51吃瓜

the first story made me inspired the second story maybe be double inspired and the third sword just pissed me off i feel like i could rule the world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a road less try alright so i have a theme here for this episode have you seen this meme that's going around on twitter where it's like a stick figure he was like this he's at his computer and it says share a bit of lore about yourself so sir share some lore and the lore is as a sort of lore means you know the the epic backstory or the the sort of untold backstory of something and so i have three pretty insane lore stories that i wanna tell you i think you might know about this first person i it's it was new to me and i'm gonna call them we haven't done this segment in a while but they are the billy of the week and the billy of the week is a person named i'm dale gia do you know who that is no i don't think so alright so ama you are the ability that we here's the story so this guy is born in san jose he's born to like you know italian immigrant parents his father is murdered when he's seven years old so he's raised by his mom his mom rem remarried so his step father is in a business that you're kind familiar with a he was step father was a fruit stand wholesaler which is i think kind of what your parents do they're their wholesale adjacent for fruit something like that that's like fruit broker they are produce and fruit brokers yes so that's exactly what his family did and at age fourteen ama mad drops out of school decides to come work in the family business because he needs to help the family make money and this guy an incredibly sharp business operator and so he joins the business he ends up just really taking over the business and really revamp it to the point where by the time he's in his mid twenties the business has done so well they're they're selling fruit all throughout california now and he's able to sell his share of the business for hundred thousand dollars that doesn't sound like much this is the equivalent of a few million dollars maybe two million dollars back then this is like in like nineteen hundred so he does that and he's he's thinking about what's next and he decides you know i wanna give back to my community a little bit he volunteers to be on a board of a bank and when he's at the bank he notices something he doesn't like and he notices that the bank would basically lend money to the people who didn't need it and deny money to the people who needed it and so he's like you know the bank was all about underwriting you know sort of the least risky loans it could do so i was lending to very very wealthy people with a lot of collateral but there's kind a small business person who needed it was not getting it he then decides to create his own bank he's like you what i'm gonna make my own bank that's going to serve the little man the common man and he calls it the bank of italy so he opens up the bank of italy in san francisco in the north beach neighborhood which is a strange name that's that's kind of a yeah of italy right haven't heard of it whatever yeah but but that's that's his heritage somebody's from so he starts doing this and this is nineteen o four now in nineteen o six something happens in san francisco which is a devastating earthquake devastating earthquake happens and one of the weird things about the earthquake was that the earthquake happens that the and a lot of people didn't have earthquake insurance but they had fire insurance so what people were doing was earthquake hits they would then like they're building on fire because they wanted to get a payout from the the from the insurance companies that way so san francisco has ruined and the the narrative is basically like that's the end of that city but while most banks basically just shut their doors literally seal their vault some melted shut ama goes in as soon as the earthquake is happening the fires are happening and he basically takes all the money out of the vault he doesn't want loot to come and take the money that his customers have stored there and he puts it in a like a fruit wagon he puts it under like a box of oranges and he gets it out of there and like two days later a week later basically when all the all the banks are shut in san francisco in ruin he pops open his bank again by the wharf on a table with just a basically a wooden plank and he's got his box of cash basically and he says we're back we're open for business if you need a loan just come to me where did the original money come from by the way so he had sold his food stand business and then he raised five hundred thousand dollars equivalent about five million dollars today he from kind of friends family people who we had met during his time as a businessman in the fruit business and the business was i will lend out money to qualify or certain people and they will pay me eight percent interest or something like that depending on their the their the situation his motto or what do you want it was basically all the other banks are serving the elite the big business wealthy individuals but what if you were like me what if you were a fruit peddle what if you're a dock worker you're a seams you know forget and so he's basically like if nobody else is gonna bank these people i will and he's his job is to serve the everyday man and the everyday woman now this all sounds like good marketing speak but there's something kinda interesting about the way this guy has done this which is that he you know i'll tell you this in a second but as this thing becomes more and more because that's what he never pays himself more than fifty thousand dollars year in salary now you might say alright well he doesn't need salary he's gonna own the bank he also doesn't own any equity in this bank and so he he just decides that this should be owned by whoever wants to be anybody should be able to be shareholder i don't want the power concentrated in me so i don't own any of this so he creates bank of italy and he starts lending up money and he's lending it often on a handshake no contract and often with no underwriting because these are people that didn't have a lot of assets to go with but he believed in the people in his community okay so it sounds similar to his other like italian con cousins tony sop i think they would lend money on a handshake so but this guy are you saying it's an iron fist yeah i was like are also to the everyday bad who just needed a little something that's something like right away so you're saying was he actually ben malevolent yes he's actually ben evelyn so which is the why this is kinda like lore right that's actually kind of a crazy door because ever till now everything so far has been something that every business ty who would say but then actually you know they're basically creamy pink so this guy the real deal pietro is the real and when the when the fire happens and everybody wants and and everybody else ran away he decides to give loans to people on no collateral no contract and the crazy thing about this is during that period that one year when the after the earthquakes of the fire happened and he's the only guy lending money out and he's doing it with no underwriting no nothing no contracts even he ends up getting paid back every single loan every penny of every loan gets get get ended up getting paid back so he did not lose money on a single loan which is kind of a crazy sort of act of good faith in humanity which is kinda crazy so wow he does that two days after the earthquake not a single loan defaults and he'd then starts get innovative again remember he's good operator and so he realized realizes look at that time the bank business was a local business you would open up a bank you would serve the people that are in your geographic radius and that was sort of it he realizes that you know the because of the way he did his fruit business in california he was selling fruit all up and down the coast of california and he's like it sucks to have different banks in every place because i can't expand so he becomes the first guy to do the bank branch model so he's like we're gonna have local branches in every place i'm gonna figure out how to sync the the ledger in the back right i'm gonna figure out how to make sure all the balances are are kept up to date i'm gonna make sure that we sort of have a local model but a central headquarters that's able to do this expansion and he he keeps he expands all throughout california so it becomes very very successful he's basically pioneering interstate banking he helps fund a bunch of interesting things so the california like agricultural boom so he's providing credit to all the farmers the vineyards all the stuff the food distributors like those are the people he knew he meets this entrepreneur again he's trying to serve he's trying to bank the people who are not qualified so he meets this entrepreneur got this crazy idea to create a film even though this guy's never created films create a film that's completely animated just drawings he's gonna turn drawings into a movie and so he says you know this fellow walt disney i believe in you and even though he'd been rejected by else he funds and finances personally actually and this not even of the bank walt disney's snow white the first you know disney film no shit is the first full length animated film nobody else would do it there's these crazy guys in san francisco that say we wanna build this bridge a big giant bridge and he says you know what even though all the other banks have deemed this too risky he funds the golden gate bridge and over time he ends up merging with another bank called the bank of america and re rebranding the bank of italy elite bank of america and creates bank of america which becomes the biggest bank on earth and even while it does that he still never takes more than fifty thousand dollars a year salary he owns zero stock in bank of america his family does not you know inherit this giant fortune and he dies in nineteen forty nine not owning a single share bank that he founded and his philosophy was that serving the needs of others is the only legitimate business what a badass story that was really good good job that's that's what a baller that's absolutely insane so it wasn't like a sam alt like oh i don't own any shares type of yeah you just do this yeah i just i just love it it was but it was that that was real so yeah well walt disney said about him and he says he goes i'm a day old that man that man gave us oxygen when we needed to breathe so crazy he started it in the north beach of san francisco the famous italian neighborhood of san francisco this is really cool i and i think if i remember correctly is this still the case doesn't bank of america they used the logo of him pulling fruit or something like that which i i've doing i i don't know about i ever seen like a a famous low a famous logo of or like they've used this logo before of a guy like pulling stuff and and another one interestingly is wells fargo wells fargo was started in san francisco as well and they started as a i think they i think that the nineteen o six earthquake i think also helped their business thrive this is cool that's cool i i wonder if there's another example of someone who truly like founded something and actually did not benefit financially from it in this like in this scale i mean what are the odds that there's a founder of a company that's worth more than three hundred billion that did not do it for personal profit and took no share in it took no took no wealth out of it that's i mean that's gotta be it's gotta be number one alright i read a ton i would say almost a book a week and the reason i read so much is because my philosophy towards reading is i wanna see what work for the winners that i love and what strategies they use and then i wanna see what mistakes were did they all make where were the common flaws that they all had and i just wanna avoid that and so hub hubspot asked me to put together a list of the books that have changed my life so far in two thousand twenty five and i did that so i listed out seven books that made a meaningful difference in my life and i explained what the difference that they had on me or what actions i took because of the book and then also i listed out my very particular ways of reading because i'm pretty strategic about how i read and how i read so much and how i remember what i read and things like that and so i put this together in a very simple guide it's seven books that had a huge impact on my life and you can scan the qr code below if you wanna read it or there's a link guys know what to there's a link in the description just go ahead and click it and you'll see the guide that i made so it's the seven books that had a massive change in my life this year so far and then also how i'm able to read so much so check it out below i've heard a john bog yeah vanguard so john bo there's this thing called i originally learned about them because there's this thing called bog heads it's like a have you ever been a bog heads dot com it's a forum where people discuss financial advice or yeah investing and the general thesis of bog heads is exactly what i buy into which is just super boring just buy an index fund john bog and this is all the top of my head so i could get some of this wrong but john bog founded that so he created the thing called the van vanguard group which created one of the first v index funds and that is now v and v v t which are the two largest and it's something like a trillion dollars in assets or something insane like that and john bog owned a portion of it but i think when he died i think his net worth was like fifty or a hundred million dollars compared to the trillion dollars in au that the company has and so not the same as this bank of america guy but a little bit of a similar like kinda had a robinhood hood type of eye well you you did one on chuck fee who gave it away which i think is is you know simpler but i mean i've heard of a lot of people who give it away i've never heard of anyone who built it and never took anything from from day one i think that's like that's pretty remarkable and you saw this story on twitter where they're the that was it the lore well i was on the most interesting man in the world's profile be twitter yeah sheila and he was talking actually about lloyd of london how during that he was he was telling a story more about lloyd of london which is about during the when those fires happened lloyd at the time people were a little bit dis of like an overseas insurer and lloyd of london said pay they they instructed their their team pay all claims in full regardless of what coverage they had and this just this restored and and they put an incredible amount of trust in lloyd of london and give them an incredible reputation and so in times of trouble you know trouble is opportunity and they they sort of saw the opportunity to step in and be the most trusted part when everybody else was trying to deny as many of the claims as possible even ones that they really should have paid out lloyd went the exact other way and that helped build their reputation and then at he had a footnote at the bottom that this is similar to how bank of america started and i thought that's interesting i didn't never never really heard the story i wouldn't started reading about it so i think about these moments all the time these moments where the data says to do one thing and everyone says to do this one thing and you choose to do the opposite and it doesn't make sense and it somehow works i've had many opportunities in my career to take those chances and i basically never do like like very very seldom them because when you're up against those situations it's it's you need courage you need you need to be a little crazy you need a bunch of you need a bunch of that and like for example i think jeff bezos has this story where he where he was like yeah the data shows that we can raise prices and we will just make more revenue but that that's i mean nothing will change should people are just gonna continue buying and then employee was like why don't you do this he's like because we said we're gonna be the low low cost provider like we said you wanna like go to buy everything from us at at a low price so i don't care with it i don't care what the data says the mission is the mission and there's all these i've i've heard a a variety of stories like this that i'm right incredibly inspired by have you ever had an opportunity to take one of these moments and you actually took it or you typically follow the data so i have i have two too mini stories i and i can't go to too much detail because i i've never talked about but they're really down these companies but by e commerce company when the tariffs hit and trump started raising tariffs on all the countries and you know one country goes to thirty percent in china goes to a hundred fifty percent and we're is pretty crazy like imagine you're selling something that typically let's just round number so let's just pretend something call it this ball let's pretend this ball cost you know a dollar to to make and you sell it for three dollars okay but then all of a sudden you made these in china now this ball no longer cost a dollar it costs still cost the dollar but that you have a hundred and fifty percent extra tariff which means now this ball costs you two dollars and fifty cents so you can no longer charge three dollars for this right to make the same you know margin you this ball now needs to cost whatever six seven dollars and so everyone in our space started raising prices so one company raised price of the second company raised price and and they all did it like back to back because it's kinda like oh they took the bullet already now is the time neck of friday news dump like let's all raise our prices and we were about to do it the ceo of our company wanted to do it and then i was like what if we just do the exact opposite like what if we just don't raise the price at all like not to cut the price because that would be like suicidal but like let's let's not raise the price and so i wrote out this like long message kinda like this like copy sort of thing like hey guys you know blah blah almost like a bit like a like a like a prank basically something hey as you know this is the tariff situation you know this was a reality of the situation is this i just wanna let you guys know like we're not raising prices and i was in never and literally the crowd roar on social media thousands and thousands like people sharing this in other communities and other groups being like this is the type of company to you know respect and i'm like oh my god this is amazing pat on the back turns out if you just give away me people love you i get robinhood out here man and then three months later i'm like looking at p and our margin has dropped to three percent we have a three percent eb margin with five percent or stuff like that and you know i wanted it to be fifteen or twenty percent and i'm like why do we fix this and it's like i guess we gotta raise the prices and i'm like i trying figure out how to go back how to go back at this point and raise the prices now because it just doesn't make any sense to run this business at these costs yeah it is so this is the hard part i'm referring to this is what it this is this is the hard part so i took the short term like roar of the crowd and to be like god everybody loves it when i give away dollar bills for seventy cents this is i'm the man i'm a genius and now i'm like oh god this what's the second time the second was a little bit different which was one of my other companies we had a situation where the business is going great it is actually a slightly different situation but the principle of trouble is opportunity so this wasn't a pricing giveaway stuff but it was like business is going gang and then adversity hits something happened a competitor did something and then all of a sudden change the dynamics and now we have to figure out what's going on and as we're figuring it out like it definitely in the moment feels like absolute like it feels like trash you wake up and you can you wake up and you're just like oh my god like my business that was so great yesterday now like i was so hopeful and now i'm absolutely hopeless like we all know startups of this roller coaster even knowing that doesn't quite prepare you for when you go from that peak and then the roller coaster starts to drop and just at this moment where we were like okay one mindset here is damage control so minimize the amount of bleeding that happens here but before we go into just like minimize damage mode let me just ask a question like is there a way where we come out the other side of this much better off like is there a lloyd of london moment here where we could do something that on the surface might sound a little crazy a little unorthodox but in a time of trouble when everybody else is doing x what if we just did why like would that work is there a possibility for that and so again i can't like go into too much of the detail here but i think it led to a slightly different mindset of like actually you know what i think when we come out the other side of this we're gonna not just be stronger because we we survived but like i think there's a thrive possibility here if we just nailed x y z and we never would have even figured this out had this not happen right and everybody else went this everyone else went left but if we go right i think we might end up being like we really have separated ourselves from the pack and so we'll see how that one plays out but you know i i just sort of always remind myself which is like within every disadvantage baked is a small potential advantage if you could figure it out right and that trouble is opportunity so the the natural reaction in trouble is that trouble is problems trouble is pain and yeah there might be some challenges that might be some pain but trouble is also opportunity if you are have your eyes open during the trouble to figure out where is the opportunity so we had tim ferris on the other the day have you one of the most suggested books that he has or that he recommends to others is the twenty two immutable laws of marketing have you ever read that book i've never actually read it now i started reading it this weekend because i'm just i i wanna learn and he was just on and whatever and it's only a hundred and ten pages it's very short and it's very easy and one and it's written by these two guys that are marketing consultants whatever and they have a lot of wonderful clients so you kinda trust them but they give you twenty two laws not to break and one of the laws refers to basically the idea of when everyone is going one way it's significantly better and easier for you to not try to be better than them but to be different and one frame one framework is to be the opposite and you call you call out that opposite and when you call it the opposite the thing you you you can't insult the the other thing you just have to like objectively say what it is so for example they talk about a two different mouth washes one was list arena i forget the other one but the other one was the second place player and they're were like well instead of going after list and like mocking it we're just gonna say list makes you smell like you just left the doctor because it's like of clinical use and whenever we are the opposite this is the one that actually tastes good and so they're not exactly saying one's better or one's worse they're just saying this is what this is and then we are the exact opposite and it gives you all of these laws to follow it's an amazing book but i'm reread it and what i'm learning is that what you're describing is a marketing problem and how most problems in business are marketing issues and i didn't really think about i didn't really think about that until recently until i started reading this and how perceptions reality and so like the truth or the there is no objective truth as to what products are necessarily better or worse it's about what we think is better and so it's this book is really good you should reread it because what you're describing is like it's sort of like when you reread the the forty eight laws of power and you like see like oh this person is committing this like they doing this like you could do the same thing we you new in the matrix moment but you see the code you're like oh okay yeah it's pretty cool he's like are you so you telling me i'll i'll be able to dodge bullets like i'm telling you when you're ready you don't have to right it's like basically if you understand psychology at a certain level then you're able to make less you're able to do less work and have a better result i used to i don't know if you remember this at the office we used to come to monkey inferno we used to have a giant poster that i made where it was three triangles and then it was a picture of a ugly circle and it just said different is better than better for sure i i pay this for our team because like we're always just trying to say how we're better than everybody and everybody says they're better and everyone's trying to be better we're all trying to one up themselves the only thing have to focus on is say how we're different the public can decide if that's better for them right maybe you want the mouth watched stuff really clinical maybe you want the mouth of us that taste good right like what do you want well our job is just to highlight the difference and and it's really hard to be better than something that's been out has more funding more people working theirs been out for twenty extra years like it's really hard to topple the incumbent with a with a better product when actually you just have to be a significantly different product that will be way better for a certain set of customers hey let's take a quick break you know hubspot helped tumblr solve a big problem tumblr needed to move fast they were trying to produce trending content but their marketing department was stuck waiting on engineers to code every single email campaign but now they use hubspot customer platform to email real time trending content to millions of users in just seconds and the result was huge three times more engagement and double the content creation if you wanna move faster like tumblr visit hubspot dot com alright back to the show alright so the second one alright the second one is modern day so we went you know whatever hundred thirty years ago now we have a today situation that kind of inspired me i think it'll inspire a lot of other people too so do you know who do you know who preston thor is preston thor i don't think so you may have seen this story because it was going viral recently but here's the story so i see this headline that there's a guy who's a software developer he's an engineer except the weird thing is that he's incarcerated right now he's an he's an employee and he's a he's a software engineer for them but he's incarcerated in a prison in maine and he has been for a while and so was like how did this happen what is the story here and so the story is pretty crazy basically this guy grows up he's seventeen years old he's a computer geek he he's you know sort of always like he's torrent music and movies he's doing what a lot of people were doing you know a lot of us who were on our computers and when we were teenagers not me of course for anyone listening but you know others and you know somewhere along the way he he this is what he says he goes i get kicked out of my house about my parents for biggest stupid seventeen year old the kids are but instead of being broken homeless on couches i come back i'm ap and i beg mom and dad to let me back in that i'm sure was their plan and it worked the problem was i stumbled head first into the into the dark web where silk road you you know pre silk silk road of internet wholesale drugs and he's like there's was a place where you could buy chemicals from you know for pennies from sketchy companies in india and china and canada and holland and they would sell bulk so instead of just being totally ap and reformed i ended up going off the deep end and suddenly i'm making tens of thousands of dollars a week by the eight you know by the age of eighteen nineteen years old selling drugs that i'm buying wholesale so he's a you know so what he buying buying like md mma could've weed stuff like that okay alright he was buying that and he was selling it that's so twenty he gets arrested for the first time they catch md mma coming in the mail from vancouver they catch some weed coming from california and because of the weed he ends up going to prison and so he goes to prison goes for a couple of years and he gets out and here's what he he goes a few later i leave prison was zero dollars in my pockets because lawyers and comm expensive and nobody pays you nobody pays what they owe you when when you go to jail and so then i'm i'm get out and i'm living in a halfway house it smells like crack smoke filled with parole officers and junkie and i'm left with a difficult choice i can continue to live here and walk every day to a temp agency hoping to get a ten dollar an hour manual labor job but i don't have an idea or a social security card at this point or i could go to new york go see some old associates and come back home after a week with ten or twenty thousand dollars in my pocket and i could spend my time living in a comfy comfy luxury hotel until i get my get back on my feet and rented an apartment i chose the latter and obviously i was back in prison a short fourteen months after after a short fourteen months of addiction in misery where's is he writing this on his blog on his blog it's called my story and he says i've incarcerated now with this sentence since twenty seventeen and he says the following he goes i came in with a terrible attitude a terrible outlook on life outlook on life and no hope for my future i've spent i have spent he's spent three of the ten years that he's been there in solitary confinement so twenty two twenty three hours a day he and he writes parenthesis ten percent of my life question mark and at some point i truly became one of the people that people looked at me and saw when i first came into prison at twenty they would ask is this your first bid and he would say first i'm not coming back here and they would always laugh the older heads would always laugh everyone says that but everyone comes back and sure enough i did and so he talks about how he's there and during the pandemic he just he got lucky that he happened to be at this prison in maine that has his program where you can both enroll in a in college coursework while you're in prison but you can also they also gave him limited internet access so some some prisons have this college kinda coursework that you could do to try to learn to better yourself but very few have the internet access so he gets on he immediately blows past the he gets hooked on programming and he blows past the college course where it starts doing starts becoming self taught and just sort of gets absolutely that's fourteen fifteen hours a day he spends learning out to code learning about ultimately like databases he becomes a huge open source contributor to projects and people don't know because they just see his open source code they don't know his back stories so they they reach out with a job offer and then they find out about him well one company who did that was willing to actually employ him and so for the past few years he's working a full time job from prison and he pays ten percent of his wages to i guess like whatever he has whatever he owes or has to pay back and then the rest you know he keeps and he's like become this kind of inspiring figure and i just thought that was this is kind of an amazing example of you know doing what you want you know of of making the most out of a otherwise pretty bleak situation he said following quote well when you wanna google them his linkedin came up first and he he's employed that at torso is that right t yeah wow okay and so what do you say so he had this one quote that i really like so he goes there was one day after spending a few years where i had an epiphany i started questioning everything about my life i no longer knew why i had accepted the former identity and situation none of it made sense to me anymore and i decided i was no longer okay being where i was or who i had become this is fantastic this is a great sign it says on linkedin he gets out this year i know i'm excited for him i'm rooting for him this is the this is the the new serial for me so so i thought this was pretty inspiring i do have one more and this one is a a a different lore story i hope this by the way if you know if you're connected to this guy he works said is it tu i don't know what that company is that a big reputable company i had never heard of him before this so you know they've gotten a lot of pub from this but they're they're basically trying to rewrite sequel light is what i picked up if you're if you're somehow can get connected with this guy i'm not sure if he's allowed to watch youtube or whatever i would love like see him comment in north let me tell you something not only is he allowed he restricts himself to one hour a day of youtube entertainment and the rusty he spence code he's got more self control than you were reit they're just like us yeah yeah he did a podcast recently so i saw him on a podcast from prison and i really wanna get him on here so if anybody he can make that happen or knows him or can get us connected please do we'll preston if you see this comment on the youtube in the youtube comment section that'll be fine and we'll actually pin it and we'll see if we can get you on 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 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 alright so i gave you one the bank of america guy the generous titan the the guy who builds the the biggest bank in the history of planet earth takes no equity and essentially no salary in the in the process and does yeah some one of these sort of bank mo who says all the right things but then actually did all the right kind of amazing he's about that life alright so then when preston inspiring guy rising up from from you know his circumstances and doesn't let the past dictate the present okay now the last one is a guy named stefan thomas and this one is a different different sort of lore story that just kind of also captured my imagination and sort of broke my brain a little bit alright so this guy stefan in two thousand and eleven he he's like a program i think in two thousand eleven he gets paid to make a video about bitcoin and again in two thousand eleven so you know bitcoin i think the white paper was like o nine thing i think bitcoin started in twenty ten this one year into bitcoin and he makes an educational video about bitcoin he gets paid seven thousand bitcoin to do it and seven thousand bitcoin at the time is like ten grand basically it's couple it's like a dollar or two per bitcoin who paid him like who if you're a year in if was it like satoshi i mean was it like a i don't think so i think there was like you know some early companies that were you know interested in or or you know making educational content about this so that same seven thousand bitcoin is today worth four hundred million bitcoin but of course that assumes you held now the crazy about stefan is he held he held the whole way now you'd by wondering how does this guy had this incredible you know belief this conviction this foresight is he an investing genius does he have the self discipline of a navy seal like how did he get himself to hold all the way up to you know bitcoin today hundred eighteen thousand dollars well the answer is he couldn't sell he lost the password to his bitcoin because what he did was when he got to bitcoin he stored it he did a best practice he stored it on a hardware wallet the iron key at the time the most secure way to hold bitcoin and he writes the password down to his iron key on a piece paper folds it up puts it somewhere safe problem is he forgets about it because at the time it was a little bit of a smaller thing and it's you know seven ten k cool i'm gonna hold this so we'll see what happens life happens and he loses the piece of paper is iron key a brand or is that like a yeah protocol so it's a cloud brand wow company that that makes the it's the name of the device what let's say great great product it works yeah exactly also great marketing for his product in a way i actually that i take the back pretty terrible of working this is my fear with hardware wallets in general is you lose you you are the security vulnerability you lose the password so he loses the password and he goes and he tries to guess guess what it was guess is once guess is twice the problem is iron key has a limit he only get ten guest so he has a four hundred million dollar treasure sitting on a device that's in his house just sitting on his desk and he can unlock it and he tries everything he tries to remember he tried looking everywhere for he tries to remember it he has h done to him to try to see if the h can bring it back out of his his mind nothing's working he has now tried eight of his ten password guesses oh me two left as of as of right now now that alone is already just like oh dude what a it's like a party story it's gets weird dude have you seen them the old tv show twilight if you're seeing that like there's a famous out of the episode or no no no this is from the fifties there's a there's a very famous episode where this guy like all i wanna do is read all day and there's a doom apocalypse the world like ends and everyone dies and he's all by himself and he's like finally i get to read all day and then he's walking to go grab his favorite book then and his glasses fall off and mistakenly steps on them and it's like one of these like be careful what you wish for type of thing and this is this is it this is like it's like when you ask the genie for something but you weren't specific enough edit like this is that story that sucks it's almost worse it's like he had that he found the genie and lost the lamp it's actually what kind of what happened here and so he he's got this genie he's got this lamp got four hundred million dollar treasure sitting on his desk which would be one are the biggest like found treasures sunken you know think about sunken treasures all around the world or discoveries of you know diamonds or cold or things like that this guy just got one in his house it's crazy so now he's got two guesses left and this was as of twenty twenty one and there's this team of basically like crypto cinematographer slash treasure hunters who heard about this story and were like we're gonna try to break the iron key so they start working on all these methods now the what they're what they're gonna do they weren't able to figure out how to actually like just pick the lock to open it without knowing the password but they took a different approach they're like can we get rid of this ten password limit right if we can get rid of the ten get ten guests limit we can guess an infinite number of times so what they do is they figure out how to use a laser to cut open the usb without triggering the anti tampering devices then they use nitric acid that they put on the thing to like get rid of another defense and these guys actually have done it they figured out how to turn the iron key into an infinite guess situation oh away when did this happened like recently this happened a few years ago three or three four years ago but here's the problem stefan doesn't wanna work with them why he he goes i made a handshake deal with two other groups to try to crack this and i wanna honor that and they're like what and so the the quote from these guys is we've cracked the iron key we just haven't cracked stefan yet oh they have the solution and he won't use it because he made a handshake agreement two other groups promising them a portion of the of of the proceeds if there's a never go around wait so it's seven thousand it's seven thousand oh what so that's seven hundred million dollars yeah now it is yeah so that there's there should be enough to go around right where you could have like three parties to work on this there should be more than enough in fact there's also other things that he could do he could just sell it today for a guaranteed payout to any of these groups right like you could be like i'll take fifty million today and you guys go ahead if you crack it you there's i think it's eight hundred million total or whatever eight hundred million is is you know minus fifty you can keep seven fifty if you can crack it but if you don't the risk is on you so he has like all these options and it's so bizarre to me that he is not taking any of the fantastic options that are in front of him isn't it this just weird this is weird is he wealthy complete non nonsense what's his like i'm looking him up it looks like he it made me mad to be honest with you the first one the first story made me inspired the second story maybe double inspired and the third story just pissed me off is stefan rich or or anything like that like is he a big deal i don't know if he's i mean i think he's done well he has done other stuff in the realm of crypto so he started this company called coil that was like trying to do something interesting in crypto failed he now is a creator of inter ledger which is was like a kind of like a open payments protocol he's trying to make yeah it's kinda weird i mean he's not eight hundred million dollars rich like the you know i think this would be the the greatest thing he's ever done do you have any friends to have like like for example my roommate james was was like a hacker early on and he was hardcore in the space and he like was doing the typical stuff like he was buying things like as soon as bitcoin was accepted in this weird experimental way he was like hell yeah let's do it and he like you know spent a thousand bitcoin on whatever do you have any friends who have done crazy things like that i have a friend that lost two hundred bitcoin i know that i know personally just which today like you know and every year it just sort of updates how bad that loss is so now it's a twenty three million dollar loss he was kinda kicking himself when that was like a you know two hundred thousand dollar loss or whatever at the time but he's like like he's like i mine two hundred bitcoin it's on a like a a a a a hard drive somewhere i think i i think i threw out the hard drive i think i threw out the laptop like it's gone and insane there's another guy that's got the story where he his usb are he he his hard drive his bitcoin hard drive was in a landfill the her he was trying to search for they were they wouldn't let he's like i will buy the whole landfill and tried to purchase the landfill and they turned them down and this guy just like trying to get access to this to this landfill to go search for various hardware so that's it that's what i got for you three stories that's just my gift to you this week sam alright that's awesome that's great that's it that's the bottom i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a 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 dollar moves it's brought to you by the hubspot podcast network again billion dollar moves alright back to the episode

