you don't know what you're doing and you make mistakes and it's very scary and you know it's easy to lose your confidence and if you lose your confidence you hesitate and if you hesitate as ceo then somebody's gotta step into that vacuum and then that's when it becomes very like political and dysfunctional alright a few episodes ago i talked about something and i got thousands of messages asking me to go deeper to explain and that's what i'm about to do so i told you guys how i used chat gb as a life coach or a thought partner and what i did was i uploaded all types of amazing information so i uploaded my personal finances my net worth my goals different books that i like issues going on in my personal life and businesses i uploaded so much information and so the output is that i have this gp that i can ask questions that i'm having issues within in my life like how should i respond to this email what's the right decision knowing that you know my goals for the future things like that and so i worked with hubspot to put together a step by step process showing the audience showing you the software that i use to make this the information that i had chat ask me all this stuff so it's super easy for you to use and like i said i use this like ten or twenty times a day it's literally changed my life and so if you want that it's free there's a link below just click it enter your email and we will send you everything you need to know to set this up in just about twenty minutes and i'll show you how i use it again ten to twenty ten a today alright so check it out the link is below in the description back to the episode you've said before like having confrontation the right way is super important and i nod in my head and then i was like cool i really don't know how to do that though so okay so what is the right way to have confrontation hannah complicated but like the first thing is you gotta stop thinking about yourself right so you you know and it could be anything it could be like firing somebody or getting them to change your behavior or whatever you're you're gonna be saying something that they don't wanna hear and so i think people to get caught up in well either i need to be a tough guy or i need them to like me or you know some other thing that's about you but really you have to go okay what am i gonna say to them that isolate it to this thing that i'm really talking about you know so if i need them to change this behavior like how do i get them to hear that in a way they can actually act on it without getting in their feelings and you know in order to do that you just have to be like very straightforward and you have to be open with how you feel about like if you think there is shit bird then you're probably gonna have to fire them anyway but if you think there otherwise good then you kind of have to let them know that but in a way where you're not clearly setting them up you know you're not giving them a shit sandwich you're a greatest person in the world but this is all fucked out and i love you like that that like people are onto that like that it's just too simple so you kind of have to you know you have to get to a very honest place with them and say like you know we're working together on this you're doing this it's not working it's not effective and you know like i can help you get to it to be effective but i need you to get it to be effective like you have to get that message across and a lot of it you know like people will accept things from you if they feel like you're basically telling them the truth like you're i'm like completely open and honest about this shit like i'm not i'm not telling you it's worse than it is and i'm not telling you it's better than there it is i'm telling you what it is and and this is you know when i said earlier about like a lot of leadership is getting all the way to his truth you have to sit with cell phone to say like what do i really think about this like not what like my motherfuckers were complaining about him or this happened or you know like it hurt my feelings the way like this went down like he's doing that in my company you you kinda have to get beyond that and go like what's really true why do they do it you know can it be corrected if it can be corrected what would motivate them to correct it like you you have to get all the way to to that otherwise what happens is you know they're just gonna get upset and defensive or like you know they're not gonna hear it because it's too soft and it's like well yeah like ben kinda doesn't like that but he doesn't really care so you know how do you get into that like meaningful place where people can hear what you're talking about and you've invested in and known for a long time a lot of the tech the biggest tech ceos and i would say the stereotype of the most successful tech founders is this sort of like slightly autistic very high iq lower e q sort of persona but that's not really what would be good at the thing you're talking about and so what is it that that stereotype is just wrong and that's not what you've seen when you've kind of been are you guys i think invested in facebook early on stuff like that like is it that the stereotype is wrong is it that they learn these things is they're like some are they taking touchy feely at stand for like what what's helping them be able to do this yes i think some of these guys have like much higher people understanding than you might think like the ones do who truly like can't read people and understand people don't get like they don't become mark zuckerberg mark zuckerberg like his mom by the way is like a psychiatrist or psychologist and like he's actually pretty insightful and and you can see it like in the deals he's negotiated the moves he's made you know guys who are processing information at that rate of speed you know it's a little weird like like you always feel like okay what the fuck is around the my clock like this guy's thinking faster than me but so the my very first conversation i had was z i think in two thousand and seven and you know at that time if you guys recall you know the facebook traffic had flattened and the current the executive staff he had at the time was trying to run a coup to force him to sell to so they they were leaking all this stuff to valley where at the time and valley where was you know calling for zach to be fired and you know that whole stupid that was like that famous story where you like didn't sell right yeah yeah many he didn't sell but you know right at that time you know his first question to me was you know should i if i fired by executive team for the second time would the board be nervous i was like well you you know it's not that's not even the question mark because you know if you're asking that question and you know you kind of have to do it because the you you can't succeed with them so you know whether or not you can see succeed without them is like at least a question mark he'll let you know you're gonna die with them and i said but like you know like let's talk about like why they're they're doing this you know like why has traffic went flat and he said well he said look we doubled the size of the engineering team this year we went from four hundred to eight hundred engineers and we have you know the way the product is architect that we have like hey my sequel layer and then an api and then the applications are built on the api but a lot of the new engineers just wrote straight to my sequel and they like worked up the whole thing and now it takes like ten seconds to log in and so traffic flatten because of that and i was like well how do you train these guys and he said train these guys and i never forget that and i was like oh shit i said zach like when when you're ten people there's no knowledge in the like everybody just comes on and they jump in and they start working and so forth but you get to like eight hundred people a thousand people like you have a lot of knowledge that's in your company about like how the product works how you check and code everything you actually have to teach people that because they don't know who to ask or how to learn that on their own and so you have to do that and like just you know to show you what like great ceo he ended up being he created this two month boot camp for like everybody in product management every engineer who facebook had to go through this thing learn everything and so forth so he was like he you know like he's like a phenomenal student of management and you know before he became like nah you know now he's one calling him a student he's a great ceo but like a lot of these guys you know can figure out the people part pretty fast i would say and like i said the ones who truly don't understand people art don't actually turn out to be good ceos like they they don't get to that level like you can you know you can make fun a larry page or elon or z so forth that they are actually very smart about people all three of them you you have these great stories that's a great story one i think that's in your new book is a story that i feel like it's relevant to kinda any business size so some of these are it's like oh well my company's is never gonna be twenty thousand people so like i don't really i can't really relate to this but one i thought this was it was about collections it was about collecting money which i think is you know whether you're like an accountant and you have to do this for your clients or you're you're your ten clients or you're a big business and i think it's the ceo of nation yeah could you tell this story i thought this is a phenomenal story yeah so i you know then they're they're they're kind of we're living on the edge you know they need every kind of thing collected possible and you know she was just like you know cash collections would just be you and there were all this dumb stuff that would happen like they sent out the wrong kind of email or this and that and you know they didn't kept the thing and so forth and i said you know i learned this technique actually from andy andy grove we're like if a project was off track he would just go okay eight am every day we're gonna meet on it and i'm gonna be in the meeting and i'm gonna want answers and what that meeting actually turns into is you know every dumb thing going on you can just resolve very very fast because people don't know who to ask how to resolve it you know whether it's a problem and so forth so he said leah just like every day eight am get everybody in the cash collection team together and start meeting by saying like where's is my money like why haven't we collected it and like make him explain to you why they haven't collected it and you'll be shocked at why they haven't collected it and sure enough you know it's like well we didn't know we could edit the email it's just like oh you didn't know you could edit the email like but but it's you know those kinds of things start popping up i i didn't know that i could do this because this is what we ought to be doing but we're not doing it because i don't think i'm allowed to do it and it's like we'll know i'm the ceo you're allowed to do it and then that can un stick a like dumb pro you know project that's way off track or or a process that's off track or so forth so it's kind of like a different idea about management where you know the the enemy as as you grow like communication becomes your biggest challenge and so it's just a way to go like okay i'm gonna manually un fix communication in this organization right now and the the amazing thing about is does tend to be very long last thing where like once they get that then you know it sustain i had a experience with a a founder you invested in do do you know sue ali he's one of good buddies and you guys invested in tiny yeah yeah yeah the day of course yeah yeah he does the this exact thing the founder emailed to us and was like hey what you know we're gonna start raising money you know we really need to raise money so it's important and i would just love to pick your brain on what it was like very like yeah can i pick your brain would you like to go get coffee for this my house is on fire and we were like wait just to clarify is the house on fire he's like the house is on fire so we said okay well let's meet like now why are you email me mean let's just talk right now and so he jumps on the call and like okay what do you have so far you know let's phrase the money and he's like oh here's the pitch deck and basically in the first thirty minutes we just gave them like hey here's three things let's go like these are the three most important things you gotta change this is this still part of the story is broken and you're missing this information and you know you're not you're framing it the wrong way you gotta frame it this way and he's like okay this is so helpful wow thank you guys would love to touch base again next week and su was like next week how long do you think it'll take you to make those three changes he's like well he's like how about we meet today at three pm and you show me and we did two days with it and i i it kinda broke my brain a little bit because there was like this invisible wall as a business person like you don't meet twice in a day like that would be a faux pas you know like it's like bad manners it's like fuck your manners when it's like was this a big problem or not like just clarify that for me because if it is a big problem then i'll just keep showing up and saying okay now what okay now what and okay and if you just do that for three days that like all of the excuses get squeezed away is when i found like all the excuses suddenly disappear and you get to the brass tacks about what's going on it was amazing and that's definitely right no no that's a you know z silly and i actually had a lot of conversations but he he went through a lot of crises in that so he he he knows today's episode has brought you by health hubspot because using only twenty percent of your business data is like dating somebody who only text you in emojis first of all that's annoying and second you're missing a lot of the context but that's how most businesses are operators today they're only using twenty percent of their data unless you use hubspot that's when all your emails your call logs your chat messages to turn into insights to help you grow your business because all that data makes all the difference learn more at hub hubspot dot com can i ask me about confidence you give a talk with the a bunch of portfolio companies about i think i thought you say that like they don't fail due to lack of confidence but a lack of confidence i would say the number one reason why a founder fails at the ceo job is some kind of lack of confidence crisis of confidence whatever it is that causes them to hesitate basically okay i should do this and i can see that i should do this but i'm not sure i should do this so i'm gonna wait if you had to teach a class on how to improve someone's confidence is do you have like a framework or simple bullet points that you would that you would stand by it ends up being like at the end of the day confidence is personal and you have to feel it yourself to have it like i can't you know it's like the wizard of oz it's like i you know i can give you like a clock and tell you it's a heart or whatever but like at some point you've gotta believe that and the thing that causes the crisis in confidence is you know okay you invent something you hire a bunch of people you make a decision it's wrong people really suffer from it you feel horrible because you're like wow i don't know what i'm doing and i made a mistake and it had real consequences like most people in life don't have a situation like that until they become ceo and so then you know it's like well how do i how do i recover that and so like a lot of the idea of the firm is like well you know what if you could call anybody like how would that make you feel like what if you could call anybody you know in the white house in congress in you know like any executive you know any kind of big company ceo and be able to have a conversation you know like what if we could build that network for you so that was kind of the idea behind the platform and then you know we would do i used to have this event which i should probably bring back but i i ran out a room in my backyard eric called the ceo barbecue where we would bring all the ceos for the portfolio and then we would just like put like very famous people around them so we had like zac and larry page and kanye a out of barbecue and they're at the barbecue and there's no like talks there's no business agenda there's no nothing there's no even toast right like it's just a barbecue and so it's just to make them feel like oh shit like i know kanye hit like i'm i i have to be somewhat important like so it's you're trying to like view this feeling though like i may not totally know what i'm doing but i should be ceo you know what about a barbecue with kanye yes yeah so i can't be too yeah what about what about the inverse when you look at a ceo and you're like oh they have just like hit this fork in the road now confidence is gonna go horribly is gonna go down and it's gonna be the their demise what decisions do those people make like what are the commonalities between the people who lose it that way it's sort like the charlie mu like tell me where i'm gonna die so i know not to go there right what what would be the decisions i would make to to take me off the path i would say the big thing is it's almost like a lack of decision right like it's a hesitation in football though i say like trust you have to trust your eyes because you could be really fast but if you don't start running when you see the thing if you wait then you're not fast and that's kind of what it's like for ceos like you could be really really smart but if you wait too long before you pull the trigger you're not smart anymore it's too like and there there's all kinds of like excuses people tell themselves to not make a decision so for example like the one of the biggest ones on an executive like is well if you know we made such a big deal when we hired him like what is the press gonna say or what are the people in the company gonna say or you know i don't have time to hire a new person to do the job that this guy's fucking up with you like these kinds of there's all these reasons not to make the decision and they're all just if you think about him for more than like five minutes you go well that's doesn't make any fucking sense because this guy's like fuck up the whole org like who goes a fuck what the press is like can you just get rid of him like start rebuilding now you you know like it's not if he's doing a bad job like no job is better than a bad job like i think we all know that and everything kind of ends up like that i don't know enough to make the decision like i didn't give him enough of a chance this than that the other so it's it's kind of that lack of confidence that generally causes a no decision where there really needs to be a decision is is the main i i would say that's the common pattern yeah so and the two examples you gave the first one was like the cto blah blah that's kind of like avoiding the conversation yeah would be the the the mistake there and then in this one like avoiding the decision would be the mistake yeah you have to you know i wrote a post the long time ago so you know run at the pain in darkness you have to run at the pain in darkness you can't run away from it if you run away from it it's all bad you're pretty good at a tit blog posts in books i think you know the hard thing about the hard things like bad ass but i think you said that i think in the in the publishing industry typically the author's title is not the winning title and i think you were like brag and that you're like that's my title i came up with yeah hey ram i i i didn't full yeah because i didn't need a book like i i didn't actually wanna write the book they asked me to write the book the the publisher so i felt like i did do what i wanted so i i called it what i wanted yeah what what do you what excites you so this you know a lot of the stuff we talked about is like the hard stuff the pain and but nobody gets into this for just the pain right nobody gets into this though the pain is just a sort of necessary that we we go through to get to do the good stuff i'm just curious what are you really excited about right now like what are either you know rabbit holes are going down cool stuff you've seen that you can't haven't have been able to forget like what's really cool and interesting to ben h well so one of the most exciting things that's going on now is you know like kind of it's well known that the united states has kind of fallen behind in defense manufacturing rare minerals all these kinds of things but what's been very exciting is like there are startups that are like or all solve that for america and so like we have a company that we just funded recently periodic labs which is using ai to do like novel material science to kind of enable better kinda of design of everything from like rockets to missiles to you know all sorts of things and then we have a company cobalt metals that is basically using ai so they take a dirt sample and they use ai to analyze the dirt sample and they it tell you oh yeah there's gonna be like you know copper below that you know whatever a mile down into the earth and so you know these kinds of techniques where you're kind using tech to go no we're gonna catch up fast has been like very very exciting i would say my my view is a founder on the ground is just that sometimes you see something and like i said it it breaks like imaginary wall you had and and sometimes things become cool and cool although we tried to not like follow trends sometimes you could use your psychology for you you rather and against you and instead i you know seeing what elon is done where it's like oh he goes into these really hard spaces and does these like like hardware or hard tech literal literal rocket science right and it's sort of una afraid of that or you know and going in and doing you know weapons and defense tech and making that cool to be kinda patriotic in that way is that what it was is that what it took or was there something else to it you know there's is a lot they're very challenging companies to build in some ways but on the other hand you know it's a good time to do them because people because elon has i mean know god bless elon for showing that it was possible so now whereas like only elon could have financed tesla normal people that can start to finance these things now because elon has shown that it's possible so it's a little bit like a four minute mile mile on that way i would say but yeah i mean like you know the things that yeah and even in like public safety you look at something like you know flock safe see in a way technologically it's not nearly as complicated as some of the other is like a as an or something like that but is very very powerful i mean you know they really make both kind of policing being a citizen and even being a criminal more safe because all of a sudden you're using ai to provide real intelligence so you know for example in las vegas where we deployed it a huge problem a huge problem in like police violence police getting killed our traffic steps and a big reason for that is somebody reports there's a you know a nineteen ninety eight honda acura that's driving that's brown that kidnapped have a baby okay so that's a real situation but like that description is usually wrong like the description of the actual car is usually wrong so you you have flex safety you have the exact match so the difference between a cop going into a situation where they may have the wrong guy and if they have the wrong guy that guys could get very agitated and then you have a bad situation or they know a hundred percent this guy he is in a car that we know is the car and there's a baby in the back that's not his okay you're going in with a hole you're not sending a single person in there with a gun coming out their motorcycle like you've got a whole team that's gonna make sure that that person is apprehended safely and incorrectly and the baby is synced i've heard i've heard fox this amazing thing is it drones is it cameras what are the so it's it's primarily like a camera system where ai well basically so somebody does something you know they grab the car on the camera that car shows up on another camera anywhere in the city and there they're like oh there it is and actually that's how they caught interestingly the the the tesla terrorist to set the tesla ship on fire in las vegas was he came in earlier to case the place flock safety pick up the car they saw the car come back at night and they were like oh we know whose car that is and they just went arrested them did you guys see that ad i think it was like two weeks ago i i was trying to find it it was went viral on twitter but it was basically i believe it was a solar company was it a solar company where they're recruiting employees and they had a whole website just dedicated to the recruitment aspect of just they needed more staff and they bought an ad in the new york times i believe were some newspaper and it was like an old man sitting with like what it looked like his grandson overlooking a mountain saw and and they're like overlooking i think it was solar panels i'm not exactly sure but it was like do you really wanna to tell your grandkids that you spent your entire thirties and forties building just b2b b software it was great and it like and there's this whole trend amongst young people in twitter of like being more traditional and things like that and i think that taking answer your question sean on about andrew and and elon i think that it's kinda been like a perfect spiral or a perfect mix of like people seeing elon and and palmer do these interesting things and also just like getting sick of just building b software or something you know that's just a stereotype for what's boring this may or may not be true but like you know like seeing this like there could be more out there i think that the the software had to get good enough to of course make make these other things possible which is you know and it's amazing that we're at that time where you can really imagine changing the world in all kinds of ways you you get to see a lot of pitches of the smartest people in the world telling you what the future is gonna look like in five years and so you have this like element of your job that's a little bit like a time traveler so you you probably have a better sense of what the world looks nobody has perfect sense but you a better sense of what the world looks like you know five seven ten years from now you don't know exactly why you don't know who's gonna do it what's broken your brain either from a demo or a a story pitch that you've heard you know sometime in the last year so that that the rest of us we'll experience you know sometime in the future yeah so i think you know one of the things that i mean you in everybody's talking good about embodied ai and robots and so forth rightly so but i i would say like in the creative space i i'm starting to realize like this ai video and so forth it's not like making the old thing more efficient it's a new medium it's an actual new thing in the same ways that like movies weren't plays you know ai video is not video the stories that you can tell are completely different because you can do things that you just you know without a two hundred million dollar budget you had had no chance of doing and then it's like no problem and i think that's gonna be like very very very interesting and then the how well it's working on like existing stuff so people you know the people who are on the cutting edge of the movie industry are now you know they're able to do like whole movie scenes or edit or change their movie have the ai actor do the do the do the third cut at at a level of quality that even the the actor doesn't know it wasn't a m doing the acting and and that kind of thing so it's i think it's gonna change dramatically again and and there's gonna be kind of white space for not new creative but new entertainment entrepreneurs and so forth that nobody is really imagining now is there any ai content that you consume as a fan yeah no no well like you know i i we've been watching that the one with the cap was pretty good over the over the weekend to cap playing all the instruments and the lady coming out unfortunately it's going like you gotta get that ra out you guys see that one yeah without a sore those freddie good i think it's sore video ben do you mess around on sun at all with ai music yes sun and you know eleven labs has a model and u has got a very good models so there there's there's a few different really good models like i feel like i can have a music career again that's gonna be very very interesting to me because it it's sort of like one thing that hip hop showed was so people don't really realize this but this is something quincy jones pointed out to me before he pass he said you know ben like hip up started like exactly when they canceled all the music programs and schools like it was the saying that the exact same time when people didn't learn to play instruments and schools that's when that is exactly when hip hop began and hip hop kind of free you as a somebody who was like a musical talent from actually having to learn to play an instrument which you know and and even for the producers right like you had a drum machine you had samples so you could hear what you liked and play it but you didn't need to be a and that kind of opened up a world that we've happy for and i think ai music is kind of that on steroids i don't know if you guys know the number one song in the country right now is an ai country artist this i'll walk my walk oh yeah and and the first i think the first ai artist to got a record deal recently like you know so this is definitely what the future yeah looks like is people who pit non musicians it's just like you know rep and others make it so that you don't have to be a code to make ads yes yeah and now you don't have to be a musician to make music and i don't think people really understand how big of a deal that is like my my personal trainer who's been in the fitness world his whole life yeah has been in a rabbit hole making he's probably in the top point one percent of ai creators in the world right now that's pretty and he's like got like a full band he's like his own record label and every day he's up till two in the morning and he knows these programs inside it out and because he wasn't really accessible to somebody who didn't have you know musical talent before to be able to make music right there's a big difference between taste and creativity and being a virtuous of violin right like those those don't necessarily have to be the same thing and it's great that yeah know people you know whatever practice violin in for three hours a day and like get got amazing at it and all that kind of thing but it it's pretty neat to have a world where like okay if you can just do this part you can still play 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 away 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 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 it change mind and i know it will change yours so check it out join hampton dot com sean can you ask you have this really cool light about the rules of culture and making them memorable well yeah so when i'm doing the research one thing that stands out is like you talk about culture you talk about like and it which is normally culture is like i just fall asleep because it is so overt talked about in the business world just like you gotta really tell me something wrong overt talked about without anybody saying anything the exactly culture culture right it's like so cool tell me your values is like integrity like alright great glad to hear i'm i was worried it was gonna be the opposite right like it doesn't really tell you anything and you know when you go walk into the company the stuff on the wall doesn't match the stuff you see happening within the four walls so it's so you you get sort of disillusioned in the way but when you see somebody do is something interesting or you or somebody actually pulling it off which of course there are examples i get interested so one thing that i thought was cool of nuance that i hadn't really heard before is you were talking about how at asics z you kind of take time to drive the culture like i think in the new onboarding you like i do in a culture session one hour they signed something at the end and one of the nuances is i thought that was interesting was you said my rule for writing the kind of like the culture rules is it has to have some shock value like it has to give per per the the other person like oh what the hell are you talking about type of reaction if it's gonna be memorable i think the idea was if it's not memorable it's never gonna be remembered or used so you have to do something to make it memorable can you talk about your theory around this yeah so i mean it it kind of comes down to what you do every day right like it's a daily habit so you know this idea that you put cultural values on the wall and then you know the once a year at a performance trip you you said do your fall the culture it's like that that means absolutely nothing right it's nothing and so it's like well what do you do every day and so like one of the things we do every day is like we meet with entrepreneurs so like what's a rule that sets the culture around that so it's like well if you're late at at anything it's ten dollars a minute it's like well ten dollars a minute like well what if i have to go to the bathroom yeah you owe me fifty dollars i don't care you know what what if had an important phone call like can you only me a hundred dollars like i don't care you have an important phone call well like why am i paying the work here you know well because building a company is extremely hard and culturally we wanna have the ultimate respect for that and we don't wanna waste any entrepreneurs time and so that's your most important thing so you have to plan to do that you guys have a fine now you're talking about this is a real a z yeah so every time i have to like go to the meeting you know like i have to think about that because i've gotta be on time i gotta fucking plan my day so like there's not i'm not back to back on that one i gotta be on time otherwise you know i'm gonna be embarrassed in all that kind of thing and so well why and why am i doing that and then that okay if you do that that's a habit that makes you go okay like no i'm gonna respect what this is i know how hard this to build a company i may not even know how hard it is but i know that like somebody here thinks it's hard enough that i have to show up on time so can you keep can you tell some more of those interesting like you know the the tar ness paying thing that's pretty cool what does the amount so as well second one is like if you if you talk smack about an entrepreneur on x you're fired it doesn't matter if they're in the portfolio or not you're just that's it and why is that you know well culturally first of all we're dream builders when not dream killers if you want do something bigger than yourself and make the world a better place i don't care what it is i don't care if i think it's stupid i'm for that i'm not against that i am for that and i don't care if like sequoia funded you or benchmark funded you i'm for that like go get it like we're a pro entrepreneur and then you know kind of related to that i don't wanna give anybody credit from making themselves like smart by making some else look stupid like i don't wanna give anybody like a gold star for saying that guy's you know make selling dollars for eighty five cents i'm so clever you know like fuck you like no we're not doing that here and so it's it's that kind of thing where it's like oh that seems like a harsh punishment but i get it i get it because i've heard it and and i understand it and so then that's like a way to kind of show up behavioral daily as opposed to you know like look here's the problem with integrity what does that mean break like integrity only matters when it's tested everybody has integrity everybody's honest until it's tested and then when it's tested very few people are right like when it cost you money when it cost you a deal would it cost you your marriage are you honest then because that's the actual thing and so you can't just have it in the abstract you have to say like what behaviors do want do you have to have to work here you know how responsive do you have to be these things end up making the culture much more so than like a value or like one thing i really like is the the the samurai called them vi virtue saying ain't call them values it's like these are the virtue like this this is your way of being this isn't like some fucking it's not a set of ideas it's a set of actions a culture is a set of actions listen to this sean so if you go to a sixteen z dot com slash about you'll see their values and i just wanna read like i've never seen this before so i'm gonna read a couple of them but the six one the six out of seven it's we played a win our culture only matters if we're important and in order to be important we must win we are the best firm in the world we expect to win there it's just like that's fantastic i love that and that's i don't know if controversial is the right word but it's polarizing right and not a lot of people are are into that but that's that's bad ass and then you say you have another one that are really like we only do we only do first class business and only in a first class way i think that's a really i actually stalled out phrasing from jpmorgan so called he said it in court they were accusing him with some kind of like crazy like mark manipulation and here talking about me v jp yeah yeah yeah james part jpmorgan yeah yeah yeah i think that was i think i read about that line in the andrew so got that like nineteen twenty eight or twenty nine book and and i think it says that but that's great so but okay but like when i go to this site and i see these i'm like okay this kind of like these are like the high level principles but you what you were saying just now is a little bit different you were like hey look well there's it's got be behaviors that support the principles yeah yes so you you you basically were like what are the daily situations and actions where we have a choice we either show up this way or we show up this way and we're gonna show up this way and sometimes with a a penalty punishment or praise based on like the extreme version of that behavior with the no tolerance policy right like and i think there's this great military quote that you have in your book oh yeah well hey if you if you see something below standard and you don't correct it you said a new standard and right and that's a but that's very true and that's why they have to be specific because if they're not specific you can't enforce it how do you enforce like you don't have integrity that just gets weaponized it's like that guy doesn't even tell you he's not following the cultural value you know he doesn't why doesn't he have integrity well he lied me well let's go talk to him no i didn't lie you did it like so it's not that whereas oh you just put out that tweet like that's clearly against the cultural value like there's no backing off that so like you know facebook famously had moved fast and break things which i think that was really good by the way hall of fame yeah know that's that's a hall fame but like that's kind of the you know one of the famous that i thought about i thought about that for months like i'm like move fast and break kid because it's so counterintuitive intuitive it's like well you know you you want me to break things i'm an engineer i make things i'm gonna break things but it it was just his way of saying like there is no excuse for not fucking ship it like we're going right yes but it'll don't have that anymore do today is that well you know they got bigger and then you know i think speed wasn't their main thing that they were trying to achieve i think they literally changed it to too like move fast it's moved and stable it like with stable infrastructure and reliable yeah i'm lost its edge yeah to have you seen anything like that move faster break things or just a behavior when you walked into their airbnb office you noticed something yeah i'm mean too and you know amazon had this thing where they used to make the desks out of like doors and to by forest and so i tried doing that by the way it's it's way cheaper to get a desk it's way cheaper were to get a desk but like i think the idea back in whatever the late nineties when they did that was like like we're not wasting anyway yeah you know and that kind of thing which is you know those markers are are very very powerful like one of my favorite one of those was actually from the haitian revolution when to saint lo basically made a role he's like you you can't cheat on your wife which which was like so absurd because here they are they're in a colony you know a french colony they're you know the british the spanish the french they're all raping and pill and doing all this stuff all these armies and these guys i can't cheat on their walks but that little cultural idea that said look this is about trust i gotta be able to trust you and like the people has to be able to trust you ended up basically really influencing the war so one of the things that was like very surprising i think to people who read about the hi revolution was the you know here's the slave army taking on these european colonies and the white women in the colony supported to cent against like the french and you go like well why they do that because they didn't rape they didn't pill like to sound like these guys were like half naked soldiers or slaves and they weren't doing any of that they were super polite they were they they behaves in a certain way and the legend is so he was too sat mature but slaves didn't have last name so where did mature come from and so the story is napoleon who really was pissed at them brought his generals together and it's like how the fuck can you not get this slate like how can you not defeat this slave and they're like well we get them backed up we get them surrounded it and then all of the sun there's an opening and he became to san church to sand the opening and the opening a lot of people say was created by these towns people these you know these women who were just like now fuck where for him who where for that army i don't give fuck about your jeremy army we're for that army so like the culture it can be like super influential that's a great story that's really cool ask you mentioned amazon see jeff bezos got a new startup oh it's yeah did jeff got new photo oh yeah you you didn't see this announcement they project prometheus it they raised an initial seed round of six billion two two that true they called it a sea round oh yeah the first round of funding so six billion dollars raised and they got a hundred people and they're building ai for like the the physical world so it's not just robots but basically like the manufacturing of airplanes and ships and think things like that so they're basically saying how do we use ai yeah and like sort of advanced manufacturing i think it's the i think is the idea but obviously the little title details but that's pretty cool he's like back in a operational role for the first time which is cool yeah no i i think that by the way like how great is it that the logistics genius of our time is back at it and gonna help us like get back in the manufacturing game like that yeah yeah yeah those things are just incredible to me and i think all of us were a little sad when jeff was just living his best life just because he's is so talented so this is very great news i loved it i was like hi these guy's having fun he's getting jacked he's showing a a different you know a a new north star also which like has has kind of also taken over the ticket by the way like what whatever like you know people always make you into cartoon when you get to that level he is you know for sure like a top two or three best ceo in the last forty years so you're you're you're a bit surprising to me because i've read all your books i know about your background basically like you have like a guided the people who have shaped destiny you have also shaped destiny yourself but like you're you've done all these amazing things and you're a shockingly fun hang normally think like you know about hip hop and all this stuff normally the people who have outs size results typically have very strange personalities and and they're like a little quirky and i'm sure you have your quirks but you just seem shockingly well balanced for how not normal your successes is there anything in your day to day life you that you think that is would would surprise probably like the average person or are there any tendencies that you have that you recognize probably aren't at all normal well yeah you know i i would say probably the thing the thing that my daughter always says that is unusual about me and i think it came from like the beginning of my you like i had i i am different than the modern people like i was married when i was twenty two i had three kids by the time was twenty five like i i kind of had to grow up fast and you know and then right i had the company again i was trying to raise the kids and the company and you know i i have money for na or anything so like it it was a lot of that but what she says to me is she's like dad like you're like at the up of mas hierarchy key like you're very zen with all this mh and like i take things for what they are i i don't look like i'm pretty good not being une emotional but not letting like my emotional reaction control my behavior were you always that way or did you become no no it's definitely not like i think it was just all the trauma that like forced me to learn that what age do it did what what made you calm down was it age was it kids was it success was it like look i've made it everything else is just icing on the cake i don't care well hey i think it was the combination of the kids and the company you the the the first company i found it love caught which pretend became ops where was so difficult that i never like in life since then like we like we've had difficulties building the firm whatever but like they never got like a rise out of me that could compare to you know what i'd already been through so it's almost like i i feel like it's almost like i know guys my friend oliver stone was in vietnam and like you could tell everything about him was i'm not in vietnam anymore so much of his life is defined by not being a na and like i i do feel like i i don't wanna compare it to work as people always criticized me for my war metaphors but it it's kinda like that feeling where it's like okay i've been through that i'm just looking at the world differently now and about it and and and like i'm sure you had some sense of like alright i've accomplished something like i feel good maybe i'm playing with house money a little bit with with everything else yeah it's a little house money and then it's a little like all you can do is deal with the thing that it is you can't stop it from having happen it happens and that now you have to deal with it were there any other sort of wisdom accelerators so you have these formative experiences right you you got three kids in three years or whatever in you're about time twenty five and then you're trying to build a start up and everything you face kind of like the back against the wall moments were there any other formative things like you know for example my life i went to like a tony robbins seminars like you know i sort of got five years of wisdom in the weekend type of type of yeah he's very good at like dealing with your own psychology he's yeah are you first summer doing something or you read a book at the right time or you get the right message at the right time and you have a moment where you just aside like from now on x i guess i'm just curious was there any if i just think about like formative moments besides the kids and besides loud cloud what what else would there have been okay so when i was a kid i was in this relay race and it was like it was a very big deal for me you know like it was whatever the track made and we came in second in the relay race my father wasn't at the race but we came in second because and the team that came in first dropped the baton and like didn't pick it up the guy just ran up the baton and they gave in first place and they didn't penalize it and so i was you know my father said how'd you doing the race and i was like well we came in second but it wasn't fair and i was gonna explain to him why and he said stop right there he said life isn't fair and that shocked me so much at the time but it really stuck with me and it's the single best lesson that i ever got in my life was life isn't fair and i see young people wreck themselves so much because they have an expectation that something about life is gonna be fair like nothing about life is fair it's not fair where you're born it's not fair what race you are it's not fair like what your parents did it's not fair like the job interviews aren't fair like nothing the tests aren't fair nothing is fair and laugh and so the way you succeed is you don't have that expectation you just deal with it as it is and i think that everybody who tries to or who like thinks well like i wasn't treated fairly or this is fact like that is devastating you know like for sure i mean the whole time you you know when lot of cloud in the dot crashed and half our customers went out of business i never crossed my mind to go this is unfair it was just like okay i have to deal with it and that is i would say the single best peace of advice and way of looking at life that you can have is just it is what it is and now do what you can do with it being as it is it is very important you've referenced a lot of really cool stuff the the haiti story i've heard you talk about history a lot outside of work work related stuff what interests you right now you know sean and we like to talk about just like just fun stuff that you were into i'm i'm constantly reading about world war two i like that what about you is there anything that you're kind of like being obsessed about yeah so i do have this i'll give a plug for it so i i have this charity that i created with my wife called the paid and full foundation which basically you know it's kind of this idea a win but we give pensions to the old hip hop guys so you know i got a hundred thousand dollars a year and and then we have this award so for them you know where we named them grand masters and so forth and you know that's so the first winners were rock camden scarf face and and you know we had grand master cows and s and q d and so forth and then grand p and and ko rap and this year you know we added this thing the quincy jones award to the guys who got sample the most and we gave it to george clinton and the event was so i'm still thinking about it was so amazing because so george clinton knows all the words to follow the leader and so he's on stage and quincy john says can he rap all and he's rap follow the leader and ra kim came out and wrapped with him so it got george clinton and ra kim and then doctor dr bought a table to the event and he like couldn't help himself he goes up on stage just to say look i have no career without george clinton and it was just so amazing to have like all these guys that were so important and that influenced so many people just being that appreciative of of each other was i was like you know and it's kind of and you know hip hop of course is so competitive and and you know they're always going out each other and so forth but to for them to be at that point where they could just go man you guys meant so much to me and and that kind of thing was it was just very special that's so cool yeah that that idea of tensions for for for the og is is so great where what did that just come on a whim or you're just at lunch one day and you're like why don't they you know how does that because that one liner gives you the clarity right gives you the clarity of where to go so so i was listening to the the each of the is jay z son where he says i'm over charging for what they did to the cold crush and it goes with and it's like who was the cold crush and it turns out right it's grand master cas and grand master cas wrote bra was delight basically and they stole it from it and they stole it from him so nasty that they didn't change the words so big bang graft so if i'm the g r andy ray ray n nd m the as that's grand master cas that's his he's rap about his name not big back hank big bang hank is them not named grand master why is he calling himself grandma because he stole is fucking wrong and he never got paid and he never got credit for it and everybody in hip hop knows this and grand master cas by the way like if you meet him he's a stop like he's the coolest guy in the room he dresses amazing he's like super articulate he can still wrap like crazy today sixty six years old or sixty five something like that and i was like wow like we ought to go back and fix that and then you know where kim was like on tour at these little clubs and so forth i was like i guess where kim like how are people treating them like that so that was the idea most like we ought to just do it you know i'm like getting it set up with the irs and all that stuff is like extremely complicated but yeah it's been it's been really really i i would say amazing and like just the like an unbelievable epi so cas at the last one tells me he's like ben i bought a house i was like oh that's amazing cast you've got a house he's like no ben it's first time my wife i haven't lived in the projects like grand master cas the guy who were the first great hip hop sign who was never not lived in into projects like how crazy is that and you know now here he is for the house in pennsylvania here and see he's got berries in his backyard and the whole thing yeah he's got berries his backyard it is pretty nuts the people who are like invent the shit don't get it like for example sean i love and like we see like the early u events in bad yeah and they're getting two thousand dollars to show up yeah and they still come to like the legends awards and they still are talking and you're like damn him dude this guy probably is someone insurance or something like that like he like you know he probably got made fifteen thousand dollars that year no doubt no doubt yeah this happens is the nba too this is why like the culture gets kinda messed up the because the old heads keep criticizing all the new players yeah and it's like wow why are you doing that it's like they made too much more money makes seventy million dollars a year and that guy didn't make seven in his whole career and he's like i'm better than that guy and that guy you know so the this resentment and then they get on and then they're the the guys doing the halftime shows and it's bad bad for the product right like bad for their lineage because everything is a creative lineage like on top of what was yeah before right so you it's really cool to kind of almost like economically fix the you know or like try to improve that ecosystem because we all think like you know it's funny it's it's also kind thought i have about capitalism this capitalism is is definitely the system that lifted the world out of poverty and like kind of created the modern more we live in yet you know it's incredibly powerful but right over time it does get corrupted and so forth and even if it wasn't corrupted it's not perfect and like certain things happen like oh you create a musical art form and or the guys who actually made it happen and it becomes the biggest musical art form in the world and you never got paid like capitalism shit work like that but it's just kind of the way it works right like and it's nobody's fault and so like you can go back and say fool just correct those things i think that i think you are so cool like you're on one hand you're like a pretty like hard hitting capitalists where you're getting after it and you're you're talking about making really tough decisions of having to fire people whatever but then you're also like but also we can we could do good by doing all this other stuff and i think that like particularly in tech i don't think that people's interests are are particularly that wide yeah well i think people are get very into tech yeah like tech is so deep and invest that like people can get stuck in it for sure yeah yeah well ben we thank you for coming on man i know you're you got a lot of things going on but this was this is a lot of fun i appreciate it yeah no it's a good time thanks guys definitely alright appreciate you that's it that's a pod i feel like got rude work to know why i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a road travel never looking back hey let's take a quick i tell you about a podcast that you could check out it is called the science of scaling by mark robe he was the founding ceo of hubspot and he's a guest lecturer at harvard business school the guy smart and he sits down every week with different sales leaders from cool companies like cla y and van and open ai and he's asking about their strategies their tactics and how they're growing their companies as you know head of sales or chief revenue officer if you're looking at to scale the company up if you're a cro or head of sales just look at to level up in your career i think a podcast like this could be great for you listen to the science of scaling wherever you get your podcast

we call you the most interesting man in tech and i stand by one of the reasons you're great is because you made money in aldi these random ways that i wouldn't have even ever thought to you've got a four fifty million dollar fund down he also started this all a food delivery business that's like doing over a hundred million dollars a year you're and nsf run around like rich people weirdo what's hot what are the kids into everyone is times and everyone's got their dealer i can't say who was doing this but on the pitch was like so like how do you plan to be legit with this whole thing and he basically pulls up a picture of the like the cofounder with like trump and kennedy is like yeah we're pretty sure we're gonna be able to get some things screwed say it with me cro capitalism one of my best friends is completely jacked and he does not really work out he does ems it's gonna go viral because it's gonna be hated and loved at the same time which is what you need i'd rather take drugs but this is the only podcast where you're gonna get ai a triple each preference from wrestling i mean the the range is incredible we're gonna get answered for this episode i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put all in in like a days all on a go less travel one of the reasons you're great is because you made money in all these random ways that i wouldn't have even ever thought to you like created a domain shipping and made millions of dollars that way i think you did like a fee fighters thing yeah your credit card fee fighters processing yeah credit card processing you've got a four hundred fifty million dollar fund down you're probably you know if anything is in fintech i go to you as basically like hey gut check is this smart or is this dumb because it's easy to fool me it's hard to fool you he also started this all yep yeah he's just started to help start a a food delivery business that's like doing over a hundred million dollars a year so all these different spaces the guy got married in the meta at a taco about whatever the hell that means we call you the most interesting man in tech and i stand by and i have yet to meet a more interesting man in tech welcome she'll back for round three or four so happy to be back also i gotta tell you since the last time i was on so many things have happened as a result of me being on like what okay so i was hiring a chief of staff and a bunch of people applied but one person applied and the person who got the job my current chief of staff is a huge fan of m m and she was debating leaving her current thing which we're which was paying her a lot more money her per previous thing and then she was like fuck it i got the opportunity to work with this guy who was on m m i'm gonna take it and so should my chief of staff joined because of m that's a lot of pressure for you i hate when people say that when they're gonna like they're like i able to take this big pay cut to work for you like it's a lot of pressure last time i was on i talked about wanting to get better at like photography and video with ai and this guy jacob reached out and he was like i can help you and we went out for like hours in new york shooting he he showed me all the cool stuff and then i mean i your audience must be like the nicest people out there because also like recently i went back and looked at the youtube comments usually assess but your guys are so nice everybody that listens to your podcast is super nice nobody was like that guy has a big nose or whatever whatever people would say on youtube comments everyone is like just talking me up talking to you guys up it's great alright the bots of work and keep paying them yeah alright so we got i we wanted to brainstorm with you so we asked you to bring some ideas businesses that you think are interesting will be cool to start i think we said ten million dollar ideas which i don't even know really what that means but here we are she brought five ideas let's run through to some of the ideas and then i wanna talk about oh actually wait before we go to the ideas you had a great thing on there there's this idea of this fifty year mortgage and you're my finance guy you're my fintech guy yeah fifty year mortgage trump is like you know what more years the better is this a good idea of bad idea context i i don't really follow the news so i mean trump sure so so right now thirty year mortgage is generally the maximum in the united states so you pay off a home over thirty years trump wants to address the affordability crisis which is a real problem and it said what we should do is extend mortgage is to fifty years so you have fifty years to pay it off instead of thirty years i think it's a terrible idea because basically what happens is you give people more money so the monthly the month the amount that they pay monthly goes down a little bit but actually you're not earning equity in the home after like the average length of time that somebody our age stays in their home is relatively low and by that time they'll earn no equity in the home or almost know i think the average person spends something like six or seven years right now it's not a lot yeah i think that's right six and a half years and thirty year mortgage i think the way it's set up right now something like the first fifteen years is just interest is that right it's not just interest for your earning you're not you're not earning that much equity and so here you'd be earning less but the thing is actually switching from thirty to fifty it doesn't change the payments that much and the real problem is the thirty year mortgage kind of worked well for an america back then which was like you bought a house in your upper twenties and then you retired by sixty ish and you owned your home outright so even today for when people retire the median american when they retire almost eighty percent of their net worth is the equity in their home wow so yeah you your home is your retirement plan right your home is your retirement plan and and part of that is for americans you can't spend it like if you could spend it you would spend that money but because it's in your home you can't spend it so i i don't think the fifty year mortgage really solved anything and actually probably what it does is drives asset prices higher so japan did this in the eighties they they had a bunch of problems like interest rates were zero and asset prices went through the roof at one point a single property in tokyo was worth more than all of the real estate in california like it was an insane bubble and part of that was they extended mortgage times to fifty years and actually some people got a hundred year mortgage so like your grandkids kids are on the hook for the problem that you buy and asset prices went through the roof and then leverage is nasty when it collapsed when prices drop a little bit you're you're pretty screwed so home prices have actually gone down so much so that there's still half of what they were in nineteen eighty nine in japan in japan yeah in tokyo but did you say one property was worth more which profitable so okay so it was the land value under the imperial palace and so that's it's about a half half square mile of space in tokyo so okay so maybe maybe maybe a bad idea yeah i from what i understand because when rates drop here basically the sellers just raised the price because they're like oh you're you're buying not really on the whole price it's like what do i owe per month and what can i qualify for if i can quote if my monthly payment is x i can afford that yeah and so what happens is when your monthly payment goes down whether it's because you stretch the payments over fifty years or the rates go down what happens is the sellers just can justify a higher price and it didn't affect anything you just end up paying more because i think in a thirty year mortgage i think you pay whatever the home price is plus something like what is it fifty percent or something is because the interest compounds over thirty years and if it's fifty years you're gonna basically pay almost double the the the the list price of the home because you pay so much more in interest yeah exactly so i think the solution like we do have an affordability crisis no question but the solution is not to induce demand because if you induce demand what happens you have the same fixed amount of properties you're just making prices go up so mh the solution is creating more supply like making it easier to permit like all this kind of reform to build more housing make it make it cheaper to build housing i was listening to this person who had a different take on affordability he was like are things less affordable today than they were in the sixties he goes look here's the deal in the nineteen sixties your version of a family vacation was a road trip to a state park once a year okay you never traveled you didn't go on a plane you lived in a eighteen hundred square foot home in dayton ohio okay like you had a crappy car you didn't eat out and you never took vacation now young people today they want more things which is totally fine they want to go international once a year they wanna go on these cool trips they want fancy phones a new home even the the the average home nowadays is a new home with two acs and a beautiful build with a really nice kitchen and really nice bathroom and they're like is it more is it are things less affordable or do people just want more stuff yeah it was like it was like an interesting take where i was like that's okay that actually does have a good point because even when i grew up i didn't go and this isn't like oh i was so poor but like i didn't go into plane if i was eighteen years old like whenever never we didn't take like vacations like i do now we didn't i remember like the ac was broken one summer and we just like left the windows open like or like it was a lot shared rooms like bunk beds there'd be like two or three kids in a room now each kid needs their own room like you said sam like fourteen hundred fifteen hundred square feet was like a nice sized palace and now that's not the case have you guys ever seen the tv show the wonder years yeah and it's like yeah one father the husband could provide for the whole family but he was angry all the time he worked at a factory where he got like black log and like a man yeah like he was like borderline and alcoholic and he was like grumpy all the time they didn't go anywhere when they did like the car broke down like times were different yeah i i think so take the side though i think we shouldn't be telling people like you shouldn't want these things i think we should not saying that i'm just joking but yes yeah so i i think i think we should make stuff cheaper and i think we can do that making the cost the inputs cheaper i i think it's all possible but i i hate demand side adjustments the way you said this so so made it so simple to me which was if you make if all you do is increase demand and the supply stays the same you're not gonna make things cheaper you're gonna make things more expensive and it's like yeah that that obviously makes sense alright so a lot of people watch and listen to the show because they wanna hear us just tell them exactly what to do when it comes to starting or growing a business and really a lot of people who are listening they have a full time job and they wanna start something on the side a side hustle now a lot of people message sean and i and they say alright i wanna start something on the side is this a good idea is that a good idea and again what they're really just say is just give me the ideas well my friends here in luck so my old company the hustle they put together a hundred different side hustle ideas and they have appropriately called it the side hustle idea database it's a list of a hundred pretty good ideas frankly i went through them they're awesome and it gives you how to start them how to grow them things like that gives you a little bit of inspiration so check it out it's called the side hustle idea database it's in the description below you'll see the link click it check it out let me know the comments what you think what do you got sheila hit us with the first okay so a lot of these are based on like what's going on in my life today so i am trying to redo my backyard and i redid it like ten years ago and it's like kind of a shit now i wanna add pave i wanna add like a nice maybe a waterfall something like that and so i've been reaching out to all these landscape all these backyard specialists and the process sucks it takes them forever to get back to me and then they come here all they do is measure and like i knew the measurements to begin with and scheduling that on my schedule and their schedule sucks and they're coming from like an hour away sometimes just to do this like ten minute thing and then once they take the measurements they're super busy they don't get back to me for a week and so then i'm like can i really trust this guy and i was talking to a to a guy who build a company in this space and said like one of the things that's really important to them is just getting back to you quickly and if they get back to you quickly you're way more likely to purchase from them and this this is a fairly large purchase let's let's say fifty thousand dollars and so i was thinking there's gotta be better way and you could solve this with ai in in part so all i could do is give them my address and they know what my backyard looks like like they can get the measurements from satellite imagery and they could actually give me a design like they could it could either not show up at all or when they show up they could have an ipad with a bunch of sample designs of my place how amazing would that be and the idea for this came to me from a buddy of mine who has a company called deep lawn all they do is they help lawn companies quote and so the lawn company you put in the address it looks at satellite imagery uses some ai to determine how much grass you have comes up with a square footage it knows what you charge and it instantly gives them a quote and they charge like a couple dollars per quote but there's so many lawn care companies so many lawns out there that it's actually pretty good business and it's simple this is actually like one step beyond that it's not just giving you a simple quote but it's giving you a bunch of designs and stuff like that and i think i think it's very doable and it would solve a problem that i have if these guys used it so it's really interesting to say that ben had told me about a business that's very very similar in the roofing space yeah so if you go to roof dot com so r o s r dot com and the guy's doing the same thing it's just the quote part so basically i i guess the way that roofing works is if you wanna get a roof for repair or whatever it is the guy will come out so you gotta do the same thing you said schedule it comes out just gonna check out the roof today gonna gonna get in give you a quote and the the roof hate doing this step because they make no money in the quoting process they need to get the job gotta go all the way up the roof they gotta schedule what they can only do so many in a week and so what this guy was doing i don't if i remember exactly the meta the method but i know what he was doing which was he's like hey he would go to the roof first and say hey anytime you need a quote done i'll do the quote for you you know you just pay me like a small amount basically to to go do this quote for you and i think he was using either drones or imagery in some ways i think it was drones at the drone would fly by it would auto do the quote for you so you would have a way faster quote which increases your odds are getting the job you didn't have to go do it yourself they can scale so it could do way more quotes per week than the than the roof could have done themselves and it takes off like you a one part of the sales funnel that they really hated doing and i think this business is doing really well i think these brute bootstrapping this i'm not entirely sure but i think this is this business is doing really well last time i heard the numbers for it yeah and i i think you could do the same thing for like pools decks per like playgrounds fences outdoor kitchens like all all this kind of stuff would be fairly easy to do so you could build you could build this in one niche and then go into all the others you guys remember the that there was like two or three tech guys that like left their like seemingly great tech companies i think and like started bathroom remodel businesses i think the first one was this was this guy named roger so roger was like previously like i think he started z or something like that he he founded mafia awards which was part of z okay sorry i'm in the ballpark club you're in the ballpark i'm not right okay and then but like gi was like a like a you know raised by raise money from prominent investors and then he left to start made dot com which was basically like a you know how like the best barber you go and you sit down with the chair and they're like what do you want and you're like just two like a little here i don't know it's like give me like the justin bieber the the great barber are like there's option one option two option three option four here's the menu which one do you you're like give me that one give me the four he did that for bathrooms and it like killed it and then the second guy was this guy i think named luke one of the c cofounder of casper he left casper and he start a i think i think bathrooms and kitchen but i just called block block renovation was it just it was it both of them are just bathrooms same thing it was bathrooms and maybe now they expanded the kitchen and by way i don't know how these businesses have all done now but like super interesting where it i was like hey here's four you can pick off the menu you want your bathroom to look like this this this or this and it was like running facebook ads we talked about this years ago on the cloud running facebook ads for people who wanted upgrade their bathroom which is not how they were how any other construction company was selling to customers so you had this new channel and and they're requiring customers to do these like expensive bathroom renovations using this like kinda picking off the menu model which i thought was pretty fascinating i think it's interesting but it's it's so complex and things can go wrong and get bad reviews based on your partner or whatever i feel like it's a very complicated business i don't know why i know i think roger sold made to like home depot blood i know how i don't know how good of a business it was what i like about this one is it's really software like you just have to sell these folks and you're not on the hook for anything else and it could be a pretty lean team i think you can easily do ten line of revenue on this business right i love i love because you know i hate when people wanna start a marketing agency because you're signing up to be a genius every month yeah it's like oh i'm gonna be and and every business really cares how their marketing is going and they're gonna be on there you're gonna be on your ass and you gotta continually be fighting versus things like compliance it's like nobody wants nobody cares how their compliance as going as long as it's not a problem so similarly here like roofing it's like doing the quote is very different than the emotional purchase of a new bathroom that's gonna go in our master bath and that's like i really get how the route was done or whatever at know what that word is i just used it to that i don't know you're there so so you know you wanna sell things ideally that people don't have extreme like preference and emotional attachment to because your the the bar for delivery is so much higher than it is for boring things that they don't really care about so you see i i i like the i like the example you gave better and also the fact that you could do it for if you could do it for roofing you can do it for lawns you could do it for pool you could it's a blueprint business anybody can go do these businesses is yeah exactly is is the stereotype true of indian guys that they don't like being handy that's like saying do white men not like to jump like you no it's not that we don't like being handy you're just not handy okay like the all the all the blood rushes to our brains there's is nothing left in the limb my dad likes being handy but like i've looked at he he owns some of our buildings and i've looked at reviews and people are like whenever i need a problem there's like mister mc who's like trying to