My First Million

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

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

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

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

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

i'll start with this chris i don't know if you could see this but i'm riding down today's date because today is the day that i become a better to negotiator i feel like got rude where to know i could be what i want to from at all in in like a days off on a road less travel never you're a master negotiator former fbi negotiator for twenty plus years now you've been consulting teaching the art of negotiation to business people and anybody who needs negotiation and the funny thing about negotiation is it's the skill we all need that i feel like i personally never got taught i never i it's all self taught anything you learn and one of the things i realized was so often i was negotiating and i didn't even realize it whether it was with an investor or with a with a you know with an employee or a customer life is full of negotiations but so i'm excited because i think this is gonna be quite useful so maybe my starting point is this if today was the day i'm get better at negotiation where do i start yeah well first thing is let the other side go first and then is the difference actually listening is a challenge because they're when the other person's talking this time you wanna jump in it's almost impossible to resist it's basically if there five six steps to get becoming a better listener the real challenge comes at step two it's a hijacked point if you're listening at all as opposed to completely focusing on your internal dialogue where you're waiting to speak most people get past that stage but if you're listening at all either listening to re robot here's where you're wrong the urge to correct is irresistible i mean like it's insanely impossible to overcome so you'll jump in there to hijack the conversation to correct the urge to correct is so irresistible that we actually use it as one of our negotiation skills i'll i'll say something wrong on purpose because you will not be able to resist the urge to correct me with the truth and it's a great way for me to trigger getting hidden information out of you they won't regret giving me because you won't the old saying we don't remember what was said remember how we felt in the moment dear to correct is so satisfying that you'll never regret telling me something you shouldn't have told me because it felt so good in a moment so that's that's the power of this hijacked moment hijacked to correct now the other thing that you're you'll do frequently is hijacked to relate and it's called storytelling stealing and you won't you won't mean to do it but the other person will say something it triggers this incredible memory in you of a past experience something it happened to you it's one of the file of common ground and you'll completely be unable to resist that urge to jump in to tell me your story oh my god the same thing happened to me and you feel incredibly good in that moment not realizing how squashed i feel and it's one of the peep one of the reasons why people refer to to stories stealing because it feels so good to you you can't imagine that what i feel is like how you had to have a better story than me you had one up me get it do better than me and you can't imagine that that's the case because the memory triggered in you was so good so actually listening through that hijacked moment is one of the big channel when probably the single biggest challenge of becoming a better negotiator because you gotta listen so somebody all the way through and then and here's how powerful it is to make somebody feel heard because just because you've been hurt doesn't mean you feel her just because i do understand does it mean that you feel understood mh so i've at a wedding a couple weeks ago on ireland and it's my first substantive of conversation with the bride the night of the you after the wedding ceremony and as as you could imagine she's unconscious on her feet she's making the rounds through the wedding reception dinner she's obligated to speak to everybody because that's what bride gotta do it at the bride and groom was supposed to walk around say hello everybody make them feel happy that they were there and thank him for shaun up and all i'm doing when i'm talking to her my first real conversation with her is telling her what she went through that day i'm telling her what she went through i said you know this this is this is probably it's probably easier to run a small country in south america than it was pull off this wedding and you know you're here to celebrate the union of two families and your your husband is here because he's gotta be you know so i'm laying all this outdoor all of of what she's going through showing her completely that i understood everything that she went through leading up to that point she runs to me the next night at dinner and she walks up to me and she gives me this big hug and she says i have no memory of what you said to me last night i just remember how good it made me feel and that's the power of making somebody feel understood she literally couldn't remember work but she felt bonded to me because i thoroughly understood her that's the challenge of making and the the mission and the goal of making feel somebody feel completely heard and understood you have no no idea how many times i wanted to interrupt during that story and i just knew this if i'm ever gonna do it this is the one time i need to just listen the way you're what you're describing and and and also like you've you the urge congratulations on resisting at urge because in the moment you had you're like i wanna speak right that mean good job that urge is huge i have trouble resistant it sometimes and so you're saying that the starting point is skill of truly listening not waiting for your turn to talk not trying to hijack you the what you called the the fallacy of common ground where i think i'm building this bridge with you and you're like dude you just sides swiped what i was trying to tell you and you're you wanna tell me about you what i was trying to tell you how i'm feeling or what i'm going through and what what's happening in my life and so those techniques are not even i mean negotiation is just one small part of that that just seems like how to win friends and influence people that seems like you know it should be relationship you know the foundation of any kind of communication of relationships so is it that negotiation fundamentally is just connecting with other people is it that or is it that these skills apply to other domains i mean what's the right way to think about that well yeah it's across the board i mean and first of all negotiation if your objective is to have a long term relationship of trust we both prosper now if your complete social path that should be your objective because it's low maintenance it's at least amount of effort and it's a maximum amount of money i gonna make i'm you know i i get a number of people i get one of our top level coaching clients said i have made so much more money being collaborative than i ever made being cut your relationships you make deals faster your relationship flow more smoothly that should be your goal like you you if you're the most mercenary person in the world and the only thing you care about is making money then that's the fastest easiest way to make the money but not that's not everybody's definition most people think of it as win lose you know battle of arguments i'm gonna get the upper hand on you i'm gonna i'm gonna have you over parallel i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna force you to do what i want you know the the people of power negotiations if you will that that puts out of business you lose you lose friends you lose collaborators you lose college alright let's take a quick break because we got something for you you know we pinned a survey to one of our videos so we asked what's the biggest challenge you have right now in your business and the number one thing that you guys said was getting your first hundred customers that was the most popular response and it's of course that's the challenge because if you can't get to a hundred customers you're definitely not gonna get to a one thousand so what the team at hubspot did was they went through all the old episodes and they heard the stories where i talked about how i got customers for my first business how sam did it for his first business and some of the guests that came on and talked about what they did how they scrapped and claw and got those initial hundred customers to get the ball rolling and then they put those together in a report it's a pdf it's totally free and you can get it and it'll give you some exploration some ideas around how you might be able to go get your first hundred customers check it out it's in the description below so what is the right way to think about negotiating because in my mind you know my simple to brain if i imagine a a great negotiator if you said think about the best negotiator i think somebody who's either very powerful maybe slightly even intimidating or they're just very charismatic they're able to sort of manipulate when the other side over and i definitely default to a win lose dynamic i'm trying to get as much as i can and they're trying to give as much as they can and let's see who wins this negotiation whether i'm buying a car i'm going and getting a nintendo off of craigslist or wherever it is i'm that's the the default for me and so how do how did you do relationships if you're i mean maybe this just doesn't imply but if you're a hostage negotiator i i mean you trying to have a relationship with these people that somebody you've never known and they're clearly you know off their rocker if they're hostage let's not let's not put them in the author rocker category let's make that simpler to start with okay let's let's say it's not the first person i would think of when i say i a long term relationship with this person and so can you tell me a story about maybe i don't know your first high stakes hostage negotiation and how you approached it and i guess what the mindset is there well i i learned for the three things i suppose to start with i learned the application of empathy from a crisis hotline and what we now refer to as tactical empathy but just you know demonstrating understanding not understanding but demonstrating understanding in a way that the other side feels heard it draws them into telling you more removes you as a threat first move a negotiation is to remove yourself as a threat because why would they make a great deal with you if you're a threat why would they they they might make a deal with you if you're a threat but they're not gonna make a great deal with you so one of the one of the first really counter moves is to move yourself as a threat and hostage negotiator does that with a non threatening voice calming soothing late night fm voice and expressing genuine concern for the bad guy like i'm i'm i'm here to get everybody out that includes you mister bad guy now whether or not you let me get you out is gonna be up to you but that's my objective first first of all and i need to find out whether or not you're good with that some some baggage i wanna die i need to know that right away now here's the counter crazy counterintuitive thing when you talk about relationships hostage negotiators have repeat customers so i might not see you again but if i get you out alive another of negotiators going to which means if i lied to you if i deceive you if i didn't take the time to understand you that's gonna be your experience when you run across the next guy and things are probably gonna go bad so in point of fact you know the the whole idea of a long term relationship i i i gotta i gotta be willing to step in to be open with that and you're gonna be bad guy gonna be able to smell that what was your first big case first big situation where you you had to deal with a a hostage situation and you came out with a successful outcome it was a very rare event that i was lucky enough to get involved in a bank robbery with hostages where we trapped them inside with the hostages and so what happened you get the call that this is going down and i mean just well i mean what was that like tell me but tell me about it so we didn't get the call we we became aware of it and we just went which is a a really a philosophy that i live by which is called run to trouble it's it's amazingly liberating if your philosophy is run to trouble and so we ran a trouble we showed up since it's a bank fbi i n ny are showing up the negotiation team from both sides knew each other really well we had a great relationship we had a bank robbery task force in the new york of the time so the the pd and the bureau already aligned on the criminal prosecution so the two negotiations teams blended and the the first hostage negotiator on phone was a was a pd detective i was his coach the pd commander was in charge of the negotiation operation center on the inside the bureaus lead negotiator or coordinator at the time went to the outside of any event any voice to voice bull stuff was needed when negotiated for a number of hours the commander decided to sort of disrupt the dynamic a little bit it was stalemate at a very low threat level and so he pulled the penny negotiator and he put me on the phone with the bad guys and i had one of the bank one of the bank robber out about ninety minutes later would you start with when you got on the phone we went disruptive to start with which is was not the usual protocol the commander sensed gall great instincts great instincts he listened long enough to realize that the secret to gaining the upper hand and the conversation was gonna be how each conversation closed bad guy was constantly saying hey i gotta go they're coming they're gonna hear me or i gotta i gotta put you on hold i put you on speaker and and he just get off the phone so he said no matter what happens you extend every call you end every call he tries to get off the phone i don't care what you gotta do you keep on a phone five seven ten seconds longer than you end the call we're gonna take control of this but taking control of the end and the other thing we normally the normal handoff off is hannah hannah phone up to the next negotiator and the next negotiator does an elaborate summary of everything's been set up now because what you anticipate is a bad guy saying like oh chris who's this chris guy does he even know what the hell going on right and so normally chris gonna say have been sitting here for a long time and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah so i'm up to speed you don't have to why do you hand it off at all it could be for a variety of reasons normally it's to take a harder line okay no negotiation team whether it's business or hostage hands a negotiator off to another negotiator to be nicer ever business or hostage if there's a change in negotiators on the other side it is always to take a harder line always and why why is it better to handed off to somebody else who'll take the harder line versus you yourself escalating to a harder stance it's gonna catch you other side off guard a little it's destabilizing without necessarily being threatening right away and if i've been a push over up to now and suddenly i'm demanding you have reason to believe i've been you know which guy is the real you the other guy or this guy right so lose there's an authenticity issue involved and so how did you get them out you said ninety minutes later you got hostages out what resolved it or what was the breakthrough point the inflection point for that one well i you know i threw the the first guy was high highly manipulative negotiator i in hindsight i now referred to him as the great corporate ceo negotiator a great corporate ceo if you're in negotiations with them it would be like oh my god you know my board's gonna fire me if i make a bad deal you know i mean there's my board is gonna kill me if i agree to that you know blaming people that are not in the room right so that that guy doesn't get cornered diminishing his influence at the table because if he does that that had to do this call in all the shots he's just smart enough to knock and corner at the table was always gonna blame somebody outside the room so the first bank robber at chase was telling us how dangerous his colleagues were and he he kept saying like you know these guys are crazy like you know i'm scared of when when he was calling all the shots so i took a harder line with him i was taken away is comfort level and being more confrontational without being aggressive he gets rattled and while he's trying to figure out what to do hands the phone off to the other bank robber on the inside who does not like how this is going down it was not part of his plan to be stuck in a bank surrounded by snipers with fifty caliber guns that might you know put a gaping hole in his forehead which he he would no longer could wear his favorite hat if that happened like he's scared a death about getting out of there and so i start in with them and i'm i've still got the late night fm dj voice which is calming and soothing them and then the real critical issues where somebody else on the team heard what was really bothering him and they handed me a note and i listened and i and i adjusted my stance in a moment on the note and he felt so heard and understood then in very short over was meeting him out in front of the bank he was surrendering to me wow what was what was on the net we were pressuring him to let a hostage go they had three hostages on the inside shocking that the hostage negotiators would be trying to let the bad guy get the bad guys the let hostage go and the note to me said ask him if he wants to come out and in in a blink of an eye i switched from ask him about the hostages and letting one go to saying do you wanna come up and his response to me was i don't know how i do it which is a great big giant yes just just tell me how get me out of here well i wanna count and when when we had him on that thread then i completely focused on the consequences that he was looking at how he was gonna get out of there he was most concerned about what was gonna happen to him in the instant he stepped out the door and as soon as i got enough reassurance i almost i almost had this guy out and then i got another note as it turned out from the same negotiator and then note said tell them him you meet him outside and i said you wanna just meet me front and they said says yeah i'm ready to end this shit and so we scrambled i i went around i got on the bowl on on the outside got him out in front of the bike listen up the old playbook is slowing you down ai broke the funnel loop marketing fixes it it's a new era for marketers ai is capturing search traffic channels are fragmented and generating leads feels less predictable than ever before hubspot loop marketing playbook will guide you through this unprecedented disruption it's the system your marketing teams should use to move faster connect deeper and gross smarter the modern growth playbook for the ai era built by hubspot design for today's marketer get the loop marketing playbook at hubspot dot com slash loop dash marketing to find out more and leave your competition behind alright back to the pod when you talk to ceos and business people you know obviously different situation than a hostage negotiation what's the first message you try to get through to well you say you have a room of a hundred of the most you know a fortune one hundred ceos we're in a room and they're all here to listen to you europe on the stage what's the first thing you really wanna get through to them to to income where that this information they need that they could only get at the table i remember a long time ago somebody wrote a book i don't know if they call it a ten commandments on negotiation you i don't i remember what it was call but i remember taking a look at it and one of the one of the commandments was and which is i completely disagree with by the way it is what it is which is your experience you were not new it's not your first rodeo you've dealt with these people before it is what it is so i'll i'll ask these ceos when are you ever in a negotiation where you don't have closely held in information you don't wanna reveal to the other side whether it's your budget whether it's your pressures deadlines on other deals quarterly profits demands from your board when is there ever a negotiation where you don't have proprietary information that if the other side had it it would change everything right you always have yeah like all the time and i go i go okay so that means the other side's got that too which means it isn't what it it's not what it is and the other side will tell you if they could trust you not to hurt them with it so your first negotiation is trust because they got stuff as they could tell you it would change everything and that gets people out of the perspective is i gotta make my case or i gotta what's my leverage what's their leverage what are our giveaways what are our what are what are our a lot of executives say you know what are our must haves and what are our giveaways well if they've got proprietary information that would change everything then you you must have and your giveaways could be completely wrong right and you have and then so you've got imperfect information and what you wanna do is you wanna sit down and gather information and trust and then rethink what the best deal looks like and it's really hard to get experienced executives to do that because you know i know the lay landscape is not my first rodeo i've seen this before getting them out of this is something i've seen before is a really hard day right okay so that's great so i'm a i'm a executive in that room and i hear you and i say okay first of all even though i've been through a lot of negotiations there's more to learn so i'm open minded to this secondly i buy i buy what you're saying which is that if i had more perfect information we can we can make a better deal that might be mutually beneficial if we were willing to trust each other what are the simple ways to build that trust when you do meet with the other side and they're naturally initially gonna not not just be super willing to trust you what are these simple ways to build trust well the the the simplest way to build trust and gather information simultaneously it is nothing anybody's ever learned okay so basically what they're you're saying here is number one i gotta build trust number i gotta get the information so number one build trust come ground let's find out what we have in common did you play little league baseball growing up the the you kids you know you made what are kids doing you know how many times have been married in know this whole common ground thing because they felt so good when they shared it they didn't realize that they were squash in the other side so there's there's that's one of the worst ways to build trust and then gathering information you talk to gather information bias asking good questions well questioning somebody makes them feel cornered which then diminishes trust because nobody trusts you your corner them or interrogated them so the the the counter answer is the you know the hostage negotiators tried and true tool called and hostage negotiation it was a emotional label in business negotiation just a label and i i i can start triggering information out of you right away if i sit down and i'll take a a sense of you and i said this to a colleague recently i hadn't seen him months i looked at him instead of saying hi how are you how are you doing today how can i help you and anita how nonsensical how questions i looked at this guy and i just i just kinda soaked them in for about three seconds maybe it sounds short but always feels like an eternity and i said you you seem centric and he set there for a second he said you know i just came off the mountain and the mine is where i go to meditate and i work out and he's all this asian philosophies and martial arts it's makes him feel phenomenal he said the last time you saw me i hadn't been on the month and months and i was just wound really tight and you know i just came off the mountain and i've been up there for about a months now if i'm listening he just told me a lot about himself and he also told me where he's at right now if i just sat down and said hey nick how are you he looked at me and went they are fine you right right and you did it with a observation a label but it was almost a compliment too it wasn't like you said oh you seem stressed out where you'd get defensive right you you said you you seem centered it is it important if it's a positive or negative label in that way it's just gotta be what it is okay like if he just seems stressed i said you seem stressed or if he seems stress one i like when somebody seems stressed is it's probably that day and i'll say tough day and you can watch them get their balance back when you say that and so the observation gotta be you have to observe what it is because of if they look stressed and i go like you seem centered then i'm an idiot okay so you you put the label to give some information that was what what happens next what's what's the next move to to continue to build the trust yeah well you know i'll probably i a i may feed it back to him i'm gonna i'm gonna sit back and you know i'm gonna let it i'm gonna let the other person talk and then i'm i'm gonna see if they got a next step and then i'm it's it's a little bit like there's gonna be a little bit of a dance here we may need to take a circuit route to where we both need to be but if you pick the root we'll get there faster by pick the route i you know i don't know what where where where you're going through i don't know where the friction points are for you i don't i don't know what i don't know what what's gonna make you lee i'm gonna let you pick the root because it's gonna be faster so i'm gonna sit back and wait to see if you if you pick a next step i mean try to trigger you to see if we can go is it you know is it ridiculous to talk about what we're here here for so you caught that question then yeah it was a no oriented question yeah instead of do you wanna talk about what we're here for which you're driving for yes because that going for s creates friction but going for no creates protection safe price no no it wouldn't be ridiculous for us to do that there you go exactly yeah and so that's how i wanna when i when i wanna when i wanna maybe go some place i'll i'll trigger the decision via no versus yes mh and you know there's all these words when it comes to negotiation negotiations those sort of classic words you know compromise tell me but tell me your thoughts on compromise do you think the united states congress is deserves an a plus rating no but they compromise all the time i think so if you think politicians are awesome then you think compromise is good and it's a crazy thing about it because everybody preach compromise how do you feel about compromising your principles and not good yeah it's it gives you an instantaneous uneasy feeling inside right so it's compromise is to by definition make something lose lose and that is not compatible with a long term relationship of trust and prosperity it's it's compatible with being a c player mediocrity compromise is correlates very strongly to mediocrity and you gotta decide whether or not you're good with mediocrity and so what's the replacement to compromise because i don't think it'll goes in saying i can't wait to compromise they sort of feel like it's a necessary evil i guess we'll have to compromise in order for us to to agree and i think that's where people land settle for that that's the mediocrity part so what's the more more effective more powerful way of thinking besides expecting to and accepting a con accepting that you need to compromise well let me find out where you're let me make you feel heard first if i can make you feel completely heard on your position my guess is more than thirty percent of the deals we made in your in in my favor on the spot and about half of the deals are made on the spot once the other other side feels completely earned but let's say let's say it's only twenty five percent and it's it's well more than that alright so now you've knocked out you've just accomplished you have to negotiate twenty five percent less because you just made the deal by making other person filler just not twenty percent of your work off the table now what happens the remaining seventy five percent their positions going to move closer to yours and they're going to be more honest with you about what exactly the position is they're gonna tell you what they perceive that must haves to be they're gonna move away from their throw away right away so me gonna make the deal on the spot or eat i'm gonna find out what we really have to negotiate about immediately which is also gonna save me a massive amount of time now there's a difference between compromise and high value trades and you know i i'm not a hundred percent sure whether or not this is a great example but i like it steel is two percent carbon and ninety eight percent iron so let's imagine a carbon and iron we're two negotiating factors and they said we gotta compromise and go fifty fifty because we need we need a fifty percent representation here now in point of fact two percent of one person's idea and ninety eight percent of the other person's idea made a stronger ally that mankind had never seen before so your real challenge is what's the blend not the compromise right what's the blend you know there was a guy who came on this podcast and he said something great i don't know if this aligns with your philosophy and he said he's told me something that really helped me in negotiating he said you know most people when they go into negotiation they see themselves on one side the table and then the other person on the other side the table and it's sort of me versus you and i'm tugging this while i'm pulling this one you're pulling that way and he said this is a guy who buys companies and he said the best thing we did was we realized that that's the wrong mental model the right mental model is me and you are sitting on the same side of the table and across the table is the problem maybe the problem is you think the price is x and i think it may is why you know there's some problem that's preventing us from just doing this deal instantaneously but it's not me versus virtue it's us together jointly looking at this problem on the other side of the table and that was a very like effective visual metaphor for me is that something you would i don't know agree with is that something you you you would you probably know more about that than i do no i agree completely i mean for the longest time on my side and we've always said the series is a situation and what you just did was explain what that model looks like through that example and it becomes very real when you describe it that way and yeah that's a very smart way to describe it and where does a leverage come commit come into this because you know when i've negotiated i always think about you know leverage deals i deals i feel you know i do but i'm not hundred percent happy with i'm not not too happy with it's typically because i felt like the others i had a lot more leverage in the situation and this was my best option to go with it was ninety eight percent their blend and two percent mine and in other situation where i have leverage or create leverage or i apply leverage you know i tend to feel like i do better but is that a is that too simplistic like where how do you think about the word leverage because for me that's always been key in negotiation it's not simplistic it's a step up from flounder entirely to you know and it's gonna sound harsh i mean you get yourself to b level negotiator there you'll never get you'll never get yourself to a a plus on leverage because leverage is the ability to inflict time and if you're making deals based on the ability to inflict harm these these are not those those they'll go for stable long term relationships they don't go for the other side sharing information with you that'll that'll change everything because if you've got leverage you're a threat and why would they give you important information if you're a threat and vice versa how much leverage do they have on you holy shit i can't give them i can't tell them that they'll little more leverage oh my god so it can be useful in some situations but it'll never get you to the best outcome and because in many cases you can talk you can think about when you made a better deal because of leverage then that becomes really addict really satisfying and you lose track of the deals that you should've have made but you didn't because you didn't have that thought you had leverage or the right you know the the it's a it's a very limiting factor it gets you you know into passing grade and it just doesn't get you to the top of the class gotcha and so what does get me to the top of the class so we've talked a little bit about it right i truly listening using labels to collect information plus make the other side feel you know heard and understood what else is kinda key to get me to the to the top of the mountain when it comes to negotiation well what you really negotiating what what people really don't understand is how important trust is and trust is based on your how predictable you are take out the word trust to put in the word predictability you all it automatically become more trustworthy because you're predictable and so then the ability to collaborate as we deal with issues because there's always gonna be issues you know the the making the deal is the beginning you gotta get into implementation and if we don't trust each other then problems are gonna crop up and we're not gonna tell the other side if we've compromised i'm gonna resent that compromise and what problems crop up i'm gonna keep my mouth shut it's gonna hurt you because i didn't like i didn't like the leverage you used on me i didn't like the way you forced me into this deal yeah you know what threaten me find find make me cooperate make me tell you about problems in the early stages as opposed to when they're turning into the land mine has gone on it's really an issue of you know how we're gonna do the implementation and so the whole issue of you know do we start and then and then you're even gonna talk about how we're gonna pro cross a bridge bridges when we get to because there are gonna be problems you know i i i'm gonna train a long time we'll before the book came out as ceo said this is my cfo and i want you to teach him how to put clauses and contracts i don't penalize the other side for non performance and my thought was if pen the other side of for non performance is your biggest problem it started a lot sooner because you're not making great deals if you you're telling me you can't get your deals to implement it that's what you're telling me so you need to back way up and find out what the problem was well before that because implementation is where it's at and if we don't trust each other if i can't count you to work through problems with me gonna cost us a lot of money alright this episode is brought to you by mercury they are the finance platform of choice for over two hundred thousand companies it shouldn't be surprised because i use it myself for not one not two i have eight different mercury accounts i have seven for different companies that i'm a part of and then i have my own personal account because now they have a personal banking which is really cool feature i highly highly recommend it like i said i use it myself the reason why is because the way that mercury works is beautiful it's very intuitive and you could tell that it's actually made by a starter founder it's an entrepreneur you could tell it's made by somebody who used other banking products in the past and didn't like all the different rough edges and and annoy and decided to you know actually fix it himself really any type of entrepreneur you are let's say you're an agency well one of the things every agency has to do is be able to send invoices easily create them send them to customers and stay current on your balances with all your customers well you can do that inside mercury and so i think that mercury is great highly recommend you check it out and thank you for sponsoring the show for more information check out mercury dot com mercury is a financial technology company not a bank check show notes for details what are some examples of kind of the great deals you've seen maybe the great deal makers are great deals that you've you've seen i think oprah is a great deal maker and visible examples of that he gets lance off armstrong to come on tv and answer yes or no questions straightforward as to whether or not he dope and whether or not he did things now i'm not a acquainted a with over i am a acquainted with lance and i like lance a lot and when you look at the totality of the circumstances you get quite a different picture as opposed to somebody given you a very narrow view but anyway the lance on a armstrong interview he wasn't caught off guard by those questions that was the negotiation between him and her in advance as to whether or not he was gonna get on camera and what she was gonna asking you don't see anything in the media about lance armstrong being upset with oprah winfrey which means they negotiated a great deal upfront that they were both good with and then they executed it and it was no bad blood after the fact that to me that's a great deal and that's an example and a reason why and also and if you look at the totality of oprah think about the fact that she's dealt with some of the most difficult to handle people on earth celebrities who are used to getting their way at all times and she she she doesn't have any dust up city arguments with any of them now how is that possible when in today's day in age the celebrities love to have feud with each other all the time as a way to gather attention but that's not her method of operation and her such success is extraordinary especially thinking about where she started and i i'd take i'd take some very small percentage of her network and be quite happy do you have a sense of what she does or how how she accomplishes that the the interesting thing is it's very similar to what we did in the chase manhattan bank because i was talking about a woman talk with a woman los angeles several years ago to work for oprah and i'm laying all this out and i said the last impression is the lasting impression we didn't lieutenant did it buy and instinct that the chase bank i found out later on from i was at a gala poll conference on human nature you know the gala poll the long time collectors of polling data of course they're sitting on decades of human performance information and this one speaker stands up and says people don't remember things how they happened they remember and they don't remember it how it started they remember the most intense moment and how it ended the last impression is the lasting oppression so i'm laying this on my colleague who work for oprah she said says oh yeah oprah lived by that all of her whole life she said in in the entertainment business the joke is in an limo out of a taxi as soon as they get with a want from you you know you're out hitch up front finding your own way out but at oprah it was in an limo out in an limo and the philosophy was no matter what happened on any interaction no matter what you had to make sure they felt respected heard appreciated and loved at the very end and i've had several conversations related to me when know i didn't see something i'd to eye with somebody else and her last words are will always no matter what i will always love you and i will always be supportive of you and the last impression is the lasting thing impression and she's she's a master how do you prep for an for negotiations so usa you're gonna go try to make a deal and some people have this idea of like a what's it called bat with the best alternative to whatever you know they they sort of think about their their desired outcome and then the worst case scenario they're gonna accept other people do lots of research and they try to try to you know find as much as they can about the other party to be you know fully armed when they walk in for some people who do power moves how how do you prepare for for something that's a in the business sense in the business context it's gonna be a combination of two things i'm gonna first of all i'm gonna think about what negatives you're gonna harbor about me in advance and i'm and and i'm not gonna and everybody everybody's got that i actually interestingly enough everybody could do this right away even if it's a first interaction one of the things you wanted deny i don't want you to think that i'm gonna be greedy i don't i want you to think i'm i'm i'm know this slimy salesperson i don't want you to think that i'm to maximize my opportunity i don't want you to think i'm i'm wasting your time that i always tell people what would you wanted deny walking in that you got instinct telling you a negative is there and you make the shift from a denial to the straight observation but probably gonna seem greedy i'm probably just gonna seem like another slimy salesperson i'm probably gonna seem like somebody that's wasting your time that then instantly makes me the straight shooter the honest honest person and so i'm gonna think about what negatives you're gonna you are likely harbor because the brain is seventy five percent negative and that's the fastest way to for me to build a relationship deactivate the negatives and make me look like a straight shoe which increases your trust in me and then there's gonna be some stuff that you're gonna be thinking about that you're gonna be offended if i don't appreciate and you're gonna be offended if i don't appreciate how hard you work the fact that that i'm talking to you at all means you have value and that you have legitimate reasons in your own right to be respected and admired and it's taking what a lot of people would refer to as flattery but then articulating that it's not vac as flattery it's genuine appreciation from where you're coming from and i might say you something like you worked very hard to get to where you are today you have been in this business for a very long time and you know what you're doing otherwise if you didn't you wouldn't be sitting here in front of me at all and you have things that are valuable and worthy of my attention and of my respect and you put those two things together and you kinda get empathy that's what you were calling tactical empathy earlier right yeah because it there's there's brain science that backs up that approach particularly starting with the negatives before the positives right and why is it so important for i mean this is gonna sound like a dumb question but like it it just seems like it's the most important thing so i wanna talk a little bit more about it which is why is it so important for somebody to feel understood and heard and why do we default it seems like what we default to is i can't wait to make my case so the so that you understand me and right i feel hurt right like right right it seems like the biggest swing i could make as a negotiator is to let go of my need of that or at least initial need of that and really hone in on your need for that and if i just did that one switch i'm a much better a much better trust builder and therefore a much better negotiator when it is that the right summaries from what you said yeah you know it really is and it's fascinated to think about the fact that people come to the table with such a desire to be heard and to make their case they can't imagine that's what's driving the other side it's blinding and neuroscience wise what differences it make to make somebody feel hurt i will trigger to release a in you of your neuro chemicals oxytocin and serotonin if you get ahead of oxytocin in interacting with me you're gonna bond with me and you're gonna be far more honest with me oxytocin just it's bonding and truth serotonin is a drug a satisfaction which means you're gonna be