so this is like a can water brand a high school basketball player and a tiktok meme walk into a bar and comes this and and this is the the story of that i feel like i could rule the world know i could be what i want to put all in in like a days on on a road less travel i just hype you up like i'm dana white in the u because we have here the most entertaining man in business the guy with the most ill career he started teach for america he created the viral hit game draw something and sold it for hundreds of millions of dollars he worked with ari emanuel in the talent world that he built the best amateur basketball league on the planet in affected culture and now he's here today telling us about his new ventures his new brands new things is he's he's building along the way and how to do it so dan welcome you're the reigning defending undefeated most entertaining man in business i appreciate that you know sometimes people go nineteen to know and then they don't win the super bowl so i gotta keep winning until i guess i'm in the grave so you are a teacher professor nyu and so is scott gallo who's the better professor and who has more street cr at on campus who's got bigger pull he's richer and more famous and i'm humble so i guess that's that's how guys okay so dude i wanted to talk to you because you texted us something and confused me you're building a water brand now well you've done this crazy water brand thing can you you gotta tell this story i don't think anyone even knows the story yeah kind of so this is like the unlikely story of like the fourth most followed water brand in the world on social media and so to take a step back i don't know if everybody knows what n is n is name image likeness it's like a revolution in college sports where you know for years players could not make any money reggie bush lost his he trophy people would lose their eligibility and then a year after we started our be oli and started paying players supreme court ruled and all of a sudden there was n so now every college and many high school players in america can make money the difference is they can get paid to play to sport but they can get endorsement deals and so forth their name you think about phase yeah if you think about it like you're in school and your roommate has you know is a rapper and has a song and your other roommate is a youtuber and makes money and you hoop or play football you can't make money it doesn't really make any sense right especially when the schools are making a lot of money off of those sports and so the players today give a sense of the scale of this so how much is an n n like top players top basketball players football players maybe a you know i don't know what cooper flag was making last year or you know a sec quarterback give me a range like are they making tens of thousands dollars a hundred thousand dollars millions years tens of millions what are the best players making through this i stuff so if you look at a top power five quarterback sec whatever seven to ten million dollars a year why a year a year right to play for one season wide receivers running backs best offenders a million to three million a guy on the bench two hundred and fifty k and like the nfl salary for a for a if you're a first round pick as a quarterback you would sign so caleb williams in twenty twenty four he was the number one overall quarterback picked he signed a four year thirty nine million dollar deal so he signed up deal that made paid him ten million dollars a year you're saying that college guys are making you know sort of that same range seven to ten while they're still in college they can absolutely make that by the way does this trickle down like if if i'm like a woman's lacrosse player somewhere soccer player and we're not powerhouse sec football blah are still you know hundreds of dollars a month doing local stuff with the car wash nearby like or are is everybody eaten or is it only the people at the top right now it's really the people at the top top top basketball players one to three million i have about four or five players who played in my league who are making over a million dollars in college and it's kind of a waterfall there is a there's a softball player in text who makes a million but it definitely it kind of falls off the cliff because those are the sports march madness on television football television that generate a tremendous amount of money for the schools and so this those are the sports that they wanna win at at the highest level and in fact a lot of n n legislation says like you you have to still support all of the other sports the olympic sports the women's sports the less popular men's sports right and and so forth and so but in women's basketball on the college level you think about n n you know there's all there's not a there's not a large number of of w nba teams and in fact there's only there's three rounds to the w draft and if you're in the second or third round you usually don't actually make it onto a team so if you think about from the women's side college basketball is a much more lucrative opportunity for them than the w nba because the path to it is just so small it's just a numbers game there's there's not enough so but our swimmers and la lacrosse players making hundreds of thousands of dollars currently they are not right okay okay so n n good thing for the athletes overall getting getting some money so now how does this take take us to you building this water brand in a very short period of time getting it to go viral making it one of the most followed water brands in the in the in the world yeah so this is like a a a canned water brand a high school basketball player and a tiktok meme walk into a bar and comes this and and this is the the story of that so to take it back you know we've this basketball league over time a lead it's the second most followed basketball in the world behind the nba is over twelve million followers and many many fans a lot of people watch the games and there's a player in this league tale kin that called tk k his initials he's gonna be a senior this year he's being recruited by louisville and kentucky and in yukon in a bunch of schools he's a great player and he's actually a great guy just like really level headed funny but just like works hard no drama great kid and so last year you know one of our teams is on a beach somewhere and he and this other player joking around and the player asks him some question and his answer is six seven you know so forth and he moves his hands like that it's line from a rap song by sc about two months later somebody text me from our team and says you know there's like millions of views on tiktok where they've taken his voice and they've said six seven and i'm like what and he hasn't done anything and we haven't done anything this kind of one off comment that he's make basically just kind of explodes all over tiktok and you get into kind of the the spring the default you know part of last year page backers you know how you're training six seven they're asking cooper flag how many hours of sleep do you get a night he goes i don't know sick seven and it's like and it's one of those things it's like new york real estate it's like every time you try to buy an apartment in new york you think it's so expensive it can't get any more expensive right and then a year later or like pal stock it's so expensive it can't get any more expensive and then it just keeps going up like it just doesn't stop and then you're like wow i should have bought that expensive apartment two years ago because it was so overpriced now it's twice as expensive and this is the same this dislike meme it keeps moving now on tiktok you know middle schoolers are going up to their teachers and saying what's twenty three a plus fifty four and the teacher's like sixty said oh six seven and it's the thing and it's like you explained to anyone over the age agent twenty one and they're like what does it mean and you're like it doesn't mean anything a week hold it up here i yeah i saw you drink from it you have one there hold it up real quick alright so you so you told me about this you were like dude we have this water brand that's exploding you sent me some of the the stats the about the growth of it and so i looked up the brand six seven i just and you were like yeah this player taylor kenny or whatever so i just assume he's six foot seven i didn't even think about it that was like two weeks ago then the last night nine i'm sort of preparing for this and i realized the kid's six one so my why is this called six seven i'm i'm thirty seven years well i'm clueless to this trend right i don't i don't leave my house let alone talk to a lot of like eleven year olds to figure out what what the memes of the day are so last night dude i'm watching literal powerpoint presentations explaining the origin of the meme it's a and how it started and why the hand motion and then the song the songs called like boot too or something like that that i don't even know what the song is from some rapper i've never heard and then the kids are going crazy with it and then just handshakes and then it's going viral and then famous people are saying it and then they're tricking their teachers into saying it and then there's a whole world of tiktok where the teachers are like okay guys if a student comes in and ask you a question and then the answer answer's is gonna be six or a seven be ready they're gonna say this and you're gonna wonder what it means and it doesn't mean anything but that's why they love it because it doesn't mean anything there's like no meaning behind this they just want you to ask and wonder and they just find it funny and and so it's like this meme where there's not even a satisfying backstory to it that's kinda what makes it cool you know i again this it's like so out of my realm that i i mean if you if you think about it at the core first of all it's the it's the like definition of post right it nothing means anything in into it in and of itself it's the meaning that we as sc to it which is obviously the generalized post modern condition and art and literature but also it's like what it really says is that like young people have an ability to impact culture and they can create things and they can mean things whatever they mean right and that's all about their power and their media as opposed to this idea of top down culture that we create right and they both exist stranger things exist as top down culture and six seven exist to something and it's like i get them to like every summer camp everything like that and every grown up being like i don't know what this means so tk k is like i wanna take advantage of this i should sell t shirts and i'm like god it's like there's gotta be something in life beyond selling t shirts and so you know he's trying to figure it out and we're trying to support him because it's really him he's a young entrepreneur he's the creator of it he's the face of the brand we're kinda like the back office in this and we just start talking about water and like why do we talk about water because water's just not that complicated and i i've tried to make a lot of products a lot of people have tried to make a lot of products five years ago i tried to make like protein rice crispy treats oh they were too chewy they were chewy enough the flavor wasn't this this couldn't happen and i'm just thinking like okay memes and trends don't last forever like tk what about you making water and he's like oh i i wanted to make an energy drink and i had to wanna make something else but i'm like the thing about water is like you don't like it's just water like let's go tomorrow you could be making this thing right and so it's just like you're not tasting it you don't need a formula or anything else like that he gets totally jazz i wanna make water he said it's gotta say you hack and family on it because that's my other phrase i'm like i don't know what that means that is not hard to do and so we try to find a water manufacturer for him and the designers stuff for people who are just listening on audio they can't see you because you know half people watch on youtube have broad audio could you just i'm not gonna profile you but if i was a police artist sketch you and i'm thinking about this kid who's how old is he's fifteen sixteen years old something like that he's seventeen i think yeah he's seventeen seventeen year old and can you just describe who you are the unlikely cofounder duo hero do duo of this i am in my late fifties and i'm wearing a button down colored linen shirt and i don't poop and i have no bars and i wear glasses and i'm not super athletic but i guess my superpower is i believe in young people and i'm good at listening to them okay grand like over overtime is a platform for them you know people are like over overtime is a hundred million followers in in that kind of demo and i always say i don't make the posts i don't write the captions i just create the platform for creative young people to reach other creative young people and i love culture and i love music and i love all these things and so my job isn't to make this my job is to build a platform for tk k to figure out how he can build this product that he wants to do and his family wants to do and just be like kiss right keep it simple stupid like just like really fuck little sport where the puck is going and then there's the people with the broom on the side they're just shaving the ice are like you just seasoning the ice for curling curling yeah on the ice shaver curling exactly alright so everyone talks about content and how you should do content marketing to get more customers the problem is that it's really hard how do you make something that blows up that goes viral that actually gets you customers versus what most people do they make something that's completely ignored but when i ran my last company the hustle i had to study this and i eventually made content that reach tens sometimes even hundreds of millions of readers and so we were able to dial in between what works and what doesn't and we made it fairly repeatable and so with the help of hubspot i made a guide called the twenty ways to craft irresistible content that looks at the books that i read to learn all this but then also the tactics the twenty different tactics the twenty different strategies that we use at the hustle in order to help things go viral so we actually got customers from the content that we made and so if you wanna create content that people actually read you can check it out there's a qr code that you can scan or you can click the link in the description not back to the episode and so i just say to our designers let's make a bunch of stuff tee k is like i like this i don't like this he doesn't have to be a designer and within eight weeks there's a water brand like there's a somebody in in michigan who's pumping out cans of water and everything else like that and tk is like here's a plan like we're we're gonna we're gonna launch it on june seventh you know why six seven right and so a word just like oh shit we got we gotta help and make this water around in eight weeks and so on six seven it just drops he makes a launch video it's just him messing around these from lexington kentucky with his friends and then he and a bunch of his friends and some are social people they just go to these basketball alternatives and they start giving it out and it just starts going crazy like every influencer every basketball of person is picking it up all of a sudden like there's five thousand ten thousand twenty thousand followers like a dad is offering a hundred dollars in cash to buy a cannabis but you can't really buy it anywhere because he's just made it we're just trying to figure it out we talked to him and we're just like where do people wanna buy this and he's like at the gas station so like if it were me and i'm some corporate executive i'm like we gotta go do a deal with pub we gotta go do a deal with whatever and i'm like the gas station was like yeah that's just like where we go buy stuff because you're sixteen you have a car i'm in new yorker so i think about bode day that doesn't really exists in the rest of the country and then you're always being driven by your parents somewhere to go play in some sports tournament and there's a gas station so he sneaks into a couple gas stations for the video and puts it in the shelf and pretends that he's founded it there and the account just keeps growing like you know kids start making their own commercials for it people start pouring it on each other like it's holy water and it's only been sold a couple of times and we just trouble website twenty five thousand people sign up and they're like i wanna buy this and that's as far as we've gotten we've have almost a hundred and fifty thousand followers some people are like oh you made a you know you made a liquid death for gen z for the urban crowd it's canned it's kinda gold i'm holding it up because you want people to it wants to look good on social media you wanna see people across the court but all it really happened was like there's a guy who's good at basketball he accidentally created a meme we supported him to make a product that was we could make fast and easy but was like not a t shirt we went out everybody who's a fan went crazy about it every grown up i talked to as kids or there like can you get my kids some of that six seven one they don't know how to get it and so i don't know we're on the thirty yard line i know i'm use a football metaphor the ten yard line and like how does it go from here so tk selling a hundred million dollars worth of water and twelve months we really figured that out he doesn't really know we don't really know we just made something big and now there's over a hundred and fifty thousand followers like if you look up most water brands they don't have that many followers and like all of the you know except for you know liquid death which is hugely inspirational and very successful and all kids mess with it and now every player is coming up to me and they're like dan dan i got this idea i got this idea for this product and i think what's cool is like number one it's like youtubers do this but athletes haven't really done it you know number two seventeen year old athletes haven't really done it and number three is like it has this whole overlap with n so now if you're trying to recruit tk k to come play at your school like maybe you're gonna buy ten thousand cases of six seven water and you're gonna make it red because that's your school colors oh yeah and you're gonna tell everyone buy this and tk is gonna commit to our school and it all is covered by nih there's no eligibility issues there's nothing else like that so you've unlocked this whole kind of creative super superpower and if you ask him like and you ask the people who support him from our team they'll be like six seven is in a water brand it's a movement it's a vibe it's a feeling like when you're just like having fun creating culture and everything else like that endless in his number is zero maybe six seven water in nine months is called double zero water because it's really just about the concept and all of that and so maybe the mean dies but it takes other shapes and forms or maybe he goes to the nba and he is another thing but you recognize the gold can and you recognize everything else like that so it's really like i'm talking to you in this process where like he's figured out a little bit we figured out a little bit but i can't tell you how you know pepsi is acquiring this for five hundred million dollars yet because everybody's baking it up as they go along and that's what i love about this you know we do a lot of episodes with people after the fact oh you sold draw something right and and you you'd made all this money can you go back and tell us what happened fifteen years ago when you started that business and hey by the way everything has changed and none of that will really work anymore but hopefully it gets some inspiration maybe a few nuggets i can steal from there that's typical podcast and then the other one that we do is like here's an idea i think it'll work i don't really know it's not like in motion it's not in flight it's just an idea and hey it's blue sky this is a very unique thing we i haven't i'm in the middle i yeah you're literally middle middle like at the you're just at the point where it's not nothing but it ain't done yet right and so i'm like oh that's interesting i've never actually talked to somebody at this stage of the thing of a fun brand like this so just to give this purse some perspective it's now we're recording this august fifth so it's been almost exactly what two months six the launch so six seven was was june seventh we're about two months in so if i'm just looking at instagram your success look at ig g tiktok but if i do if i just take instagram just for simplicity here for a second so like the instagram is almost at a hundred thousand followers for the water brand yeah okay let's just look at a few other water brands that i can think of just off top of my head alright das water eighteen thousand okay so you got five times more followers than das list aqua seven thousand followers and like you know there's literally like ten comments on a post so no engagement no nobody cares and there by the way there's like a full social media team that they hire like there's there's like half a million dollars of salary working on on their social media at all times at the minimum okay let's even think of okay maybe i'm picking on the the bose boring brands let's go to vitamin water right big eggs exit owned by big company now fifty cent was involved a long time ago they certainly gotta be big eighty one thousand you're bigger than vitamin water let's go and and literally let's say like the two months what the best part of this is the best part is like tk k this guy tom what's the what's the marketing plan what are we doing next tom's like dan what are we doing next i was like here's the marketing plan i'm going on m msn and like i'm just gonna talk like ben and shaw chan are gonna hook me up and some listener is gonna be like yeah i own five hundred gas stations call me up and i'm gonna put you in this and then when they write when i do the third podcast when i come back on in the year and it's like how i sold this how the seventeen year old entrepreneur sold this it was like i came on your podcast and then when we went to the moon yeah exactly you you need the gas station owner because i was gonna say we don't really have the whole like you youth culture stuff going for us if you want like a bunch of people who you know work remotely and wanna you know take a picture and put in slack they can do that but but yeah that i mean probably have five listeners who know everything about the beverage business see this is what you get this is what you get about media that most people don't right you're like cool i'm gonna go here because there's gonna be five people that either know everything about the beverage business they were the early distributor of this blah blah blah or they on a chain of like sixty gas stations they're a huge fan and they're like yeah i'm in and you're like that was a great hour of time for me to to do that and you know what tee k is gonna do as the as the founder of this brand as the basketball player he's gonna train he's gonna get buckets he's gonna commit to go to college and he's just gonna keep being him right that we'll just keep growing the brand which is what i love because of when i looked at the content it wasn't like some advanced brand strategy some like cool slick or anything it was literally this this kid who's obviously he's a great basketball player well it's even more likable about him he's not like a lebron where he looks like a grown man even though he's seventies he's night some man child he's like a child child like he like looks young he acts young he's a great dude not growing was body yet he can who he can dunk he can talk with some amazing things on the court but he's still got like a very young energy which is cool and so like just he's seventeen year old out there building a billion dollar brand that's not vibe coating yeah that's true that might be true actually okay so i wanted kinda steal what's replica about this now as so let's break down a couple of the elements here so the first is you were listening to the trends you were listening to the memes you're listening to the culture and you didn't sort of just write it off or be too busy to listen right you run a a company how many employees you guys have four hundred how much money have you raised for over overtime two hundred and fifty million dollars you you run a big ass business and for you to be like yes someone on my team was talking about how one player on one of our teams set a random thing and then some tiktok editors chopped it up and mixed it with a random song that like you know is not even like it's not like some huge not drake you know doing this yeah and you were like that's cool like let's let's talk about let's have a brainstorming session that's interesting to me is there like a principal or a philosophy you have that served you well that's that's like that i might be asking you know steph curry how do you how he's exactly do you shoot a jump he's like i know man i just do it i think there's a couple things one is like if i think about like it's like twenty fifteen twenty sixteen and i'm launching over overtime as an example i you know we start filming some players playing basketball in new york with some iphones or whatever and making some posts and all of a sudden kinda realized that like they're players that are getting tens of thousands of views and they're not even top hundred ranked players so my understanding is like here's high school basketball here's the top ranked players here's the people who aspire to go to sean's alma mater duke and play and hoop and everything else like that but the reality was the deeper i looked i realized there were all of these networks and sub cultures of young people who were connecting that had nothing to do with the grown up view of the world and everything from like i'd find one of them and then i'd be like who does this person follow and then i'd go through and i'd look at every single person who they follow and and so forth and so on so in a way culture is culture it just makes things but if you're att to it and social media is a cheat code for decoding it and you start to go in deep you can just observe and find these things it's like if i try to explain at the most elemental level i'll say anime like most half people in america have no idea what anime is but it's like once you and you're like cartoons what is the anime and then once you see it you realized that it's everywhere so it's like i remember the first time someone's like anime or whatever years ago i go on a trip to rome for vacation every t shirt in rome in the store has an anime character on it and then all of a sudden and then i'm sitting next to a kid on the plane and he's reading you know a graphic arm manga and i'm just like wait i didn't see it anywhere and now i see it everywhere and it's kinda like you're digging down the earth and all of a sudden you find gold and oil and all of these other things like that and then once you see it you just you assume that most people don't bother to see it and that's where your opportunity lies hey let's take a quick break you know hubspot help tumblr solve a big problem tumblr needed to move fast they were trying to produce trending content their marketing department was stuck waiting on engineers to code every single email campaign but now they use hubspot customer platform to email real time trending content to millions of users in just seconds and the result was huge three times more engagement and double the content creation if you wanna move faster like tumblr visit hubspot dot com alright back to the show there's actually a a a neuroscience nerd way of explaining this there's a a part of your brain that is made to do this as you call it particular activating system i'm basically what i learned about this it was pretty interesting so it i basically said look as a human imagine if you had if imagine just all the different field inputs that are coming into your your mind at any one time so your eyes like in this room right now there's a whiteboard there's a piano there's books there's this there's a guy sitting over there there's this light over here that's shining in my eyes but i need to be focused on you so really i'm telling my brain this is what matters don't tell me about that sticking out on the wall over there that's yellow if i look now i see it but like most of the time filter it out same thing with noises is a guy mowing the lawn i'm telling my brain not important ignore ignore if you're at a cocktail party there's a hundred conversations going on you're it just all sounds like noise to you until somebody says your name and then suddenly it's like well my brain was actually listening because i heard my name but i couldn't tell you the other ten things they were talking about because it was just chatter otherwise and so basically the brain is a fence system which just says y'all throw away ninety nine percent of all inputs you're not gonna need it we'll go crazy if we try to take it all in but there's a bounce at the front that's looking at the idea of every little thing that's coming in and say you get to come in and then the trick to life is when you you tell the bounce are hey add this to the list add anime to the list start paying attention let anime in then you start seeing anime everywhere this happens if you buy a car you're like oh i'm looking for like a bmw suddenly you'll just start seeing that bmw everywhere yeah it's not like it just appeared as always there you just weren't paying attention to bmw around you until it became high that point whatever was like my phone is listening to me right and you're like it might be but but what you're saying might be true too i i do this thing in my class at nyu where i'm like look around the room and find everything that's blue i'm gonna quiz you on right and then everybody close their eyes and i'm like name one thing that's read you only see the thing that you look for and then there's a ton of red things there but nobody sees them because they're looking for something else and in a way that's part of the reason why i've never been a a massive fan of business school or hiring mba because i feel like what business school does is it trains everyone to look for blue and what you as an entrepreneur building a company one is somebody who's whose focus isn't narrowed but who's incredibly wide and it they're like oh there's yellow there's red they're are all of these other things like that and we we tend to be like oh you've gotta refine your skills but like if your whole process is just seeing blue like you're never gonna see the other colors and then your ability to create or add value becomes extremely limited so there's a great story about this in the early paypal days i don't know have have you ever read like paypal wars or any of the early like paypal books yeah the couple of them are are pretty good one of them tells a story about basically that you had elon who had his company was x not like what twitter is say but he's loved this this idea of a company named x for a long time and he wanted to build a bank on the internet all your financial services your mortgages your loans you're checking your business accounts your credit cards everything on on the internet and he was he was right he was just like twenty five years too early right like that's happening today with ramp and mercury and other companies like that but he wanted to do it back then and he had to top down his view of the world and he just wanted to like make that thing come to fruition and it was like kind of not working very well but it was a big idea and he was obviously a really like relentless entrepreneur and then you had paypal which was this like small thing that was like hey you could email money to a friend but it'll sounded like v moe or like you know just like some little game you could play it didn't sound like transforming financial services using the internet's technologies and what they but the key to paypal success was not blindly following the top down sounds good on paper vision but it was somebody i think it was david tax somebody in the customer service department that was like hey you know we noticed that like all these ebay sellers are asking for like a a logo that they can put as a badge on their thing and you know legal like no they can't use our logo and then other people are like wait why do they want a logo they're actually like interested their curious what's read over there it's like they want a logo because they're trying to say we take paypal and like they looked at their data and they're like wow the people who actually use paypal are all ebay sellers and like then it turned into their strategy and eventually they changed the name it wasn't even became paypal and that became the killer killer app essentially that made it a billion dollar company and i feel like this idea of you start with a vision hard to start without a vision but if you stay blind and you're not looking for clues of what's actually happening like what you're talking about where you're like i don't know look at culture i don't try to apply my view of what should be happening or what what is good and what is bad i just look at what is and i try to play in that that lane is that something you did in the past like withdraw something or anything like that there any could we connect the dots here yeah i i feel like that a vision it it's really just a premise it's just an idea of like this is what i think the company is gonna be but i don't really know anything because haven't done anything yet and as soon as i get out there and i do something then i start to learn and it really fucking annoys me when people are like you pivoted you pivoted you did this pivot being a basketball term and i'm like i'm not pivoting like i'm adapting like i see this and i see opportunity and the thing that i think sometimes people miss is like you start your company and let's imagine like you're on a track you're running a race and you're on that track well all the other tracks that are next to you are what's happening in the world around you and you can't ignore those so you start in the gaming business you're like i just wanna make great games boom the iphone goes by you boom facebook goes by you boom ex xbox goes by you your job isn't just to be like blind to all of those things like all of those things are changing and you have to be able to make tons of micro changes around that and i remember like even when we started over time i went into a pitch meeting and all we were were like five people who you know like sports a little bit running around with a bunch of iphones filming basketball in new york and the guy's like what's your distribution plan like how are you gonna grow and we were like well now we're gonna go to la and we're gonna film some basketball then we're gonna go to houston then we're gonna go to oakland and film some basketball and he's like yeah you know week ladies like we passed we just don't think that's the right distribution strategy and i was like great because two days ago we also gave up on that distribution strategy because like whatever you're just trying to figure it out like the real strategy is like we're gonna figure it out because we're gonna try a bunch of different stuff and it's like you judge everything like it's this moment in time and everything the company does is an absolute cert you know it's like final this is our decision but instead you're moving in space right you think about the best basketball players luca iv it's like their ability to ky like they just move into space they find where there are nobody there as opposed to somebody who comes down and it says i'm gonna run the play you run to the corner and go here and you give it to him three times yeah fake step through and i'm gonna make the shots it's like yeah we wish worked that way it would be nice yeah it's doesn't not not to be like too sporty but like it's a live reed situation you're like that guy just flew his coverage do you get accused of being too sporty a lot do people just work at you and they're like you're just too sporty them i mean i do a lot of sports conferences at podcasts so for them they're like you're not at all sporty like they like wouldn't you play in college and i was like i was bad dj on the radio station yeah exactly piano but but in in the case of this i don't want the odds forty people to be like oh this going deep what you'd have is what your watch time to be really high so appreciate out for you you know you're just you're just improvising in and and you're you're figuring it out and you're just paying attention and the the other thing i'll say is like like you don't need a massive dataset to be able to understand where these kind of opportunities and slight tweaks are and i always say like when i used to be in the app business you could do like a really good user test and by the time you got to the sixth or seventh person see what i did there not the six hundredth person but the sixth or seventh person like you already knew what wasn't working like you only need one or two people to say something that's really deep and you're like oh i totally got it and so in a way like if you're very att to small data it usually has some level of of scale around it and you can you can constantly make iterations to make sure that your product lands and the second that it lands all of a sudden there's a new platform or netflix changes their strategy your spotify changes their strategy and you're just out there with everybody else in the ocean trying to kinda tread water and figure out how to get to land alright listen the two most beautiful words in the english language are email subscribers you need more email subscribers i guarantee it i don't care how many you have you need more of them i need more of them you need more of we all need more email subscribers because email is an amazing way to build your business to build an audience and to build a direct relationship that's not dependent on the tiktok algorithm the instagram algorithm it's how you get people to engage directly with you so you can get them to trust you to like you click products check them out check out your stuff that's how you build a relationship with people and so email subscribers are key and they're free it's an amazing tool and the tool i use for my email subscriber base is high it's a tool that i was built by the folks who were actually running morning group so they were running growth at morning group they grew to four million subscribers and along the way they had to build out all these special tools in house that made morning brew great and helped to grow faster helped it make more money helped it nurture the emails subscribers and so they took all those tools that they built internally and they said could we provide those as a separate start for anybody to use and not just morning group and so that's they made it available to everybody because before have you were duct taping five different apps together google docs mailchimp stripe a spreadsheet and your dream i was all bundled together well now bee behave is just one tool that does it and it's a single purpose thing it's what i use for my newsletter i sent newsletter out to over a hundred thousand people and that's what i use and so for listeners with my first million there i should do in a special code so if you're thinking about hey i should have a news newsletter i should have subscribers i kinda wanna build an audience that way we'll check it out they'll give you thirty percent off use the code m f m thirty go to b h dot com