solve it with like he doesn't have the right tools or anything but he like create some crazy way to solve some problems the indian handyman event comes to your house when you have a problem and just convince you that it's okay and you need to compromise and life is not about getting what you want yeah it'll be fine and now looking at you guys now just talking about like you know like a bathroom remodeled startup no but this one works is the indian friendly business it's satellite images exactly price quoting and then you hand it to a strong guy who's gonna be able to go do the do the manly stuff exactly strong idea with number one let's go so got that's number one and then number two is maybe an offs shoot on that like you could start with number one and go into number two but every let let's use this back backyard guys so every service business runs the same workflow like you get a call or an online whatever thumb tech so you have to answer calls you schedule jobs then you dispatch a crew you follow up and you respond within with an estimate and then you know you schedule the job and then you asked for reviews and i think all of that stuff a lot of that stuff is super auto and i think the big unlock is actually ai voice like i think a lot of people are sleeping on how good ai voice is already today and how useful would be for something like this actually yesterday or the day before bill posted something about elon musk and he was like i'm not sure if this was ai or not and like the three of us are like are you fucking kidding me it's obviously ai what was it it was a fake video about elon musk and it was so obviously fake it like didn't have his manner or anything and it was like talking slowly it was kind of his voice kind of not but the fact that bill oc i know how how old he is maybe sixty he couldn't tell or he was like i'm not sure if his ai so that means that ai voice is already good enough if bill fooled by this video then like a lot of people are fooled by ai ai voice so already these service providers should should be having ai voice do the work for them and i think it's already good enough if it's just gonna get better in the next year so i think instead of a contractor hiring an office manager you give them an ai office manager for like a few hundred bucks a month and it's actually you you might think of it as a as a money saving thing but it's actually not it's more than that it's like you have super fast response time people responding round the clock like i whenever what when i decided to do this back backyard remodel was like a sunday afternoon and nobody's responding me then but like the first person to respond is way more likely to get the job than the next person the person after that so like you respond super fast there's no missed calls you text to follow up like it does all that stuff for you and a super easy app man so we have alex from mo comes on to the pot bunch and he's one of our buddies he's got the he like runs these like seminars rs or these like events that you can go to that look really cool and we're i wanted to see like how good his sales funnel was and so i went to like sign up to like a call and like as i clicked like confirm calendar i get a phone call from a guy and fifteen being savior and i'm like xavier he was like hey sam what's up i just saw you booked to college i just wanna like confirm a couple of details with you make sure we're good and if you want i like move the appointment up whatever and i go i don't believe this is you he goes it's a real person and i was like facetime me right now he's like we don't have i go well you you know my number facetime me like i know you have an iphone and so he facetime me while he's talking me and it was him it was totally him and and like it kinda like got me bought this idea of calling leads like within minutes within minutes and like there's been so many times where i bought yelp or a bit on yelp and i'm like literally the first person will respond to my car wash like request is coming to my house right now i don't care how much it costs the first person exactly and sheila what do you think is gonna be the challenge of because i've seen a this idea makes so much sense to me and there's either there there's a couple of them out there what do you think is gonna be the key if you're the founder you're running a business like this what do you think you need to do to win what would you do in your maybe go to market or like how would you how would you take this idea that i think a lot of people are gonna have but how would you end up being the winner what do you what do you think would make the difference between winning and fourth place yeah so it's too bad that ai robo calling is illegal because what i would probably do so my first i would just have my voice agent call each of these people right right so maybe you can do it where like i don't know what the legality of this is but like maybe you do it where you call your ai voice agent calls in and you're on the call and it it maybe it's fine then and the ai voice agent is so good that you convince them so you just call each of these people and convince them that their agent is so good like don't you wanna try this try it for free i'll just send you leads right now and you do it that way and and it can be a great business today's zip episode has brought you by health hubspot because using only twenty percent of your business data is like dating somebody who only text you in emojis first of all that's annoying and second you're missing a lot of the content but that's how most businesses are operators today they're only using twenty percent of their data unless you use hubspot that's when all your emails your call logs your chat messages just to turn into insights to help you grow your business because all that data makes all the difference learn more at hubspot dot com i wanna ask you so you have like two or three more ideas on here that actually really good one that is like like the has the least amount of information on it i actually have a question about it let's do it so you put on here something about peptides because everyone because everyone in s nsf is doing it and yes this is me just like wanting to get information so your peptides basically the it's a category of drugs whatever we could talk about it but like often oftentimes people use peptides and t in h c h like interchangeably or in the same ballpark are you saying that all the nerds in s that for now in testosterone or pep everyone is on peptides and everyone's got their dealer so so the way this works is like in peptides are like these amino acids that tell your brain to to repair or regulate something they're like precursor to protein or something like that where yeah yeah you can like so it's really good for a bunch of things that your body can do and regulate so like healing body composition like give you more energy control your appetite those are gl ones the problem is the problem with this business idea is they're not legal or they're they're legal for research purposes they're not approved for the applications that people are using for that's right so i don't know where the opportunity is here but it's like really complicated to use them and like in san francisco everyone's doing let's see if friends are doing and they're like oh i got this peptide and it's been so great for me or whatever and of course like there are challenges in it not being fda approved but i think for the most part these are things that people have been using for years and and have some sense of efficacy on but yeah people are getting oz sema are tired like oz and and oz other oz like things via peptides and so a lot of people right now longevity is a huge opportunity you've seen like function health and superpower and others do really well there so there's a ton of ton of interest but the experience i've had with peptides is confusing and sketchy so i actually haven't i haven't tried them yet but i've tons of friends are talking about it so i feel like there's some educational opportunity there's some like dosing guidance safety some high trust supply chain and coaching opportunity in this space but i don't know what it is and the fda approval thing obviously is a big problem interesting so you're saying maybe right now because the legality and that approval part of selling the things directly is sketch yeah you would build the biggest most trusted information source so that when the time comes this becomes more clear you either become the highest value affiliate or you yourself could start to to deal some deal peptides exactly exactly right have you guys heard of peptides or you have friends on them i heard of it because sam like five years ago before peptides was really a thing told me he because it achilles hurt and then he was on some reddit forum and got a vial of something and injected it into his body and i was like bro what are you doing you know take a drugs off the internet at he's like it's amazing feel like wolverine yeah bp p one fifty seven baby my oh love b one hundred fifty somebody you told me about it my daughter who was just born that's her middle name bp p one fifty seven like i love that stuff so yeah look like i've always been like into this step of stuff and if you listen to the podcast you know i'm gonna cut a brag a little bit here but like semi tight i was that big dude would it when it got popular we're that was all news to us on this podcast because we've been talk about it alright i had already overdosed on it i could told you all about it and then when and so i was into the stuff in san francisco and then i moved to austin and that's when i really got my fixed man like every jack i ever was like show me all the cool stuff that they're doing and not a lot of the stuff was like like not wasn't like a i don't know actually the definition of a steroids but it wasn't like an ana antibiotic like make your muscles huge but there was like bp one fifty seven for when i hurt my achilles someone was like you should try this or you try your shoulder and there's all these like weird peptides and weird things that were were around longevity not like how do i look like triple h like you know in wrestling like not like how i look huge but how do like live a long time and so yeah i've been fascinated by all this stuff and i think that i think there's a lot of really interesting stuff and i and i still test on of the stuff and i got a guy i text them i got a guy i text them and i been home it's incredibly shady however sean and i invested in a company called home home first well i figured what they originally called peak peak health or something like that yeah yeah i don't even remember but they were originally just t now they do everything and we get them monthly updates and this is like the chart is like you want the chart to look this way and i think they're they're doing a really good job of not looking like you know for a long time actually we talked about crt clinics sean and not you and i did and it was like dude the biggest crt clinic is like this guy based out of vegas and he's got these like stores and you go to the store to get your t and they have like lazy boy leather sofa and like monday night football on and it's like it was like the lame is like most un thing and so hone is actually a good example of they do they also do female stuff too i don't know what type of drugs women tape they sell women drugs as well and they've done a much better job as it's not like spanish where there's like a male and female yeah i don't know association of the verb yeah it's tough they're like know what i'm talking about women yeah yeah i don't know whatever you guys take whatever you're into i guess there's a little bit of everything thing for everyone this is the only podcast where you gonna get ai t r t h a the a triple h reference from wrestling that i mean the the range is incredible dude she'll i looked at this peptide business recently to same thing i'm like okay clearly there's demand right but the yeah know how do you do this legally and what's the good way to do this and i can't say who was doing this but on the pitch i was like so like how do you plan to be like legit with this whole thing because it's unclear what the what the legal legality is gonna be of this and he basically pulls up a picture of like like the cofounder with like trump and kennedy is like it's like yeah we're pretty sure we're gonna be able to get some things through will make i was like oh wow okay and that's like probably one of the best slides i've ever seen in a deck yeah pulls that out a pulls out a card from this wall he goes i have an answer right here you're like sir that's a get on a jail free card from to give monopoly that doesn't work and sounds was like i think actually yeah being we're really close with bobby kennedy would be like a perfectly reasonable part of your business plan right now so so is that really what he said literally yeah they're were like hey we their pro this it's gonna pass and we're like you know we're gonna do everything to write with one thing they pointed out rightfully so is that everybody who's in this space right now is like the kinda like you know like the early kinda crypto community or like down mid stage crypto community where everyone's just trying to get a quick and they're gonna go like foul like you could just be coinbase base right and you could just be like hey we're just gonna do things the right way and we trust that over time this will become more and more you know mainstream but we're just gonna do things right way from the beginning and like what coinbase did where like you know all the other crypto you know exchanges sort of fell off is i think of a valid strategy in this case they're like say it with me cro capitalism oh dude this is this is a good topic because there's so much of it and actually like i've never in the past i'd never seen anybody pitch like a a core part of their pitch as being i'm close to administration i've heard so many pitches about that now which which is kinda sad honestly but or is way like slide thirteen we know a guy yeah and exactly what why is this in your deck totally actually like i've been searching and chat will not answer me a bunch of questions i have because it says peptides are not medically cleared like we can't answer this question so like one of my main sources of information is gone right by the way again a little can we do a little politics tangent real quick ear mu if this bothers you but trump sam i just thought you'd find this entertained did you see the trump thing about do you know who c is do you know who c he is from bin finance finance guy didn't he like pardon him but trump definitely doesn't know what that guy is so he pardoned them and then he gets interviewed so the guy was jail i think for four months or something like that and this is guy owned like the biggest asian crypto exchange and was like in whatever he was in in in hot water for money laundering or wire fraud like a bunch of stuff whereas is like you know bad people are sort of using your exchange to to to do money laundering or something and they they asked them they're like but you part this guy and then he bought like two billion dollars of your son's cryptocurrency like don't you see how that seems like why did you partner him and he's like here here's here's the thing you wanna know you wanna know i don't know who he is and i was like wow the audacity he was just the audacity of saying don't even know who he is don't know anything about the guy any part him i just thought that was one of the most crazy things i've ever totally it's like this man this man has no fear he's not afraid of anything he is that he does not fear anything if just get started and the what was the guy from nicola trevor melt he part that guy too that what the hell man and then they looked into they're like oh back guy i donated yeah it's a get out of jail not for free car yeah get out of jail at this fixed price yeah that was insane probably be very low it was like a couple million dollars and did he really say that word for word he was like i don't know where it's like you're not you're not ugly you're just poor it's like you're not it's like you're not you're not a criminal you're just poor you know what it like you can get out for if you got access to a couple million whether that i there's that joke i forget who where where originally came from they're like look if you own the bank like fifty grand that's a big deal that's a it's really bad for you but if you own the bank if you owe the bank five hundred million dollars that's really bad for the bank yeah that's the big problem yeah the other one that was crazy was that george santos that i just thought it was so funny like this is like a congress person who like lied about everything like he would have a different college that he went from each time you talk to him he claimed the guy said he was jewish said he was jewish and then he was like you ish behind jewish out here where right i live there was a like a new york congressman or something like that like kind of or a local side i don't even remember what it was so not that important but he was like he was he was a gay brazilian guy i think he's brazilian and for yeah yeah the audacity to the to tell people that he was jewish and they're were like george santos like i don't think you're jewish she goes i wanna say i was jewish i said it was j ish like i like like jewish people well honestly it's an all timer it's an timer and then like he had so much audacity like he claimed that his mom died in nine eleven like there are very good records of who died in and eleven and he he he like lived in brazil at the time there was notes guys that that was possible he just anyway pretty pretty incredible alright your most can come off and politics alright so what else you're got the circus seat or the ems thing those are all okay i'll do the circus you one okay let's is the circus you one so okay so personal note my wife and i were like old i'm i'm i'm forty three my wife wife's forty and my wife has a in condition that we need to screen against and being pregnant can trigger this condition that she has so our doctors have said if you can avoid pregnancy you should do so and we were like okay yeah can afford it let's do it so we started going down the sa path and for those of you who don't know sur is when another mother another person carries your child and so you you transfer your embryo to that person and then they carry your child and it's growing very substantially so like this wasn't really a thing not that long ago and then actually new york only legalized it five years ago so it's still growing very rapidly it's obviously extremely common in the gay community because that's the only way they can have kids you know their own their own children and it's it's actually a very complicated thing how it works there a bunch of so agencies out there and the sur agencies they have a a number of women that they work with carriers and and then they try to match you but the way it works is they can only introduce you to to people that are in their platform so imagine if it was like and it's it's a matching thing like there are a bunch of things that we care about there's a bunch of things that she cares about we ultimately found a great match and she's she's wonderful we love and how much is it and how much does the woman get yeah so it costs roughly a hundred and fifty to two hundred thousand dollars okay and then goes to her plus the agency takes a cut is that how it works agency takes a cut she gets a certain amount so i think in our case she gets seventy five thousand dollars roughly something in that ballpark there are a bunch of there a bunch of things that you know there's a base fee and then a monthly fee and travel and time off work and also sorts child care sorts it's of stuff that's embedded in that and then there a bunch of there's like legal fees and then of course their medical fees for like actually doing the transfer and her health care and her insurance that we pay and do you get to hang out with her or is it like do you see her on a monthly like your check or yeah so we we hung out with her like so we're in san francisco she's in las vegas area we've hung out with her she's she's come to our house we like her we text with her you know when the transfer happened we sent her stuff like we you know we've we know what her family life is like all sorts of stuff the thing i didn't realize going into this is there are a bunch of things that you might care about or that somebody might care about that are important in making this match so like i thought like i didn't really know what i would care about but we've talked to people who care about like what do they eat are they eating only organic i met a hindu person who said their surrogate can eat beef during the time of pregnancy people obviously care about would they abort if medically important are they okay carrying twins would they have a c section and then there all sorts of other stuff like do you wanna have a relationship with this person like we really like our surrogate like we we we chat check in with her all the time and she takes us back but anyway are all these things that you wanna match on but the way it works is like each agency only has a few folks that you can talk to and and make that match and it would make a lot more sense if you had a like a dating app like e harmon here are the things i care about hear the things they care about so it makes sense for it to be a larger thing imagine if you were buying the home and you're a real estate agent could only show you homes that they had listed that's kind of what it is today i think there's an opportunity in making this much more common i think people don't realize how many medical challenges people have and not being the reason they're not able to carry and not not able to have kids i think if people knew that some of the stigma about this would go away and you'd have more people who want to be surrogate wanna be carriers so i think there's an opportunity to create a company that does this for people and and is a much broader agency than what's out there today and sort of does this matching process brings people on sort of recruits carriers that's really the the challenge right now is there an enough carriers so i think you have to create more carriers and to do that you sort of market you offer them a higher portion of the payment so like i think by automating some of this stuff instead of it being a manual process where like our agency you know the ladies going like word mouth front find new carriers i think you can automate a lot of that process and and create an awesome business but i don't think there's gonna be billion dollar company like i think there are maybe five to ten thousand births in united states every year from sur and i think that'll probably expand but i don't think you can build a billion dollar company here i think you can build i think you can do something great for the world and you know run a company as well how do they recruit these women now that's such a strange way to recruit someone like it's a great question i don't know but i think what they do is there all these communities credit facebook etcetera where people are posting and you go there and people and a lot of the age agencies are there just recruiting can i go full full crazy here yeah sur the ml yeah i think an ml has solved the marketing challenge of how do you recruit other women to go like kind of do this thing for money and this is just the like premium why sell makeup and candles when you could have a down line generating you know a hundred thousand dollars a pop right like there's a a it's a premium ml man i feel i it's so crazy i've got so many fronts doing this when i was little kid like or in my earlier twenties like the only thing i knew about ce was that amy polar movie where she you know she's like the surrogate she's the surrogate for tina fe and she like eats big macs and it's like yeah candidly we change her to be healthy and like that was like that that was the the just the movie but i didn't know anything about this and now i think i probably know five or six or seven friends that are have done it this way it's a pretty wild experience it's also like science is amazing it's one of these things that i learned about this and make this is just absolutely insane i can't incredible this exists so sheila if you said there's ten thousand surrogate birds a year roughly you think that's ballpark right yeah it's growing fast i think it's growing like ten percent a year but let's just say ten thousand so if it was a hundred thousand average spend per surrogate sur that's a billion dollars a year of sort of revenue generated across all the different agencies today but yeah but note that most of that goes to this surrogate so right you know what if you you're a venture investor right like how do you describe to somebody who's not a vc the appeal of the sorta of niche weird marketplace that behavior that seems a little fringe today but oh my god wait people spend how much money watching people break open pokemon card decks and what whatnot is a twelve billion dollar company now yeah watching people open pokemon card packs live on the internet what do you mean right there's like there's an appeal is how do you describe that that kind of phenomenon and and where the the and the upside of the of the sort of the fringe yeah so i think what whatnot a great great one because it started out as a collectible marketplace for funko pop toys and if you told me that a collectible marketplace for funko pop toys would five years later be worth i think it's like twelve billion dollars or something i would say you're crazy but you start somewhere and like you dominate that niche i think in this case i don't think it's a venture opportunity i i also think venture capital incentivize growth and that might incentivize the wrong thing in this in this space so i probably wouldn't want it to be a venture opportunity but i think it is a good opportunity for somebody to build a business so me and tyler the ceo of have came up with a little challenge for you it's the newsletter challenge now if you know me you know that i'm a big fan of newsletters i own newsletter i also had a business that was a newsletter business that was amazing i wrote this newsletter about crypto we grew it to quarter million subscribers and we ended up selling it after a year for millions of dollars and i want you to be able to do the same thing in your business so we're doing a challenge ten grand is on the line plus me and tyler will should be in your corner as growth advisors you would just need to go to bee hyped dot com slash m m and you either start a new newsletter or you move your current newsletter over there and five finalist will get picked pitch me and tyler sort like shark tank and the winner gets ten grand so go to bee dot com slash m m that's b dot com slash m m to enter the challenge today can i ask you about one more thing you have here because this is on the long list of things i thought were so stupid when i first heard about this and people seem to love it and it's you know what do i know sean have you ever heard of ems is that a like of ambulance is that is that what ems is that's another ems electronic muscle stimulation okay tell me about it is this like the thing where you get six pack abs by putting that electrode on your thing and you watch tv yes yes so okay here here's the thing so you you gotta try it first of all but my one of my best friends in the world did i'd rather take drugs yeah okay fair so so one of my best friends in the world completely and utterly jacked and he was not five years ago and he does not really work out he does ems so what it is is he has this little machine that he bought for thirty five dollars on amazon look for tens t e n s and ems oh do we have one of those that's for like during contractions my wife used the tens machine yeah so he puts those all over his body and he like jacks it up i hate the feeling of it so i don't do it but i have seen it work for him so well that this is something and so recently i was in new york couple weeks ago and i went to a workout facility where they have it set up like on a thing that you wear and part of the problem is it needs direct skin contact so it's annoying to put on and off if it was easier to put on and off i would be doing this thing but i went to a facility where they had this thing and they like you put a shirt on that has these electrodes on it and they spray water on it so it makes it touches your skin basically and it's an amazing workout like it was one of my favorite workouts ever and it was fifteen minutes i know it sounds like total bullshit wait so you do with this one you do work out while it's happening you do a little bit of a workout but it's it's working you out a lot more because of the stimulation in your body by way so let let's go to the case study of your friend your friend five years ago not tell me his name i'm a go to there it's gonna love okay so it's sam pull up a picture are you get a picture let's get a screen picture yeah let's do we do we have a shortlist pick yeah we you a shirtless picture i can send you guys a pic he he's jacked now and you're saying that the in between there wasn't like a crossfit phase and then this it was really just this over a period of time plus diet i assume not much changes died he's diabetic so he's kinda limited in what he can eat he's he hasn't changed his diet but he attributes at all to this so okay so where is the opportunity i think so this gym thing that i did in new york it was amazing and i looked for one here in san francisco great i i couldn't find i couldn't find one in in a cursor research but i think you basically build a berries of vms where like you have a workout routine and it's really fun and there's a class and people put on this thing and they they're used to it and and they get jacked and people see them getting jacked and i think the way you do it is like you start with somebody like me who's like not in great shape a little flu and then i go through this and like you show the evolution and and then people are into it if people like i gotta try this yeah this has the the viral factor of being weird right like of people hating on it right yeah if i posted this and i was like this is all you need you're gonna get all the comments about like dude just do it blah like and so it's gonna go viral because it's gonna be hated and loved at the same time which is what you need yeah so the problem with the thirty five dollar product so he bought it for me and i the problem is you to be like do these sticky things you have to put on your body and it just like takes time what he does is his primary workout is he flies a lot for work and when he's on the plane he's doing at the whole time and that's his primary workout does you put this through the x frame machine and like what the you it's a little thing it's like this size of a phone and it's nothing oh but so this thing you linked this catalyst thing this is the full body suit you go there in and your exercise or what is this yeah that's that's the full body suit that's basically this but already in a suit form alright i think i may have to try this sam what do you think as as a as an actual fit person what what do you think of this so this you may not be the market actually i love shortcuts so like you know we like if i think we had someone of the deposits be like well why i don't care why people hate on get rich quick schemes getting rich quick is the best way to get rich so like if i can get like more fit without doing anything i'm i'm on board is there actually data that backs us up i think it's pretty lame but if i can did you not hear the story about his friend yeah no it's a good data so i think there is data on catalyst people use it i think the question is whether these thirty five dollar machines work and i only have my one friend as a data point and the the funny thing is like we've all seen it work for him and yet none of us others in the friend group have done it and the reason for that is it's annoying like to put these things on and it's painful and he's willing to like every plane ride he's willing to just do it the whole plane ride and i'm not but when i did this work workout he took we did the workout class in new york two weeks ago and when i went to that workout class i was like this is actually really fun and i know i'm getting a great workout like you feel the next couple days it was like the good kind of hurt after a great workout so i was like i know this is working but how come i haven't heard more about this so i think there's opportunity in building a product and this like berry style workout where like you teach people how to do it do this looks pretty sick the vest like look like a like like armor like body armor like it looks like an navy seal yeah except i don't know what this tank is here that that's a little bit suspicious especially i don't really fully understand what all the pieces are but dude if people are buying six thousand dollar six thousand dollar cold plunge at their home and you know five to ten thousand dollar sauna at their home and red light therapy my brother law's has got got a red light therapy bed in his house and his kids are doing it because it's like good for their sports whatever recovery whatever this is like there's really no end to the kind of wellness you know rabbit hole right and there's always those people who are gonna look for the next edge it's not too dissimilar to a reformer machine and at a pilates class right absolutely it's a tool that gets you more leverage on you know your your hour of exercise although this makes me wanna make fun of it it also makes me you wanna secretly do it these guys i actually was looking up these guys i think they emailed me this catalyst guys asked if i wanted to test this out and i don't know if i replied but if they're listening wanna you to be an influencer was this during the sam fitness influencer era it could've been that was a great era i think i was it's literally dozens of people dance six weeks count as an era though well you know so it's a season it that that was a transition to the dad dad influence pretty quickly and the content shifted once i became a once i had a kid i wanted to quit posting shirtless photos online but just so you know it's still there it doesn't go away it's still there and so catalysts i'll would totally try this thing yep this looks cool i like to make fun of these things but suit me up baby there's an announcement on their site of like hey i know a lot of you have had a very very bad experience but there's a new owner and we're gonna you know do it right this time so you know maybe it's been a little bumpy road yeah i'm i'm in a bunch of like these longevity groups in san francisco and whatsapp and people are people were like trying to buy the company can you it let wait that's actually okay you just gave me a beautiful opening you're an a nsf you're kinda run around like a bunch of like rich people weirdo successful people like this really cool combination of people what are the kids into like like on this long longevity stuff what else is interesting to them what like you know i don't live in san francisco anymore sean lives a little bit outside of stuff now before when we were there it was the best place to see what's can happen in the handful of years because there's always weirdo doing cool stuff like sharing their couch on a on on a website and now airbnb thing or sharing the car what what are some other interesting stuff that the the odd balls are into yeah i think there's so i think we talked about a lot of them peptides nobody's drinking you know i think this brian johnson has done wonders for a lot of folks in just changing how they think about life not necessarily all good like i don't think drinking is absolutely terrible but i i think probably people should drink less than they do one interesting one that i did not like a new business like as as crazy as airbnb b and uber were i think prediction marketplaces are a good one it's obviously not just the san francisco thing but it's a kind of business that like i probably would not have funded when these companies got funded i would say like this is never gonna work it's gonna be highly illegal but the fact that you get the difference between a prediction market and so prediction market does that just mean like guessing who's gonna win president or who's gonna win the mayor yeah so so one of my pushback was initially was it's only gonna be used for elections because you know that's obviously something that everybody is thinking about and and wants to wants to bet on but actually they use it for so many other things too like their their political outcomes all the times people are using it it's basically like a proxy for sports betting you can do all sorts of secondary derivative products on top of equity investing their markets for everything i think there are a lot of questions in my mind about why it's legal and like can you influence the outcome of something that you're betting on like you know is if there's a marketplace on whether how many companies bt tv would invest in the next year i'd you know i'd be betting on that while while participating as well but i think there's no question that there's a huge opportunity in this space did you see the coinbase based earnings call thing yeah that was fucking hilarious what how you do this so so there's a there was a prediction market on poly market for the coin based earnings call i like oh the q three earnings call will will brine armstrong say any of these words or how many times they'll say these words oh my god and and then at the very end of the call volume oh i think it was probably you know it was shield it was single digit thousands it was like a very small thing but his team passed him a note and he goes oh before we hang up here i just would like to say web three crypto blockchain bitcoin ethereum thank you very much and he just basically he's like you know just for all the prediction markets out there you know here we go and he's just hit all the words he just said seven words and then laughed and then basically like they hung up the call and i thought that was so funny but of course it's not that funny when like it's weird all these like sports things going on right now where good in the u like in the u if you're like a nobody u guy you get like twenty five grand for fighting and they're like flagged a bunch of they flagged a bunch of fights where they're like this is very suspicious because there was like you know eighty gram the line for a fight that the guy would only earn twenty five thousand dollars and they're being investigated so yeah there's gonna be a lot of downsides but so like the average tech nerd like when i was in san francisco it was like a joke like it was like the giants play here where are the giants like no one knew about like you know like like it wasn't like particularly popular i know sean was at a basketball but like basketball or any sport wasn't particularly like you know that popular are the young tech guys caring about gambling for sports or is it all other stuff it's a lot of other stuff i think sports is interesting and i think will be one of the key markets in the prediction space but i think there are also some other things like like gambling on or you know predicting equity outcomes are interesting too i i i look through those things all the time i'm just curious and it's it's also uncanny how right they are and how ahead of the curve they are on some of these things can i ask you about one more thing yeah you made a very interesting statement we said what are three strong opinions that you have for life and your number one opinion is i i think books are a waste of time for me i think books are arrested stuff so i haven't this is i haven't read a book in like fifteen years and i think it's very very in opinion but i think like i have so many friends that are authors that i talked to that are just like trying to get the words out but if you like listen to a podcast it's like one podcast by that author is at least eighty percent of the value of the book and so is it worth spending another five hours reading to get the additional twenty percent in my mind know so that's my that's my provocative statement it is the first thing i do when there's a book i'm interested in i go to youtube and i just look for a talk by the author and if they're not interesting in the first fifteen minutes of that youtube video the book is definitely not gonna be interesting the book will probably have more you know it's not gonna be fully sufficient but if you can't do if you can't give a good talk you probably don't have a good book let me give a a different opinion that's related so i read a lot like in terms of quantity and i was reread a book that i read when i was younger i think it was like robert chow these influence you know it's all about persuasion and i was like i've read all these other books on business and whatever i should've have just re reread the same book every six or three months and not read any other book on this topic and i would have been significantly further ahead and so my opinion that i'm telling young people when it comes to reading i'm like pick like the two or three like classics or the grades of it and master it know it word for word and master it and don't read a lot just read the same thing over and over and over again if you wanna read for fun reef for fun but just do the same thing over and over again for your educational books what were the other three you said yeah had three think i i think i had two the other one was just reach out to the owner so this is lately a few things have happened like i'm booking it's my wife's forty birthday and we're we booked a trip for like forty of her friends and i was having some trouble with the the cruise it's it's a a virgin voyages and i was having some trouble so i just reached out to the ceo i just from the ceo's email and i reached out to him and i was like hey you know if i were you i'd wanna know troubles like you're a smart guy you wanna build a great brand i've had experience with you with your brand that was not great let me tell you about it and he responded so favorably he was like thank you so much for telling me here's what i'm doing about it and it just made me realize i should be doing that more often so actually we did that recently with our fertility clinic same thing like had a bad experience i reached out to the the like the guy who founded the clinic and you know obviously you shouldn't do it for everything but in some cases these people want you to have a great experience with their brand and they they don't often know until things get like until you write a bad review they don't know so it's just important to let them know earlier on it doesn't have to be the owner but in my case it was what it and did you get a discount i didn't get a discount but i got like really like white glove service where they're like everything i want they respond immediately and i'm i'm not trying to be a dick about it and like get something that i don't deserve but it it worked out quite well right but it wouldn't say no to you make it right either yes exactly if you wanna give me a discount i'll i'll take it seal you're great man thanks for coming on as always so always super fun have you on super fun to chat with you guys this is great 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 hey let's take a quick break i wanna tell you about a podcast that you could check out it is called the science of scaling by mark robe he was the founding ser of hubspot and he's a guest lecturer at harvard business school the guy smart and he sits down every week with different sales leaders from cool companies like cla y and van and open ai and he's asking about their strategies their tactics and how they're growing their companies as you know head of sales or chief revenue officer if you're looking at to scale the company up if you're a cro or a head of sales just looking to level up in your career i think a podcast like this could be great for you listen to the science of scaling wherever you get your podcast

jb created ring doorbell you sold it like a billion dollars right one point one five the part after his decimal point it's worth more than our entire career so far yeah i wanna brainstorm business ideas with you i wanna see how you think is there a five or ten billion dollar company hiding in the bugs space probably they're it you said i just don't know how to stop and sometimes it's not smart and it cost me yeah you're gonna make me cry sam you're gonna do this i feel like i could rule the world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day off on a goal less travel so sean listen if you're like me you woke up this morning you roll out a bed you checked your business insider dot com and you read this amazing article about jamie and it just says i'm jamie and i'm the ceo of ring and i have the world's worst morning routine and it's a whole article about how he rolls out of bed he scrolls its food for about four hours everything he shouldn't do like immediately like all the wrong shit like everything that was the whole article about oh jb has the world's worst routine good p strategy right like they sit down with you and they're like hey we need to get some cool like tech billionaire weirdo stuff what you got and you're like nope don't have anything so they're gonna use that i'm the average guy from missouri are you from missouri i'm from new jersey but i tell people i'm from missouri now because i have this farm in missouri and i've decided that there's no reason why you can't just be from missouri guess where i'm front jamie can just look at me and gus missouri i'm from missouri my saint louis so i my farm is in lab bell m missouri so i'm in i'm from missouri you're from missouri you're more like a city folk but we are two and a half hours north of s saint louis dude i love how he just out missouri you even though you were actually born and raised there and he just said he was like you're a city slick not a real true missouri we don't like people folks this is like you going to like tony sop and being like actually tony it's just get that so let me tee this up alright so i didn't call with jamie and and it was super fun jb created if you've ever seen a doorbell that has a camera on it this is the inventor this is the man who did it he created ring doorbell grew it sold it to amazon for tons of money and i was like hey i wanna kinda have you on the podcast in brain or business ideas with you i wanna see how you think how do you approach businesses and he's like i believe i don't know the exact quote but it was something like you know ideas are like my drug of choice and he's like i have this list on my phone of like thousands of it is which one do you want yeah exactly and so so i wanna do that sam you saw the doc that he sent over which is gives us kind of bullet point ideas we don't know what he's gonna say but bullet point is where do you wanna start wait can i ask a question before we get in how much you sold it like a billion dollars right one point one five but i mean if you wanna you can round down if you want to i mean okay okay so we're talking to a guy who you know you have a billion dollar company for his decimal point is worth more than our entire career so far i think you just point out i did sell it for a billion when a billion was a lot of money just just backward with was crack win a billion was actually like you could buy more than a cup of coffee with it well to can we actually go to story do you remember kinda where you i guess i've always curious about two things one was there a good negotiation story or like kinda throw out a number story of like how do you arrive at that one point one five billion and then like how did that go come about i mean what was cool with amazon is you know from the the we had been working with them on stuff for years so like i i actually went to amazon and showed this guy nick the ring before we launched ring because we had been talking to them they were with the lack sense that they were looking at so they were trying to reach out to all the small iot people at the time there's a lot of little hardware things bubbling up so i i even like literally like brought them the first one and it showed to him so we had been working together for a long time we were very like aligned on like mission what we're trying to do they started to look at video realizing like with the alexa so they had you know the kind of the call it the ears in the home and they started to see the eyes and and saw what we were doing we had this you know kind of like dating awkward because we we would talk all the time we'd meet and you know nick said let me come down and let's have lunch which was kinda not that abnormal and we're seeing there in next like you know we should kinda go to the next level here and it was this like very funny like dating conversation of like you know it's like where you don't wanna just like jump out and be like okay let's do it you know it's like and and it's like do what you know so so it's like we keep going back for like till you mean and he's like yeah and i'm like to and like we kept going and then he finally said yeah like we it's time we should combine and you know not not a merger of equals by the way but that amazon should buy you what was your revenue then do you know we were with so that was two thousand seventeen so we we got year we did four four hundred and eighty million okay so you guys were just huge was it a profitable business or were you burning money and you had to figure out it was so interesting is like it was the like the the of each like the individual customer economics were insanely good so the the the fund like the the fundamentals of the business like the actual like business was good it was growing so fast that like money was just being lit on fire everywhere and it's not that we like we we had crappy offices like it's just you have to hire so fast to get ahead just about like customer service when you're growing at like five hundred percent a year and if customer service takes three to six months like a person you hire to get up to speed that means you're hiring like two to three x what you need at that exact time yeah just so that you can like not blow up as people are buying and the growth so you're just you're just like putting out all this cash to do this stuff so i mean you start to think about it it's like it sounds cool but then like when you're doing a hundred and seventy million and you're ordering for four hundred and eighty million it means like if anything slows down i mean you are just like you're dead right it's like on one side yeah i'm sitting there with nick and i have this i have a four hundred and eighty million dollar year business that's growing you know triple digits still like literally triple digits at that at that scale which is insane and the other side is like and i'm going out of business every day like every day i'm facing basically like the wall like we're gonna hit the wall and the only way to stop that is you raise little money you get a little financing something else comes in like so it was getting to a point where i just couldn't handle it like i i was you i was sort of the stress was getting to me i mean it was you it years of just like that and then we we kinda got into you know started to get in a negotiation during the negotiation and so i i wrote this book and part of i wrote the book as like this story i mean it's a it's like a bit of a longer story which is why a book is good but during the negotiation i get sued by ad probably for something that was a little bit self induced to be fair they win an injunction and literally i mean and this is like holiday like i you can't make this up nick calls me is you know you i'm gonna send you a term sheet over you know tomorrow morning just fyi great an hour later the injunction hits us i have to call nick back and be like hey just fyi like not a big deal at all doesn't you shouldn't matter like shouldn't matter at all but like just like as an fyi we did get an injunction from ad t on this lawsuit and he's like did we're out wow and and what does that mean so ad t was suing you for for what so we had been building an alarm they had a like a company that they had some part of that they were sort of invested in that was building it they stopped funding it the company went out of basically shut down i hired all the people from there they told me i couldn't hire all the people from there i told them in a very respectful way you know i said like you know please and thank yous that i was like a total asshole and i was like so dumb and i just like yeah i i again i i you poked the bear i poked the bear and it's like looking back it's funny because it's this at same like insanity and passion that like gets a company to go from one seventy to four eighty is also the person that blows it up it's like you know it is like the demolition man of like you know it's the the the same person that can use the demolition to like clear the way for the road is also who can like blow everything up for everyone my favorite elon thing of all time when he goes on saturday live and he goes you know i took all my money and i spent it on trying to get rockets that will take us to mars and electric cars and he's like what did you think i'll just be a normal chill dude and it's like oh actually that explains so much of course we can't have one we can't have mad genius and then also you know a stable respectful peaceful reasonable man over here it can't be the unreasonable in one area and totally reasonable in the other i think that's the problem is like it it's just true like if you wanna do something i mean ring is one in a whatever generation company and like i i say that as someone who like looks at it and i can't believe i'm even part of it like it's i mean it's it's a verb like people just call it a ring like it's it's mean to build something like that is incredible and so yes like you you you probably have some traits that are very strong but those can cut both ways and so you know when the person from ad calls you and you're like think you know like you're like in this sort of vortex of doing stuff you know maybe you don't sort of take the time to say like why don't i just come to you why don't we sit down like we're two humans and work this out and by the way i'm it it'd be funny to like now go back like i'm sure if i had just flown there sat down for dinner with them i really actually feel like they apologize but like like fine whatever we're good like we just wanted to like talk you know can't honestly like we just wanna talk you instead i was like you know like luna you know doing stuff and they sort of said well well don't we teach you some business and so they they did and to be for air like whatever and so that that was very you know turned out to be fairly painful alright so you guys are about to get to the best part of the podcast this is the part where we asked jamie how he comes up with new ideas for businesses how we came up with the idea of ring but also a lot of the other projects he's looking into starting and he's got this amazing name it's called the snowball method meaning he likes to find very small ideas that can eventually become big but like the problem is that these ideas are so small that people don't notice him or they forget about them and so here's what we we went and looked at what he's got talk about on this podcast which you're gonna hear because you're gonna get to it but then he's talk about the snowball method on a bunch of other podcast podcasts and we went and broke it down into a really easy to understand methodology and so if you're interested in solving these four questions this guide is for you so it's how do you spot billion dollar ideas hiding inside boring problems number two what early stage moves act actually validated ring before it took off number three how you keep momentum when your business feels stuck while you're on the brink and number four what critical decisions make or break a finder path from two hundred dollars to a billion dollars and so if this type of thing interests you which i think it does because you're listening to my million you can get the link in the description below so you call the guy you're like hey feel silly even bringing this up but there's a little loss that you should probably know about and then they he's like we're out out and you're thinking well look you drafted the term i think we just go ahead and send it over and he's like no no we're out how did it go back on so why don't we just keep the negotiation going and like you if i settle this thing out then like we're good he's like we're not like amazon's is like knock we're done like it's it's like basically like pencils down until you whatever on the flip side which was great as i had a safety net so like don't worry i'm totally fine like i'm going into this amazon deal with a safety net which is if we don't do the amazon deal i'm gonna raise two hundred million dollars so i also had to call them and say just fyi like i know this deal like we're about to close it for this money and and just fyi like we had this little injunction on that little thing that i kind of said that was not gonna be a big deal and they're like yeah we're out too it's like the two doors i was looking at is like selling to amazon or raising two hundred million dollars it was the first time i was gonna take secondary money off so i was gonna actually take some money off the table and meaningful money like it would have been like real for me and so those are like the two things i was like sort of looking at going into the holidays basically and all of a sudden both those doors evaporated and now we're negative like seventy million dollars in the bank because we didn't plan the cash flow because it was like one of these doors is gonna happen you're not gonna raise more money like i mean you you're not gonna raise like a third set of money like you know so so all of a sudden we like go to like basically we are like technically like a bankrupt company almost immediately okay go on i'm hooked so what happens and for more importantly what's the conversation you have with yourself in that moment because i think you know there's what you did but there's also what you said to yourself before you figured out what what's the like my so again to traits that are good like the one thing i do have which is probably you know has kept us from completely blowing the the place up when things really happen like could things are really really bad i go into like a pilot checklist like i am just like dead pam calm we gotta do we had do so i'm like we have to we're going in the holidays we have to sell everything we have to like break every record we have to like it's like the only way to survive is just like we gotta like do this and we also have to stop paying our bills to anyone that can't like you know actually like tow us away right and so we did that too which was pretty that was and that's it's that's not fun because like you're calling people that have worked you know vendors and you're like hey listen like i i know but if you if you like stop shipping this we're dead if we're dead everything you've already sent is dead like you know it's just it's a bit of like it it it it's not a conversation you wanna have everyone's a problem at that point yeah it it's horrible like it's just a it's just like a bad it's a bad situation and then did the lawsuit go away so we like we're going through whatever we it it's crazy as we go through you know black back black friday so cyber monday like that whole sort of week we literally blow out like every like everything's like ring is just the it's the product of the holidays like it's a number seller it best buy like it's just literally like on fire so by the way on that if this wasn't happening how much less do you think in sales you would have had you know like percent wise how much do you think you've got extra just with the forcing function of necessity at least there's definitely like probably like low double like ten percent fifteen percent at least at least and was it just your intensity because it's like we have to or did you come up with a new idea would you do every we did everything like every social post every this like mean we just had people like we did yeah you just like you put it all in the field like you just like send in your best to everybody so we just went crazy but if for sure i think for sure that was a part of it but we like we needed it to like we needed to like literally break every number blow everything out and still with that like it wasn't clear that we would live it just felt like it was gonna be more likely you'd live if you were blowing it out than not and so we doing that and then all of a sudden ad calls and says hey would you like to talk in a settlement it's like it's like mad i imagine if he had like you know if someone's like literally like no oxygen you know they're like hey like little oxygen you're like i'd love some oxygen and so we went and they were actually like pretty like fair and once we settled like that like everything else was amazing it was this weird thing where like everything underneath was like the best ever and we had this just one cloud that that that moved everyone away and as soon as that dissipate and went away like it was you know i mean so basically it was like december ninth or something you know that we settle which on fast that's that's really fast right and was you go to this like it's this thing you gotta to like this this office where there's like two conference rooms in this this judge and like a a retired judge who walks back and forth between these like two conference like you're in one there and the other and you they just keep going back and forth all day and then it's the craziest thing like finally like okay and you're like okay and then you sign it and you're like are this is done and they're like it's done i'm like done done like i kept like i was like like like you know like a laurel and hardy like done done done done and then do you know i called i literally i called amazon and just said just fyi settled and they said okay like it was like you know like that's all like we love the business we just didn't you we didn't wanna get involved in that and so once it was settled they know that was like december ninth or whatever december thirty first we signed for one point one five billion to sell it wait till the deal closed thirty days later after so we signed the lo like the binding like literally like less than thirty days so did did you shop it around as well i i i didn't for a number of reasons that the biggest one was i did not know of another buyer that would back our mission so we were very missionary around making neighborhoods safer what were your interactions like with with jeff bezos so jeff loves entrepreneurs so much that they've learned not to have him you know involved in the in the purchasing because i think jeff would just be like i love you man like he's like jeff so great and so so i didn't actually i mean i met him like once before but i didn't really kinda know him and so really it was post deal that i got to you know really start to spend some time with him and he is just one of the greatest people ever for lots of reasons i i'd say the number one is he's just like a good human do you have any good base stories of like you know it's because rare that you you know get to actually interact with or in your case work with because there's always levels to the game right i meet people i think i'm great that i need somebody i'm like wow that person's got a different level of intensity or they're a different level of sharpness or they ask a different style of question and so you but you don't know until you meet it you don't even know what level twelve looks i can until you see level twelve yeah and so i'm just curious like did you have any moments like that with with with bezos definitely many many moments i say the biggest thing i took away from jeff is he's the most positive person i've ever met in like the weirdest way because he gets shit done so it's not like he's like just like hey good job guys you know it's like but he's able to just like be so patient on things and i and just like he he like sees the future and he's just very patient and and and very positive and so i've i've tried to is it's definitely different than my personality you know i'm i'm sort of more like you know punch a wall kinda like run around yell a little bit more like this it's just like kinda like more like that like it maybe like inventor passion but he has taught me to sort of try to like just be a little bit calmer and let things sort of work themselves out versus like forcing everything i think maybe that's the the the biggest learning and well and why have you state this i mean how the deal was what ten years ago five years ago two thousand eighteen so seven seven years ago why why are you still there i mean obviously i mean money it's probably a big part of it but is there mission he's gonna say mission i could bet anything he's gonna say the mission money yeah no you know i actually so in two thousand twenty three i ended up stepping down i was just you know i'd i'd taken the company almost ten it from when we got to amazon brought profitable like i felt like i delivered like the package i'm like here it is it's pretty amazing so you grew it to four billion in revenue if that around there you oh my gosh yeah that's wild so it it you know the thing just kept growing just kept like it's just insane and so i i finally was just like i am i'm feeling like super burnt out on just the like a whole thing i stepped back and i and i did realize i missed just i just missed like rank like i missed the the mission i missed what we're building i love like yeah i'm an inventor at heart and being able to be at amazon you can invent at scale so you yeah an inventor the best thing for an inventor is like see your invention out there but it's pretty amazing that like most inventor i mean i mean there's many inventors adventures that are successful dyson there's you know edison was a good businessman but you know maybe maybe musk would be an inventor i'm not sure who else but but typically the stereotype type of of an adventure someone who's got like to different matching socks and like they don't like not how to do anything other than like invent and they're a little bit messy and whatever but it sounds like you actually knew how to operate i i would say i've used invention around operation but i don't operate i certainly don't operate in a normal so like i've never had a staff meeting like everyone's always like you know what did you do your your staff meeting i'm like i've none because i've never had one and we never had an all hands meeting at the company and like so we you do things when you need to so there's a lot of things like i don't have those like processes of how to like run a business did you are exactly like you know who he's like sean one hundred percent who allan elon the card game yeah elon oh my he had the exact same mentality where he was like yeah we don't do this at the company where whereas sean and i were like wait but i thought everyone had to do all hands he's like well i thought about the reason why and we just invented a different way to do it yeah i think if you can turn like again like it's still inventing like it's like just like just because it's not a like a physical product or just because internal it doesn't mean it's not an invention so i do love that like you can use invention across the board and especially like how you build the business i i would say like i mean this is where dyson i think i don't i don't know him but he's like he's like my mentor i just this is like the mentor i don't know but like look at what dyson has been able to do by having built a great business like if he hadn't built a great business he'd just be a guy in a a barn somewhere and like oxford shire or some shit and instead you know he's like able to like build all this crazy good stuff and have this company so i think i did feel like the business was something you needed in order to be able to like get your inventions out there bigger and that's that's kind of what ring has been and then being at amazon that like that's just like you know a thousand x that was there a moment in those early days for ring where it went from not working like it's not a thing to it's a thing like an inflection point where you know it or did it take off right away as soon as you had the product people started buying it it's certainly you know looking back it probably took off more than i thought because like being inside of it you're sort of dealing with the problems so you don't really see it as easily like again when i wrote the book i kinda like was able to like go back and like think about all of what was happening and look at it in a different light and so it was two thousand and sixteen my wife was out trick or treating i was away on something and that was like the year she called and she's like this this is you're it's like an every house is a arranged she's like this is insane and i think you really felt it because like they're literally trick or treating and like they're like hitting like the ring like every house so i i think there was like some moments like that because that's gonna be like one of the most proud moms ever where you're like my wife is seeing yeah so i mean like we we would literally drive around i mean early like and yell like when we saw a ring on a house like it was like that was like a and then we kinda had to stop the ring game because it like like it was like you just kept yelling ring the whole time but but early on yeah i mean it's like as an adventure like that's that was you know i i i never felt like it was successful until we got the wire just because i felt like it could blow up but i did feel like i had created something meaningful and had that like satisfaction of that just by seeing like seeing these on everyone's front door and the stories that then they created like the you know stopping a crime doing whatever like those those were the things that were like that was amazing i'm curious the wire hits we've asked a bunch of people about this on the podcast because it's a you know it's a moment you look forward to as a founder like like crazy but you know it's hard to actually get there and we've had some guys say yeah with the wire you he's like i went to the atm in the next five days a print balance you know never pushed that button but so excited or you know some people feel lost know right after is i guess like wire hits what where were you and what was going through your mind i booked to i don't know if you're this company task us but the the that's a great public company now the founders or friends that were you know kind of kids from santa monica that i had known that started and they asked me to speak at their customer conference like six months earlier and it was new york just like on whatever some random day in april of two thousand eighteen because of how everything happens like you sell like you finally announced it and the government has to inspect it then even after that there's like they have like file stuff and whatever so like the actual wire date is not like any of those dates it's kind of a random time when it just comes and so it ended up being like i'm at this event and i'm speaking in new york and i'm sitting there and i'm like i'm sorry everyone like i'm i'm my like my phone's out i'm like i'm like i can barely even i'm like just like i'm i'm like i'm just gonna keep refreshing this because the wire supposed to come in and everyone know like they knew i'd sold so i'm like the wire i like come in yet but it's supposed to come in right now and i just like i'm sorry i keep you know wells fargo you know i was like and you're like on stage you're like look i know i was talking about customer service yeah are they able to get i'm gonna give a talk on how to get rich yeah i'm like you know money doesn't matter to me all about mission but like but like you hold on over the next hour yeah it's like like it's all and and and literally like you know it comes in and there's like just commas and commas and commas and it's like like how many commas could this be like it like it's like like to run on sentence yeah like yeah exactly commas and commas and i just i yeah i it it was the best be i'd be especially i it just gone through the most traumatic thing ever and from a money side like i if if ring had it exploded at that point which you i mean it it got right on the edge of it would have been like really impactful to my family like an i were like just not broke but like were you just like you know seven like a hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty thousand dollar year sal person like that yeah it was like a hundred and fifty i think at that point and i pride myself this was if looking back a real mistake i pride myself on being like the least paid executive yeah man that makes you desperate i did the same thing on a much smaller scale but it made me desperate that and that's exactly right so to here's the other problem when you're making that kind of money and you're at a company to forty eight million people are like hey come to this charity event oh it's only ten thousand dollars a table do this and you kinda have to like you're it's like you have to sort of take part in some of this stuff but you don't actually have the money so you're you're you're spending even more than you would making that salary regardless so yeah i i was like i mean i was basically zero dollars and i mean you i wasn't like i wasn't like in debt debt but i wasn't i didn't have like a nest egg and so if ray sudden went away like that was all my like future money was ring i love how honest you are most people the more successful they get and the more sort of you know these moments like they try to either downplay player they're just less less honest and i think i and by the way i think this is why what i call like that dude's tap i was like it's not like you're like you know some yogi or you know a monk who's just like know i peace so that's not that but i was like i you've you seem free and i think that that's something that we all hope success gives us but it's actually not the success that gives you that you have to decide how you're gonna be i think also like yeah when you're facing like when you see what the other side is that clearly i i do remember like it's like i remember how lucky i am sort of every day like i wouldn't call it like this i mean it is successful like money but like money i think i've have so many friends that have a lot of money that are not free which is a shame because like that's really what this gives you is the freedom to do what you want like i get to wake up and work on things that i wanna work on and impact things that i wanna impact and be with my son and take them among college tours this past weekend and like i get to do things because of that and that yes like i am like that oh overall i say that is very happy i wanna take the mindset that you used to build ring your approach as a as a founder and kinda break that down and then see what other ideas might fit that so one of them that you told me you said rule number one yeah know i like to start with the problem not the solution or the technology and so you know what did that mean for ring and then what's another example of an idea where you could where you could take that kind of problem first approach yeah i mean so ring was i was in my garage i couldn't hear the doorbell so like like what do what what do you need to do is you need to hear the doorbell now when when you find that problem it turns out a lot of times new technology can help impact it like oh there's smartphones coming out okay well those have screens like there's wi f now in homes there's like this so it is that technology can assist the problem i think the prop the the issue is most a lot of founders will say i found this new chip that's out there what can we do with this and so they don't find a real problem they they're just like you know it is a technology looking for a problem i like to start start with like actually something that is a true problem and then it doesn't matter what the tech is i mean that's part of what built ring into the where it is today is and again you you're gonna laugh a mission but by being a mission to make neighborhood safer we don't follow any technology we're not a camera company we're not a alarm company we're not a social network company like we are just a making neighborhood safer company means like regardless what comes out or what what we can think of it doesn't matter what is if it's a steam engine in the middle of the neighborhood and that's gonna make things sure i don't care and so you take that now with if i'm you and i'm like oh i was in the garage i couldn't hear the doorbell i think there's a part of me the inner critic that would have been like is too small like you know that doesn't sound like a big fancy idea i'm trying to do big fancy i'm trying to be a big success not a small success and you know you it is it that you did napkin math i'm like how many doorbell sell is it that you just don't care about market size and how do you think about there's a a a guy who's like somewhat successful and said to me is it was insulting thing like almost anyone could ever say and right when i'm doing this he said to i kinda put his arm on my shoulder and he was much much more successful than me at the time i am now much more successful than he has ever been and he put his arm shoulders say like i love you man because you just like to work on these like little things and it's like so cute and fun to see and i was like oh my like that was the most like it it was like when you're finding these things it's if they were obvious that they were huge problems someone won't be doing it so it's like you have to find these problems that are sort of not obviously huge but sort of have that have again i look at it as like what is that what could it be and so like with