less demanding so if i could make you feel heard you're bond with me you're more honest with me and you're less demanding it's a pretty good start for negotiation how does how does chris v you know buy a car how do you do in day to day everyday situations have you had any any implementation of any of your techniques that on like the low state stuff we've seen the house negotiation but like what do you do with when you're on craigslist do you need a couch or you're you know you're at the market yeah well you know i i tell the other side why what they are selling is worth what they're asking you know i make their case because that's what they're gonna say to me so what i've done is i've just now left them with nothing to say and then like see i can i can i can i can pound you down on price i mean i i and i still if i choose to be i can be i can really pound you down but i better never need to come back to you for anything and there are a few deals that are complete one offs so if i'm buying a car depending upon who i'm buying it from i will tell you i do not have great regard for car dealerships across the board i no longer ever get any vehicle i own service that a car dealership on a care what the warranty says because i don't trust them so i don't mind piling down a car dealer right i got no problem with that and i and i will do that to them i will i will make their case and then i will become very passive aggressive and you know my favorite is how am i supposed to how am i supposed to pay that well you would have said all the things that i just got done saying if i hadn't sent it first but now if i said all if i if i took away all the wind out of your sails took all the bullets out of your gun then when i give you the opportunity point that got me you got empty you got empty chambers you got nothing to say yeah i know and your dealer on a margin and in in real short order i'm gonna get you down to your bottom line and then if i like it we'll make a deal if i don't more at but i better i better i better not ever need to come back to you because once i've killed you on price you are not gonna forget that and you were not gonna list a finger to help me ever again right okay what about other sort of day to day negotiations this is i i got little kids i have a five year old a four year old one year old and so my my most frequent negotiation is with them and i'm just curious do you have any parenting negotiation tips maybe it's just don't negotiate at all but i don't know i find myself in that pickle a lot now well you know with your kids this is the you know their ages for thinking if you will but you're what you're really trying to do as as a as a parent help your kids think and so recognizing where they are in the stages i heard a long time ago up age five treat kid like a king five to fifteen you know work like an servant at fifteen let them go there's a lot of brain science that that overlap overlaps very closely with that in the development of the brain but all along the way is you you want your kids to feel slightly challenged and you want them to get them to think now that they have the ability to process that at about age four slash five six they start to cross over into ages where they're starting to process that and what a lot of parents wanna do is just order kids like go to bed because i'm day i'm why because i said so i'm because i'm the father that's why right well that's not it's not really helping them think it's demonstrating to them that the only we can get stuff done this by through use of force now that doesn't mean you wanna put up a bay behavior either there's you know one of my favorite videos is some you know this mom trying to talk her five year old son and into getting in the into backseat of the suv and she's come on you know and he's crying to make a noise and his nine year old sister walks up and grabs them and throws them in the suv and they get up they they leave you know at some point in the time you got a toss a kid in the car but in the meantime you know your your your jobs the parents just help them think and and it's not to shield them but it's to challenge them and make better people help them think and after all these years of helping people be better negotiators and you teach certain you know techniques and certain frameworks for for this what do you think is the most easy to implement of all of the frameworks meaning the easiest way to get points on the board and start the process of improving in this area well it it it's really gonna be the different ways to repeat back to somebody what they just said you know label you're you're focusing on their emotions or affect mirrors and para phrases focuses specifically on what they said it seems like it's got a waste of time and it ends up being a relationship accelerator which send as a deal making accelerator so how do you do it the more you can make somebody feel heard the less you could be a threat and they're yeah sometimes charm is involved charm and empathy you're are very close yeah but who's the most interesting at the table if i make you think i'm the most interesting person okay cool we had a great conversation but are we are gonna make great deals now if i made you think you're the most interesting person are likelihood for collaboration is very high right and how how do you find that balance or do you need a balance between like my business partner ben he's like this he goes into a lunch he asks so many questions because he's genuinely curious and he's he you tends to know a lot about the other person and what they're interested in because he's paid attention he absorbs he remembers what they said he remembers where they went and he's just so he'll feed them things that he knows they're interested in not to minute with him he's just that's like who he is i don't know his nature is to be that way and he leaves the lunch and they've talked ninety eight percent of the time he's talked two percent of the time he's asked them a couple of questions that he knows everything about them they know nothing about him and they go this was amazing we gotta do this again this was one of the this is so fun i would love to do this again and you know he comes back at the same time i'm curious if there's a sort of a downside to go in too far in that direction where you know you haven't sort of demonstrated value or you know provided the other side with an you know sort of an almost like a in tech like an api connection like an ability to understand what your needs are and how they might be able to help or intersect with what you what you do is there a danger in going too far down the kind of like let the other side talk route well first of all curiosity is the superpower like it and it in it like it is a superpower like it's ridiculous where it shows up in terms of your survival their survival long term relationships your resilience your ability to discover new things like curiosity yeah i can't tell you so many different ways it's the super superpower so now what's the danger at some point in time you gotta keep in mind while we're talking and if you get too curious then we have a finite amount of time we got an hour to be together if i if we got an hour together and we get nothing accomplished you gonna remember you really enjoy the conversation but we didn't get anything done so you might feel like it was a waste of your time mh you have to be aware of the progress that has to be made and i my team what we always do is we set finite periods of time for meetings period and we never go over it doesn't matter where we are we'll we'll set another meeting before we'll go over a meeting because time is this commodity that is so limited that if i don't help you manage your time and your interactions with me then preaching you're gonna start avoid well speaking of you seem like a guy who is very conscious of his time i wanna make sure wait it looks like we're eleven minutes over i wanna we i didn't mind i enjoyed the conversation i i do wanna tell some people about some stock yeah town please so we've started this new thing called the black swan negotiation community and you go to our website and find it and it really is that across the board amazon one stop shopping for where you are in your negotiation journey you can't afford anything come into the community because membership is free and get started getting a return on the investment of your time in terms of dollars so you know get thought on your journey any any incremental change could be monumental very quickly awesome well chris thank you so so much for coming on also for i don't know all the content that you put out over the years i've always picked and picked and chewed on different little bits of it especially whenever i was in the process of either raising money or selling my company it was these very brief periods of time maybe three weeks four weeks six six weeks where the value of my years of effort would swing by fifty percent depending on how good i was at negotiating and understanding you know the other side and being able to find a a mutual beneficial deal so it's one of these arts where it can make a really big difference at a very small amount of time being you know the difference between being bad at it versus good at it versus great at it and so i i i appreciate you coming on and helping us be a little better at it today i was a pleasure i enjoyed the conversation conversation i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a road travel never looking alright let's take a quick break because as you know we are on the hubspot podcast network but we're not the only ones there's other podcast podcasts on this network too and maybe you liked them maybe you should check them out one of them that wanna draw your attention to is called nudge by phil ag and whether you're a marketer or salesperson and you're looking for the small changes you could make the new habits you could do the the small decisions you could make that will make a big difference that's what that podcast is all about check it out it's called nudge and you can get it wherever you get your podcast salesperson

alright so we had da mesh shah on the podcast today da mesh is interesting one he's probably the most listened to and viewed guests that we've ever had and two the reason he is that way is because da runs hubspot which is a twenty five or thirty billion dollar company that makes billions billions in revenue and he's a billionaire he also is sort of like a hacker so he launches little projects all of the time sometimes they works if a fails sometimes they make five thousand dollars a month and so he's probably the only person on earth that has this perspective of both being a big thinker and launching new projects yeah and on this episode we wanted to talk to him about the early days like how did you actually get hubspot off the ground you had no money you didn't have any connections and he figured out a new model of marketing around blogging and seo and we wanted to talk about what did what did that look like then because today with ai and chat seems like there's a new opportunity and i have like more energy than i started with because he's got this kinda i don't know like playful builder like get after energy that's pretty contagious alright give it a listen let us know what you think in the youtube comments yeah 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 dumbass mess looking back do well back from a busy but fun week at inbound in san from cisco did you guys get together and in s yeah we did it da is like you know this was his coachella he's there he's the guy so sam i go to san francisco and basically like the street is shut down for the they take over that that area of the moscow center and they have this thing called inbound and so da is like hey after your talk let's go hang so we go hang out and my first question was like dude so what what is this because i'm you know i know it's a i know it's a conference or like sort of this event i'm not like confused about that but i'm looking at it and there's these giant you know like they make those block letters and it just says inbound but doesn't even say hub hubspot first thing is this is like it says inbound and then there's all these people walking around and i'm just thinking why are they here what is this all about and you actually told an interesting story about like the origin of this that that i think is kind of a like a pretty interesting business strategy der tell the story you you were you told me something you go talking to brian and he was he was telling about these very well funded companies that were had cmos that we're trying to get website like traffic to their website and here's der just blogging for fun at home and he's getting like way more traffic and then and they kinda looked at that they're like they have a chief marketing officer they have a ad budget they have like all this stuff how are you getting ten times more visitors to your website like people come into your store did they are there's something here right like wasn't that the story yeah that that's exactly the story so the yeah know the i was still in grad school finishing up writing my writing my thesis brian graduated a year ahead me but we would still get together like once a week and chat about ideas right it's like well you know because we had kinda considered the possibility of starting a company together and while we were doing that he was working as a venture parker one of the vc firms here in the in the boston area his sort of job his role was to help these startups go from ricky dink startups and and get scale right it was just to help them with their go to market marketing sales you know how do get customers and so we'd be meeting and as part of my thesis work called un startups the patterns and practices of modern software entrepreneurs so because i'm a i'm a software guy and my thesis adviser who's won of tougher advisors but like three quarters the way through is star mesh like you've got a lot of words here but there's not a lot of data this is not like da opinion and this is supposed to be a thesis this is you know you have to have some like research and things and this is you guys know me well enough now so my immediate thought was well what he's asking for is going to involve like interacting with humans and that sounds awfully unpleasant that's not what i signed up before and so i thought this i blogging was a new thing at the time i'm like well maybe i can like write you know write a blog and maybe i can get comments on the blog and i can use that as like the citation of the was like oh you know on my blog article i said this and some people said this or whatever so that's that's what did i start a blog in order to come up with a name for the blog i just took the first two words of the title of the thesis which was on startups stuck the words together and put a dot com at the end of it and this was you know in the early days so that was available so registered it for you know fifteen dollars or whatever it was and anyway so that like how do i get people other than my mom and in you know two friends to read it right like what's what do i do and so then i kinda dig in it's like oh well there's you know this thing called google they got two types of traffic you can pay your way in or you can do what's called search engine optimization can get organic traffic there's social media sites like dig and read at the time like here are the things you do in order to get people to your website right that was a a collection of things and so those are all the things that i sort of dug into obsessively and learn about and we can talk about some of those because i think that's a good topic even for today as as things evolve it's and so brian's is watching me do this now when we're meeting is like da how's that blog going like asking going pretty well here's the traffic he's like how the heck are you doing that i'm like oh well there's this thing called seo and there's this you know like you're all the things that you do he's like well yeah like my portfolio companies like they can't get like a hundredth of that traffic they should be doing this not whatever it is they're doing like stop to madness in terms of spending this budget on things are just not you know not driving any engagement and style was a kinda of genesis of the kinda idea of inbound marketing it's like okay well everybody was doing it wrong they needed to be doing it like let's pull people into your website that are kinda curious how do you educate them how you put value out there and are kinda catch rates of the time was you know try to add value to your prospective customers before you tried to extract it like all other marketing was forms of how do i extract value from you how i interrupt you at dinner or how do i you know get you in and we were the opposite of that and so now back to the conference so when we did that we're like okay what we didn't have a product yet right we're like okay well here's the things that we're i was using stuff that was you know the common things like google analytics and you know blogging software and things like that so two things we decided one was that the reason so many people weren't doing it is not that it didn't work it was that it was just too hard to put all those two two pieces together all the pieces that you needed to do and it anyway put that so we're like okay well there's lots of dot of heads in terms of the idea being right of this kind of inbound marketing thing and so we decided amongst other things to say okay well let's start blogging about that let's see what the market has to say about it let's start getting up on stages when we can get up on stages and then part of that we're like okay well let's have people that are like minded that believe in this this kinda of new way let's get them together so the first conference was that a marriott that was across the street from the office it was like two hundred people in a ballroom with a marriott and we made a decision when we start the conference it's like this is not intended to be a company conference the idea here is there's this thing called in inbound marketing which we think is a better way and all this is really doing is we are acting as a host to kinda bring this community together to talk about these things in fact we actually i don't think ever used the word for before but it's it's like you're not allowed to pitch up hubspot from station if not if you're your hubspot employee not allowed to pitch any of your companies from all the speakers that we add it was just all of us internally at the time and so we sort of kept that up that's why the conference was never named hubspot you know this is the seventeenth year that we've been you know doing that event on an annual basis and we it was a con competing of the community not a tech conference the classic sense where you see the ceos get up there and pitch their book and like here's what we're doing and that's that proved to be good there's a few smart things that i did that i would wreck in that everyone should go off and try to do this but a few things that work if you're really looking to kinda start a movement start a category we did not trademark the term inbound marketing even though we had coined it right and and we were starting a company right so it's like okay well if this thing is actually gonna be a thing we want everyone to use it we want people to put it in their job titles and their job postings it's like we want it to be a thing and the way to be making a thing is to make it accessible to everyone make the event accessible to everyone so even the early years we had direct competitors that would send like half a dozen people that would send their entire team to the inbound conference even though you know hubspot was a competitor so that was it was a yeah it was an industry event not a conference i've seen this happen many times so i i was part of the early blogging community first as like a reader like i was really passionate about a bunch of blogs and then i had my own small blog and then i somehow became friends with a bunch of the people who i i read their blogs about read on the blog and then it was like from o eight to like fourteen or something it was like a really magical period for blogging and back then we felt like freaks where we there was a very few of us and we were kinda weirdo we basically all nerds and yep we loved like other beating other nerds then when i lived in s f which sean there were startups but then there was like crypto and crypto was like the same thing where it was a very very small and very passionate group of people and it was the same thing they were freaks there weirdo if you told someone what bitcoin was i was one of those guys where i laughed at it and i'm like this is a joke what are you guys talking about and my takeaway from hearing you tell us story is that i've seen this happened so many times where there's niche communities or you know also with like early youtubers we knew early youtubers and it really became a thing we have seen this happen so many times for a small a small group of really like unique or odd kinda odd people that but it's very tiny it's crazy how the signal is like how passionate they are who's that now i think ai is already it's our that's that's past yeah so like that's not it but i think that like peter levels has done that with like the indie hacker that was really cool but what do you what is it brian johnson was that two years ago like the body hacker it's obviously easy for me to say what is past but i that it it's a hard question i don't i don't actually know what do you think it is now well well i was thinking about first the the strategy that the hubspot thing did with the category creation when you make it about a movement and a a way of doing things instead of like starting with your company and your product and so was thinking who's done that well and i thought of two just like little examples just while he was talking and the first one was brian johnson i think when brian started he didn't have a product to sell and so he basically was like he just made this like this way of bio hacking longevity let's call it the and then he named it the don't die movement like it's like if you believe what i believe and then you think the way is to like use science and be like yeah a little weird about how you're gonna yeah i'm gonna sleep at this time yeah i'm gonna put this mask on my face yes i'm gonna you know i'm gonna get this test done every six weeks yeah i'm gonna do all these weird things because i believe in this way of living i thought he did an incredible job of that and he created that that movement of you know the longevity movement really along with hub and others course the not one person or one company ever owns these things and so so i thought that was one example and then another example that's a little bit you know just smaller or more niche i thought you know i was thinking about okay so hubspot basically had of course this the people who believed in doing this new form of marketing and then hubspot became like a tool you would use naturally if you were gonna do that then i could build the tool for that community i was thinking who else did that and i think one is what russell b it did with click funnels yeah so first the idea just a rebranding of kind of like the funnel the the ward funnel so it's like oh yeah like we already had websites we had landing pages yeah we had growth we had all these other words but then to like own a word like inbound marketing of like funnel and then i think they have like funnel hacking competitions and conferences and it's not called the click funnels like if like the click funnels meet up you know it's for people who are great at funnel hacking and funnel building and have generated lots of sales and they make them feel like stars and they give them a huge plaque for how many sales they've driven through their funnels and of course if you're gonna build funnels for you should use you know click that's like the natural like the secondary thing underneath i i thought russell brown did a great job of like popular like a way of marketing and then selling the way to do that well alright guys if you liking this interview with der you might want a little gift from him so der has put together a bunch of ai prompts that you can use to help your brand grow on ai so the old way of getting discovered was people with google and then you wanna be at the top google well the new thing everybody's doing is you're using chat or a perplexed are all these different tools that are ai tools and they're asking questions and they're searching for stuff so how do you get found there how do you get discovered in ai well you gotta make content that ai likes you gotta make content that the ai knows how to read well how do you do that that's something that da has put together he's got a bunch of prompts a bunch of things you can go put into chat gp and it will give you ideas for content writing that will help your brand get discovered by ai so if you wanna get the prompts go to site it's a here's a qr code there's a link in the description as well and there's a hundred of them you can literally just copy paste them and start using them for your company check it out it's pretty cool alright back subset so one kind of category of ideas i've been obsessed with for thirty years which i think is a really great category like broadly defined category of ideas is making inefficient markets efficient right and so the kinda of macro level definition of an efficient market is that every transaction that should occur does right like oh and an efficient market is like oh someone wants to sell x and someone wants to buy x that transaction happens if it's an efficient market so a good example is like the public stock market someone's willing to share sell shares at why price someone's willing to buy shares at why price and so that transaction and what it needs to occur does occur and so then the question is like what makes markets inefficient right thing number one is the buyer and seller don't know each other so there's just no way to connect the dots thing number two is the buyer and seller know each other but they can't come to some objective way to kind of determine price by number three they can come up with a price but there's not enough trust for the actual transaction clear so there's all these things that make markets inefficient and if you look across kinda the span of history some of the most money that's ever been made are when someone took an efficient market to which there was what i think i was like latent economic value that was just being wasted as a result these transactions out happening they essentially took some of that inefficiency out so ebay was an efficient market for these niche market product like like pest dispensers and things like that like oh i've got this thing that i'm obsessed with or i'm selling and here's the buyer google in a way was creating an efficient market for niche information that says i'm writing a blog post about how to build fences for llama here's someone that's looking for that content that's fences and google is the market maker for a niche market content for the viewers of that content across a really really long tail right that's that's what they did and so this idea of a community is really a form of for a business perspective is a form of creating efficient market these are people that would enjoy knowing each other may be transact maybe they do business maybe they hire each other depending on what the community is but just the act of pulling those people together you're move removing some market inefficiency and as a result of removing market inefficiency you get to participate and some of that economic leave economic value that you uncovered and that's how communities make money and when they do well they do really really well just on a kind of profit margin basis because they're relatively cheap to kinda get started almost self sustaining if you can sort kinda get the people together and you get to critical mass that's actually got lots of other positive effects versus just blogging or said like content creation is because you have these kinda of network effects so wherever the community is already aggregated it's sort of hard to disrupt that once the good community gets going so one of the other things we talked about when we were hanging out was were telling me this story about like hey like early on i was blogging it was getting this kinda of crazy amount of traffic and then we realized like oh there's gonna be other people who wanna do this and then we built a tool and i was like one era of marketing was like when that was like you know early to like as it matured and hubspot became like a huge beneficiary and then i started thinking about we i think we talked about like a few other eras of marketing it's like okay when facebook launched its ad marketplace which i think was something like two thousand ten ish range but like paid ads across google and facebook became like a dominant way to market your product and a bunch of people did that cool then i was like you know there was one other one that i was like i told you i was i thought i was late to even though it was right in front of my face which is what i call a jacking and there's two people that i met that i think have done this incredibly well and they even told me about it specifically to my face they told me the secret i was too dumb to like acknowledge it and the first was actually steve bartlett so i hired steve bartlett when he was probably i don't know eighteen nineteen years old he came more for me steve had this one scale that was like really interesting to me which was he had he was building up all of these social media pages random themed accounts and he could grow them very fast they were run by like a single nineteen twenty one year old person and they got like ten times more engagement than my corporate accounts what's an example page so he had one like freshman problems okay and he would just post something and then like all the college kids would laugh at like the memes on the freshman problems but guess what once you get the attention and trust of every college kid through your you know freshman problems you know uni problems he would create these pages like that then he would then just shove in a product and spotify and others and nike would come and pay him a hundred thousand dollars to reach that audience through his accounts and so he had this like method i guess like in the same way da that you were like just a guy blogging in his bedroom and you were like basically out pacing these venture funded startups with cmos and budgets and you know marketing professionals who couldn't get one tenth of the traffic the same thing was happening and he literally was in my office who's sleeping in my office at the time and he was telling me he's like yeah you gotta think about you know jenny in her bedroom she's just scrolling and like what's gonna make jenny in her bedroom care she's not gonna care that you launched your app and like how do you get how do you pay attention that and he started thinking about just work backwards what does the algorithm want give it that and then find a way to slip your product and giving it the same things and now if you look at one of the most successful podcasts in the world diary of ceo the reason one of one the most successful in the world is because he figured out how to a jack youtube and instagram like look at the engagement they get on social there it's i don't know a thousand times bigger than what we get on our podcast and if you think about like you know he he out he worked backwards from the algorithm so what we do for example is we have a product and then we try to share it and it might may work it may not work what he did was he changed his product completely to be what the algorithm wanted so it started as the diary of ceo's his personal diary okay not that many people wanted that then he started interviewing other ceos about ceo stuff some business people wanted that if you go look at his feed today it's like south health sex conspiracies you know like whatever and it's basically like the mass mainstream thing mostly in the format of they've lied to you about carbs they're lying to you about this and they're like but guess what that's what the algorithm wants and when i just when i said algorithm really it's like what people like to click on when they're bored jenny and bedroom bored was scrolling on on on her phone mister beast did the same thing like if you go talk to about a great video what's a great video one that gets a lot of views you're like well by that definition but is mcdonald's the best burger and he's like well yeah it sells the most burgers so it's the best burgers like are you talking about and i'm like what we have different definitions of best but his thing has always been like i wanna make the videos they get views so i work backwards from what's gonna get a view i work records from how do i give views the book algorithm is basically what is what does youtube want to show a billion people and i'm gonna try to make that video and even though i saw that that trend that sort of a a i'll go jacking trend you know i didn't really understand it and i think long story short da today you see a new trend what do you see today as like the next thing yeah so let's talk because i think there's real value in some some history here so the thing that i was doing back when hubspot got started and we made a brief reference to this it was called search engine optimizations seo and the kind of practice of and there's an entire industry now that was has been about search engine optimizations which is how do you increase the odds that your web page your website will rank in google organically organically being you're not paying you know add dollars or whatever it's for free you know how do you kinda rise in the rankings and there was an entire discipline around how to do that and kinda of pulling on your thread sean around kinda a hacking the way i'm i'm a positive kinda guy it's like it's really optimization right it's not a hacking in the sense that you're sort of what you're really doing is just saying okay knowing what i know about let's say in this case google is looking for right here's what i'm going to do in order to kinda of have my website go up the rankings and there's actually lot layers the game and the first layer is always more of the hacking like how can i trick the google algorithm into ranking my website versus somebody else's website and there were lots of practices that we're kinda later labeled as being kinda of black hat because like oh it really likes when it sees a the keyword that someone's searching on on the web page it's like okay well i'll just put the keyword on the web page five hundred times right in white font on white under at the bottom of the face that exactly and then that was level two it's like oh well google got too smart about that is because because that would actually like show up poorly and in other results and i'll do it know in a tiny font or a white font on the white pack and slowly it was just this game that was costly being played to try and trick the google algorithm with google would do an update every year i don't remember whatever and then like you all like they do the update and then six months later you see an article this company lays off five hundred people or like and so it's sort of like so like you you see i remember we have we i'm friends with the nerd wall guys the nerd wall is a company that like writes articles about the best credit cards and i was with them and they were doing that well and then after three years google made an update and they became number one if you google best credit card and overnight literally overnight they went from making zero dollars the third year i think they made thirty million in revenue and it was like google rewarded us because they changed their algorithm and we did things the best practices and all these other people got wiped out and it worked out and so that's what you're kind of you're describing of of all these hacks and then doing the right away was exactly right and so and i really like really as i tend to i would deep down the rabbit hole on seo kinda back in the day it's like okay well what is this how does it work and there were a couple of key insights that i think are still applicable today that i think made us money would make other people money because i think it's it's a successful strategy which is going back to kinda sean's po is the first thing you have to figure out is that there are lots of smart people at google whose sole job it is is to deliver high quality results to the end user okay so if you say that that means that every black hat tactic you're trying it may work right now but you've got an army of really smart people whose sole job it is to make what you're doing not work so it's just a matter of time so that's kinda thing number one right it's like okay well are there other things i could do that would act make those people's jobs easier it's like oh yeah well you know they really like it when you structure webpage so their a crawl or has an easier time crawling it it's like well they will reward sometimes intentionally sometimes unintentionally just what we will call like good behavior make your site clean make it load fast make it do the make the content actually useful so the you know i i got up on stages and and wrote about seo all the time back of the day and my one thing i would tell small business owners that's some like kind of primary audience was is that whatever's term you wanna search for type it into google right now let's go don't type it in and it's like okay well here are people that are coming up right now do you have a web page on your website right now that deserves to rank higher than the ones that are showing up right now and be honest with yourself like not in a self serving weight if you are searching if you were the actual human typing this keyword in would you wanna find your website versus what the ones google are showing right now if the answer to that is no job one is to create the content that deserves to rank higher than ones that are ranking right now because google's is imperfect and all those battles are win it's like i see them the top two or three are pretty good but if i were really searching here's what i would actually want then produce that web page that the actual end user would want and nine out a ten ninety five out of a hundred times it was just a matter of time because you got a lot of smart people that want to find that web page if it's actually truly better for the end user than that right and there's a bunch of things you can do you know write good content right timeless content but you know i have content that i wrote for hubspot nineteen years ago that still drives traffic to hubspot dot com that still generates leads that still generates you know revenue nineteen years later and this is one of the big things about seo and we'll talk about ae kind successor to that which is this is one of those things that when you're doing like google adwords and then you do those things right it's like as a marketer you need to have a a repertoire of things that you do to reach customers the issue with like google advertising or any kind of advertising is you're effectively renting someone else's stage or renting someone else's microphone and you pay them to do that right like oh put me on the page and i will pay you x dollars and there's a nice efficient auction mechanism for the price but it's like yeah but the day you turn that off the traffic turns off your link does not show up in google search results on anymore so you're basically renting and you don't control the rent you don't control what the prices are because that's a market dynamic thing so it's like it may cost five dollars a quicker down it cost fifteen dollars a click literally tomorrow based on what the supply and demand is so now you are at the kind of va of the market the nice thing about seo and doing this content focusing it's like building your own property on your own land that compounds value over so as land prices go up the value of the thing you built actually goes up not down and it's under your control if someone comes along and says oh i'm gonna produce a better blog article it's not gonna be instantaneous as they take all your traffic overnight you will see them come up the rankings it's very very rare that overnight some brilliant piece of content that google finds it trusted enough to put in the number one spot instead of you so you will see your competitors come up if someone's doing again and you can do something about it them me so there's all this positive this to investing in seo versus you know paid paid channels and i i was gonna ask you this you know one of the painful lessons i've learned is this one phrase called intensity is the strategy so i'm the type of guy that always like to read the the next blog the next tweet the next book because i always was looking for like what's the better answer because i in my head life was a you know a game of chess and if you just knew the right moves you would win and chest is like the wrong analogy for life it's a lot more just like taking a chest piece and just battering the other guy as many times as you can in different ways and picking up different pieces and just keep hammering on and i've learned that like you know for most other things in my life i knew the strategy i knew the answer and the difference between success and failure was the level of intensity i took to the strategy and i think diet dieting is the easiest example like we all know what to do this is your question of like how intensely you do it or not but like a lot of things in life of this way i've asked you i bring this up because i can kinda tell and i want you to confirm or deny this maybe i'm wrong but your volume what's a lot higher than what was normal in those days so it wasn't even that you were the best writer or you were the smartest of seo necessarily but like i'm guessing what you guys did as normal was completely abnormal in terms of volume did you basically like was volume or intensity of out of the marketing the strategy more so than like coming up with the perfect you know the perfect strategies totally have this is my has been my personal belief for my i think my entire life as far back as i can remember is that i'm never like the smartest person out there or even in any given room that i'm in you could out think of me i think that's relatively easy to do you will not out grind me will not out work me because that's under my control and so i've always believed that the kind of quality of the outcomes is almost directly always directly proportional to number of iterations and that's it so if you can squeeze out more iterations compared to the the know the next person or whatever over the fullness of time you win that like the universe says you win right and and you just have to have a conviction like the the problem is that the universe has a kinda a slower feedback loop especially in the early years it's like okay when you're first blogging four people will read the blog post and then you have it's like then you like pour your heart and soul into it and then it goes to six many part your part and then it goes to five goes down was like okay well what the hell is going on here but you sort of have to have the conviction to say i know it's just a matter of and i i don't work out but it's just a matter of putting the reps in like it's it's meaningful thoughtful and they don't have be perfect reps right they have to be incrementally better each time one of the things i wanted to do was for some reason in hubspot you guys changed your blog where i used to be able to go to da shah or brian hall your blog your author page and i could sort by recent and then just go in reverse and see your early blog posts and it was pretty cool because like brian was very casual you're like this is this guy does it sound like a thirty billion dollar company and it kinda like gives anyone inspiration because it's it's pretty great but if you go to on start dot com which is your personal blog and you can kinda rig it where you like sort by recent and you gotta change the url a little bit but you can go and