that's b e e eight i i v dot com and use the code m m thirty i'll put the link in the description to make it easy for you start scaling your content today you know you said something else here because i think it's amazing that in eight weeks you've built the you know water brand that knows you know i'll call like a ten million dollar water brand i don't know if it is whatever but the interesting thing about that i just threw out a number there the interesting thing about the number is you didn't start out by saying we so we went out there and we put it up on shopify we started selling cans and we ran some facebook ads and then we sold some more cans and look we've sold you know we've done you know whatever three hundred thousand dollars of revenue in the first five weeks that's success and the reason i found that interesting is because you said some of the opposite you're like we started giving it away and we put some on the in the cooler at the gas station and we would go to games and we would you couldn't even buy it if i go to the website right now just as joined the waitlist list you can't even buy it and so i've seen you kind of do this before you do this kind of grassroots brand building long game shit and it's so different than the way i play whereas like i normally if i start something i'm like cool let me see if people want this and i'm trying to validate my idea and i'm trying to go sell as much as i can i get my own conviction and validation in my insecurities to start to melt a little bit the more tangible concrete proof i have that this thing is valuable which is measured as dollars to me you seem to play the game differently and i love it and i wanna know more about it so could you just described your approach and and why you think that might be interesting here yeah i don't i don't i've never thought about it or categorized it but i don't i agree with you like i don't know i'm just a very bottoms up type of person in terms of creation and marketing and i think about like to use a sports example when people were not watching as much sports a lot of people in the sports industry were like we need more stats on the screen let's show their heart rate let's show how far they've run let's show all this stuff and i'd have meetings with them and people on the team would be like we need to show more stats that's gonna bring people back to tv and i always say like who asked for that well we just think that that's what people won and it's like who who asked for that who's who knocked on the door and said hey i got a question for you i'm not really interested in watching sports on tv but by the way if you put their heart rate up i fucking change my whole schedule and now i'm just gonna do nothing but watch sports on tv and so it's like the amount of stuff that starts up here whereas like and i don't know my my mom was a sociology professor and she did she just really like sociology anthropology it's just listening and studying people and like sometime time in the nineties i spent a summer in stark mississippi with her just driving around listen to local people talk about economic development their little businesses and everything else like that and i i just think that like i could read a million business books and and watch a lot of videos but like there's some magic in those things that people are talking about and as a ceo i've always like wanted to hear the opinion of every single person who works for the company because somebody has some insider observation that they don't even think is like that deep and they say one thing and you're just like damn that really is true i haven't thought about it that way and then you start to be able so in a way it's like my approach is to be in the right place at the right time in the room where it happens to to hear what all these people are saying and to try to parse through that and to say like if i can find that insight like people care you think they care about that but they care about this or anything else like how do i figure out how to make it that much bigger and even on the water side some of it was like yeah you know what it'd be better if young people drank water than things that have a hundred grams of sugar a hundred grams of caffeine in or anything else like that and listen sometimes you're wrong and sometimes you're right but if you can't if it doesn't come from the bottoms up i i don't know who the customer is like i'll give you a really non sport great example at some point i was like on write a book and i'm gonna pitch this book and i was working in the talent business so i not knew a lot of book people and the guy sat me down and this was kind of like you know barnes and noble still decently big but i i used barnes and noble as a visual representation he said listen when i go to sign an author to buy a book i just say to them what section are you in at barnes and noble like i get it you have this idea this and that i'm like gold barnes and noble psychology business whatever you tell me what section you're in because that's essentially the distribution then i know whether i wanna buy this book or not but if you're just telling me you have this idea and it's like kind self help but it's kind of you're not in any section and i can't buy it and so it's like this kind of like the ground up isn't just the idea it's the distribution it's like all of those types of things like that and it's just some level of i think paying attention to it and then also having the recognition that if your idea is like i wanna make a toothbrush with a removable head because why do have to buy a whole new toothbrush every time oh yeah i've actually been around long enough to know that a hundred people have tried to do that and there's actually a reason that doesn't work and you i think about apps i've been pitched a million times let every fan monetize their fans directly and you're like they actually just like being on instagram and it's like you've seen ten of them and none of them have worked so sometimes if you've got a little pattern recognition and you overlay into paying attention about culture and what people talk about and stuff like that that that just tends to be how i do it and maybe you and i will collaborate because you're smarter than me and you'll be like i'm gonna turn this into the five step process and you and i will go to barnes and noble and be like dan that's the shelf your book is gonna be on well the the one i wanted to write with you early on when i was building the milk road and me and ben called you now are you called i i you emailed to us you're like hey this is cool or something like that and we were like holy shit damn porter i don't think we knew each other maybe at the time no and you were reading it and so we we did a call with you and on that call you talked about because i had seen the rise of over overtime i didn't know what caused the rise of over but i had seen the outward manifestation of it right i also saw it go from a a brand i had never heard of to basically the most popular youth basketball brand on instagram which was it's not nothing right like that's so hard to do in a crowded social media space to build the number one rant and not only that like they were wearing t like top players eye on these guys who nike is paying the millions of dollars trying to sponsor them and they're like voluntarily putting your shirt on and throwing your o logo up and cameo in your videos and i just thought like at any anytime i would see a dunk clip it would always almost be from overtime first i didn't know how you guys were always getting there first turns out you had this army of volunteer grass kinda a camera that were doing stuff it turns out that that hand signal was something that you literally were sitting there you're like we need a sign that when one person sees another you could throw up the sign like a gang sign you know or like a like a team sign or like you know and so you started studying bands and cults and you started studying people who have built these types of real organic tribal movements and you were picking out the best practical the best ideas from them and saying okay what's that's interesting and you know in european soccer they have their songs that's interesting how do we do that and not every idea hits but like enough of them did where you built a real brand you gave us advice from milk road where you were saying you were like cool what i like about you guys is that yeah you're in into crypto you're a believer but you're not like super technical or super like day you don't you're not taking yourself too seriously everybody else is trying to like over dress and they look like a sort of a kid and a big bag wearing his dad's suit and trying to be taken seriously and you're not because you're doing that and so you were saying like hey when they have their uber serious conference you need to counter program against that and throw the like two beers you know conference at a at a at a bar and just give every bar like you know a two hundred dollar tab for your readers to go and enjoy and you gave us some ideas like that i really like there were zero people in my life that i think that way and it was very intriguing to me like those are the types of things i love like you talk about idea aviation and marketing and distribution but to me the thing that i pay attention to the most and maybe the thing that i'm a little above average on is positioning and i don't think people talk about positioning as much but positioning is kind of like where you sit in the mind of the consumer and while people talk about white space it's often related to positioning and the best way i can explain it is like the most simple way and once you see it you'll understand positioning forever and you don't have to watch twenty videos on it is if you go and you look at breakfast cereals in the supermarket they have a left to right and a top to bottom usually left to right is like least healthy to most healthy so like there's not it's they're not mixed up right so on the left you've got the most sugary cereals and as you start to walk down to the right at the end you have like ezekiel eight twelve whole grain cereals like shit it's like it should be refrigerated or whatever so that's left to right top to bottom is adult to kid kids cereals are most often at the bottom why because that's eye level for kids and therefore adults are at the top and so if you think about it almost as this diamond with like you know adult kid is top bottom and like sweet kind of super healthy left right every cereal has to find out where it's positioned in that market is how you upper left lower right or anything else like that and i think that that's positioning it it encompasses everything it's like where is the market opportunity where is the white space and the other thing that it it's it does as kind of like a sub factor is that the way you compete with somebody who is much bigger is better capitalized or anything else like that is you you make their success their box the box that they get trapped in so if i go out and i make a sports platform right and i have to compete against maybe espn the market leader twenty five billion dollars of revenue everything else that they do and every other sports site what's espn super superpower it it appeals to everybody it is the d facto now and for sports well okay so if i come out and i'm like i'm appealing this demographic that's massive right forty percent of all global purchasing in five years will be gen z and stuff like that like and all i do is focus on appeal to them well if i am the incumbent i can't start being like that's the lid that really was fire because what happens is all the fifty year olds falling there they're like i don't get it so you take their success and you almost make it a box or a trap that they can't get out of and then you can own something and that's visual language product features simplicity complexity harder to use sometimes you will make things that are really hard to use because they don't want the mass audience they want something else like that and you think about like the classic business school example like the kind of it ikea example where it's like how do you compete with everyone else you you actually have them build the furniture themselves because it allows you pricing power all of a sudden you have a different level of ownership over that it's not scary you know there's no words on any ikea instruction manual there's pictures and so in a way to me a lot of those roll up to positioning but nobody's like oh yeah i just graduated from war and i major in positioning right you're like marketing finance other things but positioning what your position is in the market and how you make that happen and understand that is very visual and to me that's how i kind of think about everything and then as you start to be successful you think about from going to play offense to the things that you wanna do to protect that position so all of a sudden i create this thing and i have this massive position in basketball and everybody's coming at me and i'm like warren football also and all the people are like oh shit where many overtime in basketball now they're just on the side of the road because now half of overtime businesses in football and they were they're called hoop this and ball that and everything else like that and i have a very kind of name that could go across any type of sport and so you go from playing offense to defense to offense again in your positioning but you're this vibrant organism that's kinda growing and expanding all the time and that's that's literally just a brain up of how i think about approaching it that's great i have this ism that's very very related what i say all positioning is counter positioning so i'm like you i think positioning super underrated any entrepreneur knows positioning is underrated because you've gone into markets thinking you're so great my product is so great my team is so great my service is so great and come to our come visit us and nobody wants to visit you why because you can't differentiate and then you're like you spend your whole life differentiating and then you look at a few other people who started out figuring out the point of differentiation figuring out where they live in that that that map that you described and they found white space and for them they don't even have to start with the best product or the best service or any of that they will organ they have time to build it and make it better because they figured it out and so this idea that like all actually counter position is important because what people the mistake i think people make is when they think positioning they think they just start naming positive attributes about themselves like it's a self help test in people magazine and they're like oh yeah we're are positioning is that we have you know really high quality service and you know we move fast or like you know we have great whatever have a great customer service so you know like something that every brand is also trying to play and so you're you know what even if you did it the problem is you can't claim it because everybody else has also claimed it you're gonna have to go come up with some unique way to show not tell to even get anyone to believe right the the way the way i i i totally agree with you i'm actually obsessed with this idea from this guy roger martin who's like this business thinker and he says something that i'm gonna butcher but it's like if the opposite of your strategy is stupid then it's not a strategy so their strategy is like we have the best fucking customer service out there and the opposite of that is what company out there says yeah our strategy is we have the worst customer service right we're like we make the best products oh yeah our strategy is we make the worst products well if if that if the opposite is so stupid yours is not a strategy that's right so you can you can say something else like that and then i just started to like think about it as applies to everything it's like our strategy is on this family vacation we're gonna have fun who's as our strategy on this family vacation is we're gonna fight all the time and have no fun right so it's like not realize that the opposite is really dumb like what you have is not a strategy or really plan this is the same about company values people are like we make companies about high integrity discipline hard work yeah again nobody would agree with the opposite i just got a job at this company out of college their values are low integrity no teamwork and hostility it's gonna be amazing right actually that actually might be interesting because the would not be stupid if i'd actually pass this exactly if they said that but like mark zuckerberg had a good example of this he goes oh somebody along the way top me this and he goes your values are meaningless unless there's a trade off baked into it so if you don't if you don't acknowledge that there's a cost or a trade off to doing the things you say you're gonna do then it doesn't count so you know the famous facebook value that we all remember is move fast and break things if it was just move fast we would not remember that they're that what that that's facebook's value the fact that it was move fast and break things that acknowledged the trade off of moving fast and how fast we're gonna move and this is gonna happen we accept that trade that's what's unique about us where other companies are not willing to accept that trade theirs is move as fast as you can but if you make a mistake then you shouldn't move that fast right which is how actually most companies operate yes so good and so you're it works at the values level it works at the strategy level and here's an example of who did it right so like who competed with facebook with snapchat snapchat strategy was we're photo sharing but all the photos are gonna self des destruction in ten seconds it's like well i could actually argue why that's a very stupid strategy and why the opposite would be very smart you should save the photos that's people want memories people wanna go back and look at it again if you told my mom about that she'd be like you're gonna destroy this photo no like that's bla but it worked for a certain it it actually unlocked a whole of behavior and use case which became you know pretty ancient to the bar of facebook had to like try to clone it at fifty times and they did the thing you talked about too which was they intentionally made things harder so it's like well social networks are cool until all your aunts and uncle show up right like it's not so cool to post all my photos from this weekend and knowing that like all my teachers and my aunts and uncles are gonna see everything i post so the way snapchat worked was like intensely kind of like confusing and it was like grown up proof it's like a you know like medicine has like a child proof top they had like a grown up top which was like you know when you wanna do the face mask there was no button that said like push here for face mask it was like no you got a know to hold on your face for four seconds and then the secret door appears and now you could do this shit like only could be spread like a secret password from one kid to another and most parents thought it was too hard too confusing they never gonna figure it out and so that was like a intentional strategy for a while that fits your your your so good like what i like about the trade off too is like when we launched our bass league in the first year before n n all the players essentially lost their eligibility and i was just said they didn't lose it the mca took it away every college basketball coach in the world hated us like hated us i got so much hate mail and i used to say like i guess if we're not pissing people off we're not trying hard enough like that's the trade off even in the early days of teach for america i remember i went to pitch the board in seattle washington to let us come and the teacher's union hated us and somebody came in and they punched me in the chest in the middle of my speech i'm my and i was just like i didn't even know what to do other than to keep talking but i guess if you're not like if your trade off is if you're not pissing off enough people i guess you're not trying to do something that's different enough for a revolutionary enough in in that aspect so i like that i'm gonna put that up there with my opposite is stupid you you also have a thing that when we were at our hoop group event and we ask everybody like hey can you give like a tiny version of a ted talk like we'll put seven minutes on a shot clock here and everybody in this room is world class at something daniel your world class at brand building can you just tell us like a brand but building brain dump of like everything you did to make over time have a hundred million followers or whatever don't have any stupid number of insane followers you guys have and the very first thing you said was you didn't say how you went viral you didn't say how you grew the market you didn't talk about an algorithm you didn't talk about you know scaled processes you go in the first year i replied to a million comments or something some some absurd number yeah you go we replied to a million comments and you go we built this in a very grassroots way bottoms up and i that's i've that's stuck with me that was like three years ago i still remember yeah one line because it was so counterintuitive and surprising to me that that was like a pillar for you of like how this how does this empire get built you don't you don't really understand where the studs are like where are the beams that this whole thing is built on and you showed me one of the beams with that can you talk about that that little part because i think that's something that more brand should do yeah listen i think everyone wants awesome growth hacks and the best way to get a lot of views on anything that you write ever on linkedin or whatever is like the c three secret growth hacks right do this the viral growth hacks but like most of those are post facto and they're hard to replicate and to build something meaningful you've gotta build a real connection and i'll i'll preface it by saying i've seen this a couple times and it it's it's it's taught me a couple times i i remember i went to a concert at at state farm a little baby concert and everybody had their phones up and i was gonna film because i wanted to show people i was cool and i was at a concert and i realized that everyone was filming themselves and i was filming the stage and the concert was actually a backdrop for them to create content and it reminded me years ago right when the iphone was coming out somebody came when i was at virgin to our office and they said hold up your phone and take a video and and they said at the end everyone under thirty has the camera pointing at themselves and everyone over thirty has the camera pointing out and we looked around the room and it was true and i think from those insights you've just have this idea and i kind of like crystallize that into this point of view that sports media is talking to people about sports and over overtime is about listening to people about sports so okay that's like a different point of view is kinda rooted in these anecdotal observations around me well how do you listen to them and the easiest way was they're all talking to you they're dm you they're in the comments like what are we gonna do that no one else is gonna do we're gonna respond to every single one of them because the other thing you see in media is like ten people leave a media thing and they set up and they launch a new media thing and you imagine a bunch of men and women in front of a computer pumping out articles and and you know and videos and and i think well who asked for that nobody they just thought it was a good idea and i i remember a young person had told me yeah i respond to a lot of people on mine he was a kind of smaller version of something and he said you know what once you respond to somebody when you have a bigger account over a hundred k one time they become a fan for life so i was like okay how are we gonna get our first million fans for life we're gonna respond people used to dm all the time y literally that was the whole dm y and so we'd be like y what's up and they'd be like oh shit i didn't think you were gonna respond like you just jumped out of the corner and you scared them and in the early early days i used to take screenshots of those conversations and post them in the story and and all of a sudden people would start to say this overtime respond and stuff like that and we had this kind of apex moment early on where i i hired this guy who'd had been a uber driver and a hoop and he was a friend of someone but various things he had tried hadn't kinda hit yet and i was like and i realized he's just really funny he still like to make funny videos on instagram and we were like your job is just to be funny and so he'd go on the comments and if somebody commented he would go to their personal ig account find a picture of them and just make fun of them just like roast them just be like bro was with the mom jeans like you gotta get your fast or whatever stuff like that and to the point where it hit this fever pitch where people would just comment on overtime video and they would just say roast be right and he would go in there and roast them and all a sudden you actually think it's about the video and about the dunk or the whatever but it's actually about the massive conversation all these people were like me me me me you know who who wanna be who wanna be picked from the audience and you interacting and i think it was just a really different version of media and it put that put that into practice and i will say that we have community managers now who just talk to fans all day i'm in a group chat with two hundred and fifty fans of the citi reapers on instagram which is one of our basketball teams about once every three weeks i hop in and i answer a question and everyone's was like whoa wait who is this and i'm like yeah that's not happening because i run the company and i just said so and they all go crazy or whatever and then i'm like got bounce because i could get trapped in there for two hours and i just think like your fans aren't just mindless face people there they like they're they're about it there the consumers are your product and you wanna live with them and you wanna talk to them and you wanna make sure that they know and i think like you know i looking at like sabrina carpenter just had different fan accounts announced the track name for her new album and every single one of them and then she announced the final ones and it's like there's so many lady gaga there's so many musicians are so good at being like i wouldn't be anything without you guys and taylor swift used to like jump into comments or like show up at people's weddings and stuff like that right and i've always taken inspiration from that and i just wanted to have a company that could be meaningful and do stuff like that too i i have this idea where like i'm gonna send one of my guys out anywhere in america and the first person he sees with an overtime shirt he's gonna give him a thousand dollars i would be like that's i'm in the ohio airport right now and it's like i'm gonna playground ground in in oakland or whatever and it's just like oh shit i literally feel seen right now and and that's what i think that's what everyone once including this generation have you seen what the all american rejects are doing i haven't school me so okay i i didn't prep this out of them the though i don't know much about the but band that was popular like i don't know nineties or least two thousand some some type of the thing kinda of been off the map off the grid not popular whatever so for their comeback what they did was really interesting they started crashing actual like house parties for high schoolers and they would just show up and play a set in someone's backyard and that was their comeback tour is that they're just going around america right now and if you go look dude its instagram like liquid gold dude the the actual content the way it looks when they just show up at somebody's backyard at some high school house party right before prom or whatever and they just start playing a song they surprise everybody it looks cool it looks an nostalgic it looks fun it like fits them they're not trying to be like super they're not trying to come back and pretend they're super relevant when they weren't and they're sort of building back up in this bottoms up way and almost reinventing themselves as this like like this band that's kind of like of the people and it just it's amazing what they're doing a whole marketing point of view i'm a lock that away and i'm gonna figure out the sports version of that yeah you you once you watch one video you're gonna be like that i need to create that moment because that was an amazing moment i'm literally the second this this podcast is done i'm gonna start tapping into that and i think to me it's kind of like listen i work in sports was a vertical you music you were a b saas it doesn't really matter what your your vertical is most people only take inspiration from other companies in their vertical i'm just like how can sports learn from this band right like a lot of ideas i watch gaming i'm a massive consumer of korean and japanese non scripted television in various forms of reality and shows and like i always get ideas give me a recommendation give me a example of a shell i need to be on man there's so many there there's actually the audience is gonna be like these shows her terrible for this the your taste is your taste maybe and my taste there's there's one there's a japanese one that i just watch this summer where they take ten japanese people to a town in france and they take away their phones and they just have to find each other and realize that they're in the same show and then some of them fall in love and it's like glacier slow and you're kinda thinking okay well it shouldn't be that hard to find the other japanese person in this and then when they're like they're like let's meet up they're like what time well in front of the bakery what bakery and they can't look it up or anything and so i just i love all those shows because it's all about the game design right what makes those work is the game design and inherent in game designer are the principles of marketing distribution all of those elements there's another one that's a little older called nineteen to twenty where it's just a bunch of korean kids who are in there basically last year of being kids who grow up who come together and and i just like i learned so much about other cultures i learned so much about game design i learn about things that the us market doesn't think about and then they go through my brain and they come out as things that we could think about because if you're looking for inspiration from the same place as everyone else then you're just gonna do the same thing everyone else does you gotta look in all those little pockets and that's not unrelated to me saying i pay attention to a meme that a seventeen year old basketball player creates because i'm also looking in those places where other people aren't looking i love it well speaking of you're big on chess right now why do you are you so bullish on chess well give me the the pitch of light chess is the next big thing so i i think first of all you know we talk about positioning and people are like oh overtime is a high sports company and i always say over time about the audience i mean my goal is to get a hundred million gen z fans to love over time if i thought they wanted to watch gran play three on three basketball i would show randy playing three on basketball like you can't get confused with that and so i've always been looking for opportunities to do things that don't feel like high school sports to better explain the superpower of what we're doing my cofounder zach is like a twenty two hundred drank chess who's a s and chest champion the pan ivy league chest champion and chess is one of those things that's like kind of not very accessible right first of all when you watch it they're like a eight to c four like you've have no idea what's going on the games are like six hours everybody is a mad genius and we were always like if our goal at over time is to see things that other people can't see to make things that feel niche mainstream like what's the most out of the box thing that we could do and we were always like zach likes chess can we do anything in chess you kinda look at it and you're like i don't know and you start to talk just people and they're like oh you're gonna do a chest championship in magnus carlson gonna play and that guy gonna play and you're just like yeah that's kind of already been done and it's already obvious and so one day zac comes in he goes so you know what the biggest movers in culture for chess are and i'm like yeah queen's ga right that kinda started before that searching for bobby fisher yep and he's like yeah those are probably the two most relevant things in culture what are they have in common i was like they're movies and tv shows he's like no they feature prod young prod yeah and i'm like oh prod he's like there's something about prod then immediately i think about because i play the piano every eight year old i've ever watched on youtube who plays guitar better than b king right who plays the piano and everything else like that you're just like how does that person know how to sound like herb hancock and they're eight years old and i'm like oh yeah i see it in my own life and we're just like prod that's it like they're accessible they're interesting who they are in and of themselves and i always think about this thing that my you know my son who was a poker player used to say is like like we used to play like texas hold them and he'd never look at his cards when i get my two cards the first thing i do is look at them i'm like what are you doing he's like i just look at the other people he's like i spent a lot of time watching the other people then i look at my cards because then i know what to do and so you think of this idea oh you play the players not the cards and then i'm just like okay so you have all these prod it's not actually about the chess it's about these incredible young people with these crazy gifts and then you start to think six hundred and fifty people or million people around the world play chess and like i could have a prodigy from india and argentina and all of this other stuff like that and then you're off and running so i'm working on this thing that we're trying to you know pitch and create called the prodigy cup and it's like these chest prod and it's a one night live event and we have spent actually when i get off of this podcast today we're gonna do a shooting in the studio we've spent over a hundred hours filming chess to make it so easy and fun to watch that if you and i didn't know the difference between chest and checkers we could watch it and be super entertaining and i think in there is the unlocks so to me i'm actually the perfect audience because i don't like chess and i'm not very good at it i don't know this a sicilian opening or any of these other things like that so i just watch it and then i look at my watch and i'm like board right and i'm like okay we gotta figure out how to do that so it's this it's this kind of opportunity where it does everything right it taps into this thing that isn't is is this growing trend but it's the unexpected part not the obvious way it's great for the positioning of the company because over time is about something bigger than high school mass and what better way to choose it do chess and then it's just a lot of experimentation and some prodigy in the middle is gonna say one thing and you're gonna be like shit that's the unlock yeah and you're gonna pivot the whole thing around it and i hope that a year from now you're watching it on a major streaming service and three years from now i walk up to madison square garden and there's a line of a thousand people and they're like yeah just bought tickets since these two prod playing i'm obsessed with this kid and i can't wait to watch it and it's all this ip that just came out of something that was very bottoms up and organic i love it i i love how you keep using your weakness as your advantage so for example you're like okay the worldwide leader of sports you're like oh man i'd be i'd hate to be them they have to cater to everybody they're boxed in by their mainstream and i could do stuff that they can't do right i can i can have this like you know gen z brand we can say that things are lid and there's r and there's all this and that's gonna become our advantage that we can cater to that audience in a way that if they did it it would be way too try hard but we could do it because we're starting fresh or like you know with chess you're like cool i don't know anything about chess that's my advantage i couldn't watch that if i wanted to right it would be too boring for me to watch traditional chess so of course i'm gonna make something that's more accessible because i couldn't access that i can only make something that's that makes sense to me and so it would make it goes it goes back to that thing that we talked about before if you took if you train people to look for blue and you tell them the close eyes and you're like what's read they're like i don't see any of it right if you could train yourself to look for every color at every time it's you know i i love the education system and i'm professor bus side an accident that some of the best entrepreneurs dropped out because they just saw things that were broader and i i think you know is it's just it's just a different way of looking at the world i don't know why that happened to me maybe my brain was wired that way maybe that's how i learned maybe i didn't go to any i never studied business but i think again it's it's about seeing what i think other people don't see and and and being able to stick with it and there is a lot of deferred mentality and so forth the and it takes either a lot of courage or oblivious ness to just go and do something that's different than everyone else is doing that's why i always respect people who do some crazy gap year they're like yeah everyone's gonna go to college i'm actually gonna be a goat farmer for a year and they're like you deferred called for a year to be a go farmer like why would you do that and they're just like i'll don't know it just feels fucking cool and it's like those people who are the people i'm in a bed on long term i love it alright dan you are the mad band brand builder this is fun i love i love this conversation if we fast forward i don't know a year say alright actually i don't forget the year if that's too far what are you most excited about for six seven water next i don't know ninety days what's the what's the next play the next move the next experiment that you're gonna try to get a bucket here with us with six seven water who get a bucket of it i think that you know tk k has created tail kin tk k has created this phenomenon with his water that we've supported him on and helped him on the infrastructure and i think everyone's like well six seven is a trend have you sold a million cans yet or anything else like that and so i think we all wanna figure out how do we par this kind of massive social media following in this kind of print ground up something based in a kid who's just a great kid into selling a million cans and maybe it's gonna be in the gas station or maybe it's gonna be in some place it's like completely not obvious and maybe i'm not gonna know and he's not gonna know what the answer is until monday when we wake up and we're like oh my god it's actually selling in ice cream trucks you know where something else like that and that idea that you don't know it's like nobody wants to play a video game where you don't know what what is gonna happen next and so i think that aspect and then unlocking that and then doing it again with one or two amazing other athletes who super genuine and have a massive audience connection i think is really cool and always doing it from the bottoms up to something that makes sense and resonates with their brand i think that i'm really i'm really excited about i think it'd be great i love your n recruitment idea where basically if if kentucky wants them but no khan wants some money we're gonna try to do that who knows how much legal and ip and other stuff we'll lock that down but you imagine he's like i'm gonna go to the school that buys the can with the color of the school and the most amount of care he's just like show me the love yeah who's with it who who who so i just wanna go to the buy that's the most with it and then they basically gotta figure out how to create a stunt out of it right how to speak the language that he wants to speak with the with the water brand and i think that would be really cool and i think that would be also like kind of like that would these like moments where like because when you said that my brain broke a little bit like oh i thought i knew how college recruiting works i thought even n i thought i didn't understood what that is okay great kid goes to a school i think after they're at the school then they're gonna start to get maybe some endorsement deals and it's gonna look like endorsements but just a younger age and then i was like oh no so if he has this vehicle the school could kinda like pump his vehicle and part of the recruitment that's actually like pretty genius so it's like your your wife is gonna be like sean why there twenty seven blue cases of water out and you're like i gotta give what i got to do eggs because i gotta do my part drink up to drink drink up i had this i when i was like in my twenties i ran this profit and education and we eventually started some of the very first charter schools in the nineties in new york and i had this guy who was on my board and he had been like a sixties activist who eventually became a successful investment banker but here's the first person in a board meeting i ever heard say no and said a yes and i didn't know you could say no and he had said this thing to me which now he's in his eighties and i had lunch with him and i was like you said the most impactful thing to me ever goes i don't remember saying that and he said you know they say you gotta crawl before you walk and you gotta walk before you run and if if you do that you spend your whole fucking life crawling and i don't know i just always like i was like yes it's really logical i almost put my whole life crawling i wanna get into the running part so he's like i don't remember saying i was like you said that to me i was only twenty seven if you changed my line so you know that that's how we think about going after all of these things spend your whole life crawling alright well if if anybody in the beverage industry if anybody's got gas stations if anybody who's listening to this drinks water drink up what was it drink thirsty people what was this other catch for don't you hack family yeah that that's what i that's what i say you i didn't tell you that the best part is it says on the back it says attention if drinking six seven water doubles your vertical please contact your coach immediately so good hi did thanks for coming on then yeah i appreciate you brother i feel like i could rude 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 boundaries 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 fear courage and all that great stuff so again if you like my first million check out billion dollar moves it's brought to you by the hubspot podcast network again billion dollar moves alright back to the episode