the doorbell it was a small thing because even people like two hundred dollar doorbell like there's doorbell are ten dollars and it's like that was the problem but if you really looked at it and zoomed like everyone has a doorbell in their house across the world like globally like literally doorbell on every home so was nest popular at this point so nest was popular as a thermostat and they had it sold they were just selling or sold to google and drop cam was actually the wifi camera that was out there that was doing well and that nest ended up you know that tony ended up buying at google to bring in to nest so maybe there was some inspiration where it's like okay not the same thing but like a house item for sure oh for sure like i i was actually like super in fact i actually have a email to matt rogers who is the cofounder of nest like when the nest came out was like one of the first customers and just in like it super inspires us this like what you're doing here so yeah no was there was stuff happening yeah i think it's it is hard though to see like at the time how big a market is again if it was obvious like everyone is just be like oh the doorbell it's just do a doorbell like look at this guy's doing a doorbell let's just it's gonna be huge and no one thought it was gonna be huge did you have like a dream where your laying in bed talking to your wife feel like you i think i think we can make a hundred million dollars one year one day i i didn't i kinda like built it my wife was the one who said like so this is and this is where she's like it makes me feel safer at home and that was like oh this is like again like this is more than just like scratching my itch in the garage just could and and that was what i realized that the security market like the overall security market had not yet started looking at how you could build and invent products around presence and sort of like true crime prevention like it was the alarm was built in the eighteen hundreds and kind of was pretty much like buried the same thing which is like trigger off of a trip and call you know of central station like it was like that was kinda like best in class though and we were like we could look at this problem differently which which is again that's that was the superpower was the not just the doorbell but then we did the flood leg camera then we did like we did all these things that were sort of unique because we were look even the neighbor's app which is a you know it's a huge social network for crime and safety and neighborhoods like all that stuff came out of looking at the problem and trying to solve it so what's an example of an idea today you see a problem out there you're like somebody could go try to solve that bugs like i just hate bugs like i've never found anyone that likes bugs and it's amazing that there's like no one has actually created all the technology like we can we launch rockets up in the air and land them on like a little barge we can like do all this stuff but we can't get rid of freaking flies at my house in missouri and so i just i just feel like there's gotta be simple ways to do this between like solar and you know there's just gotta be like ways to look at this problem differently than just either hitting it with some toxin that's gonna kill us all as well or these other products that just don't work is that your current obsession so i i i have realized over time you have to work on like one thing like you can't work on ten different products when i meet a founder that's like or you know in entrepreneurs i'm doing this and this and they're all different i i'd say you know ninety nine out of a hundred times like they're gonna fail because they're just splitting their energy alright well for the sake of entertainment but also just teaching our listeners and it's fun can we walk through this let's say that you're not at ring and let's say that this is like actually the idea which this idea potentially i don't know how it's i mean now it's obvious that rings is awesome but maybe in two thousand fourteen when you're offended and they're like what well that sounds so stupid and so maybe like a lot of people are gonna think bugs flies that's it that's all you got like let's walk us through like this idea like why this is a big problem and like how you would attack or how you would go about solving this yeah so i i would just like literally i would stick myself on the farm i would get the sold iron out and i would just start like figuring out i'd just be like and also i i'd i immersed myself in the problem like why are bugs going on the horses like why are they like what are they like what are they actually attracted to on this like are they doing and i i would get on chat and i would be like trying to figure that out and i'd be like looking at everything and and i just figure out like what like and again simplify like like how do i go from a first principles approach like what is the way to just get rid of these damn things at scale what would that be how could you do it inexpensive my feeling is it has something to a solar and either like some like kinda screw mechanism or suction just sort of like you because you gotta it's like a big problem right like it's like a it's like a mass volume problem and so it's like these like i keep they give these like little stations that you just put all over your property and are just continually sort of like collecting and and how to do that so that's that but i would and just literally i'd just be like building this stuff like i would start i wouldn't i wouldn't do research i wouldn't ask friends if it's gonna be a big business i wouldn't spend time on any of that stuff i would be out there like with solar panels and dyson vacuum cleaners hooked up to lights and you know tubes and like i just be like doing this stuff sam have you seen j friend julian obsession with bugs no so we have this friend named julian who's like out of this world and like he's he's only eaten steak for like two years and now he's moved to hawaii and he has a ranch he's doing crazy stuff so he he moves to hawaii he buys a ranch and he starts building like you know home and he's he's got this bug problem just like you and because you know the big project he was doing was the ranch the big problem with the big project was the mosquitoes and so he's like he specifically focused on mosquitoes and so he told me he didn't emailed me for like over a couple month period that like just different things he was trying to do to but what you're were saying like understand what the hell going on with the mosquito where's is the root problems kind first pencils and he's like oh the problem is we try to kill the mosquito no you need to kill the eggs if you don't kill the eggs you for every one mosquito you're killing there's like whatever a hundred mosquitoes that are coming out and then he tried bought all the fancy contraption and then he realized like oh they lay their eggs in the water and so what you need to do and so i guess i don't know all the signs behind this but he basically has this i i got on the screen it's like this just a bucket with water and then you spray this or you put this thing in the in the water that's gonna like kill the eggs when they try to lay them there and so it like stops the cycle yeah and he's like i did it i solved the problem with the mosquito the mosquito problem which is that they wanna lay their eggs on stale water so you put the dirt in there as you make old stale water as a trap for them and then you put this thing in it that's gonna it's a harmless to human bacteria but it's gonna kill the eggs and he's and he was like so pumped likely this thing this thing has eleven thousand bookmarks on a single tweet which is like you know that's pretty that's pretty unusual but it kinda shows a lot of people are like you know have the same itch the same problem and don't really have a good solution yeah so it's and it's like you know is is there a five or ten billion dollar company hiding in the bug space pro probably they're it like probably like i mean it's it's global like every like they're everywhere it's it's also like i mean it's it's an issue on health you mosquitoes cause health issues flies cause health issues so it's like it actually like there's like real impact so if you could figure something out like it actually it it it you know it is probably you know a five or ten billion dollar thing it also seems like there might be like a branding thing that you did well with ring that like could be applicable in the bug space like i don't know what all the big bug companies are but i know raid it's like they all literally like they look and sound like killing yeah with like toxin basically and like the you know it it's all branded and it look a monster energy looking can and you know the way that these new like celsius and and prime like a lot of the new drinks came out and they're literally like just energy drinks but with a like a a different vibe i think that's that's a good point like there's like it is the same thing where there's like there is a probably a new brand in this that stands for and it's like it's not environmentally safe because like i'm like some eco warriors it's because like you don't wanna spray shit all over your house like you live in that like it's like that's not good like we do these like bug bombs and stuff like there's no way those are good for you like it it can't be i thought the monster energy drink of mosquito spray it was a pretty good that was pretty good yeah right isn't that what the can kinda looks like it says it's like like i wish someone go do it i i wish shouldn't like it'd be amazing and measured in five years someone comes back to because i was listening to this thing i had the same thing i needed like a little push i got inspired and i built a five billion dollar business out of it like that would be the like and that would be the coolest thing ever ray like we're at war we're gonna go to battle i'd like think about these this weapon is if you don't aim it the right direction there there might be there you know there might be a self inflicted wound here yeah ebay you know it's bad when you're using something when you're when you're when you say the name i can taste that like it's not like i can smell it like i can taste what that is like because it's like that spray goes through your it like bla through your skin my wife hates that stuff because we have a dog and we have a baby it's like she's just like look we can't just spray this stuff all over like yeah i don't know it's too risky right so i mean what were you like using it as hairspray like why spray it all over the place you know what it is when like there's a bug that it's like that one episode of breaking bad where there's a fly in the in the and it's like meth lab yeah has me with a bug the other day and and like my house and i was like okay fine mission i'm like suited up at a hospital just go into war but you know you get carried away one of the things you had said i really like was you called yourself a snowball yeah so there's a snowball would be like if you about the fly thing it would be i i hate these flies okay like that's the snowball starts going down the hill and then i'm just like taking stuff and sold it together doing it like it's now it's gathering sort of its and then it like hits something and like you lose a little bit off the snowball but it keeps going and just kinda roll down the hill by the way some snowball and they're rolling down the hill they hits like a they hit the tree and they just explode so like that could be the fly thing is you get to this point we just can't figure it out that totally happens if you can see the finish line when you start it's usually not a big good thing like it's it's like that's usually you're you're not like you're not inventing or you're not changing the world typically if it's like that clear how to get from start to finish and so yeah it's like i just kinda feel like i just kinda roll down the hill and gather and and you hope you don't hit a tree and as you get to the bottom of the hill you i hope you're like a bigger snowball that's you know i guess know hopefully good for the world like i guess snowball if if snowball are good for the world that you are helpful when when we got bought we got up by twitch and emmett the founder he's this you know great entrepreneur and i was like you know my value of being that i was there to earn out my deal and you know be helpful but i really wanted to learn from edit i was like this is the one guy i wanna learn from while so i asked him i said hey in the early days of twitch did you ever like send investor updates or anything i'm a little bit nosy i was like can i would you share any of that with me like i would love to see that dude just as an entrepreneur like what was it like ten years ago and he's like sure so he sent me this update and one of the things he wrote in there he goes it is one of his updates because it was hard at the time you know they were doing a pretty unproven thing video game streaming you know it wasn't clearly gonna be a big market but he felt a sense of momentum and he's it one of the investor updates the title was we were a steam roller going through a field full of flowers and he was like just saying and then they had got like a hundred and fifty dos streamers that week and he was like yes and so he was just taking a lot of pride in the small stage because if you just keep looking at the small stage and poo poo it you never build up the momentum yeah and the second thing he said was like same thing he goes you know i really wanna try to get into this like kind of adjacent space i was like why do you wanna do it seems like there's so much more room to run still with game and he goes yeah but he goes you never wanna see the the finish line he's like if he's because i know he's like i don't wanna be able to see the like the horizon yeah at the end he's like even if that's still five years away i need to do something that's gonna push the horizon out further so that we have more room to run and i'd really never thought of it like that but i guess you as you play at scale that's obviously like an important yeah but it's actually i i think i always have goal a lot of goals are actually ceilings like you think of a goal and you want it to be something like you you kind of hitting a goal perfectly is probably means the goal isn't set right like you you wanna have these directional goals like things that you could try to achieve that are sort of tangible but sort of in some ways una unbelievable that you're always like to your point like you're just trying harder to get like it's it's the carrot on the stick in front of you where like you can kinda never get the carrot but you keep going for it you have a life philosophy and a life outlook that's very different for mine but frankly i'm en of how you think about things both like where you like i start with the problem and i'm an inventor which sean's basic but the way that you do it is quite nice you have a really good attitude and then you just made this line about like goals and ceilings what people or what books do you think have influenced to you and if sean and i or one of our listeners wanted to like kinda develop this jamie mindset besides your book by way show be shout out your book yeah yeah yeah i mean i of course read ding dong by jamie si off i i think that's the the how to guide of of business no title by the way thank you think in all seriousness no i would i think the book that stands out the most for me is the walt disney biography if you wanna read this like get ready like you better clear your calendar because this thing is like i think the audiobooks like twenty four hours i mean it's whoever did that audiobook died afterwards like it was like that was like like of all the people that i've talked to and all the biographies that i've listened to the walt disney biography might be the most cited version i've ever heard and like walt i've never read it but there's all these stories where like on the small things like apparently someone was building like a train in walt's backyard for his kids or grandkids his i don't know something like that and he wasn't there like a contractor that says like well we can't make the train curve and he's like what has the curve because when someone's on the train i don't want them to know what's coming up next that is the embodiment of it and it's also he was so man mechanical about every detail of every experience and i was what was gonna say is when you read this book you realized that he was tortured he could never achieve what he wanted to which was like absolute perfection of this and so when a movie would come out like my my the the thing that i took out the most from his book was every movie that would come out because you know he was pushing animation ahead like like the the technology and animation so like snow waiting in the seven doors come out he's sitting in the theater in the back everyone's watching it like literally mind blowing like seeing what's up there but because he's already working on the next movie and the next iteration of animation he knows that this is shit like he knows that like that movie is not as good as the next one's gonna be and he's like literally like crying in the back of this theater that he's showing such a bad product to people because it could be so much better and all he wants to show him is the next one and i thought that's like the struggle of a true inventor an entrepreneur and like product person is like you just like everything i put out on mad because i know i can be better and it's like that just that constant thing and that's like that's how you drive to be the best and there's definitely you know like i i think you look at some of the greatest inventors and entrepreneurs out there you see that constant just like that that that that drive like that engine that just they can't stop yeah you seem a lot happier than him which is a good attribute to also have it's not it's not terrible today's episode has brought you by health hubspot because using only twenty percent of your business data is like dating somebody who only text you in emojis first of all that's annoying and second you're missing a lot of the content but that's how most businesses are operators today they're only using twenty percent of their data unless you use hubspot that's when all your emails your call logs your chat messages just to turn into insights to help you grow your business because all that data makes all the difference learn more at hub dot com another one of your your philosophies as an entrepreneur that i really liked just you talked about this idea of tom brady i've used this i idea did we did this call before this pod like a week ago or so i've already used it twice in my thinking in between so that's when you know an idea stick so could you explain the tom brady hiring thing yes i mean every team like when you get to the whatever and i'm not that into sports but you know they trade like the first trade pick for this and like they're always trying to get like the first pick of the the the the of life that what is it called the draft draft is how much i'm into sports so but like every team they they had a the chance to get tom brady multiple times like it's actually insane it's like you didn't just have like one shot at him he was the hundred and ninety ninth draft pick like everybody had the chance to get tom brady and so while everyone's focused like whatever the the the number one draft pick of that year i don't know the number top ten i probably are unknown to us today but tom brady is one of the greatest athletes of all time and so to me as a as a business you have to find the tom brady they're actually out there for you like everybody has access to tom brady or the tom brady of your business of that area it's like how do you find them how do you incentivize them how do you let them become the tom brady that is just the amazing thing whereas i meet with founders who like oh i'm trying to get the person from the company the the this and it's like that's the number one draft and you're gonna just pipe pay too much and honestly they're probably not gonna be known in ten years great sounds good how my so i there's lots of people have lots of different methods for finding great people my thing is hire fast fire faster the mission really helps so you sort of bring someone in like the interview is basically like i mean obviously like you have the skills to do the like the basic job so like it's like there's like a sort of a a light bar but oh above that it's just are you passionate do you want to work on this problem with us like do and do you really wanna work on this problem with us do wanna wake up in the morning excited about this problem if you're passionate you wanna work on the problem and you have the minimum skill set to do it will let you we'll let you try like it's just like let let like i don't know go out there and throw the ball say how you do and you give them massive autonomy in their area like give them the ability to succeed or fail i think another thing that a lot of companies do is they so like wrap you in soft like in they don't want you to fail so they stop you from succeeding it's like such a weird thing like they like they they're so worried that maybe you're gonna you know if you you're not able to do that level of the job so we gotta be careful like we don't want you to beat be over your head versus like let tom brady beat tom brady let him throw the ball and and and when you let those people do it it's like it's incredible and yes in the process of that you're gonna have people that are just gonna like not be able to you know succeed at those jobs and you you know you move on with them and you do it and that by you can be compassionate in that it's not you don't have to be how fast do you fire like when people say higher fast fire fast that's that's a little bit vague so like let's say you meet someone how fast would you offer i was at that time like i mean yeah we're probably not in that sort of like with amazon now and stuff it's like obviously engineers as you get bigger like things are a bit different back in the start biz i'd say like three to six months because you certainly don't wanna like it's not like the first day someone comes in you say like okay you're bad like or or you're good i mean it takes someone a little bit of time to get their like their feet wet get sort of get their footing but you wanna be pretty quick it's it's i would say it's very rare if you talk to almost anyone that you know an entrepreneur or leader that they say like i wish pretty much any that you say like when they fired someone it's like i wish i done it sooner so three to six months what about hiring hiring is like on the spot i'm a i'm a i'm a on the like i mean again amazon is a little bit different now so i wanted just be like honest of like yes like we have a bigger company we have like some more like it and you have to do that it's like that's part of the that's par for the course but but yeah we were like like mimi who is my chief revenue officer today she cole emailed me and said i worked at dyson i now worked at sonos you know i see what you guys are doing i'm in the neighborhood i'd love to stop by so great stop by so she sits down with don and i don runs our sales she starts talking look at don looks at me i said we she's just hired higher right yeah i said okay you're hired and she's like she's kinda like like are you too joker serious like this is like i'm just coming to talk you and i'm like best done like i i likes to you don't wanna work here and she's like no no i wanna work here i'm like then then just come into work here it's she's like what am doing i'm like i don't know you just said you seem to like know all these problems we have so like go fix them like i like you just told me that we're doing all this stuff wrong like why don't you just take whatever that is like make that job title and go do it and she's our chief revenue officer today so have you ever heard warren buffett described his his thing with us with people and the too hard pile no i actually have it so this guy came on the podcast mon per bra and he in the episode he described he he bought a charity lunch from buffett for six hundred and fifty thousand dollars he had learned so much from buffett he had been so super successful doing buffett method basically he's like this is my my tuition is overdue so he's like i'll i'll do i'll buy the charity lunch and and we'll go and i have no expectations so i said what did you ask him and he asked warren buffett buffet he goes warren you seem to be a really good judge of people like he hired some pretty great people inside of berkshire and you've avoided a lot of the kinda like doing the wrong acquisition so you seem to be a good judge of people what's what's the secret and warren buffett goes no i don't think i'm that good at people he goes i think what i do is i'm a very harsh grader so he said he goes basically the cost of me saying no to a good person to somebody who actually turned out to be good it's not that consequential if say if they turned out to be good and i happen to say no because i couldn't tell but if i say yes to too many people who happened to be really bad that becomes very costly and very hard for me to unwind so he goes if i was at a dinner party and there was a hundred guests and you let me spend five minutes with each person he goes i could without a doubt i could tell you these five no doubt are fantastic these five definitely stay away they're sort of toxic or there's something you know that i don't trust about them and then there's ninety people who i don't know i can't tell in five minutes then they all go in what i call the two hard pile it's just too hard to tell and he goes a lot of life just works by putting everything else in the two hard pile and just focusing on the five things that you were pretty clear and pretty sure about yeah in a very small amount small amount of time and everybody waste their time trying to get clarity on that ninety percent that's very hard to figure out it takes a lot of time in energy and you're gonna get it wrong a lot yeah i say i say and so kind of my method has been on the hiring is the two hard pile is i'm aware that i'm not that good at figuring out who's in that pile always and so if it if i'm wrong i'm just gonna be very quick to sort of pull the trigger and by the way like can also be wrong pulling the trigger like if you're pulling the trigger after three to six months like you could be wrong i'll also say like there's lots of people who didn't fit our culture who went on to do incredible things and are incredibly successful so it's not that like failing it ring was failing in life it was you just didn't fit what we were doing and we are a unique lock and you want a unique key to work in that lock and that's where i would say the empathy side like i didn't fire them being like you're terror get out of here like it was like it just doesn't like we're not working out together and i would feel bad for every single one of them that i think have to go back to their family or whatever like that what so that did weigh on me but i also wanted the business to have this clarity and to move fast into you and from the above they're like i will say the wrong people are really real could be like that's bad can i ask you about one thing here you said i just don't know how to stop and sometimes it's not smart and it cost me yeah it's like this this is like the this is like the jerry maguire like you're gonna make me cry you're gonna you do this yeah i mean i think i if i if i look at like part of you know and it's it's even like we talked about that at thing it's like i just keep going like i just don't stop and you know overall that's probably like you know i think so i keep telling you young people keep asking me like what should i do you know ai coming out like i don't know where i should go to college or what should i do and it's like just put yourself in a position where you can just grind like just go grind because you you just gotta get out like it's it's no one knows where the world's gonna go no one knows what's happening you can't control the world everyone like acts as if they can luck has to be your c copilot and so just go out there and just just keep grinding it and a lot of those times when you're grinding it's hard because when you can't actually see where it's getting you to you talk to entrepreneurs that have already made it so it's like people say that the average business takes seven years to be successful we'll say me so like it's kinda like you knew when you started that you had seven years it's like no you don't ever know that it's gonna be successful like it's the average it's just so i i do think the grinding thing is it's under estimated how hard that is to keep grinding because it's you don't see where it's going and you need sometimes to have these weird other factors happen that are out of outside of your control to make your success happen just like instagram coming out while we're building a camera at your front door you know that's super powered our message i i didn't build instagram i didn't like push it out there i didn't help it i didn't know it it's was coming and but i kept grinding on my side and got lucky on some of these other things 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 giving 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 in business and in life and for people like you who 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 one of the things i like that you told me was you look for products where ninety percent of the marketing is already done and i called it last mile marketing and you're were describing how this worked in your favorite ring and how sometimes an entrepreneur can go wrong if you if you really need to like educate the the market about something completely from scratch yeah so it's it's and so i i would call it pre awareness so if you can if you can try to like give a little bit of invention a little bit of differentiation to something that has pre awareness you it's incredible because if you look at there's a cost just look at like the cost like a new to world product you have the cost to tell someone about it is incredibly expensive like if i have to tell you about some product and everything i have to tell you about it is is new to world it's very hard for you to understand it and they like go to the film business like when it's a completely new film it costs more to market it than top gun too because top gun too like you know everything like you know top gun you know you know tom cruise like there's so much pre awareness in that the doorbell putting a camera on a doorbell and again i sort of got lucky to learn this thing is everyone knew where the doorbell was mounted they knew what the doorbell did they knew like the functionality of it i just added like a piece to that i did the same of the flood light camera you knew what a flood light looked like you know where it goes like you know what it does for you and now you add a camera it and so where wherever you can use this pre awareness i like liquid death like it's water like you didn't have to tell someone like what this drink was or like it's like but they changed like a piece of it so i just think like changing a piece of it getting your edge on it in something where there's pre awareness great great way to start because you get billions or hundreds of billions of dollars like in my case like the doorbell think about how much like advertising sort of dollars or whatever like you wanna call it you know come from the doorbell just being known for the last hundred years alright so i told everyone that you know we give a less where we were like let's start with ideas let's start with strung opinions i cool stories you have one on here that actually was probably one of the most eye catching things i've ever read you bought a town in missouri is that right i well i i i went to a town in missouri that had and a lot of these small towns now if you go out into the midwest and some of these areas between like the opioid issues industrial farming like these towns have just been just p and this town missouri when i went there was really like i would say it was in it was in pretty tough shape you're actually you're actually the second guest that we've had that has bought a town of missouri the first is a he bought a small town he him and his mom own a knit company that is a multi totally know that town yeah that's amazing yeah so so basically alan his mom his mom started then out i guess it's like running it where it's like a knit company and he has bought a town in missouri and he calls it like disneyland but for knit yeah i think i think it is but it's become this this place has become like the mecca like people go there it's amazing jobs by the way a i'm so sorry it's called missouri quilt company it's i'm totally missed i actually i i i do wanna talk i gotta talk to it at some point because i he's done some amazing stuff what i tried to do though is just a little different so they they've made it like in his it is an incredible destination and they've done an incredible like from what i've seen like an incredible job my thing was i really just wanted to help bring this town and i again i i'm an inventor i look at things that i see that our sort of not where i believe they should be or a problem like again we had our problem right like what's the problem the problem is that this cute little town no longer has any business the sidewalks are broken peep and it also people's perspective had changed like how did you show up there though so i i invested in a business off of shark tank i went back on shark tank as a shark invested in a business called mo this woman luc lucinda cram from lab belle m missouri and and she has this direct to consumer meat company where we buy from small farmers and send it out very missionary really cool little business and i go there and visit with my family and i just like follow over the place my son's running around on hay bales he doesn't even know what his phone is at that point like it's just like you know we're coming from los angeles and like it's just amazing and i ended up buying a little farm there and fixing up the house and getting involved with the community the town was really in sort of a tough place and so we started fixing up the sidewalks and like kind of the broken windows theory of like if you kinda start fixing some stuff up you know with other people join in there was a lot of like kinda trash on some lots and like kind of that kind of stuff and so people started cleaning up their stuff we cleaned up the streets and the and the sidewalks we then took the building that was broken on the side of the thing and fixed it up and made it into a beautiful coffee shop there was no place if it's like crazy there was no place within an hour to sit with someone during the day and talk to them about anything except the bar and and i like going to a bar but a bar is not a great place to have like a civil discussion about things and so like the coffee shop is an important fabric of the community so we brought the coffee shop there and it's like that became cool and actually became successful and then we helped fix up the tavern in town and made this awesome it's like the coolest bar ever but it's like farm to table with organic grass fed beef from my ranch no one even cares because out there they just like they're like wow whatever but it's like literally the best food you'll ever have like anywhere it's like incredible it's like literally probably the best like beef in the world and then a doctor put an office there and a help clinic now and that's been helping and the town's gotten healthier and as that happens people so it's like this again this is the snowball factor like the the the is incredible flywheel of you get things go and then people sort of take it from there they also are like i don't want this you know jamie this city slick from la why is he making all the money like i wanna it i i know it's great like have the greed be there so sorry building apartments like little apartments there it's a town of seven hundred it's amazing that's badass so what what do you think makes like there's all those like levers that you talked about like you know the coffee shop so that people have this third place there's fixing the sidewalks and the broken windows i imagine like i don't know sports or church there's like other things that kinda like revitalize the community was there anything that surprised you that like how how much of a difference it made like it seems small but actually it's pretty big what surprise me or should i just say should didn't surprise me when i went it i'm like i'll just buy like you said like i bought a town like i i did not like i i took part with others in the town to change the perspective and so i was a catalyst but like it turned out you needed everyone so would you be comfortable revealing how much like you had to invest or it's how much money it's it's quite a bit but i'd say the the what really needed though was everyone to join in like it wasn't like you so this is actually what's interesting it wasn't the money like when i went there it's like i would like i saw the town like i'll write a check you know it's like sadly like i was like i'll write a check and i'll like just fix this whole place up and it'll be nice like i'll just do that like and then no one would even sell me any properties everyone was like a like it and then i just started to get involved in the town i drive my back into town you know like with a bud light and the cup holder and like you know talk to everyone and like they realized that i'm just wanna like i am one of them and like we're just all like a movie man and this is the scene where like total this guy you might be alright yeah and and i did because i buddy i am i love sitting out with them at the side of a pickup truck watching this sunset on the farm and have a beer like that's my happiest place to be so and then i started we started fixing up the sidewalks and i went out there and like i was part of it that was the other thing is truly being part of it it wasn't the money it was like showing that support and then another guy in town like i'm gonna help fix this up and i'm like great and we just it was it it's like also a created ring it's like a thousand things that we did it's not one thing and so it's like there was nothing that surprised me that was like one thing we did i am surprised at the coffee shop i thought would lose money just didn't want to lose too much money it actually makes money so that was surprising but i'd say what the the unsurprisingly thing is it's like it's just it's it's also a long thing like it's been seven years that i've been working on this now with you with the people there i'd say we're like now turning the corner but it's probably another seven years to get it really where you'd hope it to be because it just it's like every year you do another project every year you do another thing like you can't just do it all at once every four months in this podcast here's what happens you see sean and i sit on our hands like this if we just stare at you because we're in you got too funny if you guys are in let's do a podcast from lab about missouri sam i mean you can you know you can go visit home and then and then come up so well i've been for that that's i'm what i was saying was i'm in on jamie i think it's so cool i mean even the way we sent it was wrong that you bought a town you invested time and energy and money into a town you invested kind of piece of soul into it and the idea is kinda like some places just need a little bit of that like cpr just to bring them back to life yes and get that you know it it takes a little bit of pom cat a catalyst like the like like i was a catalyst but i was not the right it again it's like it it is a business right like it takes a team it takes everyone being on board everyone like it's all these things are the same thing like it's it's not just like getting venture capital money and you just make it like you don't just like you know do that it it it's like it's very it's hard to build something great the the tripadvisor page is pretty cool you guys named stuff really well that's called the top places the milk weed in the talk motel tip bar grill stanley diner i'm in i wanna say i wanna stay and e at all those places they're that'd awesome i think you know in the sort of like i i don't like the idea of legacy i think the legacy is just sort of like a ego thing but i do think we do get remembered for certain things by others and it's not always what we expected it's not always in our control and i think what you're doing here is is really cool this would be if you're on a ted talk i you i'd actually wanna hear this story more than the the ring story i think it's it's such a cool life resume you know win and i'm sure it's been very like satisfying and fulfilling in a way that just doing another company or hitting another like quarterly sales goal would never do for you at this stage and so i think it's pretty awesome to hear that because i think you know we all wanna we're in the game of entrepreneurship initially for the success and then satisfy some insecurity get some financial independence but then why do you stay in the game well it's because it's fun to play and too like these projects are just vehicles there's just like workout equipment it's you're you're there to hat to like to go for a ride there just to grow a little bit and so i think this is a really cool project that that you did the entrepreneurs should be making the world better and so like whether it's on a big scale small scale whatever like we should just be like working to do that is this gonna be like a second act for you i mean this is like first of all this is like you know i don't we have to figure out how the story ends and like hopefully there's like a good like very tall ending of it like the town arrives or whatever but like is there like a book here is there a movie here because it seems like a pretty like pretty funny and like interesting tail i i maybe i i don't know i i i kinda just would hope that i i just wish more people go do this like i just think like we need to like it's like i if we could use if all the people that have learned so much could use their brains and a little bit of their capital to do this like we would solve so many problems because it is going to the root of the problem like like we look we keep we always treat the output of the problems like we have hospitals to treat people that have had sugar all their lives but we don't stop people for eating sugar and then we try to tell them not eat sugar but we actually don't like do things to make sure that like they understand why and so it's like i think like part of this is like if you look at this this area now it's like healthier like it's like all these things and so how do like how do you figure out like the root of problems and fixing it so i i'd say like la bell is just like one of i don't even know five thousand towns in the us that have the same thing and if you grew up like that you know the there's gonna be like societal issues that come from if we leave areas behind and and so we we get like i'm in new york city right now i'm from missouri i'm in york city right now and there's the lang hospital nearby and it's just you know the guy start home depot probably donate a billion dollar to start this hospital but then like a four blocks away this other hospital this other hospital other hospital all rich guys yeah and that's wonderful you know great but what is not talked about is like middle america or like you know instead of like donating to different countries like it's it's not particularly accessible in terms of it's top of mind or it's even thought of as a thing of like investing into a small town but it seems like a really awesome way to give directly to the recipients but also the teach the teaching them how to fish kind of idea of like look i'm i'm helping it's our town it's your town and i'm just here as a part of it and it makes just a little bit better which snowball into something bigger and that and that's really fascinating because every rich person or a lot of brewers they wanna do dope shit they do want legacy and like it seemed like a really great option i i think it is it's where you can also use like your superpower of what you've learned like you can actually like impart your knowledge it's not it's not just money it's like money obviously does help but you need a little bit of that like spark to help but it's not cash it's like actually more about using your brain and helping and by the way what you learn from it like what i've learned from being there is incredible like that's the other side like we but just just share more a lot of the tech guys it's like you know cool to be in politics right now and i've that is not my personal inspiration and i hear a story like this and like man that sounds so much more helpful and very fascinating yeah very jamie well i appreciate you coming on telling the story shout out the book it just came out two days ago so shout out the book should read it to hear to get the full story what's it call where do where do people get it so it's ding dong how a shark tank reject went to everyone's front door it's available on amazon dot com man you're the best we you know sean and i have a bunch of favorite people i think jesse it's rob du we've had on about four or five other the guys you have just made a our mount rushmore thank you for doing this you the it thank i'll see you in missouri we'll be doing a a a follow up podcast from there there you go i'm in i don't know about sean i'm in i'm in i'm amazing it how how can you say no after after such a great story well thanks for doing alright that's the problem i feel like i could rule where to know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a less travel never looking back hey let's take a quick break i wanna tell you about a podcast that you could check out it is called the science of scaling by mark robe he was the founding ceo of hubspot and he's a guest lecturer at harvard business school the guy smart and he sits down every week with different sales leaders from cool companies like cla y and van and open ai and he's asking about their strategies their tactics and how they're growing their companies as you know head of sales or chief revenue officer if you're looking at to scale the company up if you're a cro or a head of sales just look at a level up in your career i think a podcast like this could be great for you listen to the science of scaling wherever you get your podcast

got the best opener may i meet you sam oh my god i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days on on a road less travel did you do you see this may i meet you think i did see the context but i saw the quote bill act said this is how you meet women may i meet you is that right yeah deep this we're doing a deep dive by the way this is not a this not a casual reference so i'm going all this is my first topic okay so tell me about it happened great bill act we won't just call him bill act he's gonna be called the great bill act it's not only he's has he proven to be a prolific billionaire investor he's also just the best at twitter because he uses it all wrong it's like have you seen how magic johnson uses twitter no alright some magic jobs at the great basketball player does not know how to use twitter you twitter he just tweets the most obvious thing so it'll be like lakers playing the celtic tonight whoever scores more points tonight gonna take it home and he's like what yeah that's how all games work whoever scores more points wins or gonna be like they're losing now if this stays this way they'll lose the game but he's not joking he's been doing this for like seventy years and so bill act if you don't know originally famous for being controversial and prolific investor right yeah he basically owns this company called per square management he's an activist investor so what he would do is he would buy stakes and companies that you know he either really believed in that he thought we're undervalued but he's also an activist in that if he sees sort of corporate wrongdoing or he company has said some sort of you know mouth then he will come out and talk about it while taking a big short position against it and so he did that with herbal life because he's like this is an ml and this is not right the way that they do their ml and he got kinda burned on that one but that's what he does okay so he's he's billionaire activist investor awesome whatever great great story i wanna have him on the podcast his life story and his approach to investing is is pretty yeah he's got one of these stories i think where he was like successful in his harvard dorm investing like that's type of thing i think he's also like hit bottom many times and like bounce back okay so he so he said i hear from many young men that way then they find it difficult to meet young women in a public setting in other words online culture has destroyed their ability to spontaneously meet strangers i'm reading this i say yeah true glad to speaking on this nodding head nodding head nodding head so he says as such i thought i'd share a few words that i used in my youth to me go there that's what it stops that's what about now that the head not went from put everything i was doing down why is he about to it's like when i saw like they dude from red bull jump out of the space station and it's sky i was like oh my god he's talking about pickup lines using soon as you let's here this he goes i would ask may i meet you maybe i got the tell him that may i meet you i don't know don't know how you say this but may i meet you before engaging further in conversation i almost never gotta know oh my god that's inevitably opened up the way for a further conversation it got really i i i got to meet a lot of really interesting people this way he goes i think it's the effectiveness of proper grammar and politeness and my infect you might try and yes this will also work for women seeking man as well as same sex interact this is versatile just my two cents from a happily married guy about our next generation so this thing goes wild may i meet you you know you know what i told my wife when i saw her i picked her up in real life i said what's the difference between a chick p and a lint i don't pay five hundred dollars to have a lint on my face so i made a joke about peeing on my face and it worked thank god i didn't say bay me yeah actually i don't think we're allowed to make fun of this given what you did to your why if if a girl will will reply to may i meet you i think that she's not someone i wanna i wanna go out with which i'm just joking by the way a little bit i do think that you can walk up to a girl i'll be like what's going on like doing wanna hang on something like i do think that like casual like a total boarding casual can crush it but may tinder meet you tender with the may meet you billboard love it there's people who are just going around doing may dispute wait wait with that video already let's just walk it up to high girl i'll segment meet you so people are just going crazy with this man meet you thing and they can't thinking number one bill like what's the best number two do you think that this actually would work and number three this totally improvised the top five m m formal pick compliance in addition to that so we're gonna go there in a second but first what do you think of this okay may i meet you like i have a joke that i said not a joke when i when it comes to flirting i think as long as the girl laughs you could pretty much say anything and so like you can kinda get away with anything so if you say it a certain way yeah it could work but that's may i meet you it's probably got the best right do you think if you were twenty two or twenty three and you read this you're a big bill acting guy you're on twitter all the time do you think you would have laughed and then secretly that friday gone out and done it no i would not have used this line would you have i probably would have so desperate bigger state chooses try everything i read the book the game and then for like five years my opening line to anybody i saw a party was a hey i need you guys to help me settle this argument i'm having with my friend how many oceans are there fibers seven that that'd be better we had this all elaborate story about the ex girlfriend and then it was like too much and they it was just loud if it was loud in the bar or the club or whatever they were just like what stuff and then i was like i'm telling you give the background of a story first no i'm just i'm just peacock that's the it's i'm just trying to track you alright sam so i'm gonna take a second here i'm what right some of our own pickup lines because why is bill black the only one who can give young men sort of advice i think we too should steer the next generation so here we go you wanna take a second let's let's write out a few sean i can't there's not a chance that i can come up it'd the great pickup up lines it's first of all that'd been the great i've been like married for like twelve years so alright i i will give you three that if you can't give me already i just wrote one down how about this this is actually a close cousin to me i meet you no may i take your jacket so now first she's already un dressing second you're in she's not gonna say no right she's very kind of you to do a generous act she will think you work there and that you're in staff so now you just have to bridge that gap but you're your the hardest part is done you're in into the conversation now she's gonna say yes and start what we called in sales as b ladder so i like that one i think that one's pretty good another one are you cold i found that women are always cold there's there's just a cold species and so i just think you a good chance of them being like you what yeah i am cold you see me you understand me and then from there you can maybe you may have to give the jacket from the previous girl that you talked to and give it to this girl i can't believe you have children i can't believe at someone let you do that i had a big advantage which was my wife was looking for a guy like me you i went the lottery she was i was like what you your type is me that's insane are you crazy is there something wrong with you for some reason at my company hampton we have twenty or twenty five employees twenty of them are women we have just for men let behind as scott gallo says i don't know something about it and so i over here all these conversations that they have they brag about their boyfriends being u than them did you know that women do this they brag about it like they want to date someone who's u than them is that the craziest thing you've ever heard of that doesn't even make sense so what what is the because it implies something else or is there more story or that's the fact because they wanna be the they wanna be the hot one in the relationship but have you you've never seen us sean women like they wanna be explain so much yeah same what's your third one okay my third one is hey i'm bill act i'm the billionaire founder of pushing square nice to meet you that one's i one can work too if that would wanna work but it it needs it needs some pretty worth that actually this actually makes a ton of sense i'm pretty sure he was like worth ten million dollars when he was like twenty seven years old and so here bill ackerman and also he's like six nine by the way do you do you know what's about the six three yeah yeah so they were like oh you're a handsome six three rich guy also you may you may see me again so yeah this is not like the best person get advice from do you he might be honest something though because you know what show women love bridge ten and they love the formality of bridge so maybe he's tapped into this like secret desire that they have to just like being incredibly formal or be treated like a princess dude i used to think that as a kid but i looked like napoleon dynamite whenever i tried like be proper like it was as if i was like it it just never worked okay like when you had braces that we a yeah sam bar high school you hear my photo like hello miss thing like it like like it never worked okay it never worked frankly nothing really worked so who am i have say but no that never worked alright so a lot of people will 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 is 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 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 let me tell you about something let me i have two things i wanna get your opinion on and just on the first let's do let's do alright this one short let's see do this guy okay so have you heard this thing called the go to the two zero three media dot com oh oh i i've seen this so it starts with so first of all if you ever been on tiktok you see these videos where it's like a young guy interviewing other like good looking people like at washington square park and ask them like what they think of this deodorant owner or like you take a bite of this brand's chocolate and like what do you think and it's like a review but it's supposed to look organic whatever this guy named josh he's started working with oliver at tabs chocolate you do tabs chocolate yeah yeah is anne was a popular product so this guy oliver who was like a twenty year old entrepreneur twenty two year old entrepreneur at the time hired this other guy named josh who at the time i think was only nineteen and he's like hey i'm gonna pay you money to go to washington square park which is a popular park here in new york city and i want you to interview people about my chocolate and like get good clips that are testimonials for tiktok whatever and it worked he killed it so eventually josh is like i should do this for other people so at the age of like nineteen or twenty he drops out of syracuse university and he starts doing this for other people and he's now making three hundred thousand dollars a month in revenue doing this so he's got something like forty six employees which are a lot of freelancers and he has he goes to parks in new york city la in miami interviewing people and he tells a story about how he started but and actually the wall journal wrote about him and he's like i just with dm founders on twitter constantly can i would show these videos that i'm doing and i would do free work just to get like some videos that maybe look more legit and he starts filming these videos and now he's killing it he's building this business and i'm not sure if this business is gonna be who's like big thing who knows how like huge just gonna be but anyone who's bold enough to go to what these parks and walk up to someone at the age of twenty and build a company doing three million hours a year in revenue this kid's gonna be it like it's this is talk about how door door sales is like this weird breeding ground of incredible entrepreneurs also you know why mormons so successful like well one of the things they have to do is their mission where you for two years you block out the world you wake up every day you go knock on doors and you try to spread the gospel about something you believe in and like that also happens to be incredible training for entrepreneurship and sales this is the same sort of thing not only is the agency kinda of working because well he took a format that works on social which is a street interview but no founder really wants to go do this this is like you know extremely exhausting to go do and you're basically p yourself out there for rejection of humiliation along the way and he just product that it was like let me product this one ad format and so that's kinda genius when he does this i don't know if you say like he basically walks like thirty to fifty thousand steps a day when he's doing this like he puts his like you know apple health tracker or whatever and it's like yeah he just i'm just walking around the entire day i was walking like whatever ten miles a day and doing these street interviews it's pretty incredible hustle so first of all just being a college kid doing this i bet you i don't know for what the numbers were about i bet you just him he was probably could've potentially have been making three hundred thousand dollars a year doing this yeah and there's a skill here but it's honestly mostly bold and it's mostly just like getting after it it's like pretty much i idea we could do this but no one will do it right someone's paying him them money because they're like i'm too embarrassed to go talk to it a stranger at the park and film this feel stupid but then he's operationalize it in fact our friend i originally heard about him because ramon he was used to ramon was like i'm i'm in new york city because i paid this kid some he said the money some certain amount of money to like do these things and i was like what he goes yes man i just gave this kid tens a thousand dollars and he's was just walking up the strangers and i'm like that's so interesting that that's how scared we are which me too i don't wanna do it i saw this guy's twitter feed and i just called him because i was like wow i just dm them i like what's your number and then we call i called him i was like man you yeah may i meet you sir and it totally worked by the way i think he listens to the pod so i'm glad we get to shout him out now he's he's a real hustle man and i think this is such a cool like i i i have this phrase that sounds a little you condescending and i don't mean it that way at all in fact i'm i think this is like one of the best things you could do which is what i call like a white belt business like a starter group business so said basically what's what's a great first business to start because your first business probably gonna be one of your worst businesses you're gonna be at your worst because you're just getting into the game you're not your best yet and you maybe don't have the the network the capital the skills or the the knowledge of what you or the big things you wanna go do in life that's fine just get the game and this is one of the best examples of just getting the game business that he's doing this cool in new york guess what there could be after listening to this podcast if you're you i don't know between the ages of like eighteen and twenty five and you're like oh man i just wanna be successful so bad i'm willing to work i'm a hard worker and you listen and there's nothing's working for you yet if you listen to this and you don't go do this you're basically i'm calling your bluff then right because this is a business that's available to anybody you could be in miami doing this could be in los angeles doing this can be pretty much any city do this hell you could be in the be doing this and it doesn't really matter in fact that could be your stick is that it looks like you go to costco and you talk to ordinary people type of type of deal right did you see this kid who has this page called the school of hard knocks oh this podcast who's getting five thousand times more views us yeah not that kid we got a podcast well it started like a man on the street like short instagram stuff now he's turned into like a real thing it the funny thing is it is a podcast guys is just so short right like he just does the same things like oh like i talked to successful people i hold the mic and then i ask you a question then they answer it's an interview it's a pie it could be considered podcast but you're right like he what he did was he shrunk it into there's a more authentic format catching bumping bumping into somebody on the but at this point he's not bumping into shaq and dude the the tom cruise on it tom cruise on this it's like those guys see his content they follow he sets it up where he can bump into them but he's really young i think that guys i don't know like he's got the he's got the broccoli haircut like he looks he's gotta be like by law under the age of forty seven but if you have that so i think it's kind of amazing we he's it's just one minute compilation where he just cuts up a quick question answer with a star on the street and it just works great today's episode has brought you by helps hubspot because you're using only twenty percent of your business data is like dating somebody who only text you in emojis first of all that's annoying and second you're missing a lot of the content but that's how most businesses are operating today they're only using twenty percent of their data unless you use hubspot that's when all your emails your call logs your chat messages to turn into insights to help you grow your business because all that data makes all the difference learn more at hubspot dot com alright i wanted to show you one more thing so i sent you the article in the wall street journal so check this out so in nineteen eighty one warner was you know the big cable company or entertainment company and they decided to create a music channel where they was were basically just gonna be music videos and it was gonna be called mtv and so they had a group of like four or five basically like punk rock slash hip guys who they said you're in charge figured this out and one of the guy the guy's name was tom preston and tom frost had this amazing article about him in the wall street journal the other day and i wanna get your take on this but basically he tells a story of like founding mtv and mtv you know you and i were raised with it but the people who are in their eighteen nineteen twenty one years old now the mtv note they know now is not what it used to be so what it used to be was basically music music videos and then also cartoons and like some tv shows that was like old and things of that yeah yeah but eventually mtv they became they owned nickelodeon and they owned comedy central and so listen to like the things that this guy tom he was head of the pro he was in charge of programming listen to some of the show in the week right yeah listen listen to i i think he's a billionaire i don't know but listen to some of the shows that he that would came because of him blue's clues bi and butt the adventures of pete and pete sponge bob da the daily show jackass south park crank the paleo odd parents chapel show the last em air bender the colbert airport wren s the real world dorothy the explorer rug rats i'm gonna have a nostalgia seizure over here you just say in those names names i haven't heard thoughts i haven't had and so like he like this article goes really in deep but there was one thing that really stuck out to me so listen to those quote so tom like tells a story and he has like all these hilarious a bits so he was like basically he was like we were like the rejects he was he goes the receptionist sold cocaine and the office had one clothing rule no frontal news like like he was the these guys were the real deal man but he's got this amazing line so he says he goes i had this idea i said let's find the type of pot smoking guys in high school who sat in the back of the class that could draw well and have some character living inside their heads like this crazy guy named steve who made up sponge bob let's get these guys who don't know anything about how to make a tv show or a series and school them and we're gonna crank these things out yeah so good that's great right and the reason i thought that was interesting is because first of all there was like four founders of mtv and like they are now like the mafia a little bit like one of them was bob pop bob pitt who is the ceo of i heart media another guy runs the rock of hall fame they're all like you know big shots but i thought it was interesting this line because in business i think you and i have times have fallen in this trap but i think we're actually better and i think a lot of our listeners do this where they come up with an idea and they kind of like iterate their way like to this idea versus taking a stance and saying like for example i think bars has done i don't particularly love bar content but i think they've done an excellent job of like planting their flag and saying this is what we are and this is the bet we're making or vice did a good job where they're like we're youth culture and we're gonna like give inexperienced guys cameras and santa them to africa and maybe they get something or pixar saying we think that computers and animation can tell stories just as good if not better than real life actors but the idea of like putting your your saying this is the bet we're taking this bet and even if it's a silly bet of saying we're gonna give like pot heads like jobs and like let them create content but when you when i look back at that i think that's actually like brilliant and very romantic and very cool which to like take a stance yeah that's i feel you did this with the hustle i i gotta give you some props here when i think about who in my kinda group did this i would say there's really two groups of people one alex two and michael act smith and they were doing calm they had from the beginning this idea there's this like a problem that they wanted to solve which was like the meditation is this thing that's incredibly good for you and so few people do it and even when the initial results were like somewhat lukewarm and it was unclear what to do and investors didn't wanna fund it they did not iterate and pivot like crazy around into like other ideas like oh yeah today we're a messaging app and tomorrow we're gonna do delivery of weed and you know whatever else like they were like no we're gonna do fifty different attempts to make meditation a thing like because that's the thing we think is important and that's what we believe in and so like that's what we're gonna do so they did like they launched this app called do nothing for two minutes it's like meditation and disguise right like almost like a gimmick it was a app or if you touched your phone in a two minute period it would start over by try again and it would just like calming music like waves crashing on a beach and just for two minutes you just couldn't touch your phone couldn't use it for anything the next one they did was this app called check which is an again they did this viral app about like how many times a day do you check your phone so right like we've heard of this idea of screen time i was like oh you know whatever i can go to the settings out and find this check you would be like hey don't do you know you you've checked your phone like you've unlocked the lock screen three hundred and ninety eight times today like you are the little rat in the maze who's addicted to the pellets you know like they cocaine pellets you're pushing the button over and over and trying to see if you can get the prize out and so they did many different versions of this ultimately sleep stories was the thing that that worked for them and help them really accelerate growth but it was the same there's meditation at night instead of just during the day and and they did it they pulled it off and i just remember when it was so un cool and so lack of like lack of momentum lack of investment traction lack of sex sex appeal there was no other comparable in the market that was like we're just we're doing what they're doing but in our category which is what entrepreneurs used to validate themselves and they kept going so i thought that was a plant flag and i thought you did too where you were like betting on email yeah and we're gonna be independent i like dude facebook videos right now going viral snap snapchat you gotta do start doing snapchat and like i tried to dang every shiny we didn't even have an instagram handle we didn't have an instagram i think when we sold i don't think we had instagram and you were just like no we're gonna be and you kept calling it a pirate chip and i was like brother it's a new newsletter and you're like no i'm building a pirate chip i said i'm building a pirate chip in every email subscriber i get is just a little bit more wind in my sales and i was like why is he reciting poetry then i also kinda liked i like damn i don't say cool stuff like that as a ceo like i should probably have lines like that and and then you had like a a tattoo of a pirate chip on your thigh i was like going on but this guy both bats fun baby that's the that's the male version of l love you weren't shorts right now pop this sucker up well i wear pants all the time now erica because i want people to see it sold the company still got the tattoo though so yeah i thought you did a great job of the plant your flag in the ground let me tell you where i where i messed up i messed up not i i messed up not believing a couple things one i messed up okay so when people start something most things don't work right away even though whatever you see on our podcast and all these things they don't they don't work right away the the thing is is can you deal with the pushback and stay the same and that's really hard to do that every day it was really hard for me to do every day but the second thing is underestimating how big something can get i drastically underestimated how big we could can so i think the year we sold me to twelve million in revenue and i was like i think i can get this a fifty sixty seventy and i was like but looking back i was like this is foolish so morning brew our competitors who they only sold part of the business so they were able to keep running it they're at ninety million in revenue and i could give you other examples of people that are doing hundreds of millions of revenue and so same with bars stool if you say that to bar stool if you look at them in like two thousand and fourteen you're like this company is gonna make hundreds of millions of the year in revenue you would say that's insane that can't happen same with calm a meditation app it's gonna be a multi multi billion dollar thing and i think the issue is you underestimate how big something can get because you don't realize that the tam once you have a really cool product it can expand and i think that that's really hard to see because the numbers don't say that but you just have to have faith right yeah everything takes longer than you think but it can be bigger than you think for sure the the weird like rule of thumb for an entrepreneur you think it's gonna happen faster it's not sorry it's gonna take way longer than you want and then way longer than you think way longer than you expect but on the upside you've probably underestimated yourself even though you think you're being mister ambitious yeah exactly and i have this i wanna hear about your mistake but let me tell you one a quick thing so the very first okay so before i come to the hustle before we were an email in newsletter we or events business whatever and we had tim west tim west a guy who founded pandora pandora it doesn't get talked about enough nowadays but i'm pretty sure it's still a multi billion dollar revenue business and at its heyday i think we're tens of billions of dollars and it it's one of the early pioneers years of the app on the iphone and tim west has this amazing story where basically he it was the he told the story at my event and then i wrote about it on the hustle the very first article we ever published and it got like it went viral and the title of the articles is here's how pandora founder convinced fifty early employees to work for two years without pay basically the company started the music genome and what he did was he raised five million dollars and he convinced fifty or to a hundred musicians struggling musicians to come work for him and he basically had a i think he i think it was legitimately an excel spreadsheet and he created fifty attributes for a song and they would sit all day listening to music and they would write the attributes in the spreadsheet and eventually have to doing this for years they had this massive database but unfortunately it didn't find product market fit they just had this database but they're not they're like what what do we do with it and so originally they had it in best buy where we can listen to a cd and best buy and be like here's ten other cities that you could potentially buy that fit that cd that song but it wasn't really working and so he ran out of money and but he was like this thing is magical and he convinced his employees to continue working form for i think like eighteen months without pay and someone in the crowd goes what speech did you give on a weekly basis to convince these people to to work for you and he goes yeah i got the exact quote he goes man it's hard if i close my eyes though i think i could figure it out and he goes we all know that we have created here is very unique and it's solving a gigantic gigantic problem no one on earth is gonna do what we've done and when you use this product we all know how magical it is it will find its home everyone on the planet loves music and there's millions of musicians who produce great music and they can't find each other when this thing finally finds its home it's gonna change culture how many times in your life can you say that you've had a chance to do that that's what this is about fucking a right how good is that that's almost a separate skill which is you make everything bigger than it is elon is the master of this so you know he'll he doesn't just say hey we're gonna build a company that launches satellites he's not even say we're gonna build a company that launches you know the the best rockets reusable rockets he's like we're gonna take humans from being a single planet species to a multi planetary species which is basic gonna save the human race and all consciousness as we know it in the universe because something will happen to the earth at some point and there's no plan if we don't do something so he creates this incredible grand scale vision sense of urgency and purpose around what he does but you can do that with anything like with when he he got like a coworker pregnant and he was like he was like the biggest risk civilization is under population here the population collapse we need to be having more children and i was like this is the teflon on like how was he how is he know giraffe neo when the matrix away from these bullets that are coming for pregnant this he just rebranded cheating like aioli is tom tomato yeah