look at some of your old blog posts from two thousand and six and a few things one the headlines are are evergreen they're fantastic raising capital friends family and fools another one is revenue early revenue often the other one is the danger of solving venture capitalist is biggest problem like really good headlines for one and two there's days like there was a day in november where you posted five articles in a day and then for the most part in two thousand and six two thousand seven two thousand eight when i imagine hubspot i i don't know when hub hubspot started but i think two thousand and six so you are running a company an early stage company that it probably takes up your whole life and and i think i don't if you had a family at that time but sure you're very busy but your personal blog is posting something like three to five articles a week not even your company's blog your personal blog pretty crazy reps work my friend that's one thing and this this is you know and we've talked about this in terms of as you pick an idea to work on you know as an entrepreneur whatever it happens to be one of the most important kind of filters and criteria should be is this something that i at least enjoy enough then i will be able to put the reps in because if you you can't make yourself do something you hate for that long for that many times over an extended number of years it's just not going to work so pick a market you like pick a category you like pickup up kind of business that you like it's like if you like e commerce if you like selling whatever it is then do that right just because something else has higher margins or you know susie down the road was able to create a billion dollar outcome or whatever it just won't matter because if you just give up a along of the ways like do not pass go did not collect two hundred dollars kinda of thing so funny listen in april of two thousand six he wrote an article saying less is sometimes less and it's an article written about how a lot of people say less is more and he's like no i disagree with that i think more is more is more in terms of effort this pretty funny you you been say the same stuff now for twenty years did you guys see this video that's going somewhat viral of the youtube founders early on have you seen this what's this no so this is twenty years ago and this is chad and steve from youtube and they're just in their office talking but basically it's the guy saying like they're just been they're just sitting there like i was got depressed last week like we have forty videos on the site and you know if i came to the site i wouldn't find it i'd be gone i wouldn't and they're just like yeah this sucks and this is youtube is the founders of youtube and you were talking about like in early days blogging it's yeah i got six visitors and and i got i got eight the next week and you know being able to persist through you know through that time and then and then the volume right like you just don't have enough videos it's not that youtube doesn't work it's that youtube with forty videos doesn't work it's not that blogging doesn't work it's you're blogging once every two weeks doesn't work right like i think that's one of the big lessons here listen up the old playbook is slowing you down ai broke the funnel loop marketing fixes it it's a new era for marketers ai is capturing search traffic channels are fragmented and generating leads feels less predictable than ever before hubspot loop marketing playbook will guide you through this unprecedented disruption it's the system your marketing teams should use to move faster connect deeper and grow smarter the modern growth playbook for the ai era built by hubspot designed for today's marketer get the loop marketing playbook at hubspot dot com slash loop dash marketing to find out more and leave your competition behind alright back to the pod we didn't close the loop though der so you the new wave we talked a lot about seo and like that's good because history doesn't repeat but it rhymes what's the new wave clinton new wave and i think just like seo created an opportunity for seo consultants seo agencies and businesses you know driving direct traffic organically i think we have a a new thing now so a couple of things are happening one is and lots of marketers have been hit hit by the ai taken away which is organic traffic that used to come through seo very very predictably including to a folks like hubspot we are very good at the seo game have played it for a long time has gone down literally by about twenty to forty percent based on which industry you are in and the reason it has gone down is that historically the practice of search is that we would go to google we would type something in we would get ten links right that's the that's the whole game as it turns out there's this new thing called ai and a new app called chad gp which has eight hundred million weekly active users and what people are doing now is not going to google and and getting ten links are like going to chat gp and just asking a question getting an answer and and that's it right it's like okay well there's no quick through there's no reason for someone is like oh just tell me the answer instead of me having to go through and read the articles from those ten blue links and then figuring out my own answer so like just do it for me and so that's happening already and you can see it in the actual kind of data as we've seen and so what's happening now is there's this an new emerging discipline that says in the same way we had search engine optimization we have what we're calling ae o which is ai or answer engine optimization it's like okay well peep peep before people are going to google doing a search for my product my service my industry in my category and my job was to be one of those ten blue links hopefully the higher the better because it's a a power lock curve now i it's like okay well people are looking for products in my category service in my category they're looking in chat ep let's just say that's the number one number one app right now how do i show up as an answer or part of the answer when they do that so that's the emerging discipline of of ae and there's a few things that are distinctive about it one is the click through rate in terms of web traffic to your site through ae is going to be down because if they could just get the answer there's no reason to come read your blog posts about x where you stole the virtue of how whatever your approach is and it also lists way less more way less so if you say like what's a good clothing company or whatever like you only get like four options whereas on google i can click next next next and you get correct yes which which no one ever by the way did that those was a running joke in the seo world is if you ever had to hide a a a dead body hiding it on the second page of google search results because no one ever went there like all they would do is they would just rewrite the query they would not click next they would just rephrase your queries like i must have asked this you know suboptimal optimally or wrongly i'm just gonna rephrase my questions instead of going to second page but at least i get ten like a lot of what i noticed when i asked it that dad to be it's like they give me like two or three i agree yes so it's even more important and and that's a what engineers math people would call like a binary so it's like either you show up or you don't right if you're not in the actual citations and the answer that was given you might as well not have played the game because there is no difference right so you're actually literally zero in terms of the the traction you're gonna get okay so then the question is how different is it what should people be doing what should we be doing now in order to start getting that and so the number one thing is that so when google crawls your website back in the old google days they have a google crawl and it calls websites and you can kinda control that and there were things you do to make it easier for the google crawl to crawl make your site faster make it more structured to all those things all of those things still actually apply the difference now is there's a kind of a oa it's called oa ai search bot is the name of the bot that's doing the search thing there's another one called gp bot that does for the model training and things like that so they're they're are two different ones number one on the off chance that you're blocking unknown caller bots which some companies do it's like oh i only want bing in google whatever to call crawl i a lot random people just calling my website because it cost me resource or whatever even if you're doing that if you're blocking it explicitly go in and turn on the ability for oa search bot and gp bot to to crawl your website because if you don't get indexed then right you're not even in the game let alone you know you have no chance of winning because you can't be in the results okay so that's thing one for sure yeah know one thing too is that and this was nice of them is that they do report so any when you look at your google analytics or hubspot web traffic whatever analytics tool you use it now self reports when something comes from from one of those bots from the ai so you can it's a ut source per parameter on the for those of us analytics it's like so now start and hubspot has this in in the product now so we will tell you what percentage of your trap just like we used to tell you y here's how much you're getting from paid here's how much you're getting from organic here's how much you're getting from ai referrals you know broadly defined so take a look at what traffic you're getting now so as you do things you'll know whether you're not better or worse you to sort of like anything else you you know have to sort of measure it in order to improve it so start looking at that traffic see wherever the baseline is today and then and start tracking it number three and this is a a a tactical tip reframe your content either rewrite it we're putting new content out there that is closer to a structured question answer form right so this is less about the kind of pros and narrative writing and hook and things like that because you're not trying to hook a human like you were back when you're writing blog post because that's when humans are reading it they were like clicking on the link so you needed a great page title that would actually get the quick then you needed an actual really good content to kinda get to the lead conversion right those are the things you did and you were solving effectively for humans and google was just a proxy for the humans but it effectively you were solving for the humans now you're solving for that that ai crawl and the ai crawl trying to get to a good answer to a question that the user is asking and it's easier like if the question is we're the top crm for small business and start there should be a webpage page on the hubspot website that says here the primary factors that kind influence what what you would pick or lever and here's is why the seven reasons why up hubspot is the the top you know thing whatever is like make it easy for them like reduce the friction for the ai to get the thing that's trying to look for the thing is trying to look for is the best possible answer so the question the user is asking number three is all the things you used to do in classic seo most of them still work you still want page authority because chat t specifically what it goes off in does things what it does is you type a question what's the best crm for small business it will take what you type into chat gp and it will convert that into search queries it will para us so it's gonna do a bunch of bing inquiries bing as of what it happens to use but doesn't really matter us most of the search engines are roughly equivalent technology wise so all the things you use to kinda rank a web page will still help you because when big goes out and gets asked by chad gp says hey the user is asking this question about small business crm may rephrase a query but still gonna do a a bing search it will come back with a list of pages those pages go back to chat gp chat gp puts it through the l and comes up with the answer that it's the game that gonna show the end user so so you know getting high authority links showing up and being doing all the kind of classic good practice white hat seo stuff still applies sean are you are you getting have you noticed that you're getting traffic and sales for your for your stuff from ai i don't pay attention to it at that level of detail but we've and and it's not that big for us but we've looked at a few of these tools because now there's some new like you know the way like with the seo you'd have either you know hubspot or you have like mas or whatever you'd have these tools there's a few startups that have come out and been funded for this and they're basically like hey we can help you track this and get you into the top you know the top the top answer box for for this and so we're trying those now but i think it's like early still to see if if we're getting any results from it by the way i just typed i said i'm a small business owner and i think i need some kind of place to keep track of customers and perspective deals what should i be using for alright tops hubspot was the second answer in the thing said yeah here's here's the top you need to it goes you need a crm here's what a crm does and then it's like here's the top crm for small business two twenty five but it looks like in this case it literally just every the ranking is just pulled straight from tech rate article like tech radar has some article i've tested thirteen of the best crm at twenty twenty five and it just like pulled that exact list and it put a comparison table in there like you said and like it just gave me that as the answer whatever tech writer said is is the answer here so that that seems a little tricky we've for hampton we've got we've got a we've got a lot of business it's it's it's crazy how much is happening what are people looking for sam that they're finding hampton so so sometimes it's just like i want like what's like an entrepreneur entrepreneurial group that i can refer to you or or i can i can look into so that's like one that's major one but then sometimes people will be asking questions to chat as if they're an executive coach like saying like i'm struggling with this problem and it will say like you might need a have you considered a an executive coaching group or an executive like peer network something like that and then we get shown and what's crazy is we don't try like i was shocked by this i started seeing leads and customers come in and it would say i we use hubspot and hubspot would be like yeah this lead or this new customer came from chat gp and it honestly shocked to me and i remember the first time we got that like eight or ten months ago and it was you sean us star mesh when was the time that you like the light bulb went off i felt a little bit of that light bulb the problem is that maybe it's not a problem i think the best way to make it work is you just do the same things that you're doing to rank on google no but he had some good nuances right like the fact that you know on google you would structure your page a certain way because it's like that's it's like a a guest comes over for a dinner party and you're like oh he really likes you know to discuss books and current events alright cool that's what i'm gonna give you this other guy really loves to debate and it's like chat loves question and answer and so format your your content has question and answer this is like a simple nuance of like the new the new way of doing right but in general like it's signed like it's kinda like just do what you think a customer and the last thing is even early on google had what what was called the keyword what do they have key tool yeah they used to call it one thing and they changed it so like in the early blogging days you could type in like a certain word and it would tell you ballpark how many people are searching for it and you're like and then it would also tell you how much competition there is and so i could just like replicate that i don't think that exists for chad does it der it does not yet no and it's the other thing that doesn't exist yet is that we don't really get so back in the early years of google as part of the data that would come through in your traffic analytics you would see which keywords people were searching for was show up in hubspot it would show up in google analytics google's have subsequently kind of curtail that so they don't pass that kind of granular what we think of was like intent data what was the user actually searching for yeah i i think things will evolve so the couple more kinda tactical tips that i think are applicable today sean for you and this may be happening automatically based on being on the shopify platform but one of the things is that chat pt and the ai engines really like is structured product catalogs right that's because as you would expect it's like oh here's a here's the standard semantic web way of described the product catalog which is size color all those things right and then another key thing is inventory it's like is it in stock or not you know can shipped or something delivery time those kinds of things if you put those on the website that's going to influence as you as you would expect to like if i'm searching for i wanna buy this kind of a musical s synthesized or something like that i wanna find a site that actually happens to have it right that's why you know amazon gets you know so much love generally but anyway so that's one thing to look at and for you sam the other thing that the aes of the answer engines kinda optimized for is more kinda human based stuff so if you look at the review sites of g two and things like that for product oriented companies but also it i won't say over indexes because that's a relative term but it highly indexes on things like reddit especially if there's like active lots of back and forth or whatever and if even if there's one comment in there that says oh here's the thing that definitively asks and you will find that the the the citations that you see that show up and chat and you could just do this through personal anecdote and just experimentation you will find that the the reddit threads it picks up are the ones where the original post was actually a question and that question sort of matches a question the user's ask like oh what's the best you know crm for small business if there's happens to be a reddit post that loosely kinda translates to the exact same meaning that re fred post if there's a comment in there where someone definitively says yeah it's hubspot and here are the five reasons why and that comment gets a bunch of folks because they have access to that data that has a very very high likelihood of being a sided source is gonna be the biggest company in the world imagine if google had a so google is already the third or something largest company in the world now imagine every customer is also paying ten dollars a month or you know what i mean three episodes ago we were talking about open it's like oh if you give me if we have to predict this to which what's gonna be the the next trillion dollar company this is before i i don't think any company had reached trillion dollar at the time we did that episode but one was about to it it's crazy how much like chat ep for it to be a eight hundred like they're essentially the new operating system for this current generation i i had a buddy and i i maybe mentioned it on the pod years ago but he was deciding between two very promising companies one of them was open ai and this was before chat was launched and i think they were already worth thirty billion dollars and we were talking and he was like man i think like i don't know if this equity can grow anymore like i i just don't think it i can work and he ended up taking the job anyway and he made already something like thirty million dollars or so from his stock and he sold a portion of it so he could like be very comfortable and then we were talking he's like what i do the rest and i was like man there's definitely a world where it could ten or twenty x or more again who knows and it's just crazy to say that out loud that what's it worth now one trillion or eight hundred i don't even five hundred billion is the current publicly disclosed round that's happening currently alright this episode is brought to you by mercury they are the finance platform of choice for over two hundred thousand companies shouldn't be surprised because i use it myself for not one not two but i have eight different mercury accounts i have seven for different companies that i i'm a part of and then i have my own personal account because now they have personal banking which is really cool feature i highly highly recommend it like i said i use it myself the reason why is because the way that mercury works is beautiful it's very intuitive and you could tell that it's actually made by a startup founder it's an entrepreneur you could tell it's made by somebody who used other banking products in the past and didn't like all the different rough edges and and annoy and decided to you know actually fix it himself really any type of entrepreneur you are let's say you're an agency well one of the things every agency has to do is be able to send invoices easily create them send them to customers and stay current on your balances with all your customers well you can do that inside mercury and so i think that mercury is great highly recommend you check it out and thank you for sponsoring the show for more information check out mercury dot com mercury is a financial technology company not a bank check show notes for details yeah can we do like some rapid fire questions we have this document this is listening we have this document where we were like preparing different ideas and sean had sean said he wants to know your process from zero to one and how do you get ideas do you do research what do you do to move the ball forward and you replied something interesting you said two things you said this gives me a good chance to talk about algebra alibaba and i was like i no idea what you're talking and the second thing you said was iteration it's all about iteration could you elaborate a little bit on that yeah so a couple of things one is i don't have i don't do deep research on ideas i outlook look at the market like an nba wood should most of the things i end up pursuing are either personal itch issues i need the thing myself or someone close to me either my business needs it my wife needs it or something like that that should exist but doesn't and these are all all the things i pursue tend to end up being software the only thing i know actually how to produce if i was a carpenter to a musician and it would be be something different and my kinda of running thesis has been and this is referenced algebra i was making is around mathematical induction and so mathematical induction is this a very simple principle that says as long as it's true for n equals one and it's also true that if it's equal true for n that it's also true for n plus one that it's gonna be true for everything all along the way for until infinity for all positive numbers anyway i'll simplify this dis still down what that means is if you start that's condition one and if you can always take the next step make the next iteration it will work look at that that's some for some definition of work right it's like you just have to just kinda keep at it and i'm not saying stubborn pursue the exact same idea that you started with that does not work right you do have to sort and iteration is truly taking kind of market feedback and doing a true a true loop right and informative loop that says i i'm wanna gonna do it or at least try to do it better the next iteration the next iteration next iteration but that's my approach it's like find an idea that i can like and then just get started like often it'll be like can i write code tonight so right now i've got three projects in flight that are these kind distractions scratch my own niche ai projects and almost tempted to tell you what the three r because i'll force to launch them before this episode goes live they can give a one liner maybe for like one or two of them yeah so one is around it's like a like a visual designer as an agent so there's lots of great image generation tools there's you know chat a chat has one there's nano banana that's now from google but what's what i've always found lacking is the actual process i go through as a non designer as a business person like if why i'm doing a social media post for doing a blog post or something like that is it's like like i have a process like okay i wanna come up with like visual ideas what would represent this then i wanna say ten possible examples then i wanna iterate then i wanna say okay i wanna pick these five and i wanna create my own personal brand my own style that i wanna apply that style to the kind of is it's like there's this this kind of workflow that i go through and like that's just painful and i'm too impatient like i have access to designers this this is not a matter of saving money but it's like if i have an idea two o'clock in the morning and i want to get the idea out there with a visual that goes along with it so that's the thing i'm building that that goes through my entire flow as as an h agent tech process you have a name board i know you like to do names with the idea i do it's and i'll put it out there let's because it's it's close to launch of bowl it's called a image gen dot ai so image generated dot ai and is this gonna be i like one of your first or second tons on m word was popular and you said that you made a word alternative so for those listening navy if you don't world is it's i don't know a game like sc whatever and your side project where you just launched us i think what your son was making eighty thousand dollars per month at the time i have no idea where it's at now do you have some type of ambitions or guesses as to where this is gonna be in six months i don't know a lot so being a part of it we talked about this a little bit last couple of episodes you know so i've been working as kind of part of my kinda hubspot hat knows is the the agent dot ai platform which is basically a a marketplace for agents if you can build agents find agents hire agents to do these kinds of things so in the back of my i'm gonna build this thing but i'm building it as an agent that will be on the agent dot ai platform and the hope that is that the utility is high enough either it will cause a bunch of users to be added to agent dot ai i which is now up to two million users which is awesome or you know i have thoughts about agents on the platform being monetized someday and this is like okay for me it passes a litmus test like if this thing already existed would i pay five dollars a month for it or ten dollars a month for it in the answer is yes it's like okay well i can sort of and i actually post it on linkedin exactly because the product roadmap for this thing was yesterday i'm like okay here's the thing i'm building i didn't disclose a name but you're the thing i'm building here's what it's gonna do and it's like like can it's like stupid simple things right now first is this when you do an image generation thing right now that has text which a lot of kinda of business images that you create will have like a i headline liner some sort of text in it the image models have gotten better a text still not perfect but one of the things i wanna do is like okay well if you generate image with text i can pass the generated image back through ai and say tell me the text that's on this image so if there's a typo in it just reroute it don't like waste my time giving me things that have typo and then me like oh by the way you got you misspelled this or whenever you have a typo in that by the time it makes it to me it's already done right like having a an intern going off and doing this stuff in the background and then i show up and it's got ten options for me i can pick and i can run and it'll do it in my style without typos so which sounds like a minor thing but useful sean do you wanna ask him some of these other questions you had some pretty good ones like the request for startup or his chat eb history yeah well well i'll do the chad three one i'm just curious so you you run a huge company you are also kind of like a scratch out guy your investor you do you have many hats so i'm just curious how you use chad gb i if you were to pull up your chat you'd like looked at the last five to seven searches that you did or or questions and answers that you do what are you talking to chat gp about i'm have a huge hat fan it'll get you wrong of even if i were an investor in open but my my the way i consume chat is not through the app the way i consume chat is through their api so i have my own kinda of command line thing that i put in and the there's a reason i do this so the the next big advancement we're gonna see in an ai apps generally is this notion of memory that they remember and you'll see as you've been using chat you will find that it's going to remember more and more things about you even though you talk about them a week ago a month ago right like it's it's the best out there in terms of being able to retain that memory which is awesome the non awesome part of it is that that memory is locked into chat ep so if you ever go to claude or if you ever go to gemini or something else those things don't have that memory of you and that's a very frustrating thing which is great for open ai because it makes a very very tricky well wait so it's your personal version that you're running in your command line has better memory than chat why why does that how'd you do that oh because it's it it has infinite memory and what what it makes it the better memory is because it's under my control as my memory for instance i can go off and say i'm going i wanna go back through and i have this for my email as well which i think is just another form of memory i'll email archived and i have like you two and a half million emails in in my quote unquote memory i can go back and say through my chat history here's the thing i'm actually trying to kinda get to and then i can combine that with other things i can take that memory like now i wanna pass that to a google gemini or i wanna intersect it with google gemini which it has video analysis a lot better than chat does which doesn't do video and yet it's it's the openness of it right that that's the the motivation for it it's not that i can do memory better it's the fact i can do more things with it because i can intersect it with other apps but why isn't this the product because i think everybody would want this right yeah give me that because it violates okay i have i have three rules of business rule number one never own a piece of a restaurant never be a shareholder a restaurant rule number two never be a landlord because i don't even wanna maintain my own properties let alone properties on behalf of other people and number three never compete with sam alt from open ai those are my three year rule that will violate the third rule which is i don't wanna create a chad gp competitor but well where will this this will manifest right is that hubspot building kinda of memory into our breeze assistant you know i i ai product and so that that's going to happen so localized memory in terms of you know for use case specifics i i wanna create a consumer app that tries to solve this kind of for the broad horizontal group of people but i think over time the industry will evolve where there'll be some forms like federated memory i think that's oh you can plug into this similar to how we plug into google docs and gmail and things like that it's like open i made not own like absolutely everything but right now someone needed to do the memory i think they did the right day it was not you know dia planned to to be that way it's just like oh it would this would be a better product if it had memory so they added memory right okay but be okay so but you didn't answer my my phone question she said i don't use the chad tv app i use it through api on my own little thing you've created which has better memory okay but what do you use it for like what's like the last few things you've used it for so i i do it a lot for kind of research i'm researching like ideas and i use it a lot for domain names as it turns out so i have a thing that can actually look at google trends so i can say oh like i've i've come across this idea for a domain name or whatever here's a price i can look that up in the marketplace right now i can look up the transaction history as has his domain been sold before was the last purchase prices like zillow for for domains one of the agents i'm also working on that we'll launch actually this week but i want so what i wanna do is to say okay i'll vibe coatings are good example it's like once andrew ka that i was actually part of that but sometimes i'm a little bit later for the like oh i see this trend kinda of picking up like what is that i wanna know who coined the term i wanna know what it is i wanna know what domains are available what's the price are you any of them listed or not are anyone's just free and cleared like no one's as a turns out vip coating i was early but late enough where someone had already kinda purchased the dot com domain by the way vibe coating would fit your inbound framework like if i'm rep or one of these companies right now i'm creating the vibe coding you know movement in the the community and the events and the blog and all that and then like yeah i have the tool underneath that you could use but you could use many others right or maybe i'm super base or one of these other companies like putting it behind that the way you've done with inbound marketing i think would be smart right now i'll tell you what am i and i will i will sacrifice this idea not not for free but in the idea here and this was the original idea behind so i paid six figures for that for that domain that's on i think i'm what dot com or what you get voting dot com okay really and i oh my the idea i've logged hundreds of hours doing what people some would call live coating and there's other terms like agent coding i think is is a more accurate thing but it doesn't have the same vibe as vibe coating okay so that that reason doesn't exactly raw tip the tongue it doesn't yep and just in case i own that one too but that's the okay so five coating dot com i think it's a great idea it lowers a bar lot allows lots of non developers to kinda get into the kind of product building game the problem is and i would bet lots of money on this is that almost everyone that is not a developer by trade will do live coating if they're trying to build a real so there's a class of problems that v coating is really really good at it's like if you're building software for yourself if it's got a short lifespan this is i'm building this i need it right now or whatever it's like disposable software or if you're just building it for your team as i only have to make it work for three people and if it stops working no big deal but as as you start violating some of those criteria for a like no i wanna build a production product i build a billion dollar software company around that's going to be long during and i'm gonna be maintaining this product going a year or three years five years ten years down the road then by coating invariably right now even with invariably non developers will paint themselves into a quarter that they will hit some bug something won't work something will break it will it's just a matter of time based on how ambitious the thing you're doing when that happens it's entirely possible that you actually have an economically viable idea but you have an un viable code base because you have no idea what's happening inside that black box when that happens gotten if when that happens what if there were a community in a marketplace called v coding dot com where a bunch of engineers hang out and what they do is to say hey i'll help i'll answer questions for you like my more questions but also for five hundred dollars an hour i will jump into your github repo figure out your problem and fix it in cause and set up you to test for you now and help you get through this corner that you've painted yourself into so i think that's gonna be a massive market so you listed i think so you probably own between five hundred and a thousand it's between five hundred thousand yeah okay so i could collect if i were you know had unlimited money in i i could probably collect five hundred over ten years you go to you just have an idea and you just buy it but what's crazier is a lot of these domains that you have they actually have projects on them so i'm looking at pitch craft dot com open graph dot com prompt dot com dad joke dot a i speed round dot com and it's like speed dot com it's an investment firm a check or no in twenty four hours dad dad joke dot ai a dad joke generator that's works but not that well and you said you have three other projects that you wanna launch but you said i need this podcast go and then i'm gonna go get it out so i'm setting this up sean came up with the idea of being generative this is the most generative i've ever seen so one which is how do you have enough time to actually do all this well but just and just to be clear the the list of domains i put in i don't have sites launched on them right now so the thing i was kinda trying to share and i may just put this up publicly so like here in my top twenty domains for which i have ideas but i don't have calories to actually pursue them make me an offer if you're but you have to have like street cr some something that gives me evidence that you would actually be able to kinda pursue this idea and i'll will kinda contribute the domain and maybe some capital to kind of kick the idea off but to answer your kinda questioned bluntly sam my hours have not changed in the thirty plus years i've been you know doing this as as a entrepreneur i still think of myself as an entrepreneur despite being part of a thirty twenty five billion dollar company for all intents and purposes and i mean this the most positive way i can possibly put it i live in the matrix that's basically what i'm doing right like it's like long as like are we a simulation or whatever i personally is like okay my window in into the world is like i've got well talking character people that sometimes show up on this other screen that i have up here in my office or whatever is like and i'm just trying to play the game and this is and i in the same way people play video games and do it obsessively this is my version of a video game and i i did play video games a lot back when i was younger too but i really enjoyed it i i like it because if if i were a writer you know i my favorite writers are the ones that spent a lot of time on world building and character building right it's like they create this entire like especially the sci find fantasy writers they create this entire thing that a world that could exist that's got its own physical laws and here's the the species that live on and the powers they have in the in all that and this this entire world that they fabric out of thin air they dude in words i'm trying to in my own small way create a version universe that exists that solves all of the problems that i have or people that i love that and that i can sort of yeah kinda poke out of the and make a version universe that i think is a v one point one of the universe that exists does your house work like that in your in your physical life like in on your day to day life do you is your home life setup up to where you've built like your own like is everything about your life exactly and your a very particular way of of going about it is it set up that way no ends and i'm i'm actually probably drawing the wrong visual picture so my life is if you just looked at how i live it's more like the absent minded professor my desk is completely messy so it's not like i have like an engineers scientist kinda thing where we're like it's a lab you know white lab code clean desk and everything's is kinda of pristine it's the exact opposite of that right it's it's it's it's just not how i'd i i i work and so i'm not that the methodical about it i'm analytical in some ways but i actually play things actually very loose like i'll have a random idea and i'll drop the thing i'm working on i'll go play with something else for a day or two you or whatever and that i'll drop the fact that doing image agenda dot ai in the next few days or whatever is like and and now i'll i'll finish it and get it to some some sem of kinda of working but you know i i've said this before but it bears repeating is it's it's a really good piece of like personal advice is that you know when if a musician were out playing music and practicing when they're not doing like for twelve hours a day sixteen hours a day which people do that if an if an athlete if for a basketball like the if they're off you know practicing eight hours a and then even between games and looks like we never questioned that we never ever questioned like oh well that's what it takes to be kinda of top of that particular game music sports or whatever for some reason there's a stigma attached to work yep and there's some stigma attached to if you just happen to make money at the thing you happen to be doing like well was like you we all has all the money why would you keep doing this for a like i'm not doing it for money at all like i don't care about money at all but i do enjoy the the craft and the practice and the actual process of building business yeah you you have have you ever heard of the the famous clause that michael jordan put in his contract when he signed his big deal with the bulls so they added a clause and i don't know if this was nike marketing or if this was genuine but at the time if you were an nba a player you signed the max contract they would have all these rules like hey can't ride motorcycles like you know things that would jeopardize you as an asset to them and one of them was like you can't just go play like random pick up basketball games on concrete with strangers right like you might get hurt and that's on you know now you can't play on company time and he had this famous clause that he put in called the the for the love of the game clause and it was that jordan was allowed to play basketball anytime he wanted for the love of the game and i think that that's like a clause that we all just wanted in our our own mental contract of how we do things like you had this great tweet where you said if money doesn't let you do the things you love doing why else would you want it and i thought that's so good because oftentimes i know i to talk to my mom or my sister and i'll tell them about you and my buddy fur con is like this fe was my cofounder or a last company and then but the company built before that app love is now like a hundred billion dollar company and so like fe got all the money he he'll ever need right and they're like oh what's fe concept to i'm like oh yeah he built this lab called founders inc in fort mason and he's in there and he's there till eleven and pm and he's you know he's branding and he's he's got a new start up and they're like oh my god if i had the money i would never do that and you know part of it is like well because you wouldn't he's not doing it for the money he's doing it because he wants to do it that's why he got the money so first of like yep you have it reversed the money came because he is this way not you know he's not he didn't become this way because of the money and also like you're right that whether it's athletes musicians you know we find it like noble when they do it but if you're a business person you're greedy or you're a work a hall like when your mom says that are you're like have a seat mom pull chair you see my lebron james are you familiar with jordan's contract in ninety six i subs section three seeds for the love of a game plug she's like oh i just wanted to know if he has kids yet at like he's like she's like actually an pretty at a in different level than me man der we we love hanging out with you you i always leave better than i came in i wish we could do this for for many more hours because there's just so many different things about life and business that we can learn from you we had howard marks on recently and at the end it was the same thing where it was like i was like man you you you came to talk about investing but you're really just talk about how to live a good life and you're that guy you kinda do the same thing where kinda funny right like the in the the the kinda legend investors we have they they go they they bring this philosophical energy of like almost like patience and like like observe the world stay calm you know stay calm and carry on or whatever and like dha and like come of the builders have like a slightly different energy it's still philosophical but it's kinda like a let's make it happen energy like let's build it why not we could do this let's try this it's okay if it doesn't work it is a totally different playful builder energy that i think is is dope to be around yeah i have a tweet almost sent yesterday but i wanted to get my image generator working so i could attach it to the tweet and it's two lines i'm gonna share with you it's some nice warm kinda closing which is dance like no one's watching build like everyone's waiting nice we and i we have to do a quick plug this one of the ways this episode came about was the marketing team of house hubspot was like we need you to promote this thing and they told us to what was thing and we're like yeah let's just have dark mesh on the pod and maybe he'll like plug it because that's way better but it what is it loop marketing loop marketing finally way loop marketing is a new inbound marketing that's nice that your prediction learn about how to do marketing well in the modern age of ai look up loop marketing loop marketing dot com you own that one too i guess yeah we promised we would say it seven times so loop marketing loop marketing and loop marketing boom that's so yes they were like could you guys read this ad or talking you were like white font on white background at the end of the the pod you you didn't even plug it by the way we asked what is the new inbound marketing do you call it ae that true true thank you that's it that's a pod i feel like i could rule to world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a goal travel never looking bad alright let's take a quick break because as you know we are on the hubspot podcast network but we're not the only ones there's other podcast podcasts on this network too and maybe you like them maybe you should check them out one of them that wanna draw your attention to is called nudge by phil ag and whether you're a marketer or a salesperson and you're looking for small changes you could make the new habits you could do the the small decisions you could make that will make a big difference that's what that podcast is all about check it out it's called nudge and you can get it wherever you get your podcast