if i told you that a kid flu out of first screen i don't think the first thing you would say is that's a future billionaire but you probably would have joined the crowd of people that made fun of me for being dumb today he's known as this guy you see on the cover of forbes tech entrepreneur this billionaire sun god because of all the work he's done in the solar industry but the crazy thing about hey is that his story is very much a started from the bottom of story a lot of great leaders that are level five leaders there's daddy issues there's learning disabilities or there's a near death experience he's pretty much never does podcast podcasts i pulled the front card i asked him to do this because i think he's got a story worth telling i never told that one before definitely on camera but you're in the eye of the storm right like the wait subprime mortgage crisis you're in the mortgage business i would like literally throw up in my driveway before i could go see my family every night you said the difference between rejection results is just how long you stick with it a lot of people quit when it gets hard sometimes you don't even know your quitting you just come up with a reason why you think you need to quit what it like i'm meeting you on the first time well when i at on for the first time i feel like i could rule where to i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a road less travel i think what's interesting about your story because i have all the research here and if i just zoom out and i think about i think how does a guy who flu out of first grade end up you know one of the macy's these class oh yeah it's shout up to miss mac how does that guy and you know where you are today super successful you've built a ten billion dollar company you're doing what a lot of entrepreneurs wanna do right like if i think about how i got into entrepreneurship like what would have been the win the win would have been but i'm having fun i am building a company that matters you know i'm having the success and i'm doing it with talented people you're you know one of your cofounder founders like a fourth grade friend so that's kind of that is winning to me and you've done that and so i think what's exciting to me is to hear i guess how you approach this how you've gone from the guy who can flu out a first grade to to make that happen if i if i had met you when you were a kid maybe twelve thirteen years old fourteen years old would you call yourself like were you really ambitious then were you smart oh you if you would've have met me in in grade school you probably would have joined the crowd of a lot of people that made fun of me for you know being dumb you know i i would go to this room called the resource room and the resource room for kids that couldn't read and so then i would go and i would write all my letters backwards and they would like give me a dick and jane book to read in the third grade and i would struggle through it and it was it was so right yeah yeah i i have d graph in a form of d and i didn't no one knew what it was in those days right and people just thought you were stupid and people just thought that you you you just couldn't read and you couldn't keep up which is why i flu the first grade so it's not fun when you flu the first grade when all your friends to go to the second grade make fun of you every year for basically twelve years of your life to know you're the kid that flu the first grade yeah because that we're all friends in the first grade and then you didn't go with the rest of the kids and so i had a a lot of self confidence issues i would say i had a lot of questions about you know whether or not i was even gonna be able to provide for myself at at that moment in time i over with sports i guess i over with you know trying to be a dynamic person i don't know that i over compensated in in the best ways but i had a couple teachers that took me under their wing there's this one guy ron edwards he was the gym teacher he was this amazing guy man and you know gotta imagine i don't father i'm raised by a single mom and he kinda stepped in and he would be like he knew i loved football and he would say look hey do you wanna go and at the time the s saint louis cardinals were there and there was this court quarterback his name was jim hart and there was this running back his name was o j anderson and that was like my outlet that i was like a fast runner you know because i wasn't get at school good to something my man i got i need something i needed some that i can anchor on that maybe i'm good at something and it was the only thing i was good at was the forty yard dash but he would take me to these banquet where i would have the opportunity to meet jim hart or o j anderson and it was just kind of a lens for oh okay these guys maybe maybe there's a way out and so now if you meet somebody who maybe as a kid who's d or has a learning disability like that what's the perspective you have now now with the benefit of hindsight yeah about those same kind of like quote unquote limitations well it's interesting now when you sit down with with people that have achieved extraordinary outcomes and jim collins wrote a book about this called good to great he talked about level five liters mh and i had an opportunity to have lunch with jim collins at stanford i had to be fifteen years ago and this was an unlocked for me and he goes hey you're a level five leader you know you're operating on this frequency that allows you to you know create these business and do these things i'm like how what what is a level five leader what's the well oftentimes with a level five liter they have a great deal of compassion and empathy for people they'll off they often give up to go up they have the ability to empower people instead of micro manage people recruit top talent and put them in a place that allows those organizations to scale and so the reason is for this if you dig a couple layers lower is oftentimes they have a learning disability many times they're on the spectrum and so people that have burgers or that on the spectrum when they're in in school they get made fun of a lot too this this turns out this big tea trauma where all your friends make fun of you and you don't have a lot of friends in you're an out cast as a young person wants you to do things later in your life to gain affirmation and get respect especially if you're a male and you want male affirmation the second component of that that often you'll see is daddy issues okay a lot of great leaders that are level five leaders have pretty severe daddy issues they had a major falling out with their father maybe it's a situation like me where my father left when i was too so i don't really remember meeting my dad i didn't meet him till i was i think you know around thirty years old and so when you dig into somebody's of these elbow five leaders you go oh there it is there's he's looking for male affirmation he's looking for respect he's that's why he grinds and does the hun hundred hour weeks right to gain that affirmation and the third one oftentimes is it's a near death experience or it's a career ending injury in sports or something along those lines and that will force that individual to make a greater sacrifice the and and and it also forced him not to quit in the face of a pretty significant amount of adversity which unfortunately you know a lot of founders and leaders do you you set a phrase in there you said they they get what what'd you say the give up to get up what what do you say you gotta you gotta give up to go up give a so when you're really bright let's say hear the guy that gets a thirty five out of thirty six on the act or you get a you know fifteen fifty on on the sat and a yeah you get to a brag about it you know at at the cocktail parties about what you did and you realize like i'm the smartest guy in the class okay by the way my two business partners jason walker matt dawson we're the smartest guy in the class they had all the tassels and we graduated from high school all the tassels we graduated from college i wasn't stupid but i'm like hey i want you guys on my side right and there's lots of other people in my life were they were the smartest person in the class the smartest person in the class oftentimes it's not ego it's actually they're just very competent and they get frustrated quickly with other people that it takes them longer to learn things and so what do they do so forget i was do it on my own right right i'll do it more efficiently i can do it faster why would i take an hour to train this individual on how to do it when i can do it myself in fifteen minutes well the problem is they keep doing that same task over and over and over for fifteen minutes and they never give up to go up mh and they end up becoming a control freak and then they wonder why their business isn't gonna scale because they have to be involved in everything all the time right and so someone that has d demeanor has an example well you learn to surround yourself with really smart people right they can do oh wow you're amazing a bond math you're like the best math mind i've ever met in my entire lifetime i'd like to start a company with you you're brilliant and so you start to surround yourself with all these really talented amazing extraordinary minds they're good at different things and instead of trying to do it on your own you're celebrating that talent around you right have ever heard what ari emanuel says about this what so ari runs cia a now endeavor he's he also i think was likes and so there somebody who's asked him to like how do you read contracts so your whole business is contracts basically you're you're a talented agent like you're every day is contracts he's like i sit in a room with people who are amazing at contracts he's like because i couldn't he's like i literally could not focus enough to get through it so i just built i built it a machine of people like who can i bring in that will bring that to the table and the same thing like i respect them i value them i need them and they know that and we because of that i am able to have my zone a genius they're able to have theirs and we built a great you know team from that yeah you worked with and for larry ellis and with elon both of whom i would say are like kind of legends in the in silicon valley and as as leaders long leaders of companies what what was their style is it similar to what you said do they have their own play style that's totally different and give me a sense how close proximity were you yeah i i was probably like six levels away from from larry allison because literally i was say kid in a cubicle that was a good bother of database administrators i would basically have my headset on i would call you i would bother you to buy buy oracle seven dot zero they're like oh man you're so good at bothering people we're gonna let you manage twelve other people and teach them how to bother people yeah yeah it's like hey can you teach either there twelve people out to bother people and and sell oracle eight dot zero i was like yeah no no problem at all and then were like wow you know we're thinking about not selling one or two products but like three hundred products so by the end of it you know i i was there about eight years you know i i i was fortunate i was a global account manager i could sell the whole suite of products in different things but what i learned the most was one what phenomenal products do the fact that you could sell error for eighty ninety million dollars and all you ship was a cd blew my mind i just couldn't believe this whole concept of software and and and the talent of people that could come together to deploy those assets at that stage and like the information age it was the biggest wealth creator at the time when i was there is between bill gates and larry ellis on who is the wealthiest individual in the world at the time and so i was super inspired by larry ellis and very inspired by the collect the talent that they recruited and and surrounded you with what's his superpower right you said at the time maybe one of the wealthiest people in the world vision he could pivot i mean you know obviously we just started with as a database company and there's was a handful of other database companies at the time it was like side base in form mix you know sql server with microsoft and then some of those started to drop off or we acquired them but the superpower was his ability to have big bold vision and ideas to go nope now we're gonna be an applications company now now we're gonna be a middle company now we're gonna go acquire some of the hardware providers now we're gonna become a software as a service company and being able to persuade an organization of that size at the time to shift those gears and and peep it was such an aspirational inspirational place to work with such urgency like no matter how much we grew you know just the urgency to close out a quarter or the urgency to close out a year you just saw the grind factor and the give a shit factor from a group of people it was next level right and so i i learned like i learned how to grind i learned like yeah this is why you come in on a saturday this is why you get in the office at five thirty in the morning this is why you skip your lunch this is why you go to training and so a lot of people candidly they were gonna go play basketball at three o'clock in the afternoon because larry built out all these amazing facilities with basketball courts and six restaurants and all these things and i was like nope i'm gonna go back into training class i'm gonna sit down and i'm gonna go learn about you know negotiation skills i'm gonna go learn about all these various courses you could take to to learn about the technology obviously so if you are a fever learner and you were driven by growth it was it was just a platform you could run as fast as you could and his mindset was i don't care if you're twenty three years old i don't care if you went to harvard stanford princeton yale all i care about is your numbers hit the numbers get promoted and so humbly every year i got promoted in this company and they would joke you know when i would joined the team they go okay we know you're gonna be our boss next year but it just came down to work ethic and your ability to post up numbers against your your peers is very competitive the bottom twenty percent got cut the top twenty percent got promoted and you could look around and it didn't matter age race you know anything it just came down to performance it's like a it's like a pro sports team more than it is like because you know you people describe it like oh we're a family or you know they try to create like a comfortable environments but it sounds like this was more competitive and merit bureaucratic in terms of the the culture absolutely and it it was it was high risk high reward i mean if you if you performed you were compensated accordingly you know i made a a tremendous amount of income as a young individual there and what you started to see is the confidence build amongst all these other individuals on what they could achieve when they were pushed to to their peak performance level and so you started to see people like you know craig conway leave and go run people off at the time which is our biggest competitor on the hr software side of the business tom si left he built this amazing software program we used to do all of our customer resource management called oasis and tom si left to do to go start si systems and and he created a great company another gentleman left to go start nets sweet mark ben leaves to go start salesforce dot com so you see all these individuals and it's learning and and believing in themselves and their ability to perform regardless of their background and where they grew up from a kid they grew up in cr core missouri with his mom in an apartment while she worked three jobs and and you know walked to the washer and dryer every day to you know the the guy that you know had an undergrad from harvard and it and went to gs at stanford you were all equals right and then you watched these people and their ability to go launch their own companies and in some cases larry was very supportive and you know he was a big investor in salesforce dot com as an example when mark left and did that and then the others he acquired he acquired peoples soft back he acquired si systems back he acquired nets sweet back and so it was just really interesting to see collaborative alpha right like a group of people that just saw themselves as as the ability to kind of create technology within the valley and the level of respect and admiration that we all shared with one another right hey i got a quick break because i wanna tell you something cool so our sponsor for this episode is hubspot but instead of the ad telling you about hubspot they just wanna do something that's useful for you so they did some research and they found that a bunch of people in our community have side hustle they start a business on the side they get it going and then it becomes their main hustle over time and so instead of just tell you about the features of hubspot they wanted to give you something that will be useful for your side hustle and so they put together a database of ai prompts so things that you could put into chat g or your favorite ai tool that will help you with your side hustle so check it out it's gonna save you a bunch of time i think it's a prompt database that you should be using to make your side hustle a little more successful and you could use this as your little personal little cheat sheet your tool set to be a better operator with your side hustle so you could either scan this qr code that's on the screen or get the link of the description to get the ai prop database alright back to the show thanks up hubspot you also get the itch to leave to start your own thing well you see all those other individuals leave you can help but be inspired but you have a c job at that point it wasn't c i gotta tell you good money let's yeah i was i making good money i was making really good money when you're making seven figures and you're like i don't know man twenty five twenty six years old from a kid in missouri like you're you're had explode what'd you do with the money as i yeah kid by the way did you i i couldn't believe it was real i just kept it in my bank account you know i put it under the map i was i was sharing an apartment with matt dawson and and down the marina in san francisco running the golden and gate bridge every day and matt and i started to whiteboard all these crazy ideas in our apartment what was on the table what we're what's on the white you would laugh man so like so we loved tahoe he and i built this home in tahoe and there was this guy his name randy paul and randy paul had hot tub company and so matt and i had this idea i was like man we could just buy randy paul means hot tub company i'm sure randy like a little checked out he's getting older he's ready to sell it and i mean the annual reoccurring revenue of of these hot tubs and the maintenance of these hot tubs could be a great business around lake tahoe will will snow board in the winter will wake surf in the summer and we'll just take care of the hot tub business we almost did it like the the hot we're we had we talked to our our fiance at the time there are wives now and we were like would do you guys think you would move to tahoe with us we could all live in this one house that we built up in pig's would estates you know this house matt and i built up there together and we'll raise our kids there and we'll just sell hot tubs and we'll maintain hot tubs let's put it this way the the wives shut that one down mostly the living together was the problem yeah yeah they're like no we're not we're not doing that we thought about starting a car wash we put a bunch of time and energy and into hey we could start all these different car washes together and then ultimately what we decided was and this was based on kind of a background of learning that you could remotely sell anything once you realize you can sell really complex items like we were selling from a software perspective you could do it virtually over the internet you're like okay you can sell anything virtually over the internet it was a huge breakthrough moment for me in my career and that led to everything else that i did and so ultimately i said hey what if we took matt and jason's background in residential mortgages and we just digitized it we just created a virtual technology platform that allowed us to sell these mortgages and other financial products maybe it could be insurance or other things virtually so you're like i could take my sales playbook not maybe not playbook but my sales experience of like i can sell the stuff over the phone and through the internet but now let's find a product that might work for it not hot tubs but mortgages what was that i guess like what was the sales model back then this is is this like good ads didn't lead into a phone call or no no google ads there's bare barely the internet at this point in time what was the model what we do yeah so so here so here let's just go back in time so ninety seven ninety eight is when the internet really starts to catch it's it's it's some tailwind right and so you start hearing about the dot com verticals and this is all the big dot com companies start popping up well really when you look back at the internet in those days and what was going on the internet was a way to sell things online it was like hey do you wanna do a trade maybe you wanna do that on e trade right do you wanna you know you remember web van i don't know right if you wanna buy groceries or anything you can buy them online and web van will deliver them to you amazon at books on amazon so it was basically like hey now there's this virtual retail environment where you could sell anything so led you to think okay well what are complicated things that everybody needs in the world that you could basically bring to the virtual ecommerce world it's what people are doing today with agent ai it's the same thing how do i take a complex business that's very people intensive maybe it's insurance company maybe it's a mortgage company i'll just bring agent ai into it and i'll automate automated it well that's what people were thinking about in ninety seven ninety eight and so our idea when i left in two thousand and three right because what happens is dot com crash happens in two thousand everybody gets wiped out eighty five ninety percent of everybody gets wiped out google launches is around ninety eight ninety nine once everyone gets crushed and becomes google but that was my window where i said okay i've been here eight years i've seen a lot of people come and go i've seen a tremendous amount of success i've seen a tremendous amount of failure i think now i've got the maturity to think of a big enough idea that can really scale and basically i can take advantage of the internet wave the information age had already happened those guys had murdered it right and became the wealthiest people in the world it was jobs it was gates it was andy grove it was it was you know larry ellis and so now it became the internet age and i was like okay and i basically created a bad version of quicken loans dan gilbert and quicken loans did it a lot better than i did same idea same time dan was a little ahead of me and executed it significantly better course well they bought into it right so that that that was kind of like the the or they they they kind of branch out of intuit it and they had a tremendous amount of capital and they really invested in technology in a thoughtful way that allowed their organization to scale and big a build a bigger a brand dan was older than me he was more mature than me he he was just a better entrepreneur than me period at that point in time i was like a a thirty year old kid right you know with the big dream trying to figure it out with my two best friends from the fourth grade and my sophomore year of business school and you guys self funded it did it work right away where you we totally self funded it i think we put each put in like fifty grand or something along those lines you know and so if it it well we from humbly we created success very quickly we decided to move to sacramento california from the silicon valley because we were gonna do these cheesy radio commercials and i got stuck doing the cheesy radio commercials i'm so embarrassed by it to this day i literally like hey hi i'm at oh god it was so bad it was like i this breathy voice and i would be like hi i'm hayes barn you know call me and you know get a rate in the fours which is like the the you know interest rates were in the fours for like ten years so i just said the same rate for basically a decade of my life and then the my last line was i'm so confident i can save you money i'll even pay for your home to be app oppressed and this is when like wells fargo or bank of america or all these players there they're charge is six hundred bucks for an appraisal and i thought hey okay that's a nice thing to do i'll give you the appraisal for free if if if you just give us an opportunity to do your mortgage online for you but it was it it's just funny of the things you do sean oh have you ever done anything like like when you look back at your life and go i cannot believe i actually did that but it was like a stepping stone forget you to another stage in your life this business was a sushi restaurant chain so yeah i guess i and then even worse like you know we were this before door to dash before uber were eats we were it was like a delivery only because we we didn't wanna sign a ten year lease we're like we don't even know if people want this concept to yeah trying to build the chap chipotle of sushi and so i used to go not door to door but floor to floor in a skyscraper because i realized the front desk lady orders lunch for everybody in the office the most viral way to teach everything everybody in the office that we exist so like if i could just sc the first front desk lady i can get get like a floral of business so i would just put go in the elevator i'd sneak in because i didn't have a badge yeah and then i pushed one i'd get out and i sm sure that i'd go back and that i pushed two and i'd go up like a fifty full floor building but again it's like our business idea was terrible objectively it was clearly a terrible idea yeah but you know that type of selling was actually like pretty interesting and then made a bunch of mistakes and then the story was kinda good and it led you know the next guy who met me was just like guy who just sold his company for five hundred million dollars and he found our story so amusing yeah that he was like i just want you guys to come do something with me and i think if we had not done something interesting or amusing that made him literally like laugh i don't think he would have wanted to take a bet on us was like he kinda just saw like okay these guys are hustle they're kinda stupid but like you know maybe pointed in the right direction they'll do something or at least they'll bring some good energy to where out you know they'll make me feel young and alive again i don't know what his reason was but yeah it led to the next opportunity in the next it isn't it funny though so people always say like you how'd do you make it i'm like well i started carrying golf bags at the local country club when i was eight years old i would carry one bag when i was eight years old but by the time i was nine years old i would carry two and i would walk in your line and i would talk while you're were putting i was like a total knuckle head like a total but they like kinda liked me they're like hey i like this kid rides bike here for like an hour to come carry two golf bags the belle reeves country club there's all these rich guys the belle reeves country club that i got to go wow you guys are members of this like super nice country club in saint louis missouri and then i would get twenty bucks a bag and they would buy me a hotdog dog at the turn and i'm like okay cool man i did that eight to nine i'm living large dude if you give me twenty bucks in a hot dog today i'm happy i exactly and so like when i think about the waterfall of all my gigs are the things that i did then i went to go i was a sandwich artist at subway and they wouldn't let you work at subway into were like eighteen but like i got this guy jim condom that that was the manager i'm like look man i just please i promised i'm really sure i've had this job i've been working for a while so by a time i was fifteen years old i'd ride my bike to subway i a sandwich artist and so i i like i'd make the best i carve the boat back in the day where they carve the boat and the bread just perfectly and there people wait in line and they'd be like no nope wait for the kid have kid gets bored black olives he gives you more bo you know pickles like i'd work there till two in the morning when i was like fifteen years old and then i went to this is another funny one i worked at am i was i worked at the gas station so i'd be the guy that would come out i'd check your tires i'd fill up your tank i'd check your oil i'd wash your windows and then when i really when the when all the all the the grease monkey guys would give me a nod you know these guys were amazing they're incredible mentors of mine they'd be like okay hey you can do an alternator or you can do a headlight or you can change the you know you can plug a few tires or take it off so i clean these guys tools they'd make fun of me they'd just be capping on me all day long and i get there and then get the tool had a little bit grease on it be like nope do it again kids you know so we had this funny rapport and then they would leave the whole base just trashed and jason walker and i so would literally go in there and we would race how fast we could clean the base right and so it's so funny if you think about that as kids jason and i would clean the base we put the soap down i'm like dude we can clean these days in fifteen minutes today well of course naturally later in my life i'm like we gotta work together we can read each other's mind right we worked so efficiently together but it started in a gas station in missouri you know with a bunch of guys that would just we had the best rapport with this awesome group of people at at the ami on olive and fee wrote you know and so it just goes on from thing to thing you know whatever working at on a farm after that but it gives you this ability to kinda have this humility and have these stepping stones in your life where you meet people where they got you go okay you know this this these are things i need to do to be successful i learned so many lessons from these people before you picked up your nickname thing because you're a you're a big nickname give something i kinda saw like nickname i was like hey everyone meets i was like it kinda has a nickname for them right away it builds this rapport right away yeah because look i live in silicon valley there's a lot of rich and successful people there there's not a lot of people who have the like fun to hang charm that you have it's top like i wanna steal a little bit from your game on that you know you it's almost a big country i'm just going on here so like ben is in my phone now is been big dog levy right like yeah i'm gonna i'm just giving nickname out now that's gonna gonna be is that something you'd intentionally i tell somebody who where i picked it up this guy's is zeke sig that used to work for okay so zeke sig he was like the black sheep and the sig family and the sig family owned all the car dealerships in missouri so what does zeke do zeke loved the gamble he loved to drink beer and he loved to play golf so he started he he had a family farm and he started a dr rage on the family farm and i was the johnny come cut the grass make sure that that all the tea lines were set right but zeke had these nickname for everybody that worked for him and i'll tell you he taught me one of the greatest lessons of my life and and this this one is is i passed this one on to my kids so i did everything as fast as i possibly could because i learned at the gas station just do it fast get an att boy from your boss you know get the gold star going to the next day and so zeke brings me in and he had all these nickname for everybody and so i'm this is my second summer there he said you're fired and i'm like what zeke what like what's going on and he'd have his little he he called him his little girls his little girls so he had this little bud budweiser in his hand and he said yeah you're fired you're out of here and i said what and he goes every day you come out here and you run around and you get all these little things you know done real quick you go out there and you weed eat the railroad tracks and then you you you you pull the weeds out of the sand traps and you set the tea lines and you do it faster than everybody else and i said oh thanks zeke i really appreciate it here's you know the problem is you come in here at eleven o'clock every morning after you get everything done and you asked me what you should do for the rest of the day hey zeke i got all that done what do you want me to do you do it every single day and you've done it for a year straight he goes you're fired and i said well zeke i'm not leaving i mean come on man you can't fire me for something like this and he goes no you're absolutely fired until i don't wanna see you for the rest of the summer you don't come in here and don't ask me what to do again and i'm like okay so i was angry i went out there and i picked those balls and then now at eleven o'clock every morning i'd look around and like okay i probably need to go take the hey and move the hay up into the barn i probably need to go out there and clean the barbecue pit so i didn't talk to him for the rest of the summer i i was like i'm not gonna go in there one time i'm not gonna get in there you know whatever may be so he brings me at the end of the summer he last day right you're going back back to school i said yeah it's my last day and he goes you're coming back next summer and said yeah i'd love to come back next summer and he said you're the boss and he gave me this big ring of keys and he goes here here you go and i said what and he goes you're the boss i said all these guys are ten years older than me and he goes you're the boss of all of them now because you know why he didn't come in here and asked me what to do you knew exactly what to do and that stuck with me for the rest of my life when i worked at oracle at larry ellis i never went to dean pans because office wants and asked him what to do i never went to hillary ko office wants and asked him what to do i thought okay what would they want me to do as the boss and when you do that he become the boss you think like the boss become the boss you become the boss yeah and so if the person that goes in there looking for the att a boy looking for the pat on the back looking for the affirmation or hey what's the next thing you want me to do they're never the boss right it's by y you bring your own clarity right versus being a a a sort of direction taker at all times yeah yeah a lot of people get that wrong yeah yeah so if we go back into the into the story for a second so you you leave you're doing the radio ads said the business is working you start to build this business now a mortgage business sounds like a good business to be in but there's always bumps and and bruises in in in any kind of roller coaster here so what happens with that business oh it happens you know the the financial crisis so you know on douglas boulevard where our office was i think ninety five percent of mortgage companies went out of business you know a lot of people didn't have their hedge position right they blew themselves up there because interest rates did increased then also the people that did subprime mortgages were done we lucky we didn't do a lot of subprime mortgages we didn't do any reverse amortization mortgages so i wanted to ask you about this so so you're you're in the you're in the eye of the storm right yeah the eight crisis which is subprime mortgage crisis you're in the mortgage business i'm in it yeah you know i've watched the big short that's my level of knowledge about this i'm curious like a what happened from your so what's your kinda like layman's explanation of what actually went wrong and then be how did you not fall into the same trap that many others seems like you know there was an incentive to give these subprime mortgages that you're gonna make more money every mortgage sales guy in the country at that time wanted to sell reverse amortization mortgages and wanted to sell subprime mortgages stated loans was the big thing right let's just have someone make up their income and they'll we'll give them an any loan we can stated loan yeah you yeah i'm good for it yeah yeah i'm good for it no you would basically say hey sean what's your income and you say oh i make two hundred thousand dollars a okay great two hundred thousand dollars a you're qualified for this loan so what happened at the end of the day there was a bunch of loans the people received that they should never received okay okay the underwriting criteria wasn't tight enough that's what happened that's why the crisis happened the default rate skyrocketed people walked away from their homes they're like hey i don't know i i have no equity in this house at all who cares i'll just walk away i'll i'll take the the light fixtures out of here right and you know whatever else also were putting a lot down then basically they were putting nothing down so nothing down stated income yeah and so that felt really really wrong to me like morally i was like i was saying the devil doesn't tempt you with spinach okay alright it's so you're like you know he's like oh you know like it's and then the guy that the sales guys would come in you know the mortgage guys hey man you know if people want red cars we gotta sell red cars if people want hamburgers we gotta sell them hamburgers hey i heard of analogy the sun i'm like we're not selling hamburgers we're not selling red cars i don't know how this movie ends but those people don't deserve those loans and so we're gonna walk away from the volume and and we did we walked away from a tremendous amount of volume walked away from a tremendous amount of people that wanted to come work for us take advantage of our cheesy radio commercials and the brand that we had created for ourselves and and sell those loans because what do they care they'll just sell those loans until that company blows up and they'll go on to the next company and so i give jason matt a ton of credit here jason has a brilliant mind for underwriting criteria and he has huge ethics and he basically said man it's not right it doesn't smell right we shouldn't do it and jason matt were experts in the industry and i said great we're not doing it and so it was a it was a hard decision at the time because you're right everybody else was doing it it was the only reason we survived there were so many buy backs from other companies they just said hey we can't buy them back were out and we we had done some stated loans and we had to buy some of those back but it wasn't at all near the magnitude if we would have done subprime loans and we would have done those kinds of things you sort of look wrong until you look right in that situation right meaning like you're just growing a little