he was like it was the most noble cheat i i've ever heard of him i was like this is like incredible lot of he tie this to the collapse of population and civilization itself it was amazing but you could do this for anything like have you ever read the biographies or or the listen to the founders podcast on pat or dyson sure haven't okay well do you know what anything about dyson i know that dyson is so hot right now every it's like the cool thing for a successful ceo to be into like you know who my hero not it's not musk jobs dyson it's the cool thing to say dyson basically i think they do three things vacuums hand dryers like in and restrooms rooms and blow dryers so blowing and sucking basically that's not like inherently cool but they're why are they such a cool company it's because the ceo has done such a good job of like grand like making like in my opinion dyson is the standard of excellence and so when i think of like if i have an employee wanting to work at dyson and i'm like vacuums it's like well no like it's excellence like we are gonna make the best and there is something very appealing about that and so you don't have to be going to mars i think to give one of these speeches and by the way anytime you have more than fifteen employees your job is basically like forty percent dis like right like and so you're happy to get good at this and so i don't think you need this world changing product to say like this is cool i mean we're talking about rug rats and fucking sponge bob and we look back at it and it's dope right like it's like how cool be to be part of that and changing culture yeah yeah i i've really come to appreciate this that everybody who's successful in life has just taking a simple idea very seriously way more seriously than you would expect way more seriously than it was necessary way more seriously than everybody else and whether that's bringing cartoons to you know to tv sets around the country or it's making a vacuum cleaner that's better than the last vacuum cleaner better than any vacuum cleaner that sucks more than anyone else can suck in the world like you know like whatever it is like if that's your thing yeah that's your thing it kinda doesn't really matter what your thing is because your experience of it it's gonna consume your world did one of the most beloved person is nick gray who hosts cocktail parties two hour cocktail parties yeah he took it very seriously he's like i'm gonna write a book about how to host a dinner party and it's like are you sure you need to it's not an email and he's like no it's a book and it's a science and it's an art and i'm gonna master it and that's why he's you know that's why he's fallen in love with us that's why he's done such a good job with it that's why he's it's really open up all these doors it it became much bigger than somebody would expect something like that to become and so a lot of life is just picking a simple idea and take a seriously of course some ideas are a little bit more impactful or fulfilling than others but i think the ticket it seriously i think you know i spent so much of my life focusing on the pick and idea part right i pick a simple idea and actually it was the ticket seriously muscle that needed to be built better right that was the thing i was i was week at and it's it didn't really matter what simple idea i picked if i couldn't if i didn't learn how to take it seriously so me and tyler the ceo of have came up with a little challenge for you it's the newsletter challenge now if you know me you know that i'm a big fan of newsletter i got my own newsletter i also had a business that was a newsletter business that was amazing i wrote this newsletter about crypto we grew it to quarter million subscribers we ended up selling it after a year for millions of dollars and want you to be able to do the same thing in your business so we're doing a challenge ten grand is on the line plus me and tyler will actually be in your corner as growth advisors you would just need to go to bee hyped dot com slash m and you either start a new newsletter or you move your current newsletter over there and five finalist will get picked pitch me and tyler sort like shark tank and the winner gets ten grand so go to bee dot com slash m m that's b dot com slash m m to enter the challenge today so you're writing this book series try to find the url one hour books dot c so sean's talking is writing a really cool series of book so one hour books dot c go to your go to his website set up and you your first one is on creativity you should really google mtv and comedy control and nickelodeon in some of the early years because i started going on this rabbit hole and i started reading about the guy named steve i forgot his last name steve who started sponge bob and so this guy basically was a teacher like a grade school teacher in san francisco then became a marine biologist and then he quit doing that at the age of twenty eight or twenty nine and went to school for animation because he loved drawing comics in his free time and he eventually like kinda worked his way up to nickelodeon and he worked on ro modern life and then from there he got in and he was able to pitch sponge bob and sponge bob was like a silly show it's almost like a show that our parents didn't want us to watch a little bit because it was there's something weird about it but it wasn't inappropriate but it was like silly but his passion for marine biology and everything led to creating this and i thought it was really beautiful and something that i don't know it's going on with the world of creators on youtube is this like fiction style content or in particular animation which i loved as a kid and so i would love to see some of that stuff because a lot of the stuff on youtube now it doesn't talk about that i mean i don't think that that's like that's not really a thing but i do think do you think that there's room for that like do you think that like do you know anything in that space or does this interest to you i know that our friend dylan jar was trying to do something where he's was doing comics and i actually thought it was pretty awesome we've met the guy who was doing this have you do you remember the amazing digital circus go to youtube and look up the amazing digital circus the pilot the first episode of this currently has three hundred and ninety eight million views on youtube yes yeah okay of course remember this yes so this guy kevin and his brother they are based in australia and they had like a passion for animation they didn't really know what to do it but they just decided like look we're sitting in australia where guys have never done this before the odds of us getting a deal with netflix or hollywood is super low but maybe we could just make something and put it on youtube and so they worked on this they they basically were using gaming engines which is not what you use for for normal tv shows for animation so they started using like unreal engine or whatever unity i don't don't remember which one instead of making a video game out of it they animated this wild show with a little bit of a dark humor and it's basically like anime but done for the west so they to remix the idea which is one of the core creative tools i find a new connection of old dots and so they connected the old dots of anime and like you know sort of like picks pixar animation and they created this show on youtube and it gets hundreds of millions of every episode on every single episode and we was there i i was i i don't know jimmy mis that well but i said hi to him and i started talking to him whatever and he goes you wanna meet like the guy who inspires me or who i think is even better than me or like he like deferred to this guy yeah yeah like with with who group we basically say like our jimmy like do you have three or four people you wanna invite that are not in our network we're bringing a bunch of people from our network who's in your network that you think is awesome and he this was one of the guys and so and he was he was an awesome dude and the you know they're doing and i was like so wait so you you put all this money in time you make these crazy animated things you know it's kinda like this the sponge drop guy right i was like just a guy with an idea to sketch and then turns it into a show and they were making like tens of millions on just merch drops just fans buying the merch of their thing that was the business model it was literally selling t shirts at this point and then i was like i'm looking doesn't they merch i think they got a deal with either amazon prime or netflix and so now they were gonna bring their show now like hollywood wants them basically and so now they're going their show to one of the big streaming platforms and they cut a very unique deal where they didn't have to take it off youtube because they're like no no we're keeping it on youtube youtube our our place where we're building a giant fandom and i mean you don't know have few videos get four hundred million views like you literally have to had made des to get four hundred million views or like gang i'm style this it's not like a number that a normal youtube video can get and this is their own original content there's also something interesting here going on where i'm romantic romanticized eighties mtv and then you're romantic romanticized this this guy now but like this guy kevin digital circus like he's only a handful of years into his journey and when we were with him thought that was neat but it was just like oh that's cool now i'm looking back and i'm like that's very romantic that's very bad ass it's it's very interesting that you don't see that at the time when you're doing it but i do think that i have to work on i think everyone does have to work on like ref framing things because it would make it so much more fun to work on and you could like keep going for a lot longer because now i see this and like this is amazing keep going keep keep doing this but when he when i talk to him he was one of twenty interesting people mh yeah hundred yeah so true what you just said i noticed a few people who do this now in fact we just had ben h on and after we stopped recording he had told us the story on the podcast about this incredible like leader in haiti i think guy who started song overt her yeah tu tucson hey he's like he read this book about him or read multiple books about him this book called black sparta kiss and he told the story about how this guy i think was a slave came like the leader of a five hundred thousand person army and it was one of the few places where slavery ended as like out of like a successful revolution like and they like changed the norm and know it was just like just incredible and so you yeah as a guy who's investing in world changing leaders i think he was just fascinated about how somebody pulled this off and so we were like how did you actually be a really good take i didn't put that together that's actually that's that's a really good insight actually why he liked him i i'm not sure if he consciously did that or not but yeah obviously there's an appeal to it so he after the pod was over we were like and on the podcast you know what was your and what was your impression of ben h like oh what's oh cool bet you you did a pod with ben h what's he like what would you have said a top ten so we've done seven hundred fifty he's in the top ten of like wisdom people and but would you say like he's like outlandish personalities outlandish smart is he on any surprisingly good balance well pricing well balanced good hang seem like a like a more normal dude than that your average tech billionaire type of guy right it seemed like a really good father i mean he was he's probably thirty years older than so i can say that but he seemed like someone who i could like ask for advice and it wouldn't be extreme right so i was thinking about that i like this was just like a great hang with just a great dude but more on the normal side of the spectrum than i would have expected just because i've gotten used to every time i meet these extreme outliers of performance they often come with these kind sharp edges i think his partner mark has that his partner mark seems sharp like polarizing his literally his head as like thirty percent extra headroom like you know he just hold more brain in there dude like you know it's like oh i mean it's hard to it's like sing lebron james he's like well okay i could see that we're different like yeah we're both you know both humans but like you're six nine and you could fly and i'm i can't so like i get there's a difference that that happens a lot of tech guys you're like oh you're literally just super smart your process information differently he even said it he was like people get confused because he knows mark zuckerberg and peter t and all these guys and he goes people get confused they think that those guys have like low e hq like they don't they don't understand people because they kinda stu her and s and they they they're a little awkward he's like no they actually have a pretty deep understanding of people you wouldn't be who they are if you didn't actually understand people but they are processing data at such a high rate that it's a little bit awkward would you hear them try to talk and reply because they're processing they're just literally processing so much information and i was like oh that's and amazing putting it anyways v kind what i was saying on him at the end of the podcast we stop recording and we asked them and we're were like how did you get into that soc guy like that's crazy like we're how'd you hear about this and he said something he goes i was thinking about why slavery ended and i was like oh my god i'm glad stopped for recording because that's you could cancel for saying something like that like this you know rich white billionaire wonders why slavery ended today like that's a bad p r for you but he he he had a really good answer and we didn't even say anything but he's like because according you know slavery was not just a a human rights issue it was actually also the economic model of the times so he's like you know slavery been around for a long time and in many different places it's sprung up organically it's not like one system that was ported everywhere like difference countries each came to the same i think he said he he goes the aqua ducks and rome were built by slaves yeah pyramids were built by slaves the aqua were built by slaves he's like it was the six it was the functioning economic model so gotta be curious why did it ever end yeah and and but he didn't mean they're like just be super super clear he was not saying it's a good thing he was of course literally thinking from first principles like isn't that interesting that this this thing that was working and all the years and then all a sudden now years and suddenly it stops you you'd be kinda curious like what stopped it and he's like haiti was the only place where it was like a bottoms up successful revolution where they just decided to change the rules without low without like i think i don't know what how we was saying but it's was like it was different than like the civil war for example and so he was like that's what got me curious and i thought there it is there's your weird like you know you have your funny bone in your elbow like i found it i found your special sauce you asked a question that the rest of us would have never asked you leaned in and got curious about something that we would have all just accepted at face value and there are so many of these in life you realize this when you have kids and they're like well how does this building get built so there's people what where do people come from and you're like oh my god people come from this and like but why didn't this just happened and you realize how shallow your knowledge of the world actually is not just scientific by the way it's like like my son was like why can boys show their nipples and not girls we're going to the pool and i'm like i'm telling my daughter like you knew where you're swimsuit to your boys she's bad it couldn't find his and was like it's fine just go in and he's was like but why and i was like honestly i have no idea why that would be horrible if she did it and it's totally fine if you do it i have no clue do you know i don't know yeah and so there's like there's all these things we just sort of accept which i take it because it's like too much mental energy to go try to answer every question and the great ones get curious about like obvious things they see things on the floor that the rest of us aren't looking at and they just pick it up and like that's where they become great i love this topic because eddie murphy has a documentary on netflix it's so good it's a two hour i gotta watch this it's two hours people forget we grew up listening to him or watching him people forget how impactful he was i mean he turn off this podcast code if you're on youtube just go to the search part just type eddie murphy raw and just go watch that and you were talked about that and so basically eddie murphy was famous starting at the age of eighteen eddie murphy was an snl at the age of eighteen and it's a whole documentary about his creative process but also it's really interesting eddie murphy was famous at the eighteen in new york city when he was twenty five or actually twenty two i think he was the star beverly hills you know the police movie and right he was the most famous guy on earth and he hung out with all craziest people and all of those guys now you know prince rick james all these guys are dead because they were drug addicts and he was like i was sober the whole time he knows i don't drink i don't drink drugs and so they talked about that and so anyway he talks about being funny and he was like don't really think of myself as a comedian i'm an artist and i express myself via a comedy back could do anything he was i've done serious movies i've done everything and he's done i've done actually action movies it's very inspiring but he has one line that has stuck with me and he was like the thing about comedian i think what makes a special is that we're actually more sensitive to everything and so the best comedian you know if i buy a new car and a car gets and the car comes home and the dealers cnn and right in front me and i can like point out a a scratch that no one noticed because i just noticed it first and that becomes the comedy and that becomes the bit or if i walk into a house and there's just one little tiny smell i'm gonna be the first person that says it because i'm most sensitive and what the the thing that you're describing with ben i've always noticed this what first like good comedian like shane gill does this whole read history and whole retail this very funny bit about george washington like this one little thing that i read tons of history i would have like i would've have skipped over that three sentence story and i think that what separates this i'm all putting this together right now i think what separates these really insightful people like ben who asked the right questions is that they're very sensitive and they find one or two lines and they're like that that is like very interesting to me that is the truth that is the right question and i think eddie murphy did the exact same thing when he said he goes we are just more sensitive to everyone and we could do boom and so our threshold of like something that grabs us is is lower it's a great observation they notice what the rest of us ignore and because if you think about great investors what do they do they just sort of notice that this company is not being understood properly it's misunderstood it's mis price it's misunderstood and they go they bet against consensus in a way and why do they do that the you first up to notice in this pile of stocks which one is the one that's mis priced and you know there's just great stories about buffett and he read the moody's manual front to back so he's reading just company profile it's like whatever two thousand pages or something like that it's like a bible and it's just company financials and company prospect perspectives and he would read the whole thing and all he's trying to do is just notice for something that makes him curious that's weird has this much earnings but price only this i wonder why oh it's because this is believed is that true how does that work and what if this happens that's very hard so you see it in investing you see it in comedy comedy is the art of noticing i have this running dock on my my phone called seinfeld premises and basically like if you like what would be the premise of a seinfeld joke seinfeld like the master of observational humor and so when you turn this part of your brain on that starts to notice the like hilarious of human life you start to notice things that don't make any sense so for example seinfeld talks about that when he talks about this power of observation he's like he goes you know when somebody's on the phone with somebody and the call drops and they call you back and they're like hey sorry i don't know what happened he goes of course you don't know what happened you don't even know how this is happening do it of us you didn't even know how phone works as if we could know the reason the call drops like you know what a hilarious but a ridiculous thing to say and then he then he builds off that premise which is like we all say this thing and what nonsense of course you don't know what happened you don't know how microwave works you don't know how anything works and then he could build off that and like turn it into a joke and so i started doing this and so i have this list of like just things that i've noticed over the past three years and i'm like i've never done sam comedy i hope was secretly like want to and like had you been talking about for years you just gotta pick a date but like i'll give you like one that's on this list that i just had i took a flight and right before the right before boarding they're like you know platinum america global elites whatever right and they're like any military vets or whatever and like a soldier basically walked up and got to board the plane thirty seconds before us and i was like i looked her around and i'm like that's it that was the perch got like this guy forced the walk still had to go through tsa like security he is security like we're like this guy should be getting like a blow job on the plane like this is insane that all he got to do was bored after global elite but before group one i was like what a shame like this dude i always thought that way about metals when they give you like a metal i'm like all that for a metal the same thing my son got after soccer this year metal so it's just like this art of noticing the the the the sort of things that the is just taking a face value and i think as an entrepreneur you wanna be doing this as a technologist you wanna be doing this right like a big part of technology like the big wave right now is ai and the funny thing about ai is that all the big companies all the companies that were winning an ai and all the people who are leading those companies they were not the og of ai like ai has been around and talked about for fifty years and the study of you know neural networks and all the underlying technology there were as experts none of the experts are the ones who started this these companies so like why is that and it's because they were so far in it they actually didn't notice that something changed is like they were so lost in the sauce that they did not realize like this time it's different even like the the core thing that changed at all was this transformers paper was written by google google which have been pouring billions into machine learning and you know their neural networks and all this stuff who got sam no sam was an outsider to this whole thing that paper at google was written by these like seven or eight got that's seminal paper call called attention is all you need and attention is all you need was this breakthrough this realization that like wait a minute all you need is this and then suddenly the outputs change this is written inside of google who has spent billions of dollars on this and google wasn't the one to use it they just released this paper nothing and then it was others out in the field that were like that's actually pretty interesting that's new that's novel so that means if that's true then we could try this and maybe we'll get a new result this time and suddenly the computer could figure out what's a cat what's a hotdog dog and you know all these things that were previous kinda hard were now actually like very doable and so then that's where you know this wave happened and now all eight of those people from google have since left and they're a part of the the big like you know the big eight ai companies now but like it's amazing that google itself which was looking for the treasure you know the metal detector started beeping and they just kept walking down the beach you know they just didn't stop and dig and so it takeaway away because it takes beginner mind to be able to stop and dig right so and to your to answer your question of like who did notice i would say first it was deep mind so this guy dennis i don't know how he says last name bp that's a google company right so google ended buying having to buy that company so deep mind was doing really interesting where google buys it for half a billion dollars or something like that i wanna say nothing many years ago so then elon notices he's like wow what deep mind can do is like what they've been talking about with ai for forty years but nobody's freaking out about this and elon is like i shall freak out about this so he starts realizing that google has all google has a monopoly on ai and he viewed ai as an existential threat and he viewed larry page which was his friend at the time as somebody who does not care about ai safety because he would talk to larry about ai safety larry brush it off he larry basically viewed it as this is this is the evolution of man we're gonna go from homo to this like kind of this new species of like ai ai plus human whatever it'll be like a new thing that's what's gonna happen and elon was like this is crazy and so he decided to help create open ai which is a counter weight to google which had a monopoly on ai talent and research so he's like we will get researchers and we will open source the material because google would never do that and that will be like a good counter weight to this so he noticed kind of the the difference there which is kind of crazy i don't know what we're gonna call this episode but this is one of the most interesting ones that we've ever had you had a really good thing in your five tweet tuesday email you had a jerry seinfeld quote you said the context of this quote is that jerry seinfeld sold or turned down the most amount of money ever in tb history apparently he turned down a hundred and ten million dollars for one more season of seinfeld the reporter asked him why why not do one more season and jerry says the most this is so good the most important word in art is proportion how much how many words how many minutes too much cake too much of anything changes the whole feeling of it getting proportion right is what makes it art or makes it mediocre so good right so good so good we should end there that's beautiful that that's it that's just the best i feel like i could rule to world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a less travel never looking back hey let's take a quick break i wanna tell you about a podcast that you could check out it is called the science of scaling by mark robe he was the founding ceo of hubspot and he's a guest lecturer at harvard business school the guy smart and he sits down every week with different sales leaders from cool companies like cla y and van and open ai and he's asking about their strategies their tactics and how they're growing their companies as you know head of sales or chief revenue officer if you're looking at to scale the company up if you're a cro or a head of sales just looking to level up in your career i think a podcast like this could be great for you listen to the science of scaling wherever you get your podcast

i made my first million when i turned thirty years old but i'm gonna walk you through every single business i tried before i've made something that worked and sam you can roast me for how bad my ideas were i feel like i could rude where to i know i could be what i want to upper from at all in in like a day's on on a less traveler alright look you so i did this previously you totally went up to me by having a presentation so that's a little unfair but it's like in mean girls where she shows up to the halloween party and she doesn't know that just was to dress flooding and she dresses this scary that's kinda how i feel right now but that's okay i'm incredibly excited to see what what you have to do business number one i tried to create the chipotle of sushi so this was my first big hair brain idea it was called sa sushi and we even though i didn't know anything about sushi i had just tried sushi for the first time of month prior i just thought this is it this is the big idea i can create the chipotle sushi we partnered with a food network chef we launched the thing i learned how to make you know spicy tuna and like all kinds of stuff and that was the guy who what was your brother's name who bought the bag company dan yeah so if you've seen the episode with dan who dan the bag man where he bought a a paper bag company now and is thriving he was right next to me in the sushi trenches okay so you just kind of the summary of that whole venture restaurants suck as a business you know ten percent operating margins you're working morning afternoon a night you're open on weekends there's no let up hand smelled like to all the time it was just a a brutal business to be in and we literally did every dumb thing you could possibly think of i sort of took a buffet tour of all the possible mistakes you could make in doing a business and then oh my grade for this by the way a for effort but this business was an f and i think in the end we made something like twenty thousand dollars of profit before we voluntarily shut down the business because it was so brutal but if you to look at that in terms of the one year of full time effort that it took us i was making a dollar eighty two an hour so that was my big big profit out of that business how much did it cost to start we got lucky it was gonna cost half a million dollars to build out the restaurant that was a combination of signing the lease and with a personal guarantee by the way which is bad because restaurants fail and you had nothing to guarantee and i had nothing to back it up so it was like you'll be on the hook for this for ten years unless you declare personal bankruptcy and did you have to buy all the equipment you're gotta do the build out all the shit we hired the fancy oh we hired this architect who built the val fedora he was the architect of the vita fedora in vegas and again every dumb mistake you but we thought oh wow he's the best so he should design our restaurant and he came up with this plan that was gonna cost us half a million dollars to build out but i mean that's pretty ridiculous that's like having like the guy who like developed the world trade center to like make your kids background plays that go later like my play structure exactly but we were yeah was so sick we were really we're really just changing the game out here did did you tell that was your bitch we were crossing our areas and dot our ts but that's not what you're supposed to do that's not how those letters look so yeah we were doing everything wrong in in with maximal effort so how much would it cost we ended up luckily this beautiful beautiful man with a beautiful set of hair named john print grass met us and i was like hey guys maybe test your concept before you commit ten years and a personal guarantee to this thing and we were like how do you test a restaurant and so he convinced us to basically do a delivery only restaurant out of a comm kitchen what today is called a cloud kitchen yeah it's very fancy today back then there was no uber eats no door ash and we just looked like bombs who couldn't afford a restaurant and so we tested it that way that's why it actually cost us almost nothing to start and we made twenty thousand dollars of profit and like i don't know one or two months but we also were like this is a trap every day that this succeeds is another day we're gonna be in this business and i just went out i'm only twenty one years old it's not too late i'm still a minor and i don't need to have a life sentence in this business give me out of here alright which we we have to say this really quick every so you gave yourself an f and you said it horrible and you wanna escape we can give examples of every for every type of business and probably everything you're gonna mention i don't you actually did it so for example the chicken tenders guy todd graves who's now like you know the t of americans and it sounds awesome obviously it sounds awesome because it's successful but yeah i'm sure jimmy john's is not like regretting it you know i mean cool he likes it yeah but for us it was not the right business to be so you know i'm giving you a little bit of wisdom so here we go sean the elder now that went with my elder wisdom sean elder says lesson number one your first business is your worst business and that's okay the most important thing of this entire business was just that i started and i kinda got the itch and i kinda got some momentum and i saw man if i can make that much progress with something i knew nothing about then you know the next thing didn't scare me so i think that was the only good thing out of this business which is that you know all success requires a start and it was a start alright number two number two i tried selling bands online then there down that man lives strong i saw the lives strong band trend which for those who don't know lance arm armstrong had these yellow wrist wristband that were like all the rage so what happened everything i did wrong in the first business i was like jerry i'm doing the opposite now and i basically we we well here's what we did we said a forty eight hour time constraint so we said last time we spent nine months planning and researching and planning and researching and no action this time it's all action and so we gave ourselves forty eight hours and i said look i feel like we've been playing dress up as entrepreneurs or just playing in house like my daughter does and instead what we need to do is like do the real thing so i said the rule is i don't care what business we do we gotta launch it and we gotta make a dollar of revenue from a real customer in forty eight hours and that constraint was actually pretty amazing so what did we do we were too dumb to really like do anything fancy online but we're like it's make something online no physical location and i had just discovered alibaba this was now in back in like twenty eleven i was like wow it's amazing you know all the shit we buy comes from china there's a website where the factory is just like online you could go talk to the factory and they will they'll just ship it straight to the customer you don't even need to buy the inventory and basically i stumbled into what is now obviously drop shipping so we did this drop shipping business and in forty eight hours this one is actually a pretty cool idea the the as you can see my website here it says the fat band dot com that was our our website and then it says one inch silicon wristband free shipping as seen on tv so i was just lying this is the huge liar already as i don't even know what tv this would have been on at that time but we we went with as seen on tv and and then we had and this is what was pot at the time you can see what was locked by the the free examples the london twenty twelve olympics were coming up so we thought maybe maybe people wanna wear that and we don't have the license but let's just again if we're already lying why not also steal the next thing was gt do you even know what that is g t l no is it like good get to it or i don't know good fucking mocha i'll give you a guess go ahead go ahead just make something up g t l i god to love i i don't know like this is g t l if you remember the hottest show in the world back in twenty eleven was the jersey shore and they used to say jeep japan laundry oh we were like oh yeah dude jim tan laundry that's the thing and there's a another one them here that says bieber fever something detected you did jim you were tan and you definitely probably weren't doing laundry over three but here's the good news i give this business an a because in the forty eight hours we actually got two orders we made seven hundred and fifty dollars i learned how to make a website i learned how to take payments online learned how to use alibaba and we did it like way faster than everything we had done before so it was like actually way better of a business in two days than the previous year had been for me so i give it an a although i'm pretty sure one of the orders like i did this was my buddy trevor i think he was just like hooking up with one of the girls who ordered and she wanted to get back together with him or something but hey like a dub a dub would take what we can get you know beg can't be choo so sean the elder says he who studies success learns little hue studies failure learns truth i think the real lesson out of this one was basically creativity loves constraints the power of setting a time box constraint if we had said this will be our next big business we would have again spent six months planning it was when we said come hell or high water we're doing it for real we're gonna get revenue in forty eight hours all our ideas then had to like fit in that box and so there's this lie in creativity which is you wanna think outside the box no no what the pro's do is you put yourself in a tight box and then watch how you guy your way out and so that's really what this business grows alright so a lot of people watch and listen to the show because they wanna hear us just tell them exactly what to do when it comes to starting or growing a business and really a lot of people who are listening they have a full time job and they wanna start something on the side a side hustle now a lot of people message sean and and they say alright i wanna start something on the side is this a good idea is that a good idea and again what they're really just say is just give me the ideas well my friends are in luck so my old company the hustle they put together a hundred different side hustle ideas and they have appropriately called it side hustle idea database it's a list of a hundred pretty good ideas frankly i went through them they're awesome and it gives you how to start them how to grow them things like that gives you a little bit of inspiration so check it out it's called the side hustle idea database it's in the description below you'll see the link click it check it out let me know the comments what you think alright next alright i tried to start a biotech company with this billionaire in australia wait how old are you i was twenty two twenty one years old twenty two years old at the time was he like a criminal no he was not a criminal stand up guy not a elizabeth holmes type of person no no he was super legit he had just he wasn't a billionaire actually he had just sold his company for four hundred fifty million dollars and he had a non so he had a lot of money it was his parents company originally so he had a chip on his shoulder he wanted to prove that he could do it so guy had cash a chip on his shoulder and he was non competed out of the business he knew so he had to do something new and biotech sounded really interesting and you were and i was i'm making it sound like you're a dummy but you actually graduated from duke and you were really major yeah you're okay okay it's not like you're just like a dumb commerce bro you i think there was some stupidity in this so i thought i'm a bio major i should do something in bio honestly what you studied in college means very little here it's not like i truly had a passion yeah but you like took a class at least yeah i i i used the wrong heuristic what i really should've have done which was smart was i got around smart people so this guy was a really smart guy and working with him was actually really cool so like that was actually much more important than the biotech link now what did we try to do we tried to create a biotech company where you could take coal that was too deep to mine un mina coal i don't know if you know like ninety percent of the world's coal is un mina too deep too une economic to mine so the idea was there was little microbes that would go down and eat the coal down there and they would like basically far out natural gas you could just collect the gas without mining cool kind of cool idea unproven if it could actually worked i got this opportunity because he was reading our blog he he read our he met my dad and my he asked my dad what he what your kids do and he went and checked out our blog and thought it was cool he thought it was our hustle was cool and it was come the first time that content or building in public like doing a portfolio mattered more than a resume and that is now become like very true in twenty twenty five back then like i didn't intentionally do that but it really worked i failed forward in that way and i used content to kinda create opportunities the second thing that happened was when i got there i realized oh wow i don't know anything about oil and gas industry i don't have no experience and at first i tried to like catch up but how are you gonna catch up to like twenty years of this guy's experience very hard to do and so i had a different idea which was instead of being the worst in the room at the thing they're all good at how do i become the best in the room at something they don't know how to do and so we started me and my buddy trevor we started learning to animate videos to take their ideas and turn it into like a one minute video that they could show their you know investors or their prospects or whatever and they loved it the owner was like oh my video guys yes like because you're making me look cool you have a new power you're got you guys are good with computers and shit so like we found a way to like bring something to the table so rather than like focusing on our disadvantage we try to figure out what's our advantage so i was like a lesson that i you know took forward from that but overall i give this business a see because it didn't really work the business didn't really work and you know i made like a hundred and twenty grand a year as like a job essentially doing this where's he he's still in australia still doing anything thing i haven't talked him like in a long time but i hope he's is doing well lesson earn your spot at the table kinda of the the thing i just said alright making the next billion dollar app so i tried to basically this was a period of life where i tried to make the next billion dollar app and so i was like twelve different apps i tried i tried we made this like club house style app where people would get on and hang out in these rooms and talk all night and it got to four million users and we thought we were doing it this is the next big thing but we couldn't grow from there it just kept it just stayed at four million four million is a big number but a social lap needs like a hundred million so we were playing this like very difficult game and it wasn't really working so i used to use lab and for those listening this was back when martin sc was like in his first up and coming scandal no no he had just gotten out of jail hat i thought no he was on trial because i remember he did lab from the courthouse back home and like in the courthouse he had plea plead the fifth but then he got on lab and just started talking shit and we were like this this was like yeah this was pre prison and he was basically on the up rise in terms of notary notoriety speak as farmer bro that was when the photo of him like sitting back like smoke at a cigar and you could just hop on and talk to him and it was kind of funny it was kinda like the beginning of cell culture a little bit my legacy bobby wasn't it what it was you're right i also tried to build a a beer app or you would check in new beers this is a giant mistake because a i i i didn't even care about craft beer so why am i trying to build something for other people who i even really sounded like scratching my own itch we built a messaging app that got to number three in the worldwide charts i remember above facebook which was kind of incredible but had no retention incredibly viral but no retention i think we got a million users in the first week or something like that and then a month later we had like i don't know ten thousand users like they're were all gone basically what was that one called that was called be messenger so this business i would give a b and our profit was minus eight million dollars of investor capital so we basically were burning something like a million and a half dollars maybe two million dollars for four or five years and that was called was this all under the umbrella of monkey inferno yes so this was you know playing the wrong playing a very hard game i felt like i was running around with a bottle trying to catch lightning since then i have done the exact opposite i now look for the most straightforward businesses that are you know still fun to do but i think have a high high shot of success because i was so scarred from this it's pretty magical experience so you you met we met so many i mean i met them via you but you met many amazing people in silicon valley like you know we told story ten thousand a time to calm app founders were at your office all the time yeah mo and and and ryan hoover and sierra like it was amazing people met amazing people and learned a lot so i my lesson here from shawn elder is i asked the right question i said where can i go that will give me twenty years of experience in the next four i basically took my twenties as a period for adventure and learning and not earning money i remember when i got this job they told me how many shares had they're were like oh yeah you got i think i was making a hundred and twenty k a year when i joined and then they said and it was something like forty thousand a year of stock in the monkey inferno like portfolio and he was about to tell he's like that represents he was about to tell me what percent that was and i had already seen like kind of like i've seen in the tech industry if you join a startup you might earn like one percent or less of the you don't you don't get more than one you get like point four percent point five percent point six percent point two percent of the company and that just sounds like a minute minuscule number but i wanted to go there and treat this like it was my own startup so i remember telling him on the phone i did the like finger to the lips and i was like don't tell me out of how many shares i'd rather not know i wanna work like this is my company i own a hundred percent of this that's how much i'm gonna care and he was like good answer the the benefit that came out of the kinda of the takeaway was i never went and asked for actually that's why i asked one time but i i didn't really go back and ask for more for a while and if you pick the right people to work with they will reward you based on what you're what what value you're actually creating but without you needing to ask and so i went from it turns out i had point four percent at the time then he bought me to ten percent and then over time i got to twenty percent i own twenty percent of the company by the by the end of the of the deal or sorry of that of the thing it didn't end up matter in because of the way the structure of how we sold the company but i did take away that of like you know what just go there try to learn do as best work as you can and like let the chips fall where they may i think that was the right approach alright what do you got now the last business before this is the one where ended up you know actually making money which was that at some point we were like fortnite had just come out and we were like we should write a wave of something that's popular so we took fortnite which was popular and we had this idea which was hey you know how there's youth sports you you know little league baseball youth soccer stuff like that like you know more people play fortnite than play basketball right i was like wow that's kinda crazy like so why isn't there like la league you can join as a as a teenager to play this with other people and have it live streamed and all that stuff like it should be just like youth sports and so we created like our version of youth sports basically and it was an app and then that was and we built the largest high school fortnite league in the country and then we got acquired by twitch and that was the kind of the big win the i turned thirty may you know crossed the million dollar mark made a few million dollars and was like yay this is amazing that ten years of sucking was was worth it and so that's my that's my story there you had so many more interesting like near near misses or near hits so the stripe one was crazy when i was running so i i had a i had a thing a startup up that wasn't working and then we ended up getting like hired and when it wasn't working i went i went and applied to jobs i applied uber i i applied at google and shockingly got like an interview i got one interview i applied it at facebook obviously they didn't call me back i applied at a zero cater an easy catered do you remember those companies yeah they were hot those are really hot at the time these are all the high companies i wanted to be an uber launcher it was called like you go to city city did you would have been so good at that that was a miss on their part yeah screwed yeah the google facebook one i'm like bill i think maybe the the the recruiter did well to like kind of like i don't think you were the fit for that but dude if you worked at uber and you were like a city launcher you would have crushed i think so and so it was it's fun to look back at like all the i i actually the way jack smith one of my best friends i applied at v that's why i met jack i applied at his company and they didn't he didn't hire me the constellation was he's like i'll be your friend yeah we became friends but you didn't hire me so you're an idiot you're good hang wait did jack say why he didn't hire you by the way dude his c cofounder was in charge his c cofounder was like i was like this all knowing kinda of sm guy who's not my friend who's his saying but he was like so you think you're good at sales go around the office right now leave our little room right now and i want you to go and talk to every single person in that room right now and convince them why we should hire you and it was so d meaning and i did it and i did not get it i did i guess i did not convince i had to do the same thing at monkey inferno to get the job today ever tell you this no so they were like okay you clearly don't know anything about technology you're not an engineer you're not a designer you've never worked in tech so like we really like you but we don't really know what the hell you'll do and we all just keep saying like yeah he's it's a real hustle and so can you do some hustle like how would you hustle today to add value to what we're doing so now they're like can you show me that hustle thing and i was like was just sitting in a conference room and i was yeah i got you i was like hey you have this app that you're working on i'm gonna go get your customer feedback like now and they're like hey how are you gonna that was like on my way in i'd flown into san francisco before this but i i was killing time before the interview and there was a burlington c factory if you remember right next to our office and next to next to that was the west field mall i was like there's a mall right they're yeah i was like i'm gonna go to mall so i go to the mall and the guy comes with me and he's like i'm gonna observe and i was like oh my god was this michael does paul waited now the the cto came with me so like the most introverted engineer was like let's see what this guy could do and so i go and i've never done this i'm like i'm can't i don't have a product to sell was like i'm gonna get like feedback i guess and so i was like i'm gonna cold approach like a pickup artist at the mall random people and try to get them to come over this table and give feedback on our app i was how the hell am gotta do this and then i realized the easiest hack i just went to them and i hey i'm a job interview right now and yeah i get the job if i can get people to come over this desk and just give five minutes of feedback would you do that so i get this job and they're like yeah no problem i was that was sucks i was like this is so much better because the first three people i i was like hey have you ever been have you ever had to plan a party and needed to use an online e bike planner like i have a new one coming out in six months and i would love your feedback and they're were like you'd literally get away from me they like give me like aunt annie like a rapper kirito so away please exactly i should have been like the guy in the bathroom who like pulls the paper towel out and hand it to people i would even got me more success than what i was trying so just switching to like dude there's like a camera following me right now and i'm screwed if i don't do this whenever i see reality tv i'm like just say that that works way better and what's my point being my point being is for a lot of people in these situations where the things just not working going to ask for a job a it's normal b it's incredibly modifying because you're like shit supposed to be this guy who has his business i put all my identity into it now i'm applying it feels weird it feels like uncomfortable but we've all done it and you did it in one company that well it just adds the list of screw ups so in twenty eleven or twelve before the monkey for everything i only applied to one other job and it was this company called stripe that i thought was gonna be maybe a good company maybe a good startup and i think it was maybe valued a hundred million or less at the time oh my god it's now almost i don't know what it is now it's a hundred million a hundred billion so so you know i did the math a few years ago and i was like wow my entry level sales type of job would have made me like twenty million dollars if i held and that was then has probably doubled since then so i did what you did i applied to the job i didn't know how to do it was my first job interview ever did not how to do it and i i had a lay up dude because my mentor that guy john turner i mentioned from the sushi thing he was the mentor of the guy hiring me so i asked them i was like y can he put in a word he put it's the strongest word he was like y this guy this kid's amazing yeah hi this kid he's an entrepreneur you're lucky he's even applying for a job he gave me like such a strong and i remember what it was but it was i remember thinking like like lay up like this is like so easy oh my god and that bit me in the ass that attitudes because i got on the call and the guy was like hey you he says great things but i just wanna you know ask you a few questions and i just started bombing the interview and to the point where he gave me the the sort of cell this pan exercise and brother i did not sell that pen you didn't buy that pen that pen stayed in my pocket it did not fly off the shelf what would your answer have what if you look i'm sure you like replayed it in your head at ten thousand times how would you of no i was so traumatized you know i'm like i'm a student of the game of life i love to learn not this one dude i just bury that shit deep down and moved on with life i was like sometimes you just take the l on your soul and you just move on do so i was thinking about this of the day do do you agree with this where you know we we just summarized ten years of your life in thirty eight minutes and we laughed about it but a it's not funny when you're going through it incredibly funny you it feels like you the worst part is you're comparing yourself your friends right and you're like why is this so much easier for them why are they getting this and that and and that like eats you that like you turn green with envy but the second thing is like you do it for ten years and then all of a sudden and like the tenth eleventh to twelfth year you look back and you're like oh it's kinda working and then it feels like slow progress slow progress a little bit better progress than all of a sudden you snap your fingers and it's like holy moly like i've have just grown so much it's it's like i don't know if you ever like when you when you've been getting fit where it's like i feel nothing i feel feel nothing i feel nothing and then eight weeks pass and finally you're like oh man i think i i feel my stomach it definitely feels different today and that's a new baseline and so and so it's guess what i'm getting is it's months or years of hard work at an overnight you feel progress yeah slowly and then out and then all at once so i just gave you i just gave you ten years and i think in truth because i i fast forwarded it through some of the apps we tried to we tried many apps in that like app phase i i think i did twelve different failed companies in the ten years so over twelve ten years brutal in the i'm thirty seven now in the seven years sense i think i've gone like five for five everything has worked right away and i don't know the portfolio of the companies where i own either majority or or a just a huge chunk is probably close to a hundred million in revenue now and i think it's seventy five million in revenue and the feeling is so different not just because it's successful but because like you just it's like a route you know how to drive you just know what potholes to avoid much better still hit some right like it's not like you're your full foolproof but like man the hit rate going from o for twelve to five for five in the last few years is so different it's unbelievable what allowed you to go from five to five and seventy five million in revenue so project selection is the first one alright because i a little think about what i tried a restaurant this like innovative biotechnology that's like a science project i tried creating the next hit app the next billion dollar app the next twitter the next youtube the next facebook like we launched a messenger we launched like a social network we like those are just one in a million type of success ideas so the odds were against me even if i was good at executing and i wasn't i was like bad at executing and then trying these like moonshot things that i really didn't understand what the hell i was getting myself into whereas since then i chose projects that were like way less risky you know like i kind of understood how to do them a high hit rate i just need to execute you know so did an e commerce company i did you know a services business i did it you know we have somewhere dot com it's like a overseas staffing business like every company needs to hire people and i in my own businesses was hiring a ton of people overseas i was like no brainer it was or it was a business i was already working i bought into it and helped grow it right like that's just like a much more proof way to do things so i a project selection was number one stop chasing these like moonshot that if they work you pick a trillion dollars and you get to have a movie about you but most likely are not gonna work so i stop doing that i stop playing to like silicon valley dream the second thing was more action less planning so understanding like what amount of research and planning is helpful and at what point you need action because action produces information and i told you kind of in the first start spent nine months basically in the planning phase and that was a huge mistake we didn't confront reality of the business i remember when you started hampton before you ever announced it you showed me your calendar and we called it the zebra calendar because it was just twenty minute stripes on the on your calendar on your day and it was just calls with founders and you were like personally selling you could have offload loaded that you could have launched the business you could've have done any a number of things but you were like hand to hand combat selling to try to figure out like you know does this is this something people want and what message what version of this what message of this actually like gets me that kinda like real quick yes reaction versus like people just being polite to me so going for action rather than planning and knowing knowing when to use which gear with that second thing and third was just like pay attention to what works get around really smart people and pay attention to what works because success leaves clues do you think okay so you're thirty seven now first of all would you have predicted when did you sell lab vivo twenty nineteen something like that so that was six years twenty maybe six years ago so thirty one ish so let's just say that was six years ago let's round up to forty seven well first of all at thirty or thirty did you think you're gonna be here where you are at thirty seven no way where did you think you're going to be i thought alright i'm gonna earn out this deal you know i get every year we've we vest i was like i'm gonna do two years of that deal which is what i did i did two years of the deal and then i'm gonna go start another company and this time i'm gonna start like you know if this one sold for tens of millions the next one i'm gonna do is it's gonna be a hundreds of millions or billion dollar company i still didn't really understand what to do but the beauty of the situation was because i was earning out my deal i couldn't go start another tech company it would be like they look me mean like what the hell are you doing so i was forced to do things that were dead didn't look competitive that didn't they i i was forced out of my comfort zone so like all i knew was start a tech company raise venture capital type of type of deal and go for the big shot when i was earning out the deal at twitch i couldn't do that so i started this podcast i was like i'll do this for fun and his podcast has turned into a phenomenal business and open up all these doors then doing the podcast taught me about all these other types of businesses that i then went and was able to be like oh that's a great and that's a great way to do a business that require like getting super fucking lucky that doesn't require like being the most competitive you know like most hardcore person like you just do the obvious and it works so like that was one i did a e commerce business because i knew that that would not be seen as competitive you know by by people twitch twitter i was oh it's a there's a business like you know it's kind of like like cute little like physical products selling you know it's like i created a brand right and i don't talk too much about what that brand is on here yet i think i'll bought it probably by the way i i'll do the reveal of that maybe this year you sell prop prosthetic legs is that what it is yes something like that yeah so basically i started doing other types of business not by choice but out of force because i was earning out the deal and i i couldn't do another tech start at the time today's episode has brought you by hubspot because using only twenty percent of your business data is like dating somebody who only text you in emojis first of all that's annoying and second you're missing a lot of the content but that's how most businesses are operators today they're only using twenty percent of their data unless you use hubspot that's when all your emails your call logs your chat messages just to turn into insights to help you grow your business because all that data makes all the difference learn more at hubspot dot com okay next question at forty seven what do you think what do think have you made predictions on where you'll be i think i'm just gonna be doing creative projects i think i'm gonna be writing books and making movies and doing this doing content and i'm gonna just be all in as a creative person and like business will be secondary to me when will that shift happen now was already happened it's already happened yeah so that's i've doing the last year and so like that happened now i would say there's still like some vest of it because i still invest in businesses but i don't run them i don't start them and run them myself that shift is already happened so do you think you're done starting businesses i think so i mean so i've i basically only said like only if something like really just slaps me in the face something that like i can't like i'm not looking for a business to start has been the mode i was in for fifteen years and is that because you feel financially secure or because you feel emotionally secure i don't know like is it because you laid down on the couch for this part i know like no what it is like what i mean is like did you like discover this makes me happy this doesn't make me happy yeah yeah it's that this makes me happy i think i'm better at this i think i'm a b plus entrepreneur but i think i'm a plus at content so like why not i do your a plus thing i think doing content is now like an incredible way to make money so like you know like we make great money here like are you look at other content creators they make a ton of money so it's like you don't have to do a company and then do content on the side like you could just do content as your main thing and make you make all the money you don't worry and the last thing is it's kinda like the test of what would twenty year old me think of dope but i remember thinking this at the time like i think a cool version of a career is like these five five year arc seven year arc type type of chapters where you just go do like really creative endeavors you're like oh i'm gonna like i'm gonna go and try to like do stand up for a few years i'm gonna do i'm gonna go try to make a tv show that i think is cool that version of life if i look back at my resume i'm like either i just kept starting businesses like tech companies and our businesses and i already have more money than i need i made even more money that i didn't need versus like no i started going and trying to make dope stuff like i had the creative challenge of that yeah i actually made that show and i made this musical and i made this book and i that to me seems more of an interesting life and so i'm just more attracted to it i think every not every i think many entrepreneurs go through this period but i mean i've i've i'm i'm in the thing but to where you you you try to get paid you try to feel secure you try to feel accepted you get a little bit of that or maybe get a lot of that and then you go through the phase of what i call the second mountain which is like what else is there you know and that's when you see a lot of people get obsessed with like beautiful things or art in your case content which is basically art or i just like interesting ideas where before you're like ideas ideas are worthless and then you're like i don't know ma'am just talk about ideas that is actually exciting or being around like pretty things that's exciting can i give you an example of someone who i think is is a has dead did both so joe ga friend of the pod one of our one of our our our our guys that we were a big fan of so we started airbnb obviously colossal success you know like grand slam type of six he's the ninety six richest man in america yeah and household name blah blah blah great did that still pretty young right so he's like i you know i'm not like dead no what am gonna do what am i do now and so he was like what's the second mountain so i remember going out to dinner with him once and he was telling me about he was doing that do you even know what he did next after airbnb do you know the next thing he did was at the museum the architecture thing no no no he has a company he has another startup do you know what the ad thing exactly so he created this company i don't know you pronounce this sam or sam sa think sam yeah it's basically there is forty million dollars and i believe what it is is you can spend fifty to a hundred thousand dollars and they will give you an ad meaning a guess house basically in the in your backyard backyard guest house in law unit eighty whatever you call it and beautifully designed because he's a designer so like you know a lot of times these eighty use look very cookie cutter cheap materials like poorly made he made like a really nice one like one you would like adds value to your house aside from whatever rental income you might be able to get it out of it so he creates this company and he's doing it and when we went to dinner i was like dude the product looks awesome i want one of these in my backyard but at the same time like dude why are you doing this you have all the money like you've all the money you'll ever need you made it like why do the grind again because he was like you know having to think about seo again and how do we how do how are we gonna grow this thing and was like oh dude all the pain of doing a company why are you doing that and you know he said something at the time he said you know he said he said a good answer but one the things he said was like you i wanna prove that it wasn't locked i wanna prove that i could do it and i remember in my head i didn't have the guts to say it but i was like man i what a dell answer like there's nobody out there who's like you know what joe you just got lucky like and even if there were people who inside that who cares but do nobody thinks everybody only thinks airbnb is incredible what you guys did is absolutely incredible but he had this kind of like maybe i need to prove it again because what else do i do i i innovation right i i did dive totally i think most people have that feeling i have that feeling so i remember hearing that be like oh man like i wish i could like go into his brain and find that line of code and like have a bug here let me just pick bug fix patch boom you're better now but i you know whatever so he but now what is he doing so he basically is so he did that and somewhere in the middle he got pretty inspired by dough she's friends with elon like all that stuff he goes and he joins the administration and he's he starts with a very simple project which was like the retirement process for government workers was like a six six month to know eighteen month process like you just you couldn't just retire get your papers and move on to life it was like hold on a guy needs to go into this cave and find your paperwork and like it'll be a year and we'll get back to you and so he was like i'm gonna just solve this problem and i'm gonna solve it well but a design a product i'm gonna make the government product stuff work well and somehow that's turned to he's now the chief design officer of the united states of america and i'm like wow what a inspired second mountain like creative endeavor has an impact grand scale so cool like you created a role that didn't even exist but it's so perfect for you you know like he's proud and he's he wants to serve he's proud and he's extremely talented design i'm like that's the type of second mountain that's awesome i think his ad company is cool will be successful i want one of them in my backyard but i just felt like more inspired personally by the kind of the new thing that he's doing more so than when i heard i'm just doing gonna do another business and try to create another billion dollar company yeah well the other thing that he did was there's these famous designers charles and ray ames or ea is it ea you know they make the famous chair the ea james yeah it was a husband and wife couple and they were prolific designers and i think they lived in arizona and they had like their home which was famous and it was full of like their prototype furniture and things like that and i think he also bought all of it and restored it just as a preservation thing and so he's done a he's done a bunch of stuff i i i don't call me i so you guys don't have to google this to get everything right but something like that where he's like preserving history of these two designers and so he's done a bunch of this like second mountain stuff that i think really i i admire i i'm i'm a a very thoughtful guy i really admire like a lot of the way he approaches work and life he's he's a very kind of like principled and thoughtful person and i think i like that because i i find that i'm less principled and thoughtful than i i wish i was and so when you see somebody who's like very on that end of the spectrum it stands out 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 giving 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 in business and in life and for people like you who 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 to change mind and i know it will change yours so check out join hampton dot com i think that this is i personally am i'm quite inspired by this thing that you're saying now i will be extra inspired if you actually follow through on this for a a couple of years because it because it sounds like amazing now and if you follow through on this you will be my hero and the idea being you're kind of in other words saying you're retiring a little bit from business and focused on purely on creative which not entirely true because the creative things you do will make money but you're not like seeking money for money money sake which is what most people do when to go into business and i think that that's really really cool i think it's inspiring and when you say these things you sound a more confident and b more happy than you have in the past does that sound right hundred percent i i have this framework called your last dollar have i told you this is that the one where you have that really cool line of you've already earned the last dollar that you're gonna spend yeah you've already earned the last dollar you're ever you're ever gonna spend so there comes a point because people think about these ideas like i wanna be rich how rich what's rich what's rest to you i wanna be wealthy what's wealthy i wanna be i wanna be financially free free to do what what do you not free to do today maybe you could actually do a lot of those things today i think people are money's is this like very big motivator you're ashamed to talk about it and then you actually don't put a lot of thought into it and man that's just what a shame because it's driving a lot of your decisions i'm gonna ask you a question and you don't don't say a number only say what you comfortable with but like for example for me is i didn't find it as two ways one your your ability to spend three percent of your liquid net worth so if you have ten million dollars you could spend three hundred thousand dollars a year another way i define rich riches your passive income so just from your investments pays for your life so do you have a definition for yourself on what rich is yeah similar so basically i said if i wanna spend half a million dollars a year burn rate which i wasn't when i came up with this number i was spending maybe five times less than but i was just like i talk talk to him other about but what do you spend what do you spend what's kinda like if i went crazy okay no i don't care about boats and planes so don't worry about that side of thing you know but just like give me a sense like i do care about this type of shit and i don't wanna have to worry about this and like for go to disneyland i wanna what's that thing you do where you don't have to wait in line i like that i wanna go to yeah like i just wanna be able to do all that and i don't care about some of these other things for now let's just assume that to be true and i wanted to live in california so i rounded it all the way up and i said i'm spending half million dollars years as my like personal life burn rate what do i need to be making in passive income or the passive gains of my investments to where that's like not an issue at all like as long as my passive earnings are higher than my active burn i'm free yeah i don't have to i don't have to prioritize money and then you apply even some factor on top of that of like safety at cushion big swings whatever and i i came up with a number that was like cool that's the last dollar i ever need to make and actually this came because i met you know other people i an episode of this podcast with my brother love you can go see it at s chop he's a a real estate guy and he's done incredibly well i'm a i was sitting in his like vegas like mega mansion type of thing and you know he had just come home from driving to go see a property he owns and like idaho or something and he drove back and he got back at eleven and then he was like up at six am the next day to like take his kids to school and i was like dude you're really like grinding and he he had this goal of like i wanna you know make all this money and i wanna be able to buy the raiders i wanna do all this these cool dreams right but i was like the truth is and and at one point he was talking about i wanna leave me know my my dad didn't kinda leave me he didn't support me when i wanted to go do this i wanna leave each of my kids like i think he said some crazy like twenty million dollars and i was like dude your kids don't need twenty million dollars when they're twenty one years old to go start a business you'll actually like poison their entrepreneur entrepreneurial career if you do that but like i get the ethos you wanna support your kids i like that okay i i i totally get what you're saying and he wasn't like it's not like he was fixed on those these are things that were bubbling up in his thoughts and i just remember telling them dude you've already earned the last dollar you're ever gonna spend and your kids are ever gonna spend so you're now throwing good hours after bad dollars and that still good me i was like because i'm trading good hours trading energy right yeah life energy right i'm trying good hours for bad dollars so