listen up the old playbook is slowing you down ai broke the funnel loop marketing fixes it it's a new era for marketers ai is capturing search traffic channels are fragmented and generating leads feels less predictable than ever before hubspot loop marketing playbook will guide you through this unprecedented disruption it's the system your marketing teams should use to move faster connect deeper and gross smarter the modern growth playbook for the ai era built by hubspot design for today's marketer get the loop marketing playbook at hubspot dot com slash loop dash marketing to find out more and leave your competition behind alright back to the pod this guy's story is kind of amazing so this is basically a farmer billionaire love it and in i feel like i could rule world to i know i could be what i want to from at all in in like a days off on a road less travel never let me give you this one this is kind of a crazy story so do the words john brag mean anything to you no didn't mean anything to be either shout out to shane parish over at far street he did a great podcast with this guy that caught my attention this guy story is kind of amazing so this is basically a farmer billionaire love it and in like there was only two sources for this far street and the van trump report had written about this guy there's only things i could find yeah right he's got a biography as well but alright so so here's this guy story i just think there's like there's a bunch facto toy about this guy that i just think you're gonna love you're gonna love this guy's whole aura his vibe he is the belly of the week cue the music to million dollars isn't cool you know it's cool a billion dollars john brag this guy grows up on a family farm i guess saw or something like that and when he's in high school you know what a teenagers do this start to experiment they start to dabble maybe a little bit of maybe girls maybe we no no blueberries he tries to harvest blueberries for the first time at thirteen fourteen years old you know he starts to he gets the itch and then he goes to a local blueberry farmer he decides hey can i pick blueberries for you and he picks blueberries all year his last year of high school him and four or five other blueberry picker end up making four thousand dollars each pick and blueberries which was a lot of money at the time because this guy's very old and pay realize realizes wait i can pay for college if i just pick blueberries every year and so he's making college was like ten or twelve grand he's making four grand he realizes oh i can do this my parents otherwise we're weren't really gonna be able to send me but i can do this and so he makes more money the next year in the next year picking blueberries finally when he graduates he's got a couple options on the table you know plan a was gonna be to become a teacher and he was gonna make i think like thirty eight hundred dollars or something like that big a teacher an extra hundred bucks if he coaches like the the the basketball team or something and plan b was let me go work on the family business maybe over time buy out my data on the saw but he decides to go plan to he's like i think this blueberry thing there's something to it and he decides to start his own blueberry pharmacy so he buys a little piece of land and he starts trying to harvest blueberries and it goes pretty well the first couple of years he's doing alright but a couple years in he there's a problem in the blueberry industry which was that one year there was just huge supply glut so there was way too many blueberries not enough buyers and prices crashed and so he's like shit you know could quit but he's like no i'm just gonna figure out what i should have done differently he's like i need basically like a backup of plan of you know an insurance and he wasn't doing financial insurance but he's like i need another way to make money in case this ever happens again never again will i let this happen to be where i'm at the mercy of the prices and so he decides i think i need to build a packaging and freezing plant for blueberries so now he's got no money but he's like i'm gonna try to do this so he goes to the other blueberry farmers he says hey guys we all just got whipped let's put some money in together and i'm gonna build this plant and then you can use the plant too you could freeze and package your stuff too if ever if we ever have overs supply and so they do that he borrows money from the bank he gets buddy from the other farmers he starts to build this thing never no experience by way no manufacturing no factory experience but he's like i can do this but so he builds this plant and in the first year that they build the plant he's ready for two million like of capacity of two million but they only produce a hundred thousand because this is crazy frost that kills all the blueberry production that year and he's like oh my god i owe so much money and i and like we came in at like five percent of the like the estimated like freezing capacity this is terrible i have this empty factory now i owe a lot of money and basically it's like dude you gotta just let us go declare bankruptcy move on with your life instead he calls another guy who he knows guy mccain and he's like mccain he's like y what's something you need to make but you don't wanna make is there anything give me the the the last thing you wanna do but yeah you should do it and the guy's like alright i got you onion rings it's like onion rings okay he's like hey he's like can you send me like a file like about so gets like a little book on how to make onion rings and he's like alright say less i'm never gonna ask you another question i will figure this out from here so he he's got an empty factory but he turns it into like just for that one season or whatever he makes onion rings for this guy it just tides him over enough to continue and so he carries on and he ends up building something called oxford frozen foods which today controls about forty to fifty percent of the global supply of blueberries it's like seventy million pounds of blueberries they're making every year here they still have onion rings in blueberries and onion rings and mozzarella sticks on their you never forget you never forget who got you there and so he builds this absolute juggernaut over time and they become bigger and bigger bigger his brother invent this like blueberry picker that can do the work of thirty five like humans doing this and he's like oh amazing and then what he does is he actually like gives it basically like freely shares it with other blueberry farms too he's like he's like what's good for one is good for all here we go and so he wants the entire blueberry industry to grow because he's like the more the blueberry industry grows the better we all do i don't wanna be the biggest fish in the smallest pawn i want the pawn to get bigger and we're competing with all the other fruits out there so if we can up our production and we can have more blue blueberries we can build more innovative products it's gonna be good for everybody and so he's got this very interesting business philosophy he ends up then going into a new business so it's many years later actually i actually i think he kinda did this around the same time i shouldn't say many years ago i i know the exact date on but it wasn't like once he is already like huge it was like somewhere somewhere around at same time tv was picking up and cable cable tv was picking up and this guy's from nova scotia population nine thousand and so they held like an auction they were like hey alright who wants to buy the t cable tv rights for nova scotia nobody shows up he's the only guy there and so he picks up the cable tv rights for that area and he's like alright i don't even know what to do with this like i guess i'll put like some old recorded programming on here there's like no programming basically but he's like whatever let's do this and so he's in that business and he's losing money the first couple years and his dad's like bro you gotta figure this out like this you can't just keep bleeding money over here and so he cuts his call off he fresh to figure this out and he finally gets it to like kind of a like a break even point or whatever he ends up over the next you know couple of decades building the largest private telecom company in the country and he owns cable tv networks you know everywhere he does a bunch of acquisitions he takes on a bunch of debt and he ends up buying up others and he goes down he goes like sort of down the stack so whereas most tv companies wanna do the sexy fun stuff they get into original programming and content and the like content is king he's like yeah no you know what it's king fiber like i'm gonna go own the underlying infrastructure for for cable tv and he ends up building this juggernaut so this guy ends up now he's like whatever like you know much older now his eighties or something like that and he's worth a billion dollars he built the largest farm but it's fruit farm basically in in the world and he's built the largest what largest private telecom company in in the country isn't this kind of amazing this is amazing i've i'm as you're telling me this i'm i've noticed there's a trend amongst this era of people was this was he doing a right wing cable was getting started yeah man there's there's a trend so ted turner who eventually went on to start cnn he owned a billboard company which he par into a radio station and then eventually a cable news network cnn cable news network do you know another guy named jim patterson have you heard jim patterson no who's that dude google jim patterson another canadian guy look at what he looks like he's like yeah yeah yeah i've seen this guy before he's like one of the rich richest guys in canada right yeah he's like the he's like one of these guys who is like he's like energize energize the bunny like like he he's like a wind up toy like he just can't stop like moving but he i think his story was he at a young age opened up a car dealership and within three years he bought like a plastic manufacturer or something very like out of left field and then another thing and another thing now he owns a telecommunications business but he also owns like rip believe it or not and i think that like the pate group which he owns the whole thing i think has a hundred thousand employees or something and insane like that and then another one is his name's john cat his last name is crazy i'm gonna butcher butchering cash meningitis yes is that it he's got a condition kinda that's you tell him do you know him no so he started a grocery store i think it was called apple foods dude tell you this and guy who looks like this i just showed you this photo and i said rich rapport yeah you already know everything about it just like looking out him one photo yeah like when he this guy when he gives you a hair handshake he's pulling you in do you know what i mean you just look it but you don't know what he's gonna do he's gonna pull you in and do the smack you really hard on the backs shoulder yeah and no chance this guy has one wife by the way let me just look this up i bet you i'll bet you anything right now let's just wikipedia if you google is kid they're beautiful of divorce new wife fargo this guy started apple grocery store it's like a twenty what it's a twenty store chain in new york city like it's it's tiny but then he bought a radio station and then that's like how we got extra rich and then i think he also bought a cable news network as well and so my point being is there's a finding company and the he owns company like an airline he i think he owns like a small private airline they he owns everything there's this type of entrepreneur where they're kind of cowboys where they start in one thing and they get the media eventually and a lot of it happened in the eighties the late seventies and the early eighties when cable was getting popular and it was sort of like the first version of of a of a saas business you know it was recurring revenue huge tam kind of weird and unknown people weren't weren't sure what what to do and i believe that a lot of the cable new news networks they were regulated by the f cc and you had a certain satellite like you'd only own x amount of satellites like there was some type of like limiting blocker where only a certain amount of cable companies could even exist and so if you were able like get in on that it was almost a near monopoly ted turner came along and he was one of the first guys that were like petition congress is like this is nonsense we need more competition and that's when cnn came about but in this whole era like i like how sometimes when we explain these things it's kinda like when i explain it to my kids like they're like how does like how does the picture come on the tv like where is this coming from and i'm like oh satellites and they and they're like but how does it get from a satellite to our tv i'm like it shoots it it's like it's a video that's it's shooting gabby doll house at our at the tower i think i think that's what the cables are for or maybe that's electricity i'm not sure exactly what's going on it doesn't matter no it's gonna but you're like they were rent there's was only so many satellite you had to buy these letters but they only had so many letters i letters okay you supply that it is true like my spectrum available there's like yeah yeah we know a lot about spectrum there was i do i do know there was a famous like like hearing we're ted turner like made this passionate speech to like politicians to convince them that they have to change the rules to allow small ups starts to to get a satellite but anyway that's cool i like this blueberry very guy alright so a lot of people will talk about how you need a million dollar dollars and three years of experience to start a business nonsense if you listen to at least one episode on this podcast you know that it's completely not true my last company the hustle we grew it to something like seventeen dollars or eighteen million dollars in revenue i started it with like three hundred dollars my current company hampton does over ten million 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 give you some of his his little business ism his philosophies okay so and this is again some of this is from from from shane paris stuff dude i just tell this guy is he canadians are in midwestern people where i'm from they're the same the same people aren't they yeah it's like goes is the species in the town so he here's a great line by him i have no reverse gear i just thought this an amazing line which is like he's like yeah you know when things got hard and the blueberry crop died and then the factory is empty like i just didn't consider going backwards i did not consider like it was just not a gear i have to either stop or reverse course like i just decided i have to find a way through and the onion rings were the way through another thing that that was interesting which was kinda counter to conventional advice so you know most people who are in the business the game of business buffett and all the real estate guys the famous phrase they all say is you make your money on the buy you don't make your money when you sell if you buy it right then you're gonna make money dude i read that line like after i bought three real estate projects that i totally lost money on i was like shit i i i'm i'm being serious like i it's not like the fine print by the way this this is like the first thing you learned like i was like reading a warren buffett book and i like read that quote and i remember thinking like that was literally the exact opposite thought doing the john brag so here's john brag philosophy intentionally over pay what okay i'm in so he goes he goes early on i intentionally over paid for acquisitions and word spread fast if you wanna sell sell to john brag you'll get a fair price quick close no games which i love that like like if i'm i'm i'm gonna put that on my on our like little mini private equity shop website i feel like he said that that advice typically isn't right though well typically so here's the caveats here's the caveats of you know they say like you know the amateur learn the rules or amateur don't know the rules professionals know the rules and then masters know when to break the rules or whatever that thing is this is kind of when to break it so he goes i will over pay as long as it's something that's only available once because when opportunities are scarce you need to pay what it takes i know many people who tried to nickel and dime and then spent the rest of life regretting not getting that key asset so i think in the in the in the realm of buying the tv rights when there's only they're only gonna be up one once so whoever gets it's gonna own it those are that's like a time to over pay or if it's a key asset that locks down you know a certain competitive advantage don't qui on price in fact come in over so that you make sure you secure that asset and you develop a reputation he he said sits something like you can't buy a reputation i was like i think that actually what you're saying is you can buy a reputation it's like oh but the here's the reputation i will over pay right like it's like soft bank in the venture game right now it's like oh you you want a bunch of money and that a huge crazy valuation go to soft bank first right and there's actually like some merit to that strategy when they you have these like you know this this if if you can get the things that have huge upside so was he like an m and a guy like or or was it was a a lot of building the empire through m and a and what was he buying other cable companies or other farms both he here's another bang of a line so he has forty to fifty percent of the global supply and about half of that is like stuff that he owns and operates his farms at half his farms he's buying or owns like a you know a big stake and he's he goes here's the exact light he goes we don't wanna have one hundred percent of the interest industry that that wouldn't be good politics dude that's like imagine having the choice to have a hundred percent market share in the best that's that's not polite we'll what a baller but here here's here's some sam porn for you so focus is absolutely critical probably the biggest single principle you can have in business here's a big mistake people make they make their first million and they think now i can succeed in any business even once i know nothing about then that same sam buying the ranch yeah and then there and then he goes i just wanted to he goes i wanted to just stick to my knit figure out what i could do well and then just do more of it you know everybody else who came into this industry wanted to make a buck i was this young guy who said i'm here to play this game for a long long time sounds awesome sky awesome right i think it was my uncle then he goes here's a couple other great great quotes the guy who asked the question to me looks better than the guy who knows the answers like that done did you get all this from shane podcast with him shane and then there's like a couple other people that have written about them but a lot of this from shane podcast which i didn't even get to watch because i i was doing that like i discovered this guy this morning it was like on my list of like things to check out and as soon as i checked i was oh man this is amazing i gotta i gotta go watch this later so i i've actually only like skim the transcript and stuff for this so i might be getting some of the details wrong a couple other things he's one of these like buffett types where it's like he's a billionaire but the vast majority of wealth came like after the age of seventy so it's like you know just saying the same way for buffett where they just they keep compounding he had some other things that we're interesting so i would thought be richer if you own all half the blueberries in the world wouldn't you be richer than one point five billion yeah punk yeah weak shit he'd better be a huge like philanthropist and have given it a lot of away because i definitely would to thought he'd be richer right i mean i don't know i'm not gonna i'm not gonna knock him alright so he believes in buffet a lot he loves buffett and so he buffett has a great quote which is i'm a better investor because i'm a businessman and i'm a better businessman because i'm an investor yeah so at age seventy he was worth you hundreds of millions of dollars so he goes to each of the executives at his companies and he says today you're just businessman man you're not investors he gives them ten million dollars each not as a bonus but as an investment portfolio that they get to run and he said i want them to see how strong companies operate and how weak ones fail there was no penalty for losing the money and no bonus for the gains it was pure education isn't that like pretty wild to do so he gave how many managers did he have i don't know six teams so sixty million bucks he gave them what like a stock portfolio or or he gave him ten million dollars in total million dollars to go invest go buy businesses oh within the the their portfolio sure wow okay that's badass that's crazy said and this was at age seventy and then he's like most people stop learning once once they become successful but the outliers never stop being students love that resonate with me alright what else resonated with me let me give you one more and how about the fact that like i i just googled the i googled the the shane podcast shane went to his office which is really cool and he's eighty four years old doing a podcast like that's that's amazing that he's with it and he's sharp and he's had this pod dude what i'm eighty four i'm gonna be in the med i'm gonna be so just like plugged into what everybody's doing in the future i hope alright do you wanna do one or do you want me to go have you read about united fruit if we're gonna talk about fruits i to read about united united fruit is that the banana guy man that's a great book i'm in the middle of reading it and it's the story of united fruit which is basically centered around bananas so like you wanna do the quick story i think we've talked about it before but it's on theme it's sun trend in the the late eighteen hundreds i think bananas were discovered i think in nic or somewhere in central america and they brought to america americans were like yeah we we want every banana we can get our hands on we love it it even got to the point where like i think in the nineteen twenties when immigrants with land at ellis island we gave them a banana and that was like you're here now this is a american this american thing and it's sort of american because went to hawaii and they give you the delay and like yeah was a banana and this the banana company united fruit it became so big that it basically a monopoly and they did the same thing where they tried to hide that they weren't monopoly for years and years and years and sam the banana man i think named samuel za he was i think a ukrainian immigrant and he started out like was with like a fruit cart like walk the street that his whole thing was he would sell rights and so the way it worked is a banana train would start in one part of the country i believe louisiana and it would slowly make its way up over seven or eight days to the northern part of america and along the way it would drop off that bananas at different markets and his whole s was he was gonna sell rights meaning bananas that were already becoming a little bit brown that they previously thought were throw away bananas and he was like i'll buy him for a fraction in the price and i'll just be really fast at getting them to where they need to go and he eventually becomes so big that by the time he's in his sixties he he takes over united fruit and it's a big well he he starts with a hundred fifty dollars and by the time he's twenty one he's got a hundred thousand dollars and this doesn't neat way back in the day right so this is like a lot that's a lot of money and if he's all going and it gets to be and and and that's you're saying he's basically he starts as just like a dude on the dock or whatever like a dude on the side of the road taking their discarded trash and going and hustling and selling it and by the time he reaches his peak he buys the he buys the whole company yeah where he was initially just like taking their discarded trash and the book is called the fish that ate the whale because he was the fish and he eventually ate the whale but it gets even crazier so samuel mary he has a lot of admirable qualities you know he's just like hardworking working immigrant he's pretty quiet and he's like a stoic guy but he's kind of a warlord because because at one point nic like they have like some type of meltdown and a new president or dictator comes in charge and they won't sell them bananas and so he funds a coup so he basically gets like a small unit of like ten or twenty people to like help this other guy assassinate the current leader and take over and that leader was like alright thanks for getting our back now you could have some more bananas and and so that's kind like the story of sam samuel z it it's pretty badass got that killer instinct let's go yeah that's this is is pretty wild right like imagine a story like that today is there such a thing i can't think of i mean what elon does in rockets is like pretty like you you're you're kinda like dominating another planet like potentially i mean that's like a crazy of like the republican party this year does that like going to the point of like actual like funding a malicious think i guess like donald trump is doing this like where he's like for shits and giggles i'm gonna like play a joke and run for president and just kinda starts to work but yeah i mean it's a pretty crazy story yeah so it it's been great so i did something this weekend and i thought about you and i've been holding this in me like waiting to like talk to you about this but like a like a man in atlanta or or november cold it in yeah oh man yeah if you know you know so i saw a broadway play for the first time ever this weekend phenomenal wow phenomenal it's called oh mary it's basically about mary todd who is lincoln's wife and it's just like a comedy it's it was fantastic never been to a never really been to a play honestly my whole life because you judged it or just happened did not go when it was the deal yeah i don't know like you know it just went on the list of things to do it just didn't it just didn't it didn't make its way into my life and i finally went the first thing is i thought of you because you had made an off handed comment a while ago that you cared about like running writing a show yeah i just thought it would be cool i and saw one and i was like oh that would be kind of a fun fun thing to work so you had the same thing i did which is like it was like a new art form that you hadn't previously experienced and then you go to it and you're like i understand the appeal now that was that right yeah yeah i'd had gone to a bunch when i was a kid and so i think i liked it from that like i was at theater kid when i grew up so i liked it now how is it related to this podcast well for one if you google o mary revenue you can see there's a website called broadway world dot com where they estimate the the revenue of each show i guess they look at like if they're selling out and the average ticket price online and this thing oh mary i think it's been live for june of twenty four it came out and it's been making a million dollars a week so it's doing quite well and it started off with about four million dollars in funding to to get going and it all reminded me of this podcast that we did about two and a half years ago you you didn't make it but we had this guy named michael harris did you ever look into who michael harris was he's what what was death which which record label was he the the guy sounds yeah so the short of it is some people call har because name's michael michael harris like har like harry og g gangster so harry was famous because in his early twenties he was basically a drug king pin and he made a lot of money selling cocaine and at one point in the podcast with him i said yeah you and i was trying to be nice i was like you know i instead of saying you are drug dealer i said i read an article saying that the article said that you were selling like one yeah the the article said you were selling one million dollars a day in cocaine and he goes i think that article said two million dollars a day he's like i told that journalist it was two i was like yes sir and eventually at the age of like thirty two i think he gets sentenced to life in prison one for attempted murder one four can drug conspiracy which basically is he's like the rico king pin law and he had a life sentence and recently i think like ten years ago trump commute his sentence and that's how he got out of prison and when he was thirty two years old he founded death row records with doctor dr and shu knight while he was serving a life sentence in san quentin and that's like how death row got started and one of the reasons why his called death row is because he was wait they c founded it with him while he was in prison and what did they would they want from way what was he able to offer them while he was prison for life money money so his wife actually his his wife was on the outside okay and she somehow had funds to fund death road records you know right now how this really to broadway well on the podcast that i did with him he said something that i didn't pounce on because i wasn't i didn't know anything about it but he made this comment to me where when he was twenty nine i think he was the first ever black producer of a broadway musical or a broadway show and he kinda told the story but basically somehow he got in c you know he was he was considered like well known for being like a drug guy and hope you said c damn yeah ryan i said oak okay i gotta even the podcast what which button ends this podcast i was like holy moly harry y you dog holy moly harry so somehow he got the loop at this but he funded den washington an early den washington his first ever play damn michael harris is har was the fun he was the investor that funded the show with a million dollars i think this was a ninety three or ninety two when den he was just getting going and he starts telling the story and while while i was at this play i was like holy crap this guy got his way into being the first ever producer of broadway like while i was there i was like oh my god i one like he was so much cooler that i even realized i i invested in den z before he became den z that's like you know you jason cali ann is like i was saying he's the fourth investor at uber i would never shut up about it goo google michael harris den washington you'll see a photo of them together and michael harris looks like a like a well to do guy he's wearing a suit turns out he was only i think twenty nine or twenty eight in these photos and he he was a drug king pin kind of amazing right yeah that's that's incredible when you're just twenty twenty for something a twenty six like i think is was pretty young yeah very young and like allegedly leap had made something like a hundred million dollar selling drugs pretty crazy and when i was like sitting there in this play i was like obviously what what do you and i do when we do everything we yeah go to the play and you type it like oh mary revenue on google and i started seeing a numbers and i'm like like the plays going on in front of you you're turned around counting how many seats are in the upper bleach yours and they're like are were are you watching the show what are you doing here and this is how i remembered michael harris saying that where it all like click together i was like oh my god do you know how much revenue these shows generate i'm looking at it's a it's a astounding it's a astounding the number one this is i'm just gonna give you the top top five top five highest grossing broadway musicals of all time you have number one lion king grossed over two billion and just just the ticket sales wicked one point seven billion phantom of the upper one point three hamilton which is newer already crossed a billion and insane right and of course are guys from south park are they number one they're number five book of mormon number five eight hundred and fifty million dollars on their side angle that could be oh dude they're just it we just need to be talented and hardworking working that are we're missing they are so talented when i was at the show i was like the this it's just they're u with talent one of the guys a blinked the character was played by what's the guy from silicon valley k is is that his saying oh he's in the play yeah he's in the play and it's like it was like famous actors and actors actresses were like in the place he's like a jacked indian abe lincoln like what do you what do mean he played a lincoln it sounds crazy and honestly it is crazy the guy who played mary todd was a was a guy so like it's all types of crazy yeah there's a it's a it's a whole thing but i just had to like nerd out with you about this so i looked into this pretty hardcore course so it's definitely a like outlier hits business just like no angel dustin yeah it's angel vest because and then i was looking at the venues i was like should i own the best venue in san francisco like can i go buy the san francisco like you know i forgot what it's called like the the the theater the upper house whatever there's like a bunch of there's like three or four different theaters for this and i was looking at them because the theaters make money either way because the shows have to pay rent they gotta be like hey we wanna do sixty days on stage they're like great take your money right whether that show becomes a hit or not they paid the money up upfront so i thought that was kind of interesting then i was looking at the shows i was at how much it cost to produce the shows because i just seen the one about le brothers which i recommend by the way it's like a it's too long first of all way too long i the one that i went to we only went to it because it was ninety minutes i can't sit there for more than ninety minutes yeah less is more guys less is more here in the theater but it was great and it was bit of it was business entertainment which is what i considered to be my genre and i was like damn if they could take i wasn't even interested in learning about the le brothers if they took an uni interesting subject to me but they made it great and i remember the story because of it this is cool this is a really cool format and so yeah i've definitely definitely interested in if somebody actually knows how to do these things i would love to to talk to you email me maybe we could make some make something we were a story in mind but we had tim ferris on the pod and like the top comment on youtube was like rich guys finally discover board games and like like this all i'll be like the rich guys i was like yeah hell yeah hey not no this one's gonna be like the bros discover plays i'm like like sam they were singing in the middle of you're talking one second that they're singing that's incredible it's all part of the story listen up the old playbook is slowing you down ai broke the funnel loop marketing fixes it it's a new era for marketers ai is capturing search traffic channels are fragmented and generating leads feels less predictable than ever before hubspot loop marketing playbook will guide you through this unprecedented disruption it's the system your marketing teams should use to move faster connect deeper and grow smarter the modern growth playbook for the ai era built by hubspot design for today's marketer get the loop marketing playbook at hubspot dot com slash loop dash marketing to find out more and leave your competition behind alright back to the pod alright i got one more cool business story for you so i'm watching a lot of sports lately i know it's like like everything's kicking out like football season just kicked off tennis was awesome by the way did you see the i've you been following you file a tennis you using a little bit like i went last year and like i kinda watched a little bit on tv the the russian gal she's she's an athlete bad she's a freak what's it name abi i think she looks like a terminator so i follow i've i i've gone in and out of tennis right there's many years why i won't even pay attention and there's like oh my god the doll he's amazing and i'm watching these guys and the a great tennis match is up there it's like very thrilling to watch a great tennis match it's like a great you have c fight like there's some sports where you know the the median game is like really good i'll put like you know nfl in that category but then there's some sports where just the peak is just like peak drama right yeah boxing and u are like that we're like the average thing's not that good but the peak the biggest personalities when it's all on the line and it's just two guys going in there and they're trying to take each other's head off like hard for a basketball game to match that okay so tennis tennis is kind of up there in that sense so there's the new the new wave of tennis players so this sky alvarez and this sky center happened the men's final happen it's it just happened yet and so so i really wanted send her to win because i just like went down the rabbit hole of this guy's youtube highlights and he's unreal and and the other guy is also real unreal but he's he's unreal when it's in the sense of like do you know a guy who just like does all the right things it's like he eats right he works outright like he just does it he just like prepares really hard he's very talented he's maximizing his potential he's not like there's not a lot of like flaws to like attach with there you there's not a lot of like it's like oh see you work hard and do all the right things great yeah that's fantastic in fact they showed the warm up right before because i think trump showed up at the us open so it was delayed like half an hour or an hour or something like that and so the guys were just in their locker room like supposed to be warming up and alvarez is like you know doing a side plank in mid air with his trainer and like activating his core to get ready and the other guy was playing dodge ball with his trainer and like running around the gym like just throwing balls at each other pigs yeah so i like i was like i kinda like this up guy anyways they go out there center loses and he just keeps losing to a he's he's he's ranked number one because he beats everybody else but a has beat him i don't know four out of the five last times that they've faced each other and he's like and so he had this great quote that i thought like forget tennis this is just like a great like mindset quote so they were talking about like you know hey you know it must be tough you're at the top and then you you're ranked number one but the guy seems to you know you've had some tough matches this guys got your number a little bit and here's what he said he goes i was very predictable on the court today he changed up his game and the style of how he plays and now it's on me if i wanna make changes or not i'm definitely gonna work on this you know for example i didn't use a lot of drop shots i didn't do one serve in volley you know you arrive at a point where you're gonna play this guy i gotta go out of my comfort zone so here's what i'm gonna do i need to start playing more unpredictable i might even lose some matches but i'm gonna have to do it i'm have to make some changes i'm gonna have to try to become more unpredictable as a player that's what i have to do to become better at tennis and at the end of the of the day that's my main goal and i really just love this mindset from the number one ranked guy who's beating everybody else and he's like you know what i'm here but the top of the mountain is still a little higher but this path i'm on doesn't get me to the summit i gotta go back down for a bit and i gotta find a new trail and that is so hard to do in life it is so hard to go back of these things where like bottom and really yourself he's like i'm gonna i'm gonna learn how to play tennis but i'm really learning how to play the game of life it's like one of those type of moment totally totally like and and to be like i'm gonna lose i'm gonna probably lose some more matches because i'm gonna have to learn this i'm gonna have to experiment with this new style and that's gonna suck but i'm gonna do it and like i whatever you're doing in life that analogy probably holds for you right now whether it's you as a parent it's you on the book that you're writing it's you at your job it's you in your business like whatever it is i guarantee you there's an element of like if i wanna get to the next level what i've been doing doesn't it probably get me there and i need to like be willing when the time comes when when i recognize the moment i need to be willing to go back down the mountain for a little bit and then come back up a new way i have you ever heard of this guy named me if you googled him it's a hard name name so no yeah that's a that's a hard last name to google but if you google marathon ne e b you might recognize his face marathon me e b you see me i don't recognize this guy he's fifty yeah so i think in two thousand and four he was the gold medal and the olympics in the marathon for america but he's an immigrant and so when he won it was sort of one of