bit slower than other people or you're leaving money on the table until finally the crash happens and then then you're validated for that strategy but it's like most people are not willing to be to to look wrong or be wrong you know for three hundred sixty four days you know for the one that was you know a lot of times it's more than three hundred sixty four days sometimes it's three years mh you know i i just went through it in the residential solar financing business you know there's been about five companies that went bankrupt recently in that space and look we raised pricing i think sixteen times because the the fed raised rates so much in a short period of time and it was hard because we lost a lot of market share for a period of time people said hey you know if you guys are are gonna have to increase your pricing but the bond math didn't work the unit economics didn't work and i was like look if the unit economics don't work at some point the music stops and you die you blow yourself up and so you know the reason that we're a healthy company and we survived was for two reasons one the diversification and two was because of the discipline and the devil doesn't tempt you with spinach and and the the second piece to the mortgage piece just to go back to it is what happens after o eight is i look i had to lay off four hundred people so we had a couple i would say fifteen hundred employees or something along those lines and i i was so depressed man i would like literally throw up in my driveway before i could go see my family every night i was so so depressed they say you're never real ceo and until you go through a near death experience and i went through mine there i'll go to this rock and like literally pray just get me through this and i promise you i'll do good things for the world and so what i did was diversified i launched an insurance company next to the mortgage company that allows us to save people money on their homeowners and auto insurance i then had the idea to get into the energy business and save people money on their electrical bill and the way i did that was through the residential solar business so that diversification and is a good thing at times it forces you to kinda diversify the risk within your company but you've gotta have the unit economic discipline on the front end and and have a a good sense of ethics and and the right thing to do you know when when other competitors may or or may not be willing to do that so where do the where does that strategy come from at that point where do the what are the ideas to do insurance energy because you're in the middle of a you're weather a storm you're laying off people when i was a little i accidentally almost burned down my house and you know for like you know it's like everyone comes come everyone in the neighborhoods looking at you and is like he tried to bake cookie and almost burned down the house like you know like yeah the mortgage interesting almost burned down the house of america totally so you're in a tough spot where do these ideas come from at that stage man it's when your soul is getting crushed is when you get the download at least that that that's was it for me when i worked at oracle i would run the golden gate bridge most mornings and i sat in a meeting there where with hp we had just done a really big a deal with hp and what i realized that the time was you know yeah they they've maybe needed the software as a crm solution it was a new crm solution for oracle but likely it was a horse trading deal that i was a part of for some reciprocity between oracle buying you know a lot of hp servers and laptop computers and printers and then in return hp saying hey you know we're gonna take a risk here and buy buy crm solution from oracle and i just felt a little bit like man is this what i'm gonna do with my life i'm gonna be in these rooms i'm gonna work with legal groups for like a half a year to get these deals done and then it's it's about it's a trade you know in some way shape or form at the end of the day and so i wanted more meaning in my life i wanted to and so i thought about hey what what's important to me okay my mom and i never owned a home we rented our entire lives i wash or paid four hundred bucks a month in rent our whole lives if we were always strapped i always watched my mom work three jobs was always like mom can't you get educated and buy a home and i was just talking to a good friend of mine just a few days ago he's from the inner city in saint louis and he said hey as you realize our people went the way we grew up will never buy a home unless someone really sits down and educate some and that was my dream was hey could i create a mortgage company they could educate people online they could educate people in a non threatening way where they could learn about the ability to own a home instead of renting their whole life the american dream of owning this home right and so i found meaning in that and i found a other group of people that found meaning in that of course i hired a bunch of processors and under writers that were single moms because i was raised by a single mom of course i asked my mom to move from chicago at the time she was taking care of her mother out to sacramento to come work with me and be along my side and you know she just retired this year but she was with me for whatever was fifteen solid years or more and then that led me to think about wait a minute what if i could edge educate people on their homeowners insurance and auto insurance and how to protect these assets and then i found a lot of you know i i candidly i had a vision for what could i do that's really solves a big problem around this that also is tied to a big bill inside of the home and that was the vision for it's the electric bill and it's clean energy and i can elect the home and that is an amazing opportunity and so i would advertise with the cheesy ad about hey i can save you money on your biggest bills and people would call in and we would save a money on their mortgage payment their homeowners and auto insurance and their their their electric bill that create diversification but it also allowed me to see what three separate entities underneath one holding company could do to make an impact in in homeowners lives right i wanna read you quote that i really liked you said the difference between rejection results is just how long you stick with it and this is like you know on one hand it's like okay this is kind of just like fortune cookie advice but for some reason it hit for me what's i guess where'd did you get that and i guess like what's the kind of like unpack that what's the story there look i think a lot of people quit when it gets hard and you you sometimes you don't even know you're quitting you just come up with a reason why you think you need to quit just like i had no choice i had to quit right you become master salesman to yourself to point you in the other direction yep yep i you know and they you wanna run by all your friends that you know they were gonna tell you to quit it you you do that start i know the five guys that'll tell me i should quit so i'm gonna go call those five guys and then i'll tell me it's okay to quit and then i know i'm this is blessed for quitting and so what happens to a lot of companies is all companies they go through really challenging difficult times and it's inevitable if you run these companies these these companies are just riddled with problems right that's what they are and you're always constantly solving the next problem and in some way shape or form they're all cyclical they always face some massive headwind it could be a policy headwind it could be a financial headwind because of interest rates it could be a headwind because a terrorist whatever it is you're gonna face one and so the key in those moments when you're getting your soul crushed is to find a way to get through it to find a way to not quit and make sure the team stays together and not quit because the valley is the value and no one realizes that when all your competition dies and they they they're going out of business one after another because of maybe a bad decision or maybe they lost the team because people weren't inspired anymore or maybe it just got too hard and people were fed up with it that is the moment where your company is actually creating value now it wouldn't show that in your stock price right it wouldn't show that you know in in in your board meeting necessarily but that's the difference you know i just went through a really crazy difficult cycle in residential solar over the course of the last really two and a half to three years usually these cycles only last about a year this one was two and a half to three years now we've diversified significantly and made a bunch of investments and and innovated in really big ways but the valley is the value and ninety nine percent of people quit in the in the moment they're like oh you know maybe i should just join the board or maybe i should just kinda do something else right because again winners have options you know if you got a little money in the bank you're like you know what man i'm just gonna go do something else with my life like like this too much of an opportunity cost for me to sit here and slug it out right but as you grind it out during those moments there's two things that happened one is you gain tremendous market share and respect from your board okay in those kinds of moments and the second thing that happens is you see yourself as a different person in the face of adversity and the muscle that you created and what you had to learn to get through that moment which makes you a stronger executive for the next wave of of pain that's gonna come your way hey take a quick break you know hubspot helped tumblr solve a big problem tumblr needed to move fast they were trying to produce trending content but their marketing department was stuck waiting on engineers to code every single email campaign but now they use hubspot customer platform to email real time trending content to millions of users in just seconds and the result was huge three times more engagement and double the content creation if you wanna move faster like tumblr visit hubspot dot com alright back to the show when you were at solar city i mean solar is kind of a controversial company like i remember from the outside it was like this incredible company then tesla was gonna acquire it and then it was like but wait is it a is it in good financial health is it not a good financial health there's was a lot of like i guess narrative around it did you learn anything about kind of like the internal storytelling that's required to not only get yourself to believe but but the whole team to believe when there's a lot of noise on the outside yeah absolutely don't don't listen to the noise like i have thin skin which is is why i don't do twitter which is why i don't do podcasts when like i don't wanna read all the comments of people that say oh gosh that guy this i don't know why like i care like some people don't care right i'm like i actually care care some people say i don't care i but i care i i really care and and and so i'm not i'm not good at the public thing i'm not good at putting myself out there you know which is why i don't do any of the self promotion or anything along those lines because i'm not man enough to take the blows that that come my way i'm embarrassed is saying that but that's that's really the the truth of it if i make myself vulnerable and so well for me is i don't read it i don't read the articles i don't i don't look at x all the time and and all the comments and things along those lines i keep my head down i stay focused on on on and try to feed my mind with the right things that's why i don't watch scary movies you know i i really don't like if i watch a scary movie it's like stuck in my head for a month i'm like i'm not man enough to watch scary movies i just wanna watch happy things like i wanna watch a comedy i would you know i wanna watch something inspirational some great documentary so i'm just really careful about about what narrative is is yeah and it also comes down to who a hang out with like it's weird man like you know when i'm met my dad i i like there's a part of me i would see things in my father okay and so it's like and i didn't like it after i hung out with him i was like oh wow man like i i do some of those things too like that is that dna based is that like you start to question who you are as an individual right and so you gotta be really careful with the kind of people you spend your time with and what dialogue that you're having with them because proximity is a powerful thing that it cuts both ways right what was it like meeting you on the first time would you have suspected then when you met them that like kind of the the rise basically i mean now he's bought don't know the wealthiest guy in the world and he's created this like world changing companies yeah i'm just curious what was your kind of impression at at that stage i thought i had a great work ethic when i was working with larry allison or had my own company no company has the work ethic and the commitment and the sacrifice factor than than an elon company you know when you go to work for those companies my son versus at spacex right now he's doing his second year internship down at spacex out of all the companies in the world that i would hope my son could go work for he's you know nineteen years old i'm like go go for elon man right go see what it's like at spacex go down in boca chic go light some rockets off with mark c some of the greatest engineers in the history of the world see what it's like to have that level of work ethic that give a shit factor you know i mean like when you're in those kind of environments it's like look you're playing with live ammunition man you gotta you got gotta you gotta play full out and you're in the fox hole it time to go to war we're the warriors of light you go hard to go home that's just the way that it is because think about it we're the most highly short stock in the history of the world between tesla in solar city everyone said we're the next en on right we were done the articles you know were were crazy you think they were there were you know now they're a balance between the two at that time we were all the biggest morons in the world right because we were the you know the clean energy guys the sustainability guys and there's no way we could ever create a a company of any value well that's that narrative is is changed but you know just to be just very direct it was very very obvious to me that elon was the ultimate alpha and he had a leadership skill and a magnetic energy to get human beings to make the necessary sacrifices to build the most important disruptive impactful technologies in the history of the world like when i just i worked so hard i never stopped working for nine years of my life i'm not kidding you i just wanted him to be happy you know i wanted i and he was always so kind to me and he's always so grateful to me and you know and i would always get a kind nod in the boardroom but like i just wanted linden to be happy i wanted pete to be happy i wanted you know you to be happy and there there was a a sacrifice that i think everyone everyone makes when you work at those companies a sense of pride and commitment and sacrifice this necessary based on being driven by growth and being around peers and alpha that are gonna gonna push themselves to be the best they can be and driven by contribution and and the difference that you can make in the world yeah i have this phrase that you don't know what level ted looks like so basically i have this theory which is really this podcast actually helps me do this which is in any area of my life i think at a certain time oh okay i know what the spectrum is i know one is the bottom but i know what a ten is and you know sometimes i i fool myself at the ticket i'm a ten at this thing then you go meet somebody who totally breaks the frame and you're like oh that's what like that's that's that's what they did and i call i call it eleven eleven eleven it's like oh didn't even realize the knob actually goes further you could just crank this baby up yeah it's whether it's like work ethic or even storytelling ability or it's you know it's just how sharp they are because because you know work ethics a part of it like you know one of my companies got bought by twitch and i got to work this guy emmett emmett to see founder of twitch yeah and people what's up like you and i'm like i can tell you a lot of things but you know one of the things that was very obvious to me i was like oh this guy's oven burns a little hotter like this guy's just genuinely much smarter than me like yeah and so it's not like and and i didn't i hadn't really encountered people at that level of like inc of of sharpness of inspiring you know we they do amazon so you write a six page memo and you come in in the first ten minutes of a silent read so i'm reading this thing within like three minutes he's done with the paper he's highlighted the one he's found the needle in the haystack like the one thing that actually matters we're talking about and he's waiting for the rest of us to catch out and it's like okay so so i i love saying level eleven in fact is why when we came out here we did your morning routine with you yeah because you're kind of like a level eleven of like energy like you're energy rich i don't even know how old you're you're way more energy to think like twenty years younger than you you have twenty times more energy than me i'm sixty two fifty two like thought of a pretty high gi yeah and have like a certain viva vicious sn for life but then you oh that's eleven okay good yeah now i can recalibrate i'm i'm actually at a seven cool but now that i've seen it that's like a a very important thing is literally just to see it gi and so you know i hope with this you know the when wanna do this podcast is like we talked to so many people done whatever five hundred or six hundred episodes the goal is that you break some people's frame i it yeah and and what what is the commitment to sacrifice as necessary like i you think about it right so they they buy my company the first one paramount solar rolled in solar city i this big first big exit right of my life what did i do the next day i packed up my stuff i moved into a studio apartment in san francisco by myself remember i'm married i have a wife i have three kids i'm like i will see you guys in a year i'm going down silicon valley don't worry i'm gonna do this i'll buy us a house i'll figure it out out kids are in school all those kinds of things i eat a burrito four nights a week at you know one in the morning in my little studio apartment in you know south san francisco before i went and and built an organization we grew that organization from you know maybe at the time there's fifteen hundred of us max i i think i brought four hundred of the fifteen hundred and we grew it to a twenty thousand person organization that did twenty thousand residential solar systems a month and you know it became the largest solar company in the history of the world but it's like that into energy that you're feeding off of when you sit around linden r and you see his spirit and you see his energy and it's like in literally all every moment of every day i don't care if we were mountain biking i don't care if we were kite surfing i don't care if we were on vacation and cabo we were talking about work we were talking about different ways we can engineer things different ways we could create things and do do things and it was amazing just to be around those kinds of people where you're absorbing that energy and that competitive spirit to do something that no one's ever been able to do before especially when the rest of the world thinks you're crazy and there's no way it's gonna work it's i'm gonna make a guess you tell me this is right it seems like maybe prior to that you can just said i found my tribe it's like yeah for a while it's like you don't really quite fit in you're sort of an odd ball and then you finally meet a group of people who are wired the way you're wired you think the way you think you're talking to the way you talk talking and it's only normal to be your weird it's gotta be a good feeling right like it yeah was that how it was for you totally when i was in missouri i was a fish out of water man and i was depressed like i was i was frustrated listening to the conversations around the kitchen table i was frustrating listening the conversations on the field there was this level of your your skepticism self doubt highly medicated mindset that lacked ambitious and they're like man you're just too excited about life chill out have a cigarette and relax okay you know life isn't that great buddy you know and i just i knew i needed to leave i knew i need to pack my car up and i i would've gone further than the silicon valley if the ocean wasn't there i mean honestly i i didn't come home for a long time i i stayed out west for a very very long time and and the reason was i was all of a sudden around people that were believers i was around people that were excited about things that weren't getting caught up and what they were gonna have for dinner at night or the two cups of coffee they needed in the morning to get themselves going or the smoke i was like oh man this is incredible and then i was around with people at oracle obviously you know it really really bright people operating on a high frequency they were hyper motivated to do something with their lives then you kinda graduate to hey i'm a founder in this world of the of the silicon valley with other peers and founders and then i got plugged into that group of whoa these are these are the greatest founders in the world this is this is sergey brent this is larry page this is you know the the all the paypal mafia the luke no the the ken har you know the like all of a sudden you were around this peer group of friends that you spent time with and you're like i can do anything right i can do anything if i bang out with these guys and i feed off this energy every morning i i can do anything right and and honestly i still feel like that way today i'm i this is why i love spending time with people like you i love the young young energy i loved a you know there's there's a guy his named keller he's the founder of zip line i just went and visited him at his office a couple weeks ago in san francisco with the drone door drone delivery i just i'd wanna be around keller you know he and i went on a hill trip together we went snowboarding together we became friends and he's like man i come visit my office i got a lot of things to do i wanted to go to keller office and visit with ke and just see his operation and what he's doing and so i'm really thoughtful about trying to find other people with great energy great ambition and drive that are trying to do impactful things of the world and and bring them into my life so if through that door came like twenty seven year old you right we we we you get a second because you're busy yeah and you're doing things when you're already in what you're in you're doing what you're doing you have your company if twenty seven year old you comes in and he's got all the time in the world and he says alright what's the blueprint what's the hayes barn way of doing things what where should i go point my i what where i direct my energy what do you think you would how would you explain your way of doing what idea specifically like what problems do you think are worth solving that you might plant to seed and in the head of twenty seven year old you man it's such a that's such a good question i would with with the gray hair that i have the day i'd probably drop him with them and i'd say look you're gonna be addicted to success okay you're gonna be addicted to productivity your work alcoholic because you're constantly trying to prove everybody that you're enough okay and so you're gonna take on a lot and it's gonna at times it's just gonna feel like the weight of the world on your shoulders and you're fighting for clean energy tax credits and the big beautiful bill in dc and meeting with senators and and you know all all the things but i need you to think about more than one level of wealth and one level of success which is financial success right i need you to think about time success and i need you to think about mental health success and i need you to think about physical health success and i want you think about friendship and community success because i'm afraid that you're gonna sacrifice those other four pillars of success for one right which is financial success and you gotta realize man like when you grew up like i did and your mom's got her head in her hands and she's crying about whether she can turned the air conditioning on and she's this amazing woman all you wanna do is help all you wanna do is carry a couple golf bags and put forty bucks down on the kitchen table to make sure that you guys can turn the air conditioning on all you wanna do is someday hire your mom to come work for your company right and say hey we're good it's okay all you wanna do is give your wife the life that your mother never had give your son the life that you never had and you're willing to make this crazy level of success so you have the financial means to make sure that they can go to that private school they can go to that you know university that they wanna go to someday well that causes you to make this massive amount of success and give up maybe any time for yourself or maybe maybe your mental health suffers because you've you've grind out and your adrenal grounds are shot and your doctors are like hey man like we gotta get you on meds so that you can get your thyroid back in order because you've blown it out and so i'm at a stage now where i've tell that twenty seven year old guy i'm like look man the goal is to also solve for happiness you don't need to be a marty right okay you don't need to just like devote your life to all these other people and all these other things and die miserable okay at some point in time i need you to make sure that you're working out every morning you're doing the breath work you're you're you're doing the swim you're doing the hit workout with your friends you're laughing you're playing but boy because as you create more success it just it gets really really difficult the amount of people to start targeting you and coming after you right someone will watch this podcast and go man that's a really nice couch he shouldn't have that nice couch right there and at times i think man i probably shouldn't have that nice couch maybe maybe i don't deserve that nice couch right you know and so it's just this whole mindset that i think you have to think about where you're really driven person on hey why are you doing it what are you doing but but it's the how component how do you start politely declining certain things how do you not have foam for all the things that you'd feel like you need to show up for because i feel like i need to be in two cities in the same day and have two different meetings and do it in person and you just burn yourself out on the whole thing and so i need to learn tell that kid take time for yourself create space give yourself an opportunity to kinda rev down every once in a while you'll be better off in the long run you know we need you around for the long haul right because you've you've been around the you know whatever the dinner table of success is like the top of the top you've been around a lot of those people you don't need to name names but i i i would imagine that a lot of those people are a bit of a murder in the sense of they're not that happy or maybe loving their life in the way that one would assume when you have a certain level of success is that has that been true from your your experience or yeah i would say most of the really successful people i know there's a also a meaningful amount of sadness in their life you know because of the sacrifice maybe it's a lack of connection with their kids maybe it's a lack of connection with an ex wife or you know they kinda regret you know the way they they they interacted at certain times because you're revving in the conference room and you're battling all day long these intense discussions it's hard to come back home and then just be like a chill normal guy you know like you're never a chill normal guy you always have nice intense look on your face you don't smile as much for you're like man he's like okay like he needs to chill out a little bit and so you know for sure what those level of sacrifices you you you gather more demons in your life and and and and it's sad to say that but money doesn't make you happy money doesn't make you a better person it's like really important the more things that you have it's actually more stressful you know it like and and and people that maybe don't have a lot of things would say oh man you know how how try to view to say something like that but the reality is the only thing that matters in the end of the day is are the relationships that you have you know and the love that you have those those deep relationships that you that you carry on who's the exception i'm sure there's somebody out there that's that's found that you know the these balances right i have a few newer stars yeah there's like man i like michael dell like kind of the biggest north star i think i've ever met in my life you know his not well his marriage with susan is is amazing his wife is incredible she's her own force of nature what they do philanthropic what they do for the world they're very humbled so you're not gonna be able to read about it or anything but the impact they make in the world their children you know like their son zac dell is like i i i'd say to my son luke hey can you spend time with zach read the books of zach read and talk to zach because he's like a pretty amazing guy but it's the humility that he has you know now he he politely declines the things he's taught me that and and and he creates space for himself to read and relax but he didn't go crazy like a lot of people they create michael del wealth they go crazy yeah and and they they lose themselves in this into environment of winners have options and you can have anything and do anything and instead he's the kind of guy that just becomes more humble becomes more of a give become more focused on on the impact that he can make in the world through all the now it still plays big don't get me wrong you know he's bold leader and he takes big swings and big bets i mean this isn't a guy going through the motions and you know and but he's somebody that has this level of humble humility about him that that i i respected admire tell me about the the blue ocean strategy insight you had because we haven't even talked about your current company the main the main company yet good yeah which is a kind of a juggernaut or not but talk about this insight you had well what do you do after you know we sold source to tesla elon was great he wrote me a really nice letter you know to the any any and you know you kinda cc the tesla board about it and and so you're kinda like okay you know i i exited there gracefully i think as much as you can you know i think people always want you to come back and do different things and there's at times i i feel guilty that i i didn't go back and help at times but where where do you go from there you're like okay well the insight that i had was we were by far the biggest solar company in the country we had forty percent market share in the entire united states and was recruiting a lot of people from our competitors and we were building you know the the largest manufacturing facility in the western hemisphere for solar panels and tesla built a giga factory and we're at this stage where i was like man i i'm very passionate about sustainability i'm really passionate about the deployment of these solutions i had been burnt out on sales a little bit i was managing around a ten thousand person sales organization and so it's a lot of text messages from sales professionals that that wanna raise i'm i'm joking but you know they wanna talk about their comp joking but it was i was just like i was like how do i do something that's not really sales focus but technology focused and i can deploy these solutions okay and so i was coming off a big high and i thought about i read a book called the blue ocean strategy and so we were in a little bit of a red ocean strategy which was like hey beat your competition beat your competition just beat your competition and i was in a in a mindset where i was like what if i can make my competition our biggest partner instead of our biggest competitor and so i looked to the premise of blue strategy what is what does it mean yeah it means if you can make sure everybody wins in an environment where literally even your competitors win that creates a flywheel effect that allows that organization to scale so red oceans is like testosterone and you run a solar company i run a solar company i'm better than you we're gonna sell more than you we're gonna win that customer blue ocean strategy is like hey what do you need like can i support you in some way shape or form red ocean would be like okay let's imagine you know are both gold miners and we're out there you know panning for gold blue ocean is like i wanna be the guy who sells the picks and shovel to everybody right and so the mindset was if i can enable the entire ecosystem from all the panel manufacturers to all the battery manufacturers to all the different installers in the marketplace to all the sales professionals in the marketplace and empower them with a b to b marketplace and platform that allows them to have access to capital access to each other in an environment where they can transact with consumers where the consumer wins they elect the home they lower their carbon footprint they save money the installers win where they can all install any panel or any any battery solution in the marketplace and all the manufacture of these products win because they get access to that marketplace to the the ability to deploy these assets boy that would be a cool business and that was the beginning of the idea of good leap it started with point of sale financing for solar which quickly led to wait a minute we should finance all electrified solutions in the home hvac energy efficient windows roofing smart thermostats you know synthetic grass turf basically anything that allows us to kinda lower that carbon footprint in the home that would be that's a blue ocean strategy and so now the banks are winning and the financial institutions are winning because they're getting their eight to ten percent return on the assets all the installers are winning because they have access to all these great products and great sales professionals and all the sales professionals are winning because they have access to the installers and the products so that that was a blue ocean strategy and a marketplace business that allows us to grow pretty quickly 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 starter founder entrepreneur you could tell it's made by somebody who used other banking products in the past and didn't like all the different rough edges and and annoy and decided to you know actually fix it himself and really any type of entrepreneur you are let's say you're an agency it's 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 can you tell the dad story because you told this i you told us privately so you don't have to say if you don't want to but it was i think i sent you a note after this i sent you a voice and i was like man that a story really moving at my own you know dad issues you know that are going on but the way you told it it's funny first of all but secondly i think it's really powerful is a lot of people i think have stuff like i don't know personally i would love to hear yeah you're open to no no i'd look i'll totally share it so it's a it's an interesting story so i remember my dad leaves me in in in saint louis missouri my my mom and he and i moved from illinois to missouri he worked for merit so he was like a guy that would like take people on incentive trips you know so he's a here's a drinker you know he had had a lot of problems with alcohol you know he had he had you know under i don't know i wanna be respectful to my father and all those kinds of things but long story short he left and and they separated at a young year yeah i i was about two years old okay and and i don't know where he went we didn't hear from him but as a kid you know if you're a decent athlete or you're doing things you really hope that maybe dad calls and goes hey man i saw that wow i saw that article in the paper or you know and you always think about who your father is and and maybe what the situation was my mom was amazing she never said anything poor about my dad so i didn't know much about my father it wasn't a focus but i became a man of the house that a pretty young age and and that wasn't awesome for my mom because i would run her boyfriend's off and i was trying to be a little alpha dog around the apartment and things like that i you know i'd regret that too and but basically i finally when i'm at oracle and i i'd quote unquote made it i was like i wanna find my father and i sat next to this guy kelly cook he was a good old boy man from oklahoma kelly cook played football at oklahoma state so he was the full back for barry sanders and thurman thomas can you imagine dude this is kelly cook yeah this guy is the bad alright and so kelly was my i called in big papa yeah i got my nickname you call me play alright he's gonna me play icon can't be pop so right up that's why i said big papa man i wanna i wanna find my dad he goes you know we this internet thing we can maybe find him on the internet and i was like you think we could find him on the internet he goes and and he goes yeah man let me let me see if i can figure it out so not i swear it wasn't like a day before all of a sudden kelly's is on the phone he's waving me over he's waving me over and and and he's like your dad i got your dad on the phone man i got i'm like what you talking my dad on the phone and so he's talking to my dad jim yeah you're jim you're from illinois right yeah hey jim that's what i thought yeah you it's where are you working right know what's going on so so my father at the time he's talking to him about a suit about a size of a suit and the and the length of the arms and not i'm like what is it going on man what is he having this conversation the guy about so he could hangs up phone and he goes hey you're not gonna believe it now i was working at redwood shores now at oracle hq and he goes you're dad you don't complete this man your father is in palo alto and he works for patrick james clothing shop he found him through tax records and i was like really he sells clothing like across some stanford right there i mean it's maybe fifteen minutes down the road okay and i'm like kelly come on you gotta be kidding me goes no well that rocked me for about three months i'm like my dad is fifteen minutes away from me what are the odds both of us are here in you know out in the silicon valley well i put my best suit on i went down there got a big deep breath and i was like alright man i'm gonna go i'm a go meet my dad i'm gonna go in there and make it happen so i'm kinda looking in the store and like i at him is that him excited to have me pictures or anything and i walked in and i said hey how you doing and they said great and i said it's jim barn here and they said no jim doesn't work here on wednesdays you know was like what it was tuesdays thursdays and sundays or something i'm like oh man okay and i think subconsciously i wanted a reason to come back and so i was they go well how can i help you and i was like oh at the time i bought custom shirts because have a thirty seven inch long arm okay i said can i get a couple custom shirts they're like sure no problem what's your name well i used my best friend's name jason walker you know from the fourth grade i said jason walker hey jason how you doing anyway i buy the i buy the shirts and at the end the guy's like hey they're ex amount how do you wanna pay for it i'm like oh man i can't get my credit card that says hey barn so i'm like hold on a second i left my wallet in the car i go to the atm i get the money out i think it was like a hundred and fifty dollars i go in and i'm like hey man you know i just had cash is this okay like yeah jason you got a phone number cool we'll call you and in those days it was like a month and a half where your shirts are done okay so i'm like alright so now you can imagine in a month and a half i'm sitting there you making my phone calls at oracle do my whole thing and i'm thinking man i gonna meet my dad can meet my dad put my best suit on they call they leave a voice mail your shirt to ready i go back well this time i can see him this time i'm like oh man that's definitely him when you see your dad for the first time you're like okay that that's his face i'm shorter than me he's a little fuller than me but that that's his face and i'm like oh boy okay this is it well he comes out and he's got a cigarette in his hand he's he's it isn't lit yet and he's got the lighter in his hand and his dust it's about five thirty at night because i drove it down that that after work and he goes back and he goes back in the back alley and i'm like wow he's in that back alley back there if i'm ever gonna go back there and i don't wanna embarrass him or anything i'm gonna go there and and meet