i don't need that dollar has zero utility in my life at this point and so that thoughts there now am i perfect am i a monk have like do i just not invest in things do i not have it's sometimes like oh we could make this no i have that i have that thought i do make investments but so far so good as far as like i'm gonna do projects now where the main criteria cannot be because i think it will be successful or it'll make money it's like i'm only gonna do it because think it's fun and interesting and a challenge to do if i'm actively the one building it working on it that i think that's a massive turn that you've made because i think that like i've known new for this whole time and there was this period of like you wanting to be the man which we all wanted to be the man you know in silicon valley that was like the point of us being there it was like going to hollywood wouldn't and see seem like who's gonna get a role right right and then there was the period of like okay i like have a hit but like i still don't necessarily feel not why am not prominent like you know like why like i i've gotten some wealth but why not king you know or you also see that there's so many more levels and you get on this treadmill which i i think i compare myself to others way more than you and so i'm far more guilty of this of like more more more you know someone says i think it was in the movie wall street where they're like how much is enough and the guy's like oh i know how much is enough it's more that's how much that's how much it's enough but then you come with this other side of it where you're like nope it is i know what it is is enough and i have enough and now i need to pursue like truth and happiness and all this wonderful stuff and i think that's like a beautiful message i think it's an amazing message and i think frankly i think i need to hear it and i think if i need to hear i think so many other people do need to hear because i think i'm far more norm in terms of self comparison or comparison others and gels and all that stuff and so it's very refreshing to hear you say that and you sort of i think your uncle sean s is kinda lame but in this case you are my uncle sean like this is the this is just right to the heart you're you're thirty six you're thirty seven years old but you gotta be at least forty five to be at call okay like you're i'm trying to grow this gray beard no you're you're thirty seven you're still like like you're still like a child too old to be a hot guy i'm too young to be a cool old uncle you're not at what am i supposed to be doing right now yeah you're you're you're in the the awkward middle but in this case i do feel like you are like frankly teaching me i feel i feel like this is a bit of a mentor situation and and for that i i'm very thankful because i do think this is quite magical i think if you're listening to this and i think if you're twenty four years old your think sean you're an idiot what do you know i need to get rich i need to do this you're so fortunate that you get to like what the hell and to that i say go and find it out for yourself but i do think that i have seen you know both of us have seen a lot of wealthy people lot of successful people what you are saying is one hundred percent the best path of like get what you can and then reflect on do you actually need more and pursue what truly makes you happy versus more and more and more and more and more because i'm telling you for a fact that virtually one hundred percent of the people that go down that that route are unhappy things that i'm sure of and things that i'm not sure of here's my list things i'm sure of in your twenties if you're smart and ambitious just prioritize getting around the smartest and most ambitious people you can that you like to hang out with right you're like them to prioritize things that sound more interesting rather than things that sound more likely to succeed and be cool if something gives you a lot of learning and not a lot of earnings because don't worry you got time that's one that's one thing i know about my twenties is that i think is pretty universal advice it wasn't just for me another piece of universal advice i think that's in your you know the early entrepreneur phases is like dude if it it's okay if it takes ten years because you only gotta get rich once and at the time sure i dude i wish it happened earlier and i did not enjoy going over twelve but i did not enjoy that it took ten years but like that's fine to get rich a t actually it was like no problem i actually that that works really well and it's you're very it's very hard to predict if you're gonna get your first business idea to work or get rich in when you're twenty four years old but if you commit and you're gonna iterate and you're gonna be good at learning you will probably get there you you flip your odds from like ten percent chance of success to eighty ninety percent chance of success which is as good as you're gonna get yeah love the timeline is is long enough at least ten years who work exactly so i'm pretty sure of those two things i'm also pretty sure that you should be more thoughtful and more honest with yourself about money and what you're actually gonna prioritize and where if there is ever a stopping point or not a stopping point where you just stop trying stop making money but you stop prioritizing that as like the decision making thing of what what what you're gonna do next with your time and energy so i think people should definitely think more about it i find very few people that are actually thoughtful about this and have done the kind of like the asking themselves enough questions to be clear now will everybody land at the same answer as me no i think there's tons of people who actually want more they're gonna affect change they do wanna own the raiders they do wanna like be a titan and that is the thing that's gonna make them happiest it's just not what it was gonna make me the happiest i had to ask myself like it's like i'd been ordering this burger and it was like y like do i even like pickles like why do i keep ordering this burger with pickles like i actually don't like pickles and get this stuff off and so i had kind of like kinda just borrowed off the shelf goals and getting more clear about like we what actually would be a dope life to me and for me it's this like every five seven years i do a bunch of creative endeavors i make shit i'm gonna go try to like succeed in these different areas the variety is the spice of life type of shit that's me but like that wouldn't be it for someone else so i that part is not universal and like making art is not universal so like you know that part i'd i i wouldn't really put on anybody else i kinda feel bad that i gave you hard time with s i didn't mean that way i was only teasing but i saw wanna i i wanna because because don't worry no offense the the reason i wanna take that wearing a mickey mouse shirt bro no the let me let me i here i i wanna be serious the reason i wanna take that back is basically you wanna get rich go listen to sean's previous episode that was titled how to get rich without getting lucky that's virtually perfect for everyone who has less than a million dollars but if you have more than let's say five hundred thousand dollars if you make more than two hundred thousand dollars a year and you wanna be happy the last the second half of this episode is the number one thing you have to listen to because i'm am going through exactly what you were discussing now and this made me feel better and this has inspired me and so the second half of this episode is probably one of the best things that i think you've said all all year and i i don't know if you made up the second mountain thing or that's a book or something like that i think i've been feeling that way and i heard it via i heard that phrase i think via a book i think there's a book called second mountain which everyone has said is great yeah so i think what what me and you are talking about is second mountain stuff this wouldn't have been the right message for us when we were on our first mountain like you're saying so you know when i was twenty three it was how do i make two thousand dollars per month that's all i need just tell me what to do you know i saw you come to my office and you did a copywriting one day workshop with neville and you guys made ten thousand dollars and i thought i just watched oceans thirteen i thought i saw a man rob the bank and i could not believe what just happened in front of me and i felt like such a loser that sunday that i was like did that guy just came in here and just talked to like thirty people about copywriting it was cool they were happy and he made ten grand for that this saturday and i just looked at myself like you're a little piece of shit if you what are you doing you don't even have then i went he how to do it and taught a copyrighted course and made a decade money you know took ten years but yeah later i was like oh yeah that's a substantial amount more in a weekend so it kinda like became circle but like you're right the first mountain mindset is so different right and it should be it's supposed to be i think oh can i ask you about have you ever met a young person that tries to do all the wise like yoda shit the like i'm already passed success and money and status and i'm like on this and it honestly kinda disgust me i'm like no i'm like can you go get drunk and try to pick up a girl exactly like penny dues you know don't just get you just get to skip all that stuff and be enlightened like you know that comes later you i have this there's a kid who i know that like i like the kid he's awesome and it's i don't know why it's probably a good thing that he's already like wise up but there's something about it that like pisses me off inside and i can't i'm just like dude you can't skip that go be stupid you can't be smart before you're stupid you gotta be stupid before you're smart like there's an order of the universe here and i feel like he's like kind of spitting on that order that way of doing things yeah ma'am i i do meet people like that can we before we leave can i create a new segment real quick called life happens yeah what is it so i wanted to know what you did for halloween did you just was it was a quick life courthouse just thinking did you do halloween and did you dress up and this year and then i also wanted to know i just have this hunch that you are great at halloween and that you've had some epic halloween either traditions or costumes in the past and i just needed to answer that question so what did you do for this halloween this halloween i have a two the a material than a three week old kid and we went to my mother law's apartment building in new york city they probably have four hundred units in the apartment building i wore suspended indoor trick or treating dude it was the bass you go from florida to floor literally we you could hit four hundred houses you know what i mean well fashion and it's like halloween meant to be and it's a very fancy it's a very fancy building and i didn't even have bars hi well yeah it was it was lovely and i didn't have to buy costume i just wore my overalls but no shirt and one one of my cowboy bought you bought that for halloween owned like i already owned it i wore my overalls but no shirt with cowboy how get how'd did you get it to look so used so pre free warren and my little girl was a mermaid and we went from door to door and it just looked fantastic do you have a a philosophy of framework of halloween like for example i have one which is like halloween is about looking cute not looking at realistic so you know i i remember one time somebody dressed up when we were twenty one like we went on a booze cruise halloween and they dressed up as a bush of grapes and there were it was a great costume looked super realistic that balloons all over the body but it was they had such a bad time and i remember just learning that lesson like never never try to be realistic we're gonna be our future it it was hard this year because my wife had just given birth and so she wasn't like we're not gonna do a bunch of creative up but our future costumes are gonna be group costumes and so my wife has big hair and so next year she's said to be slash and i'll be axle rose and like my kids will look like a little rock stars nice but no we're gonna do we do we're gonna do themes because i think they're just darling and we trick or treated in new york city that's how new york kids do it building the building which is absolutely insane do you remember growing up as a kid watching movies of like twelve olds like richie whatever like in the inner city and like they they like oh my god that's crazy i was around those kids it was awesome and my kid is gonna be one of those kids which is just crazy what did you do we dressed up were astronauts which is the first first good good year in a while because my wife does the matching thing and she always like stiff me with like your yeah my daughter wants to be elsa so you're like kristoff off i'm like who the hell is kristoff or like you know you're like you're olaf and i'm just a giant like snowman man it's i don't wanna do all this so i've been getting screwed lately this year was better but i oh i dodged a bullet i gotta gotta lie dodge bullet so i was gonna come over the costume and i was like you know what my i'll do fire man this year my kid loves fire trucks he wanted to be a truck i was like oh you could be the truck and i'll be the you know semi sexy fire and i was like i'm gonna do that and i'm so glad i didn't do it because you know why when we were out we bumped into by kids friends from soccer and their dads are one dad is a fire man and then the other kid's dad is a police officer actually and they wore cut their suits no but but like he he was he wasn't even dressed up because he's like a man i don't do this and i was like if i had dressed up as a little goofy fire man and i met this real fire man who's a friend i was like that's like the biggest l i could have took just man to man that's the biggest l you could take i gonna dress up as like the loser version of you the why version of you i saw because like if he dressed up as a podcast and jumped and met bumped into me i'd be like oh that's cool it's i saw this was the pod by the way i hope he hears this dude also that guy you may be a cop and thanks for your service you may be a fire minute thank you for your service but if you address that come on bra like that's lame i saw the video or i saw a photo of what your wife gave to your children like a gift basket like a like they woke up one morning they had like a presents she's a good mom great she goes over the top man she's on top of it that was wild yeah does she she does up for every holiday doesn't she yeah she does that look that looked like it took like eight hours yes she like just sacrifice like full nights to sleep like pulls an all night and gives them something and her you know she loves arts and crafts anyways it's like you know it's not like it's terrible for her but she just wants them to have these like kinda like magical moments and like like the spirit of holidays which growing up i didn't have which kind of explains why i also don't feel the same way she does about holidays so and your eldest is just now old enough for where she's probably oh no your your your middle is old enough now he's probably like understanding traditions oh yeah yeah they they they get it they like it they anticipated it they're excited for it so it's it works they that's awesome alright well great a wholesome episode well by the way we're about to enter elf from the shelf season so like which is it's like what's the thing called for navy seal buds this is like my wife's version of buds trainer what buds hell week through hell month for her i will never do elf on the shelf i i it's so we are a wise and smart individual telling me and of course it's easier easy for me to say now let's see if i actually stick with it but you're telling me that this elf is supposed to be watching the children at all times big brother you know let's just call it pound here that's what it's gonna be it's i'm just gonna car on the shelf yeah carpet the shelf peter t in the house he knows exactly what you did better be contra this year yeah fuck on the elf on the she country or consensus is the new naughty nice i just want a little like a little dollar of of peter t and it just you click a button and it like says well well like oh it comes with the authentic starter that's a credible well well you yeah alright that's it that's the pod i feel like got could rude wear i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a go less travel never looking back hey let's take a quick break i wanna tell you about a podcast that you could check out it is called the science of scaling by mark robe he was the founding ceo of hubspot and he's a guest lecturer at harvard business school the guy smart and he sits down every week with different sales leaders from cool companies like cla and van and open and he's asking about their strategies their tactics and how they're growing their companies as you know head of sales or chief revenue officer if you're looking at to scale the company up if you're a cro or a head of sales just look at a level up in your career i think a podcast like this could be great for you listen to the science of scaling wherever you get your podcast

alright everyone in this podcast we talk a lot about the successes but i wanna talk about the failure so here's about ten different companies that i started before i made my first million almost all of them they sucked it didn't work but i'm gonna to explain how much i made for each idea and the lesson that i learned 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 travel alright what's up sam what's going on let's set this up name of this podcast my first when did you make your first million so cash like cash million i made it when my wife worked at airbnb and it went public and right that that's only made our first and then about three months later i think it went later in december my company sold in february and then we made a lot leading up to that we were doing pretty good too but i don't think we had crossed one million okay so you made your first million let's call it thirty one years old here's all the businesses you tried before that before making your first million which i think is pretty fascinating i wanna go down this list it does it start in high school yeah alright go go far give me number one in high squad made twenty five hundred dollars one summer by buying graduating seniors old sports equipment and selling it on ebay and so what i used to do is i would just buy like people's like track spikes or you know whatever and i would sell it on ebay and i'll most time that i didn't buy it they would just give it to me they're handed it to me and right on eb ebay i made twenty five hundred dollars so that was my first business where i actually started making online money and this is flipping basically this is flipping assets that other people not only value they might even to not value to the point where they're happy you took it off their hands yeah and frankly i did this in college too which i didn't list here is when at the end of the college here i would i would stay a few weeks after the end of the school year and when people were moving out i said i have a storage unit you'd come in put it here and just give it me you're gonna throw it away just give it to and then i and i would resell it exact i saw people doing this in college with textbooks they would just say oh at the end of the year you don't wanna take all these heavy textbooks home you're done with that class well guess what the next semester there's bunch people that are gonna need that exact textbook though we're happy to buy it at use and so they would just go buy up people's tech they would just take people's textbooks and they each book was like you know a forty or fifty dollar you know future sale that they were able to pick up for free okay and then at twenty i started a hotdog dog stand whichever everyone makes fun of me if for talking about you i have a hot dog stand you have a sushi restaurant there's sick of us talking about it but i had one called southern sam so we as big as a baby's arm basically i knew a guy named doc who had a hot dog stand he let me rent it from him with very little money up front i had i was able to pay him on the t as opposed to the first the month so he hooked me up and with five hundred dollars i went to restaurant depot and i bought a bunch of vienna sausages to get my supply and i was in business baby within a week of having this idea and i used to live in a bad neighborhood ride dell was my next store neighbor and he became my best friend he had served twenty years in prison for attempted murder and somehow we became best friend he had the he had the spare key to my house this was my guy and ride dell ended up working with me at southern sam's and we spent all day outside and it was a pain than the butt some days i would make fifty bucks other days i would go to a a concert or like an outdoor place that was popping and i would make a thousand dollars and i did that when i was about twenty or twenty one this is summer in college or what were you doing i was in college i was in class and so i would work until three pm i would go to classes from three pm into eight pm and then i had a night session where i was out by all the bars and that would be like a nine pm to like one am that's amazing how did you have the idea to do the hotdog stand you just saw somebody else doing it i met a guy who had a car and i wanted to do something yeah did he tell you like i'm making three hundred bucks a night or something but would it saw the video online of a guys like how much money the home depot hot dog guys make they make one hundred thousand dollars a year the ad said and you were like in i was a man i was i was broke i i had by phd poor hard and driven i was would you do this again this one no man it was so hard it was so hard not now but like if you're were nineteen twenty and you needed to i learned how to sell so well man this is what inspired me in the copywriting i realized that you had to like wheel and deal a little bit you had a sc you had a flirt you had to do this and then i realized what if i could do this on the internet where i could write something one time and have an infinite amount of people come and read it and didn't have to sell constantly didn't have to stand there in the heat and didn't have to stand on the heat i will post a photo here i had these horrible i mean look at me i'm like the widest guy ever i had these horrible sunburn that when i took my tank top off it still looked like i was wearing a shirt just a white like peter there there's this there's this tweet tweet that's been going viral that's so they said flirt with everyone flirt with flirt with women flirt with men flirt with old people flirt kids just flirt with everybody it's non sexual but literally just be the most playful charming person you could be at all times like practice this muscle and i actually think this is a hundred percent true i know a couple people in my life that are like this i'm not really like that but i've been starting to do it just for fun just it's a little mini game you know when you're just living a pretty routine life you're just go to the grocery store it's either gonna be a forget experience or you try something to make it a little more fun i been doing this and it's kind of amazing know what i call you know i'll be able say nonchalant be be don't be nonchalant be as hell yeah be try hard i i emailed my wealth manager at morgan stanley and i was like hey i made this trade and it like there's was like a commission of like a hundred something bucks at the end of it like the trade i was like is there like a magic button you got over there man like you got this magic button a push that makes all those fees go okay and that was what i sent with you the private wealth manager and he goes he just replied magic button pushed trades commissions reversed enjoy your trading and i was like just flirt it with everybody yeah like i could've have been annoying karen i could've just i could've just took it done nothing i could've have been a karen complaining just flirt a little bit and everybody likes to be flirt with so my next business after that i started this thing basically in tennessee at the time white whiskey which it's called moons moonshot moons moonshot technically means illegal whiskey but there is these companies making whiskey that wasn't a mason jar and it they called it moons moonshot and i started selling that online and i thought i was doing it the right way because i kinda like googled it and i talked to like a lawyer where i was like selling it as a novelty because it was kind of like a gift item i did that for about two or three months and then i went to my universities like entrepreneurship program with ed free legal advice and i was like hey i've made ten grand and like the last like you know thirty days or something selling this whiskey online i think i'm following the right rules but is there anything else i need to be doing and they're like yeah brother you gotta you better shut that down tonight and so that was like my second internet business which inspired me to get into the game of the internet and my lesson learned on that one was if you're gonna do something like this you better really do it right and you better pick something that aligns with your values around this time i was still drinking and i didn't even like alcohol i mean you know i had a love hate relationship and i like why am gonna start selling i i don't wanna do this is stupid anyway but you're gonna see there's a pattern it was definitely like a quick money which i think everyone who becomes a good entrepreneur they they do the gray hat gray hat area phase and this was my gray hat phase okay i like it you started it online did you learn about online marketing through this like were you i mean how'd you how'd you get the ten k where'd you where'd did you get your customers from i posted on forums like motorcycle forums like so basically like this is a whiskey that i was selling people were already searching for it because got drink drive of course that should've have been the name that people were already searching for this whiskey but it was very early and so i was able to rank super easily on google and i posted on message boards forms of people who wanting who people who wanted it and that's why i made money nice alright so a lot of people watch and listen to the show because they wanna hear us just tell them exactly what to do when it comes to starting or growing a business and really a lot of people who are listening they have a full time job and they wanna start something on the side a side hustle now a lot of people message sean and i and they say alright i wanna start something on the side is this a good idea is that a good idea and again what they're really just say is just give me the ideas well my friends they're in luck so my old company the hustle they put together a hundred different side hustle ideas and they have appropriately called it the side hustle idea database it's a list of a hundred pretty good ideas frankly i went through them they're awesome and it gives you how to start them how to grow them things like that gives you a little bit of inspiration so check it out it's called the side hustle idea database it's in the description below you'll see the link click it check it out let me know the comments what you think okay so now you moved to san francisco i think you you don't you just do like a cross country motorcycle ride to get san francisco as well i do it at a later date but this time i flew out there because i had a job offer at airbnb which got res scented when i got there because i'd lied on my resume about getting a dui ui and so i was out there i'm like what the hell am i gonna do i gotta meet people and so i sort a thing called the anti nba book club and i tried monetizing it but i couldn't really at first and so what i did was i posted ads on craigslist and on reddit and i think i posted on facebook and i got two thousand people to sign up but here was the premise it was called the anti nba because i was very en of stanford students in berkeley students i was very en that they had this network and said i'm gonna read it one book per month we're gonna break it up into a quarter so a week a week a week a week and i'm gonna find an expert on that books topic and we're gonna come and discuss it with that expert i'll organize and get the expert you come it's free and i got twenty one hundred people to sign up to my emailing list and i had about twenty people show up every single week some of those people include ci who's now one of my best friends is one of your close buddies neville who's now who is the best man my wedding came from matt and so was my best friends came to the anti nba book club and if and i posted a photo if you zoom in on the top left of the photo you're gonna see a ski ball machine i found an r arcade that let me host the book clubs for free in that place as long as we play ski ball and you were reading books now what kind of books were you reading in this is this like were the books actually useful for you in business or was selling white whiskey the right way to learn business i don't remember everything we read but it was like it was like tim ferris book the four hour workweek week so you know how like you wanna like if i was a tech techie i would've have built like club house or something actually cool but i didn't have like anyone discuss these books that i wanted to read but it was kind of a forcing function because i was like like i need to get good at business i better like get educated what i could do is i can get these people come to this book club and i'll just read one week in advance and take really good notes and i'll sort of teach it because when you do a book by the way and no one reads a book just the one guy who runs organize organizing it and so i was just going to organize it organize and talk about it okay what came next okay and then around that same time when i moved to san francisco i met a guy who had an idea for a room roommate matching app and i was like hey i don't have anything to do may i please join you and so i previously had a pickup truck in nashville where i live i sold it i had roughly five thousand dollars he had a little bit of money we put it together and we started with this idea called a bunk and the idea with bunk was it was a roommate matching party website and so we went to landlords who had two three four five bedrooms and we would say we're gonna post an ad on craigslist and we're gonna advertise this three bedroom as a one bedroom apartment meaning instead of a three thousand dollars three bedroom we're gonna advertise it as a one thousand dollar one bedroom and we're gonna get a hundred people who are interested and we're gonna host parties to help them team up and move into this apartment and potentially other apartments sounded interesting and it was somewhat interesting couldn't figure out how to monetize it roommate matching apps are one of like four businesses that every just graduated college kid tries to start that's one of them it doesn't really work so we got aqua hired roughly nine months later which basically meant we got a job and we got some bonus money if we like accomplish a couple things but what we did do that was interesting and i was not able to do this i was definitely like the marketing guy but we turned that idea into tinder for roommates and that was really dumb because most people when we launch when we got we actually got tens of thousands of people to sign up for via these infographics that i link to that we made but most people or many people who were using it we're just meeting it to date we shouldn't have just done tinder for tinder would have been way smarter and so that didn't really work out okay so i think that to win in business you gotta have essentially three components the first component is you need to have a money making skill meaning you have to have something that drives value this is either gonna be learning the sell learning to make things learning to hunt down interesting deals right you you know you need a money making skill what was your money making skill you were developing during all these across all these different little projects copywriting and also just like ten but like getting after it but copy routing was the the one in marketing marketing right learning to sell in your case learning through sell learning to sell through getting website traffic and getting the web visitor to do what i wanted them to do cool the second thing is you gotta learn to be sort of ten and scrappy which comes not as a thing you want to do but as a thing you are forced to do because you really have no other choice but once you find that gear you now know you have it that's how i would describe it is that accurate because it sounds like it's what happened in your case too nobody wants to be scrappy to be clear right like feel the option to not have to tough it out you would probably have taken that but when you're forced to do it you learn okay i have this sort of animal inside i can do this and now i'm gonna use this and everything else thing i do whereas somebody who doesn't know if they could do that they're hesitant to go for it yeah and what's funny about that ten or sorry being scrappy is there's this chart where basically like you you start that way and you don't like it and then you like kinda get some a little bit of fancy but then once you already are fancy or successful you realize you should always be scrappy you know what i mean there's like a reason that like amazon has like the pizza roll where it's like you don't have a team of people that are like four people because small scrappy teams do significantly better in in many cases than bigger teams and so yeah so when we when we met it's actually hilarious if you had just taken a picture of both of our offices and you had said which of these two guys is a successful entrepreneur my office was like a museum you had a dude if you walked up to sean's office i'm not exaggerating you in san francisco we led by yosemite in the redwood trees they're huge you could drive use a cut a hole in it and drive a car through it sean's office as it as if they made a like a coffee coaster for your cup out of a redwood tree and it was the size of like eighteen feet long it was like a eighteen foot in diameter circle that was like a probably a half a million dollar table it was we had four stories we had an entire apartment built in with heated bathroom floors so if you needed to stay the night you could sleep there every every wall was made of one way one way mirrors so you could like see out but they couldn't see in jeff we had a chef there every single day we had a masse on fridays we had open bar so every friday we had so all these things it's a full it's a thirty thousand square foot office decorated by ken folk one of the fanciest designers in the world and that was my office i remember sam came over one time and he picked up of the ash which nobody smokes inside i don't know why we have an ash it's like illegal to do that and he picked up the ash flipped it over and he goes this is a seven hundred dollar ash because the sticker was still on it and i was like i don't know what to tell you i i don't know what i don't know what i'm doing here and i stole it it's like that the titanic got built and then they just plucked like a twenty three year old idiot and they're you drive and i was just driving that that company into the ground and you had this like half an office it was like literally like somebody's apartment it was an apartment that was seven hundred dollars means and have shared it yeah like like the bathroom didn't have a door like you just had to be like hey i'm taking a shit but like yeah was like it was like the craziest scenario even was just sitting over there he doesn't even part of your company just like another guy was just there and like the the the the wall like the there was everything was so strange like nothing made any sense you like didn't have wifi and you're were building this internet company and yeah you actually were the one who was building something successful and they at that period of our lives like you were actually onto to something and i was sitting here just like you know making things that nobody wanted and so you know your scrap was well deserved at that time and and and earned you some good things i had to go through my scrappy period at a different time so the third thing i would say so one was the ten side developing that scrappy mentality and being willing to be at the bottom and like survive at the bottom two is the money making scale and three is project selection so starting to figure out like almost through process of elimination what are all the bad businesses that you should not be in i was in the elimination phase for sure yeah you eliminated like hey i probably don't want one where i'm standing outside in the heat selling hot dogs because i'm gonna be capped at like how long i can stand outside in the heat that's probably not a good idea right so manual labor is not scalable you know another one that you did was like illegal business was like oh great lot of people want this moons shine but like it's only gonna go the bigger it gets the more likely i am to to go to prison fail and go to prison so that's probably not a good project to select so you are going through process of elimination project collection and so you go through this roommate matching app you're making apps now that's already better if i say like what's the sam park criteria now after that after doing all ten of these things what is a good project to be in for you i believe an ic guy which is like what's the world want what's the world pay for what am i good at and what i'm passionate that and i try to find that in the middle but i my goal and mean okay so that's like the woo stuff that i totally believe in but then the other side is can i get something can i bootstrap it to a hundred million in revenue in ten years okay but can i up it so there has to be some something you're answering underneath that that's like saying you know what my strategy and chest is check mate right like okay yeah i get it but how do you get there exactly so what do you look for that's gonna be a thing you can boot bootstrap so are you looking for i can see that somebody has done a similar thing in another space that i can recreate or apply over here seemed like though the hustle was very much that way yeah the news newsletter right you looked at the scam you looked at a couple of others you were like oh i get what they're doing and i could do that just in my way yeah so i like to i i call like a forgotten business so there's a lot of these businesses that i haven't even talked about on m mfa but basically like there's a bunch of businesses like hampton that are doing hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars a year in profit and what i tend to do when i look for mean hampton by only cup that's what might be doing for a very long time but before i started i research and i go and talk to the owners and i do diligence and i thought of it this way but then when ai started coming in play it really solidify it which is like somebody that can't be disrupted easily i also like looking at things that serious operators don't take serious because i think that there's less competition so like with the hustle people laughed at me when we started it but i was like well if do the math i definitely can get to a hundred million in revenue and i sold before i got there but austin reef who founded morning brew he only sold part of the business and still kept running it and they're in the eighty or ninety million revenue i think range now so like the math was right so i look for things that can be real opportunities but the baller aren't taking it serious yeah what charlie mu says the secret success is weak competition and so if i was to say from a afar i've known you for i don't know how long ago i know you twelve kilometers years long time three obama's and what i would say is i've noticed that what one thing you do really well is you're very good at sniffing out interesting things in spaces where other people are not not even looking which is you mostly just following your curiosity and taste but you go and you do a lot of research you do you come across nonchalant but you're pretty fucking s about the research i'm very you go you go really detailed you could meet them you like talk to the bankers you talked to a lot of people in a space to get a real like i a real idea of like what those companies look like and because i wanna eliminate the uncertainty like okay so entrepreneurship i've been thinking about this the reason i i i think entrepreneurship is almost philosophical to me and a lot of people is because entrepreneurship is sort of like how much uncertainty and fear can you take and still continue moving forward because entrepreneurship is basically like you work on the same thing for six twelve eighteen sometimes twenty four months and you're like i'd still see barely any progress is this going to work and right the price that you're paying for potentially a big outcome or potentially if for building a business or potentially being free it could take five or ten years and the ones who win are the ones who can handle that on certainty for a long period of time that is what entrepreneurship is ultimately in my opinion it's dealing with uncertainty and dealing with fear you have fear over hiring someone when you only have thirty thousand dollars in your bank you have remember when my first employee had a kid and i was like i like i had a kid i felt so much fear now this really has to sustain itself you have fear over finding your first customer and thinking i am promised one thing now i really have to work my butt off to like make it work out for them you have fear over getting hate and people making fun of them and so the name of the game of entrepreneurship is just can you handle the fear and can you handle what's worse is the uncertainty over potentially five or ten years beautifully said mon had a good addition to this what you said understand the difference between risk and uncertainty so he was talking about it with the stock market he goes basically the stock market stock market investors hate uncertainty like if they don't know whether your earnings are going gonna be good or bad they will just sort of assume bad right like you guys get a huge discount for uncertainty but it's not the same thing as actual risk and you know risk is like you know what do you have to lose uncertainty is just not knowing what's going to happen and so people think that entrepreneurs take a lot of risk but i i actually think that you are a good example of what most entrepreneurs really do which is their actual risk minimize it's like how do i win while taking the least amount of risk necessary to win i'm not trying to take risks i'm not trying to take unnecessary i'm trying to vaporize risk everywhere i can and whatever's is left fine i'm willing to live with what's left and he he tells the story of richard branson so he says branson is seen is this like free wheel guns mister risk type of guy partly because of his look is brand etcetera goes when branson started his airline which is a very what people would think is a very risky business to be in most airlines fail even today most of airlines don't even make any money the the airlines at it that existed very razor thin margins and when he started virgin he called up i think it was british airways and he was trying to get one plane so he was like hey do you have like whatever a seven forty seven and they were they were telling them no we don't just give out we're not gonna sell you random guy on the phone like he called the customer support we we don't sell you a seven forty seventies days can you connect me to the person who does sell some like we don't sell some seven he's like alright do you guys have extra capacity of seven forty seven so you're not currently in in using your fleet they're like yeah we do he goes okay well would you lease one to me and basically he started virgin by leasing the plane not buying the plane which reduced risk he released it and he was only on the hook for the payments like a like if sixty or ninety days later but he was already gonna pre sell the tickets for the flights like the airline business works where you sell the tickets before you end up paying for the for the plane and the fuel and all the the actual cost of operating it and so he realized like actually well what's the worst case that that happens i just give them the plane back like that's all i'm on the hook to do is give them the plane back if i can't follow through on my commitment but if i can get it to work i will know ahead of time because i sell the tickets up upfront so it's actually a very like risk reduction approach to doing what other you'll see is taking massive risk and i would say you're the same way where when i've seen you go into a business you're looking to reduce risk everywhere possible so you're like do does another business like this already exist and work so i know that there's demand and i know the business model works can i apply it into this space where there's not a lot of competition or there's weak competition there's not a lot of other really smart super geniuses running around san francisco trying to do what i'm doing cool that's a way of reducing risk a third way of reducing risk because you try to bootstrap you don't take on external investment you try to do it where i can start this with pretty much no money so what do i have to lose just my time i'm not actually gonna be in the hole if i if the if this goes wrong that's another way that you reduce risk and the fourth one is can i use basically my copywriting skills to attract demand before i have to fulfill the service i would sell sponsorships before yeah i sold sponsorships i went sell to but yes i i would i would pre sell as much as possible right and so you know and you would do bunch of research to reduce risk you would talk to the bankers to figure out you know what works in these businesses you talk to the x ceos the ex employees to understand what works what doesn't work in this business and so i think you're a master risk reducer and so when somebody sees the business that you do they all sound kind of random but i would say like where you've come to i think at the end is you've figured out your money making skill you figured out how to be ten niche and scrappy and then lastly you've gotten better at project selection and and ultimately we'll we'll use sort of risk reduction method to pick a project that you think is there's like kind of a i wouldn't say slam dunk but like you're not hoping for this sort of one and one and a hundred outcome it's kinda like i have to fumble execution for this to fan today today's episode has brought you by hubspot because you're using only twenty percent of your business data is like dating somebody who only take you in emojis first of all that's annoying and second you're missing a lot of the content but that's how most businesses are operators today they're only using twenty percent of their data unless you use hubspot that's when all your emails your call logs your chat messages to turn into insights to help you grow your business because all that data makes all the difference learn more at hubspot dot com you should hold your breath still on saying i had good project selection because in twenty fifteen i started a business called itch juice a poison ivy treatment scratch your on as they say so stupid so there was this like type of lotion that mechanics use it was like a called a greens scrub i forget exactly who it it's called but it it turns out it was also had the same ingredients as poison ivy treatment and i bought in bulk like like a like a barrel that you would you would have at a mechanic shop and it was like twenty cents an ounce but that as poison ivy treatment it sold for like twenty dollars an ounce and i realized i could rank high on google so i was got i got in the poison ivy treatment business and i learned the same thing there or that i learned in the alcohol business which was and this this did this was starting to make money which is like do these short little get rich quick schemes that you jump into without like doing the e guy preparation of like what am i actually passionate about they're stupid so i learned that one i feel like i was a lawyer who just stood up and told the jury my client is innocent and then at the very end you were like i did it by the way yeah it's like oh i told you just don't say anything now i think i did good at selecting new so i got rid of that and then i started ten years ago i i think that the i have the same story where it took ten years for me to even figure out what a good business is dude i don't know how like i read about these prod who do who like are so mature when they're like twenty six twenty seven and i just i'm like am i was i just like slow to develop like when i see some of these smart twenty six twenty seven year olds i just speak to myself i still don't behave that way and i'm ten years older lower than that so i don't like when i was twenty six and twenty seven like i i didn't know anything i knew nothing and i actually thought this way about you and i was like he's right stuff on a whiteboard and he's got these like frameworks way of thinking i don't think it frameworks i just like do yeah while i was sitting there being like why am i just on a whiteboard this guy's out there just doing it i gotta do what this guy's is doing it it took it took me ten years to even figure out at at all what the hell is going on ten years and ten years you could say that look i said that in ten seconds it took me ten years watch that was so quick when you're in it ten years is like an eternity especially because you don't even know that if i knew by the way it'll take me ten years but i'll figure it out it would have felt so much better at the time it's like the tunnel is still dark and i don't even know where if and when the tunnel ends and i don't know how much like time i've got left to get there so it feels much worse on the moment so if anybody is out there who's in there kinda ten year tenure doing dumb stuff arc you know i feel you it's it's it's normal it still works just keep going so lewis and clark it's like one of my favorite stories ever but they basically they were sent out starting saint louis thomas jefferson was like hey louis hey clark do me a favor just walk in that direction and tell me to it end and what's it look like and what's on the end and they just go and back then obviously phones didn't exist males mailed didn't exist they were just walk around and they didn't know where they're going exactly and it took him two years so imagine that imagine sending someone off on a trip or two years and having no idea like what's going on if they're ever going to come back and that's why entrepreneurship kinda feels like it could've took two years it creates took five years who knows we're just gonna go in that direction and i pray and i hope that we're gonna find something that's like what the uncertainty feels like yeah exactly and every year you're like now i know now and then then you say that again the next year like oh well last year we were so so dumb but this year now we haven't figured it out and it takes a certain amount of self delusion to not be like hey man listen you said that three times already and now do i really believe you this time and so you need you need dilution i think actually that's also why you gotta move to san francisco is because you'll be surrounded by success stories and you'll see them and be like okay cool guy's is not special i could do it if you could it i do it and also everybody around you is similarly diluted which really helps because you sort of brain yourselves into this mode where you're gonna keep going keep taking shots and that that's a normal rational thing to do even though it's a completely abnormal irrational thing to do i think it's one of the biggest benefits of coming just to silicon valley can i read off a just a a few tiny ones so i did a thing called called the f disco taxi where we dressed up in disco outfits with a and we gave rides home for people on new just like before lyft yeah before it left maybe like i really had lyft figured out yeah yeah i tinder or two under two yeah we made eight hundred dollars that by i did a copywriting class but neville we actually hosted it at your office i think we each made ten thousand dollars maybe made ten thousand dollars total and then another couple failures i bought some real estate and i learned that basically the way you make real estate is through doing the most due diligence upfront and looking at tons and tons and tons of property because you make your money when you buy and that is not my skill set and then of course i had the hustle the hustle started as a conference then to a blog then to a newsletter which worked we launched this thing called trends which was a fairly successful thing and then we expanded our events business events businesses horrible the way that we did it horrible we had hundreds or thousands of people coming to each event way better to go after smaller groups and charging a lot more but back then i couldn't even imagine the idea of someone being willing to spend two or three or four or five thousand dollars per ticket to a trade show and i wish i would have figured that out yeah so me and tyler the ceo of came up with a little challenge for you it's the newsletter challenge now if you know me you know that i'm a big fan a newsletters i got my own newsletter i also had a business that was a newsletter business that was amazing i wrote this newsletter about crypto we grew it to quarter million subscribers and we ended up selling it after a year for millions of dollars and i want you to be able to do the same thing in your business so we're doing a challenge ten grand is on the line plus me and tyler will actually be in your corner as growth advisors you would just need to go to bee hyped dot com slash m and you either start a new newsletter or you move your current newsletter over there and five finalist will get picked pitch me and tyler sort like shark tank and the winner gets ten grand so go to b dot com slash m m that's speed dot com slash m m to enter the challenge today and then this podcast turned out to be a business we didn't really realize it you know i def i i started it hello and i didn't i definitely didn't think of it as a business did you join i still don't think we thought of it as a business for what the first two or three years for the first nine months i'm almost certain it made zero dollars right no i had a sponsor somewhere there i mean round down to zero yes like yeah like talk ten twenty grand so i posted this photo i wanna i want people to like understand this so sean came up with the podcast i think in july and then i think i joined him in september so he did a a a bunch alone and then i joined him later on i think sometime in december so we're talking six months in lance armstrong for some reason read the hustle and i became friendly acquaintances with him he wanted to use my office where sean and i were recording the podcast and so he came that day when sean and i recording because he messaged me saying i need to use an office to for a meeting can i use this and i said yeah we pull him into the podcast as we're recording and i posted this photo of me lance and sean sitting there and we only have two microphones and enter chairs and two chairs and sean chairs like sean like sitting on like the arm of my chair and during the and during the episode what john wants to talk he has to like lead it to reach my microphone and then another episode we had someone like we had a guest call it it was like a digital guest it was mean and sean in real life not a guest for some reason one of us didn't have airpods and so we just like shared an airpods like what each had one in our ear and i think we were recording on an iphone like it was so jan even six months into it yeah which is funny too because it's not even like these are the early days of podcasting it's like pretty late in the game of podcasting someone to be go and i look at those old chairs that we use we pick these chairs because there is a podcast at the time called fighter in the kid and they use these bright red chairs the brightest red chairs that we figured they use it so it sticks out on a thumbnail which i don't even know if we did youtube at the time but we wanted those chairs and it is just a hilarious looking set honestly it got to be pretty cool one when we were in person together it was pretty amazing i it we could be doing that oh was so good it would be the best it would be the best it was so much fun and we had like a we ran to a best buy and bought like a video camera and and we had an in intern record us and the shot is just you and i like it's dead on you and i talking and the guys that we were copying was theo von and bread shop who obviously theo von theo von now but back then he was like a cameo like he came in as a cameo for the other podcast podcasts yeah good times it feels nostalgic going through this stuff doesn't it because you are with me for most of it or a lot of it but doesn't this this is kinda fun to like look back and like it's crazy this the stuff that we've done yes i mean when you're in it you just kept wanna get out of it so bad right oh god i just want something to work anything is this gonna work i really hope this thing works and i just wanted to get out of it so bad and then now you're right you know you look back and i've really never had as much fun since as i did on the come up like to come up what's really it was a lot more i don't know high variance or just like unpredictable and like crazy stuff happen and it was fun things that i would never make the time to do now like you're never gonna go do sam's f disco now you're never gonna go do the hotdog stand now but actually those are pretty fun like kinda of random projects great stories great photos great like memories of trying to pull it off that you were at the time you know too dumb to know it was dumb and now unfortunately you know you sort of have the curse of knowledge the the the further you go where you're less likely to go try random dumb things that might actually have high you know high high upside or high fun or high memories you know that they come at the end of it i we have a lot of like young guys sitting to this who are in their twenties enjoy it man it was it was such a blast it doesn't feel that way but i would say with a high degree of certainty if you do the same thing or you try really hard for ten years and keep taking risk you and i sean have dozens of friends from that same era and we have seen dozens of them like many many many of them succeed not always like total toll runs but we have many of those but a lot of base hits a lot of doubles a lot of life changing businesses have been built and it's so exciting to like look back and be like it works you just gotta get it it is i mean it it sounds corny but the the truth is at the time you think your success is about how hard you're working and maybe your idea or your team or your execution of the the individual thing and that's true like at the project level but at a personal level the only thing that's gonna determine your success is basically your rate of learning how quickly are you figuring things out are you adapting and learning and getting better at your next shot than you were your last shot it's that rule of a hundred right like do a hundred try a hundred times and each time try to make one thing better if you do that is success is pretty much inevitable but at the time you don't think like that at the time you don't really realize that but looking back that's very much the case i'm sure there's some people who have a a way to get there a lot faster you know for both of you and i took ten years because was sort of through process of elimination got rid of most of the dumb things you did do one thing differently than i think most you'll did you'd never made the mistake of building something nobody wanted which is the maybe the main mistake i idea i had a bunch of things that the business sounds great on paper if it works it's gonna be huge but nobody even wants the thing to begin with seed you that you don't you die on the launch pad whereas you made the opposite everything you made people wanted whether it was hot dogs whiskey whether it was like you know a way to get rid of their itch whatever it was you know you you had a way you you always made something that people wanted sometimes the business model was broken or the scalability was broken but i feel like you did the you did one thing really well which is you never made the the cardinal sin which i would say most entrepreneurs make which is do something that sounds good on paper but nobody actually wants to think you're making gainer you spend all your energy trying to convince them why they're wrong and while you're right and actually no they just don't want it they don't need you know what's funny i looking back i i like for example the hustle i think we are at a hundred thousands subscribers in year one and then i think it was five hundred and year two and then a million and three something like that and that sounds lovely it didn't feel like it at the time it still felt like i was pushing a rock up a hill and so you're saying i made things that people wanted looking back i agree but when you're going through it like i remember ryan hoover launched product hunt and people were talking about his product way more than like my product and i was like that that's what product market looks like not mine i've never experience that what the hell and i look back at it and i did have it and so some of these things when you're in the thick of it you have to really work hard to try to come up with these lessons in this like at the time and you have to like sit by yourself to come up with these lessons in the time because there has been so many things looking back i'm like had i only done this i would have had so much more i would have worked so much better but i didn't learn those lessons in the process so for example i used to think that it i was like i wanna become a big company so i have to act corporate now i know you wanna act small as as long as you can or if you have something that is growing at like fifty percent a year don't mess with it that's a great growth rate whereas if you see other people or i saw all the people at time growing significantly faster but but but they ended up like dying and blew up but i was like i wanna grow that fast what the hell and i'm looking back i'm like no no was that was a rocket that was fantastic that was great it was bootstrap was it was beautiful i think that that i heard this line that basically says vc is like rocket fuel and you know who deserves rocket fuel rockets not fast cars not cool cars not cars that you love rockets and the thing about rockets is most of them blow up and don't go anywhere a cool car a great car car you love that could be an amazing life and it could actually get to the destination eventually but it might go a little bit slower and i thought that was of insult to me i said but i wanna rocket it and i wanted to work nonsense i wanted a car and i wish i would have like had the the confidence back then and learned that lesson that that was the way alright so that sam story made his first million at thirty one but instead of focusing on how we did it which we've talked about before it's the you know i know ten fifteen things he tried before that the stumbles and fumble on the way to success i'm gonna do my we'll do one next episode i'll do my i'll do my version of that where i tell you all the terrible terrible ideas that i had going up to finally making it i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put my all in it like a days off on a less travel never looking back hey let's take a quick break i wanna tell you about a podcast that you could check out it is called the science of scaling by mark robe he was the founding ser of hubspot and he's a guest lecturer at harvard business school the guy smart and he sits down every week with different sales leaders from cool companies like cla y and van and open ai and he's asking about their strategies their tactics and how they're growing their companies as you know head of sales or chief revenue officer if you're looking at to scale company up if you're a cro or a head of sales just look at a level up in your career i think a podcast like this could be great for you listen to the science of scaling wherever you get your podcast

highest returns on capital we get as entrepreneurs is talent like full stop where else do you get ten x twenty x hundred x return so reliably if i'm thinking from the like i really have to fill this role angle it's like usually not the right person if i'm thinking like how don't even care a role for this person i have to get then it's usually the right person once you get to like five million in revenue that's what you have to become as a collector of people it's pattern recognition but especially when it comes to talent you have to grow fast and i do think that's a virtuous cycle the fast you grow the more where tell you get which grows you faster and so it can also be vicious in the other direction it's mostly vicious in the other direction yeah yeah yeah i'm hiring for about six or seven rolls what mistakes you think i'll likely make like if somebody comes in as a c level exec and has no network of people that they've worked within in the past that's weird who have you hired recently that is significantly better than you or has taught you something who takes you to school this is something that i can only say now with fourteen years of business experience which is i feel like i could rude where i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a less travel i just like i think you sean does this as well use think in frameworks i don't think like that at all that does not come naturally to me and whenever i hear you or we have a mutual friend ryan dice and ryan was like you he he was like make me feel like a jerk he was like you don't think in frameworks like how do you learn something and then think how you're gonna teach it to your team or whatever and i'm like i don't know man i'm like a ne thought like i just kinda like float by life sometimes times and i just like i don't like reflect and think in a framework but you do that i think frameworks happen when you have to re teach or reuse the same thought process over and over again and so rather than arriving the same decision set you create a framework to give yourself mental shorthand and so i think it's just like like i i i created the scaling what like you at the implementation workshop like the mo six or whatever it's like more metrics market model money and then our i model there's you know four off shoots and then finally manpower so it's like these are the six reasons that people get limited in their business right and that was because i had to think like okay i have done so many q and a calls there has to be there is a decision treat like it might be more complex than i thought it was but there is a decision tree that i'm going through and so just actually crystal that and so you you totally thinking in frame you just haven't documented them that's my that's my two cents that's my opinion well like you had this cool like i've been watching your i think i told you the day i was watching your content not on tactics of making money but on tactics of leadership and management and you had this cool thing called the diamond yeah that's great it was like basically for the listener it was like if you have an employee who's not doing what you want them to do they're either they don't know what you want done they don't know how to do it they weren't motivated or they don't know i think when they you wanna it done yeah or they're still blocking them yeah and when you come up with something like that is that something that you make up or do you read other books and you steal like like cool bits of inspiration and you repurpose them for your need so honest truth i really don't read as much as i probably should almost all my stuff just comes from like me doing it and then saying man there's gotta be an easy way to describe this if i happen to come along some sort of you know if there's some coincidence i see that as cooperation of an idea but yeah no i i really don't consume anyone else's this stuff for for like inspiration i like i have enough shit going on every day have tons of stuff to talk about and so yeah now the the management document was like alright fundamentally people don't do stuff for a reason i have to figure out what that reason is and if there's way that i can a framework that i can have for this conversation that makes it less like how do i not attack the person right rather than say like you are least piece of shit it's like that's as unlikely to be productive and also probably not the real cause of why they're not doing things because most people do prefer to stay employed and also prefer to you know do a good job i think by and large and so it's like if if we take that to be true and i want them as seed instead do today they're like what's getting in the way here it's like well i didn't communicate that i wanted them to do this thing okay well that's on me i didn't tell like i told them but then they're like cool i don't know how to do that that's a training issue okay you know they they they didn't know there was a deadline associated with it's a win problem right and then it's like okay well they knew when to do it they knew how to do it and then knew that i wanted them to do it then it's like okay well then is there something blocking them now the motivation one of like they're not motivated to is like technically correct but it's the last one that i'll go to because most times people are relatively motivated to do now i mind you there's definitely times when that's just not the case right or the how component has a more generalized skill that someone doesn't have so i'll i'll i'll say differently like if in order to do a role there's my position is like you've probably heard like attitude versus aptitude and that used to bug me a lot because i was like well i can't always be what it is right because it's really just that's there's there's a efficiency and someone's skill set to enter an organization to do a role and so we wanna hire for the small skill deficiency if you're hiring for what people consider low skill labor so if you run an air airbnb b need maids or you have a yogurt chop and you need to have people who do you know clean the counter and like check people out that's very low skill technically but in terms of hiring you're gonna hire for attitude not aptitude and that's just because the amount of skills required to train someone on attitude far outweigh the skills it takes to take somebody who's already friendly knows how to show up on time can smile say hello makes chi chat teach them how to use a cash register and clean thing could take like two hours like it's not a lot of training in order to do that role and so it doesn't make sense to hire someone for aptitude like i've i've worked a cash register before but i'm am a dick it's like well that's not gonna be very like i'm gonna have to train it not be a dick it's not worth it on the flip side if you wanna have the number one ai researcher in the world if that guy's a bit of a dick then you could probably work with him on being a little bit you know better at communicating with the team you're not gonna take the person who was you know the yogurt yogurt store cashier register assuming they take note you know they're not on the side doing all this stuff and make them they're want ai researcher and so it's like we always just oh should at least in my opinion hire for the person with the small skill deficiency and then we have to ask the question is the business owner given that skilled efficiency is it worth us or worth our resources to train them and so i i take the business decision that i think at every skill is train it's just is it worth training like are there other people i get higher returns on in which case great i'll use them and that for me is fundamentally like why i would say that over my career the biggest change in terms of my hiring practices is i i hire far more for general intelligence now the intelligence will allow someone to bridge the skill gap faster and so it's a return on resources for where they are versus where they need to be whether it's a quote attitude issue or quote hard skills issue but i see soft skills and hard skills is just skills wanna you know hard skills are easy easy to define and measure soft skills are just hard to define and measure but they still are def and measurable and so i want somebody as high intelligence because i define intelligence as rate of learning and so if i can get someone who has a high rate of learning versus somebody else maybe that person starts a little bit behind but in six months they're gonna pass the other person who might have experience and so again it all depends on like what the timeline is if i take a toddler i can get them to be an adult in eighteen years would be perfect but i know if i have eighteen years to wait and so you know that's that's kind of my general rubric when when you're hiring for smart people how do you figure out their smart really good question i think the quality so couple of things so the the the quality of the questions that they ask let's go deep each one so the quality of questions that they ask okay what's a high quality question so if someone said hey i noticed that you guys have this media brand here and you have this advisory practice here what's revenue retention around that is there's another vehicle that you guys have considered that you know isn't in the pipeline right now i'd be like wow that demonstrated that they did a fair amount of research and they were able to take a complex stop between these two things and and asked me about it so like that's a great question whereas if someone says like you know what's the five year vision of the company i honestly think there's a bad question i just see that it's like kind of a generic and if few questions someone one might ask and if that's not already answer online which you know the the the pros and cons of our situation similar to you is that a lot of my stuff is public and so i expect somebody to come in with better than generic questions because i've already answered generic question public hey everyone really quick if you're enjoying this episode on ceo stuff so del having hard conversations with your team hiring then i've got something for you so the team at hubspot they actually went and put together a bunch best practices that sean and i use in our own companies and they put it together in something that's really easy to read and understand and so if you wanna just save yourself ten years of headache and heartache then you should check it out i wish we had this long time ago or to help me a lot but there should be a qr code on your screen that you can scan or a link of the description so check it out it's totally free and totally awesome okay and so what was the second one oh when they d a problem that they're solving in terms of what they're thinking so i mean this is this to be fair this isn't like my invention but like in the consulting world people do cases for a reason right they wanna hear how like okay if i need how many you know how many ping pong ball sit on a seven forty seven right this is a common question they would ask in you know a college if interview not because they care about the answer they care about how you think through getting the answer answers that demonstrates a level of horsepower and so for us i would say a practice that dot com we use is posted our higher level and leadership roles is we actually instead of presenting them hypothetical quote cases we actually present them with the real cases and so you know worst case we get free consulting best case we get somebody who is capable of implementing that solution that they just came up with and so if they can use frameworks that i wasn't aware of i've experiences that i'm not aware those things will come out in that you know complex you know issue that we're dealing with but it's also at least like way more interesting of an interview for me because now like they're solving my problem so i'm like way more engaged so does that mean that like the hiring manager or maybe you would have someone at the company has like a generic description of the company and what some of the numbers are and maybe they're like fake numbers even and then each role will have a specific problem that you need help solving for at the company and they get like a google doc like a two pager in advance and it's like prepare your thoughts send it to me in advance i'm gonna read it and then we're gonna have a discussion about it so i'll differentiate this by level of role and type and so i'm talking because right now i'm like knee deep in like c level like interview so it's like what i'm thinking with right now if we're trying to hire an editor or a salesperson those are roles that are super repeated and as a result have incredibly structured you know interview processes and whatnot and so for those like for a salesperson for example it's like we're going to send a script to every candidate that we wanna invite to a group interview first and so they're gonna get the script ahead of time and we wanna hear them do you know a a one minute two minute sound bite of the script so if they if they didn't even take the the time to like go through a a few times like they're gonna sound horrible so immediately either they don't have the skill and they don't have the work ethic of either way we can weed those people out and we can tell within a