these things where everyone got behind him because he's a nice guy and it was like the american dream type of energy and i think it got to the point where he like spoke obama's a much of obama events and and and whatever he's he's a big deal he's he's great his brother listens to m his brother howie and he reached out to me when he heard that i like running and i've been friendly with him for a couple years now and this past weekend was this thing in new york called the fifth avenue mile and so they get all these guys these olympia mile and they get them to run one mile down fifth avenue which is basically a huge treat and it's slightly shut down or they're they shut it down no no no they shut it down it's a big event it's like a huge event and there's tens of thousands of people there and so i went with howie and i got to like be like his like side kick so in howie who he runs a management company who he originally howie was managing his brother med now he manages other runners because med was like can you do can you help me make more money and was like yeah fine i'll it and then eventually now he manages just i don't know forty runners or something and a lot of his athletes were running at this race and so i got to be as like assistant basically he like took me and like i got to meet all these cool people whatever and these guys are flying by the way i think the guy who won ran three minutes and forty six seconds for the mile which is which is crazy and the guy who won what's your mile time dude back in high school a minute slower four minutes and forty seven seconds okay ted bundy now what's your mile now not wasn't files i'm that was not my question seven minutes not i mean seven minutes it's like very like recreational like average so wait did you run it or you just hung out with how we for the hell no i didn't run it i was watching of his watch i was just sitting on the sidelines watching and we got to watch these guys run and they look like gaze they look like animals it was like crazy and i was asking them i was like what separates so like because when i was watching the race the winner and the guy who got third they're really close like it it doesn't seem very far when you see them but like it's like a second is only it's not that much but it is a lot when you're running and i was like what separates the goose the guy who won what separates him for from the guy who got laughs because they kinda looked the same they're tall and they're skinny and they look like freaks like what's going on and he was like it's mindset he's like once you get to this level and you're already a nine out of ten what separates the guys that get first versus last and these big races is when they step on the lines they're killers he he wants to kill you and he acts like a nice guy but the when they when they step there they think i am here to win i'm built to win i'm am not trying to finish second i'm trying to be the best and i'm trying to win no matter what and i was like well your brother was like a happy go lucky guy like he looks like really kind and he was like yeah he is but he would sit down for hours and envision winning the new york marathon and then when he got to the starting line you couldn't talk to him he was an animal he was out to win and i thought that was really fascinating and i'm always finding it fascinating particularly in sports particularly in these individual sports tennis swimming track and field cycling i think we had lance on and like we talked to him a little bit about this what separates these the freaks of the freaks what makes you a freak among freaks and it appears as though it is not physical it is absolutely mental running my company hampton it gives me the chance to meet with hundreds of different businesses and i'm always surprised by how many of them still use spreadsheets emails and clunky tools that do not talk to each other it's like watching someone build a house with duct tape so here's my take custom software that actually fits your needs isn't just convenient it's a competitive advantage should transform the way you do business and that's why you need to know about a no code platform called bubble with bubble you can build powerful web and mobile apps by literally dragging and dropping different elements out of the screen no coding required by the way i use bubble on a ton of different apps including hampton and if you want help building something complex on bubble you have to bring in zero code they're the top bubble agency out there and literally the biggest plug creator for the platform they can build anything custom portals saas products and they do about ten times faster and cheaper than traditional development zero code is also all about ai business automation transforming manual and slow processes into efficient automated ones so stop cobb together different tools and solutions and head to zero code dot com that's zero code as in the word zero and then code q o d e again code is with a q and tell them that sam sent have you heard this phrase you probably heard it because you're like into running but i i don't don't run i don't do it it's not a it's like motorcycles i just don't get on that so one of the guys who was filming for us he was talking about this he wants to film this documentary about this woman and she's like this amazing long distance runner i i don't know her name you probably do but the point is she if he's was talking about this phrase called the pain cave yeah we go to the pain cave you go to the pain cave yeah and i was like not into running but i'll just take that phrase out that was a cool he's like he's like so the pain cave describes like when you're in these like ultra long races hundred mile race or whatever and it's like mile sixty or seventy you hit this just like extreme level of like physical mental spiritual exhaustion and pain and you go to the pain cave and i'm like what do you mean what what does that mean you go to the pain cave he's like you go to the pain cave mentally okay and you basically i mean you can you probably describe a better than but my understanding was you accept that there's gonna be this stretch where you're gonna be this between pain you go to the pain cave you know you're there you become comfortable you become not comfortable but enough you you you become acclimated to the pain cave and you're able to stay there where others wanna quit other and you even wanna quit others would quit and then you push through and you end up getting you know to the to the second to the you get your second way to get out of there and you could get to the end did i did i butcher the pain cave or did i just remember right no no and a lot of you invisible i've been on vacation a couple times no i i was training for ultra before and it was miserable and i hated it and i remember going out for a three hour run and it just is it's it's horrible it it's not a fun experience and like you get to a certain point and what's it's crazy to do a sport or inactivity where even if you are winning you go through hell so we had brennan shaw on the on the pod who is a former fighter and he said that one time he was fighting on a on a car and the guy who was fighting above him cro cup who was the main guy afterwards brennan solved cro cup like on a stretcher and crow cup had just won the championship but cro cup still had gotten hurt and he was sitting on a stretcher of holding ice on his head or something like that and he looked horrible like he just got beat up really badly even him though he won and cro cup was like give him my thumbs up and brendan was like these animals think that this is winning and that's why i'm not going to be the best it's because even when you win you are beat down and broken and they still are giving you a thumbs up of like yes we did it and that's what separates the winners from the losers as the guys who like are willing to go through the pain cave because in a lot of sports i think it's so fascinating and i honestly i think this way about business or anything in really in life that when you win and you get everything you wanted you still have to go through hell and that's kinda of fascinating and interesting to me is like the the the mindset of of of these winners who can just eat so much shit and honestly business is the same way it's not as physical but it's still emotional where even if you think that you're on top of the world or things are going well i don't know if you've experienced this we're but where everyone on the outside thinks like oh you're the man you must be killing it i'm like dude it's really really hard and it feels like it's gonna fall apart all the time yeah i find that these phrases like pain or whatever there's some there's a lot of power in just having like a label to put on the thing so that when you're feeling it you don't feel like this is this is bad thing that you don't panic and you don't feel like it's forever you realize it's like a temporary phenomenon and so i i know that one of the things that people brought up to me is that this analogy that's been very useful and it's like if you're gonna be an entrepreneur you know intellectually there's gonna be these ups and downs if i told you that nobody would be surprised at that idea yet when it's happening you're like well you got that feeling in your stomach when you're going up and down a roller coaster and it does not feel good and you want it to stop and you don't like it and you think this is bad and then you're like but the thing we talked to on the podcast is like you got in line for the roller coaster like what what did you think was gonna happen you stood in line you waited you chose this first you knew this is the nature of roller coasters and that there are no they there are ups without downs those downs ups like you this is has to be it's a necessary condition of doing this activity so don't complain and don't be surprised and don't feel like whoa is me and don't victim yourself and don't think this is forever because it's not and so like that's been a very hopeful metaphor for people is just remembering like you got in line for roller coaster maybe like you there was gonna be ups and downs don't be surprised when they come and then a tactical thing that's helped me is i have the slack channel i've told people about it's called highs and lows and anytime there's an extreme high extreme low i go immediately that i put it in that channel it i put my exec team in there as well and well the beautiful thing about it is when you go in there you see something from like four to six months ago that was like an extreme low in the moment or an extreme high in the moment and now it has like no effect like obviously if it was a low like obviously we survived it was fine and maybe even if it was a high it was like it doesn't have that same pull and so it keeps you from in this moment going too high too low because you could just scroll back and see all the other moments that in the heat of the moment you thought were such a you know such an extreme and now are like whatever you know just random random things in the past how from you adding stuff to that alright so last one was four months ago and it was oh cool trump just tariff all of our goods a hundred and fifty percent so like imagine a thing used to cost us ten dollars now we pay the ten dollars but then we pay an extra fifteen dollars is that same item cost us twenty five dollars that's the full sales price of some items you know what i mean like oh cool we'd make no money now oh got it cool business picked the money thing out of our control like got it the and then there was another one and then there's a high two months before that when you know this celebrity with six million followers is posting about our brand and it's like oh that's awesome but like now that i look at it i'm like who cares i don't care nothing out like nothing my life didn't change for either one of those two things my life didn't change we got through the we got through the low and i already forgot about the high you know another one rihanna manager emailed us asking for product like you know they rihanna wants our shit that's cool that's exciting wait wait hold on what brianna ask for free stuff yeah yeah they always hey really yeah wish people don't pay for things that's insane to me you ever people to buy things they've request things are you gladly give it to them have you deemed it i i think i've i've done it maybe twice have you damned people asking for free stuff asking for free stuff no i've never dm have anyone i think i've been like y this is a great if anybody wants to send me one i'm happy to take it like that's the i think that's the lowest i've s i don't think i maybe i have i don't i can't remember ever dm asking for free stuff in fact like we usually we go the other way which is like if it's like a friend's product or somebody we knew always buy we wanna be there like first customer and we wanna like purchase it to like show because you know like you feels good and right seems like the right thing to do another one christmas eve on christmas eve this last year the mexican president blocked all imports so like hey that's cool our warehouses in mexico and on christmas eve all boards are blocked with no notice and no there's no other thing you could do dude i think you cool the shit at the port do you have a coup staging team and this is just in one business this is just in the e com business this is not even like i five other businesses so imagine like if this is probably there's a higher or low every two months three months maybe but now you multiply by six businesses that means every single month you're getting hit with a high and a low in one of the businesses i think it was cool you so you said something actually that was quite good which is it feels nice to label certain emotions because it makes it feel better i went through a period it's sort of what's that that we always referenced that me where like mid midway yeah this is like the opposite of that which is like when i was really young and not very successful i consumed tons of motivational stuff and then i started like doing some stuff and i'm like oh that's for wee things yeah yeah now i'm like no i actually do like reading about like other success stories and love me a good quote nowadays yeah like i i actually do love that stuff because it feels nice to like label something it's sort of like when you read a book and you're like well that was of the best books they you people said the same thing about it to ago everything they said was obvious but i felt nice for them to say it out loud for me to read it and to be told what to do and remind me of the right things to do and that has helped me all the time i that's like i pretty much read like lots of like or it's actually my youtube page is like only motivational shit here's the trick so i've rebranded it just liking motivation that's a pretty low class thing to do okay oh that's it that's you know very low status low fashion oh oh i need motivation i'm so so weak i need this is like i need a blood transfusion it's basically what you're saying you don't need motivation you don't like my motivation like wisdom no oh my god high class to like alright there i helped you out i listen to tons of wisdom i it gets be fired up yeah yeah my favorite wisdom speaker yeah there's this youtube channel called motivation for you best the best wisdom yeah exactly i'll give you another little label i was reading this book another high class in do i found this like old book out of print had to like call a guy to get this book and it's like it's amazing it is such a such a thin book and it's it's really amazing i'm not even tell anybody but it's my secret gem and so in it though he talks about so it's a book about how to have better ideas so he's like this this is great advertising exec who's basically like he's like you know and if somebody asked me this and i laughed when they asked me the question and then i realized i didn't have a good answer for it he's like and then i started thinking about it i couldn't get this question out of my head and he's like i have now come to the realization that producing great ideas can be as reliable of a process as ford producing model t's on the assembly line mh and here's how the assembly line works produced great ideas is and one of the things he says in the book he goes this just a great quote he goes the brain much like the body has a second wind and because he's talking about like there's gonna be this point like pain caves there's a point in the process where you kind of fatigue out he's like just i need you to hang in there for like give it there's gonna be another do you have a little like ten fifteen percent left you're just gonna give yourself a chance for the brain to have a second win much like the body and literally like the for the last two weeks as i've been working i hit this point where i'm like ready to like stop the thing go be distracted i'll go i wanna open up twitter or i wanna go like go go eat some food or do something and it just the brain the brain has a second one let me just give it a second here and then i pushed through for like another fifteen minutes and it's actually like been like very very productive this little was one little simple idea can i make a guess as to who wrote that and ignore this because it's way too much it was by a copywriter if i had a guess is that right who's by an ad man here okay copyright it's crazy copy like there's this weird underground world i don't i don't know if you ever have noticed this there's copywriter out there where they sort of have a weird mystical like wizard tree about them and they end up learning about copywriting but in order to be a great copywriter you have to understand how humans think and then if you can if you could be a master copywriter you're basically a master at learning about what motivates human beings and thus you can teach all about life but i've come across all these guys that are like old school internet marketers but also people who are around even before the internet and they often have these weird aura around them that if you find a bunch of their old landing pages they explain some of the things that you're talking about and you get on their web pages and you're like i have to give you my money and they're not even a buy now button i have to track you down but i've come across a bunch of these guys one of them is bill bon at the guy who started ago go so go publishing is like the billion dollar a year who's he's newsletter business that is quite shady but another one is mark ford do you know who mark ford is no who's that so he has this book called ready fire aim on business and he's pretty under the radar guy i think he's probably in his seventies at this point but he helped make go really popular there's edmund pagan do you know who ed pagan is yeah w you're dating w from evan pagan was a guy who was one of the first internet marketers because he got going in the nineties when the internet was just getting going any other an ebook called w dating and he wrote it under a pseudo called david dean and ebb pagan is another guy where if you google eb pagan and come across his courses or books on copywriting you get entrance and it sort of becomes like a moment where you're like i used to think this way then i read this now my life has just changed and been pagan it those weren't one of those guys a lot of old russell b and stuff is like this but there's a copywriting world that like you come across these old guys or they're not old russell b is not old these guys are aged no yeah i mean like underground i don't know how to explain it no it's like almost like they ruled the world but they're not it it today they're less relevant and on the forefront and up in in the center of attention as they were fifteen years ago thirty years ago or forty years ago there's a bunch of people like that yeah and what happens and and a lot of people don't realize it is you can just copy exactly what they do and it still works and you don't do invent anything so i'll give you an example there's this guy named dan kennedy we talked about alex for mo and a lot of people say this to alex as if it's an insult i don't think it's insult at all but they'll say you just ripped off dan kennedy and so i started reading a bunch of it's not an insult at all it's totally okay it's to steal from the the greats but if you read a lot of dan kennedy stuff first of off if you googled dan kennedy you're gonna see what it looks like and you're probably yeah you you'd probably dismiss them somebody be like oh what does this person know up business because he literally looks like a cowboy but you read their books and their advice is beautiful so long as you come with an open mind and it's incredibly effective you're but it's sort of like we talked about books that where you say phrases like oh it's banned in prison because it's too powerful yeah they all have catch phrases like that i love copyright i think there's certain professions where it's almost like darwin right so like the only way to survive as a copywriter let's say that was your google and a copywriter then we'll kind of extend that like an ad man right like the og vs of the world and the only way to survive is to have these breakthrough ideas and be super persuasive with the written word so it's like a an animal that was those was on an island and the animal had to develop this shell if it needed if it was gonna survive that was the only way to survive in that climate and so if you wanna get great persuasion you wanna get great great at the written word you could learn from a bunch of people you can learn from any elon musk or steve jobs but those guys in order to do what they did they grew up you know they they had to have a other disciplines that they were great at and they could be good or maybe even really good at copywriting but there's people who that was the only way that they could make it and so those people have like sharpen that and you see this with a bunch of different things so you see this with a lot of investors when we have on the podcast we're like wow like i wanted to ask you about like stocks and like you know analysis but ninety five percent of things you thought you think about and talk about is like mastering your own like your own psychology and disc yourself and like learning like impulse control and learning how to like be a little you know to to think for yourself and be comfortable in your own skin and it's like yeah that's actually what that's the thing it was required in order to be great in the investment world combination of like independent thinking and then like self control and playing the long game and patience right and then you talk to people who are you know maybe comedian and comedian are like wow you're actually like kind of a truth teller it's like well yeah like that's kind of what comedy is it's like basically like seeing things for what it is that nobody's saying out loud and then we say it out loud and then everybody laughs because everybody knew it and so you you realize like all these comedian are actually like pretty wise and pretty like spot on and spotting like the truth the underlying truth and society like yeah because if they don't do that they don't make anyone laugh and they get boot off the stage and it's horrible and so the ones you survive are the ones you figure out how to do that one thing at a world class level and so you could study different disciplines where like does darwin you know pressure had the natural selection forced them to become like a plus plus at a certain thing who who who do you think falls in that category where you learn about them and and they've done the same thing to you where you went to them for like let's say writing and they changed your life seinfeld seinfeld is the easiest example so i i wanted this year i was like oh like could you like make yourself funnier i just sort of us assumed that like you know growing up like you either are funny or you're not and in my house like my sister is really funny and so it was always like she's the funny one and she's the great storyteller taylor and i was like the nice kid and so i always had this probably like from a young age desire to be more like her and like today so funny people would be like from the podcast and like oh yeah you're a great story storyteller i'm like yeah haven't seen my sister my sister's is amazing at this i'm just okay but over time as i've grown up i've realized like a lot of these things that seem like you either have it or you don't creativity humor storytelling like no these are just skills you can develop like even if you just try you can get way better at it and so humor was one this this year i went into and i was like alright let me just take two weeks and be like let me just learn what there is to learn let me just see if i make myself funnier so i went and studied seinfeld so i went for the jokes and then i came out and been like this man is wise and has some of like the best sort of like he has this incredible creative process like the way he works has changed the way i work like completely like night and day difference in what way so seinfeld does this thing in the morning you you you know about this but like maybe other people don't seinfeld for the last forty five years has a morning routine seinfeld morning routine is very simple he's like if you wanna be a comedian and you wanna write do you wanna you know tell great jokes you've got write jokes every day so he wakes up in the morning he sits down with a yellow legal pad a pen and a coffee and he has two hours where before it he's pre input pre everything nobody no meetings nobody can call him he doesn't read the newspaper he doesn't check social media does do anything else he's like i'm gonna do two hours of this and then i can do whatever i want for the rest of the day hey he sits down does this two hour morning blocks it's two hour morning routine he's done that every day for forty five years to the point where there's a photo where he took the pages from his yellow legal pads over the forty years and he laid it out on the street and anything think in new york no way you haven't seen this no i'm gonna get literally becomes the yellow brick road this is awesome are you kidding me this is so cool so he to promote his book he so he prob he published a book basically of like all of his like scrap jokes that he didn't put into a stand up it's called his is this any is this anything i think it's the name of the book but to promote it he did this yellow brick road of all his yellow pages and you know like for example you know how did i work before this right i'd wake up i checked slack i checked my email i'd then start to think about what i'm do but then i kinda hungry then i go do this then oh i had this meeting scheduled at nine so i'm gonna get to my main thing at eleven and just seinfeld like keeping it sacred of like yeah what's your main thing you spend two if you're gonna be creative you're gonna spend two hours the morning creating that's it tim urban from wait told me the same thing he goes if it goes all i have to do in life is wake up and spend the first two hours writing and if i do that life is amazing and if i don't do that my life sucks is again by the way it's only two hours it's not eight hours it's not ten hours i don't have to keep grinding all day two hours is more than enough if i actually do it so seinfeld does that and he talks about writer's block or they're like but jerry like what do you do on days or you don't know what to write he's like like do with writer's block he goes oh you know it's funny to you asked because there is a writer's block and they're like what do mean jerry like of course like we have all felt it there's writer's block he goes no there's lazy there's afraid there's having too high expectations but there's no writer's block let's be clear and he's like here's the security writer's block you're ready accept your own mediocrity don't sit down and think today i'm gonna make this great thing it's gonna be so amazing i'm the words are gonna flow i'm gonna make this funny joke because that's what stops you what you need to do is almost an anti affirmation can me to sit down and say today i'm gonna sit down it's gonna be hard to write the thing i'm gonna come up with is it's gonna pretty much suck i'm gonna look at it and i'm gonna hate it i'm gonna wanna crumble it up and throw it in the trash it's gonna be that bad but you know what i'm gonna put it down on paper anyways because every once in a while they'll be a little nugget of something good and then after i find a little nugget of something good i might be able to polish it with it ton of work later and make it great and he's like they're sort of like anti affirmation right so like i have taken that completely stolen that as my daily process from this guy i went to learn about like how to make people laugh and i'm like awesome i learned how to work how to live like you talked about she does trans meditation they're like oh is that that's really great you love meditation goes no i just wanna write great jokes he's like but you have to whip the mind you have to whip the body he's like why do i work out to be a better comedian why do i meditate to recharge my battery so i could be better comedian he's like all the stuff i do is to be a better comedian he's like he's like you'll learn pretty quick if you don't work out you're leaving you know some of you on the table from being able to do your best work if you don't do something like a meditation he something to recharge your mental battery you're going to do worse work like it's just as simple as that right he's got a ton of stuff on that i've been that's so great jerry i listen to i listened to a lot of his youtube videos his interviews because it's the same thing where i learn more about life than anything you know there's a famous one where he talks about like consultants like an in in comedian comedian and making joke yes what let's you say about that the joke is he's getting interviewed by i think like harvard business you and they go you and larry david famously wrote seinfeld together with no writers room just the two of you guys you wrote every single season every episode and burnout was one of the reasons you stopped the show in the end like you know was there he goes the harvard business review was was there a more sustainable way to do it could mckinsey have helped you find a better model and he goes who's did they really ask that yeah he goes who's mckinsey and they go it's a consulting thing he goes are they funny he goes they go no he goes then i don't need him if you're efficient if you're efficient you're doing it the wrong way the right way is the hard way the show is successful because i micro managed it every word every line every take every edit every casting that is my way of life do you have this up right now dude i have like a dossier of seinfeld like a total i studied this man like i went deep on this that's awesome have you ever seen live yeah i've seen sci honestly wasn't that funny but boss i gonna say the same thing i was just say let's late thing love guy don't love his comedy actually his his stand up is yeah his writing is the best but his stand up for some reason is just fine yeah it's just okay i've been it's it's part why i really love this guy right because he's been touring for fifty years as a comedian fifty years so this is a unbelievable like lebron james is jealous of jerry seinfeld longevity he's like fifty years unbelievable longevity as a touring comedian and he's also i i think was remarkable well he's one of the he's the first and only billionaire comedian mostly because of seinfeld the show but also like you comedian of cars doing coffee he sold for like a hundred million dollars like he can be really touring for a long time yeah netflix picked up for a hundred million dollars he's a super he's outlier but the great thing about seinfeld is if you see him he's not like naturally just oozing charisma and like talent like this some guy they could do amazing impressions you're like i could never do that right or there's other guys that are just like they've just a snack this gift for gap and you can just see it like the way they grew up like the these guy's just so funny and seinfeld is like a it looks like a hr manager right like it doesn't look like he's the most naturally talented guy and that's kinda why i love it like the guy's is the most successful comedian he's because he's just this craftsman he like yeah squeezed everything out of his natural talent and i think how often does that really happen like how often do people really maximize their potential very rare and i remember when i was starting the hustle scott be like i cold emailed him and he asked him to invest and he didn't wanna invest but then i just like added him to the hustle and i started writing like extra good emails and he eventually replied he's like this is so good kind like a very small sum but i just wanna let you know like the the this is like you're you're fantastic this is great and he let me hang out with him so for the anyone listening scott be at this point he's known as like a legendary investor but before he was this amazing investor he had started the pants with which he had sold for i think a hundred and seventy five million dollars now he he was nearly the ceo of adobe which is one of largest companies in the world i think now he works at age twenty four is that right like the big shot hollywood production company he's like chief strategy officer and something else and i didn't listen to his advice when i when i met with him and i always regretted that i didn't listen to his his advice and i do understand it until now he basically was saying the exact opposite of scale scale scale i was like i need to automate this i need to hire more people i need to get away from writing this email every day and making it great i need to add more revenue i to get more advertisers and he was basically like you need to go in a room and just not have anyone around and you just need to write this email every single day for about four or five years and be he used the i never heard anyone use the word steward he was like you need to be a steward of greatness and a steward of taste for your audience and i didn't understand what that entirely met but what i thought in my head i was but you're wanting me to act like i'm a small business owner you're wanting me to act like a craftsman i was like i'm not trying to be some garage band i'm trying to be lady gaga like i'm trying to sell out stadiums what are you talking about being a craftsman do you what to be like don't understand what you're saying why am i gonna say small i wanna sell out i don't wanna like that's the whole goal and it took me years to understand what he meant which was you can become this like huge successful person and also be a craftsman you know who honestly does a great job of this and it seems silly is dave port dave port has his hat and i don't even like the comedy anymore but he's had his hands in it and he's been consistent now for twenty five years and he's ridiculous he's a ridiculous person and he's sort of obnoxious but you know what he's done it he's done exactly what scott be has said which is you need to be in the thick of it and you need to be focused purely on creative and you need to be a steward for taste and i didn't understand what that meant until i was about thirty two years old i think he told me this when i was twenty six and and i and i was like scott how are you so successful you don't know anything about this you're telling me not to like focus on scaling and all this gaga scott gaga and but now that i know like some of these people who are actually making the most money are actually still craftsman and like and and so like i just distinctly remember i'm like i wanna sell stadiums i'm trying to sell up i'm not trying to be a small little like korean family owned bode day like i'm gonna take over the world baby you you said dave port there's another guy who's like that bill simmons and he's probably you he's probably the reason i'm doing a podcast today because i was back in college and i don't know what what that was two thousand and seven listening to his to the bs report you know i used to like falsely asleep listen to the bs report like was like that there's was that like and at at the time podcast were nothing and he he had been a blogger before that then he was a espn columnist then he did the podcast then he did thirty for thirty documentaries then he went and he gets fired from espn because he does the he does the ringer why do you get fired he was pretty outspoken against roger god the nfl commissioner he's like this guy's like kinda covering shit up and like not like he doesn't care gonna be contained feel there was like a violence thing there was like the concussion stuff and he was basically like he would make jokes but like the nfl espn biggest partner and so he was he got suspended a couple times and then they were just like this guy's too hard to work with and so they they killed his project grant land and they fired him and so he comes back after licking his wounds a little bit he come back with the ringer which is just the grant grant again and he'd been doing this now for like a long time but he ends up selling to spotify for two hundred million dollars and there's a great tweet that was going on the other day so the tweet was basically a video of simmons and he's walking through the office he's carrying like a chair like a school chair and he's carrying a chair at a microphone and he's like then they're like they're like bill what you it he's like a trade had just happened and then i nfl the parsons trade just happened and it's like kind of like a you know in the grand scheme of things not like a big story but like you know it was like the biggest story that week and the he his company has like fifteen other podcasts and so there's like this nfl podcast going on and he's like i gotta go talk about this so he's just carrying a chair through the hallway and there's a guy behind him like filming him i'm like bill what are you doing and he just barges in and like puts down his chair with his microphone phone and he wants to like talk about it with the guys and they're and somebody tweeted they're like honestly respect this guy's been doing this for like twenty years he's got he's worth like two hundred million dollars and yet on a like thursday he can't wait he's literally carrying his chair his microphone and wants to sit with his friends and do his do a podcast about this trade like that's kinda goals you know what i mean like that's actually like career goals and that really like i don't know that kinda looks stuck with me like i that is really what you want is like a job that's so fun and so like so you that it doesn't matter what's the money in the bank like you really just wanna do it you just want to do the thing to the point where you're just gonna carry your chair down the hallway and try to find a podcast to go do about it you know i i thought that was great where's he now so his grant still a thing grant died with espn he creates the ringer ringer soul or the ringer why and so it's part of spotify and he's been you know make a bank ever since why haven't we been able to get him on here you've talked about him like four or five times is like your number one he's like that girl at the dance i don't wanna to approach yeah i'm like hold on i just gotta like i'm a fix my shirt real quick i gotta take him my shirt i gotta go they i gotta go get some punch and thirsty yeah i gotta do do everything else except ask him yeah i mean he looks pretty awesome i i don't know really anything about them i would i would love to talk to this dude it seems great and you've talked about him them like specific yeah is he is he yeah i mean to go from a dude who couldn't even get hired by like a local paper basically so he starts blogging early on on the internet par is that blog into like getting his own section and being the highest paid sports writer at espn but the thing is it's not just that he was the highest he's it's not there that successful he did it his way like he created an entire style of writing on on like a a publication like espn he basically he wrote like a blogger on espn nobody did that he wasn't in impartial he was like no i love the red sox i love the patriots i'm from boston what are talking about i'm gonna write like a fan like i'm a right like a fan and sometimes be pissed at what my team is doing sometimes gonna be excited about it i'm gonna make a bunch of references to like mtv road rules the challenge like i'm gonna i'm gonna do what i'm interested in even though that makes none of it is like by the book and then he does podcasting early on then he does the documentary so he builds the most successful sports documentary series what thirty per thirty thirty for thirty he like it was his brain brainchild he conceived it he created it inside of espn like nobody believed in it basically and he you know you've kinda fought for it got it done it became super successful i is is is epic dude what he's he done and still on the podcast he you would never know so he'll never reference the fact that like he's basically richer than like a lot of the athletes he covers at this point a super well connected to him but he's tried to like never really he doesn't let that sort of creep his content also he didn't really rub it in the espn face which he very much could have because they literally kicked him to the curb and didn't believe in them and told him like grant land the ideas of failure like that that's a that's a money loser doesn't work and he replicated the same business and sold it for two hundred million dollars so you know like he he could have done a victory lap and never did like that's awesome i'm a i'm a bill simmons fan no there go should i interview him without you yeah i think you should have know so sean not your day but it's much yours yours inspiration that you would do anything for you but you're not well these guests for you fan girl that would be one where i'd be i'd be too much of a fan girl and it really would be counterproductive to the podcast that would be great i'd say get you rattled you're not normally someone gets rattled for alright that was a good episode i enjoyed that but that's that's a pod i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a travel never looking back alright let's take a quick break because as you know we are on the hubspot podcast network but we're not the only ones there's other podcast podcasts on this network too and maybe you like them maybe you should check them out one of them that i wanna draw your attention to is called nudge by phil ag and whether you're a marketer or a salesperson and you're looking for the small changes you could make the new habits you could do the the small decisions you could make that will make a big difference that's what that podcast is all about check it out it's called nudge and you can get it wherever you get your podcast