him and so i get out i can see him in the rearview mirror so my car parked this way he was kinda behind me so i was kinda looking their rearview mirror so i get out of the car i'm ready now you can imagine okay i'm like i'm like thirty years old i've made it making good money i got my my suit want my father to be proud of me and you know big big moment for me and so but i'm shaking i'm like i'm i'm a heart's pumping i go around the corner and oh shit you startled me and he's having his cigarette i said i'm so sorry i i didn't mean to start you i just came back here to introduce myself to you and he said well great he goes my name is jim barn and i took a deep breast and i was like my name is hayes barn and he he had that cigarette in his hand his hand shaking and you know you could just you could just and he just looked at me and he just said son i said yeah and he's like i'm so sorry and i was like man don't don't be sorry at all and he buried his head in my chest i wrap arms around him and i just held him you know for like twenty minutes he cried in my chest my whole shirt was covered in you know his tears and snot and the whole thing man you can imagine it's really powerful now in the moment i'd like he probably thought this guy come from chicago did come from missouri like like what does this kid doing out here and so you know i said dad it it's okay don't be sorry don't be sorry don't be sorry you know just wanted to meet you and he goes i'm so sorry i'm so sorry and i i said don't be sorry you know and so sorry i'm getting emotional we we go inside and this guy bought the shirts from his name was dwayne and he goes hey jason right and i said no no my name is hayes and and he said haze and my father said hey dwayne he he'd work for for about fifteen years at patrick james so close there he said this is my son this is this is hey partnered and he said jim i didn't know you had a son and he said well yeah i got a son and this this is him and so that was it you know i i kinda met my dad there and he said hey by any chance do you like football you know i i got forty nine tickets and i was like yeah you know i i i do like football dad and i'd love to go to forty nine game with you and then that that was it man i learned a lot about my life after that which was amazing you know there's all these super interesting things i learned about my life when you meet your father when you're when you're thirty years old yeah you know yeah the one thing that strikes me there is like you weren't resent full or upset like i mean like that seems unusual to me well i had realized by that point in time probably the best thing that ever happened to me was not having a father i know it i know it sounds terrible now but i didn't have when i was a young boy i was angry you know why don't have a dad and why do we live like this and all those kinds of things and then as a as an older man you realize that having a mother in that situation and the drive and the responsibility that gave you was probably one of the greatest gifts that ever happened in my life and so i was there really more probably because i was looking for affirmation from him i wanted him to be proud i wanted him to see how hard i had worked and the things that i had done and have a level of respect for me that for for some whatever reason it was just important to have that that affirmation from my dad and so i got i got that closure you know he i i didn't get a lot of time with them he ended up passing away but he definitely had an opportunity to get to know me to get to know my kids to get to know my wife to get to see me and some of the things that i had done and we expressed a lot of love and respect for each other so for me it's like sometimes that's your opportunity to show a tremendous amount of compassion empathy for someone he did the best he could man he had addiction issues he had some challenges he had his own issues with self confidence you know his his father passed away really really young his father was a severe alcoholic his grandfather was a a severe alcoholic and so he was adopted by this guy hayden barn which was this renowned doctor in hence illinois when he was twelve years old his real name was james neil o'brien was my father's name but at twelve years old they changed his name to jim barn and that's why he named me hayden barn because the guy that adopted him was this guy his name was hayden hayden barn yeah that's amazing yeah i appreciate you testing cool telling that story yeah you're welcome man yeah it's good thanks for asking it's i've never told that one before definitely on camera but yeah like i mean i think one of your the things you try to do is you what what is what would you say your life mission is connect the hearts of people around the world for like for for good or for positive yeah and connect talked to others create positive change in the world how do you do that without sharing your own stories and your own have vulnerabilities right yeah absolutely i think there's a of people out there that probably didn't have father had challenges with their father in some way shape or form and so you know it it honestly it could it's a valley for a lot of people when they're young but it's probably a spike for people later in their life right you know yeah you you told me about the laying the dirt story i love this story but yeah what's that story yeah look look the was a very very difficult time for me and i was really really hurting and so i had this idea i'd heard from front of my brad tu went to this organization at the time it was called building with books it's called build on now and he had gone to africa and he built a school and he came back and tu was like this awesome guy worked with at oracle and tu was like look you should do this man you'd find a lot of meaning in this and so when i was like you know if it had the victim mindset the woe was me oh man i had to lay out these people oh man i'm really hurting right now i'm in this tough spot i went to my executive team and i said look crazy idea what if we all go to africa we build a school and they're like what man we're struggling right now we just laid off four people why in the world do we go to africa and go build a school with some organization called build on i'm like i don't know tu went he said it was amazing i think we should raise money from our friends and we should go lay the dirt and we should get grounded and and it just called me long story short everybody's like we're in let's go make it happen we raise little money we fly over to bam over in west molly africa we've we've we load up this like van with with a goat on top literally we strapped a goat to the top of this van we all got our backpacks and we drive sixteen hours out to this zara tribe why why'd did you need to go on the van i didn't know i had no idea because the handler there has to bring a go i'm like we gotta bring a goat i never been in africa yeah like this is this is interesting and so we get there we meet the chief we got the translators they're doing a whole thing we learned then we split the goats throat you know because in you in this part of the world you drink the blood of the goat and that's the ceremonial thing and you're welcomed into the village and then a big deal they cooked the goat because most of the time they just eat this grain this mu basically every single day and then i laid in the dirt and this woman aw i was in her hut so these welcome you you dance in the village every night you saying these people are so happy and alive now it's sad they die by the time they're thirty years old because they drink poison in every single day and and all these other things but they're very very happy people and so i with my brother we're laying in the dirt in this tent and then everybody else has their own little kind of like hut it's like a mud hut kinda kinda situation and all the k pokemon just spiders are around human man you know you you you go to the bathroom in this little hole and then when you open up the hole there's all the k pokemon spiders in there as well the head on and you're like oh man you know your whole nervous system's being shook up but about every morning about two thirty am you can hear olive she's shaking that grain man and you're thinking man she's shaking that grain for me you could you just hear and now you're like wow man like she's up there two thirty in the morning she's shaking that grain for me and then all of a sudden you hear hacking something she's hacking the wood and then she's she's lighting the fire for you i'm like was she lighting the fire for why would she be lighting the fire and like three in the morning so every morning for seven nights you're thinking about this and then all of a sudden i would come out in the morning and the bucket of water would be over the fire because so i could bathe in the morning with this bucket of warm water well i figured out on the second day said where do you get the water and she's like oh let me take you i thought she was gonna take me around the corner we're going for five hours we walk like literally like five miles to a river where all this livestock basically lives and she puts the water on her head and then she walks back another four or five miles every i you do this every single day and do this for my bucket of water so that i could bathe and i would bathe in the morning and at night before i would go to bed and the gills it was almost like wait a second whoa man this is like really messed up and so you know i just i just had this epiphany man like the fifth night land then there i was like okay we're building the school but it's almost all boys in the school where the girls while the girls are fetching water they're filling their buckets versus you know filling the brains in the classroom and i was like there's gotta be a way for me to figure this out now at the time i was diversifying in the solar business and i thought man what if i could put solar on all these schools and we could get intel and other players to donate the laptops we could extend the hours in the classroom so the women can get educated to so iowa kids can get educated and so i just had this lightning rod moment man like i just have these big downloads at at certain times in my life from like okay i need to start a foundation that's gonna basically find a way to light up all these schools and and and so that that was the moment that's how it i came up with it wow yeah and so you go back and you kind of had a model that was like the tom's model right for for would be sell solar here in the us then we can give solar in africa yeah on the schools right that was the the sort of the blueprint well let me explain how how went down so the solar company takes off quick you know we become the second largest solar company maybe it's the third there was like sun there was solar city and us these were kinda like the three players of residential solar in the united states and i was partnered with sun and i was partnered with solar city like you would sell it they would install it right that's right you you nailed it and so and then we were good at financing as well so we started to launch our own tax equity funds or own financing funds this is a new way where we could basically we used of structured finance solutions to offer zero down solutions for financing for people to elect electrified their homes to to put solar on their on their there's a good story i don't know what the story is they told me it's a good story about how you struck the deal with solar city well so so we're doing about forty percent of solar cities business at the time and and less in sun but both companies the woman that had founded sun run her name's lynn uric she's amazing woman and and linden who was the ceo of solar city who's elon cousin i had a great relationship with both of them and they both came and said look we'd love to buy you okay we'd love to buy you we'd love to roll you in we'd love to make you a part of the organization and what we're doing and so we had a lot of discussions and i was like well do you want the insurance company do you want the mortgage company like now you you can keep your other two sad companies you know i'm joking i'm joking but but you you we want to we want you and we want solar business and so after some thought lin and i had become really close personal friends our families were vacation together our kids were really close friends our wives were really close friends his brother pete you know it would also i became very close with him and his wife and his kids and so we were becoming a family they said hey his come on man you know we're gonna ipo this company and we really need you to be a part of it or will i ipo it and then we'll buy you like a week or two later and so i said hey i'm open to it you know let let's think about it you know we had met with elon we had discussions with him and and and talked about how we could build the biggest solar company in the history of the world and what this could look like and all the things that we could do and so i was going to build a a solar system down in for school for build on down in nic and i said look would you come with me would you come with me to see us put solar on a school nic aqua and the impact we can make i have this big vision for putting solar on all these schools linden was awesome because i'm let's go make it happen so we went down to nic we build a solar system for the school lin and i sit on the roof he's like this is unbelievable man this is this is a really really cool thing to do and i said what if for every megawatt of energy we deploy here in the united states we put solar in a school somewhere in the world and he was like i love it man let's let's make it happen let's do it through a five zero one see three nonprofit and so in three years we put solar on like two thousand five hundred schools and in several countries in the world that's amazing yeah you're doing some amazing things right now with with your fl in around water but your organization named git power you talked about how you're doing solar panels on schools so where where did the shift go from solar panels to water well so three years later i go back to all these places in the world whether it was in nepal or nic or different parts of africa and kenya and i realized that we lit up all these schools and then when you walk into the schools this this made me sad it was a bunch of guys with their cell phones plugged in or people play video games on laptop so i'm like great i bought i brought video games to the developing world you know i brought i got i gave these guys cell phones because they didn't have cell phones i was there the first time the first time they saw my cell phone and you would like take a picture of them and they were like whoa magic me like they've never seen themselves in the mirror realize you know yeah i mean these people are amazing they brush their their teeth with a stick and now all of a sudden i brought cell phones yeah it's to this area because we brought power to these this area i like this wasn't a great idea and go figure i was so stupid that the women weren't sitting in the classroom till seven o'clock at night they were exhausted they were still going and fetching water for you know whatever it was five hours a day right and so aj was still doing her thing and her daughters weren't in the classroom that was that hit me pretty hard to be honest with you i was like wow we've done whatever it was at the time two thousand five hundred two thousand six hundred schools and yes it was great we bought electricity to school and the school headlight but it didn't accomplish the mission that i wanted and what i realized was we need to invent a magic water box basically we've gotta to find a way to bring the water into the village in a way where the women are in the classroom they're not fetching water and and it's healthy affordable water so how could you do that and now at the time now really got this solar thing under my belt and we were starting to do these things called micro grids sometimes wealthy people will call and say could you do a micro grid on my island i'm like i don't know maybe well our engineers were brilliant they can figure this out and i was like wait a minute if we can build micro grids for people on islands off grid with this new battery storage we had invented and solar this is kind of interesting what if we could bring it to the developing world at the same time a friend of mine in my neighborhood in ti had invented a water pump for yachts where he wanted to travel around the world on his yacht and have that water pump pull water out of the ocean so he could drink healthy water all day without having to stop said how'd you do what i did it with a solar panel i'm like oh wow that's super interesting so i found this guy his named kyle stefan who is the president of a company called spec water makers and we went to him and we said look crazy idea could we marry you and you're genius with these pumps with these amazing engineers that we have that work with us at solar city and tesla that really understand battery storage and solar and we marry that together to be able to produce healthy affordable fresh water out of a bra well or out of the ocean utilizing reverse osmosis and d cell and they were like can't be done it's too grid intensive it's too expensive good good luck you're naive you're you you know you you have no idea you're not as good enough engineered to understand that this is impossible it's too expensive blah blah blah well look i am naive i wanna try you know let's give it a shot and so we spend about a year trying to build that system maybe a year and a half we couldn't get it to work and then finally we crack the code and i was like well we let's put it in the container we can ship it anywhere in the world we will drop these things all over the world and we'll produce healthy affordable sustainable water for people off grid in these communities where we've done these schools and now we've done that you know many times over and that was the breakthrough and the insight was wait a minute okay we could kind of almost turn this into an economic model like milk in the nineteen sixties where we change the model where women can actually make money and earn a living by distributing this waters and what people don't understand like after it's clean basically yeah absolutely instead of carrying the dirty water back take clean water and become distributors for this i right yeah yeah absolutely and so there's a lot of people that have these causes they say we need to address migration issues we need to address these soc economic issues women's rights issues education issues health care issues what i realized the breakthrough epiphany that i had was you can't address migration issues until you address the water issue you know when like greg brennan who is on the board of home depot this guy's an amazing ceo he's an credible philanthropist he was like the ceo of yum yum brands for a while bain capital continental airlines he and i went to honduras us and we flew around honduras together we went to all these different locations that had issues with migration water scarcity all these things and he had the breakthrough with me where he was like you know what we had solve the water issue man otherwise people are gonna move go greg look at me you and are pretty capable guys imagine and i grew up here we live here are we gonna leave if we're drinking poison every day and everyone's dying by the time they're thirty he's like we're gonna leave that's exactly so water is is the unlock water is the foundation and fundamental thing that now allows you to say okay now we can educate the women because they have the time they're not fetching water all day long now we can change the soc economic model where people can sell the water and distribute the water within the communities like milk and enlighten in the nineteen sixties and they're took took since you know all these other cool contraption they build to distribute this water now we can talk about health care issues and so because we're people are drinking fresh affordable water and they're they can stay alive but you can't stay alive if you drink poison and so that's that's why i'm really passionate about it it checks a lot of boxes for me yeah that's a that's amazing i went to africa i went to ethiopia with charity water and we it was like because you even even when you hear like out there have to walk to get water walk is the wrong word because it's basically it might just be scorching hot first of all you're in a like a desert you're walking and then you you're carrying like a farm if gone to like a personal trainers had made you do a farmer's carry where you're carrying like forty five pound dumbbells on both sides and i walk for four hours right so they had us do like the carry of twenty isn't it oh my i i got one man steps and i'd like yeah i work out five times a week you know and this woman would just throw it up on her head and walk for four out it was yeah i mean if it's like the ultimate sales pitch it's like if you could just get everyone in the world to try that walk one time yeah you know everybody would be like yeah we gotta solve this problem yeah i know in charity waters is a phenomenal organization water dot org like all these people are trying to solve the problem in different ways ours is you know there's two billion people in the world that lack access to electricity they're the same two billion people in the world that lack access to sustainable water that have water scarcity issues and so this is not about just water filtration or you know distributing water this is about dignity man this is about hope this is about opportunity for humanity in these areas and capable people like you i'm telling you sean if you laid in the dirt with me and i just got back from a trip recently i was over in kenya i did a trek over there with twenty ut students and then i went to mba and i got the bowser and i delivered water and i raced the guys with the right with the you know the the whatever the thirty jugs a liters of water in there you just realize like i'm alive when i'm there i i can see i'm not in the vitamin business when i'm i'm in the life saving business and i'm when i'm there every drop of water that we distribute we you know we save life and we've got the unit economics you know it's all comes down to math right we've got the unit economics down to a penny a day a penny a day for someone and so a penny day oh explain that more one cent you can provide healthy affordable drinking water for acute for one person for a day it's a penny a day man and we maintain these systems for basically we sell the water in the areas for half of a cent okay and that allows us to take care of all the operations and maintenance it allows us to pay for all the people that work in the in the in the area the the work on the on the system for us that maintain the system and those kinds of things so it's got real teeth to it i mean this thing is a real economic model that scales and and so i'm i'm really happy with the team it's an extraordinary group of people that have really thought through okay now how do we go scale that how do we go you know deploy many of those systems we possibly can all throughout the world for these people as fast as we can and people go well you know what happens with the salt that goes back in these systems produce about seventy five thousand liters of water every single day so one system produces seventy five thousand liters water every single day and we design them at a scale in which it's a very small amount of salt that goes back into the ocean and then we can now we've invented other systems where we can pull it right out of a bracket well the the little hidden secret that most people don't know is a lot of these bore holes that are drilled they go bracket and then they sit there and and then no one does anything with them we can take our systems drop our lines in there we can des that water utilizing reverse osmosis and we can deliver that healthy water to these communities as well water's life it's it's pretty cool so if somebody's inspired what's the right way to kinda get involved or give what what what what's the call to action yeah look i mean you can go to the give power website and and it's just give power dot org and and you can kinda see ways in which you can give and and those kinds of things we're trying to come up with all different types of away where where people can participate we sent about thirteen hundred people on trucks over the last few years so i want them to see it i want them to go like you you shouldn't have to sacrifice your entire life just so you can have a glass of water and you're there and you see you're when you roll your sleeves up and you get your hands dirty and you build one of these systems you see how technology can transform communities overnight like not over a year like instantaneous the moment the water comes on everybody's alive everybody's like celebrating and dancing and singing and all of a sudden the kids are healthier and everybody's vibrant and and it just creates a tremendous amount of optimism and hope and opportunity it's amazing hey dude thank you for doing this i really appreciate it yeah thank you you man i feel like i could rule to world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a road less 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 fear your courage and all that great stuff so again if you like my first million check out billion dollar moves it's brought to you by the hubspot podcast network again billion dollar moves

wanna try something different okay it's the h hotline take five listeners out of the crowd have them call in or tell about their business tulsa a business problem cool so this is the h hop okay are you da to it i feel like i could rule the world i know i could be what i want to put at all in in like a days off on a road less travel never look we got flow here flow i want you to give us the what's the name of your business and give us the one minute description of what you do give us a sense of where you're at revenue wise and then we're gonna get to what's your biggest business problem and we're gonna try to help you out here in a couple of minutes so like i said i'm flo i in london i own a company called when worth protection and from what we do is we install security ball on people's driveway and if you don't know what that is basically like a metal poll that you put on your driveway base it's got your car from getting stolen i started the business as side hustle in january twenty twenty four so we're now like year and a half in it's just me and my best mate we both still do this side i thought we've got a couple of information guys for year we did just shy i had two hundred and fifty k this year we're probably gonna do five hundred and kind of the biggest issue we're having right now is content the problem you solve is people in the uk are getting their car stolen and there's some you put a poll in the driveway that prevents that that's correct yeah concept set is just through the roof in in the uk especially around london so this poll comes up three your driveway and i mean even if someone gets into a car they just actually they're stuck way okay got it so you get two to fifty k you're one five hundred you're on pace five hundred k this year and give us the quick and dirty on how are you getting those customers today because you said it's the side hustle so we're where are you getting business yeah yeah the first three months is based me purely door door south sunday is just knocking my boards which by the way in the uk people find that really strange yeah and now it's about kind of a fifty fifty mix between google labs just like search and mainly seo so we get those of organic leads coming in as well and then a little bit of referral in that okay alright how much do the post cost and so average pick is about thousand bucks okay so what's so what's your what's cost you to install we got roughly fifty fifty seven margin so like paying the installation price and buying the units it's about fifty percent of of tickets okay got it you make five hundred bucks in gross profit per that's sound right alright okay got it so what do you wanna have happen i at moly okay got it so what stopped you from doing more door to door honestly at the time constraint currently it seems like that the the conversion on door to door the amount of time that it takes it just doesn't equate to extra or put into content or writing more blog posts or trying to reach out to commercial partners that kind of stuff okay so one of the big things is like i think you have to get a little bit narrower in terms of how you wanna get leads because you got you're super resource constrained right now like you don't have a you know a ton of capital that you can like put to work or anything like that and so it's like you've got you've got search you've got seo you just mentioned commercial partners which i'm guessing you're doing through outbound is that how you're getting it and you're also said content yeah correct content is based not that i'm trying to crack i i inherently know that content can be really big this business but it's just like we did a viral tiktok two days that did a millions views and it's just not translating to any increase in incoming lease slow yeah so okay i wanna i wanna rewind for a second i think that so fundamentally because you have these you have these three ways that you can reliably get customers and then of this other way that you would like to get customers but aren't really getting customers from you is does that sound right yeah okay so why not like what are you spending on on on search right now about three k okay what do you make back on the three k lt tax dot three one three to one okay so what stops you so you're making nine grand a month roughly off google yeah okay and then seo is bringing in how much about about the same okay and what do you spend on seo honestly i'm just doing it all myself i buy back every now and again but i'm just doing all the ryan and all the technical myself okay got it and that's bringing like nine thousand a month as well pretty much yet about fifty fifty days and you stopped doing door to door right no you're not doing anymore you stopped doing it because you got tired of it because it stopped working no it's just we it was such a grind in the early days it was like that was the way for us to get the distance off the ground because we had no money in which just have to house and speak to people but at the moment if like i still have a job i have a kid my partner has a job he as a kid yeah and trust to find any time yeah said to schedule all through it's no heard heard okay so and then the rest is referrals yeah it's referral there's a few little platforms like nectar door check trademark bulk like we get a dr in through those but but those must be small because you basically said about ten k from each of these that's twenty k a month that's four hundred eighty k a year that's basically what you said you're on track to do what what those what twenty right so that's so that would get this two fifty you said you're your your run rates five hundred yeah correct so a lot of this is is pound so the numbers i gave you oh alright whatever big picture more better new right so if you've got if you've got search and you've got seo you do i will i will like i am staring at the door to door thing i'm not gonna i will come back to it but what do you have to make in order to quit the job we could quit right now i i'm just a little bit of a pussy to be honest okay fair well then how many hours you dedicating to doing this versus the job it's like forty hours on my job in fifty hours on this for pretty wake moment i'm understanding i got it so let me ask you a quick question if you actually just went door to door for forty hours a week i'm not saying you do this but i just like to ask the hypothetical if you went door to door basically replace your job with spending a hundred percent on daughter i'm gonna say you do that but just hypothetically would you be able to replace your income if you did that i think probably not i mean it's just just like running really quick numbers let's say i get let's say do make two thousand a week or three thousand a week from door at all which would be really impressive price at this point that would bring in fifteen hundred gross to six a a month that wouldn't cover it okay great so then what stops you from spending like ten grand a month on google ads yeah great question so we just scaled i'll group that some fifteen hundred up to three k okay it takes us about two or three months to get that to scale okay flo what one of the things i love about business is that every problem has already been solved and so one of the things that would ask is can you work backwards from a business that already is doing what you're doing so are you the only guy doing this are you the only company that offers this service and if not who's that company and how do they get customers yeah yeah there's a couple of much much bigger players in this phase and i think what they've cracked is they're just really really really good organic they just get like maybe five a x the amount of traffic that we get when you say organic i don't think you're saying that the incumbents are amazing at tiktok what do you actually mean when you say they get organic sorry i literally mean the mike potential okay so they rent delete her well let me ask you this question like for so if i bought if i bought your business tomorrow my first ads would probably men be meta ads because like the making meta work yeah make making meta ads work and the the thing that you have is one you have a clear fear like people are afraid of cars they're targeting getting stolen and i'm sure you can put some stats up on the board that shows like big arrow to the right oh my god cars are leaving right and you also have a service that is that is tangible and visible like you can demonstrate it much harder to say hey like in a in a in an ad i'm really good at seo it's way better to be like look car got stolen like literally you're just like like you could just do it before and after if like look guy with a mask on gets in the car walks out and then right afterwards guy with the mask gets in and then he's like oh no this one it's literally the the ads that i would mirror are the car jack ads if you so google that it's the little like the the bar you the bar steering yeah you put on the steering wheel those ads and then you just go local targeting do a you know ten mile radius or whatever that is in kilometers that i would bet you right now would get you the like that would scale like really high like you could probably get to ten twenty thousand a month we did we didn't miss the admin in the early days and i told myself that didn't work but it was just the crane which is terrible yeah i'm sure it was i mean advertising work so it's not like meta ads don't work right it's like you just needed to get the process down but if you just do a very simple narrative ad with your iphone demonstrating the product and the problem that it solves and keep it under sixty seconds i guarantee that you be able to get leads and then all you have to do is just call them get a deposit on the phone for you to show up and then and then roll the deposit towards the the thousand bucks just like hey it's a hundred bucks for an assessment it's just to make sure that you show up and if you suck at sales and say hey just put a card down and then i'll only bill if you don't show it's just to make sure because i'm gonna send a truck and a guy out there it's just we don't wanna get no showed most people be fine with that and then you just roll it right into the thousand bucks if they just decide today and that gives you a little bit of urgency in the sale when you show up even better we don't even have to show up we we can just we can just do the whole we don't we don't really do that does it can i ask your question about it wait you you just install it on first go you there's no scouting explain that so you just go out and install first shot right is that what you're saying yeah they just send us a picture we say let's go for fred they send us a prepaid and deposit yeah okay great so that's i mean literally it's a phone sale so if i'm looking at all this stuff the first thing i would do is say like let's see if i could triple you know triple google ads you already went to three three k be like can we get to nine and then it's like cool that buys you your job back right if it if you got it if you tripled and you kept the same that allow you to quit yeah yeah right and i would i would before doing meta i would keep hitting google ads until i can't do it anymore i would buy all the traffic and then once i'd maxed out google locally i would a hundred percent put all my stuff in meta ads what's the rationale on keeping going on google rather than just running with like doing now every every extra penny in into mess up because you haven't done it yet got it if you're making money somewhere google make it as much as you can first and then once you can't make any more more better new so flow one one one last thing that i think is important is you basically said something that i think is emotional but not logical and i think you could counter either emotion with emotion or logic with logic but don't try to counter emotion with logic so you have you basically were like i have quit my job why because i'm being a bit of pussy about it so i think you gotta have a conversation with yourself about how you feel about that do you want this to be a forever side hustle or would you actually like this to be your main business said if so where would you get the courage and the conviction to do because you have some evidence do you have currently enough evidence would you like some more evidence what would that take because you know you're gonna be limited by your own bandwidth in this business and so we could give you five strategies that would work but if you only have ten hours when you're fatigued to go execute them you're gonna walk away saying i didn't really work because you didn't really try it and so i think for your long term success you gotta be able to go go all in on this and it maybe maybe now's is the time maybe it's not only you know that but it sounds like that's something to address today and try to figure out how do i want to think about that i know how i have been thinking about it but how do i wanna think about that going forward right what's the narrative what's the narrative to myself about that so don't answer that now but i think that's something worth doing that's a that's between you new therapist so yeah but but i think it's important to answer that i know a lot of entrepreneurs who have gotten success started on the side i don't know a lot of entrepreneurs who finished with it as on on the side right so unlikely that that's your end outcome with this is that this stays a side hustle and so the question is how do you get there from where you are today yeah yeah i love nothing more than than being in the game so i think that's where i'm had is alright flo we've been charging one ninety nine a minute so you're you owe us some money down thank you for calling the h hotline we will see thanks appreciate it let us know what happens thank you thank you thank you see at the book launch hey let's quick break for a message from our sponsor hubspot who's making this episode possible listen if you're trying to build something the big and i'm talking about a hundred million dollar or a billion dollar company one of the most important things is to focus on the market where is the opportunity you are like a surfer on a surfboard board and you were trying to find the biggest best wave possible for you to go on well hubspot has put together a cheat sheet that is studying and sort of rev reverse engineering what's working today so they're looking at the top performing industries that you could be looking at the funding routes that work the best and the growth strategies that the fastest growing companies are using so if you want a one pager that is a cheat sheet on the the big company playbook you can get it right now just either scan this qr code that you see on the screen or click the link in the description below alright back to the shelf alright alright what's up who am i speaking to speaking to carson i meet too carson pleasure man tell about the business so yeah my name is carson i have a recruiting business i tell my client hiring should make you money dot com time applied bill time connect i'm a customer and use this business brand work with a lot of companies like true classic pe cloud in hardware okay full cycle recruiting pad got it so you do you do support or what what what roles do you recruit for got really all roles too near to sea level roles hit pm for sean did performance create a retention social media head of ops so a lot more on the marketing and rev gen side carson here here's your ad carson yeah carson found me my cmo for my e com business who's the ceo of the e com business so that's that's you could do your pricing you're like alright what's the what's revenue right now right now for last year did one point six sit here and track to hit around two okay got it so what's the what's the issue what's holding back do you think being a contingency focus recruiting yeah allowed us to you know get a lot of clients in the door yeah it does come with down laws of pausing rules yeah the slow communication have the let