couple of minutes so we don't need to waste a thirty minute call and somebody who wants to be a salesperson we can have ten people on the call one or two minutes and we can find out if someone's got a little bit of game from there it's like okay then we'll say hey you mess this thing up tweak it try it again when we do that we could just see how coach they are how much ego they have and how quickly they can learn intelligence i actually read a book that you suggested the guy who found hubspot sales team wrote that book and i where you do the same thing here and in the book he actually says that iq is the is the number one he was like charisma is important but it's not the most important thing it's ability to learn quickly and i think part of that also because like they were selling to business owners and you know so do we and most most of our portfolios is b2b to and so like if if if if a salesperson is being like out gun consistently by you know the people that they're getting on the phone with people on the phone feel like they're talking to somebody in idiot and can't actually help them solve their problem and so yeah i think general intelligence is such an important part but like honestly it's it started there but like i just sit across the organization like show me exceptional organizations that employee dumb people like it's i mean there are some but especially in the in the in the work that we type that we do b to b and higher level you need horsepower so in terms of intelligence like rate of learning and we can actually demonstrate them learning on a small level and that works same thing with editors we follow a very similar process here's some raw footage send us a clip back with your edit we can look at just the final output and that allows us to be more objective about like some people don't present well but that doesn't mean they're bad editors and i think like interviewing itself is a skill just like anything else and i don't need somebody's of these great interview i need somebody's these great editing right and so trying to pull that apart and something that bayless taught me that's been really helpful like for me lately has been she's like some people are incredibly smart but are not very good at communicating and depending on the role they might not have as much need for that level of communication and so that's where it gets a little bit more nuanced but i wanted the other way around like i've actually talked to people that are very charming and they communicate wonderfully and i'm like i can't fall victim to this you're actually idiot i don't think you know what you're doing i've hired these people before what was it there was a it was a like always go for an ugly surgeon or something like that but yeah there's some there's some razor that i i just wanted to put my my little claim out there which is like i by no means claim that we are a perfect at hiring or anything like that which just like everybody we take our lick but i would say the hardest ones are always leadership because you have fewer like you might appreciate this whenever i whenever i go to room of entrepreneurs i say hey who here is on more than is is on their second business or beyond and like almost the whole room race of their hands i'm like okay cool now of those of you who are on your second business and beyond who here your current business grew way faster or past your first businesses and like almost the entire room race of their hands and i always think like so why is that and so i think that at the most basic level it's pattern recognition but especially when it comes to talent and so like if you think about building like to say a million dollar business it's like first you have us you have some marketing function you have some sales function you have some delivery function you know whatever you know across the board and for the first time ever when as soon as you know maybe a million maybe it's three million a or whatever it is like it's not you anymore like somebody else has to do some of this stuff and so you you get your first pattern recognition of like oh this is somebody who can do some advertisers this is some person who can do some sales this is the person who can do some low level management this is person who can do some you know some delivery or whatever and so and you basically keep struggling and keep plateau at that level until you find that one person who's like competent and then you're like oh my god you could do the job this is amazing and then the business grows until that next level you know that next train and so then across the board by department one by one it's like you have these six month twelve month periods where you go through interviews and interviews and hiring and onboarding just to see if this person's confident and then whenever they're not you're like i have to start over again and then the business basically stays where it's at and so i think that i think the the the more experience we've had on each of these roles of like this is what you know a sdr looks like this what sdr manager looks like this is what a closure looks like this is what a senior closure looks like this is what a closing manager looks like this is what this is what a a a director of sales looks like this what a vp of sales looks like like it took me time to learn each of these levels and a obviously do that across departments but then after that point when you guard these new the new businesses you after you're not even building the business you're just assembling it yeah and that's becomes that's that's actually quite frustrating not frustrating but it's a hard lesson to learn because after if we gotta to generalize it at my guess is somewhere around five million or maybe like a million a year in profit or maybe half a million year profit honestly like there's this i i grew up go to catholic school and there's this like one of the most famous scenes of the bible is like jesus telling peter's is like you are you're no longer a fisherman you're gonna come and work with me and you're gonna be a fisher of men and i think like once you get to like five million in revenue that's what you have to become as a collector of people and that is jarring right because that's not typically why i love people love start their businesses but norton makes up to grow past five million i don't know where that number is gonna be but you start just having to collect human beings no it's the game and and i think a lot of is just a pattern recognition around behavior traits and skills where you have to just say like oh i know what this vp i know what like i had a vp of sales they were awesome what does this person look like here i also think and this is something that like i can only say now with like i guess fourteen years of business experience i'm just beginning to to reap this which is the snowball of talent which is like if you've had multiple businesses and you've had good outcomes and you treated people well over an extended period of time some people start following you from thing to thing right and then you start to have this core team that just like they're like they're good like and then when you do the next thing like they're all with you and i think that like i i don't know but i would imagine that in twenty more years like the team of talent of those people who just prefer to operate the way we operate and like like the culture that we have and like each other it's more like like if somebody comes in as a as a c level exec and has no network of people that they've worked with in the past i'm like that's weird like you don't have anyone from all the past roles who you've worked with through either a you think is a stud which is weird that you don't think anyone in stud or alternatively you think they were stub but they don't wanna come to like your new thing because you're not a good leader and so that's a great like litmus test in terms of like how good of a leader is this person is like who do they have in there in their black book because we need to build out this function quickly and i'm expecting you to bring some of that table who have you hired recently that is significantly better than you or has taught you something because you're in the role now where you have to do all the talking and a lot of the teaching for your audience and at your workshops and with the companies that you work with who takes you to school sharon s trans when your president he's so knowledgeable on the i mean he's so knowledgeable in a lot of different things but like you know he said two he said two plus billion dollar companies and so obviously acquisition is you know the third that you know we're shooting for depending on you know when we have our third party validation but basically it's like the bigger the company gets i feel like the better he gets you know what i mean like the more in his wheelhouse he is in terms of like data pipelines infrastructure real time dashboards how can we like how can how can finance get weaponized i would say that leila like shrunk so good at the finance function and understanding just like just tax ramifications entity structure like just a lot of the things that i you know for me my my my acumen is on like do we let people know about it do we get them to get us money for it how do we make sure that they really like it and tell their friends like that has been basically the core of my skill set does that is the is the last thing you said there is that product yeah yeah exactly and then but like everything outside of that is definitely not what i would say like my core core like leila is so good at that like a lot of what we're were talking about there is me somewhat relaying leila you know like or you know leila layla is mo around people and people in talent but sean is so good at like enterprise are structuring just like a lot just a lot of the things that you know a public ceo would be good at and that's and that's what he comes from but he's also was like and i would say like from an observation personally like the true a a a talent one they're not employees they are partners and they see themselves as partners and if you don't see them as partners then they are not a a plus you know how do you treat a partner differently than an employee like how would i know if i have a partner well i think if you go to them because you're not sure what to do and they're giving you advice to me that's a partner if you're constantly directing them and saying this is what we're gonna do this is what we're gonna do there's nothing wrong with that but they're not a thought partner and i also use that as a great litmus test for like the true level executives that we have is like do i want to talk to this person about this complex problem if i don't seek their advice then it means that i don't see them as a value add and so then they're not like they're they're not super central which is not good but yeah so i think that and then the other piece and this is something again i feel like i've i've learned more recently so i'm super deep in sea level stuff right now but it's clouds to dirt so vertically integrated full stack skill sets and so like i think like the best sales leaders can go like they can hop on the phone and get a cold lead to book an appointment from an sdr str level all the way to building sales strategy of like which starts to merge into marketing right it's like what what kind of messaging you when you look at kind of avatars have the highest likelihood to buying our stuff how can we weave that into our process and our scripting how can we you know cut our training time and onboarding new rep like they're really thinking about the sales organization but they can also do almost every job and i just have yet to find like truly exceptional people that aren't full staff today's zip episode has brought you by hubspot because using only twenty percent of your business data is like dating somebody who only you in emojis first of all that's annoying and second you're missing a lot of the content but that's how most businesses are operators today they're only using twenty percent of their data unless you use hubspot that's when all your emails your call logs your chat messages to turn into insights to help you grow your business because all that data makes all the difference learn more at hubspot dot com so you right now because of your size you're competing and and i'm in the type of person you need you're competing with a lot you're in a very competitive industry in terms of talent yeah yeah and so i i imagine you're competing against some of the ai guys you're competing against a lot of tech companies and the value and pete t and the value that they provide i had a guess is just lots and lots of money which i think you have the ability to do that yeah we pay but they also have the ability to offer like equity for this like lottery ticket maybe i don't know what else but i'm sure there's many things that they offer that you can't what do you have to offer to them other than market rate or above market rate money yeah it's growth and impact like if you were to ask everybody in the company acquisition come with the number one thing that they come forward its growth like they like none of those companies are grow like not none a lot of those companies aren't growing at the rate that we're growing and so there's so much career advancement and opportunity we very merit bureaucratic and so like anyone can come here and move up independent of age you know even even independent of tenure like we had a guy who came here ninety days ago and got a very large promotion after coming in at a pretty high role already just because he demonstrated he was great we're like great we have this opening we think you'd be the best fit and the growth is the the revenue of the company which then means you pull people up higher rolls yep then basically in order to attract a plus talent you have to you have to grow fast yeah i mean yeah yeah you have to grow fast and i do think that's a virtuous cycle which is like the faster you grow the more tell it you get which grows you faster and so like it can also be vicious in the other direction it's mostly vicious in the other direction yeah yeah shit you're shrinking and you have no money to give people yeah gets it gets but you are like a lot of businesses are like growing only twenty or twenty percent of a i know something like yeah fine but mediocre number and it's like where do they start if they don't have growth in order not growth in terms of just the money to pay people but growth in order to impress the right people to join them i think it all depends on what like the opportunity and the level of like the pool that you're competing against you know like if you are an ai true ai you know company you know it is super competitive on the flip side though like if someone's gonna start a new division for us i can just say like i can guarantee you demand not a lot of people can do that and so like it's not a question of whether this will work or not is it's is this the best use of the demand that we have and so it becomes an opportunity cost question but a lot of people in some ways it's like it's less risky to come to ac q because we have so much demand and there's just there's so much opportunity that's basically it like if you're working for jimmy said you know use a different brand like mister beast like he has virtually a limitless demand and so if if if he's like hey can you help me spin up whatever pick pick random thing if if mister beast was gonna say hey let's start an umbrella brand it doesn't mean like he for sure will sell umbrellas it's just not the best use of his resources right and so it's like we need somebody who can come in and recognize the best vehicle for for the demand that we have and then be able to obviously execute it on it but a lot of people don't have that like built in guaranteed you know they just don't have that and so that becomes actually significantly risk despite you know what other quote perks might exist and so it's like you've guaranteed demand you basically guaranteed growth as as as fast as you can grow we can grow and that's and we also still pay exceptionally well and so with without you know those three put things put together we can get very very good talent and there's also people that are just very mission driven like we have a lot of people who come in and are like i've consumed stuff for years and i saw the the recruiter reached out to me and i was stoked and that that was it like there's just in some ways it's like you know private equity number seventeen it's like they're all it's almost it's just comm commodity like the their business is monetize it's just not that interesting and so they have to compete on price and so their price is their comp whereas if you have a value proposition like what's the what's the grand slam offer from an employee perspective rather than a grand slam offer from a product perspective because it's still the exact same process of acquiring talent as it is to acquire customers it's just a reverse funnel what mistakes do you think most people make when it comes to hiring oh man or maybe you could say maybe it's answer it differently i'm hiring at about six or seven rolls what mistakes you think i'll i'll likely make what what's the role or what us from the roles yeah so we could say what's like a really a salesperson what's a that's a simple one but i'm hiring other roles so i'm hiring chapter leads so we have thirteen chapters that we my business is based in and we're having hiring people to manage each chapter i mean the easy answer is settling but it's so tough because there's there's trades because these things don't exist outside of time you know it's like i have to fill this role and i wanna find somebody especially if obviously for us at the level because that's what's top mind for me it's like i have to have somebody that when i'm on the phone with them i'm thinking i have to have this person and if i don't have that but i'm like man i really need this role and so if if i'm thinking from the like i really have to fill this role angle it's like usually not the right person if i'm thinking like i'd even care if ever a role for this person i have to get them in it's usually the right person are you willing to pay them more than you originally thought was would be yes a hundred percent not i have a question have you ever have you ever been like i gotta come up with enough money like i hope i can get enough sales to afford this person be but i have to have them i haven't had the second part because we're a super cash positive company so like that hasn't been a problem i mean fundamentally as long as i can just pencil out the roi of the role then yeah i'll do it i mean it's just a return on capital what's what what's your desired return though amazing oh yeah well it's like i mean it's i so google sheets allow you to put amazing in equal it's amazing mindset i think i think the highest returns on capital we get as entrepreneurs as talent like full stock like what where else do you get ten x twenty x you know returns hundred x returns and and and can do so reliably like talent is one of those places you can do it i will also say that typically the higher up the org the higher the arbitrage are you fast we continue to get faster i'll say that i think we get faster i would say that our firing practices do somewhat rely on the constraint so like sometimes you know label says this but like some fires aren't aren't kitchen fires they're like the the the trash and the driveway on fire it's like it's a problem like we'll get to it but it's not the thing that's limiting the business and so if we have somebody who's not as good as they should be but they're not to roll this right now like limiting the company it's probably not gonna be our first priority to to to to take them out but as soon as that becomes the constraint then it like quickly gets under and then it gets handled have you ever followed day port bart support yeah yeah like you know he's quirky right he's crazy he one of his jokes but it's out of joke he's like i don't fire people he's like i just i don't wanna fire people and if they're a loser i'll just keep paying them and they're gonna sit the corner and be a loser but i don't fire anyone and i kinda thought that was hilarious it's funny because he's a content company and he gave a content out of it and get roi out of like just based front of someone who wants a fire but i was like shocked that that would be his take on it because they seemed like a pretty brutal guy not brutal guy but it seems like very blunt and he has no problem firing people and he was like i do i suck at it i don't like the confrontation i don't like people feeling bad it's so i just don't do it i rather lose money and when i asked you about firing i thought that you're were gonna be like yeah like i fire fast but i sensed a small bit in your voice where it sounded like potentially you were slow to fire because maybe i'm i'm i'm reading too much into your sentiment or your total of voice but it was like i just don't like it well don't think anybody likes it i think we're we're fast if it is the constraint of the business and clearly that person is the one limiting us like we will not sacrifice the company's growth and the opportunity of all the people who've trusted us with their careers to to not have a you know a a comfortable conversation there's also levels of this and so like let's say there's like you know red yellow green right if someone's like well green they're great fonts so basically jet maybe like a yellow orange red as she's as the three levels for me like if somebody's just not doesn't have the complete confidence but it's not like they can still do their job but they're not doing it as well as they should and they're definitely not gonna grow and they can't take on new opportunities then that's to me is like a yellow if they're like for sure like they can't actually do their their their role right now that's an orange if red is like you can't do the role right now and that thing is required for us to grow and so that's that's kinda like i would say like it's it's a combination of like what is the business need and how incompetent is the person and so the rates of firing i think would depend on both those things obviously we wanna like in a perfect world we get everyone out who's not a fit as soon as humanly possible it's just that sometimes some people do turn it around with good feedback and coaching and that probably happens half the time like i guess asking myself a question like why do i feel bad about making this decision and then trying to make sure that i'm not acting in the global bad for local good like local versus global like i think about that as like my way of trying to break through that like terrible feeling you have and like i have to let this person go say well i don't i'm choosing short term comfort over over a long term discomfort and i think most of life can be boiled down to people doing that over and over again guys they take the local win they take the short term win for the global loss it's like if you do that enough times you get a global a global catastrophe and so that's what i try to avoid and i just put the the greater good as the frame as my like little my little sp for spiritual armor if you will of going into it knowing that like this person might could upset and this might even you know dramatically inconvenience this person's life in the short term but like i owe to the other zillion people who also have put their you know their careers their their their lives in in you know my hands to a degree from a decision making process like i owe it to them and so that's what kinda gets me over the hump to pull the trigger faster the founders podcast super heard that by david sen yeah it's awesome i love it and i love reading biographies of like historical entrepreneurs and a common thing that i get from the founders podcast is patience and basically like doing something for decades that's another thing that i've gotten from your content which is like things take a long time they take longer than you think it's gonna be harder than you think and i believe that to be true but then also i see people like you and if you go to your youtube i think on every description it was like age twenty six i was here age twenty seven i was here age and i'm like i don't think he was very patient that that doesn't read that that that doesn't read like a patient person because i think you if i remember correctly i'm just making this up i think you've started acquisition dot com at something like the age of thirty one and then by like thirty three or thirty four you had the seminar business that you guys do and it was probably doing many tens a million probably eight figures mid eight figures in business and very profitable and i'm like well that doesn't seem like something that was mean that was pretty fast how do you talk about being patient all the time but you're moving at a a wicked a wicked pace and getting results quickly i think the patience is relative to the outcome that you're going for and so like if you if you're trying to climb everest right your rate of ascension in terms of altitude is gonna be significantly faster than somebody who's trying to climb a foot the percentage growth might might be the same though and so a patient person might be willing to grow at one two three four percent per year towards their ultimate everest but just that four percent of everest is significantly faster than four percent of a foot and so the absolute difference will be different but the relative difference which is like what i'm quote measuring myself against is where i feel patient and i think that's where the whole macro you know macro speed sorry macro patients micro speed is is super like we still need we still have deadlines so still move the ball forward but still to act the urgency we still have to ask the question like what would it take in order to do this in half the time would it take for us to do this in a fist of the time and can we do that let's do that and i think i honestly see a lot of the job of the manager or the driver or the operator depending what term you wanna use as doing that which is just consistently pulling like pulling the future forward faster and like when you're having you know even at the tactical level like you're having a team meeting and you say hey when we can get that done by they will give you a date and then like the fall like you know level one manager level zero manager doesn't ask when they're when there's one the deadline is a level one manager would be like we're just accept the deadline like a level two manager would be like well what else do you have that's blocking you right now from getting that done and they might say we'll these three things and at that point they i might say well this is more important in those things so do this first and then with that new knowledge what is your new deadline and they might say like okay instead of end of week i can get it you know two days earlier than that it's like okay how many actual hours do you think this work will take and they might say like think it'll probably take four hours and it's like okay well it's noon now so why is in not four o'clock today right and i think somebody who's willing to continue to ask this questions and they're like well i could do it you know today and i just wanted to give myself some time it's like well why right and so i think that's that consistent pulling forward and the thing is like it's almost like many confrontational conversations that i think are required in order to move an entire organization at break next speed i mean i look at you elon a lot you know as i asked you know inspiration from a business perspective and you know all of his competitors talk about that just like the man sense of urgency that that he carries and i think a lot of it is that it's just like consistently challenging like what would it take and is it worth us doing like is it worth it for what it would take if the answer is yes then let's do it and a lot of people kind of like they make their decisions within their frame or their realm of reality when that's not based on anything besides their own con some arbitrary comment of what they think it should take i've always been like curious as to how people get to that level because like for example i was a a track athlete in high school in college and i remember thinking in high school on the shit because all i was so much better than like everyone else and then you like get around division guys and you're like oh my god like i'm i'm a i've nothing like there so many levels and and then you like get risen up to that level now or you don't or you get hurt and you just don't you're like oh i'm just i'm not good enough and then when i'm hanging out with guys like you or when i think of elon musk who have these like super intense things like i'll read something you put out you're like i wanna get a new lead i called them in sixty seconds and if i can't do that i hire someone and her full time job is calling someone in sixty seconds and i'm like that makes so much sense why did i think that calling someone in fifteen minutes was adequate and this is just a really small example but then it goes all the way up to like building rockets you know where it's like oh i'm not i'm not gonna leave the warehouse for three weeks so how do you think that people get their standards to be raised to this like extreme level like were you around other extreme people and you're like oh my gosh there's so much more to do that's now the standard or do you think that some people are just born extreme and and they they just get there and they bring others to that level i i think it's probably a nature and nurture question and it's to be clear i don't know the answer this is just my two sense i've always been a really intense person like my my father my whole upbringing used to always say like balanced he's like you're so unbalanced you're so unbalanced because like as soon as i'd find something i would just wanna do nothing besides that thing until i had like finished it or you know whatever it was and so i do think there's a component of that the other aspect though is like i for sure have had called beliefs broken you know frame shifts from people who are were ahead of me like me even observing elon you know it it it stretches the horizon of what you know i think we can accomplish and you know it's actually in some ways very refreshing to think about okay you know where was elon when he was thirty six right versus you know fifty six or whatever you know how old he is now and he said had such a exponential like cr career that to me it's like it's actually very like inspiring that it just it just takes time and a lot of i think what takes time for entrepreneurs is there's just so many skills required to be good entrepreneur and you have to be like very good at all of them that's why i see entrepreneurship is the single greatest path of personal development like you get real time feedback that you suck and then at some point most of us on some level get to a level of success and then say like this is enough or i'm not willing to make the trade offs beyond this point in other areas because depends on the entrepreneur that you asked but i would say the vast majority of entrepreneurs want to win the game of life and business a component is one of the games within the larger game of life some people get lost to whatever game they're in or are they just consciously choose that that game is more important to them i mean like steve jobs accomplished a lot i think there's there's been a lot that's been documented about his you know personal life suffering you know as as a result as professional career you could make an argument that he was amazing net positive for humanity but on the micro level he lived a harder existence elon is probably another one of those people a lot of people don't wouldn't want elon life and he says you wouldn't want my life that's probably a lot of my a lot of my like shower time right now is like when you know the price of the thing you want like it's okay to go into a store see something you like and then not buy it why are you crushing that now is it because you just had the huge launch and you like hit hit a milestone that you're like my god i wanted this all time and i finally got it and maybe i didn't wanna as as much as i want or do you feel well i had a confluence of three things happen within thirty days so i had call it a four plus year project come to an end which was a lot of my shower time was around the whole hundred million dollar series and the culmination of the money models launch so that was one there's obviously you know a financial outcome that was you know quickly you know happened at the launch so that's the second thing then third thing is my mother died within thirty days and so it was a very interesting mix of different emotions within a period of time and so i have i i've had a lot of time to reflect on like what are the things that matter most and so like in writing i mean i think everyone's heard the advice like regular and then try to live that way is that most people don't actually take the time to write there in but in writing her eu it was it was interesting to see like what portion if we had a pie chart of this jewel is gonna be dedicated to her accomplishments and she was a relatively accomplished person compared to the rest of it which was about service and character and the vast majority of it was service character and so and thinking about that it's like okay well if i were to a portion my time based on what my eu percentages would be i would probably not have the same pie chart that i do now that being said you know life is has a lot of years and so maybe that slice of pie chart that's the first two or three sentences or whatever might be fifteen years and then there's just another period of fifteen years afterwards or thirty years afterwards that are maybe difference that chart yeah if you if you live right like maybe she had a freak accident so hers was a sudden death and so yeah so that's what i think about a lot is is the trade offs because i think most of like because obviously i have a lot of content that's going out there just because people tend to ask me stuff about hard work and the reason i think i tweet so much about it is because it's always top of mind for me so like i don't have it we talk about it this at being able like i don't have a a content schedule i don't have like a you know i'm looking at trending tweets and thinking oh how do i do my own spin on this like that's not how i make content i tweet whatever is top of mind and the things that come out are the things that i'm thinking about and you gonna kind of like see the the trends of whatever i'm thinking about a specific season but you just stick the aggregate of like a month of tweets like i just thinking about this right now yeah you're like in a lawsuit and you're like talking about like being tough or having grit or like you know like over overcoming a difficult yeah like people betray you and like all this stuff is been part you're making all this money and it's like gratitude you know what i mean yeah and so i think there's two things that i think they furniture entrepreneurship part number one is uncertainty it's just the the absolute kinda like soul crushing uncertainty that is always present throughout your day every day while you're making decisions it's just always this idea like you might lose and you don't know and then the the other component that makes it so difficult is the known quantities that you believe that you're going to have to trade in order to get the unknown i guess there is some uncertainty there too the unknown upside and so it's like we can always quantify the downside the thing that we trade and we cannot quantify the upside and so i think about that a lot because i think a lot of entrepreneurs entrepreneurship you know a lot of entrepreneurs that i see especially common like you the lifestyle entrepreneurs because i get tons of slack from that community and that's okay like i just i just see that as like we all get to whatever level that we're willing to trade tray for but i just see them as trade offs and i think most of the regrets that people have are wanting the upside from a decision or path not taken without taking into account the downside that they didn't suck 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 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 to change mind and i know it will change yours so check it out join hampton dot com what's the pie chart like now i mean i think i think for now it's it's almost entirely business i would say like i probably have fifteen percent that's probably dedicated to like marriage stuff like marriage leila stuff and probably fifteen percent that's dedicated like health stuff so probably like seventy percent work fifteen health fifteen marriage what do you think when you're in the when you're thinking about what it should be do you ever think like why i would like to try on this style or this yeah i think i would love to see a world where like twenty five to thirty percent is business i'd love to see what happens there i also think that there might be like and i and i say this understanding like the position that i'm in tuesday this which is i'm approaching a point where more hours really doesn't like so much more of it at this point will be the leverage of the decisions that i make more than the work that i do and so i think i'm i'm i'm feeling i'm feeling that transition right now and so it might be that could've been earlier though i mean you know i just feel it new for whatever that's worth he's got a good team i guess yeah the team is the team is getting is getting better and better and better we have a huge a huge amount of of true a level talent coming and very excited about that be a lot of the leverage on the decision making and maybe it's just that some of the the bets that i made five years ago have come to fruition and have paid off which can then just give more more leverage right because i mean fundamentally output is just volume times leverage and so i mean i could maybe maybe with if did even more elon still works a lot so if you do a lot of volume in with a lot of leverage you build rockets and build trillion dollar businesses so like you know i i i don't say that thinking that i'm somehow i'm into it twenty five percent business what else oh it would probably just be a more even spread it probably be like maybe twenty five percent you know i probably keep i think health would probably be still around fifteen ish percent i might change what i do there but that i think i have an appropriate amount from the health the health category i assume i'll just i'll i'll bucket leila is just family yeah wife at all i i just think i just think the percentages will change i you know what i'll just say that i don't know what they are i think they will change from what they currently are i feel confident in that what's a non business pursuit that you'd wanna put in there potentially i don't know and i think i i i need i i to create the space in order for that to get filled like i don't think i will have a difficulty in finding things do film my time i think i i don't know you to have any i we're we're buddies but not we're not terribly close but i i don't i've never i we're like we're not that close well we're like we're like i would say we're we're friends but like we've known each other for off and on for a couple years now and i've never seen you shown interest in hobbies like over the like i like history i love if i like buying clothes i think clothes are cool i like cars i like motorcycles like i have like hobbies where i'm like i'm passionate about x y and z but i have never heard of you to like anything other than your wife and working it out and business in business yeah those have been like my big three i would say that i i i i would define myself for the first time in in fifteen year not even fifteen because i wanted to start making money when i was like fifteen so it's i guess it's been twenty one years it's the first time my life where i've i've been open to having other priorities i don't know what they are like straight up i don't know i don't know if they will be and maybe i maybe i'll just discover that i like the life that i have now but it's the first time that i've been like i am open to this mix changing andrew ross so he's got this new book called nineteen twenty nine i i'm in the i'm middle in the middle of reading it i i think you read sites science fiction right yeah it's just surely i like science fiction i like some of the more popular ones but i'm a big history guy and this book nineteen twenty nine it's about the great depression and how it came to be and basically credit had just become a thing so credit gm invented it so you could get a car on a loan and then eventually other appliances on a loan and then sears was like oh we'll do a lay away thing we'll give you credits you can buy clothing and then citi bank which back then was called national bank they said let's do it for stocks and bonds so you can borrow money and we will let you buy stocks and they did it at a ten to one ratio meaning for every ten dollars of stocks that you have with citi bank we're gonna loan you a hundred dollars and so the great depression happened because when the market went under which happens occasionally happened during covid it was just like a domino effect because everyone was incredibly over leveraged and he tells us amazing story about it and there's like probably twenty characters in the book and they're like the jamie diamonds of the time yeah and they give you the day to day life of these characters and it's really fascinating and my biggest takeaway from this book so far well there's been a bunch of takeaways but one takeaway is that the executives of these banks they didn't work that hard and they were like they were the jamie diamonds of the time and their income was the equivalent of a hundred million dollars a year and like one guy had a routine where he's like i'm up at sick i am exercised i'm at the office at ten i'm home by five another guy i had a similar routine as that but then he would take off he took summer off go to europe with his family and going to europe meant taking a three week boat and same with andrew carnegie andrew carter was a popular in the late eighteen hundreds died probably in nineteen twenty or so he did the same thing where he would barely work and i read about some of these like i think brian hall who's the founder of hubspot just tweeted he's like you don't move mountains working in nine to five and all these people yourself included in myself included talk about hard work but i like see all these other examples and i'm like isn't it it crazy how much you can get done by actually not working hard and lately i've been like interested by some of those examples have you ever read about that i haven't read about it but i've definitely observed it with some people that you know are further ahead been than i am i think what's what's always difficult is like do i model the the the top of the amount or do i model the climb like am i trying to extrapolate how someone currently lives for what they did to get there and that one's always a really dangerous one but i try and catch myself on which is like you know we're in different seasons and so i have to make sure that i'm comparing this person's spring you know to my spring not not my winter to their spring well like all these like just i can list so many people where i read these books and i'm like you don't work hard at all what the hell is like what am i doing like ted turner was another guy he he ted turner when he built cnn which made him a multi billionaire he was also like pure professional sailboat racer where he was gone for three months at a time racing sailboat and so anyway i could i could give you so many examples of that it's just crazy when when we let's let's take that for a second because i think that like let's say let's say like within your business let's say that you could find the perfect sam just as a a thought routine right the perfect sam that you could hire and whatever you could pay the perfect sam to do and you could do everything you can do just as well as you can it's like so whatever your current profit is minus sam's compensation if you could do that then you would have almost the same amount of money you have now and maybe in two years perfect sam would grow the pie so that you're making the same or more than you're making right now but you're still not working at all and so if that's the case then it's like we're always like in the hypothetical world where one higher away from somebody you could do one hundred percent of what we're currently doing and the business would be able to continue to grow i think to that point about patience is like but most entrepreneurs are like well i'll i'll find that person i'll give it to that person and then i'll start the next job whereas some other people just say like i'm just not gonna start that next job and then just be willing to let the company continue to grow with the team that i've assembled and i think but like fundamentally if you work or you don't work as long as the business performs these functions it will grow i heard you say something kind of interesting so a lot of people shit on course makers and i was thinking about my life and like i've bought a lot of courses actually and many of them were were not only great they changed my life yeah one of my good buddy's neville had a copy writing course changed my life i took it it changed my life yep and there's been a bunch others have you ever bought or taken any courses and which one if you did was game changing for you the biggest things that have really changed my life was actually like had been had been net like networks of people more than anything like getting in the room with people who are ahead of me within the current realm or even across realms from me that was the stuff that really changed my life the most for sure from the tactical level books courses things like that workshops seminars like those things absolutely like i'm at i am a product of the alternative education world like i have no reservations about that i am some people were able to learn on their own i was willing to pay to learn for people ahead of me and i it was more than more than worth it but i think that the biggest so if basically there's two types of knowledge right you have declarative knowledge would just knowledge about stuff and then you have procedure at knowledge is knowledge how to do stuff the the the courses in diy stuff is predominantly procedural which is here's how you set up landing page so i copy here so you structure a you know a video sales letter or whatever right and then there's that i see that the the the networks affiliation and when you meet people who were further ahead of you those are where you get their quote beliefs broken that's where you learn about stuff that you didn't know was possible and that about stuff could be like i didn't know you could work four hours a week and make that kind of money i didn't know that real estate work that way i didn't know that the insurance industry was so profitable or whatever it is right and those were where i think where i had my order of magnitude increases so it say like my incremental increases in in business were always just you know developing more blocking tackling skills like i have to learn how to do webinar hour i have learned how to do a sales call i have to eat all these things but were the like like the large step step function increases have been through association with people that were just way further their head and we're were like hey man let me tell you what the next five years it looks like if you keep doing what you're doing this week we need to do instead who's on your list of of people who you'd you'd kill to meet and spend and and spend time with our shadow for a day most alone are the obvious ones like i would love to i'd love to shadow elon i'd love to shadow z i'd love to shadow bezos i'd love to shadow i don't know i'd relative to love to try bezos like ten years ago because actually i'm not even sure what his what his working you know what what he's doing he's example blue origin and and he's got you know this thing i think he's got other things going on but so like people who are in the thick of the game i would love to because a lot of it is like how are they thinking like what frameworks are they using to think through these decisions because they've made these decisions a bunch of times so like i would love to just get that framework because if i could apply that to my current state then i would move faster i hear you learn these frameworks and i'm like but that is crazy that he is memorizing this stuff but not just memorizing it but he when i hear him talk about i believe that he actually uses this and in his day to day life and know i i would like to get better at that i'm just amazed at how much information you retain thanks i think that if you are not good at predicting what is going to happen next life will be hard for you and the better you get at predicting what's going to happen next the more you will get what you want and so then being able to predict what's going to happen requires a an accurate framework of how reality works and i think that that's where you know if you've lost everything that you can rebuild it again it's because you accurately review view reality and it wasn't luck you can redo it again and so for me i think a big part of it was like or still is i find like the most people don't know what they're saying most of the time like the vast majority of people spend their time re reg and parody things that they never thought about in saying words that they don't understand because if you ask someone when they say hey i think you should do this i would just feel like to find that or like hey my goal is i want to insert thing like i wanna feel great about myself i be like what does that mean and then they can't define it i'm like well no shit you haven't hit it you can't even define what you're going for right and so i think that the single greatest razor that i have for defining reality more accurately has been removing all sentiment emotion and quote psychology from the equation and only looking at it from a behaviors frame of what can i observe and just say like and so basically like if you were to if you were to you know alien comes on earth or a toddler depending on how you would to see it and say like hey you know what does trust mean right like hey you're not very trustworthy i be like what does that mean to you right and most times people will just say like a bunch of nonsense back you and it's like well of course you don't know like and so i find that that's most people and that's why they can't they can't communicate well and as a result they don't receive communication well from the world because they don't like it's two people saying words that neither of them understand and then they're and then they just roll a dice to see if they get what they want and that's how most people live their lives which is why they don't get what they want they didn't define what they want like the beginning of every one of my books defines terms the beginning of every legal document there's a repetition of definitions and is like you need that in order to be precise about what you want what's that mean so like defining what a win would look like what does success look like what does a fail look like yeah that that's that those are like the the would say like the big obvious ones but underneath of that is it's like the day to day life that you have it's like you ask your wife it's like i'd like you you'd be more loving towards so what does that mean like for real like what yeah what is you saying the word i need you to love me better mean does that mean hey when i walk in the door can you come and give me a hug that's observable i can see that court witness could say he came in and did that right and so but like again this is like getting his granular everything if we just bring everything down to what is observable in reality that we can all get to agreement that's where like i think the content that i have somehow seems both the same and different from the stuff that's out there they're like man i just you about marketing stuff and like he says things that i know but i i he says in a different way it's like well it's because i just think about like okay what is selling right and then a lot people were like it's a transfer of feeling between two parties you know over a bridge of trust right and i would say something like that fifteen years ago and i would yell at it to sales and i'd be like dude sales is just a transfer a belief over a bridge of trust it's like that sounds amazing there's nice visuals it's like but what the fuck does that mean like how do i go transfer belief over a of i'm go transfer belief over a b bridge of trust and they're like i don't know how to do that it's like fuck course you don't of course you don't i don't either right what you a bridge i need know guy eat fucking bridge who's got a bridge and how do i give them this belief right so and so it's natural to use is it's to use shorthand with language because it's faster transfer ideas except neither party to define the term and that's where a lot of quote miscommunication come from and so i think to be an accurate it's like we have to define terms before we can actually engage in this conversation which is annoying for some people but it's also required if you wanna have like effective communication and so for that whole like salesperson thing it's like what is selling it's increasing likelihood that someone makes a personal decision done that's all it is we just increase the likelihood and so that is your job it's to increase the likely to make a purchasing decision and we know that there's a number of variables that that affect that that that percentage and that's what the ones that that we can affect that we can observe and i think we just leave it there that we get all of this hull of blue and all of the the manifestation and the sync and the the energy and the men you know all this this crap out of there and maybe that's stuff's true but i can't see it so and so how do i transfer it i don't know and so i just talk about the observable world and has made my life so much better and my ability to predict what's going to happen next so much better but this is why i like by the way dale carter how to win friends and influence people very tactical so like the the takeaway that everyone will have for that book well at least one of them will be you say someone's name say name because that's the most beautiful sound in in the english language very tactical and another really tactical thing i love reading that more people should do particularly if you're if you're working at the internet world old school direct response copywriting books so claude hopkins david oli is a little bit newer joe sugar is a little bit newer duh kennedy i love reading those books those books are my favorite because they are the most tactical but they also teach you about life they're also great writers you know who's the best i think is felix dennis have you ever read felix dennis how to get rich yeah dude the best the best writing i've ever read or like dan kennedy who is a copywriter somehow he has books on like management which i'm like don't don't read that book dude he's like in the beginning of okay so in the beginning of the book he's like i don't have any employees because i hate employees but let me read this long book about managing a company and i read it and i'm like you are a ac man but some of your advice is actually quite good but he's so good at telling these stories and he makes them practical which is what a really good copywriter does and so it becomes quite actionable maybe you're gonna take the wrong action but it's very it's very actionable do you ever read those old old school copywriting books i did wanna basically i was when i was in my like rocky cuts with learning marketing i read all that stuff i haven't read much of it lately because i feel like you know like the mid wit meme yeah yeah yeah i feel like the mid midwest meme is one of my favorite memes of all time because it just it's it's been so true for me in so many domains of my life it's like you know when i started lifting it was like ab weight eat protein tri you know what i mean like do it over and over again and that was like that was it right and then i got into like you know prioritization and like you know a volume blocks then you know peaking cycles and like you know you know we have to have under leading periods we have to have like you know this is better for part this better for i get all this like complexity right and then like fast forward down it's just like to just just eat protein add add more to the bar and you know thank your parents for genetics like whatever now of course the comments would be like alex takes testosterone which i've in public about so deal with it and so i think the same thing with marketing and so like a lot of it is your testosterone making more persian was it persian to testosterone i don't know maybe i think it's all genetic is that the pet is being board persian oh if anything i think i think the not where it would would decrease amount of pair i have on my head at least but anyways but yeah but like with marketing it's like it's so much so like no persuasion occurs in the vague like persuasion occurs in the specific and so when it's like oh i i know he he just like if you can articulate someone's pain to them more accurately than they can they will buy what you have to sell without even hearing much about whatever your offer is if someone describes every pain your life and excruciating detail other they're like if this guy knows this much about my pain he has to know how to solve it and what's also nice about pain specifically is that pain is more motivating the promise and so it's also more compliant because if we think about like what like what is a salesperson what is marketing in general like we just simply motivates someone to take action right or we increase the likelihood that they will see this message they take a desired action and so it's like well then where is the basis of motivation comfort from which is a super complex question and so for me motivation comes from deprivation and we have to deprive the prospect or increase their perception of deprivation around the out the you know the action that's associated with whatever that we'll look them to do so the a outcome associated with we're reaction with them to take and so that comes from like when people like the pain is the pitch which is one of my my little ism is like the pain is the pitch like if you if you can accurately do that and it's not about like a fancy words it's not and not at all it's it's you know it's short words short sentences clearly to defined that it takes no brain power to process and yet it still has emotional resonance because of this specificity so like lose weight fast probably worked is the force first weight loss at in nineteen thirty and then everyone was like wow that short words that's amazing but then they had to get like more nuance and so it's like you have to keep breaking words down into like what does that really mean like it's like what like hey so you ever been like the overweight girl who wanted to take the photo instead of being the photo you know what i mean yeah yeah no and that's real like i've ever walked your thighs shapes together have you ever always had a a a cover all when your friends were in bikini like have you felt weird about you know you putting your own sunscreen on have you been like any pictures you said like do you do you duck out when you put your pants on that you used to wear do you keep do you find yourself holding your breath for longer and longer in order to put them on like those are best you know specifics right and like that's where copy is driven which is why you have to know the customer which is why my opinion some of the best marketers like the truly coded marketers can advertise pain that they have not experienced but the vast majority of marketers or who are good and specific spaces know the avatar because they are the avatar or at least worthy avatar one time we i had this designer and when i lived san francisco working for my company to hustle and we had this like new product that we were testing and it was like three hundred dollars a year and she made this beautiful page and i'm like you guys are insane the design of this means nothing and they're like what do you mean was like they're like i spent so long of this logo i'm like oh my god watch this and i like wrote out a google doc and then i at the bottom of the google doc i had a link to an event bar event bright page because that was the fastest way i i could create like i was like this isn't actually an event but it's just the easiest way that i can accept your money and once i get your money then i wanna send you the product manually the most junky thing ever we drove something like five thousand dollars of facebook ads to each of the things the pretty one drove it was like next to nothing just the google doc i made fifty thousand dollars off of i think only five thousand dollars in ad spend and i'm like please listen to me copy matters more than anything now if you can marry copy with good design then that's that's ideal and i was like go and look at like i was like i don't know man go look at like apple's page for the iphone like it's the most known product of all time there's tons of words and also there's tons of images and an image it really is worth the thousand words i was like go look at kindle go look at the amazon listing for kindle you literally only see copy there's ten thousand reviews and it just copy copy copy copy copy is the way to go and i was trying to like convince my team and that was like the final example i was like i told you just good words can sell way better than anything else yeah i agree also i actually think that that that's true with wisconsin as well like if you're an educator to be clear if you're an entertainer that's different but like if you're an educator which most you know b2b b anybody's a business whatever most businesses are if they make content is more on the educational side whether you're plumber or otherwise like you tell people about toilets and then people buy stuff right i did this experiment with my team because sometimes my my editing team gets like they get cute you know they get they they wanna get fancy so i said hey this next one we're gonna do the entire thing on an iphone alright so the whole thing is on an iphone the audio is crap that it's shaky a guy's holding it no tripod like no that's all it was but it was just about like a concept that i knew was gonna do well and it got like you know one point seven or something you know almost two million views from that video and i was like we spend so much time and post on some of these videos and like it doesn't matter now it might matter a little bit it might matter ten percent but are we appropriate appropriately allocating the resources towards the things gonna get us the highest return and the answer's almost always know because the words are the hard part the words you have to think and that's what most people avoid you know the last time i talked to was about ten days ago or something like that and i needed someone to i wanted to talk to you today because i enjoyed their conversation i was like i don't wanna plan i just wanna have a a conversation with alex and like already made joe like i want you to talk in somebody i was like that's the exact opposite of what i want i don't want you to talk to any sound i just wanna see what's up and just catch up with you and i'm happy we did that no i am too man alright i feel want i can just read like five tweets in a row and then sam can react yeah you're you're a fortune cookie yeah that's what you are you're a fortune cookie would that be better i'll just i'll wait so is that really your writing process do you just like write like one cent one sentences well for tweets yes that's exactly what it is like literally it's that's a hundred percent one do you use chat gb no no i i don't use an ai for for the for the tweets come on you dazzle me why a dime with some lines either sell extremely expensive to a select few or sell something super cheap to everyone in the middle is where people die you're making me weaker of the knees alex keep going you're right poor people stay poor because they want a fast way to get rich if you're in your twenties and wanna stand out do it what you say you're going to do even if no one is there to give you a applause the fastest way to stand out is to put in more effort than everyone else show up early use do your research at a time smile when greet people do more than your fair share follow up quickly work i think is the universal currency of respect and it costs you nothing but can give you everything that was facebook posted yours the other day i liked it well they they repurposed it from my twitter you must first become misunderstood before you can become great yeah man these are great yeah how to win realize no one is coming to save you take responsibility for your current position be willing to sacrifice who you are for who you wanna be the fastest way to become confident is to build evidence build yourself a stack of undeniable proof that you are who you say you are do so much volume that you don't have to doubt whether you can do it or not that one broke the internet yep it's very hard to have a vision when you have bills to pay i said that one at the workshop and like the whole room lit out like an audible gas and so the team was like alright that one's pre tested we know that one work that one was a a freestyle that was a r you rod dog those a bunch of these were but that one was like word for word i didn't change anything faster way to change your life is to get around people whose minimum standards are your life goals kinda like what we were talking about earlier friendly reminder that feeling lost to anxious and uncertain are good science it means you're pushing past where you know they're called growing pains for a reason do the work tired do the work nervous do the work perfectly do the work even when you don't feel like it because no matter how bad you feel when you start you know exactly how you feel when you finish you have to risk looking broke to get rich you have the risk looking weak to get strong you have to risk looking desperate to get loved you go hold back more dreams and failure and rejection ever will everything you like you just speak in like add headlines this is amazing avoiding people who make it harder for you to achieve your goals is the highest form of self care what do you write all this on i just i just use like an automation tool like just a generic one also one of the ways that i'll do is nicely like a lot of my audience will like hear a live or whatever and then they'll like they'll tag me in a quote that they heard me say and then i'm like oh great so i like quote them quoting me yeah as my yeah i'm like they i thought that was good i'll just say it's like michael scott doing the wayne re quote well i think some of like because part of what we're talking about is is rhetoric right there's the idea and then there's how you communicate it and some of these things have like rhythm to them so it's like when we have opposites you have good and then bad you have you know high and low you've given then get like they're set there's opposites that happen in you know contrast that happens in the words there's typically power threes people like having threes when you have sets repetition iteration those are all things that like if if you're thinking about like okay how can say this in a way that would sound better than just like hey do do hard stuff what orientation of that can i you know combine some of these other kinda of writing elements into it to make it easier to remember i think you're talking about the mid midwest meme i was joking with sean where i was like in the beginning of my career i listened to all motivational stuff and self help stuff in the in the like when i was building my first company that kinda made me you know do did a little something i did not do anything i was like no motivation stuff i just need to get to it now that like i i called this like second mountain stuff which is like i'm now focused on real thrive thriving but also raising a good family and like building a legacy of a company i'm not particularly i mean getting riches or making more money that is a nice i want that no doubt about it but it's like not number one and once i'm in that phase of my life which i am i am back to the motivational stuff totally i think when we change goals we become deprived around some other thing like we noticed a discrepancy in our lives and i think we saw for the greatest discrepancy so like in the beginning like the biggest discrepancy was from me was like i'm broke like as doesn't matter what like i'm broke i can't do anything i can't like at impact i can't support a family i can't i can't i can't live when live like i just all of that so that becomes the glaring hot pain in my life and then like once that's solved it's like okay well what i'm i'm not pain free right like they're still pain and so then you have other things that become the pains of your life and those become the things that you're deprived of i do think that we're exceptionally good at finding problems so i don't think that's gonna like go away i think you just get different problems as as you level up and i will also say like on on a personal note i'm about as happy as i was two years ago as i was probably two years before that like i'm not i'm not like materially different in terms of my like subjective well being and so i think i it's like what else am i going to do and when i also think about these things that quote you know could potentially trust me out or even these opportunities that i wanna pursue i try to fast for the president which was like i'll probably be just about as happy content as i am now which also eliminates a lot of the fo which i think some people suffer from a lot of like regrets of like oh i should have done that there i should ended that up this opportunity should have made that bad i should have dated that girl or whatever your thing is right it's like well you'd probably be about as happier unhappy show up right now and that actually like has dramatically quell down the amount of attention that i allocate to those paths not taken because they're just completely unproductive yeah but i think people get there like i'm am i'm i'm i'm so happy i've never been happier my whole entire life right now i like my job i love my family i'm happy with my fitness i like living where i live i love my unit my apartment where i live i love living near my in laws i like my team and you know aristotle has this idea of flourishing where you where he was like you have to live a virtuous life like one of the virtue is courage on one end of courage is like being reckless and the other one is being like a pussy like to be i think that's what he said that's that's an exact one yeah and there's like fourteen virtue and like you wanna like be in the middle like which is courage yeah same with like being charitable you know you don't wanna be like os and you don't wanna be tight you wanna be charitable and i was like i'm i'm kind of in that right now i love that and so i'm happier than i've ever been and i think that you have to get in what aristotle also says is you need money to do that he's like you don't need a lot of money but need enough money to own things that make you happy that are beautiful and you also need enough time to have leisure time because leisure times important and what's interesting is like you were saying like that you're you're i think you said you're happy right now but you said you're not gonna be happier probably with anything else i would argue it sounds like you're looking for leisure time actually which is i i didn't we really i didn't realize that until just now since it's talking about aristotle like that's the way like the one thing like hobbies is basically what he said like you need a hobby and business has been your hobby for a long time but maybe like maybe you're that'd be kinda fun to see like what what is actually your hobby gonna be i think i'll problem it's i'll problem like i happiest what i write yeah and so i will probably write a book that has no real financial benefit from me so i'll probably end bread a book about some of the topics we talked about today around like learning and behavior because it's something that i'm endlessly fascinated by and i think that's like the the defining terms i think that will be something that i will write and i think it has the potential to to change more people live than than all the other books put together but we'll see dude i'm so happy it came on alright that's it that's the part i feel like i could rule to word i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a road travel never looking back hey let's take a quick i wanna tell you about a podcast that you could check out it is called the science of scaling by mark robe he was the founding zero of hubspot and he's a guest lecturer at harvard business school the guy smart and he sits down every week with different sales leaders from cool companies like cla and van and open and he's asking about their strategies their tactics and how they're growing their companies as you know head of sales or chief revenue officer if you're looking at to scale company if you're a cro or a head of sales just look at a level up in your career i think a podcast like this could be great for you listen to the science of scaling wherever you get your podcast