alright sam i got a billy of the week for you i'm excited about it i got goosebumps thinking about this guy he's an inventor he's an innovator you know steve jobs zealand elon musk thomas edison look if those guys were going on a road trip but there's only one set of keys they would toss it to this guy he would get to drive and his name is tom brian i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to put at all in and like a days off on a travel ever tom ryan is basically the leonardo vinci of calories okay this is a guy who has invented some of the most iconic foods in history he invented the riddle he invented stuffed crust cheese pizza he invented smash burger the chain he invented the beef dip sandwich at quiz he invented his guy has just been inventing things in the food category the mc flu he's just been inventing things for you know just decades and he is like the godfather of food science so i wanna tell you a little bit about this guy okay i'm i'm interested because i didn't think that some like a dipping a sandwich in os i didn't think that was like an invention and so okay so some of these things i'm using the word invention a little liberally right some of them he genuinely invented meaning like nobody had done that before some of it is he created that product at that company which had was not previously a product and so sometimes it might be like oh well you know somebody else said had the idea of you know a sweet sandwich okay cool he he invented the mc riddle it's a specific thing that he invented that made it work and here's why but but can could we start by me asking how do you even discover this where you like on the mc riddle wikipedia page just you know when you're eating something and it's so good you're like i'd like to pay homage who's the man who invented this i'd like to put some flowers on his tombstone that's exactly what happened i saw tiktok about this guy and i was like there's just no way one guy did all this okay alright so this guy basically he goes to college and when he's at college he has his girlfriend the girlfriend taking a food science class so she convince him to take it he goes there and immediately falls on love he's like oh my god i didn't even realize there's a whole science behind things like ketchup and ice cream like there's literally like chemistry science but then there's also sort of the brain science psychology the tongue science of like what flavors work so then he not only studies food science he then gets a masters in something called lipid toxicology right this guy is just studying like the science of fat and i would say this guy like you know i don't know what the what the equivalent of the nobel priest prizes is but for like obesity what this guy deserves so he he just so he goes and he gets a job at at duncan hines he then works at ji and he's like pioneering a lot of their peanut butter work that he that you know does some some really great peanut butter work the bus work yeah he's like you know these open ai researchers that are just getting poached from lab to lab that was him going from hines food lab to the ji food lab and then he gets a call from pizza hut and they recruit him as head of new products because he got his reputation because he even at jiffy he was launching new products and so he gets this reputation as being like this sort of mad genius and his friend tells him when he gets the job at pizza hut for head of new products he goes dude i'm so sorry because what he's like that's a tough position man everything's already been done in pizza like you're doomed you're doomed to male pizza is a solved problem and he there's a quote from he goes that pissed me off they he goes he goes it pissed me off that because they the guy was doubting me but because a lot of the world thinks like that they think the world is full of solved problems i don't think like that i think there's always an opportunity so he goes into the research and he's doing research and he's like alright what consumers care about when it comes to pizza and he's like alright two things are very clear to me after studying how people eat pizza number one cheese is the value driver the more cheese the better the cheese the better and there's really no limit to the amount of cheese that people are willing to have in their pizza and second the dog eat the crust he's like the crust is the necessary part because you need a handle to hold the pizza it's the worst part of the pizza that people just give to the dog and so he's like alright i need to put cheese in the crust and so you know he goes to his team and they're yeah just put some cheese on top of the crust it'll be great he's like nah doesn't have that wow factor he's like we gotta have a wow factor he's gotta feel different it can't just be that we've added cheese to crust it's gotta like be something that's marketable and so he's like let's figure out how to put cheese inside the crust which was a whole like physics problem because you know he's like the first one he made like that he's like it tastes pretty but it looked like a like a bike tire like i burnt the whole outer crust was like this fat you know like burnt thing and so you had to figure out how do you cook the pizza so that you can have gooey cheese in the crust without burning the crust and so he does some work and they figure it out they fit get a special dough and a special pan and they get it to work and it becomes a huge shape but then he's also a marketing genius and so he creates he's like you know what we don't need to do something new what we need to do is have you ever seen this malcolm glad talk that he gives his his big ted talk about the the perfect pasta have you seen this no that sounds great what is it so it it's malcolm glad famous ted talk from back of the day when he was you know malcolm glad was the man writing tipping point and mother's and he basically talks about this guy another food scientist who got hired by a pasta sauce company rag or whoever and they were like we need you to figure out how much like what's the perfect pasta sauce like should it have like chunks in it should it be just smooth should it have like herbs in it or just be plain should have cheese like what what's the perfect pasta sauce and the guy and then the the the big takeaway the spoiler of this ted talk is the guy discovers discovers there's no perfect pasta sauce there's only perfect pasta sauce is meaning you cluster people into like four or five categories if you like chunks then give them way more chunks than you're currently giving them like they want way more if you like spice make it way spicier it's too mild for them today and if you like cheese put it until you basically like the middle that they're trying to serve everybody wasn't working and they actually needed to like go extreme so this guy discovers the same thing in pizza he creates the meat lovers pizza he creates the pepperoni lovers pizza the cheese lovers pizza and he creates the lovers lime of pizzas there and that becomes a huge success so he's crushing it at pizza hut which but all this sounds like silly like i'm laughing this not silly this is great this is actually and this is really hard to do at a corporate setting to convince someone one true inventions true innovations on yeah like i'm laughing but because it's legit and this is moving billions of dollars of product right and this is like you know hitting millions of customers and this is also by the way we have friends that work at facebook and google and they're like yeah i'm optimizing the like the marketplace banner ads to be like you know whatever happens like you you know you were talking about this with that i you're like like like if the like my wife worked and the team of them trying to put stickers on photos and she's like well if the dog's tongue is out of the mouth the the click rate is five percent versus if it's in the mouth it's only one percent right and there's definitely like a cynical side of this which is like our world's greatest minds are basically just fine tuning knobs inside of giant slot machines which is really what's happening inside of most big tech companies and most big food companies but hey i'm not a hate but me just see some of positive things of this okay so he gets the call he's at pizza hut he's crushing he creates all the all those products ring ring hello yeah this is tom speaking and then on the other side he's ronald set you and ronald mcdonald calls he gets called up to the biggest of the big leagues he gets called by mcdonald's mcdonald's says we need you is he a kid right now or is he like grown ass man okay so and he has a great thing by the way one of his frameworks because they're like how do you invent because like odyssey is like one of the more creative inventors of our lifetime and they're like how do you invent anything goes i try to get inside the mind of an ambitious thirty two year old mh and why he's like basically when you're thirty two you have money you have taste so you kinda know what you like and you don't like but you're still open minded you're not closed off to the world and you're not like easily swayed by the latest and latest trend of everything so you're you but you're still like you're still with it and like you're still a part of every major trend that like has staying power and so he's like i studied the mind of the of an ambitious thirty two year okay and he works with that so he get some call from mcdonald's he goes there and they're like alright where's the opportunity and he's like alright let's look at breakfast and they start looking at breakfast and he's like alright you got coffee check and then you have all your like savory foods check he's like got nothing sweet and he starts thinking about it and he's like alright you know casual answer we need french toast we need pancakes and he's like this average first level thinking you get out of get out of the room and he's he says no what are we really gonna do and he goes so he he's a master of constraints so he says how do we take the denny's grand slam breakfast and put it in your hand and they're like what and he's like i want an entire grand slam breakfast but that will fit just fit in your hand because that's what mcdonald's up this guy sounds like a stalled character so he creates the gi which is exactly that it's a sweet breakfast item that fits in your hand pops off gi becomes a huge hit mcdonald's breakfast surges on the back of this it creates billions of dollars in market cap and all because and he had to do some invention he's like well we can't have this messy drip syrup up you know sticky sandwich like yeah i put a sticky thing in your hand then your your whole day's ruined you're not coming back the next day and i've never had a grid have you had one well hell yeah yeah of course there when you've never had a mcrib never had a you never had hard tied this is like the greatest like the greatest submarine one of those capes like james where have you the war was still going on sounds i know man this is the best they're the best honestly and never considered it but after this after this i'm i'm so in apparently there's so you tell me i don't know is it not like covered in syrup and actually there's something called syrup crystals that are inside the take little little balls of like sugary like syrup and it's wonderful and it mixes perfectly with the salty sausage okay so that's it that's what he did tom does it so he does that he creates and you don't get a mess in your hand so you get the syrup without a mess in your hand 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 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 now you might be thinking alright is this guy like you know what he really about is he just is he just in this for himself is he an elite is he one of these elites that i should hate or is he a man of the people well he's a man of the people he creates the dollar menu the dollar menu you did what what a iconic i what a iconic move is he an employee at mcdonald's right now or entrepreneur no i mean in the story in the story at this story of course that's he did he's a mercenary he's a hired gun and he drops in like he's like a one man navy seal who drops in and like nails the target and bounces after for a handful of years i don't know why there's no movie about this guy yet right like i don't wanna see jason i wanna see tom the only question that we have at this point is this does it come in via a parachute or just do they storm the beach on a boat like what's he gonna do yeah the story has been told like a hotdog boat truck barges in so he creates the dollar menu who creates some mc flurry and then he goes to quiz quiz poach him he does a little bit of work there but the owner of quiz was like yeah this is the guy so he says forget quiz let's just create a hold of concept together and they create smash burger together which don't know if you've paid attention but as as a former r operator myself i'm i'm a lot of respect a steam for smash burger smash burger it's just it's just thin it i mean it's a burger that you when you grill it you put the meet you you stick the thing in the metal in the me right you spell it's kinda like a thin crust pizza but for burgers so they kinda smash the burger which gives it like a more of a char on both sides which is better for them too because it's less meat well i i think it's the same it just gets wider got it okay but you but a tastes better yeah i think okay so they create creates fast burger become successful but what a prolific career for this guy and what what what a what a track record like who has dominated their industry the way this man has dominated fast food science right like fast food food science pretty bizarre when i googled his name it came up with job foods corporation is he associated with that yeah i don't know what that is he's got like new stuff that he's doing he did like a like a new like like sports bar type of deal he's got smash he was a ceo of smash for a while i i don't know what all he's doing now but they were like you wanna retire he's like retire i wake up every day i i wake up every day i'm trying to dominate the palette you think you think i wanna do play golf like what what do you think this is have you googled them he he's got he's a beautiful man he's just got the most beautiful head of hair i've seen in a long time he looks like you know like like had a british reporter like who's like covers like sports he looks like that guy in the nineties and every rom com the woman was vying for an editor and chief job at v or something like that that was like it was looks like well no the he he looks like the second character now the second character is a british yes or california record label executive so they work in ar or they're running the label and they miss the kids baseball game because they have to check out this band right and like he he looks like that character he looks like the record label executive from every nineties rom movie so is he like this alpha like get after a type of guy or is he like a cookie forgetful for professor who wears to not matching socks okay that i don't know but he's an alpha in my mind he's an alpha to me i'm gladly ab abandoned to him this guy is amazing did tell you by the way if we back in the day when i was doing my sushi restaurant chain we went to a you don't like these industry conferences that you like you just some like you know we went to farm con it's like a farmer's conference well i went to like a food version of this i don't know if you've ever been any of these quirky like industry trade show conferences but they're so funny to dude so i like i to inbound the inbound the hubspot inbound marketing conference up next week yeah you'd be like that which there's a whole talk on converting m to sql yeah it's like that so i went to this thing because there's a qs r magazine quick service restaurant so there's a pre message and we we apply we're like hey we really wanna go to the conference can you give us free tickets so they're like yeah so we go and you know what the ice breaker was we got there and the ice breaker with you come in in the lobby they have three table setup of just like dirty dishes like it's a a a restaurant table and it was a speed bus competition so you would go with three other people and you'd have to try to like bust the table as fast as you can of whoever had like that's pretty good the best bus was you know like succeeded basically like one one the contest got like a a key chain or something like that it it was amazing the guy who organized his name was literally tom hamburger it was unreal dude this is this is i've this we've done seven hundred and fifty plus i think episodes of m and this happens a lot where a lot of people don't realize this but for the majority of episodes you and i don't talk in advance because we like to like surprise each other on air on the topic this is funny what you're saying is very similar to the topic that i had brought what you got and so this can all actually be related and i have but i think could be like a nice little bullet at the end to like how this could be good for entrepreneurs or business owners listening i found a photo of a billboard that i saw recently that stopped me in my tracks and so i want you to look at this billboard and tell me what it says okay so this says boiled cod and it's a picture of cod slightly more protein per calorie than our bars david the david bar okay have you good have you seen this no amazing okay so i wanna tell you a story about this it's it and i wanna explain a little bit like nerdy marketing about why it works so the story behind this we had peter ra on the podcast i think like six months ago so peter was the guy who started rx bar in his mom's basement and he eventually sold it for something like six hundred fifty million dollars only six years after starting by the way the episode he did with us was awesome like i if you if you wanna if let's go and listen to a fun episode listen to that one it basically he tells a story of how he built rx bar how we building david bar but also he had like four or five other ideas of like if i was gonna go into a category this is the type of category i look at and how i would attack it which is like what you always want from a an entrepreneur who's got like expertise that comes on the pods like great tell me how you did it tell me what you're doing now but okay that's great for you what about for me and do you have specific ideas and like a specific approach you take that i can learn from for like white space right now and he actually have a a a third part of that which was he had a beautiful attitude and not beautiful in the sense of fun to be around like he was sort of like napoleon like he had this like conquered the world energy that i thought was like actually kind of cool very intense energy yeah that i thought was interesting and so when he came on he told us the story of rx he told us a story about david protein bars i don't think david had launched at that point but the background behind david is when he was and i i have to give a shout out to new york times daily i'm i'm using them as a source for this but when he started david the idea was with rx bar it was a natural bar it was made out i think dates and it had a very small amount of protein and he noticed that had i had more protein in this bar i think i would have been able to approach a larger market and i could create something a lot bigger and so david finds this thing called ep p g it's a delivery mechanism for protein and eventually david actually the company has bought the company that owns the patent for ep and ep g is a type of chemical that allows protein to be delivered to you faster so so let me explain let me just ask this question because it the doc here says it's a modified fat called ep g which delivers the texture of fat but it passes through your body with ninety two percent fewer your calories is this remember when palmer lucky came on and he was like diet coke is amazing and he's like i just wanted to make like diet coke for like any food into the equivalent of diet coke so it's she's like food that tastes really good but it basically just passes it straight through your body it can't be absorbed and therefore like doesn't make you fat is that what this is basically it's like something of it tastes good you could put it in a bar but because it can't be absorbed by your body it's you know it it doesn't have the sort of caloric impact is that what it is so basically it's the it's it's it's one of the most efficient ways to get tons and tons of protein into your body per calorie and the way they do that is be via ep g which is a incredibly ultra processed food so i don't know if it's what you're describing but the criticisms for david of which we had just mayors on the podcast he's one he was a very loud vocal critic of this he has basically said david may get you lots and lots of protein but it's incredibly ultra processed and there's the argument as to why that's not good because this this this chemical or wherever you wanna call it ep g there's a lot of people who who wanna criticize it and say it's bad and i'm not gonna place judgment me on either side i'm just telling you there's two sides of this argument which is what i'm gonna get to but people loved it and so david which i think is it even two years old yet i think it's one year old roughly because he was on about a year ago on the podcast and i think it was like just about to launch or had just launched so this year they're gonna do close to two hundred million dollars in sales in roughly the second year of business they're they're on they're on a tear they did a million dollars in the first week of sales and if you go to like any store right now i don't know what it's like in california but any store in new york they're everywhere david protein bars are everywhere and they've crushed it on the marketing in particular they've crushed it on the product side but they've really killed it on the marketing and so when i saw this sign boyle it stopped me in my tracks and the reason it stopped me my tracks is i'm reading this book i'm reread we had tim ferris on the podcast and he had mentioned this book that he loved is called the twenty two immutable laws of marketing yeah have you ever have you ever read of that i haven't i have it but haven't read it yet it was one of these things where like i skimmed before when i was younger but when we had him on i he made a comment that it was a great book and i was you know i should actually sit down and read that it's really short it's only a hundred pages you could basically read it in one or two settings and one of the laws is called the law of the opposite and the reason why this is relevant to the story that you just said is because it goes to like the science and the methodology behind in twenty two different ways to stand out and be different and you focus on something that's not better but different and so the law of the opposite states that if you're not the leader of a category your strategy is then dictated by the leader which means it's best to not to be better than the leader but to be the opposite customers already have the leader's position locked in their mind and you win by framing yourself as an alternative and the key is to embrace the differences and often extra exaggerate them and the reason this all works is marketing is a battle of perceptions not products the challenger doesn't need to disprove the leader they need to define themselves as the antidote meaning we are not them were the other choice right and so why is this so interesting because david took the criticisms of them being an ultra processed food and they ran towards the fire so much so that on their website i thought that this was a joke and so what they're doing is they are positioning themselves as an alternative to natural foods they're saying yeah natural frozen cod that's the best that's it's definitely the best but like it's disgusting who the hell wants to eat that eat this other thing that tastes good and it's like it's just a little bit less good in terms of protein per calorie but you're actually going to be able to consume it they're actually selling so that's not gonna say pod if you go to their website they sell it they're selling it and so this is a masterclass on how to handle this by the way on the site it's their cod their wild got cod and it's like twenty three grams of protein hundred calories of no sugar you can get it it's four filet flash frozen and add to cart and then there's all their bars like chocolate chip cookie dough peanut butter chunk all sold out said here it's all the sold out bars here's cod fully available and we got a lot of this stuff still stuck and there's a bunch of examples of the law of opposites do you remember i don't know if you remember this as a kid but you would see commercials for avi do you remember avi yeah the rental car yeah so basically avi was the number two in the market and hertz was the biggest company by far and avi had this amazing brand campaign where they said word number two so we try harder and that was their that was their campaign which is like we know number two we're gonna try harder that's another example of the law of opposite but david has executed this flawlessly and this like an amazing thing to lean into and this is like not something that like dude i'm just kicking myself because what he came on i literally fell in love with the guy i was like i love this guy's in intensity love this guy's honesty love approach it's clearly like an expert in this field in this industry and attacking this it was so obvious that the they had nailed the branding and packaging of the bar so i'm just mad that i didn't push to like try to invest in this thing and be like hey i just i'm so bullish on this and then it has played out exactly i i as that would have guessed i think you go i i think we said what's your goal he goes well i actually think we're gonna expand the tam and i think that there's gonna be a ten billion dollar company yeah that's crazy on i like their copy on other side we thank our predecessor in the protein industry we'll take it from here it's so good right they they they nail it on on branding they nailed a bunch of stuff and i saw when i saw this cod billboard i was like oh that's that's so good that's exactly what the book twenty two immutable laws of marketing that's exactly what they had mentioned with a law of opposites and they completely nailed it and if you are a small business owner very similar to what this guy tom ryan i would highly recommend reading this book and then downloading it and uploads a chat gb it's so cool and interesting to give you ideas on your product or and or your positioning and what what what he just was explaining about with the with the mc riddle and all that stuff it's all very very very similar to this which is it's not the goal is not to be better the goal is to be different because a meat lovers pizza that's not particularly better it's just that's remarkably different than anything else listen up the old playbook is slowing you down ai broke the funnel loop marketing fixes it it's a new era for marketers ai is capturing search traffic channels are fragmented and generating leads feels less predictable than ever before hubspot loop marketing playbook will guide you through this unprecedented disruption it's the system your marketing teams should use to move faster connect deeper and gross smarter the modern growth playbook for the ai era built by hubspot designed for today's marketer get the loop marketing playbook at hubspot dot com slash loop dash marketing to find out more and leave your competition behind alright back to the pod alright let's do another topic okay i have a little stock market thing can i do stock thing yeah any pretty stupid and dangerous because like most likely just gonna get be wrong gonna get ripped part here not entirely so last time we talked about this type of stuff you picked so we're we're all disclosure where it don't do anything we're saying the last time though you picked u and yeah so we did a episode called stock palo i don't about a year ago i don't know when that was and the idea was mean and say i go research and we just try to pick a stock so we try to make a call similar to the zone conference we you you just try to find a company that you would believe in as a as an performer and then we made our case and i picked tee pto which is the parent company of u and wwe and you picked what ferrari i think i believe we did that episode so february twelve twenty twenty four let's see what the stock price has performed since then okay so the stock at that time was trading at eighty five dollars and it's currently at a hundred and eighty five dollars okay right you know up what what is that over a hundred percent hundred and seventeen percent did you put any of your money into it of course not bro you think i'm here to bake buddy what's going on not because not for any particular reason i was just like lazy i didn't and i didn't pay attention so anyways that that pick has performed well i don't think for ferrari done i think far is down like five percent so i'm better than you so let me let me you just stay wife for a minute let me just do this segment here you could give a pick that's bad after this i was hanging up with somebody recently who's a guest he you know a guest on the podcast super successful like billionaire type of dude and asked him two questions one was what would you be doing right now what would bold be your ai play if you're just like young and broke but like wanted to do something with ai and he have a pretty interesting answer to that which is he's like i would go into he's like i go find a business owner who's built a successful book of business like let's say it's in insurance or home mortgages or you know some some some nice industries some juicy industry and like the owner kinda knows like oh ai probably could benefit like i i could probably benefit from ai in my company but who comes two sixty but i'm sixty i'm too old to like actually figure this stuff out and don't to he's like i would go to them i don't as many of those guys i can i try to build up a police instrument and be like hey i will do all of the work to use ai to cut our costs internally like i can automate a bunch of processes and jobs and whatnot like i can increase our accuracy and decrease our costs and if i do that like can i carve key basically when you carve me out ten percent of this business if i successfully do it i'll do it totally on contingency but like here's the deal and we can like measure the op x change that i'm gonna make in this business if you just give me free reign for you know twelve months please like it's the fastest way to kinda like own a piece he's like he's you know and then i would try to in that agreement maybe create an option to buy the majority of the business at a fair value if i can pull that off so he's like i thought i was saying this the first thing second thing he was talking about he goes he's like yeah he's like spacex he's like i just think it's unbelievable that people will and that there's any counter argument to spacex he's like spacex is the most def defensive company in the history of humanity like what's the second best spacex like is there anybody you you like there's there's so few companies that can even compete with spacex and think about how monumental difficult it would be to compete with spacex like yeah you gotta literally get into the rocket business and like not just the rocket business the reusable rocket business not only that but to do it and like be compete you know competing for these giant government contracts and you have to you know successfully demonstrate you know safe launches over a period of time he's like at this point spacex is so unbelievably def defensive he's like i think it's the safest place to put money and so i thought that was kind of interesting just like generational def def ability and really the question of like who is set up over the next twenty years who just has an incredibly competitive position for the next twenty years so i just took that frame and none none of these names are unpopular so i'm not giving you some like a obscure pick but i just like this is my honest take like i you know i'm basically trying to get into all of these companies because i think over a twenty year period i think all these companies have a very combination of they have a tailwind behind them so the wind is in their sales of they're in the right place at the right time like clearly the industry they're in and the tech wave that they're surfing is the big tech wave that we're gonna see play out over twenty years and two they don't have much competition which was my case for the for the the tk stock pick also because i was like there's no competition to u and there's no competition to wwe like the number two m mma you know promotions whether it's p nfl like bella like these were companies there's literally on the brink on the brink of bankruptcy and like they're they're like not just like in second place they're literally like one hundred or one thousand times smaller and behind and they and because of the network effect they have no chance to ever catch up u is a tens of billions of seller company and the second best one like they get in trouble for not being able to like make payroll literally it's like the rich guy's hobby you typically like close like the it's like it's like it's like lebron versus the freshman the freshman tea still even in the same category and so when you're in a category of one it's like that's a pretty big deal plus you have growth behind you but like the fact that there's just no competition same thing with wwe there's really no competition to w and of course since then they both signed major major like streaming deals way bigger than you know people thought they would sign like billion dollar a year plus streaming deals but what's this have to do with the first part of ai oh the ai part that was separate alright out so here's here's five other companies i think are extremely well positioned so the first is a company that i've been i i was wrong about i own the stock very early on and i got so mad during the games thing that i sold out of principal but i'm never gonna let those stupid principles in my way again are a bad way they're the the they give you bad directions like en route to making money yeah my my big moral stand didn't seem to hurt this company so robin and who was the company i owed the stock when he was like i don't know five dollars seven dollars whatever it was like really early on like right when and ipo basically and it was like actually after ipo to kinda dipped or something and when the games stop happened and they basically shut off the ability to buy but continue to let people sell games i was like that is the most corrupt thing i've ever seen same and i it pissed me off so much that i was like if these guys i don't trust these guys i'm out since then they've just basically proceeded to like build what's clearly like morgan stanley for the next generation so like the tailwind behind robinhood hood is the following there's some like absurd amount of wealth i don't know what it is like twenty trillion fifty trillion there's like some stupid number like with the trillion behind it of wealth that's just gonna get transferred from like the parent you know boomers to millennials or gen z over the next twenty thirty years and so the question is as that money gets handed down what will those people do with it and it's pretty clear that like if you're a dead z or your millennial the platforms you trust and gravitate towards the financial platforms you're already a user of when you have small check deposits is robinhood and that and then they're like great we have crypto we have four one k's have home mortgages and we got credit cards so like what else do you want wait they do they they do all those they have prediction markets which which is a code word for sports betting and gambling so you can gamble on there you can buy crypto on there you can buy stocks now there you can buy fractional stocks of private companies you could buy hey you could do all the margin training and options trading if you're you don't wanna get really degenerate you can do your free you could put it four you can open it before on k with them you can get a robinhood hood gold card and you can use that as your credit card and you get a home mortgage it's like an people amount of financial products that they've rolled out all in one app and it's basically this financial super app that gen z slash millennials are most comfortable with and as the wealth transfer happens they're gonna be the beneficiary of that so i think next twenty years they're extremely well positioned so austin raf the founder morning brew one of my closest buddies he has been texting me for the past six months maybe longer to be honest longer he's been texting me too about this in fact he's the only reason i bought it so i did buy it back again like maybe six months ago i had i was about to have a call with him and he had been talking about robert it but he's kicking himself because he doesn't own any but he's been it was like his call he was like it's gonna be great i'm just waiting for a dip the dip never came he he doesn't own any of it and it's basically ripped up like in a five x seven x since he's been like wanting to buy yeah he's been talking about a so before the call i bought a hundred thousand dollars robinhood stock just so i can get on the call as a robinhood shareholder ed be like oh thank you for the tip and since then it's up on thirty forty percent also it's a he's responsible for my robinhood conviction even though he doesn't own any of it now yeah and i think his reasoning i forget what it was exactly or he had more than one point but one of the points was like young people and he owns a company called or he did own morning brew which probably had two hundred employees which a lot of them were like twenty three year old like hundred thousand hundred fifty thousand dollar earning people and he was like my staff that's the the default they all have one hundred percent of their net worth in robinhood right and that is only going to continue to grow so they because they keep their money in there and it's just gonna keep on growing this is this company is unstoppable and he's been bragging about it or calling that for for maybe a year and a half and so he's absolutely nailed it i and i agree with you i did not buy into that argument at all i thought robin hood was silly i would i thought on principal i'm not on board with the what these guys did more of like a schwab type of guy i feel like you you want you know when it comes to money you want boring you want like a bow tie you want like you know got a man with a briefcase is what you well you know the i i i potentially have a lot of money and i didn't wanna to keep it in now like the they think that i'm keeping it an app was like kind of let's alone nerve wracking and like the interface is so cute that i thought it was like but they cared more about luxe i was like i the ugliest website that got the biggest vault you didn't wanna keep it in an app as if it's like a shoe box like where where do you think the money's kept in any of these like if it was a website that's better but what did you want i wanted to like forgot password button to be like hidden like i didn't want someone to like i don't know i just it was too friendly yeah if it's too user friendly to me that means it's easily hack yeah that was the issue that it was too good you know it's like you find good deals on craigslist because you're you're finding something like interesting that no one else uses robin had scared me honestly obviously i i actually get what you're talking about i i actually felt similar i was like i wanna keep huge amounts of money of this app but i did keep i i had some money i think i bought like crypto on it before and i like they for years they did this thing where instead of giving you like uber for your new ride if you referred someone to a new ride they give you ten dollars robinhood had this amazing thing where you could like do a scratch off if you could pick option one two or three which obviously it's not actually one two three is all the same and they would give you stock and so like i owned like dollars of stock yeah i owned like ten dollars a ford and that is now worth more because i did this like you know right when they launched and so i like robinhood though as a company i just googled that is it true did they do one point one billion dollars of profit on three billion in revenue yeah basically when interest rates went up all of the like financial service companies started printing money because now all the money that they hold they're able they're able to like and any money that they lend out at high rates but like the money they hold are earning like four or five percent on their float which is like pretty crazy so there they're you they're very interest rate dependent right now by the way the criticism for all of these is that these are is crazy the valuation is crazy look at the fundamentals oh you know tesla you know they need to sell this many crazy amount of cars in order to justify this or like even self driving and have to be like bigger than uber to to just be where it's valued at currently right so like your upside is priced in would be the counter argument and by way i have no argument against that i just think very simply this says i actually serve pretty well which is like i told you the story like in twenty ten i just kinda like oh like these internet companies seem to be like pretty dominant everybody uses it them every them let me get some of that that's the i like i don't really know how to do a discounted of cash flow you know i can't really tell you much about that about the pe ratios and like the any of that stuff but like i don't know interesting means that toothpaste is not going back in the bottle and so like similarly and it's like pretty obvious set with some of these is like yeah yeah like i like that partners that's the name of your let's save of your firm exactly i like that running my company hampton it gives me the chance to meet with hundreds of different businesses and i'm always surprised by how many of them still use spreadsheets emails and clunky tools that do not talk to each other it's like watching someone build a house with duct tape so here's my take custom software that actually fits your needs isn't just convenient it's a competitive advantage should transform the way you do business and that's why you need to know about a no code platform called bubble with bubble you can build powerful web and mobile apps by literally dragging and dropping different elements out of the screen no coding required by the way i use bubble on a ton of different apps including hampton and if you want help building something complex on bubble you have to bring in zero code they're the top bubble agency out there and literally the biggest plugging creator for the platform they can build anything custom portals saas products and they do it about ten times faster and cheaper than traditional development zero code is also all about ai business automation transforming manual and slow processes into efficient automated ones so stop cobb together different tools and solutions and head to zero code dot com that's zero code as in the word zero and then code q o d e again code is with a q and tell them that sam sent you alright what's the next one let me just run through a couple of coinbase base is basically the same case except what they have is coinbase has nine product lines that do over a hundred million dollars of revenue each i thought that's a stunning stunning statement i can't believe how many different ways that they make a lot of money i think crypto basically it's like i'm bullish on bitcoin in general and crypto and if you're bullish on crypto the the most trusted exchange that basically everybody that takes a fee on everybody's interest everybody's enthusiasm around crypto they take a fee of everybody and every cell like that's a business gonna do very well and also like as now like the government's the government's pro crypto they're buying crypto there's etfs it's in people's retirement accounts like same thing can't can't put the two toothpaste back to the bottle on that and that ceos an animal he's an manual and so i just think they're they're extremely you know well positioned similarly for for you know the future when it when it ipo i'd never do this i've only done this two or three times or something like that i bought you jumped up and clap i i i click the heels right after i purchased like a hundred grand worth of stock and i just looked at my i just looked at it i i just made the money back now that it's like auto auto of there looks like i've i'm i'm even now after i think four years or three years alright the other two again this is this is so clear i i almost didn't even wanna do this segment but i do believe in this so like it's not you to me because i don't follow all the this stuff so i think a lot of people won't find it totally cliche yeah okay alright well unfortunately the youtube comments aren't aren't as as forgiving and and kind as you are alright so tesla and the next one which is basically if you think about one of the next big industries to get unlocked a combination of self driving cars it's gonna change the world and then the robots now the time scale is obviously the question here but again i'm taking if you take a twenty