skin in the game and so i think really like we've learned once we unlock the first hire i see the value stick with that mh really just trying to focus on kind of building that first rule with them to show on what we're doing okay and what's the issue with your current way of doing it we we have like a really good process it's just we have a lot of clients that so i was like paul pause role there's a lot of potential table for candidates that we have better interviewing and i think there's a lot more potential of kinda getting more of a streamlined profit me getting less in the leads carson let me ask your question because i think ask a better question you'll get a better answer is your question how do i streamline operations this is an operational question or is this a scaling question okay i did one point six i did two i wanna get to five or four year and right now i don't feel like i'm able to do that because of either a my business model or b by operation so what is your question on the business model and the growth side of things or is it on the operation yeah i would say we're on the business side like the first said i guess i kind of set it in two questions but mainly i wanna scale right we're we're about to hit two million that jared i see a lot of potential i wanna figure out how to how do i pick this contingency recruiting business to five to seven million being so neat yeah so how do you get customers right now really like ninety eight percent referral you know have a really good really good pal bait really get customer bait and a lot of people in the e comm space this is such a niche bait you know we get a lot of referral that way got it so if i mean fundamentally it i'll say i'll say a different question if you doubled the amount of people who are asking for you know roles right now would you be able to handle it i would say yet i think i would need you to bring on maybe a few extra recruiters at scale but ultimately like these clients use me because of me and the relationship to we have sure i'm trying to figure out how do i stay a weed but also kind of still ramp up and scale right like yeah so let i'll cut you off for a second just to yeah so basically the the the question that i'm asking i'll i'll tell you the intention by the question is are you demand constraint or you supply and constrained right and so right now if i were say i can go send you more business could you handle it if the answer is yes then we don't focus on the supply side we focus on the demand side if it's i could handle more but sorry i i i i've got more people than then i can handle right now and i need to go get more recruiters so which side is it yeah i think we can handle more okay great your demand constraint alright so from the demand perspective if you only have referrals then you need to have an input output in the business to get more leads correct okay so so it's actually gonna be so best way versus the best way for you will be two different things so you've got your you've got the core four i agree the book yeah right so you've got you've got warm outreach you've got cold outreach you've got content and then you've got ads and then on the other side you've got affiliates right okay so based on your background you get your recruits via outbound yeah like you got the outbound or really all directly compliant yeah when you when you recruited my cmo it's because you're you're blasting people on linkedin hey would you be interested hey i got something you're doing outbound to get candidates which means you have the skill and muscle of outbound already you're just only using it for your supply what if you used it for your demand that make that light bulb moment let's go there we go so fundamentally you already know your your metrics for your outbound funnel this is like you we do a hundred connects and then hunter connects get us whatever five meetings and then mo five meetings turn into one fix or whatever it is right all you have to do is just turn that external same exact funnel yeah who just focus more on the outbound it yeah because it's your main game it's your main yeah i was gonna be like hey man learn ads it's just like i if you were like you know what we're real because the secondary thing i'll just be transparent with you because of the nature you're recruiting you probably have access to very good marketers and so if you could go recruit a cmo who go run the ads for you to go get those customers that would also be a play but in terms of if i'm gonna give like the absolute i to bet my baby on the fact that you'd be successful i would say do more of the thing they're you're already doing just change the cup change the target that's it and since you've recruited for a whole bunch of different roles recruiting for customers if you think about it like that is i think the the natural step and you can for sure scale that to the moon for sure question on the like being a contingency focus right like modest scheme the game obviously it's leverage for them hire reward for us how do i really kinda like demand sort of more communication making your clients our pausing roles there's a lot of things out of bargain control at scale yeah i'm trying to figure out how two two things two things so are three things so one is gonna be the customer vetting right you have to have certain types of customers if have shitty customers they're gonna treat you shit if you have good customers they tend to be more professional so part of that that's gonna be what is our ideal customer number one number two the contingency thing the question is whether it's a feature or bug right like this may just be a and like this happens all the time i'll have these conversations they're like what if we decide this isn't a problem anymore and all our measures the business are fine hey let's take a quick break you know hubspot helped tumblr solve a big problem tumblr needed to move fast they were trying to produce trending content but their marketing department was stuck waiting on engineers to code every single email campaign but now they use hubspot customer platform to email real time trending content to millions of users in just seconds and the result was huge three times more engagement and double the content creation if you wanna move faster like tumblr visit hubspot dot com alright back to the show so what are your margins right now probably about fifty percent right okay so your margins are fine and the the issue that you have right now is just like it's like sometimes customers don't do what i want them to and i get it and your preference is not for that so the only tiny tweak you could consider when you have more demand but you don't have that which is why you have no leverage is that you could say listen our way of doing this is that you put a card down it is success based but if you don't follow our process we bill you a penalty because you're wasting our time so you can do that it's easy easy fix on the front end and say listen the role is fifteen grand for the you know the the price range you're looking at we get thirty percent whatever the hell it is right but we charge five if you waste our time now we don't wanna charge you anything right we don't wanna charge you anything now if you get a little bit more again this is where supply and demand come becomes important if you continue to get more and more demand then you start to have more and more the lever shift to you and you say listen i do half now and half when we complete the role because i've got and if you don't want it that's fine got ten other guys behind you yep that makes sense so you have no leverage right now and it makes sense so number one i don't think you have a a steaming fire because you've got fifty percent margins and things seem to be going okay you got ninety eight percent referrals which means you're good at what you do so i think we need to put some more in the front end which is gonna be take the outbound engine pointing towards customers and then be hyper target about the customers they're are gonna be the best types and ideally you probably know what they look like like if you take the top twenty percent your customers now that are worth the most the beauty of outbound is you get to snip who you want and so you can just say i'm only going after people who i know we're gonna do five rolls a year that's a good it's a good way to put it that way yeah cars carson i think i think what alex just said is huge for you i would not have used you had you been like give me a twenty k retainer for this role yeah why because you were a college kid you're like twenty two years old you haven't even mentioned that broken is not doing this while you were in college and so i think you use that to your advantage so i think the ref reframe it in your own mind as a feature instead of a bug i think we'll do you a lot of good against psychologically because it's your own mind as a founder that dr nuts and once you just literally just re label the same experience you're having you will have a new experience and so try try that out along with the outbound was that helpful carson it was super helpful both again thank you so much rock and roll baby later crush it alright let's take maybe one or two more what do you think more your hot oil let's do it the weather is cold but the deals are hot what's up you're on the line how how are you doing jordan hey dave how are you guys oh we got a group call we got the c founder here is that right the c founder is here alright you got sean and this is alex can you give us give us your names and your business name and then give us a one minute description what do you guys do and how is it going revenue wise i'm jordan ne justin f my c cofounder also on the call our business is elite travel actors and we help business owners take their families on thirty to fifty thousand dollar luxury vacations for little to no money out of pocket using credit card points and we do that in two ways the first thing is we help them optimize and maximize the number of points they're earning per year so those people will earn one point per dollar on their credit card spend we're typically able to get at least to three four x on those points earned so you help them get more points and then you help them spend it well yeah and then we help you spend it well the first class flights five star hotels luxury travel i little so no money out of pocket so jordan is the business working right now or is it broken what we yeah what's revenue what's yeah yep business is working you're doing about forty k a month right now we do have some hurdles that we've come into and and i'll let justin to kinda go through this oh he's the he's the guy who deals with the problems okay i'm gonna guess that your demand constrained that's gonna be my guess i could be wrong but go for it yeah so last ones we actually got a a really big bounce we scale the eighty five k awesome and so spend a lot of time refining systems processes automations getting the next round of staff hired so that we can make the next big push on lead right now the majority of our business comes from referrals actually and then twenty percent of our business comes from like organic traffic and then we only have a twenty three percent close rate there so there's a massive gap between the referring and organic close rates you're are you saying eighty percent of the business referral or you guys said that that was the close rate no sorry sixty nine percent of the business referrals okay ninety eight percent close rate on referrals okay okay it everybody closes and then the rest of the business is through organic do you just mean web traffic from google search or do you mean content based you or you know a mix of everything content based okay okay is your question like try to state the question as crisp as you can so what's the question you guys have how do we build trust faster and increase close rates from cold traffic is there a tweak tweaking in our offer messaging alright i'm gonna i'm gonna we're i'm gonna rock your shit in a couple seconds so just tell me so what's the price point right now we three k to fifteen k okay so it's kids scales depending on their whatever number of trips they're taking yeah and how much they're spending out of pocket okay got heard and so right now i'm assuming that you have the same sales process for referrals as you do for people from content yeah that's the issue so every every traffic source has to get treated differently because they have it basically if you think about a a a customer on a continuum them there's a certain amount of information that has to get a consumed in order to make a decision and so what you need is a microwave you need something that's gonna heat them up really quickly and so right now walk me through the click to close so someone sees some post or some real they then what dm you or they go to your link or they common they get a mini chat like what do they do click dm okay so they dm you got it so after they dm there's a set in the dms right correct okay so dm set and then what happens after that into set calendar okay okay got it and that's it that's what happens is anything else set like they can consume between set and close there's a sixty second warm up video saying hey come with this you know these data points so that we can maximize what you're doing yeah so you're missing a that's all 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 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's of crypto that's what i had wanted it 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 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 hyphen 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 consultants do things or use five different tools and try to stitch them together bee just did it all for us it was it is the best way to start and grow a newsletter in email newsletters 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 thirty so go to b hive dot com and then use the code m thirty to get the deal today there's a link of the description so two things so here's here's what you're gonna do you're gonna write a seven minute vs esl alright and very simple you'll probably it's it it follows the same concept as a youtube video so you'll have a promise you'll have a pain that they're gonna help them avoid you're going to give them a plan of how it's all going to work and then you're gonna have proof that you can help them do that and that's gonna be in the first sixty seconds and then you're gonna have basically belief one belief number two and belief number three so basically the the three biggest objections that people bring up typically on on sales calls you're gonna break those down as a faqs during the thing and then and then you'll put your sixty second this is how you prep for the call alright that's what you do now you're gonna strip that whole thing out and then i also want you to take that and put it into a pdf and then you can send it because some people especially the more baller they're bigger readers than there are watchers and so you could say hey here's two ways to consume it just watch it before the call and then when you do that close call the first question you ask after you say hey how's it going today then which you don't open a call that way but as you know whatever then you say hey did you did you get a chance to watch the video which you should have already done like the clothes should double check that prior to the call and if for some reason they have not done it you say hey no worries i'm gonna go grab a couple of coffee you can go play it i'll come back in seven minutes and then we can talk about it that way i'm not just bla a whole bunch of stuff because that we can see the visuals and you can see everything as tight as soon possible it's the best use your time got it that's literally it now the second thing that i wanna do though is i wanna kinda shift your belief a little bit because you said we're only closing twenty three percent twenty three percent isn't dog shit like i would say that you're you're gonna prop like if you just do this you're probably bumped to like mid thirties but that's that's just not it's not it's not weird that's just like a normal close rate and referrals are amazing that's why i really loved to have referrals but like if you if you like if you really wanna have your get get your mind blown start running ads it's gonna be way worse than the constant leads so you wanna treat warm light cold and you treat cold light cold by giving them more information part of the close got it that's literally like if you only need to do one thing that's all i gotta do and you have an increase in close rate that being said that's not gonna take you to five million a years that's just gonna give you a maybe a fifty percent lift on whatever you're currently doing and so once you do that you still have demand issues which means that you still need to have a reliable like basically like how can we make more and better content which is the the larger and more important question but do that first yeah so let's saw that one problem at a time and at the end of the day you wanna have your growth equation i think that's what he's talking about which is today i forgot what you said you're converting twenty nine percent or something like that it's like actually a pretty decent number if that if that number was forty what happens to our business right because you don't wanna put a transformational amount of effort into something that doesn't have a transformational result on the other side of it and you could just napkin in math and save yourself a lot of pain if that's what the situation be it might be that you can actually just double the number of referrals you're getting by doing something simple maybe today you're just getting them and you're not actually asking for them intelligently and and ramping that where you already have a ninety eight percent close rate so just make sure you do some napkin math on like what does the top of funnel look like before i go try to beat my head against a while increasing this conversion you can increase your conversion and you should but it is worth doing some napkin math to see if i did this would this get me where i wanna go or is this just one block and i'm gonna have to figure out two more things after that but at it's at least good to know that going in hey jordan would you have a referral script you use right now oh i'll take that one yeah so at the end of every onboarding call we're asking them who else they know how do you ask him just hey do you think anybody else could you use our services you've seen what like to do our credit card strategies can you connect me via a text or email yeah so i would tweak that this is just a this is just a little golden b before you compliment them first so you can reframe it so you're like dude you're an absolute pleasure to deal with my god i talked to a bunch of different business owners every day if i talk to only people like you i would so what other successful business owners like you do you know so that complements them twice before making an ask and most people are way happier to give you a referral also when you say i want other people who are successful like you you'll also get better referrals overall got it perfect sense yeah little tweet one other one that might help there i think you said this really well with the gym business you're like people are in the maximum amount of pain when they show up the first time into the gym because they for them to have shown up that means they they acknowledge the problem have walked into your hands how how hard could be to sell in your case you actually have a different situation which is when somebody's on their you know back from their vacation that you just booked for them for free and they just had incredible life changing experience it's probably a good moment to go ask them how was the trip and and then see if they you know what are what are they think for more trips as well as do they know anyone else that's looking at this because you're gonna have you're gonna be riding a momentum a huge wave of goodwill in that moment because you just they're gonna be on the high of their vacation planning a vacation is work experiencing and enjoying the vacation that's that's when they're in the sort of peak state to be able to ask as well and on the off boarding call that sean referencing if i were getting really tactical with you what i would do is when i call up and say hey how's is the vacation i would ask do you have any pictures now they're gonna be off how would did you they wanna see right and you say hey so what friends would you normally send these pictures to if you want if you threw with me then you could say hey i got this whole vacation for free and send it to your friend just threw way me in and then you're rocking and rolling yeah helpful guys yeah sure married as i asked my first girlfriend was at the best eight minutes of your life alright fellas we'll see you later see you guys alright her hotline a half alright here there we go alright caller number nine you are on air what's your name hello hello i'm da alex sean great to be talking with you da where are you calling in from da from brooklyn new york alright da single married oh wait no ram show here we go da you tell us about what's going on what's your business so i am a content creator and a little bit different than probably a lot of the businesses that call in because i have a big audience and i have all the traffic and i have absolutely no idea what to sell them you need a money model you have distribution and no product is that what you're saying i got distribution no product oh okay and i won the school games last year oh and alex like you know this you in may and i was about to ask you the question i'm about to ask and your assistant came in and said alex you have a wedding you your watch that out last the year and then i saw sean's tweet yesterday and i was like you know what dude if if your life was a movie this is this is that that this is the moment where a comfortable circle alright moment what is the question you've been waiting a you'd to ask are you'd an entertain educator real quick i it leans towards education i mean i make content for college guys and guys about how do you get internships how to get jobs how do they how to manage thought how to make money like it's it's really just virtual big brother stuff okay i have two hundred million views three hundred fifty thousand followers so a big army of young dudes and i wanna make a big swing of the per what per month per year per what two hundred million views over the last three years oh what are you what are you doing monthly five to ten okay and this is tiktok we're talking about they talk on instagram yeah five hundred okay okay go on yep and so i have this big army of young dudes that i could do a paying community i could do a mentorship but i think that there's a bigger play either they're with maybe employing a lot of them or building an app and launching it across college campuses and i just i've been building this audience and i'm not sure what's the big swing that i should be making there but before we start being no at all and telling you what to do what do you have you already tried anything i mean i've just i i committed to making two or three short form videos a day for the last couple years outside of my day to day other pursuit so i haven't tried much what's your day to day other pursuit my mom is a physician coach and she was doing twenty or thirty k a month and now we're doing two hundred and thirty last month so basically just building high ticket sales marketing fulfillment for burned out dodgers got it well i'll tell you a secret burned out doctors have more pain and more money than broke college guys by an order of magnitude i know i don't wanna keep freaking with my mom okay ordered that i've i've yeah i mean if you think there's not a big big guy there's not a big cry here than maybe embarking a braun tree the question is what do like what do you wanna have happened and if you're like oh i think so i'll i'll tell you i'll i'll i wanna give a little tiny reality check which is like five to ten million views a month is not bad it's also not crazy so like you have enough to do a business for sure this isn't like i'm sitting on a hundred million dollar like you're not getting a dollar review i just wanna like put that put some perspective there also your tiktok views are not worth nearly close to what your instagram views are it's probably a factor of ten to twenty x difference in terms of the value per view k especially if it's a little bit more meme a little bit more humor any like that it's just like you can just you could just drop it to through the floor like education versus entertainment the the revenue per per per thousand views is like it's huge difference okay i just wanna just level set there so fundamentally if you've got these guys and they want what careers they want jobs well it it's not like i'm like missed internship i'm not saying that i'm the best contact career ever but they looked to me for input on all this life stuff like whether it's how to land their first date how to get an internship how to whatever and i get a bunch of dms that are like dude you spoke the thoughts that were in my brand you like you know me so well and i think i built up enough trust with them that if i wanted them to like quit a job or come works for me to do something so that's why i'm thinking maybe i could build something yeah on the bat not sides you that so i'll i'll i'll give you just a little bit of a continuum that exists for you right and this is super common for people who are content creators and it all the the the continuum exists on on a risk continuum and so on one side all the way to the end you have start a business that you're gonna do everything for alright that's like that's all the way in the other side it takes the most skill but you have the most risk alright on the opposite end you have gonna be affiliate of something which is i'm just gonna promote some else's stuff and i'm gonna get a percentage right that's the that's the other extreme now next to that you've got sponsorships so if i'm really good at that people start paying me ahead of time and that's a hundred percent gross margin and it scales as i scale my my content which is not necessarily a bad thing in the middle you've got partnerships which is like okay i'm gonna be the exclusive guy who promotes this specific thing and i'm gonna get some shares or get some royalties whatever it is that i can negotiate in that deal and i'll just let somebody else run the business while i just continue to promote next to that you've got white labels alright so it's like okay i don't wanna i don't wanna actually run the business but i do wanna have my own brand and i wanna have all the equity and then the very last one which is what i started with which is like you own it all right it's you you you source everything you manufacture if you wanna do products and so those are kinda like those are kind of your options right now if you wanted to get in the business now you can der risk your current thing by a lot by trying some stuff on the left and seeing out outperform so you can basically you have the luxury of being able to test product market fit before doing anything so you can easily affiliate someone else's thing so see what the demand looks like and if it crush then you're like oh i got something here and if it doesn't crush then you didn't have to like do all the other shit associated with that build the business right exactly so you have this really nice position that you're in so number one i would probably work my way from least risky to most risky as i basically validated whatever thing i wanna sell and then second for tiktok i'll just give you a little hack the people who who the the people i've seen who monetize best off tiktok they're their cta on tiktok is dm me on instagram mh and then they work the dms on this instagram for whatever reason ig just confer way better to monetize than tech tiktok us so they just drive they just use tiktok as a traffic platform to send a convert on strip got it can you give me an example of some of the things that you would try affiliate for well the so you you you said a lot of stuff you're like you have like dating stuff you have like you know which probably gets into like looks maxing and all that stuff i even know then you've got like i wanna get a job stuff then you've got like biz stuff which i'm not like the biggest fan of but like you could you know whatever so like you have a lot of different pieces there and then obviously there's just like services that you can charge for them but the thing that i'd really hate about this particular customer is that they're broke and so the easiest i mean i i don't think the idea that you had on starting the school communities is a terrible idea because you can you can have a very large community you can continue to serve them and you can have a low ticket price point that'll kind of like you can you can use that as an initial launch pad build the community and then be like basically say like tell me what you guys want and i'll do that and then you can monetize in the meantime does that make sense yes that's it so that's a that's an eat that's like the easy super low risk like doesn't if you're like hey man i wanna make a hundred million dollars i don't have a clear path for from where you're at right now to get there besides i just like starting as though you didn't even have the brand you have well if you had a fleet of loyal guys that maybe you could turn into good salespeople or turning to ambassadors or if you had to launch something across college campuses like if you had this resource and it was your only foundation to get to a hundred million dollars of ten million dollars what would you if you can train a skill i didn't hear but that you just mentioned that sales thing if you can train a skill exceptionally well then you can absolutely source and place salespeople for large door to door companies that and a lot of college guys are willing to just like relocate after college anyways and you know make six figures a year or six figures in the summer if they crush it for that and those companies are happy to pay you know referral fees upon success of those of those types of guys and if you can develop a long term reputation as being very very good at training them like you can very easily run cohorts where you say hey you're gonna fly out to this place we're gonna spend a week i'm gonna train you and then after that you'll graduate and then you'll go out into the world and be fruitful and multiply you could very well charge you know probably five thousand dollars somewhere in there for people to come out learn how to sell and then basically you'll have a bunch of connections from different people that you can use your own content to go source those relationships with so just get like get a vi get a you know get some of the big get all alarm system company whatever and get those ones to just say hey will you take take people for me and then you can also make money on both sides there that like the best thing that you can do for those guys is use them as the product mh i get a question for you soul searching question are you trying to be a content creator who makes money or you're trying to be an entrepreneur who uses content to be great question wow that's a great question gut instinct you can change mind later but just gut instinct what i said that what which one did your heart going if you have to fully commit to this for life i wanna be honest entrepreneur you be entrepreneur great so i think the constraints of what business can i start using this tiktok audience for this customer is actually not serving you at all yeah just be thinking what business do i wanna be in where i see an opportunity and i feel passionate about solving it and then i'm gonna flex my content muscles probably as one of my growth levers to do that and this all this did was this was the gym where i was working out and building that muscle but i didn't build it to use it in the gym i built it to use it in the real world somewhere else and so i think that sometimes you have to pick the constraint properly the constraint of using it in this business using it using their current tiktok audience is not the right one the other thing i do is i would try to get real so not only is a certain number of views different per platform but just as a simple test right if you went to a college campus if you just put on take tiktok and put on instagram hey i'm gonna be at penn state if you wanna hunt come hang out i'm gonna be at this place from this hour to this hour how many people do you think would show up at penn state probably between ten and a hundred ten number okay that that's a pretty big spread i i think you should go try it i would be surprised if the number was a hundred i'd be shocked if it was a hundred i'd be surprised if it was even ten and the reason i say that is because the way that the nature of tiktok and the nature of short form content is that they're not loyal to you they're loyal to the feed and you might show up from time to time and so the reason to do that is to basically wash away your time your connection your your invisible sunk cost too but i've already built this audience because actually what you're what you built was this the muscle of short form content you probably haven't built an army of people who like listen and trust you like you will get more views let's say on this on your tiktok that i will get on my podcast but if i tweet something out that i'm going some of my podcast i'll get people there because i spend hundreds of hours in their ears this is a different level of connection and so i i say all of this to just say if you really want to be an entrepreneur break out of that to that constraint of how do i sell these college dudes who i've been entertaining with random tiktok about random shit what's the best business i can build in that tiny tiny box to be like just get out of the box and then build the best business you can and i bet you'd kick ass that way because you seem like you're somebody who's pretty high agency and pretty kick ass but don't constrain it don't tie one hand behind your back and david i'll soften what sean said which is normally not my role but i what you can use the brand for let's say you don't sell to this audience and you don't sell them as the product either let's say you just say like i did this thing and i learned the skill you can still use it to recruit for whatever business you want and that is actually still a massive w so you can just skim up you say you've you got these guys for are super low and wanna work it's like great work for me yep cool yep appreciate it alright awesome i appreciate you thanks for calling in appreciate it you guys thanks alright too awesome here we go alright that's a wrap on the h hotline i feel like i could rule word i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days all on a less travel never look 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 fear courage and all that great stuff so again if you like my first million check out billion dollar moves it's brought to you by the hubspot podcast network again billion dollar moves

probably recognize recognized this guy alex h he's known as the hundred million dollar man and he's probably the most popular business teacher on youtube so last week at food vegas and i asked alex to teach me the things in his new book money models how to make money thinking you yeah he says that this one concept has made it more money than anything else in his career how would we improve our business by thinking in money models so let me walk you through the actual economics of this if ten percent of people buy something this ten times expensive you double revenue so the classic upsell you can't have x extra that why right you can't burn with that fries or whatever it's like what you can't have x extra that why i recorded the whole session and i wanna share that with you here today alright if i reset your bank account and your followers change your name of face i resent you to zero how long do you think it would take you to get a million bucks in your bank now well having lost everything twice i'll tell you what i did what do your haters get right i feel like i could rule where to i know i could be what i want to from at all in in like a days off on the road let's year you got look i read this book and it's gonna start start a little campfire in my head what's gonna happen from money models you will love this book if you liked offers and so a money model is a deliberate sequence of offers many businesses have more than one offer and so it's how do we sequence those in the right way that accomplishes a financial objective and so the financial objective for this book and what i try to go for every business i have is something that i've always called client finance acquisition and so the reason that we've been able to user pays for the next user yes and a slight tweak on that okay which is so it's two x c plus cogs k so this is our this is the big thing that we want so it's basically gross profit in thirty days so i guess i could can move this over here but doesn't matter gross profit in thirty days is is greater than two times c plus cogs let's just explain the terms people don't know yeah gross profit you're not talking about overheads in in in this right so gross profit ka cost customer acquisition cogs what it cost you to deliver the product or service that you deliver yep and what you're saying is my bar my golden rate my golden number i'm trying to hit is i wanna take the cost to deliver the service and get the customer double it and in in thirty days i need to hit you hitting that number that's my goal whether that came on the first offer or what you're saying now is the second third fourth thing i sell them along the way along their their customer journey it's exactly that and can you do like a example stupid tangible example yeah yeah so the the first business i did this in was the gym business and so it's a really simple example everyone gets it to so when i came into the gym business what the vast majority business did is they would run low ticket like twenty one dollar twenty one days that they run a free month or free fourteen day trial or whatever that was the their the the the primary way of getting people in and so let me walk you through the actual economics of this and so if you have a business let's say old way right someone comes in let's say you pay whatever ten bucks a lead that's your cp cost per lead and then you can convert let's say you're getting you know twenty percent of these people to to start a trial so that means that it cost you fifty bucks to start a trial and then one out of three of those trials which is the industry average convert and typically the conversion for like a boot cab or something like that is gonna be on the ninety nine dollars a month right that's that's what it costs and instead hack yeah exactly the first thirty days exactly and so you're you're upside down here now not only that it probably took you two weeks to like before between when you like got the lead but before you got the trial and then twenty one days i you're five weeks and so by the second month now you're like okay i got ninety nine times too now that doesn't even take into account that like that ninety nine's is not all free like there's costs involved there but let's just say that these guys are amazing and they're running a hundred percent you know margins and so it's like okay so this is gonna take sixty days for this business to basically recoup the money now the problem is that in the gym industry especially many customers leave within four months and so it's a very tough way to make a buck and so what i kinda came in and started doing was we'd run these challenges and i i'd spend the same amount of ten dollar had the same you were here when you started you did the same model initially no i saw people doing it i saw people doing it and so then it was like a three step perm mutation i like i even wanna tell the backstory story but basically figured it out tried it out at a gym it worked at that gym and then i started my gym that's basically we have so same same cost per lead i would close the same i get twenty percent of these businesses so it would cost me let's call it fifty bucks whatever to for me though i would off of that fifty dollar i would sell up upfront and i would make five hundred because you're a five hundred dollar offer was yes a challenge so you win your money back so if you lose x amount of weight in next time time we get your money back now that was the beginning of the offer that's an attraction offer since it's one of the offer types i talk about the book and so it's like okay i got five hundred dollars but wouldn't didn't stop there because what are you gonna do after you have your your thing well you need some supplements it's like alright so then we'd forty eight hours later we'd sell two hundred dollars of supplements call it you know eighty percent gross margins whatever it's like okay so i get one sixty plus plus five hundred now about six sixty alright great now on top of that it's like alright three weeks in it's six week six week deal i then say hey i'm gonna roll this towards a one year membership and so boom we'd roll that over which is another mechanism that we use and so then i get the one year one year member great now at week six or between week three and week six we'd make a second offer and say hey