you know i i have a soft spot in my heart for immigrants you do love immigrants dude yeah like korean store owner energy so it's almost racist how much you love immigrants yeah yeah i feel like i could rude the world to i know i could be what i want to from at all in in like a day's off on a travel never lived dude what's going on i haven't seen you in about two weeks yeah i had a baby and so i took about two weeks off you were doing some family stuff what's going on let's talk about your baby first because it's much happier i went to my grandpa's grandfather's funeral so let's not start with the the saddest news possible tell me about the baby you yeah so like we were due i think on the twentieth on the thirteenth or the twelfth or something like that my wife was like i don't wanna freak you out and it was ten pm at night she's like my water just broke dude what an unbelievable sentence she didn't wanna freak you out she's so considerate as her water broke that's unbelievable that's the most sarah thing i've ever heard and so we went to the hospital we gave birth she gave birth it was don't put don't bring that we shit in here okay there's a space for real it was great for me no big deal i was exhausted and i complained about it for week but i took i i took two weeks off and it got me faking before we get the i needed to know birthing situation which what's your role what are you doing are you a hand holder are you a coach are you off to the side are you the cameraman what are what are you doing she had to get a c section so like i don't do anything you're out of the room yeah so i i eventually came in the room and she was like they give they give her medication that like makes her shake or whatever and so i was basically just like rubbing her face and calming her down but my wife is very stoic so i've been lucky i don't even know how to do things like that like sometimes put this situation i'm like oh i need this is where i'm supposed be comforting and i'm like i realized i've never once done that and so you don't like the like when you swing a tennis racket your the pressure's all off you don't really know like how much force to apply how much not to like why is my hands so sticky right now like it's terrible when i got engaged i was like i like started to put my knee out of the ground like out of the back will be fine seriously it's like the little things that you've never practiced that that lunch and then talk giving a speech upwards it's this is like a very strange stage yeah it's like it which is handshake hey put her there yeah we did a pinky promise and that's held true my brother law when my sister was giving birth she's like had like a longer labor like it was like so i was like taking a while and then you know she like looks over at one point and he's like a he's like napping on the couch in the room and she was like hey he did your ass he's like oh sorry i'm just so like so so stressed and tired and she was like years so stressed and just the like diva venom pure venom in that situation and it was too much for him yeah there's this funny joke it's like i'm so happy that women have to go through hours and hours of labor and pain so they can finally experience the pain that a man feels when he has a cold but like i've we have two children now i've experienced this that basically you know we are all built for things and sometimes we rise to the occasion and women just somehow like can fight like being tired and in pain whereas as i'm just gonna complain if i get anything less than seven hours a night of sleep so like yeah women kinda become like superheroes during that those moments and and i'm happy that she did that so everyone's healthy and happy i'm feeling great i took two weeks off and i was like chopping at the bit to get back to it after like honestly four days like i need a zoom call someone what be with a zoom call today well when we chomp at the bit to do exactly i'm like you know the your a newborn child doesn't do anything they just sleep and i'm so happy be your bored yeah yeah like i'm so happy i to experience for their but then in this particular case we have an a a a two old and so i i got to spend time with her taking her to her classes and like just so you know i love you so much and like you're important even though all this new stuff is happening and so that like touched my heart and i'm so happy i had that but i didn't need more than two weeks two weeks is more than enough did you agree yeah hundred percent here here's again this is this is zone of truth so here here's that let's let's clip this this is gonna be a a rage bait clip that's gonna go viral on a tech bros opinion on maternity leave go let me tell you how it actually is childbirth from the man's perspective so first of all i would say a couple things there's seems like there's two groups of people there's the people who touch their baby hold their baby for the first time and the life is changed and the endo kick in and there's like this entire like you know inner spiritual awakening didn't happen for me it doesn't happen for a lot of people took it takes me like fifteen months to love a baby i care for the baby before then i wish the baby well i want no harm to be that of the baby but do i crave like holding and touching and like you know doing the things my wife loves about a baby she's like oh the smell like the smell i don't smelled the baby what you mean why are you're sniff for the baby save you you love your baby but you may not be in love with them i mean that my might be generous alright i was just trying again your life i cared for the baby i wanted to love the baby but i didn't actually feel anything for like fifteen months but then by the way like after that it's all it's an incredible experience and like my kids are i have a one and a half year old four year four year old a six year old and like you know i can't get enough now but but that same i can't get enough feeling i didn't have that newborn but kinda normal from the man's perspective i i think the second thing is pate maturity leave a little bit confusing what i actually think is useful take the week off before birth to like do little stuff around the house just be there be a calming presence and like kinda like i don't know take the take the load of everyday life off of you know your your your partner before birth i think that's actually really useful then you know the first week or so the first few days just you wanna have the calendar clear because you never know what's gonna happen and of birth like you don't you never know what's going on after that you're really kinda like not that not particularly useful i would say like i felt this way i wasn't particularly useful and kinda wish and and i i ended up doing this in my other kids like you know plan time that's like more intermittent other intervals so there's like let's say the two weeks kinda week before the birth week after the birth that's a good window then there's kinda like two weeks let's say around month month three or four where sometimes you get a sleep progression you get other things and so spreading out the opportunity i think is very useful when you just sit there sort of like at this the baby's an ina object at the beginning and doesn't really do a lot nap ton and like assuming you know health went well knock on wood there's not a whole lot to so i kind of agree with you that initial pate opportunity leave is a lot of like nervous energy and not a lot of like productive help yeah it made realize that like taking time off and like vacation and going somewhere is kind of like lame compared to taking time off and just sitting at home and walking around your town like that's actually kind of like a special feeling it honestly felt like a like a a week mini retirement because i was like i were like putter around in the morning and not rushed right 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 how 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 and 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 there's a link in the description just go ahead and click it and you'll see the guide 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 dude have you ever read have i told you about aristotle like i've been interested in some of his work lately you haven't told me about aristotle go ahead go on so stoic gets a lot of the credit right now stoic quite popular yeah a lot right now yeah so yeah marcus aurelius is is is the it guy at the moment but aristotle is one of the folks who influenced a lot of these guys and i'm probably couldn't get a lot of it wrong so spare me in the comments but basically like when i'm obsessed with this idea that he has is this idea of flourishing and so i think the greek word of it is uni and it's this idea of that like there's like twelve or fourteen virtue and so like in order to be courageous which is one of his virtue on the right hand side is reckless like being reckless and then on the left hand side is basically being like a pussy i don't know the right word but like being soft timid yeah being timid and the middle part is courageous and then there's like fourteen of them which is like to be charitable you wanna you there's cool so it has the extremes where the the virtue becomes a vice on either side right like yeah they're over overdo it and then doing it okay like yeah and then there's like charitable on one side is like being like os and like giving too much and actually hurting people which is like like a lot of like rich rappers who would do like give all their friends like money and like enable your pos yeah and then the other one is like being like know can pussy again yeah the and so according to aristotle one of the ways to live a harmonious life that's full of flourishing which is the not trying to be happy but to flourish you have to like have these like fourteen virtue and also he talks about leisure time and how a lot of times people think of leisure time as a way to recoup from work but according to him perfect life a happy life a flourishing life and needs to have some leisure time where you get to reflect and the reflection is the goal not the time that you take to like refuel and i have been really obsessed with a lot of his his work because it's incredibly it's a incredibly practical philosophy a lot of like philosophical stuff is not particularly practical but i was like experiencing work recently and i was going i was so happy to go home to see my family i was happy to get up in the morning to work out and i was like why do i feel this way what's going on and i was like i am i'm fucking flourishing but that's how i felt i was like this is a this is this is like i don't feel happy necessarily like i feel like i'm working hard but at the moment stress does not equal pain stress equals growth and so i felt wonderful and so taking my two weeks off has just added to that where i was like i feel i feel refreshed but i i had so much time to reflect until like think about things and i love that and right the importance of being leisure and the importance of having un schedule time which i know you do i think you said twenty days a year and so what's interesting is that you you it seems as though you have come to a similar conclusion that aristotle has come to which is the idea of like leisure time just to reflect and just to think and we've heard bill gates talk about that he has one week a year i think for week or whatever here yeah yeah yeah i really like that i i think i'm pretty poor at one thing you said in there which is just making time to think like if i look at my calendar i do have a lot of leisure time i play the piano go to a tennis and i'll go play basketball while i'll do my workout i'll play with my kids i do a lot of other stuff besides work so i'll get this kinda like you know fun life maybe harmonious life maybe a balanced life but what i don't do is i don't actually spend a lot of time in silence and like dedicated think time and i've been trying to get better at this but it in trying to you know when you try to get better at something you actually the first realization is how far you have to go like how how poor you actually are it's sort of like flexibility you know it's not really top of mind and until somebody says oh can you do this test and then you realize like oh my god no i'm not even close that's how i am about think time i don't know about you but like i would say if in the past decade the amount of dedicated time that i plan to think like i'm like oh i'm not i'm just actively not gonna do something right now i'm not gonna fill it with something else that was like zero i honestly think it was zero for like a dead the last decade of my life i don't think i ever actually consciously spent think time now i would think when i was driving i would think of something in the shower but this is like an accident it's a happy accident my my brain was probably like oh dude we've got these thoughts queued up we've been waiting to have a moment here where you're not stuffing in new stuff into your brain through your phone through your tv through your computer through a meeting through a through doing something through reading whatever it was and so dedicated thing time i think is is extremely underrated i i'm i think i'm at the beginning part of that curve where i'm just starting to do it and i'm just realizing oh man this is like so obvious and i really didn't wasn't doing this before i remember when we met tim ferris i asked him something like i was first due day today he's like dude this is like the question i get a lot like what is my daily routine and he's like i think people expect like a really awesome answer he's like actually been asked like for like a writer from some magazine like hey we wanna follow you for a day and write a profile or if we wanna film like a one day documentary of tim ferris day in the life and he's like i've always said no not just because i like privacy and not he's like but because he would be incredibly boring he's like i he's like you know i wake up and i i sort of a stretch i'll drinks with tea you know i sit down like i kinda putter around for quite a quite a while and i have like long periods of time of inaction where i'm just trying to think of what is it that i really wanna do and what is it that i actually should do in this situation how do i wanna approach this do i really wanna do this and i actually like spend time with my thoughts i remember hearing that and they be like i do none of that stuff it's like gonna to hear like a really productive manager talk about how they like all the thoughtful things they do to manage their employees and you're like oh i just had a pizza party what like a month ago i thought that was good and i thought that was enough i think that you said something funny about shower thoughts i don't think a lot of people realize that you can help engineer breakthroughs i think that there's things in your life that you could do to yeah engineer breakthroughs and been thinking about what that is for me it's been slow mornings so i i tried my hardest to get up earlier than i actually have to because i'd like just like walk around and drink coffee and then i'll wake children up or then i'll exercise but like literally just thirty minutes to poke around i like working out so i had breakthroughs on i'm working i have breakthroughs when i'm journal i have breakthroughs when i'm reading and i have breakthroughs when i have organized times of talking with people but without an agenda so like i'll like have someone like interesting at my office because they're in town i'm like i don't know man just like let's just rough for thirty minutes what's your story and or like what you've done you had a breakthrough when you started the milk road after you went to a conference on a topic that had nothing to do with your interest yeah but like this is why conferences are great this is why i hope hampton is great this is why sometimes people like they because us a little bit through listening to our podcast where they like kinda feel like they're around us but like talking to other people and just listening to their opinion without an agenda i think is another great way to have a breakthrough yeah i've been right i told you i was writing this book and the premise of the book was i i got really it happened accidentally accidentally i started is it was embarrassing i was trying to be funnier as therefore i started studying comedy which is like not really pull i think funny person has ever done so probably not the best way to do it but i got really in the seinfeld and then through that i i was like wow this guy is not just about comedy but like this guy's got like a way of working that is really interesting an approach a mindset and on a date literally like a of daily habits that are pretty admirable and i started studying other great people like how do all the great ones work how do all of them actually like what are the habits of the great people who've done great things because i wanna be a great person who it does great things anyways a along the way one of the things that's surprised me right which i think when you're researching anything it's the surprises that you look for the one of things that surprised me was how much engineered rest matters i'll just give you like three like quick ones on this so aaron so who wrote you know wes wing and a social network like this great you know hollywood script writer or whatever when he's writing a script he takes eight showers a day he says like he will just keep showering he's like because i have my best shot thoughts in the there's all the science about why warm water and the relaxed environment and no distractions that's why this is actually like quite a good way to like let your brain sort of you know let the muscles relax a little bit and how you come up with more out of the box ideas it's also just a reset like every time he gets stuck he goes to showers and it gets it quickly gets through the plateau because he does that einstein used to dig einstein's boat no no i i i wouldn't have paid einstein as a voter he was a prolific boat to the point where the coast guard had a lot of problems with einstein so what said would do is in the middle of the day i said we're basically get on like a tiny little boat and he would just float it was a no motor boat he would just like float away into the in into the into the sea and he would stay there for hours and he would say there because he's like i do my best thinking out here in the sea and i would and he would do it aim in the afternoons and the coast guard was really worried because they're like dude you don't have a motor attached to your boat how are you gonna get back if the tide like pulls you too far and he's like the you know the further the better was basically like his quote what he wanted to do and that's where he did most of his quality thinking i was telling my wife this and she goes oh yeah at work we had this lady come in and this neuroscientist scientist and she told us you do your best thinking in motion or in water this is why so many people walk and why they swim pavel durham was on le treatment talks about how he goes for four hour swims because he does his best thinking when he's swimming and that's one of those like it's great i get fitness and i get thinking at the same time he's like guess what you can't be on your phone when you're in the middle of the lake for four hours like you know you just you're out there another one darwin darwin used to go for these walks and whenever he n on a problem i got a problem go for a walk which just i think not really how most people in today's age solve their problems i think they stare at the screen and like sit there and kind of just sit in a in a stationary position try to like get through it and you produce pretty low quality ideas when you do that what darwin would do is he would up he'd go for a walk and he used to walk these laps in every lap he would like kick a stone at the at the same spot he would like knock one stone off the bridge his starting point was and he would talk about his problems as like four stone problems five stone problems like he could measure oh that's fine difficulty of the problem by how many stones that took how many laps it took of him walking before he felt like he had like kind of like made headway on the problem and so this idea of engineered rest which looks incredibly unproductive when you're doing it right like taking a nap you know somebody many some many of the great inventors and artists did these like quick mini twenty minute naps there's all this science behind why that works and so you know these mini naps or going for walks or going for a swim it literally looks like you're not working it looks like you're being a lazy bastard but like if you look at how the great ones actually work this is part of their pro productivity routine and it looks completely unproductive six or twelve months ago you were debating on like a big project you're like i'm being pulled in a variety of directions and i can't decide what i wanna do but my heart is telling me to do something creative almost like a play and i was like oh that sounds pretty badass ass that sounds amazing and it sounds like i don't think a book on creativity was even on the list but that actually sounds even more badass ass and all these because you're describing this and i'm like i want this book i need this not the only way i want this i'm i have problems i should go for a a three stone walk and like give me more tips and tricks on how to solve my problems and now i can think better tell me about the book so how many pages like i is this is this gonna be like a two and three or four hundred page book or is this like no so the so the premise of the the premise of what i'm doing i guess this will be my bye announcement no we we'll do a whole podcast dedicated no i like i what i mean is like i can just go ahead and share so what i'm doing is i've created this especially a little bit like a franchise like a series and you know i have this problem with books where i buy a ton of books and i want to read a ton of books and i don't really read a ton of and if you look kinda like one of the reasons why books are long and slow and books are long and slow not because a three hundred page book needed to be three hundred pages that's really a relic of the publishing industry so like if you go talk to publishers and i've done this and you wanna publish a thinner book they're like oh but it's not gonna sell as well and they're like because people when they wanna spend whatever fifteen bucks they need to feel like they're getting value like they literally need to hold a heavier object and that was why whatever whatever the size of your idea was guess what we need two hundred fifty pages right because we wanna sell this book and it needs to have the sort of weight to it and i actually understand that i think there's like like a cool physical component of that but also how many books have you read were like that could have been a blog post you know like it's like how many meetings could have been an email like there's a lot of books that actually are not there you know a couple of great ideas and then there's like two hundred pages of fluff and like okay i got it i get it so it's one of my bet biggest pet peeve and when i studied this these how the great creative work one of the things they do really well is they pay a lot of attention to their irritation seinfeld said irritation is what breeds innovation so he said he used to hate used to get invited to go on late night talk shows it's like jimmy fallon or whatever he's like dude hate it it was so formulaic it was so cookie cutter it was so like the same thing so that's why he created comedian and cars getting coffee right it was like what's the exact opposite of that talk show it's like me and my friend in a car driving go get coffee like the no audience no applause sign know any of that stuff like my i'll take all my irritation of this and i'm just gonna do the opposite and then that's what i'm gonna and use that as the like the the force and the energy to create something better and so i decided to create this series called one hour books and the ideas is can i create books that are you know if you read it it's a life changing book but you can read it in one hour a single sitting so you're like if you buy the book and you decide to read it in one sitting on a couch you'll actually like consume the whole and you'll get everything you needed to out of the book the whatever the books promise was and so i'm creating this series called one hour books and i'm doing it on different topics that i've been any topic that i've gotten obsessed with and so you know like if i have a period of time i'm really obsessed about value investing or warren buffett how these got how these great investors think i wanna basically take the most powerful ideas the best ideas that i got my research the things that surprised me that i actually like then started to use in my life and so like for example with this creativity book like it changed the way i'm approaching big creator right like i'm trying i worked completely differently that i did twelve months ago and it's because i basically stole shit from seinfeld and disney and rubin and pixar like all these people that i went in with went studied and actually trying to figure out you know a better way to work and so yeah the book's only gonna be like i don't know seventy five pages it's gonna be it's gonna be enough for it's gonna be the size of a book you can read in one sitting actually if anybody from the podcast wants to check out the book early and kinda gets the behind the scenes thing just go to one hour books dot c i'll put it on the screen and in the description but if you go to one hour books dot c i'm just gonna let anybody sign up and if you're fan of the pod i kinda wanna show you how i'm making the book the behind the scenes stuff and give you a free gift when it launches so go there if you wanna check that out and it's you can go through a publisher or self publisher i don't know yet doesn't really matter and all the matters right now is i make one amazing book i can't really like anything else doesn't really matter it's like one book that i am like ben if i read this this would go in my like kinda top shelf this would be like my one of my favorite books is it actually like you know resonated with me and the stories really dope maybe laugh you know that those are some of the goals with with how i do this if i had to bet this is gonna be the most successful thing you've ever done because my instinct and i don't wanna do this right now but is to like oh can you just tell me all of the things that you learned from group but all these people like it's like i want to apply this immediately yeah yeah i i i mean i could and i will tell you all those things but yeah i think it's gonna be great like i honestly like the way i the i have this really i try to when i do a project i try to find like a kind of three word almost like north star or campaign slogan for myself just like as i wander through the idea and you start to go down different little rabbit holes and you hit little bumps of bruises you sort of need something to come back to and mind for this is to create create the ted for books so like i don't ted today is not as cool as it was but when i was younger ted was the shit like who was ted talk said videos like those were amazing and and what they ted event going to a ted was like like i just imagined myself like i'm gonna be h with like the president of america i'm gonna be like bill gates like it was like an honor and what they did was they created a format so they're were like yeah here's what we're gonna do eighteen minute talks that are on this kinda of beautiful stage and it's gonna be a certain quality of person who comes at you with one big idea one kind of like either counterintuitive idea or one powerful idea and then the mission was ideas worth cherry right and like i actually fuck with that i think that's actually like incredible and although ted is kinda fallen off it did help me because as i'm doing this i'm like alright well i'm trying to find the best ideas worth we're sharing and i wanna create a format that's consistent in like proposition i'm gonna spend literally ten thousand hours researching this and i'm gonna give you all of the best stories and ideas structured together in a one hour book like ten thousand hours of my time for one hour of your time this is like just an incredible trade that i think anybody should make because i'm like going all in on this and so i'd be working on this for like a year now and it's tough man says it's a hard thing to do but i think it's coming out pretty good what's mixed so i always hear people say writing a book as hard tim ferris was like i don't wish it on my worst enemy me and i'm like really i mean i've never done it but i'm like this sounds pretty great you just spend all this time thinking and writing wait and you get like two years to do it that sounds lovely but what are the downsides well oh the i mean there's a ton of downsides i you do you don't do this if you're looking for anything quick you don't do this if you're looking for a high chance of success so like the two things i think most want it's like a high chance of success and for it to happen fast i mean booker you they go the exact opposite way it's typically a one to two year process sometimes five you know george r martin and they're still trying to write a book for like thirteen years so you know these books are are they take a long time very low odds of success and even when they do succeed it's nothing compared to like if i went build a company or like in my portfolio right now there's things that are far more if far easier or far more valuable to podcast podcasts far easier far more valuable to do then than to write a book you don't write the book for other people you're write the book for yourself i think it's the only way to do it and i think one of the great things that happen when i talked to some people who who you know talk to people for advice is they gonna look a hundred people come to me because oh you wrote a best seller people wanna ask you about a book and they say everybody wants to have written a book nobody wants to write a book and so the very first things is you gotta figure out like do you want to have written a book or do you want to write a book that's why i chose a subject that basically is like currently fascinating to me and applies to i get to be the lab of doing the things that are in the book like using the actual principles because it's like what i needed it's the book i needed right now even though it's probably not the thing i know the most about or is the most relevant or the most marketable or any of those other possible factors there's this badass is so exciting and it feels i don't think you i've heard you light up about a project for a while well i was the was looking for a challenge you know that i was looking for a challenge i was looking for something that's new that's something that's hard for me this is like the opposite my i'm a an improv guy i'm a quick guy i'm an un schedule guy i be like that's what i've known and that's what i've done well with so this is like very different like requires consistency buyers sitting down every single day and i don't miss a day type of mentality which is good it's also what i needed to get in shape it's also what i need to do to learn the piano like all the things i'm trying to do right now they all require the same set of muscles internally to go and actually succeed in them oh also the other thing that's a hard about it is when you do things that are like i'm gonna make a hundred of these any one doesn't matter but with a you're like i'm gonna make one i'm gonna make this one book it is gonna be what it's gonna be the level of internal pressure you put on yourself to make it great and to be like no i gotta get this right i don't get to it's not like i'll just get started and then we'll iterate from there doesn't really work that way you wanna put one great thing out there's a craftsman like nature to that and there's something cool about that constraint that you're only gonna make that you're only gonna really write this thing once so you better do it the best you possibly could because it's not something where you're gonna get a hundred shots on goal at the same idea i can never do this or maybe i would one day but like wanna the best books that i read like i think ron cher was one my favorite authors he wrote titan which is the story of john rockefeller he wrote hamilton which became hamilton and he's written one of mark twain and a and a couple others and it's these by their biographies he's a bio biographies same with robert greene if you have a rubber green it's like every sentence is packed with like every every sentence is very purposeful and it's not even the it's per and all those those two authors so not particularly easy to read but every sentence is full of stuff and it's like a thousand or eight hundred pages and i'm just like in awe it's sort of like when you go to yosemite for those first time and you see like half dome and you're like i can't believe that something is as big and beautiful and i don't even like the outdoors and when i read like there every once and other i've read a book where i'm like this is like a religious experience not necessarily because of the content but because of how much effort this person put into it and it's just it's a marvel think about harry potter i'm like how on earth did this one lady invent this world she literally invented a language and i even like harry potter but i'm like in all of this that's another example of you get your best ideas in motion and water the idea for harry potter sort of drops into her head when she's on a train ride she's like in motion and sitting there and idle and doesn't have internet access and can't do ten other things there's nothing else you could do and he said on the train except to think and that's when your brain is open for for you know creative inspiration do you think that doing deep work is good is harder today than it was before the internet because when you're talking about writing a book i'm like i struggle to get people to quit messaging me and i like and i'm absolutely addicted to my notifications like i can't have an unread text message but then i have text slack twitter instagram linkedin email well let me give you let me give you one of the quotes i think there's gonna be the in the in one of the the first few pages of the book so sean rei who is you know a a prolific creator right so she's you know netflix gave her a hundred million dollars not for stuff she's already made but just to make new things like you're getting pay a hundred million dollars for your reputation your ability to create great great stuff in the future and she she created bridge tan and grey's anatomy and a bunch of other hit shows okay so lived did my little town of west really well she was talking about her process and she was like okay like you know they're like how does her creative process how do you work like the same idea how do the great ones actually work and here's what here's how she described like her morning and so she goes imagine a door five miles away and those five miles to go the five miles that's you writing crap and doo and just trying to have an idea then you sometimes are surfing the internet and you're hoping like hell you're not gonna get so distracted that you give up and worse those five miles that you gotta run they're lined with cupcakes and episodes of game of thrones and idris alba wants to talk to you and there's really great books you could go read and and every time i sit down to right i mentally have to run those five miles past all that shit to get to the door it's a long hard five mile run and sometimes i'm almost dead by the time i get to the door and that's why i keep doing it because the more often i run the five miles the fitter i become the fitter become the easier just run and the less fresh and exciting all that stuff on the side of the road starts to see i mean how long of those brownie he's even been sitting there and more importantly the fitter i run the faster i run the faster run i get to the door and behind the door is where all the good shit is that's where the great ideas lie is behind the door it gives me goosebumps i know right and so like when i sit down every it every day i wake up and i spend two hours i call it eating shit for breakfast it's like you're gonna make something that cut probably sucks today but you're gonna sit down and you're gonna make you're gonna do your five mile run you're gonna go and you're gonna ignore the distractions of the world you're gonna do deep work on the one thing that matters the main project your mount everest in your mind of that you're trying to create and all it takes is two hours first thing in the morning without any other distraction so i'm focused on doing that in this idea that like at the beginning when you sit down you start to do the thing your initial work kinda sucks your the first few sentences you write suck your first three ideas for that marketing campaign kinda suck it's all gonna kinda suck you just have to get keep going to get to the door behind the doors where the good stuff is and like if you have that mentality what ends up happening is you push password the sort of the amateur will give up the amateur will sit down and you know they'll start to do something and it kinda sucks and then they'll seek a reason to stop whether it's a distraction or it's talking to themselves out of it or it's settling one of many things you could do and you know what i thought was different about the pros for amateur so the pros just have better talent you know when they sit down they make good shit when i sit down i make bad it's like no actually the difference is when the process is down they make the same type of bad shit you do they just keep going and they go they go through the sit down your door yeah they sit down more you and they stick with it they're able to face their own mediocrity and tolerate it much longer than you can paul graham got this amazing article on procrastination i kinda changed my life and so according to paul graham who's the founder of yc one of the most successful business incubator of all time maybe the most successful he said there's three types of procrastination the first type of procrastination is you just don't do the thing that you're supposed to do which is like the most common the second type of procrastination is incredibly common amongst ambitious people which is they say to themselves i'm researching or i'm running it to do list or i'm doing these things that are have professional sounding words but in reality it's procrastination you know it's completely worthless and then the third type of procrastination that's the best type of that's a good type of procrastination he goes i'll explain what it is but first everyone has this idea of like the forgetful scientist the albert einstein who has two socks that are like different colors or he has a showered and he looks kind of dirty that type of procrastination that's actually the good type of because if you do your life's task do the work that you're supposed to be doing that means you have to ignore other things and sometimes that means we have to ignore things that the world thinks is really important like having two socks that matches and like thinking like oh i have to do laundry so i could look at a certain way he goes but the reason people would make fun of like bill gates from mark zuckerberg when they're were young because they would wear hoodies all the time and wear pajama bottoms all the time and be like why aren't you wearing a suit why aren't your clothes nicer and they didn't have a good answer at the time but the reality was is that they were focused on your their life's work they weren't focused on how to look good at how to appease at the people but they were actually doing the best type of procrastination and that's what it requires to be great is you have to do that you have to avoid the first two types and you have to focus on third type of procrastination and that's gonna be annoying for a lot of people it's gonna piss off a lot of people but that's the way you do your life's work i love that i mean this type of stuff just fires me up so like that's great i love that it's great man i like when i read that i was like so was like you just might've got yourself quoted in the book my friend yeah i was like hey if you actually google sam park procrastination i wrote a i wrote an article about it but i was like to my wife i was like yes sarah like get all my back when my life's work over here she's like you're on twitter repeat after me sarah life's work it's not take trash out it didn't land just it doesn't printed it off his article i slid at her way during dinner out of like read that that's amazing today's episode has brought you by hubspot because you're using only twenty percent of your business data is like dating somebody who only text you in emojis first of all that's knowing and second you're missing a lot of the content but that's how most businesses are operators today they're only using twenty percent of their data unless you use hubspot that's when all your emails your call logs your chat messages just to turn into insights to help you grow your business because all that data makes all the difference learn more at hubspot dot com i do wanna share a thing that i think you'll appreciate didn't plan to share this but i i think you'll you'll appreciate it i'll i'll i'll say so i got my grandfather died he'd ninety eight years old was the in america in america hey he lives in dc and so i flew to dc and we go to the funeral and funeral sir they are what they are they're they're sad but you know i think ninety eight years old he had a great life he was healthy for almost all almost till the very end are indian funerals like traditional american funerals or do you guys like ham up they do cremation and there's also some like i don't know parts that you're like is this what we're supposed to be doing right now like they basically have like the cass is kind of too much info but like they have the casket and whatever and i think like in american i don't know really exactly happens at american funerals but i would assume like you sort of you go you sort of give your thoughts and prayers whatever you maybe put a flower down or something like that and if you're right before they they have the kind of the send off the the final thing right before cremation i like breaks out like gal and a milk a bunch of like food and like you basically pour all this stuff on top of the body it's like it feels like completely blast and i was i like put like a drop you're no the whole gallon and i was like grab thirsty shot pouring the milk call over this man this is ridiculous so that part was a little bit strange but the rest was i would say you know normal and people gave you know their eu and whatnot my dad goes up and gives us it gives a speech and my dad told me the story before and i you you just had a kid so this is kind for all the dads out there so the best thing my grandpa ever did as a dad which i'm gonna steal and i think others should steal it too so my my dad and my family my my my dad's family grew up like dirt dirt poor india like middle of nowhere it's like you know you go on google maps you gotta like zoom in pinched to zoom three times to even see the little town that my dad gru up and like somehow my dad like you know was born there and now like sixty something years later he's got like a man mansion in san francisco and like an iphone and his i was like kinda like crazy that like that that kid ends up doing this so doesn't really make a lot of sense okay so like imagine your dad being like my son is going to be a famous youtuber in america you're gonna be like or he's gonna be writing books on creativity like it's a long dollars to talk because like it doesn't make any sense so how do you get from there to there and so he was he was telling the story he's like you know we grew up like we couldn't afford anything like you know we it's like i hadn't seen a movie to yeah movies existed i haven't seen on until sick team and you know the day we went we got one bottle of coca cola and split it amongst like the you know four kids type of deal like it was like that was like a highlight of my childhood to like i still remember the memory hey anyways one of the things that he says that his dad did form him he goes by dad gave egos goes he didn't have money couldn't give me fancy anything right couldn't send me to a fancy school he didn't we didn't have a lot of toys he didn't give me anything in that area right he goes with the one thing he did give me was he gave me this belief from the very beginning he brain me that i was special and he goes there was no evidence i didn't do anything special but he just felt like i'm such and he just kept saying it he's like he would say it in public so he's like he would take me to his job like my grandfather worked i think at like a kinda like a government like almost was like a a like a weapons factory basically for the government and he would take him there and like the boss his boss the manager of the factory would be like oh like there's the little one there's my guy hey here where the hard hat like you know someday you'll you can be here you you can run this you know the this this place and my grandfather would be like to go to his boss but like no way he goes this this boy my boy he's not gonna work in a factory this boy special you don't know this boy special he's gonna do incredible things he's gonna be in america he's gonna be doing incredible things someday he's not gonna work in a factory and so just like he kinda breathe this this belief into him and he just he's like he always said it he never had he never explained why he believed it or what what how it would happen but he was just so sure that i became kinda sure and i just started to believe that about myself and so like he goes that was like almost like in inject that he gave me like a magic bean and this being it was like my belief for myself and see this all the time with my kids where it's very easy to criticize kids because kids to dump stuff all the time it's very easy to like tell them off for not doing things the right way it's very easy to you know like mix sort of this praising criticism but my brother all has been doing the same thing with his daughter who showed a little bit of talent and soccer and then he like went all in and was like he created a instagram account called raising ronaldo when he's like i'm raising ronaldo right now i'm not this is not my daughter this is the next ronaldo and he's puts posters up and he just continues oh when you're playing pro i'm gonna be in the crowd i'm gonna do this i'm gonna do that is this aaron aaron yeah he's been saying this for like eight years now she's ten you know like she's like you know she's young she believes and she works like somebody who is the next like she's training like you know seven days a week no days off on vacation they take the ball they go do a hundred you know like when they keep the ball their juggle like a hundred juggle in a row like they don't do breakfast before that like it's incredible and it reminded me of i'm gonna read you this into it is the is is brother aaron daughter into it and by the way like she's into it which makes it sound like oh that's easy my kid wouldn't be it well i was there and like it's not as black or white with a kid like some days they're into it some days they're tired and cranky some days they have a heart he puts her she only plays basically against boys and so it's harder to play against boys boys that are you're too older than her and sometimes she doesn't get to dominate and she you know has a tough game or whatever and like on those days that's she doesn't wanna go do it again in the next day it doesn't force her to do anything but he like never he never wave in his conviction and that like has over time it is overwhelmed through it is completely brand watcher in the positive direction i wanna read you this story from this soccer player marcel marcelo so this mark this guy marcel marcelo basically told the story about his grandfather and he goes they were talking about like what does it feel like you're this star player for i think to play for real madrid like the one of the biggest soccer clubs in the world you're make millions of dollars you're adored by fans everywhere like you how does it feel he goes this is the quote because you have to understand where i come from brother he goes i can see the scene like it's a movie in my head still i'm eight years old my family had no money in yeah brazil we couldn't even afford gasoline in our car to make it to practice so my grandfather i didn't know this but he made a sacrifice to change my life he sold his car just to get like you know in a bad deal got a little bit of money but that was enough to take the bus every day so he takes me to training every day on the public bus side by side every day on the crowded four ten into he side by side all the way across rio d jane aero and every day no matter how i play it he tells me you're the best you are marcel one day you're gonna be playing for brazil one day i will see you in the stadium and he goes i could still see this that that talk like every day in four k in my head i can smell the inside of that bus he goes my grandfather gave his whole life for my dream his friends used to tease him that he was broke and he would tell his friends he would take out his pocket show that it's empty and say hey look me man i don't have a single penny but i'm the happiest mother effort in the world he believed in me we were partners in this endeavor and he talks about like in his village how there was his grandfather who did this for but also the shop keeper he couldn't afford a a ball and so he goes to the local shop and he asked and he's like hey can i have a ball and the guy's like yeah cost as much because i don't have the money but when i'm a professional player when i grew up i'll come back and i'll pay you he's like eight years old seven years old at the time the guy just laughs and he's like i take a ball you deserve it he's like make sure you pay me when you when you become pro right like just you know he it kinda pulls on the hurt strings and so when it became a pro he came back and basically like bought like unlimited balls for every kid in the town like forever growing up and was just like ed okay will have that you know that problem now it's i hear these stories and it just kinda reminds you of like the power that either a father or a grandfather can have in the the kind of shaping of a kid it actually like the best thing you could give them is like fundamentally a belief that they're gonna be great and people will rise to your assumption if they don't have a strong assumption about themselves and that kids don't have strongest assumptions about themselves yet and so you can give them a stronger frame that they will they will live up to where did your grandpa paul for we got well want the link to this one but sean has this amazing story about his mother coming to america and like seeing a playing for the first time it's like i think about that story weekly actually that's it's pretty amazing where did your grandpa end up like so he made it to america with his family did did your father come first and then your grandpa gives my my my dad gets a son to go in like kind of a crazy set of circumstance you know what ia is it it's like the indian institute it's like the indian technical college right or the important universe university in india but then didn't your dad go to berkeley no so so he went to it india which is basically like at don't know it's like harvard for india so even harder to give into to is because there's like a billion people trying to get into the one like top top brand he gets some there by happens again when you believe something about yourself you'll take chances that the other people wouldn't so he he doesn't even know what it is he doesn't even know he's you're supposed to be taking entrance exams he sees a guy hey his friend is on a scooter he's like hey you wanna complain and the guy is like no no i gotta go take this test and he's like what test and he's like i'm gonna trying to get into it it's the best and that's how you get if i get and he's like why you who why do you care it's so far away why would you wanna go to school there go school here because if i get in there i can go to america again his grandfather told him you're gonna be in america someday so he's looking for he hears that and he says so he literally hops on the back of this dude's scooter and goes and takes the test blind now my dad was a pretty like good student because again like when you don't have anything else you don't have tv you don't have anything like all he had was his books for from textbooks from school so he's a good student so he ended up getting into it i think you've rank like thirty ninth at all of india like something crazy like that and so he goes to through it he gets a scholarship to come to study at a boulder university in colorado arrives in the dead of the night becomes a pot had a week later he well well could have easily because he arrives dead of night he had a scholarship that's the only way you could go there and when you come from i don't think people realize you're not allowed to bring in like assets not that my grant my family had assets but you could only bring in like some crazy small amount of money like six dollars or something like that so my my dad had six bucks and he came to america basically how had to figure out he's like don't worry like i have housing and tuition paid by the school but he arrives in december like the admissions office is closed for winter break so he's literally just like outside in the cold and winter in colorado he's like what like what do i do again never been on a plane before like everything's new some french dudes see some student there who's a french guy another international student who wasn't home for holidays sees and he's like dude what are you doing he's like trying to get into this place trying go to school yeah so that guy just takes him he's come stay with me he just lives with this guy so you know again somebody somebody helps out along the way anyways my dad brings my grandfather over when he gets here how it's wait hold so your father was like college twenty five twenty and he okay so he was only twenty one and he brought his father over brings us over to over the next few years he brings his father over brings his brother over but gets everybody over right that's like the the goal look the the role of that kind of the eldest son is to like so your dad was the shit well yeah i mean what he did yeah changed like the direction of the kind of his tribe you know and so my grandfather comes over and i remember when i was a kid like we used to go with him to his vending he was like a vending machine side hustle we would go collect all the quarters added of like four vending machines that he was like running at the time then he opened but any he upgraded he got a like a little stack shop in the in the in the office building and we used to sit at the cashier they're doing that all day like he basically just kinda had some hustle but you know the other thing that i i thought was kind of admirable was the when he was like in his seventies or eighties like whatever the computer came out and like i don't know if remember we had like a computer room in our house like one desktop computer for the whole family he would come in and he would try to learn how to type like i imagine was like a seventy five year old eighty year old guy something like this you know and but he's not just like trying to use the computer he's literally just saying i wanna learn how to type like a skill i was like what do you planned what do you could do with all this typing he didn't carry he's like up this is the new thing i'm not gonna basically never gave up on himself he's like never too like too old where you know like most old people just literally are like that's too bad that's too complicated that's for young people and like he never had that attitude it was like if it exists like it's for me like he worked at circuit city in the dvd section when he was like eighty years old and they were like dude do you know anything about movies or music american movies and music he's like no hey and he's like it would joke like they can't fire me though because i'm so old like it would be discrimination it's hilarious they're too afraid to fire me even though i don't know anything about this job and like circuit city had to go a bankrupt before they could get rid of him like you know he's he was kinda good stubborn in that way he would like never take medicine like even at the end he the last month he broke his femur because he felt and like breaking your femur look like the biggest bone in their body is a pretty rough break but like even when he was in the hospital he was like i mobilized he would be doing like arm exercises he's like oh i'm gonna be back and when i i gotta keep my body active you know like that was always his mentality so yeah a lot of things that i kind of admire that i you know i'll always remember about him how did you get to dc when they came over like where are we gonna live they live with us for a while in colorado and then when it was like okay that's enough living with us now thank you it was like here's dc like where some some of the other siblings live so that we got them a house there they live there i've been thinking about like we've been thinking about like some logos or not logos like slogan and stuff for hampton and i've been obsessed with this idea of building what out you and so like build what out outlets you it's like like this phrase that i've been obsessed with and that doesn't mean business necessarily it could mean but what's interesting is that your grandfather so far has been the best example of building what loves you and so like telling her a story about how like he gave his father this or his son this attitude which then my father gave that to me you know you speak it at my father to me and i'm like that's the best example of building something that lives you which is just a positive attitude is what out lived him and i find that to be very fascinating and frankly i find that to be the most admirable thing a man can do is to build what out loves you and it's legacy and not legacy in the sense of your name is gonna be on the building or whatever it's just that i live a certain way because this guy lived a certain way because this this guy lives a certain way and because this grandfather live a certain way i now treat people wonderfully and that's the that's the most beautiful example of building what that leads you yeah do you do you know like your family history like i've heard this sometimes when people are like my great grandfather did this or we were we were actually warriors and therefore and then people really take that as like so that's in my blood and it really gives him a lot of belief i don't even know like i didn't know half to shit about my grandfather until the funeral when they were telling the stories about like his upbringing no frankly i did not have this and where i'm from in the midwest like it's just like my people had been here for forever in saint louis all my grandparents are dead by the age of three for me and so i lacked a massive sense of belonging and so i remember meeting a jewish guy and like him him telling like the traditions of like judaism and like going to like like having this friday night meal i'm like oh my god i crave this tribe i was like i crave this so much or like i remember like moving to san francisco and walking around on the stanford the stanford campus and i'm like oh my god i would love to have this stanford logo on my in or whatever just so i can meet other people who share these values like i've been desperate my whole life for like a sense of belonging because i never had that as a as a as a kid 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 that's 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 giving 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 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 to change mind and i know it will change yours so check it out join hampton dot com can i tell you when you talked about books earlier can i tell you this idea that this like very interesting business that i had never heard of so i've ever heard of little blue books no what is it little okay so check out what i have in my hand you see this this is a little blue book it's not blue by the way just but it is tiny so for the whole listening i googled it and sean just showed it it almost looks like you pulled the cover off of a book yeah it's a little paper back i mean not even paper it's just paper so like staple together literally this is staple on the side and it's like a three inch high book and the these were called little black book little blue books guess how many copies of little blue books sold i have no idea i don't just take a guess my god i just saw the number oh my god oh my god really okay so there there's been something like a low end estimate is two hundred million high end estimate is five hundred million copies of these books were sold did you take your idea from this or did you like no your idea and you telling i was telling craig clement about my idea for one hour books and he was like do dude you know about a little blue and i was like he's like oh dude you gotta check this out oh my gosh and the titles are the best yeah so like this one and right now i'm holding by the way just for reference like you know harry potter sold like something like six hundred million copies so this is like a harry potter level phenomenon that existed you know a long time ago so this one the title is the gentle art of making enemies oh my gosh you telling me the subtle art of not giving an enough didn't steal from that right or it'll just be like this one proverbs of turkey they're about popular shakespeare quotes a rapid calculator how to make rapid arithmetic arithmetic calculations in your head here's one call look about doing mental math how to dress on a small set salary the psychology of leadership the puzzle of personality man and his ancestors yes so they fuck they have they're good at titles good at copywriting that the books themselves by the way not actually good i i spent like an afternoon trying to read these because i was like oh i found this hidden pearl of wisdom from the past personally didn't really love any of the books but did craig like this because of the marketing yeah he was just like this was a i mean this was like a phenomenon you should study this and just steal something from this thing that happened you know such a long time ago the reason i bring this up is and why this is related to what you talked about so why did these things succeed because i thought well maybe they were just incredible fairly popular we're to well well written whatever no they're not really right like this today seems like you this could be an instagram account maybe or you know something something so simple the reason worked was basically back in the day but before this was like before they were like public libraries so books were actually rare they were not something that the average person could afford or had access to and so you had an access problem and they were lin supply and so they came out with these and these things would cost nothing they would be like a nickel to buy the book so you could buy this for five cents you could carry it around in your pocket it was so small so it was portable it was affordable and it became ubiquitous they would sell it at like you know every news newspaper stand in the corner store anywhere you can still put this thing anyway anywhere it's so small basically a podcast episode exactly it's it's like youtube videos and so what i found interesting was man in a time where that scarce this can sell five hundred million copies because information was scarce back then it was actually hard to get information you couldn't go on google or youtube couldn't even get a book from a library couldn't afford a lot of this information so where would you get that information about how to dress on a small salary or you know the quotes from shakespeare or proverbs of of aristotle right i would hope that your dad would tell you correct but like you know most people don't so that became incredibly valuable now today fast today information is ubiquitous it's like running water or you can get it anywhere you get all the information you'll ever want instantaneously in whatever style you want and then sometimes it's even if you go to your feed like instagram or tiktok you'll get information you didn't even for but might be interesting to you curated by this sort of all knowing algorithm okay so information is now abundant so something like this i don't think could ever work today now what scarce today is became it became the interesting question in my head because if information was scarce thin and then there was a need for little blue books what scarce today and i think it's what you just said now this is i hate even saying the word belonging but basically you know get being a part of a tribe i think is incredibly scarce today in america at least or in the life that i see around me me and my life's around me and i think this is you know organized religion did this for a lot of people i think group exercise classes like crossfit and soul cycle did this job for a lot of people now run clubs are incredibly popular book clubs are getting more and more popular which seems really counterintuitive to the trend i think people need this sort of in person tribe with rituals and a tribe leader and a banner and rituals that you you attend i think that is what is scarce today and i think people are people crave it and those who properly build that are gonna prosper in the future and i think you're doing it but hampton by the way yeah i'm trying to do it i met this guy he came in my office here that a pop anthony pop the uno introduced me to this guy and he was like you had did you just drop that just like that is there a davey to pick up because i just dropped did i just dropped that your democratic president the anthony that he was like you gotta i call anthony by the way it's like on all sometimes the like they they were referring to the sec chairman and they're like yeah look tim do did a great job so my version of that is anthony anthony yeah so he was like i gotta meet this guy i said yeah whatever sure could've of been the like if you're in town code to my office man i met him and i was like what's your deal he's does italian guy with a thick italian accent and he's got this company that's basically making a hundred million dollars a year curing loneliness so it's called but they're doing it in a very unique way so if you go to we road dot com the business is crazy so the company let me tell what the product is the product is basically it's traveling for twenty thirty and forty year old professionals and so what they do is if you wanna travel the issue with a lot of young people is like they wanna travel alone but they don't literally wanna be alone when they travel like they don't wanna team team up with the friends they wanna do what they wanna do but with other people who wanna do it with them and so it's basically eighty percent women twenty percent men is like their customer base and so it'll they have categories so it's like adventure it's nature it's historical they got a bunch of categories and you pick a trip that you wanna go on and then seven to maybe fifteen other young people like you are gonna go on that exact same trip and you're gonna have a tour guide leading you along each trip so this for example i click pat trek through argentina and chile there's beautiful photos of like i this just looks like unbelievable and then it's a thirteen day trip you pay three grand and you're gonna go with a group of eight to fifteen people you know twelve nights in hotel or guest house your breakfast are included and you get a domestic flight to buenos aires from from bun if you get to buenos aires from there to the like start of the of the adventure and it's and then they have like day day one here's what we do day two here's what we do all the way to day thirteen this company i think it was started in two thousand and twenty it's only about five or six years old this year they're gonna do a hundred and sixty million in revenue last year they did a hundred million in revenue and their gross margins he said i could say all this are thirty percent i've never heard of this amazing right i've never heard of it either so on a hundred million in revenue after they pay the hotels and the the con the person leading the tour guide they keep thirty percent so a hundred and sixty million in revenue what's that that's like fifty million bucks in like net revenue to their company absolutely astounding that this company exists it's one of these ideas that you told me about it and i'm like yeah that sounds like a cute little hobby they've totally crushed it and i've been and i was asking him i'm like why why do people like this he's like well because people are lonely and they don't wanna be alone and we're just one example of how you can solve loneliness this because you go along this trip with strangers and you're gonna come home best friends and he was like and in a lot of cases sometimes people come home as boyfriend and girlfriend that happens a lot and so i thought that this was an absolutely amazing product to solve like it's it's like there's these macro trends so you talk about this macro trends of like physical experiences things like that and loneliness and then there's like how do you package that into a solution that you could sell i'm trying to do it with hampton in one way this is a a totally other way of doing it it's crushing me so that was probably this is a this is a a very a very nice way to package it it would be nice if i could have my company do a hundred and sixty million in revenue in five years but isn't this pretty cool and they do something that looks way more fun and they like hook up so it's like basically better in every dimension that i care about yeah yeah this is i mean my parents do this my mom does this with like seniors do this as well so her and her siblings two to three times a year take these guided tours basically basically groups of seniors you know it's just all and because they're like we don't have to think right they're gonna organize all the sightseeing seeing all the hotels all the food all the everything they keep you safe if they have the insurance like they do all that stuff and then you're with a group so you know you can grow with a group or you can kinda make friends inside the group because you know traveling when you're young and your friends maybe not all not all being able to synchronize a trip together or you don't have enough friends like that's one thing the other is you know your empty nest your seniors and like you have way more time and money on your hands but travel is you know still you know a little bit difficult and daunting yeah it's pretty amazing like i did it when i was in college or high school maybe like an ef tour is that what what's called educational tour it's like the company called ef tours it's like a multi billion dollar company that they do there for students everyone knows they can do this do are they the ones who have like incredible on campus marketing like a machine where they basically have like kind of affiliates and then they do a vest it's like an ml basic it's it's like started by like a swedish guy who's like a rec but he like owns a whole bill of business that he does like five billion in revenue it's like one of these things where you you're like you don't realize how bad it is i was i was too dumb at the time to like pay attention to what was happening but now that i look back with like my business lens now that thing was brilliant so ef tours does eleven billion a year in revenue good if i'm if i'm one of these like who's like the travel youtuber that's popular if i'm the travel youtuber that's popular i'm like the we had a fun adventure type of youtuber i would create something like this know i mean this is very hard to create to be clear but like i would steal operators from these companies and be like you're gonna build this you but you're gonna use my my brand my face to like spin up because these are these don't really have a strong brand and the these are way overdue interestingly this this guy actually has a s connection so the guy who started ef tours i i didn't research this in advance so i'm just kinda looking at wikipedia he started ef tours in the nineteen sixty five they now have fifty two thousand employees and his last name is holt h u l t the whole international school business that's the whole school in s f which was i think down by fisherman wharf but anyway crazy way of solving loneliness so drew this was a fun episode i'm happy we got to like catch up but i'm also i i i think that there's times on this podcast sometimes we're like maybe you don't wanna talk about something personal because you're like i don't know if people gonna like enjoy this or be like if they can get like entertainment or education from like my little personal story but i gotta say that i'm actually like incredibly impacted by that story of your grandfather you know i i have a soft spot in my heart for immigrants and so i love hearing the story of your mother i've never heard their story of your father i love immigrants steve you love it i love immigrants like i i you know i kinda categorized like first born in america you know son of them immigrants as immigrants as well and in that regard every one of my friends is is an immigrant it's almost racist how much you love immigrants just but seriously just shut up about about dude i married into immigrant family about it that's one of your like phrases that stuff like a lot of people will when they email me like for an opportunity to the bike i got that korean what is it korean russia what is it korean corner store owner energy or something like that like i got that immigrant mentality yeah like korean korean store owner energy so because in new york you basically there's like the corner like markets and they are all owned by asian families so it's typically like a vietnamese family and i i like to go and i like to talk to these families and i literally just like ask them with their story and then the smaller ones are usually owned by it's a lot of indian families but it's also a lot of like arabic families and it's very interesting how and then you go to like dunkin donuts and that's always indian and so like i love going to these like or you go to mattel always indian and i love going and like just like i'm like wanna learn like what's going on and so i love like like like learning about those stuff i think it's so fascinating because immigrants have this like us versus them mentality which i've always crave you i always wanna be the us turns out turns out turns out of the them of the on the against them yeah yeah you know like i'm iceland in the muddy ducks like i'm the bad or i'm like the bad guys like you will like go to stall over here yeah yeah i'm the them i wanted to be the ass i'm them hilarious alright i good slot for us alright that's it that's a pod i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a road travel never looking back hey let's take a quick break i wanna tell you about a podcast that you could check out it is called the science of scaling by mark robe he was the founding ser of hubspot and he's a guest lecturer at harvard business school the guy smart and he sits down every week with different sales leaders from cool companies like cla and van and open ai and he's asking about their strategies their tactics and how they're growing their companies as you know head of sales or chief revenue officer if you're looking at to scale a company up if you're a cro or a head of sales just looking to level up in your career i think a podcast like this could be great for you listen to the science of scaling wherever you get your podcast