year outlook nobody's better positioned to do self driving cars and robots than tesla so and then i also think by the way he's gonna end up merging x ai with tesla like he's gonna he's gonna put it all together i don't understand that i don't get that i don't get that combo why we go together well basically and one is an ai lab and then all the although the future of tesla is as an ai company and if he's able till basically like financially engineer his way into owning more tesla by by having tesla by x ai like he's also like done this before it's solar city where he like bail out his own companies in in a way right i guess i get that the way how twitter has basically become ai which is then a tesla thing that's a wild journey that that's the wild part i wouldn't own any i don't wanna own any stock that of that elon controls because he's a crazy person and i don't mind being i don't mind him being crazy what i mind is like when he tweet something the stock changes or and so i'm like what if he gets shot which is definitely not unreasonable like there has to be like a one percent chance that he gets assassinated or a one percent chance that he dies doing something reckless yeah there's crazy demand risk with him yeah it's too crazy like when he tweeted that trump was a what pe file what did it go up or down like did it move get went down that what i is but i i but yeah i don't have the stomach for that the stock trades in completely crazy ways in the short term like they'll be like oh we missed delivery estimates by a lot my bad and the stocks like up ten percent it's like what the ones going on here it's weird bad tesla too weird for me yeah i'm i'm too old school for that but i do i i understand the argument i mean again the idea is like we're gonna have robots doing human labor once you if you if you disagree with that then you're wrong and we disagree but if you realize that robots are gonna do human labor and the human labor is the biggest market in the world is the market for human human labor then the company that makes the robots that do the human labor is gonna sell more it's gonna be like the iphone the iphone was like this product that everybody in the world bought that you know sells billions of billions and billions of units as soon as they have robots i can actually do functional work they're gonna sell billions and billions there's gonna be more robots than humans because why would you not i'd be yeah give me give me five of those guys to be doing shit around my my backyard my factory my warehouse my whatever right like as soon as people as soon as that exists no then the question is do you believe it will exist do believe that that tesla can pull it off yes the the end the it's definitely worth betting that they will so you once you go down the logic train of like the biggest market of the world human labor we now have the technology wave happening where robots will be able to do that human labor and that if you had that what would be the demand for that okay pretty much the biggest demand we've ever seen for anything ever okay great so let's go to the next one who is gonna be able to you know who's gonna be able to do who's well positioned to do tesla okay great you see you go down that chain that you realize like okay they're pretty well positioned it's just hard because so i have a friend that joined open ai in i forget the exactly what year but at the time i think they worth thirty billion dollars and he was debating he's like should i do this should i not do this and he said we also have the same thing which was wow thirty billion dollars that's a lot of money is there any upside to this well he joined i believe he's has made about thirty million dollars and as of now the stock that he was granted back then it is grant it is now worth ten million in a year so every vest it's something like ten million dollars right and he sold a little bit to to where he's good but we were talking today and we were like this could definitely ten x again like your grants could be one hundred million dollars a year and that's that's it's very hard to like overcome that that to get to that conclusion just because not logic because of emotion you know what i mean totally the smartest investors i know and the reason why i think there's merit to just having a very like simple simple model of investing is for most of the like i guess i if i look back in the last ten years i look back a couple the smartest investors i know they always had like a very like two sentence two sentence level of conviction and they sort of pointed out there they're like hey like all you needed to do was btc and chill like all you needed to do was bitcoin and chill right you know when we sold to amazon and we got in our amazon grant and it was like okay you own this much amazon stock now guess what i did all these side projects i did all this other shit during the meantime i like try like work got up every day and went to work all i needed to do was amazon chill like if you get a big enough lump sum you just can let things compound and so like one of my friend zach has this this phrase basically every year there's one investment that's sort like the power law like you know when z happened he was like oh i think i just need to own the companies that are like the the oz epic companies and he's like yep like that was the only thing that you needed to do lo epic was the investment theme of the year you just had to recognize it and you had to take action on it it didn't take a like a literal genius to it right you didn't have to predict epic you didn't have to like be me deep in clinical trials six years ago like even if it just like after it happened you just had to like understand what was actually happening and buy and hold and like that was what you needed to do and every he basically has a list of every year what's the one thing that matter what was the one deal said i think he said one year was like only fans yeah one year he was like it's only fans this year and i was only fans what this was like before it was this was actually i think in in twenty nineteen we talked about it he talked sold and we sold a twitch and he texted me and he was like only fan i believe is gonna make more money than twitch i go broke twitch is making like and i shared him with you know i was like twitch pictures is making a lot of money he's was like i said what i said everything else is noise for me this year i just need to figure out if i can get into the did he get it yeah he did and so you know he's you know but i i just really respect that level of thinking and that that type thing in fact one of my friends who's like this he came to he came over my house and he goes take two don't take two what would it take must take two do different friends talk really strangely no so like this no connecting words it sounds like it's it's it it was a kramer you just knocked on the door and take two i ask him i'm like what's the thing right now because he he was the one early on was just like you need to have one hundred percent of your net worth in bitcoin and he was just like every day he would just tell me and he would just tell me this every day this is twenty fourteen twenty fifteen twenty sixteen every day he just tell me the same thing and he would tell me exactly why and he would write it he wrote it down for me and he he just kept doing it and because of my own more bitcoin than i would have otherwise so i you know i didn't listen to didn't do a hundred percent but i i i didn't listen to him he was basically making a case why the company that makes grand theft auto he's like grand theft auto is coming with the gta six is coming out and when it comes out is it right now the stock is a little depressed because it's the game's has been delayed for like multiple years because like the game is gonna come out and when the game comes out it's gonna be the biggest selling game ever there's no competition he got and he's like he uses all these economics where like you know some word for like there are no substitutes like there's no substitute for gta yeah he was using words like elastic elastic and something exactly so he's like rubber made there's stocks bra he's like you know a great investment has these like six properties and like you know here's the six properties and and i'm like and grand theft auto fits all those he's like yes and so that's like you know his big he said this what he was saying a year ago it's already up like thirty percent or something since he told me this and he would you to and whatever there's more to that story i well like i can't share here but like it's that type of thinking that's like i don't know it's very very attractive to be i'm i fall i i get seduced by that level at that type of thinking very easily and obviously i'm cherry picking like you know things that worked i'm sure there's if i really thought about it i'm sure i have a bunch of smart friends who you know fell in love with random single securities that didn't didn't do anything i'm i'm not saying this is like a full proof thing dude when you whenever we talk about i like i i started thinking i would be like the warren thing i'm like well i don't understand someone i'm gonna stick to that thing is really novel way of saying like you know whatever i'm i'm i'm not doing it and then i started thinking about this recently where i was like well it's been eight years maybe i should learn about it maybe that circle incompetence needs to expand a little bit i'm like it's so like six months ago i went and bought a book on it and like started reading it i was like oh yeah yeah yeah i wish i would have read this a long time this spoke was published like years ago what am i doing that's right like well i don't know it i don't understand it so i'm not the to do it but that's been years yeah i don't i should have read ways sooner what's the fourth company open ai eyes is one of them but i think that's the most controversial one because i think they they you know there's so much competition who knows and i just was thinking like who else is uniquely positioned on a twenty year time scale where they have the winds of technology behind their back so they're they're in the right space where like clearly they're they're sitting in the lane where the the the the the highest velocity of like you know of of change in in and sort of upside is but then also that they have a unique def well they will actually capture it i like basic spaces is uniquely def i think coinbase is uniquely defense def i think tesla's is uniquely def none of these things are like you know completely full foolproof not of course like you know there's there there are competitors i'm not saying that but i just think like on the sliding scale of def it's very very hard to compete with any of those companies because they've built up these durable durable modes right like whether it's regular regulatory modes whether it's brand whether it's network effect whether it's like harp you know hard technical you know technical things that are you know take years for other people to catch up to but then by then they're on the next generation do not wanna like this is total like the bro signs of financial investing but i don't look into like i don't really read about the fundamentals of certain companies and the only few times that i've bought an individual stock it's been mostly because the founder the entrepreneur behind it and so when we hung out with mario the guy who started oscar health he like explained a little little bit about oscar and i was like okay it's a health insurance company but i i don't really know anything else but like you you're really inspiring and so i bought a little bit of that and then the first one was atlas i read an article about atlas and their office i don't know if you remember this but my office was at where was it it was in soma and their office was like on the street of my of my office the hustle and i used to like look in their office and i was like wow i love the interior design of your office and i read a a little bit about the founders and they seemed really smart and i bought i think a thousand dollars worth of it because i didn't have any money i think it turned into fifty fifty gram i think like fifty x and it was and so both of the times that they have made money it's literally just been because the founder was interesting to me total bro science no i don't even know what it atlas does to this day like i i i i they make software but i i don't know what software i don't know what got australian software i think yeah yeah like the the they they they say words like schedule instead of schedule i'm like like you know it's a scheduler i don't know what a schedule is but it's been like that's kind of been like an interesting way it just seems like someone has will something into existence and the cool factor so for example talent here i'm pretty sure they're trading at like two hundred times yeah revenue revenue or something like that and i have to imagine there's gonna be some research on what the alex corp like cool factor adds to that multiple yeah these become cults like there's enough like there's enough sort of like retail energy now are these things would become cult like right now they're trying to make it happen for open door i don't know if you paid attention this i have i have i've seen open door i don't understand why there's what's who's the cult leader behind it like what why do people care about door comp and it's like this guy eric jackson and others i mean i don't know i'm i'm not too far it i i stay away from the like the you know everybody's got their the their their vice but meme stocks is not not one that that doesn't for me so like fortunately i don't get sucked into that so your buddy was like i should just pick one stock and go in if there's one skill set that you should go all in honestly like i learned it a little bit with her mo and we've seen it time and time again but like for becoming a very charismatic person that knows how to talk to the masses is obviously the answer that's the skills that you have to learn like manipulation everything else just learn that i think rob the bank who you had on a while ago he like talked about some book he's like i don't even wanna say the name of this book he like heated up perfectly and i think you did i i think you did the same he's like there's just one book on how to manipulate people i don't even wanna say the name it's just too powerful and i don't want the price to go up the dark do you remember what he said that maybe maybe i don't well like you said it on our podcast or somewhere else yes and or maybe he said it on and i started following him after you had him on and he said something like that and went and reddit it and i'm like yeah you're right this is like the this is like this skill that everyone should learn screw products screw would be what is it i wanna know now i'm not gonna say we go you get it to me i'll tell you after no but i don't even robert greene they say this about his right forty laws of power like i think one of the like marketing sticks which i don't know if he completely made up or is of true and then he used it to like temp to market his book but it was this book is banned from prisons it's because because they don't want the prisons to like the prisoners to be able to like over overtake pretty powerful yeah so powerful that it's banned prisons is just perfect marketing yeah you know that's that's like the cod level marketing and i i have it somewhere on my good reads that i'll say that i'll that i'll find it but it it's i know you remember the title i'm being honest but it like so you think i should go all in on on charles isolation or what yeah i mean you're we're kinda we kinda do that do it already yeah should sort table like i'm just saying like go all in yeah it just be better just do what you're doing now but better is that it is that the pod yeah bit i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a travel never looking back alright let's take a quick break because as you know we are on the hubspot podcast network but we're not the only ones there's other podcast podcasts on this network too and maybe you liked them maybe you should check them out one of them that wanna draw your attention to is called nudge by phil ag and whether you're a marketer or a salesperson and you're looking for the small changes you could make the new habits you could do the the small decisions you could make that will make a big difference other that's what that podcast is all about check it out it's called nudge and you can get it wherever you get your podcast

listen up the old playbook is slowing you down ai broke the funnel loop marketing fixes it it's a new era for marketers ai is capturing search traffic channels are fragmented and generating leads feels less predictable than ever before hubspot loop marketing playbook will guide you through this unprecedented disruption it's the system your marketing teams should use to move faster connect deeper and gross smarter the modern growth playbook for the ai era built by hubspot design for today's marketer get the loop marketing playbook at hubspot dot com slash loop dash marketing to find out more and leave your competition behind alright back to the pod i'm not saying like i'm above this no one's above this this is cool these guys just sold seven million dollars and multi tools in like a week i feel like i could rule the world and i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a go less travel never looked so in order for a creator business to work the creator needs to be loved what makes a creator lovable like what attributes do they have where you see it and you're like that person has it and people will buy because of them finding creators that have like real love from their communities is the is the whole thing right because those are the most durable audiences that will kind of go it makes them not cancel it they peep people feel like they are their buddies their friends so i think like what makes them loved is you feel like you're watching a version of yourself doing it you know when you're if you're a wood worker and you watch jonathan katz moses you're like oh this guy's just like me and he's teaching me i'm learning and it's like a buddy who's walking me into my favorite hobby my favorite niche so that's to be relatable i think so relatable was a good way to put it i think you know often feels like you're a big sister or your big brother too or where you're like okay they're teaching me you know like you like motorcycles right like they're pain in the ass to like maintain a deal with to find the right routes to find the right routes on road to find the right roots off road but i got three or four guys that i can call and say hey i'm going to pacific northwest where do i go what do i need to pack like what am i missing like walk me through that trip you took and they give me the tools that i need to kinda get where i wanna go and i feel like those creators are the most interesting that can build durable businesses and now you're a partner at slow is that right yeah i'm a venture partner slow i've been here for about a year and before that i was at the churning group man cher i've hung out with those guys a bit they yes they're they're i saw your i i saw your podcast of kevin which is great yeah we've had kevin on i'm friends with doug tomorrow doug found that i found that that was you yeah yeah yeah your guys insight back in like fourteen fifteen and sixteen which it seems so obvious now it was like we're gonna take creators and we're gonna make them into billion dollar companies and like obviously we know mister beast does that now but what a lot of people don't realize is that cher was early on this for one and number two they've had so many successes that are niche community so for example there's the what's the meat guy meat eater next steve vanilla yeah meat eater and then there is like probably eight or nine or ten more we had kevin on from epic gardening yeah and so like you've built these like really big businesses and that's what we're gonna talk about today particularly the creator middle class because there's like yeah yeah there's like these the mister beast of the world but there's so many people out there that are making ten twenty fifty million dollars a year and they have like eight hundred or four hundred thousand followers in a very niche community like meat smoking or something like that right one of my favorite creators is doug tomorrow doug tamara does these car reviews he turned it into cars and bids which i i have no idea how big they are but i i think it's a a a quite a large business i'll tell you sent since doug started he sold about four hundred and fifty million dollars worth of vehicles and then he takes a take rate off that oh my god so this guy doug does these like reviews where he will review an suv or like a two million dollar ferrari anything that's an ent car yes and yeah what's interesting about doug is i don't know how he did but i have a feeling it was just him probably i actually not even with an iphone when he first started literally like a cam quarter like a traditional one right and he looks sloppy like he has like a dirty t shirt that that year often two t shirts two shirts that fit horribly together so like his under is popping out from his and he's right usually wearing cargo shorts without a belt so it like it's faster like falling down and he wears high white socks and like he's just kind of a i don't know how i don't know like what we're what category is but like somebody like a cornered he's a partnered yeah but even amongst car many of them are more like they dress affluent because they wanna fit in he does not care about that at all and he gives these amazing reviews and so one that's the relatable thing but then you have these on this on the other end you have like the emma chamberlain where young women i think aspire to be her because she sure is cool and and has character and all that stuff is there something in there about a creator of like wanting to be aspirational versus quirky i can it depends on the audience right like doug audience loves him because he has the best information about every car like it like his videos that are ten minutes eight minutes twelve minutes long top to front everything you wanna know about that car which is generally like a couple things like what do i wanna drive what do i think is cool and sometimes it's purchase decision right so doug gives you everything you need to kind of learn about that rig and he's like totally una assuming and fun i'm not as familiar with emma i know she's like very loved but yeah aspirational you wanna be here when you grow up you think she's cool you love her access you like her take on things i think for the ent categories i think those pop the hardest what which is to say doug is driving a two sided marketplace that has real scale and can scale without having to put goo in a bottles or get distribution from stores or launch a physical location he is like building like a venture scale business and a lot of people who come to cars and business now didn't even know who doug was it's built the scale where they're just like oh this is like this is a great place to transact i don't even i even get here through the top of funnel from doug alright so a lot of people look talk about how you need a million dollars and three years of experience to start a business nonsense if you listen to at least one episode on this podcast you know that it's completely not true my last company the hustle we grew it to something like seventeen dollars or eighteen million dollars in revenue i started it with like three hundred dollars my current company hampton does over ten million in revenue started it with actually no money maybe twenty nine dollars or something like that nothing and so you don't actually need investors to start a company you don't need a fancy business plan but what you do need is systems that actually work and so my old company the hustle they put together five proven business models that you could start right now today with under a thousand dollars these are models that if you do it correctly it can make money this week you can get it right now you can scan the qr code or click the link in the description now back to the show so can i ask you about some of these middle class creators because this is pretty interesting you mentioned to one of them and i looked him up this guy's insane who's jonathan katz moses jonathan cas moses so jonathan katz moses is a wood worker he started a website called k tools it's tips and tricks on the right tool for the right job essentially and then he was like oh well here's this tool you can use to work with this buzz and here's this tool you can use to work with that and then sold out sold out sold out and then kept developing his own tools let me tell you i see when i go to youtube page because it's pretty incredible so yeah he just looks like a just guy he's just doing we're woodworking stuff but what's crazy is he's the guy he only has i mean and this is like big but this is like you know pretty girl next door like attainable he only has six hundred thousand subscribers that's right which i think almost anyone dedicate four years to jerk virtually any niche and they spend twenty hours a week on it i think they can get to six hundred thousand subscribers so he only has six hundred thousand subscribers and each of and he only is outputting like one video a month like not even a lot of not even a lot of videos and they and they look great they look like really highly serious videos they're not like they're they're they're they're they're polished but his yeah his quantity is not through the roof and the views aren't even went through the roof no well the the cool thing about it is it's it's first of all it's evergreen content so like what he did like how often he published is important to kinda continue to to provide content for the community and build his audience and get to scale and i think like taking investment he will be able to do more of that he raised money yeah that's slow we invested a two million into to into jonathan business and how big is it now the investment is very recent he's doing around six million in revenue now from like strictly from his tool site and he's grown substantially year over year and when you and made the investment what was your upside like what did you what do you expect in five years how big of a business will this be yeah i mean we play a little longer than five years because we're early stage so i you know i i i don't know yeah yeah i mean we we'd love to see jonathan get to a hundred two hundred million dollars in revenue in the next ten years that's crazy yeah it's he gonna enjoy his life while he's doing that because it looks like you had pretty good life before taking your money he he loves he wants to build a massive business i mean we're not reaching out to creators and saying hey you look like you have a really nice lifestyle business making ten million bucks a year do you wanna go to a hundred like we're we're he reached out to us you know he's like i wanna build a business of scale you know he he needs more inventory he needs more product designers he sells out all the time so he he wants to get to scale like he love he loves what he's doing this is a great one and what's when you're when you're when you're doing research like if you're this guy jonathan or or someone listening and you have like a like woodworking is a niche huge niche but each nonetheless the is there like math between how you decide how big it can get or do you just look at like comparable are you like well there's just one woodworking eco com store that already does this much revenue i think it can be that big that's a good question i mean i think it's a little bit of both what where we say team and theme right so it's like can we invest in is jonathan back does he have the hunger is he a founder or is he just a content creator and then does he have the hunger to build something big so it's early stage we're betting on jonathan right now we can't bet on jonathan if he wants to it's funny he he made he said a funny quote it goes you know they have no control i could build ballet shoes if i wanted it now we have to look at the category that he's in and make sure we feel like it can be it can get to scale so yeah we do a little once we get deeper down and figure out that this guy's great he's gonna figure something out he's gonna take a lot of different shots on goal until he does which we've seen with lots of great creators who they're okay i tried this business and i tried that business and it didn't work and they're gonna keep going jonathan feels like the kind guy is gonna keep going no matter what and then yeah we've looked we looked at we're working like are there other businesses in his in his genre that are making tools that are at fifty hundred dollars two hundred million dollars in revenue and we look at that and we compare them and we say hey listen this is a this is good signal can i actually walk through that because i i am curious because like if i have a passion or if i'm a listener and i a passion for something and i'm like did this have legs or maybe it doesn't quite have legs but if i just change it a little bit like the trajectory might be a lot different but still within the passion of what i wanna make content wise yeah so like alright so if you're doing word woodworking where would i start to research to give me faith that this can be a fifty million dollar year company right okay so that that's a really good question so the the really interesting thing about backing creators that are in passion categories is they have real expertise in the area that they're in which is to say because jonathan creating content in inward woodworking he knows all the other wood workers he knows all the tool companies he knows everybody in that area and we kind of trust them to understand their own white space so these creators that we're backing and the creators that like i think have the best opportunity are the ones that are deep so deep in a niche that they've been working in for five ten years they're like oh they identify the white space it's not for us like we're we're here to say hey you're we're we wanna match capital with creators and who are founders who wanna build something scaled and we rely on them you know doug d romero right back to doug like doug been in the car game both on the editorial side and creating content meeting all the manufacturers he knows when he you know there's four or five other auction platforms that are available to people who are buying cars doug like this is the one we need to build and this is why but when you're when when you're trying to justify that surely you're you're thinking like okay i feel like with some degree of certainty the best case scenario is it's gonna be a billion dollar company in ten years something like that and so what what i'm curious about though is let's say that like let's say that i'm interested in architecture but also like yeah art history let's say that i'm like you know a twenty eight year old person i hate my job i'm sort of interested in art history and architecture but i wanna build something sustainable and like potentially one like the the route that i pick went with my content i would imagine there's some type of equation where it's like i guess it would be the size of the audience multiplied by the gross profit per item sold multiplied by the quantity that they will buy do you guys have anything like that i think it's a little bit more creative than math which is to say we can't be experts in every every niche category and say hey this is how this is how this is gonna pan out i mean you have a sense of like hey these are these are i mean like look kevin kevin's in the seed business like seeds don't seem like they're very you know like you they're very inexpensive but at scale like it's a massive business i think we look for categories where they're they're high spend where people are passionate about them and that the founder really understands the category and is telling us where they think the white space is more than us saying oh here's a math here's math to solve that problem yeah that's funny i mean i my my last company was the hustle and like jesse or cher came to me and they're like oh maybe you can be one of these late i don't even think they had like a word for it but they they were recruiting me to become it was very light recruitment but it was like a let's see if there's a fit maybe we could invest in you to be one of these creator led businesses and i was like yeah i didn't even have faith that it could become that like i i didn't know yeah you ought be i definitely didn't believe it what yeah churn was really interesting because you know we at churn it was it was different at kind of a growth stage because you at post investment you can spend some more so much more time with the businesses that you can early stage you know there's a willingness to roll up your sleeves and like help help build it out like there's a lot of work we put into those companies post investment at churn in that earlier stage we kind of are betting on the founder to figure it out i think every man who's above like thirty five years old has a dream to do what this next creator is doing which is owning a ranch and selling meat what is yeah yeah what is five mary's well five mary's is rad so it's it was started by a woman named mary he and her her husband brian as well but mary's like mary's is the big driver of and and brian would agree with that as well she started as a restaurant tour in the bay and couldn't find like ethically sourced meats and the way that she really wanted at scale that she wanted for her for her restaurants so she started looking at ranches and she ended up buying a ranch she's like super entrepreneurial get up and go bad she found this ranch kind of in the mount s the area of this area called fort jones which is near the like california oregon border and she bought a ranch and started raising her own cattle there she now has six hundred acres six hundred ke of cattle she's got a butcher she does shipping she has a you know like a fda approved slaughter house and she's built a very large scale business from four hundred four hundred thousand followers on her instagram channel and what was her original content like what what got the first ten thousand followers it was all her moving to this ranch and building out this ranch life so she tells stories about herself her family she's got four otter that are all rad that are all cow girls obviously it didn't start that way when they were when they were little but they're now kind of like sixteen fourteen fifteen thirteen like in that area they're all rope they like compete so they're always going around but it's like ranch life caring about the food caring about the people who you work with building out business also just a very strong female entrepreneur vibe she like taught courses to other women who are building businesses actually the baller farms woman took her course and then launch baller farms with scale now that's another it's similar yeah baller farms has a lot has a little bit more controversy around it but the woman's name who i forget right now lives in utah her husband and her bought a ranch and it's like very well shot it's very beautiful and it's a little bit more composed than mary's content mary's content is a little bit more like if you look at mary's content right now you're like literally watching her bill the house her and her husband and her kids are going out and like grabbing rocks and putting from the land and putting them on the heart and she's building them out she's feeding cows she so was she successful before she bought the ranch no she had like three or four restaurants and san francisco got it she was like she's been she's i mean as you know with restaurants they're not like they can be doing great but they're not they're not like you can't it's hard to retire her off them until you get to real scale so she was a provider i think of as a prop provider that's a category i would put it her and she had restaurants she was serving great food she had a good life but it wasn't what she wanted so she went out to the farm instead of she she saw an opportunity to like build the ranch that had ethically sourced meats and raised cattle and tell the story while she was doing it it's like so deeply authentic it's it's basically like i think i saw i forget the director's name guy something guy ritchie guy ritchie and he was telling this story that always stuck with me i think i heard it when i was a little bit younger and it always stuck with me but it was basically like when i try to live my life he's like i am a director and i want my life to be a movie and i'm the director of my own movie i'm the director of my own life and i hear like what she's doing or i see what mary doing and to me it's like social media makes it so much easier and attainable to say i'm gonna do something epic and i'm gonna bring people along the way and that is why it's going to be so epic because they're going to support me and this is so awesome so how big of a company does she have and she's and it's just selling beef well she does a lot of things so she sells subscription box boxes of beef she also sells these she she's done these courses like i mentioned she sells whiskey and cookbook she actually doubled down recently on a tall product line so she you know because she processes her own meat and has she has like tons of tall and has been making it you know sparingly the lady is awesome they do camps they do a cowboy camp where you could like go in into yeah yeah i think it's a small part of her business but it's definitely like she brings she brings people on it's it's a heavy lift she does it like it's seasonally but she brings people in and kind of teaches them with the idea that people can learn what it's like to live a ranch life and and come out there kind of in a dude ranch you kind way but she'll make you roll up your sleeves and do stuff for sure how how big is this business it's five mary's ranch i mean so as far as like all of these businesses that i'm talking about like as an investor i talk to all these folks and i like some of them if it's publicly disclosed i i'd be happy to to share that but the way i would frame this business is that it is like it has the ability to to achieve venture scale and i i would say the threshold of venture scale is probably a hundred million dollars in revenue right it can do it yeah yeah awesome also the the the coolest thing about mary is like you know the meet the meat business is great and i think she will always do it and it as but this towel line that she launched is something that can scale even more like i don't know how much you've seen about what's going on with beef tall and people using it for you know their skin and care it's very popular and she does it right there on her farm she make she makes it she they built the place to process it and they and they do it right there on the form and that's another line of business and that brings me to another topic with all these guys is they have opportunity to take lots of shots on goal it's like okay i've built out this meat business how much scale can it get to can i exit it do i wanna exit it and you get to a certain place there and then you say okay well what else can i offer my audience that it's totally organic to who i am they will totally buy because they it's something that they want and maybe that thing becomes the thing that is venture scale or maybe she tries something else that becomes venture scale but the beautiful thing about all these creators in this kind of creator middle class that we're talking about is like it's not just one business that they can start but two things i'm gonna push back on two things said i you to put me wrong number one focus like nine out of ten times one of the reasons nine out of ten times a lack of focus is what kills a company like it's sure it's more often than not it's better to do one thing incredibly well than to do a bunch of things because it's just hard to pull off a bunch of things great the second thing is operations is very challenging particularly for a ranch i mean just like a software company is pretty easy you're just behind a screen and there's no capex for a ranch that's really hard who is operating her business and how on earth do you find all these wonderful operators and also balance creating content because i do this podcast two times a week and then i also have a company and it's quite challenging and that's probably a lot easier than running a ranch great running a ranch is very hard and she will tell you and you can watch and you can see so i agree with that so when i think of focus i think of my answer to your focus is prioritization which is to say she's gotten the ranch to a place and now she decides if she wants to double down on another line of business and then she needs to make sure that she has operators in place that can that she has enough time to try and build out that next line of business and or bring in another person or two to operate and help launch that next line of business so she's got a ranch then she's gotta make sure she has enough time energy either with the people who are supporting her ranch or somebody to help her with the tall line so it's about prioritization and then building it out i agree with you but you look at somebody like can i like if you look at somebody like jo willing yeah are you familiar with jo i what i know bottom him is he was a a former seal yeah badass looks like a seal looks like a gi joe and has a podcast but i don't know much about his products yeah so that so that that's another example of like how you get to scale where you're trying shots on goal and thinking about prioritization so jo like you said he's got a massive podcast your agree he looks like a gi joe and you're right that he that he is a an ex seal and he's also very like taking pictures of his watch at four am when he's starting his workout and he's a big j you guys he's also very intentional father and talks about how to raise your kid you know kind of you know knock glued to screens and and and you know with with intentional things like that so jo like speaks to a lot of people and he has a great course called echelon which he teaches to fortune five hundred ceos and peep and the the the general public can can kind of apply and be part of those as well and he did pretty well with that business and he continues to do well with that business echelon is like so he dropped i'm looking at the website it's corporate so i imagine like if i had a guess it's six figures and he comes in talks and then like three of his team will drop in and help you with some leadership issues in within your business that's right that's right i think it's it more scale than that but yes i mean he does he he does big conferences with like multiple like fortune five hundred ceos and he's very well respected in that in that world cool in the leadership in the leadership he talks a lot in his podcast and in books about how to be a great leader and how to like you know manage up and manage down and he he's he's pretty prolific in that in that sense and then he launched a tactical apparel brand starting with boots and moving into clothes which are like you know your american made kind of workout slash military guy closed which i would have to do that would be one of the harder businesses actually to run that's a very hard business because returns and yeah returns and sizes and that would be hard yeah supply chain and yeah it's it's hard right and so he took those shots on goal right he saw a place where he thought that he can move his audience really interesting then he launched jo fuel what's that protein like it's like a pre workout post workout during workout energy drink kind of droop of drink because that probably crush it crush he probably makes a hundred million dollars a year in revenue off of that crush you know and then and then chris pratt joined in because you know chris pratt is very military friendly and likes jo and like all that kind of stuff and that thing is like you know it's in walmart is in gmc it's like you know and walmart really likes to support those like military founders