we have sixty five million of arr we do over forty million dollars of eb we also manage a two hundred million dollar fund so we're over three hundred million in revenue across thirty businesses and all the businesses in the fund prop as well i don't know i'm kinda like if that's failing like sign me up right you've owned a number of agencies how much revenue lifetime as meta lab generated for you the hundreds of millions of dollars of profits not revenue i don't know that i would still rank it very highly though sas where are you putting sas i would say it's a what do you think about marketplace well i would say it comes down to scale a good marketplace like european airbnb b at tin a i'd rank marketplace in general is that's the one i would disagree with you with i feel like i gotta ask you this because i think you get a lot of shit nowadays i think a lot of people go look at the tiny stock and then think like like max and basically you see just a downward trend a lot of people i see on twitter want to kinda look at that and say oh this guy calls himself the warren buffett of the internet and he says he buys these great businesses but what's going on i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to from all in in like a days off on a roll let's try what's up andrew is here andrew is one of the most visited guests on the pod always good to have you man i wanted to play a game with you you've done many types of businesses you've done agencies and and you know private equity and you've started you know e commerce companies you've done a huge number of companies in the last twenty years so i wanna do a game where we rank the different types of businesses that you could start and we could work out this criteria together but i i think the idea should be we're not looking at the outlier scenarios so in every industry right the world's best plumber makes a fantastic living that may not mean that plumbing is the best trade to go into no offense to the plumbers out there listening but we're not looking at just the extreme outlier so i think that here's my criteria for a great business andrew it's gonna be the median successful outcome okay so like the sort of like normal case if you can make it work that's the first that's the first criteria the second thing is we're thinking we're taking into account both the lifestyle as well as the the result the upside so you know if one thing is just makes you miserable or overwatch you like crazy then that would be obviously worse than a business that that lets you have a great flexible schedule and flexible location for example so lifestyle matters upside matters and we're looking for kind of the median success case but but you know in some of these it's gonna be like dude it's median success i mean only the top point one percent make it so you have to factor that in the likelihood of success matters in these in these scenarios okay if you're if you're listening on audio it's gonna be a little more fun if you go to youtube or go to spotify and actually you could see on screen the the stuff that we're sharing alright so here we go here's the tier list if you've never seen a tier list before they're ranked as you would expect sort of a b c d e f a being better than f but there is of course s here and i don't even i don't even really know what s stands for i think it's like from the gaming world but it's basically like s tier is sort of like god tier it's the best you can it's the best of the best okay so we're gonna start with little lay up here and for each andrea i want you to give me your almost like rapid fire take on like you know kinda what this business is why it's either great or why it sucks okay so the first one we're gonna do easy an ml which is actually a surprisingly common business that people get into if you just look at the raw numbers of people who take part in ml so ml where you where you ranking it i mean i would rank an ml as an of fundamentally unsustainable business that breaks i mean the problem with an ml is it's reliant on recruiting other people and and it doesn't actually make money based on selling services it's it basically makes money by finding the next sucker and if the person that starts the m l finds a lot of suckers they can make a lot of money yeah and the first couple layers can make a ton of money but then it always explodes or they get indicted or something like that so where are you ranking it i would say that's enough okay it's going in the f although it does sound like for the ml owner you know it's not necessarily enough you know one of the one of the associates are as they call them you know the business owners that they they like to call themselves that are underneath yeah that's apt here for them i think if you are willing to go to jail too like you can make a lot of money but i mean like fifty fifty odds to go to jail alright next one up is one that i think you did by the way say say if you've done any of these okay so freelancer which is i believe is how you started your career you were a freelance what web designer yeah yeah i started making websites out of my apartment basically i would i would rank that probably a d i think it's a it's a really good business i say it's some it's a living right i think there's nothing wrong with freelancing or a restaurant or a corner store or that sort of thing but fundamentally it's an owner operator model and it doesn't really scale unless you scale it which is what i did yeah okay well that's the the kind of the next one which is actually agency you've owned a number of agencies you've probably made i don't know i don't know what the number is but meta lab has generated something like two hundred million plus in revenue how much how much revenue lifetime has meta lab generated for you you're design agency i don't know the exact math but i think we're probably well over into the hundreds of millions of dollars of profits not revenue okay so i'm assuming you might have agency higher than most people so i i think well you know what i don't know that i would still rank it very highly though you know the reason some you know my story i started a web design agency i scaled it i got clients like youtube and uber and walmart and all these big companies and i was terrified i mean it's a business where you're either making a ton of money or you're about to go out of business constantly and you swing between those two things and so because of that lumpy nature i'd maybe give it a c but it's be it'd be a tentative c it would it would kind of yeah it like it's really really a hard business and the hard part is you're saying clients come and go it's that one it can be feast your famine with clients is that is that the reason why or is it the headache of operating and delivering the service what what is it about the agents that it makes it like well not let's and instead of web design let's imagine you're an accountant and you start an accounting firm and you start auditing thirty companies now companies don't like to switch accountants and they don't like to switch auditors so if you have that that's a really high quality consulting business however if you have a five hundred doll let's say that you hired thirty people in the philippines and you do graphic design for five hundred dollars you might have months where you're making three hundred thousand dollars and then you might have months where you're making nothing because you're not getting any clients the worst thing that happens in these businesses is you win a client like walmart let's say they come along and they say hey we wanna give you ten million dollars of work over the next year and so you you start panicking you go out you hire thirty people and then a new pm takes over that team at walmart and they just cut your budget right and all of a sudden you're left with thirty people you have to lay off so i think it depends on the nature of the business honestly so you've you did meta lab you've also had like a game design agency you've had like a a no code agency you've had how probably what six to ten different ten to fifteen agencies and services business copywriting social media web development design a lot of different stuff what were the sort of top two agencies you did and what were the sort of bottom tier agencies you did well i would say that we really haven't had a lot of success with recreating the success of meta lab med lab was the business you know like i said i started with zero and now does you know very significant earnings and revenue a lot of the other agencies have not hit in the same way and i think the distinction with metal app is it did so much defining work in like two thousand eight twenty fifteen where we you know we designed the first version of slack we worked on you know all sorts of projects that were kinda groundbreaking and we planted our flag and built a reputation and so i think the reputation piece is hard to recreate and so we've we've had a lot of success with meta lab we had a lot of success acquiring a company called z one which is in spain they're a a smaller web design agency and the theory there was literally just metal lab gets a ton of leads that are too small for it so let's buy another smaller agency and let's just send them those leads and so i think we acquired that business for three hundred thousand dollars or something and we've probably made single digit millions of profit in it so it's not we didn't knock it out of the park but it's just an amazing base hit right right hey what's up if you're liking this episode the research team at hubspot has taken all the rankings that we're doing today in this episode and they made it a downloadable thing in case you wanna go see the final to your list you wanna download it and maybe have a little breakdown of our commentary for each one it's available in the show notes below you can go ahead and download it totally free okay next one up saas where you putting sas i would say it's a b probably i think it again it depends on the type of saas if you have a saas software that is a chat gp thin rapper and does something like put a funny nose on your friend's face and you trick people into subscribing to it for six months and they always churn i'd say that's a pretty bad saas business if you have a saas business that let's say has become the dominant player in funeral home management and all the funeral homes use it and they don't wanna switch because it's the standard that's an incredible saas business and mean saas businesses they're often highly recurring really good margins i mean they can be incredible but you really have to find something with a limited amount of competition or high switching costs tell a quick story of the dj software saas business because that's kinda like the funeral home example you have so you're saying it's a vertical niche tool that's like mission critical for an industry to run on there were unlikely to ever switch and you know that's gonna be super super sticky for a long time with high margins so it sounds like i don't know a lot about the dj software business but like can you just tell a quick story of that one yeah i mean for the last ten years everybody has been basically like obsessed with buying saas software companies and thinking you can't lose in that industry which right now is still true but over the last two years like i've got really scared of buying software companies because you know you look at vibe coding and l and i i just think like l m's increasingly can build software and it's not that it's gonna put all these businesses let's say of saas software company and there's ten competitors five years ago i just think there's gonna be fifty or a hundred competitors in the future and when that happens competition equals margin compression so we've basically said note to almost every single saas software company we've looked at over the last two years but one came across our desk that we could not say no to and that was ser have you ever heard dj sc you go through that that life crisis you know what i appreciate to even think it's possible that i look like a guy who's dj before so i take that as a compliment but no i i had a phase in like twenty twelve whereas was trying to meet girls and i learned how to dj and so i kinda knew the industry and the dominant software company in that world for the last twenty twenty five years i think is a company called ser and it's an incredible piece of software i mean dj is all over the world use it i think like dip you know a gazillion of the top dj and these two guys in new zealand built it and what they did was really smart they partnered with the hardware manufacturers like pioneer and they deeply integrated into the hardware and so what that means is that a it's become the standard right so when you're the standard that is really exceptional most dj use one of two pieces of software either record box or ser right so very limited competition and there's lots of ups starts and stuff but once someone really integrates into an ecosystem like ser they're buying like five thousand dollars of hardware they're not gonna switch off really easily and the manufacturers frankly they don't wanna integrate with some random college kid who's vibe coded some ai dj you know not to say that people can't come and compete with us is just harder because it's not it doesn't have a hardware mode so i think saas with the hardware mode is pretty incredible you know that business we shared some of the numbers when we bought it i mean it's doing forty five million dollars of revenue fifteen million dollars of eb it's a it's been growing like crazy moving into a saas model from licensing i'm i'm a huge fan of that business why does a business like that grow like are there just way more dj or something else i think as long as the dj is a desirable thing to be i mean if you think about it one of the weirdest phenomenon you know when i would go to a club it doesn't matter how much money i have in my bank account i remember looking around and going oh man there's all these great girls here but you know none of them none of them know that you know i've got all these businesses i'm i'm a cool guy or whatever and you literally that name like they don't know i have a design agency exactly exactly how much i have but like i'd i'd look up i actually had a friend who's a dj and he would get paid like two hundred bucks and some beer tickets and he'd be swarmed with girls and he'd have status and throughout the city he'd be the man and so i think as long as that's true as long as young men think dj are cool and women increasingly there's way more female dj now i just met an amazing one yesterday but as long as that's true i think people are gonna wanna do it i mean it's just fun to mix music and you can you can become famous you can you know express yourself so i don't know as long as that's true it's like we've got one of the toll roads to achieving that yeah i like the analogy you have the toll road okay next one i'm gonna do actually i'll do do an easy one restaurant i think you've owned i think you own or still own a restaurant yeah i own a bunch of restaurants actually and i always say a restaurant is a a really good passion if you're really passionate about it you love food it's a labor of love as you know i know you have a sushi restaurant but i have when i meet somebody and they say i have a successful restaurant i wanna like like wayne world get down on my knees and say i'm not worthy because if you're successful in a restaurant i just it is one of the hardest businesses if you think about for you to go in and eat a good meal at six pm people had to wake up at three in the morning they had to bake bread a million things had to go right they had to train thirty people it's just like a rub goldberg machine of business so i would rank it as an e probably one of the hardest businesses and low margin and difficult yeah for people to give context most successful restaurants but even the big chains like a a subway or a chipotle or things like that ten percent margin is the good case scenario it's like that's doing well of course you know there's there's the exceptions like luxury you know sort of michelin star restaurants might have high power margins but you on the whole if ten percent is winning and then your bunch of revenue is capped at what you can produce because again you're working seven days a week you're there for breakfast lunch and dinner you you know you've basically you you can't that you always have to be there you always have to go in and make the product again fresh every single day and you're only as good as the your sort of last interaction with the customer it is just such a brutal business it is a it is an absolutely terrible business in fact it's funny that the only business you've ranked below it so far as an ml it's pretty much a a crime is the only thing that's been worse and you know like i said like we own restaurants i think they're really important but i i just don't if you wanna make money and you wanna get rich i don't think that's a good way to do it it's like i always use the gym analogy if you go into the gym and you try dead lift three hundred pounds on day one you will hurt your back and never come back and i think entrepreneurs who go into restaurants they have a rough go alright next one marketplace so an online marketplace where how do you think about marketplace this would be something like a whether it's a etsy or an ebay or an amazon or it could be you know even marketplace like angel list as a marketplace twitch is a marketplace anywhere where there's suppliers there's supply and demand right there's creators and viewers youtube is a marketplace of creators and viewers as well so what do you think about marketplace well i would say it comes down to scale like you've got a airbnb on the side there i think small marketplaces are really hard we own some and i think it's like lightning in a bottle if you can get supply and demand to match their phenomenal businesses but they're highly competitive i like a business where it becomes a verb so airbnb is a great example like if i think like oh maybe we should rent a house airbnb the word just pops in my head i go to the browser i look up airbnb and i'm gonna use it that i would say is probably a a b or an a business so very very highly ranked but if you started a marketplace for people who want to borrow let's say like construction tools or something like that yeah oh my god like i've just seen a million of these fail they're so difficult and so where you rank at marketplaces i would say a good marketplace like airbnb b i'd say a i'd rank marketplace in general as a c wow first big controversial pick there i can't believe you rank it as a c that's the one i would disagree distribute with you with i think if you get a marketplace to work like an airbnb it's s here well are we saying i'm working market because we're talking about a business model if you're one of the very few successful marketplaces you're an s it's like it's one of the most def lucrative businesses in the world but because the likelihood of success is so low i would have just knocked it down to probably an a if you can actually like get one get one going even let's put let's put airbnb is an a i'm with that this airbnb agree with the business model in general as being a a seat because we're basically ranking in terms of quality and difficulty right yeah and i i just think like like for example like we could say that the services business the accounting firm let's say p w right p w seventy five years ago was just one accountant and with a few partners and now today if you wanna get audited you're a public company you have basically five options you you're gonna pay a fortune for their rubber stamp right so i'd say like we could rank that as a b or an a but we're talking about the business model okay fair enough agree to disagree on that one alright this airbnb is not the company airbnb it's owning airbnb short term rentals so saying oh you know what here's how i'm gonna make money i'm gonna get a property i'm gonna get a home i'm gonna put it on i'll be i'll be a short term rental unit owner maybe i'll do two maybe i'll do three what do you think of that plan i'd say it's a d similar to freelance you know the risk there regulatory i owned a so you know i bought a beautiful apartment in vancouver i go to vancouver a lot and i said oh i don't wanna own a second home but you know the twenty eight days a month i don't use this place i'll airbnb it so i airbnb i'm making a fortune it's great i love it all of the sudden city of vancouver changes the regulations boom derek goes my margin there goes my business you know total nightmare and now i just it it's fine i have a tenant but it's just not nowhere near as profitable the the same thing happened to my parents they airbnb being their house in san francisco making a killing and then san six changed rule said you can only airbnb ninety days out of the year so basically three out of the twelve months you can airbnb so then nine out of the twelve months they're their cash cow disappeared overnight today's episode just brought you by hubspot because you're using only twenty percent of your business data is like dating somebody who only text you in emojis first of all that's annoying and second you're missing a lot of the content but that's how most businesses are operators today they're only using twenty percent of their data unless you use hubspot that's when all your emails your call logs your chat messages just to turn into insights to help you create your business because all that data makes all the difference learn more at hubspot dot com alright i wanna do content creators so for the person who says i wanna create the next podcast i wanna be the next youtuber i wanna be an instagram i'm gonna build a following and then i'm gonna make a ton of money because i'm gonna get brand deals or launch my own products or who knows what but i'm gonna go all in and i'm being a content creator so i think that's a that's probably a d i would argue that if you become the next andrew hub you're you're an a like you're a b like you think about it in a world of ai if somebody has a a trusted relationship with you it's a phenomenal business the issue with it is it just doesn't scale so in terms of def it's amazing highly profitable very simple to operate but one of the problems with it is and i would know a lot of these people if you don't show up and you don't bring the fire on the camera every single day and you stop posting your business goes to zero and i think that's a bit of a it's a bit of a prison i think for some people why did you say hear from minute is it because of the trust factor or because it's in health or wellness or medical is that the important factor there the niche or is it just the level of trust that people have it's if hub was doing the same sort of podcast but he was doing it about candy he's reviewing candy and if you sell ka it's the affiliate margins are not that good the the candy company won't pay that much to do it if you're doing health like if you think about hub is basically promoting athletic greens health supplements that kind of stuff those things can be very very profitable and the customer lifetime value is high and so he can charge a hell of a lot for advertising and then also i mean if you think about it like hub we own we're friends with with andrew we own a y mate business with him he is able to basically bring i would call it twenty million dollars of free marketing to any business he becomes a part of and so if he takes equity and businesses or owns businesses he grows them massively i mean we took the y business i think it's grown three hundred four hundred percent since he got involved with us alright next one owning real estate so buying properties either cash flowing them or flipping them obviously this is a big space right so this is there's like a thousand variations of how you do this so i think it's a little bit of a tough one but just give me your general thoughts on going into real estate as whether it's multi family leads commercial real estate and saying i'm going to try to buy these properties using some debt maybe i'm maybe i'm just gonna cash flow these properties or maybe i'm gonna try to improve them and sell them you know for a higher higher cap rate you know when when i when i exit the beauty of real estate is predictability i think depending on this sort of real estate i think there's really a big distinction between real estate ownership where you just buy something and you rent it out and then there's real estate development where you actually buy a piece of land or you buy something you add value i remember talking here i think it's your brother law's who does the real estate where he he was like look like i know all of the people that you know need space and i just go and i acquire a strip mall and before i close i already know that i'm gonna put someone new in yep and you know it's gonna be a way higher quality asset and then you can refinance it out or whatever to me that's kind of a no brainer way to make money so i i would rate that a c probably alright go and see and why is that not higher because well if you're not really at or you don't have that unfair advantage like my brother law's has the reason i don't really do much real estate is because i don't like anything with a ceiling you know you if you buy let's say you buy a forty tenant apartment building or something like that the rent is gonna be let's say let's say they some old lady owns it she hasn't increased the rent in you know thirty years or something like that you're gonna buy the the building over time you can get an increased yield by increasing the rent but there's a ceiling on that rent and you can't innovate to make more money whereas in a business let's say a digital business like web web design agency or software company you can take your profits and you can actually grow the business and you can increase revenue it's very difficult to do that in real estate without massive capex i think well i think they do the same thing right just go buy and they take the profits or or they refinance and go buy second property what's wrong with that that works yeah i mean you can do it i don't know it's just not something i've spent a lot of energy on i don't i don't think it's yeah when someone tells me that they're gonna go do it i think like of all the things they could do that's a pretty solid approach and i i think the one of the things i've noticed i know a lot of you know really wealthy real estate people and i've been fascinated by how ill it is so you'll meet people who have two billion dollars of real estate yeah but the actual profits that come out of it are like twenty million dollars a year which is amazing right it's made their family wealthy the bank understands that they live a good life but they don't actually have that much liquidity and it's often tied up in the next project and the next project and the next project so i think it's a great way to make your kids really really wealthy and you know ruin a few generations and then they'll buy enough one team and then lose all their money alright we have nothing in the s here yet so i gotta try to get there i i think this is the guy to do it so i have a an icon here of warren buffett and this represents investing so just being an investor generically but i think maybe we the way i was really thinking about this because i think buffett is a little unusual in the way that he's structured his company so really this is to me owning an investment fund or being in the money management business investing other people's money and taking fees and a profit off the top of it is that well no i would argue do a little bit differently i'd i'd say investment management is an incredible business but i wouldn't put buffet in that category because he doesn't actually manage other people's money yeah that's think about sort of the exception here so the distinction i would make let's say your hedge fund manager like my friend bill ac so bill for example he went out he raised hundreds of millions of dollars he bought a bunch of stocks he would go and advocate for these companies to improve and then he would take fees on that and if you think about that business model you actually don't need to really put that much money into it yourself and you can make a profound amount of money if you perform the structure of hedge funds is typically two percent of managed assets plus twenty percent of the profits so let's say that you raise a hundred million dollars and you triple it in a short period of time you can suddenly make you know thirty forty fifty million dollars of carry and fees and stuff so those are really tremendous businesses in my opinion the problem with them is that your investors can pull their cash out and so what bill has done that's so smart and i would rank bill as s and buffett as s and then other asset managers lower they have permanent capital that's the real distinction and that means their investors can't pull their money out they're gonna make those fees no matter what and they can literally i mean if you think about sorry why why is it permanent capital i can sell my berkshire stock today i can sell my per square today what do you mean permanent what's permanent about that part is that or is or are you not talking about that is there some other people you're just trading little stock certificates of ownership between the businesses but what i mean is typically a hedge fund manager would say let's say i give a hedge fund manager a million dollars i can withdraw that capital and the only way that they can give me that money back is by selling stock so let's say that you let's say you're the hedge fund manager you go out you invest in some company the stock goes down i lose faith i say sean i want my money back you have to go sell part of your stake potentially losing quite a bit of money whereas someone like buffett or ac people are just trading the stock certificates right those are just ownership shares sure even when i'm out whoever i sold it to they're in so the the money's essentially there even if the stock price goes down exactly and they if you think about it just in terms of the beauty of their business model buffett is more complex who bill's business for example he simply just goes out and he buys ten stocks and he he has fifty employees and he makes hundreds and hundreds of millions sometimes some years i think he makes billions whoa wait so bill firm only has fifty employees yes fifty employees i think he manages how much is bill act managed so sixteen sixteen to twenty billion somewhere in there so okay let's call it fifteen billion so he's got fifteen billion under management you know what we gotta break the rule we gotta do a little public math here i know he takes a two percent fee or he doesn't take the fee he takes a fee on i think he it it's a blended fee of between one and two percent depending on the full of capital call it a million one point five percent so let's take say he's taking one more hundred percent so his firm with fifty employees whose job is to go and analyze and find ten stocks to own is making two hundred million plus a year in cash flow off of just the fees well you gotta remember so so this revenue yeah cost there's cost to it transaction legal all the other stuff and again i think that number swings around based on the performance and stuff as well right but how high could that cost be he's got fifty employees and is legal he's not doing m and a with private companies he's doing public company investing i believe i mean we don't need to do the public map people can look it up but if you look at per square holdings his public company you can basically see what they pay him in fees every year okay that's incredible so that and that's let's not forget that's no matter what that's not that's not the reward that's not the twenty percent reward i remember i remember talking to him in twenty twenty he was freaking out about covid and he had put twenty five million dollars into a derivatives position betting kind of buying fire insurance against covid dropping the market he made two point four billion dollars of off it or something insane off of that i think it was twenty five million dollar bet and you think about he got fees on all of that like it's unbelievable and he also owns let's not forget he owns like six billion of that capital he manages so that's his money okay that's incredible what about the other side of it were you talked about the hedge fund manager so where are we putting in them so if if buffett and enactment are your first s tier where are you putting the general hedge fund manager money manager who's got at you know assets under management but not permanent capital the away i'd give it a i'd give it a be just because of the nature of the swings and you can you're get you're pretty much guaranteed as of let's say you're a very you have a large french venture capital fund or you have a large hedge fund you're pretty much guaranteed over ten or fifteen years to make to become a d millionaire almost no matter what which is kind of a a crazy thing about the model but you might get blown up at some point but explain the inconsistency because i believe ac also has like blown up or almost got blown up you know a couple of times what's the difference in your mind between what you're talking about bill keeps getting shot and then miraculously getting back up and i think he's one of the i remember of the investment world hey i mean he has a great line he just says the secret to success in businesses just getting back up over and over and over again and what happened to him was bill has made so many incredible investments but i believe in twenty fourteen he bet against herbal life which was an ml and then he also bet on val pharmaceuticals which was a pharmaceuticals company that was basically increasing prices it was a very elegant in intel you know very very smart model but it was run in a kind of unethical way and the company blew up so between herbal life and val pharmaceutical his investors lost faith in him and a lot of them pulled their cash and so suddenly he's his whole hedge fund is blowing up and fortunately in twenty twelve or twenty thirteen bill had raised i believe it was like four million dollar or four billion dollars of permanent capital in per square holdings and bill was able to basically bet himself he went to jp jpmorgan went to jamie dim who he's buddies with and he got a five hundred million dollar or something loan to bet on himself and buy more stock and he managed to come out the other end absolutely killing it and i think the big lesson for him was don't short stocks because he was shorting stocks and be a lot more disciplined about investing in businesses with leverage or exogenous risks i think there's just funny story bill went out and he bought these little plaques and he puts them on every single person's desk at per square and it's the ten commandments it's like thou shall not short stocks thou shall not invest in a business with too much debt etcetera so bill has really learned the lesson and been through it do you know how in venture capital the sort of the normal vc fund isn't gonna it's basically like a pretty poor performing asset class because you're you're ill liquid for ten years and then this sort of you know the irr that you get out of it is less than if you just kept it in an index fund so like venture capital on the whole is a pretty bad asset class of course the top funds perform pretty well is is is basically a hedge fund management the same distribution or do they on average do better so the weren't there's this great story there's this guy head sides he's a he's a fund manager a fund of fund manager and he had lunch with buffett and he said warren i'll bet you i think it was a million dollars that i could choose a basket of hedge funds and they'll outperform the s and p and i believe he lost that bet to buffet buffet basically said on average funds do not outperform which is very true i mean most hedge funds most venture capital do not perform and i think that's kinda what's distinct about private equity i think i don't know for sure but i think most private equity funds at least have a reasonable return 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 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 that's are provided through choice financial group call them man a and evolve bank trust members fdic alright we got a couple more i wanna do local services so you're starting a local pest control business hvac you know things that are this as i got the handyman icon here because it is you know something that's that you do with you know a guy wearing boots and overalls that comes and does something in your local area so i would say that's a c those are hard businesses but if you can dominate a local industry let's say like let's say like you really get at internet marketing and you own an hvac business and you're able to hire great technicians there's only so many technicians out there and so they're kind of fundamentally difficult to compete with and i think they're challenging i know a lot of people over the last few years who have bought hvac businesses or plumbing companies and they're like you know guys that look like you and me and they you know they come in and they're dealing with all these blue collar guys and they're like who the fuck are you why would i come and work with you and so i think i think they're they're good businesses if you're like let's say you're a very enterprise hvac technician and you wanna start one of these businesses you can do phenomenally well but i think they're actually quite difficult to operate for a outsider alright i got a couple more venture capital slash angel investing although there they're a little bit different one's investing other people's money one's investing your own no i bucket to them together here i would pay angel investing and as an e i think i view angel investing a little bit like playing ro i like to play poker it has better odds i look at private equity or buying businesses more like poker and i i just know i think the classic entrepreneur story that you know we you guys have talked about a million times is you make some money as a founder you wanna pay it forward you don't really get stocks in real estate and businesses or acquiring other businesses they seem like oh or they seem a little too boring a little too common and and you hear jason cal you know i'm the first investor in uber and you know whatever and so you wanna do that same thing and it's a little bit like you ever been pitched by a founder and they have like a pop company and they say like well i know we're like tiny right now but there's this one company that's sold to pro and gamble for three hundred million it's just it's all story driven and don't get me wrong there's amazing angel investors like lucky groom and people that do amazing stuff but i think for lay it's a terrible terrible thing to do with your money yeah it does feel a little bit like golf it's an expensive hobby but if you enjoy it fantastic i'll give you a more part i we we talked about this i think on the last episode or two episodes ago when i first started out i got in the habit of angel investing i have thirty million dollars or something tied up in angel investment completely ill liquid i have no access to it i'd much rather own like stocks in real estate or something alright i have one more here that's buy a local sweaty start oh we have cody sanchez entered the chat here i have i couldn't find a good icon so i just put cody on here for for lack of a better term she's it's a picture of cody at a laundromat and i think she's i don't know i don't i i don't actually know by the way if cody really pushes that you should buy laundromat but i think that's a a a little bit of a narrative i'll use her as a a figure head for this idea that you should find a local sort of brick and mortar a sweaty business you know go buy a boring main street business and you're gonna cash flow then you reinvest the cash flow you buy the second laundromat let me buy car wash and you keep going in that direction where does andrew wilkinson rank that model on the tier list i mean i love i love cody and i love nick nick hub i think what they're advocating is basically look don't go and work for someone else when you can create your own job and i think if you can be an owner operator but they don't say that i think if they said that it would be a lot of more an honest broker right the way you the you said one keyword which is what they say is own your own business and you said own your own job and i think there's a big difference between those two things i think that's a fundamental question you're buying your own job or you buying a business if the business returns more than the cost of the owner's salary then i'd say that's great i'd say that's a c chris and i always say like if you can skip the line and instead of working working your way up and starting businesses you can just buy a already working business and just improve it i think that's phenomenal i mean it's really a lot of what we've done so you know my story i started the the web design agency medal lab that business grew i then took almost all my profits and i started like ten other businesses and almost all of them failed it was really exhausting and at the end of that process i had one business that i could sell another one that was kind of alive but i started ten and i'd put almost ten million or fifteen million dollars and all these terrible businesses if i just taken you know the a million two million a year and just bought businesses and just improve them i think i'd be much further ahead than i am today well that's what you eventually started doing right what you what you did at some point was you guys decided to switch into buying businesses that are already working as your main business to be in and i believe you guys invested you can correct if wrong i think the initial kinda seed capital was you took something like five or six million bucks from meta lab it's profits and you were like this will be the base and then we'll try to find these sort of compounding businesses that we can hold for a long time what you guys call wonderful business is great and that's what has become tiny the you know the public company today i think the market have something like two hundred something million dollars yeah basically we just started buying businesses in twenty thirteen when we read about warren buffett and we're like oh my god this guy's doing easy mode why are we doing hard mode but to be honest buffett has this great quote i'm a better businessman because i'm an investor and i'm a better investor because i'm a businessman and i think that in order to be a good investor you need to have run or experience the chaos behind the scenes at different businesses and i think the beauty of what we did was we got really lucky so we went to the gym we didn't dead lift three hundred pounds we got really lucky with metal lab and it worked so that built our confidence to go try more stuff then we tried every bad business model you know we did drop shipping we started a restaurant we did a skin cup skin care company like all sorts of dumb stuff we always joke we put forks into new electrical sockets we learned a lot and then we started investing and so what we could do is we could look at these businesses and say oh wow this is actually a really high quality business and i know that because i've operated a similar one and do you remember how much capital you started doing that with once you once you stop starting new businesses you decided to go start buying i think it was like four four or five million bucks we we basically sat down and said okay we're gonna start this thing called tiny i'm gonna own eighty percent you're gonna own twenty percent that was only because i had more capital because i was the one who owned most of metal lab and chris put in five hundred k or million bucks and i put in the rest and that's it we never put any more money in so that's was gonna ask you did was that just a seed or did every year oh we found a new business let's take more metal lab profits and put it into tiny or no no nothing i mean we merged so it was interesting so i actually own metal lab myself i own ninety percent of metal app and then my brother and chris and a few other people were small shareholders in it and so that that's what basically i diversified with so i went off and in my family office did all the venture investing and bought some real estate and you know bought newspapers and restaurants and other dumb stuff but tiny itself really just grew from that original amount so that's pretty incredible i feel like i gotta ask you this because i think you get a lot of shit nowadays i think a lot of people go look at the tiny stock and basically you see i think you guys went or you like did this reverse merger and so then the stock basically like shoots up in twenty twenty one i think kinda like peak air at that time and then basically it's just a downward trend since then and i think a lot of people i see on twitter want to kinda look at that and say oh this guy calls them self the warren buffett of the internet and he says he buys these great businesses but what's going on look look at your stock and so they see that and they say man is this guy like many other people on the internet who maybe either overstate their claims or whatever right that's a common problem on the internet i would say just on the whole is that you don't know who's real you don't know who's actually good and so you have this public company that's a little bit of a public score board in a way and people get really r up about that on the other hand and this is kind of like you know the two parts of the trial right you have the prosecution of the defense in a way the other hand you say look there's a guy who took four or five million you know first created this design agency as really successful as a business was has generated you said over a hundred million dollars of profit lifetime and then you took you know four or five million bucks and you compounded that into a two hundred between two hundred and three hundred million dollar business that holds all these interesting assets and you know cool like the stock stock prices go up and down that's not necessarily then be able even if you said look that's how big it was that's still fantastic i don't know a lot of people who are listening to this that have done anything that's more impressive than that you know so i i admire even if that even if your worst case least generous interpretation is the today's current you know stock price that's still pretty damn impressive so i guess like what's your reaction to here's you're sitting there you don't wanna go out there and you know fight all the internet trolls or anything like that but like how do you see this what's your take on this it's pretty funny because like you know we started in two thousand six basically twenty years ago bootstrap this business until twenty three twenty twenty three when we went public and like over last ten years i think since we started tiny we've compounded at like twenty five our our earnings at twenty five percent we do almost two hundred and fifty million dollars of revenue we have sixty five million of arr we do over forty million dollars of eb and chris and i still own the majority of the public company and all these or these are all things you know you can look at the public filings and see if you also we talked about asset management i mean we also own or we manage a two hundred million dollar fund managed by the public company with forty million dollars of it our own capital and that owns aero press letter box all sorts of other businesses if we include that that adds another sixty five million dollars of revenue so over three hundred million in revenue across thirty businesses and all the businesses in the fund profitable as well i don't know i'm kinda like if that's failing like sign me up right and and i don't know what to say to the trolls it's like you know don't feed the trolls right well let's take the the the vulnerable side a little bit correct because i i always ask myself this whenever i get criticized and my first reaction is like what the hell are you guys talking about like do you not see do you not see and i wanna like kinda defend myself but at the same time i always ask myself this just for my own learning which is basically like what about this is fair but but what is the fair criticism and i i think that's always been an important question for me keeps me honest because you know look either i'm just gonna ignore it i got nothing from it i'm gonna get mad about it and think they're stupid i get nothing out of it or i mostly you know disregard what i think is the sort of like off base line of thinking but maybe there's you know some things that some part of it that's fair oh it it is fair that i said this it is fair that i didn't i didn't do this or it is fair that i thought it would be x and actually it turned out to be y you know those are some things that are fit right so what would you say is fair criticism about you first of all i just wanna say i really empathize with people i remember watching like shark tank and i'd be like oh wow kevin ole o'leary you know he sold his business for billions of dollars and then you go read the juicy gossip that you know he he got ten million dollars or whatever the out of that deal and i think it's very easy to kind of have the one blurb and then judge someone and i think before i went through this experience i would just believe what i read on the internet and and you know it kind of enjoy it to be honest like i think there's this dirty horrible part of humanity myself included that loves when somebody who's is on an ups wing falls like talk about bill ac like bill bill's is an amazing investor but he's loud right and i'm loud to i'm extroverted i like talk when i'm doing i like i like talking about our companies and everything and it's really really fun to watch someone loud like me fall in the mud right and i i i see this in myself you know you kinda churn and enjoy it like celebrities go through this too where it's like they're awesome and everyone loves them and then all of a sudden you know they like to shit on them for a few years and then they love them again like justin bieber everyone hated them for the last five years now everyone loves them again i i just kinda think that's the course of things and i think it's kind of i just gotta eat humble pie and there's a lot of great things i get out of being loud on the internet and talking about this stuff i've connected with so many incredible entrepreneurs i get to i've made so many new friends you know i i love talking about this stuff and teaching people about business and stuff but this is the price and i'm willing to pay the price and it sucks and and for me it's a button right like when i was a kid i was always i've adhd and like i'd always fuck up and i'd always be the one in our family that was blamed for everything and so being misunderstood is a big button and i really have to resist getting on the horn and trying to argue with everyone because it really doesn't help so i think for me we're just focused on delivering good results and building great businesses which we're continuing to do and people on the internet are gonna twist it however they want to the reality is sixty percent of the businesses that went public in twenty twenty three when we did are still under their ipo price so asana sweet green cup like all these other businesses they're all under ipo does that instantly mean that what the founder has built is invalidate in there moron no and i think that you know the fear the really fair criticism though of us is our business is a bit confusing right even our stock chart like starting businesses so i made all this money from the web design business started a bunch of companies one of those companies became the dominant seller of themes in the shopify ecosystem and chris and i always had it in our head we're like let's let's take a business public we'd love to do that and so we actually went and we partnered with bill act we we had sold the business we to a family office we bought it back and we took that business public and we took a public in january twenty twenty one do you remember what was happening in january twenty twenty one every stock was going to the moon and so you have this business that's doing forty million or something in revenue and like seven million of eb and it goes to literally the day we took a public it jumps from a two hundred and fifty million dollar market cap to one point two billion and so we didn't take a public at one point two billion but that first day that's where the chart starts right and then the man is over and the chart starts going down and as the chart started going down we ended up deciding hey let's take tiny public so we merge into it so really like the tiny story is this right we've been compounding at twenty five percent from almost nothing and what people see unfortunately because that's what's in the public market is this little you know this little dip down here and to be honest like i get it i think it's like you really have to take the time to understand the business and the story and why the you know why it looks like that but i've encourage people to do their research and actually dig in and understand what we own because from my perspective i think we own a lot of pretty incredible businesses and you you still own the majority of the business i do and is that still you know the majority of your net worth basically so you're i like skin i and how skin do you still have in the game yeah this is what's so funny is like people i mean i've even people have said like oh you did a pump and dump and i'm going like what are you talking about like i've sold almost no stock and the only stock i did one large transfer i think of eight million dollars i moved it to my foundation so i could start doing phil right like right i haven't taken any cash out i still own all the stock and like people will say like oh you're pump and dump or something like i i don't know it's just it's kinda sad yeah and so you you hear all this and you've also talked about this idea of the courage to be disliked you i think you know maybe that was the right the right book at the right time for you during during this period i haven't actually read the book it's killer title what is the thing that i can learn you know from that book so sam just did that great i love that episode he did where he basically said here's the recipe to a miserable life and let's invert and one of my favorite inversion is that you actually want people to hate you you do not wanna be likes by everybody i think that's a great signal that you're doing life wrong and i think if you told me this ten years ago like i would think that's insane i remember i read this warren buffett quote it takes twenty years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it and for me i really internalize that i was like oh my god i need to make sure that you know everyone thinks positive of me and right i better protect this reputation then every founder i meet for coffee i have to you know woo them and make them like me or whatever and i really felt that i had to be like consistent and predictable so for example like you know i buy companies and i'm you know i i'm a warren buffett like a wanna be value investor kinda guy but i also really like startups ups i like starting restaurants and all this other chaotic stuff and people don't like that and i remember the moment like i kind of realized what was going on my dad retired my dad was an architect and he retired and i took him out for a beer and i said dad what what now you know what what are you gonna do with all your time and he was saying you didn't really know and i said well dad i've got i've got money why don't we team up and you can become a real estate developer you can build the things that you've always wanted to build and he goes what do you think someone's gonna say if i suddenly call them up they know me as architect david and all of a sudden i'm pitching them on a real estate development people don't like it when you leave your box andrew and i was like oh my god like i i know that feeling like have you ever had like a a restaurant turf friend who like pitches you on a tech start up they're starting off sudden or you know your yoga instructor gets their real estate license they wanna sell your house or whatever it is my mental reaction i hate this about myself my mental reaction is stay in your lane yeah i don't like it it makes me uncomfortable i don't know why and it's incredibly hypo critical because like i'm i'm a flip flop i love jumping around i'm an inch deep in a mile wide and so it's like i hate in others what i hate about myself and i realized we're all like prison guards you know like we all have these labels like for me it's like you know i'm an investor and an entrepreneur but then it goes deeper it's like i'm in tech not real estate you know no real estate allowed i'm bootstrap you can't do venture that's weird if you do that i'm pro crypto or anti crypto and these labels kind of lock you into this identity and i've seen this in a lot of big public figures so like do you remember when the ceo of goldman sachs david solomon it came out that he was like a dj right he loves the dj right this guy on the weekends and evenings see dj and the press went crazy there's article in the economist about how you know is goldman sachs suffering because he's you know dj well do you think they would have said that if he was playing golf right or like you know we see like kim kardashian get passionate about prison reform we're like fuck you vanity project right jonah hill starts surfing let's make mean memes about him michael jordan plays baseball you know betrayal and so like i realized like our brains are just prediction machines and they get upset when things don't match and so for me like i realized like i don't fit cleanly in a box and it's it's messy like everyone else and so i remember like i was and i started like asking all my friends about this and stuff and i was sitting up at my lake house with a group of entrepreneurs and i talked to the the these guys and i said look what would you do if no one was looking and one of my friends runs this massive industrial business like you know billion dollar business and he says you know my happiest moment is behind oven cooking for people and i actually would wanna start a restaurant and i said would you wanna you just wanna own a restaurant he said no i wanna be the chef of like a michelin star restaurant and he said i i feel like i could never do it though because i so much of my ego tied up and being a business person and everyone think i would that you know i gone insane and and and at the moment i was like no like i wouldn't but when i think about it i would definitely be gossip and going oh my god he's lost his mind right you know and so he you know he's escaped the prison and we need to beat him with our baton baton and you know you see this with like legal degrees bad marriages disappointing your parents you know the industry you've spent twenty years and and the issue is like all these promises were made by the person you were before you know not the person you are now and so i realized like i'm in this quick send i don't know what to do about it and in january i found this book called the courage to be disliked and it's one of these books where you see the cover and you just instantly kinda know yeah you're like okay like this i kinda get it and it's really interesting it's written in this very odd way where it's a dialogue between like this wise old man and a a young a young guy and the core idea is just like seeking recognition as a trap it's impossible to make everybody happy and if you try you're gonna end up living somebody else's life and so you have to be hated you have to have the courage should be disliked and reading this book it was like someone gave me the keys to my cell you know i'm in this cell and there's no walls on either side they're like by the way there's no walls you can walk out and so my new year's resolution this year was i'm done with the like game i'm gonna have the courage read disliked and i'm gonna say what's true for me and so you might have noticed like i've i've been writing a newsletter i'm talking about all sorts of stuff i'm talking about you know having adhd and you know all my weird businesses or whatever and i'm just saying fuck it if people don't get it that's fine and you know i'm gonna keep buying businesses and doing great stuff and on this side item i'm gonna have a bunch of hobbies you know i like that when i was in high school i used to wear mismatched socks i still wear mismatched socks but i would like i would leave the house and i would be wearing two different socks and to me i didn't even think twice about it because don't know i was just not even who cares it's just sucks but everybody would comment my mom would comment on about out the the way out the house what do are doing she was like horrified like i can't believe you're doing this i was like what do mean they're it's just they're both socks it does yeah the pattern doesn't matter care who gives us shit and at school people made fun of me for it but they sort of realized like oh we made fun of him and he just continued doing it but also i wasn't even doing it really as like some statement i just didn't care like i just didn't just i just decided not to care about stocks the same way else did and it decided that the idea of matching stocks really didn't matter to me and maybe a matter so other people more power to you but it just just didn't matter to me and i don't think i realized at the time how important of a like mini lesson or trait that would be in the future i remember moving to san francisco and we were self funding or not self funny but like i had basically like a billionaire backers so michael bur was funding like the the lab we were using to do startups ups we didn't take any outside funding but one of our company started to pop and we got i don't know like million users two million users three million users and you know vcs got a little bit excited so there's a investor founders fund that reached out and i took the meeting because i intrigued by peter till and i i don't know maybe this will somehow lead to be meeting peter t so let me take this meeting even though i really didn't want investment and we go in and i start asking you know he's supposed to ask me about the business i'm just asking him questions about founder one because again i don't really care if he investment me or not i'm just here to like learn about them and you know i'm asking all these questions that if you ask a normal vc oh well what stage do you normally invest in answer proceed yeah what's your typical check size answer you know five hundred k to a million dollars or whatever or you know everybody's got like these predefined boxes labels what what what industries are what categories do you invest in b to saas enterprise blah they have these labels that they were like you know and i went to the founders fund guy i'm asking the same questions he's like are we just i don't know we just try to find the you know singular businesses and then i don't know back up the truck like how much money do you need how much money we put in let's get put it how much money you need now then we'll put more money in later what seat what stage who cares just go and so he was taught and he said that when peter started founders fun he had almost like a fight club style rule and the fight club style rule was the only rules is that there are no rules the rules that we set as a fund are going to limit our ability to find the singular business and this is why founder funds are the only vcs to own a shit ton of bitcoin and you know starting twenty fourteen twenty fifteen most vcs couldn't even like bi crypto like by their by laws basically and they didn't even see bitcoin as a like they were so blind on to like we need to find the next facebook right that we need to find the next mark zuckerberg that they didn't think that this anonymous soc na open source project creating a currency like it broke all the rules but that was the thing that mattered and and so founder has had a few of these really contra bets they backed end when silicon valley like at the time it was completely unpopular to back a weapons company it was like so like though the the time they the the narrative at the time was that that was a bad thing in fact google had to shut down their weapons project they were doing they had a big contract with the department of defense google just turned it down because their own employees were like this is not right i don't wanna sign up to be a part of making weapons and killing you know and so the companies you know bowed down and the venture capitalist bowed down and there was only a couple of investors and el gil came on this podcast and he's he said the day i saw that google shut that project down i knew there's a huge opportunity if anyone was willing to go against the grain and actually build a weapons company they were gonna do phenomenally well like it makes total sense for the us we're gonna have a defense department right i think everyone agrees in that and the defense department is gonna need weapons and if the weapons are built by a high tech company that's gonna be better than building low tech old school weapons like this all makes sense and that's when he backed and and founder respond back and so i just saw the payoff you know in silicon valley they call it being contra but what does it feel like in practice i think it's what you're talking about the courage to be like the courage to look stupid right the the ability to think differently right all these terms that have been floating around they all sort of apply to this thing and i i'll share one more story that kinda of reminds me of this which is one of my business heroes is jesse it's and he came you came to one of our hoop group events the the basketball camp we do so jesse was there and jesse was laughing who we were at the table he's just laughing he's like all these guys he's like they're all talking about their like crazy ambitious plans like this guy's building a city this guy's building a religion this guy's building rockets this guy's building this and he goes i'm literally selling a calendar because this his project right now is called the big ass calendar is literally a calendar you put on your wall so you could be a little more intentional about how you're gonna spend your time this year and he's like i think it matters but like in the girls give it this i sell a nineteen dollar calendar you know it's just funny i'm even funny i'm even here and here's the guy who reinvented himself ten times did not stay in any box right started as a white guy rapper then wrote and then that wasn't really fully working out so he writes us a jingle that becomes the new york knicks song he sells a sports jingle company when when he sells the company he gets to ride on this guy's private jet this is amazing starts a private jet company gets involved in a coconut water brand but you know he now hosts a big running event because he loves running he has a son company because he loves son and he basically is just like almost product himself and none of the labels that you you try whatever label you try to apply to this guy like oh he must just be a abyss a brand builder then he tells me about how he you know invest in this like he he decided that water was gonna be really important he bought he invested in like land that produced really pure water and i was like wait so you're an investor he's like well no don't really i don't really care about investing i just and so he was un unbelievable and so i i really find a lot of inspiration and people like this and the the thing that he said that it really stuck with me i was like what are gonna do after this and you know in this room when you're surrounded by these hyper ambitious type talented people it's very tempting to just be like oh i need to ratchet up that how big my thing sounds you know that i'm working on otherwise i'm sort of low status in this room and he told me he goes oh i think i'm gonna go be an assistant basketball coach with this like local like like like this all black college that's nearby like i wanna go be the assistant coach like i love basketball he's like but dude i was like i was like what are you why assistant basketball coach like clearly not for the money like you know because you wanna get into basketball he's like no dude i wanna be on the bus he's like some of the best times in my life we're on the bus going into a game he's like if i could just be on the bus oh dude that's gonna be good for the soul and i just admire this guy having the courage to be like i'm gonna go do this thing that sounds completely random but as soon as he says it it instantly resonated and like i've i'm actually now an assistant coach for a high school basketball team near me because i was like dude i wanna get on the bus that actually makes total sense to me that was a huge part of my childhood and i would have so much fun doing that even though i don't know how that fits with like the rest of stuff it doesn't really need to fit it just needs to be something i wanna do all that totally resonates i mean i think do you ever listen to invest like the best amazing amazing podcast he has some great guess but there's definitely an archetype and the archetype is be like autistic super genius investor who's like i you know i buy laundry or not laundromat rats let's say you know it's like brad jacobs he's like i just you know i choose an industry and then for five years i buy every company in it and i take it public and then i make you know i compound of thirty percent and then i go do it again and again and again and there's a very clear formula and i have never i've never had a formula and i think the benefit of like there's okay like i i was on kauai hawaiian island and someone goes you gotta go to this donut place they fry their doughnuts and coconut oil and they're these purple doughnuts made of sweet potato and i'm like okay so i go a go and you know it's amazing delicious doughnuts and i start talking to the guy behind the counter and he says oh yeah we're we're expanding we just we just did one in la and i said what you're you're like a a little tiny doughnut shop on kauai like how did that happen and he goes do you know kevin rose and i'm like yeah i know kevin rose really well what are you talking about he goes kevin kim and he ate these donuts and he loved them and so he invested like ten million dollars in our business and now we're scaling it across the country now kevin is a a fascinating guy i mean last time i talked to kevin he's like yeah i did the doughnut company and then i'm flying to sweden tomorrow and i'm meeting with teenage engineering which is like this audio file company or whatever and then you know he told me about this alzheimer's come this company that's doing an alzheimer's drug he invested in none of those things fit together in a box and kevin is a great example of when i see kevin on a podcast i jump like i have to listen to it like the random show with tim ferris is like my favorite show in the world and both of those guys have been so good at not allowing anyone to put them in a box and as a result they've created this magnet like the guys on if if like i had two options let's say i can be value investor andrew with my formula it'll be very good for raising money i can go and invest like the best i can tell my clean story i'll look like a duck and quack like a duck right there's a lot of positives to that you get less hate easy to raise money you know investors like it whatever but if you're just interesting and you share what you're doing like kevin rose does really interesting things come to you and i would argue like most of our best businesses come from me it's like you know i was a barista and i got obsessed with coffee and i bought aero press i love movies and i i tried to invest in film so i actually like had this period where i was like flying down to hollywood and meeting people and looking into investing in movies and stuff and i looked at it and i was like i'm gonna lose so much money and at that same time i happened to be in auckland with tim ferris randomly and i i was i was in town and i went oh there's this guy who runs letter box there i should have a coffee with him and that coffee literally that i had coffee with matt and i made an offer for the business within four hours so like these things happen randomly and i think you need to create that magnet for interesting people and entrepreneurs to seek you out and i i don't know that anybody listens to you know the autistic super genius talk about his formula and spreadsheet for buying a type of business and goes i wanna do business with that i wanna sell my business to that person maybe there's a certain type where that is appreciated but that's not my jam you know and and you know i'm gonna get my two to three percent hate quota for that and that's just fine by me but gotta get the haiti either way you think those off to you think the the as aig crowd doesn't get the hate of course they do too right totally you're gonna get the ad way yeah if for not getting the hate you probably haven't you knows it's a signal you haven't really done enough yet you haven't how jealous are you of you are you by the way of those guys right i i wish that i could be that focused i wish i get that excited about buying you know waste management business is i i do it but it's just not true you know it's not true to me or you exactly why would be jealous of something that i would be miserable of you imagine my first million if every time you just talked about one vertical right be the most boring podcast of all time did the greatest hack in the world is if you're gonna be jealous be jealous of the inputs not the outputs alright i just sets up the profiles i'd be pull over your car write this down okay listen everybody looks at the result that somebody has in their life and they get jealous of the result and that leads you astra because you don't even really know what it takes to be that to get that to have that right if you're gonna be jealous it's hard so most people try to just turn off the jealousy knob i'm just not gonna do it well good luck with that it's a pretty tough thing to do to really truly kill envy inside you right a certain level of enlightenment and wisdom you need to reach to truly just never feel that envy again so instead just redirect it get en mb of people whose inputs your jealous they're day to day the the work that they do and if you're like man i would love for my day to look like that i would love to work like that not the not the results of the work but the work and so for example bill simmons is a guy like this i don't know how let you know about simmons is a sports podcast but before that he was a he was a blog you know he tried to get hired by newspaper they rejected him so he charts us on boston sports guy blog and he's just sitting there writing about his hometown sports because you know since he was four years old his dad's been taken her to boston sports games and he somehow like blog his way literally to like espn ended up giving him his own section then when he's at espn and he's like i'm not just like and by the way they're he's a call he's a journalist no well he doesn't do journalism he's just writing as a fan so i guess we'll call him a columnist no he's not really columnist him i guess he's a blogger we couldn't by the time they were trying to figure out one label he goes and creates thirty for thirty he reinvent the sports documentary space and he pulls that off and then he gets fired at espn for for speaking his mind and he goes and he leaves and he starts the ringer and it's a podcast network and then i always build a podcast he tells that to spotify makes hundreds billions dollars and there's this great clip the other day that came out of like this big trade happened in the nfl and there's this clip in the ringer office and bill is carrying a microphone and one hand and a chair and he's like basically like jogging through the hallway because he wants to go join one of the other ringer podcast to come talk about this trade that just happened like that's not his podcast he doesn't need to be there he's got all the money in the world he could be on the yacht he could be on an island and he said they're running with a chair in a mic because he really wants to go talk to friends about what's going on in the world of sports because that's what he loves to do so i'm jealous of bill simmons not because he sold his company for a hundreds million dollars or has a popular podcast but because the guy gets to talk to his buddy's about the thing that he loves all day and when he doesn't have to be right and so i'm jealous of the inputs and so you know i think that's a a thing that if more people did you could kinda use your jealousy as more of a compass to figure out what do you really wanna go do i think if more people knew the behind the scenes of a lot of these super wealthy people they wouldn't want that life like the there's a lot of there's a lot of sad very wealthy people as you know and i think the trick is how do you figure out what you're great at and you actually enjoy because there's things i'm great at that i just don't enjoy like sales i love pitching and selling and talking to people or or sorry i'm very good at it but i i actually drains my life force i it's it's misery right and so i think like you know for me i started out headphones on coding ming websites twenty years later i've realized i can write and talk about things i'm passionate about and that creates opportunity which i can then funnel into all my various businesses like i think being a human router and just doing the thing you're great at you're doing this too i mean it's like ben might run all the day to day operations you just get to go and do the thing you've you're amazing at right and it benefits your business in a profound way and i think that's the trick well i i would even push back it's not even that oh man there's always these well people who are miserable there's a lot of other people who were happy doing something that you would be completely unhappy doing i remember when we got bought by twitch and i was like oh you know i get to meet emma he was my boss he's the founder of twitch he did the thing that i had been trying to do he started a tech company it like took over the space that he was in it became like one of the few social networks i was out there that's what i was trying to do before that and you know the guy sold his company for a billion dollars and here he was running this thing and it was like a big part of the internet i think twitch was like on the second biggest consumer of bandwidth or something that year like is it crazy and i saw his day and he was happy doing it which was basically he sat in the boardroom on the ninth floor of the office on a long table and he sat at the front and the coo sat next to him and then teams would come in thirty minutes at a time and they would sit down they would put a memo in front of him he would read it he would ask them questions he would grill them and sometimes he'd be like this sounds fantastic can't wait see what's next and sometimes he'd be like this doesn't make any sense to me and he would kind of rip them apart and then they would be like leave go back they would do a week of work and come back in the next week for their weekly thirty minute meeting with him and that's what he did all day and i just remember looking at that and being like thank god i saw this because this is not what i would want i thought this was my dream i thought like literally what he was doing what he had done was the dream for me dream outcome and i realized like that would be kind of a nightmare of a life and so wait what if that's the nightmare not the dream then what's the dream and then you start asking i you start looking around and he start thinking about what would be and that's when i started the podcast because i'd i looked at tim ferris and others and i thought that sounds pretty fun and so a easy hack because i'm starting a new content project my first new kind of big content project since my first million and the hack the the trick is instead of asking instead of trying to think about what would be really popular what would get millions of views what would get millions of subscribers the better question is what would i have fun doing three thousand times because if i do it three thousand times i'm probably gonna get good at it and i'm probably gonna stick with it and i'm probably gonna get a good result sure but like more importantly like i'm gonna go do it three thousand times i'd better really be like let me optimize for that instead of optimize for what might work let me ask you this are you leaving your your your yourself are you breaking out of yourself is it something that people go wow this is like crazy i it's like when tim ferris launched his card game or he wrote his like he made that weird crypto project is it one of those it's it's i've explored that wide like totally we totally move go make a movie create a broadway play like i've explored all that and there's like things but that's not the active thing i'm working on one of them is i would say different in that it's a different mode to be in so for example this podcast is live it's improvised it's une edited i get on here and i just do me and then don't really think about it after the fact there's a team that basically takes it they edit it they title it they package they send it out there and i don't really think about it again whereas the thing i'm doing right now is a little bit more of a craftsman approach it's like i'm not just gonna improvise it and it's this like you know three weeks later that's kind of gone i'm gonna make a new one it's like no i'm gonna make one thing it's gonna be great but that means i'm gonna really like have to be a craftsman about this and i'm gonna really have to go and take a take a scalpel to this and try to like make it as great as i possibly can which is not a mode i'm normally in it's awesome i mean this it's like a the happiest been in the last ten years is writing my book just headphones on doing something and and actually shipping something that will be relevant hopefully in twenty years that you can go back to if there's something so a fe about podcasting and tweeting and all the other stuff son nice to zoom out totally well andrew thanks for coming on again man always good to good to hang and yeah you wanna shout out anything your newsletter or anything anything you wanna shout out yeah i mean that's mostly i've haven't really actually been tweeting very much i've been posting on my newsletter and i really love it i sit down like once a month and i kind of do like what tim ferris and kevin do i just like write about all the random things i'm excited about sometimes it's about business sometimes it's about other stuff but yeah people can sign up never enough dot com the newsletters there and i i love it like it's it's been so it's some been so much more enjoyable to just sit down and actually write something formally and take my time instead of like tweeting out toilet thoughts randomly and then fighting with trolls alright man good see you yeah great seated 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's off on a road less travel never looking back hey let's take a quick break i wanna tell you about a podcast that you could check out it is called the science of scaling by mark robe he was the founding ser of hubspot and he's a guest lecturer at harvard business school the guy smart and he sits down every week with different sales leaders from cool companies like cla and van and open and he's asking about their strategies their tactics and how they're growing their companies as you know head of sales or chief revenue officer if you're looking at to scale a company up if you're a cro or head of sales just look at a level up in your career i think a podcast like this could be great for you listen to the science of scaling wherever you get your podcast