and like you know it's a it's a product that people like and people really trust them because he has you know like a like like they would a human because it you know he's he's he's such a specimen and he talks about working out and training and people really do that so these are all places that he totally has permission to be in and so you could say okay well the focus is why one of them is not working better or you like try something you launch it it does fine but what do you do with the fine thing like if someone running his clothing company yeah i mean that's i think that's what you do with the fine thing is you say okay this thing is like doing fine let's get let's make sure somebody's running and i'm sure somebody's running and he he he's a prolific content creator so i'm sure he has partners and operators that are running these things you know being a leadership guy and being in the military i'm sure network is vast when it comes to like getting great operators and knowing how to work with them and communicate them i mean he's a proper entrepreneur you know what's it's funny is i i guess i am a creator which i i don't have anything wrong with that with that title but i didn't seek out to become that i previously started a business and right i was mildly okay at running a company i'm pretty good at hiring but i was mildly okay at doing the work myself and i would say mildly okay at being a creator but finding operators is still hard for me and like working with them as a partner is quite challenging how do you find a partner if like let's say that you're listening to this and let's say that you have twenty or thirty thousand followers and you're like something is here but i don't know when to get help and how do you decide when and how yeah i mean i think entrepreneurs have to be able to that that that is kind of one of the telltale signs if they if they're a founder that they know how to hire and that they can attract people to hire which is to say if you're a creator who like does general comedy and or just general entertainment and you decide okay i wanna start coffee or i wanna start goo a bottle i think attracting a operator is gonna be very hard because they're gonna say okay well is this person really gonna put the time into it are they really behind it is their audience really gonna believe it like is their audience really gonna move when they say move and you have to have a real value proposition for an operator to wanna come on board and work with you so i think if you have sound principles in what you wanna build and why you can find a good operator like part of that is the test of at least what we invest in we invest in a creator that is a founder that can attract talent to run their business so where do you go to find them i mean first you go decide what your special sauce is and where you need support and i've i've heard you talk about many times like where places that you need support and you need to be very clear about that and you needs to you need to like make sure that you're attracting talent that's gonna like cover the hundred and eighty degrees also you don't have to you can kind of date before you marry which is to say work on some projects with them you know work on like say hey i wanna build this out i wanna try this out make sure you're you're putting enough capital into it so you have money to pay an operator and that you have a plan for it so i think it's really important to we we look for we look for folks that you need that that can attract that kind of talent listen up the old playbook is slowing you down ai broke the funnel loop marketing fixes it it's a new era for marketers ai is capturing search traffic channels are fragmented and generating leads feels less predictable than ever before hubspot loop marketing playbook will guide you through this 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that was that was really the caveman version of that i'm looking at his video first of all there's like a four million dollar acid martin that he cleans but then there's also gonna be like a car that's been in a barn like a barn and that's gonna take like a week right yeah yeah so he yeah so larry has a robust business cleaning celebrity cars that either are going to auction or they just have a bad collection and they're gonna be taking it to you know a car show or they're gonna be you know going on going on a a a trip that's with all the like hot hotshot chick car owners and he really gets in there and like really understands the cars and has built products with his own mixtures and built his own brushes and towels and everything all d and he uses the top of funnel which is the car content of detailing these cars which is like kinda car porn for people and any car ent who has like a proper collection knows larry and uses his products dude i would watch these videos like silent like this would be like just play in the background of my living room on apple tv for like you know eight hours while i'm just hanging out a today just larry awesome check out this other guy detail geek so this is the other side of of larry oh my god this guy has almost four million subscribers and so what's he what's he do like more low end stuff he just like he is somewhere and i wanna say like the dakota or the midwest i don't know i don't i can't remember exactly somewhere where they drive lots of pickup trucks second dirty that's right it looks like the cars have been for like four weeks on a hunting trip in the mud where he's like getting out shotgun shelves and he does these twenty minute long videos that get insane views and he too launched his own products called detail geek really really interesting guy i've tried to talk to him many times i talk to him once he's very happy with his lifestyle business he does not want to engage with people who invest in these things and help scale these things he's like i like my family i like my life and i make good money and bob's your uncle and he he doesn't need and let let you know larry larry is a little bit more in the sexy world but this but but the detail geek does not care this guy's is awesome what's your what's your you probably can't say it's a stupid question for being even ask but this company definitely does more than ten million in revenue i would think here's what i'll say all of these middle class creators i think have the ability to be avail venture style businesses with the right with the right founder and the right hires so which is to say direct to consumer businesses who kind of somebody came up with an idea like casper or or glasses that you can buy over the internet or shoes that are different like they they were kind of built a brand boardroom and somebody said okay well i have a new product right that i think the audience wants and then i'm gonna go build a brand and then i'm gonna go build an audience and i'm gonna go spend a money bunch of money to to build consumers these kind of middle class brands have gotten to a place where they're like i already have the audience i know product mark market fit i'm ready to i'm ready to go and then it's the right fuel to the fire determines whether they're gonna get to venture scale or not when they're starting is it just oftentimes them with an iphone and them editing it either on their phone or on their computer and how how big have you seen them get it with just doing it in that sort of scrappy hustle way great that's a great camera so mary back to mary she just shoots everything on her iphone like that's it you know she's she's on instagram she shoots everything on her iphone it goes on her reels like you know it's just her making the content so that's one that's one version of it so if the question is from your audience can i get started without a big setup the answer is yes you know like yes and obviously depends on the genre you're in and the stories that you're telling you know mary's telling a story about her life she's relatable like you you wanna know where your meat comes from it's mary it comes from there it's not highly produced beautiful you know it's just mary doing her thing and mary's rad and her kids are at and her husband's are at and you can tell that right away larry started with a small setup and now he's got a four bay or a three bay garage in his spot in connecticut that's all lit and he's got a guy who shoots it with him and he still does it all himself but it's just two guys he two guys with two with almost three million subscribers basically yeah i mean he's got more people that work in the business but yeah it's like two or three guys but it's like a beautiful studio yeah slash detail spot it's all well lit he's very intentional about the look and feel and that makes sense for like these high end cars right like it's like for high end cars and people who are like very wealthy who have you know multi million dollar car collections who are watching this kind of video like you wanna like you don't wanna just shoot it on iphone you want it to look beautiful because larry cares about what one side of the car looks like before and one side of the car looks like after and you gotta you gotta really show that so you need equipment and you need light and it you can't just shoot it you know in the front you know in the in the front driveway there's one more really funny story that i think you you would you would like there's this guy named toaster name who's tony it's tony i don't really i i i don't wanna butcher your last name but better he better be some italian guy with the name of tones so he was working at sherman williams making like you know like it's like an entry level job making blends for paints oh tone like paint tone i thought it was like tony from the garage with like slick back there it's like a little bit it's like a little bit of that he's not like a slick old guy like that he's like he's a he's an interesting cat and he's done a great job so he starts making tiktok while he's working at sherman williams while he's blending paint just kind of like talking about paint blends and just kind of posting tiktok casually and he starts to blow up and then he gets fired from sherman williams because he's using their office for tiktok oh they blew that one which is like duh right so he launched his own paint brand oh my god tones through paints and it's like running a clown card into a bank other than he's not a clown he's really smart and he's done a really great job and he if you look at his tiktok you know he's got north of a million followers and he's how's like no dude don tiktok he's two point three and on youtube because you a million and i'm almost positive that all the videos it's literally just a camera on a pink can and you six the drills and there any mix it that's all it is that's right and so that's where it's kind of like back to your story where you can just start and then if you hit the right audience you can you can you can really build it out but i think the the ones that are and we'll see how he does he's doing great now and he's a smart business guy and he's figuring it out and is that the venture scale business like is he gonna have his own sherman williams is i gonna get to a hundred million dollars in here he could it depends on execution at that point i think the the ones that i look at and the things that we wanna invest in it slow and the things that i think have a better shot to get to venture scale businesses are the ones that have been building audience trust for years that are known for that specific niche and may have a really strong community and they are creators that are entrepreneurs how long are they typically creating content before they launch a product it could they could do it on their first one or they could do it after four or five years you know jonathan katz moses the would work you know he he launched a product very soon after and and kind of his story was about launching the product a lot of it but he he did a lot of videos about woodworking and tips and trips and people were following around for a while so i don't think i think it just depends on your niche in your audience like i think like you really have to be a trusted voice of authority in your niche you know like you have to people really trust jo you know people really trust a people really trust hub people really trust mary but i'll push back a little bit on that because because okay so jo was a veteran so like he knows about being tough which is like a kind of his thing peter tia is a doctor so he knows it's about health but yeah like this guy worked at she sure she and williams that's why it's like it's sounds not like you need a phd you know i think like they're not to discredit but like i bet you i could spend one year learning how to clean cars and i and i can like make at least interesting enough content and then maybe after a little while longer like formulate a product you know what i mean not like i need to i don't need to spend eight years of schooling to do this totally make totally i agree with your point exactly which was just to say toaster is a wool because he hasn't spent like for me somebody who has spent years and years and is a trust so back to your architect architecture idea or your art your your artist idea like somebody who has built five or six years of trust and authenticity with this an audience and scaled it they have more permission to launch paint and then you think that you you feel better about their understanding of about the industry and product market fit feedback from their audience what their lane is what they can sell like you feel better about investing in somebody who's been in it for a long time versus somebody who is like okay for a couple years they've been creating content so tone is like a big will i think he's great and he's smart and he's gonna do something but somebody like larry yeah i think you could start a detailed channel and like grow it but larry has been doing this for ten years and when it comes to getting distribution in other you know like getting to scale like the chemical guys did which you know they took an eight hundred million dollar check and they were they had shops they had locations they scaled into all the different auto specialty shops and home depot and everywhere like that comes from years and years being involved in the industry and really understanding the white space and really understanding our audience that people who kind of just get started like you know mary's been at it for six seven years and built that trust so i think the ones that build the trust and understand the community like they really have an opportunity to scale in a way that somebody just getting started is like a let's see so you can use a little bit of me as an example but just the just the audience anyone who's listening and has a passion but like i i've sort of thought like oh it might be interesting to do youtube or instagram a little bit more it might be interesting to get into this creator space what's the lessons that i should learn from these people on the repeatable process like what's the best practices that i should take away like i know that this is part art where it's just like if you have an if factor it just kinda can work but surely there's some type of workout plan where if i lift this amount of weight and you need this my might of food then i'm gonna be at i'm gonna be at least in the ninety percentile mile my do it for two years versus everyone else so like what are the what's like the the lift weights and eat and eat lots of protein and kinda checklist version of this yeah that's a good question i mean i a couple of things that come to mind and i'll and i'll we can decide together if it's a complete answer or not i think for you personally and for or or or to take you as an example like i think you double down on the stuff that's really interesting to you and stuff that you wanna talk about and bring people and you can build an audience around your journey right so you you're doing a lot of that now which is like business building you're interested in entrepreneurs you're interested in like what's going on in the business world and that that that'll drive into you can decide if that's gonna work in the a bottom of the funnel where you can go beyond being a creator every day so for example like you like motorcycles you are sober you have a family and you are interested in like intentionally raising your kids and being a husband i would think through the things that are your passion hobbies and that bring you the most joy and i would double down on creating for those things with keeping in mind it doesn't have to be day one but pretty soon that you have to be thinking about creating content building an audience establishing yourself as a voice of authority in something that there is a bottom of the funnel bottom of the funnel meaning a product that i could eventually sell yes kevin sells raised farm beds and seeds doug sells cars jonathan the wood worker sells tools the detail sells chemicals the tones their guy sells paint mary sells meet you know on and on and on do you think it's safe to say that any content niche can come up with a product or service that can sell or should you think first like what could i sell and then let me think of which content falls within that category of something i'd be willing to dedicate ten years to to creating that content around yeah that's a good question i mean i think you don't wanna you know like it's really hard to sell products if you're just funny right you know dude those those like i was telling about my my mormon buddies they like the la in new york crowd might laugh at them like oh these like they might like you know be high brown laugh at these people the the funny new york gl or l actor comedian crew who i know who makes content they're yeah they're broke they don't sell anything that's right i think you can build the big audience that doesn't transact and you should be careful about that and i think if you're in a niche passion category that you like learn and love you will eventually figure out what the white space is and you can build a product or a service that works there and i can give you more examples of people who are doing that but i think if you're building content you have to be keeping in mind what's the bottom of the funnel like what am i moving what am i gonna move people to but i think you start by building a voice of authority in in in in an area like you can't even if you have a large scale audience in you know in an in an area doesn't mean that you can move product like you have to learn how to do it like the the people that we've been talking about today like have learned how to move product and learn how to build product and learn supply chain and hiring and you know subscription and blogs and how to keep their audience from churning and how to you know keep things in stock like you're an entrepreneur you gotta you gotta know how to you gotta know how to build a business and that is to say also like there are two kinds of business there's lots of kinds of businesses but two there's like lifestyle business it's like hey i make a million dollars a year doing this or i can make half a million dollars you're doing this and or i can make two million dollars you're doing this that's just fine with me the problem with that is is from bearing deals and adsense and like selling like merge and a couple little things here and there the problem is is once you stop like your revenue goes away you're you're just a freelancer you yeah exactly you you've built something that you can't exit and for some people that's okay and like it it's not like a what's better or what's worse but like if you're gonna spend five years building your audience build them into something that you can like transact into and you can add value to them by cool new tools or like great ethically think sourced meat or like cool color tones for your bedroom or you know anything that kind of like adds value to your audience is there a medium or a platform that matters so you've we've talked about tiktok instagram and youtube those are all video one thing that i've predicted i i wrote this or did we did the podcast on this where i'm like there hasn't been like a billion dollar twitter creator but i think there will be and there might be actually some now i said this like three or four years ago do you think that it has to be video and audio or video and we know podcasting works too so video and audio i think video and audio are the are are the examples that i've seen where people have been able to build kind of like lifestyle plus slash venture scale businesses i think the audio is a great way to connect with your audience like consistently and you can really like own the relationship and and build like a cadence of trust with them it's a very intimate platform where if you love something you listen to it weekly i think video video is the same way and building an ecosystem around the video the video first platforms is for me it it has more signal alright instead of a commercial break i'm gonna tell you a quick little story so a few years ago i got really into crypto bitcoin ethereum i was all about it and i wanted to be at the center of the action i didn't want just wanna buy the coins i actually wanted to be you know on the edge i wanted to be a part of the community that was actually building this thing and look i'm not a genius i don't know not how to build a blockchain but i did realize that i could create a newsletter that would keep people up to date on what was going on in the world of crypto that's what i had wanted i wanted to know what's new what's interesting what should i pay attention to and i had friends that had sold their newsletter our companies like sam had built the hustle austin had built morning brew and they had sold their newsletters for tens of millions of dollars so i thought how hard could it be i launched a new newsletter called the milk crowd it was a daily crypto newsletter and it grew like wildfire we grew it from zero to over quarter million subscribers in a year partly because the content was good but partly because people were crazy about crypto and that was a good time to be doing this but the reality is that we wouldn't have been able to do that and build that business that we ended up selling a year later for millions of dollars had we not had bee bee was the reason we could do it in a year because if we didn't have that we would have had to build all sorts of custom stuff or pay expensive consultant do things or use five different tools and try to stitch them together bee hyped just did it all for us it was it is the best way to start and grow a newsletter and email newsletters was this little secret of the business world because they're free to send a free to grow and you could build this incredible relationship between you and the readers so check it out b is actually offering thirty percent off your first three months if you use the code m m thirty so go to b hive dot com and then use the code m m thirty to get the deal today there's a link of the description i was gonna ask you what niches you think like someone should exploit you said that was you you gave me the energy that was hard to answer but i'm gonna so i'm gonna like tease you up push me yeah i'm i'm definitely gonna push you but we're gonna ease push me push me listen yeah yeah so i'm sure that you have a list of like creators that have one to five thousand people and you see them and you're like oh they're they got something here and and and who is on that list is there anyone like that or a category like that i am i'm gonna preface this by saying like a lot of the companies that we've talked about here are very dude focused and so i i i wanna like also say that there's there's lots of categories that i'm i'm still i'm learning and getting better at and but one is everyday carry i think is a really interesting category everyday carry being handgun or does that include like mason knives and everything i think like knives i mean obviously we've seen what's going on with ridge wallet but like a creator that owns that like at what you keep what you keep in your in your in your pocket every day so yeah got it wallet watch key chain pens writing tables there's there's some creators out there that do it there's a really cool scaled company that sells knives called blade hq it's also a a company that's in that's in utah and they started creating content because they couldn't advertise because they were selling what is considered by the internet weapons and i think the the every the everyday carry creator there are some of them that are really kinda of popping up they haven't some of them haven't reached the scale you know what i i completely agree with that and if i was listening to this so i think that there can be a h key so h key was a watch blog that eventually i was on the board of holding we we we invested in a churn and i don't know it did the outcome wasn't as expected but it that doesn't that's right but i don't think that meant the business itself was bad i i don't know anything about with the company but i've had to guess maybe it was like they just grew too fast or something like that and you could correct me if i'm wrong but i think there's to be a h for fountain pens or a h for fancy pens i agree that's i mean i think those are the kind of things when we see those were like whoa you know like chest creators really interesting people who play chest passionate you know that's interesting yeah fountain pens any of the everyday carry stuff is great i also think two eight creators like second amendment right creators who are teaching who kind of do reviews on different guns and different vinyl and different h and things like that have a massive audience i obviously we've seen what happen with black rifle coffee yeah but the ones who are actually teaching about tactics and safety and different weapons and scope and and vinyl to to kind of carry it like those have massive audiences and have and some of them have built scale businesses and i think that that that those that's an interesting category as well that's the guy named mom i actually this is like the first time i ever said this word out loud just one of those words that i i read it and i know it but i'm afraid it so i don't know if it's hitchcock or hi okay forty five i thought maybe i meant like he's in oklahoma and he's like a redneck and he was born in nineteen forty five right and right he's this old man that you would only understand this if you live in the south or you live in the midwest like i am from and we all had grandfather like this they like war like overalls or wrangler jeans and like a fl will and they're pretty nice and stoic and you like to be around him well that's what this guy is except his passion is like every type of gun on earth and so he'll do like a machine gun and they'll say like oh this is a cute little machine gun let's see what he's about or he'll be like like a revolutionary and i don't know anything about guns but i just like watching yeah but it'll be like a revolutionary war canon or like the type of gun in a civil war where they like you know put the thing down on them than they load the black i i don't know anything about this shit or like a silence sir on a gun like what's that sound like and this guy have you ever seen this guy he's got eight million subscribers on youtube no i haven't seen oh my god it's like look looks like forms he's the bob ross of guns is what he is that's the best way to put it so that's awesome yeah there's and there's some newer cats on the scene like check out this t rex arms it was started by a couple brothers one one of them name was luke lucas bak and he's actually since broken off from t rex arms but it's like tactical second amendment cons creators massive firearms accessory business you know does some advertising but there's a lot of restrictions on that sells their own tactical gear has a total cult like loyalty and they're running a really scaled business now what cra is is is lucas is part of brothers and lucas and the brothers have split and lucas is now starting his own thing so i'm actually interested to see what lucas builds on his own and if if if t rex continues to grow but that's that's a properly scaled business alright so everyday carrie what else i mentioned chess i think that's interesting people are really passionate about that we've seen some really cool scale businesses come out of chess what's a chest business that's scaled chest dot com i mean that's a multi billion dollar company that's right that's right ji ji too yeah we we know that that's a really great category have you seen brazilian j ji two genetics yeah i live in texas mandate i feel like if you you you like everyone did that shit yeah look look up the brazilian j fan fan website this is a two sided marketplace started by a ji champion and a guy who kind of did commute like continuing education this is the scale of course guy is this is yeah the famous coach right right but what do you do it's a two sided marketplace so two instructors can upload their videos and then people can sort it through like i wanna learn how to do a you know rear naked choke or i wanna learn how to sp better or whatever they can pick coaches that they like the site can help kind of id coaches that you might be interested in and this total web one point o this is crazy and i can't say how much they're doing but it's a it's a good business what about you being the creator no i mean this is like the hardest thing i do and talking talking like seeing myself on the internet is like my least favorite thing i'm very excited to talk to you i think this what you wanna talk about is great but man i will never watch this because i just cannot watch myself i cannot be a no one watches myself like i i never seen them in my life and it's one of these things where you just you you have to have tough skin but like the the mormon family that i mentioned yeah they have a whole subreddit dedicated to mocking them and i met them and these people with the most people in the world were the it was the most loving family they took us in i felt like i barely knew them and i was their cousins were like the most loving family and people mocked them like crazy and then on our pod someone will be like you know you you look fat or skin than i thought or you look older they're are young and like we get mocked constantly no i think it's a very hard thing to do is like putting it out there and and and building their audience around things that they're really passionate about talking about and and yeah i love the idea of getting involved in a crater led business but right right now i really love the the thesis that we have at slow kind of like building out supporting them and matching capital to creators who are entrepreneurs who are really wanting to build build things at scale let's say someone said you gotta a quit slow right now and you have to go and join we'll give you like a draft like you get three you get three pissed of traders that you're like i wanna oh actual creators i wanna join that company and i want like a little stake in it from are three that you think are going to the moon you know we have the things called sarah's list sarah's is was my wife because she joined we like planned where she could join airbnb at a time where she could still have a very comfy gig like a forty hours you're not totally grinding and you get a lot of salary but your stock it's still ten x you know if there was a if there was a a a billy list for you and traders that you like what would the top three or four be oh my gosh i love what kevin and doug are doing at epic gardening and cars and bits like those are both humans that i like and would like to work with which which is kind of like my most important which if you asked me if i hypothetically would go and work with the creator like i would need to like love them as a human and love the category and those are both categories i can really get behind i just sold my car on cars and beds oh you did what car two thousand twenty amg e sixty three station wagon nice we happy with the price yeah i got what i wanted i hit my reserve oh good yeah i think that's awesome i only own old cars so now that doug is selling old cars as well i can sell my scout if i if i'm if i'm ready to move on it but i i that's great yeah yeah it's it's a good it can be a really good about buying experience for everybody okay you should follow sarah mca cali sarah mca acosta has a company called go clean go right now sarah is just like the queen of clean and people have been following her since like the pandemic and she's been building she's got a couple million subscribers on instagram i think two point four and i think she's got a real shot to build a a really awesome business so i think she's really cool but does she own house work dot com that's the that's what it i remember exactly what it is but yeah so she has people that love they dress up for her of halloween when she is a bad ass and she is really cool so i really like that business does she sell anything yet or is it just it looks like she doesn't even have like her own product so there is still like it looks like it's she's still a predominantly a media company she mostly makes revenue through yeah affiliate links and brand deals and stuff like that at the moment oh this is that's a good one i think she's great the queen of clean that's a good one i i don't know if that's what anybody calls her but i i just made i just said that dude this lady comes out with a a laundry detergent like that's gonna be the greatest thing ever forget it yeah i really like her i also really like this creator named go con so when he was like thirteen fourteen or maybe even younger he started making like minecraft youtube videos right and he built this massive audience and then he kind of like put it down focused on school got into mit and when he was in mit it was during covid so he started making videos about going it going to an ivy right like going to mit you know i think he has you you tell me i have it in front me was he have six million youtube subscribers yeah more oh my god i'm looking at his numbers how so is he in his teens so so he launched this no no he's post college and he's launched this thing called next admit which helps students write college entrance exams just teaches them how to who's chat no it teaches them like teaches them how to not right he has people that like read through them who have also been in the iv he reads through them and he basically like you know at i don't know eighty bucks a pop or something he helps you kind like do that but he's also kinda gives you a lot of information about how to think about the big story you're gonna tell when you wanna get into college about the thing you did in high school and now he's starting like sat prep courses and he just knows his audience and he knows that young first generation kid who wants to get into that iv not not bumps like you and i were in high school and he really has an opportunity to build a really scaled service business that really understands what kids are thinking and kids want when they're are trying to get into iv and they're trying to get it that's awesome so i like him a lot those are two really interesting you want and i'll and i'll wrap up by rec kit i'll give you my too okay good yeah yeah yeah please do have youtube should made first bro i sure while you were talking so the first one i mentioned this guy got a harder path to build a business business because clothes are harder but it's called the iron snail alright so the iron snail i started following this guy a while ago his background is that he went to film school and sean and i talked about this on a previous podcast that the creators nowadays the younger folks when you know when i was well still but even though i was younger and youtube was just getting started it was all about being authentic which meant like kinda scrappy and just thrown together now they're way more well produced and so this guy tells you both the history of clothing like why why jamaican are obsessed with clark shoes apparently there's some like some history behind that oh yeah but then he'll also do like here's the highest quality lowest price clothing ranked he'll say why are the why do japanese makes the best jeans on earth down right and so he'll like break down and do these really interesting and you know what's funny is like the the reason why he he's gonna win is because you can be a woman this is mostly men's clothes close it could be a woman cannot give a shit about clothing you cannot give a shit about history but you watch his videos because they're so well produced and because he's so funny he's hilarious that you're engaged and you're bought in right he is currently in the process of launching his own clothing line and so he's like doc he's documenting it clothing is like the hardest thing ever so it's gonna be a our business but and the second one it's project air so look project air it's this young guy named james who's in the uk and it originally started out with him building model airplanes so what started as just like a model plane turned into like an rc plane which then turned into i'm gonna build the world's fastest rc jet or i'm gonna build the world's largest rc jet or i'm gonna set the land speed record for an rc car and he's even done things like i'm gonna send a like a spacex i'm gonna send a rocket it up and i'm gonna have it land right back down just like spacex does except i'm gonna do it like in my garage so it's like became like hacker engineering stuff to where the stuff that he does is actually incredibly challenging math problems like he's yeah a proper engineer he's got one video where he built an rc battleship and he was like gonna have him fight and sink each other and so good i see this guy and i what do you think his bottom of the funnel is selling rc kits it's very similar to mark what's mark robe crunch labs yeah it's very similar where it's educational stuff and if i had to guess a large percentage of fathers like me who want my children to like i think it's cool but like i don't wanna build an rc plane and take it somewhere i'm gonna look like a pe file going and do in this shit would be weird but if i get my kid into it i all you know like how fun do this shit you know what be like you like like buy rc card take it to us how old you how'd your how old your a little one thing we got ways to go when you're ways but you just gonna bring them along in the in the pre yeah i'm be like yeah yeah look my kid's just a prop basically so i can give you a school yard with a with a really fast rc c car awesome and so yeah and so i think there's a bottom of the funnel for that to like build like model kits i will check him out yeah robe is done it right like that's i mean that business has exploded those guys have done a great job building out those that subscription kits and there's this entire there's this one guy his name's rem i think r e m i and this will be my last one type of rem rc c plane so check this out this is so strange so it's r a m i r c is well million followers tell me what the first video that you see can you can you tell me what that says rem rc plane world's biggest rc twenty nine million views on this one building an airbus this guy is building a freaking airbus so he's building remote control airplanes there that are the size of a of a olympic sized pool like these that's basically a fucking plane is what he's building and there's a really weird part about the story so they never truly call this out i think maybe they do occasionally okay but you're gonna see them on like an air like an airs strip and you're gonna see him take take off from a house and you're like does this guy is rem just a rich guy with a with a where what is going on right it's tyler perry house so tyler perry yeah his hobby is he loves rc planes and so he is this guy's patron and so this guy rem i don't know if he lives there or if he just spends some time there but tyler perry he him he just puts him in a para and takes some of the park he i don't know what he does but tyler perry has this massive hanger at his house except i bet you he has a hanger with real planes to be honest he's so wealthy but yeah he also has one dedicated to rc planes and you'll see it's so funny tyler makes cameo like you'll see them like basically i i know that tyler's paying for it because tyler's is always the one flying the plane and so these guys rem will like build the jets and just hand it to this like guy who they barely talk about or mention and it's tyler flying the jet because they like don't wanna wreck you know it probably caused a hundred grand for this jet yeah and this guy it's it's such a oh i guess they do call it out so flying planes with tyler perry but that's like basically it like they barely talk about it the fact that it's just this like got i think it's from dubai bro that's the end cool it's so this guy has a million followers and i think that's like another interesting thing so the the those are the picks yeah that's good this isn't a pick that that like my anyway you should check this one out have you seen hacks smith what's hacks smith dude these guys just dropped something called the smith blade oh these guys gonna tell it dude seven they just did seven million dollars on kickstarter in like a week thirteen well it says thirteen days ago i think i think they dropped it this time last week that's what i wanna say seven million dollars and it's just a box cutter it's a no it's a multi tool a multi school is like a swiss army knife right it's got like five different kinds of knives on it and like you know a swiss army knife is gonna have your toothpick in your tweezers and a couple different kinds of knives that have different edges and blades on it and this one is built with the kind of intention of everything that you would like these guys also sell lightsabers like you gotta check out their their youtube page oh my god and they have fifteen million subscribers yeah they they sell like lightsabers and and and all kinds of like what's lightsaber such as a flashlight a lightsaber have you seen star wars i i know what it is but i don't know how you know make you haven't seen light just know star wars you haven't seen star wars no i was like playing sports and stuff and going on out i was at i also played sports and i know and i know what star wars is i don't know what it is but i don't know how is it a flame it's a little it's a mini light saver bro check it out i mean they call those what's comes out of the metal part a piece of plastic light but that's just a flashlight no these are yeah they're bad flashlight you could call it that but they're you know they're hundred and fifty dollar canadian or they're three hundred and fifty dollars or they're five hundred dollars they're like back i bought a five hundred dollar laser pointer or the other day because apparently if i could try it on a piece of paper it's gonna light it on fire so i'm not saying like i'm above this y no no no no one's above this this is cool i'm i'm into it i'll tell you no no one's above it these guys just sold seven million dollars and multi tools in like a week so i really lives are still willing to have sex with us by the end of this episode billy man you're you're cool i'm really thankful that you came on and and and hopeful hopefully we'll stay friends but you're the man yeah man thanks for having me on i love what you're doing and you know happy hunting thank you that's it that's the pod i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a goal travel never looking back my friends if you like m then you're gonna like the following podcast it's called a billion dollar moves and of course it's brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the number one audio destination for business professionals billion dollar moves it's hosted by sarah chen spelling sarah is a venture capitalist and strategist and with billion dollar moves she wants to look at unicorn founders and fund and she looks for what she calls the unexpected leader many of them were underestimated long before they became huge and successful and iconic she does it with unfiltered conversations about success failure for your courage and all that great stuff so again if you like my first million check out billion 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