you're already a member can i just save you some money and they say sure and we say hey if you want what we can do is if you just prep for the whole year we'll knock knock two months off and so then all of a sudden i'd get about twenty percent of people to prep for the whole year which is the two thousand dollar two thousand dollar cash upfront which if it's twenty percent and we add all these together i'm getting about a thousand bucks upfront in the first same period of time that these guys are getting ninety nine or one ninety nine and so my ability to out spend them in a in a an auction based based on attention on like facebook or google search or whatever was like unparalleled right and so because of that i was able to not only outs spend my competition but because it cost like if you're actually doing an duty calculus on this cost me fifty dollars to make a thousand i'm getting twenty to one thirty to one up upfront and so i was actually able to finance the opening of all my locations that way so i could spend five thousand dollars in ads and make a hundred grand back and literally paint the walls put the lobby in buy the equipment and by the time i actually open the gym because i do pre sales for a month or whatever i would actually already be cash flow positive day one without actually have a new invest capital and so fundamentally i will continue to tinker and that this is where i got spoiled or whatever maybe my belief set changes is that this was the first model i ever had and so every business i've had since then i was like i know there's a way if i just keep tweaking it until eventually this thing will print and then when that happens you don't need the outside investors because you cash flow getting customers and so you basically almost like every business i've had has been supply because i can blow the doors off from the front because i can acquire customers and so like this has been the skill that's probably been the largest you know contributor to my material success and like alan went from zero to you know one point seven million a month within six months gym launch went from zero to two point two million a month of twenty months prestige labs zero to zero to one one and a half ish and six and so like each of them just very quickly just ramped because i could get customers at a profit and when you look at the actual like where the mechanics of the money happened as soon as one customer comes in right one guy comes in now if he gives you that two x capitalist cogs then it's like okay well i've paid for him and i pay for the delivery right but he comes loaded he's holding this guy by the throat he loaded with my next customer right and so but then this guy brings me to you more and so basically you keep doubling he comes loaded yeah exactly and so then at that point you literally only have to acquire you have to have the cash or the wherewithal to acquire the first customer right and then everything after that is is fine as by the by the customers and the greater that discrepancy the more you don't have to even put more capital into the business at all and so that was a very long as as fast as i can say it that's that's the that's the that's what we hope to accomplish the good money about this alright so a lot of people will talk about how you need a million dollars and three years of experience to start a business nonsense if you listen to at least one episode on this podcast you know that is completely not true my last company the hustle we grew it to something like seventeen dollars or eighteen million dollars in revenue i started it with like three hundred dollars my current company hampton does over ten million dollars in revenue started it with actually no money maybe twenty nine dollars or something like that nothing and so you don't actually need investors to start a company you don't need a fancy business plan but what you do need is systems that actually work and so my old company the hustle they put together five proven business models that you could start right now today with under a thousand dollars these are models that if you do it correctly it can make money this week you can get it right now you can scan the qr code or click the link in the description now back to the show i wanna break down a couple of things in here just to because i can first of all this is great you know in i come from silicon valley in silicon valley viral vitality rules all yeah and and they you know the early growth hackers in fact there's a book called the viral loop the guy my mentor the guy who who kinda plucked me when i got to silicon at valley he's featured that book because early on he was like scraping hotmail realized wait i have no marketing budget but one user can get me the next user through this thing called the k factor yeah and maybe you measure the k factor it becomes like this how facebook and other other businesses grew you've created a version of the k factor for non tech yeah businesses that are not gonna grow viral but you can grow you could finance the next customer through through the existing customers i wanna point out a couple of important so the first one was this is what this is kind of book one so this is you know your hundred million dollar offers book yep and i would a key difference here for any entrepreneur is that you're able to charge five hundred dollars when this guy probably honestly struggling to even charge ninety nine dollars a month i drove by a place that here there was like five dollar entry offer the las vegas fitness club or whatever because you were not selling a a gym membership which is a cost to the customer you were selling a transformation promise yep right so you're selling customer transformation the happy ending five so first of all what what are you actually selling that was a key thing the second was you were then up upsell up upsell one of your money model yep and you had a good insight here in the preview year team sent me which was basically that you wanna sell where the customer paying is highest can you talk about that yeah i i'd love talking about this so basically i think so many people at businesses etcetera get they think about the what especially services because seventy eight percent of businesses are they think about they have a term that they deliver for a customer and they typically wanna renew when they're about to stop getting paid right which is typically the absolute worst time to try and it like next boyfriend hey yeah right but yeah it's like how you i guess i'm on month eleven of my trial know exactly and so there's there's basically five five five times that you that you wanna sell sell a customer so number one i'm just gonna move search okay number one is immediately right so that's like in the same conversation so the second one is after basically some sort of activation point next you have your halfway would just because like you're like why halfway because it's halfway and that's why it works because half yeah you have your last chance at the end and then you have milestone which is which can happen kind of anywhere in here but basically they have something occurs so this is something they do this is something that happens but the action item for a company here is yeah map this for yourself you but if you're like okay well what of the five do i do you wanna sell the point of greatest deprivation not the point of greatest value sometimes the point of greatest value and the point of greatest deprivation occur at the same time not always though i'll give you my simple example which is like if i go to the best steak house in the world and i have a stake and i'm like this is amazing and the waiter comes back and says hey would you like another stake i'd be like i'm i'm good they're like you didn't like the steak and i'm like no the steak was great they're like why don't you get another i was like i'm they're like if you if you like the steak you get more steak and the thing is that so many businesses are trying to sell and upsell that and they're like mom my customer suck they're so cheap it's like no so at that point i might have a i might have deprivation around something that's sweeter and lighter right and that might be the right time to offer dessert right versus more of that other thing now the deprivation occurs the same time as value creation when the first loop of value that gets created creates the next problem so if i help you get leads and you get leads and then you're like oh shit them overwhelmed if i say hey would you like me to help you work those leads then it's a very natural upsell where greatest value and greatest deprivation at the same time if you are a business that doesn't have that type of i'll just i'll just speak broadly if that doesn't occur in your business or on a short enough timeline then that you you don't wanna sell at that time right and so that's basically what we we strive for and that's why i've always been of the belief like when someone comes in with red hot pain that's when you sell not when you offer your trial right and so for let's take or you can use the gym we can use a different business if that maybe maybe that'd be done if you can what would you either you know either or a money model well you know you can either walk through a money model or you could walk through this another business let's do another example be sure let's say you have a an seo agency whatever so if you we actually we can use one of my real businesses okay so we have this business somewhere dot com we basically help you find talent that is so we help businesses where you're like i really wanna developer but i'm not trying to you invest in that too yeah okay got it i thought was okay so we we own this business somewhere dot com so for example i got my assistant through this all hire developers graphic designers data analysts whatever you need there's talent is everywhere in the world hard to find they put boots on the ground in different locations so south africa philippines and they have hundreds of recruiters in each of those areas to find you know who's the best one percent in each of those locations to come work for this right great business great margins love it happy pebble happy owner yeah exactly okay so now what's the problem so today the way our money model works mh is customer basically listens to sean's podcast we'll just do this or they follow nick on twitter yeah so we get leads from one place exactly not that exactly fully but that's a a bulk of it and they come in they book a call and on that call we try to sell them a contingency based thing which says if we find someone pay us a fraction of their salary now they're so low salary typically because you're getting talent from different regions so the world that will come out to let's say you know maybe six k per customer and what we do is that happens and then we stop and we go fishing again for the next one yeah okay help us with our money model how would you if i took if i read this book i wanna go help nick improve this business yeah how would we improve our business by thinking in money models yeah so the question would be like do we need so if i'm looking at this right we have traction offers so it's like do we have a big demand issue or do we have an lt issue which might be up upsell do we have a conversion issue which might be down sells all of the above everything can be improved or do we have a continuity anything right and so there are different structures that lend themselves more to one versus the other type of type of problem right they we're trying to solve and so like for an attraction offer if you're like you know what let's get a shit load more you know phone calls in the door i would say hey i just got this absolute savage and i would be like this is the dude alright this guy is a fucking guy right whatever now who here wants him and i would say the the business that like we're gonna do a raffle and everybody who who submits to win this guy now obviously you gotta be ethical the illinois but assuming that you're not a fucking idiot right this is this is the guy that you're gonna get and you have to be a business that's like this in order to qualify cool so they're gonna enter their information in order to get into the raffle so they get the sky now you're gonna say we will pay for this guy for a year as are as the deal as the big giveaway not only the amazing we're also pay for for a year and so that makes a hugh you'll get a gigantic amount of demand but what's beautiful about it is that the demand is for your most expensive or ideal product and so that at that point the person like every single other person who opt in is a qualified lead who say you know we can't give you carlos but we can give you so and so and you will give you a partial scholarship we'll give you a partial win whatever and you knock whatever off ten percent twenty percent off and then you roll that right into the continuity so that would be an example of an attraction offer you could attached to that existing thing from an upsell down perspective it be like and there's five different ones that's just one that i pulled out that's a giveaway right giveaway yeah and we'll write carlos yeah and so like the just for everyone's just listening the the the weight loss person that i had was something called win your money back which is a different was a different mechanism right and so there's there's five different ones that i think that work exceptionally well for bringing people depends on the type of business and so for yours there's bikes go free there's a bunch of different versions but like think this makes the most sense cool we use a giveaway alright so then upsell and so with down so i'll i'll start from down sells so you can have feature down sells you can have free trials you can have payment plans now for your particular business payment plans doesn't will probably that doesn't really make sense because it's a continuity thing anyways and so it's like okay we have free trials would you kind of have with contingency so it's like that parts that risk is kind of avert but from a downside perspective they might think okay why i can't afford six now that's a business decision where there anything think i like to think of feature down so i can get you somebody who's maybe not as phd level whatever but we can do it for three k a month and that person might give you more opportunities to say yes that would be the downside component it from the upsell perspective there's there's four different upsell structures that i like the classic upsell if you can't have x extra that why right which is like you can't have fry you can't have a coke without a fries you can't burger with that fries or whatever it's like you can't have x extra that why and so it's like you don't wanna buy this big you know this big framed art without insurance yep right so there's always a you can't have x to that y and so the so for here because they said yes naturally yeah say yes to was next thing exactly in order to make your first decision and even more sound and this is why the whole deprivation thing that i was saying earlier so important where like right like supplements because some people are like why don't wanna sell them something else it's like well you just created this new problem that they weren't aware of which you will now make them aware of right which is oh sometimes these guys flake out whatever and so we have insurance that we can offer for for this type of thing so me just shooting from the hip here i was i'm running fees one in this situation is payroll so great they but a lot of companies are not set up to pay people all around the world we can manage that for you yeah and we'll do it for you for five hundred bucks a month yeah we'll take care of this because you're gonna you're gonna build out a remote team here all around the world you don't wanna be doing compliance and pay foreign exchange exactly reporting yep we take care of all that for you for we have we have an account team that does that perfect and so that would be the natural upsell that you do you tack on and so some people and i'll i'll just make this point a lot of business owners will will think well why don't i just include that in the main offer so so i'll just say in my experience it's a lot of times as you know as as bad as this may sound it's easier to get the second yes after you get the first yes right and so like it's like well maybe if i included that they'd buy at six a seven thousand or a like yeah but do you might also just raise your price to seven thousand dollars a month and then do it again right then still have it and so because i mean i the james were like you know what i'm gonna i'm gonna take the challenge system and then just to include the supplements i was like or you could just do it the way that i've already tried a hundred times like believe me if i could sell somewhere more on front i would it works better this way and i had this whole psychology around it which is like you have these different wallets in my mind it doesn't work this way but like it's like my grandmother just say this thing like i would go there and probably like your family like over feet she'd had have she'd having enough food for ten people when i go and sierra her on my own and i would just shoot stuff me to the gills and one time went there with my dad and she she and i have different languages so she's tough to talk to but she said something under her breath after she walked away after i was like dying and he cracked i was what did she say and he said well you said you were full and she said well you're your your main stomach full but your deserve something is yeah and so it's the same idea here where it's like well their person while it has been spent but their their tax avoidance operation paint what a pain ass isn't and that one's still full so we can still tap that one and so if we're if we're drawing this it's like okay so we've got payroll as our upsell cool and you'll know your service is better than i do but it's like okay so we have one or two things that we can include in the up upsell but the mechanism of doing it is part of like part of the money models book and so the x without y the way that we probably present it so each of that whole section is a lot more on the scripting of it okay so it's like hey what a lot of people do is they do this do you know anything else do you and so when we say that everyone says yes by saying no and by that it's like you get eighty ninety percent take rates on upsell rather than saying hey do you want it's a it's a it's a binary it's a different question right and then they have to just consider a purchase and so all of them have like tiny little little repositioning that work really well but that i think would make sense like you'd say that's that's the classic upsell there's rollover upsell there's which is one of my favorites there's anchor sells which in bankruptcy it would be like let's say you're like okay if you want nick will go find the person for i'm just making it right and he'll do it for fifteen thousand dollars upfront and you know ten thousand dollars a month now at that point they're like shit it's like that's a lot it's like or if you're good with the exact same work being done by someone that nick train we can do it for one third the price and it's like oh yeah that's fine it's a key part is that you anchor them to the anchor is is part of it but there's also like what you wanna anchor so the way learned this was actually at a salt lake city suit place so i go in a friend of mine sets up a private suit appointment with me now i'm not ball and i have like ten thousand was my name so i was like he's like you gotta have a boss student if you want people to take you seriously so this is many years ago obviously i've really listened to this advice and so i go in there and the guy was like i i'll get he he asked me what do want i said a boss suit and so i'm twenty three or twenty four something like that and so he puts this suit on me and he was like do i was like oh i look awesome and then i i looked at the tag and it was sixteen grand and i was like i i think i turned white right and i was like oh and i think he saw me like just like freak out he's like hey he's like do you care about the brand and i was like no not at all and he was like i got you and so he the thing is that he had his lineup already picked for me and he just pulled the second and put it on me and he's like what do you think i'd even look in the mirror i just looked straight at the tag and he was two grand and i was like thank god i was like okay i can like my friends not gonna be embarrassed that he senses his poor you know is his mug his non match folks over peasant and so anyways i ended up checking out and he was like well you want you can't add this without that he was like well you wanna make sure that you have the little pocket thing and you want the socks whatever ended up leaving for twenty five hundred bucks and i remember after i left i was like i spent five times more than i had budgeted for this thing and i realized i was like oh but the key part wasn't just that there was something expensive number one is that you actually have to sell it and because sometimes people put anchors but they don't really like commit to the anchor if you just say it and then immediately like don't even acknowledge it then it's just like this is this thing we put in the sales process i don't know why it's there that's dumb you have to commit to it because the thing is ten percent the time you have a whale and they'll fucking buy it and you're like holy we shit but the other ninety percent of the time key is that the thing that differentiates the anchor from the core offer is a very negligible thing and so for me the brand didn't matter or like he might be like do you care what kind of wool this is i be like now somebody might and the reality is they probably don't actually they just always buy the most expensive thing right like leila just always ask what's the most expensive thing and then she just buys it that's how she rolls right she just always wants the best shit you know whatever the thing is you wanna have a model that allows for that and if ten percent of people buy something that's ten times expensive you double your revenue so it's still worth it and that that's why the anchor should be super fucking high and so that's an example of a different type one but this one is a is a classic upsell which would be positioned the way i said which is a a no based no based yes we cover the downside with a feature down and then continuity now you already have a continuity business so there's no real point to like saying how do we how do we do that but one of that like there's a different mechanism that i use in that on that side but one of my favorites is like something called a waive fee so this works really well with expensive stuff so we would say hey for us to go find this person it's it's ten grand up upfront or i can waive it if you commit to a year and so you just waive the fee but you get the commitment and you and the thing is like oh if you're not sure then just pay the ten you get month to month nope no sweat and so with that also you say and we would stack it so we'd be like okay we're gonna waive the fee you commit to a year and if for some reason doesn't work out with carlos we'll get you we'll get you another carlos within ninety days or whatever no no cost and so that it's like the so you you decrease cost and you decrease risk with the continuity commitment and we create artificial pain in the moment now what happens if they're like hey six months in i wanna cancel like no worries just pay the fee right that i waived for the commitment so it actually creates a very simple contract which is like you just gotta pay that on the way out the door so it also increases a stick so that's like it has like three prongs to it that makes it but it's very easy to understand a very elegant and so that's one of the continuity mechanisms that i use hey let's take a quick break you know hubspot help tumblr solve a big problem tumblr needed to move fast they were trying to produce trending content but their marketing department was stuck waiting on engineers to code every single email campaign but now they use hubspot customer platform to email real time trending content to millions of users in just seconds and the result was huge three times more engagement and double the content creation if you wanna move faster like tumblr visit hubspot dot com alright back to the show when i'm looking at a business i'm running through the different mechanisms that we use do like okay we're having issues grabbing a lot of friction here right now i'm guessing because you're selling continuity on the front is probably not a huge deal right or but maybe churn is i don't know but here it's like okay which part of this process needs to get lu is that we need to lu people coming in the door and that's where you'd use a raffle or give away or sweep steaks or something on the front end or it's like you know i like the thing is is they're signing in for six but we need them at ten it's like okay well then we need to put more lu duplication here or you know what we're getting all these on cloth like eighty percent of leads that are coming in our own qualify we make the business decision we still we wanna sell to these people okay we have a gross product a gross margin product gets sufficient that still makes sense yourself eighty percent gross margins on this inferior product okay how do we present it and that's where the downside would actually become really key so i had a business that i close right to my head and what we did was for the down he we basically the super high ticket thing that we were selling he's a a phd for health stuff and he does all this like really weird health stuff for people i'll just i'll just you have a problem he's the last person you go to and then he fixes it that's his whole thing okay and so what we did though is we created a down that re upsell people and so they'd they'd get sticker shock and he would say no worries if you want i can do it for you know two thousand dollars less but i just won't include a guarantee and so then people were like i kinda want the guarantee and then they'd re upsell themselves right and so the guarantee is worth that two thousand me which actually gets to show you so then there there's becomes the art i talk about this in the book of how much do i decrease price versus how much do i decrease the value and so the play between those two if you if the more you study the customer the more you understand which components they value the most and so typically when i'll create a a down structure i'm gonna think okay the first down gonna give is actually to re sell the main thing now if they really can't because they they clearly said no even though it's a big a big issue then i see the next one i'm gonna do is gonna be a tiny thing with a large decrease in price right and so the first one it's like small decrease big drop in value you know what i'd rather have the main thing right the next one though i'm gonna have a bigger drop in price with a smaller change in value at that point price is actually to the stock and so then it then i'd basically how do ethically lower my price without saying i'm selling different things to different people that way i can change the terms rather than saying because i i never discount but i will change terms it's like oh no they got something different than you which is why they pay less if you want i can give you that that's fine but you just won't get what their you're getting now and so that's so that's a little bit of a brief overview in terms of how i think through creating these but you can see right now like if you were to do just even like a raffle once a quarter it's like that would probably feed all your leads for the next whatever yeah it it and i think one of the best parts about this is every business has some version of right this is a different way of looking at a funnel yeah but the cool part what what i think you're you're doing with your books is you're basically taking the parts of the funnel yeah offer getting leads through the core being able to actually sell the first thing sell the first thing to them sell and how do you string together things to maximize the value you're getting for every that harder earned lead that you already you know paid for and bust your asking yeah and one of the things i like about this is that you've basically cod a lot of what the best people do but they do it in their business then they get rich and then they sort of relaxed yeah right like i don't need to go back i don't need to even label what each of these things were but you've sort of looked at and said okay let's call that an a attraction offer what are five examples of those that i've seen and then and then you're on the lookout forum you see it in this business and that business and you sure put it together so i think that's very very valuable even as a a structured way of brainstorming but because i think most people in their most most founders will understand yeah i got it i i wanna get more demand and i wanna make more money per customer yeah but he's vague wishes yeah and i think the the key is to sort of not be most people i have this like rant about most people i'm like you know we try to fit in that's our nature yeah but it's like most people in america overweight to obese most people don't like their job most people get divorced most people don't have enough money to you know to pay for an emergency at a procedure you don't wanna be most people yeah you wanna fit it doesn't really make sense and so i'd love to understand from you where you see a lot of entrepreneurs yeah when it comes to money models what do you see is like what are your most peoples that you're seeing if we just drew kinda like here's how most people are doing this and if you just made these sort of one or two tweaks you're now not in the most people bucket anymore you're operating in a different way your business is gonna have a higher chance of success or be worth more i would say not enough entrepreneurs or students of business and their students of the thing and so i'll give i'll give you an example so like i will never claim to know more about remote work business or hvac or plumbing or whatever but like people fly out here not for that but because a very good understanding of the variables to create money and so it's like okay how can we arrange these variables and then we will fit like you said the payroll i was okay great like do you have a thing i'm not gonna be the one who immediately knows that like but be like there's a slot here they're we're missed it right and so one is they're not big enough students of business number two is a lot of times it's like this is what everyone else does to your point of and so like well i'll give you an example i had a a guy who did guard services right and so they they staff like buildings like this right with with guards and so he had huge cash flow issues because he's paper thin margins but it's super sticky people say forever and it's very comm in terms of competing for bids and so you know after talking for know extended period your time i like okay well why don't we just say that people pay quarter to time and pay it upfront it's just oh yeah and he's like well no one does that and i was like let me give you the best overcome in the world someone's gonna ask you and they're gonna say well everyone else to sit you're like we've just always done it this way that's all you have to say back all you have to say we just it's always that's always always always done it right and as crazy as that is that is still the number one excuse yeah is what still the number wanna overcome like when i used to ask for credit cards on the phone for someone to show up for you know restraining or trial or something like most places do not do that but they'd be like why do you need my car like this is how we've always done it and then they're like oh okay and so there's all this like it's so funny how some these little lines just make huge differences your like weaponized the the the the you the useless of of most processes it's like we're also used to process stupid positive stupid hundred percent we're just like oh it's one of those got it from management they're like oh yeah retarded got it in and so so one is but like when i i had to spend probably thirty minutes with him to just like just get him to just be okay with asking for the money getting paid quarterly number one and getting paid before you do service rather than after you do service and so i mean everyone's throws around the word first principles but it's like very few people actually think from first principles like what prevents us from doing this and i think that's that's like this is the constraint cash flow then like what are all the things we can do can we change payment terms which is the first thing you're gonna do if you have cash flow issues can we push our stuff out in at thirty always right like how can we change this this cash flow balance in our business what's the money model of acquisition dot com so this is really interesting so it's so hard for me because what i have to write about is not the rules that i have to live by and so my favorite movie in the world is is the matrix like many people's but there's the line in the matrix when neo is looking at morph and he says so are you telling me that i'll i can dodge bullets and he says i'm telling that when you're ready you won't have to and so all of the things that i write about like even like selling tactics and things like that they assume you have no brand and so like when you have a brand you have so much demand and so little supply that you can set your own terms i can have zero attraction offer and make the the absolute worst offer the way i don't have to make a grandson offer at all because i might say i don't wanna deliver much at all i will promise zero i will guarantee nothing and like but because then that'll still give me less operational to trace on the back end and so at the end of the day like the reason i have the the two parts of my logo are this is a lever and this is supply and demand and to me those are the two biggest the two biggest forces in business and so like if you have i always thought it was a whale tail that's exactly yeah but like those are the two of the strongest forces in business and so all of these things are to help lu or create or channel demand when you have little when you have an ocean of demand it's hard to lose and so the model that we have is very different it's almost like a word away model of like we you know we invite entrepreneurs out here who we think are interesting we look at the business and then we say hey change these things call center a year and that's that's basically what we did we took our diligence process that we were doing for multiple years and i was like what the the the catalyst for was that we had we getting all these thank you emails so all these founders come in from my content or whatever and they'd be like you know they took we my deal took six calls with them and was like at the end was like listen these two metrics suck do these things see how it works for a year give us a call and they were like this was the most valuable process i've ever gone through and then i was thinking like that cost me a lot of money right and so was like what if i just charged for diligence functionally and then i got then i could actually staff it better and all these other things and so that's functionally what we do from the advisory practice then then feeds the deal size you have the content which creates the brand yep what you did is you turned your cost mh into whether it's a profit center or breakeven even i don't know but yeah you know something like that this this is your workshops yeah what you it you called it something else just now you advisory breakfast advisory okay yeah so there's your advisory yeah and you you say okay pay us five grand come over here yeah but then you do able to upsell here to like more advice just yeah so we just do so basically from there it's this is how we basically how we see value creation and so we say like this is our framework for hitting value if you like this happy to help you if you're like this is cool i'll go do this awesome but the the consulting side true consulting it's it's one thing like they come we identify the constraint we say okay okay well we're gonna go look at cops we're gonna look at the different as ad strategies of people who are bigger we're gonna say this is the funnel and this is the offer we think you should do and we say this is all you have to do when you do that call us and so it's it's a hundred percent from point to point it's not like a ongoing thing it's literally one time consulting mh and that's the quote that's the quote upsell and then at the bottom here you have the equity side yep where you're like great yep the private equity side right yep gonna buy the businesses that yeah in the venture i know which we do a lot of and okay gotcha interesting when you started how much of this was figured out as you go hundred percent of it grand master plan visionary well there's turtleneck next some things from master right some things i would say the the big goals for master plan the all of this mechanics was absolutely like figured out as you go like the books and how they've all been structured has been a five plus year plan and you'll you'll see what what i do with the launch and and why yeah it's gonna be awesome but it will it will it all be revealed but like the mechanics of like the prices and like how we do that like that was very much born from like i am currently spending money on this team we have way more demand than we have supply maybe if i can generate more revenue here i can staff it better i can get more luck surface eric i can look at more of these deals because you've probably did seeing like some companies look terrible in paper and then you meet them you're all these guys are awesome and so we had to do so many like i mean we we probably talked to one percent of the papers that we that would come in and i was like i know we're missing stuff right and so that was that was basically the thesis behind this i mean i think it was brilliant i was like wait a minute so he's basically gets paid for people to come and open up the kim camino they get value too otherwise they wouldn't be doing it these not dummies these are business owners like they they should be you know making good decisions but i was like wow that's a either the median size is is four million so it's not like they're not small business this median like there's plenty of like tons of good businesses every every every time we've workshop top one's usually between thirty and a hundred you know and there's plenty in eight like every single i don't think we've ever had one that doesn't have multiple eight figure companies i wanna play a game you do we have the the game here oh what is what is the game so the game was this pro okay so so this is gonna be a game that we're calling make it or take it alright so you're gonna have to shoot i don't i know i know you're not big a battle we're gonna have to get up for this yeah okay so you're gonna take a shot okay gonna see how far back we're gonna go here but i think we'll set that as the benchmark here okay you make it you're off the hook okay you miss it you have to take it with one of the tough questions that we spin the my sw we i was like i really like alex and i was like what do people want so i asked people what do you wanna episodes i put out a ton of content you know i'm not just going here to get the like yeah let's do something new let's do something fun and so they were like ask him some tough questions so i okay let me think of some tough questions but let's make it fun how do we you guys alright so first shot go for it and then you get and then if you make it you guys you the question if you make yeah you can ask me the question that's fair or i burned the question up to you so this the question i okay what's the question perfect so the question is what do your haters get right what do haters get right meaning you know you get criticism as anyone does what's set chris some criticism is fair or there's components of it that's fair so what do the haters get right steroids is one you know he's just you know he's here for the money i would say from like the the philosophical angle you know i'll say they're are people who are like you know the say that like alex of life and i'm like we yeah i'm pretty open about that too you know so it's like they will use a fact as an insult i'll be like i agree right so that's oh i think that qualifies i think that's one right yeah i mean they're we're sending it as a hate comment yeah but you're like yes and i agree i agree yeah and if you if only you know i'm open with that yeah no like because you guys you said like i'm here seven is weak like i work all the days until i cannot work and then i take a day and then i continue to work again and i i work twelve out hours most days i'm usually you're five to five for six and so it's is that a temporary thing are you like yeah i'm in an era of my life with that i wanna do or you're like that's who i wanna be it doesn't feel this doesn't feel like a push like if i if i when i'm pushing i work third shift which is i work eighteen if i do that for an extended period of time that starts to grid me like twelve is like that doesn't yeah like five to five five i'm like i still feel like i've got plenty of time so like chill out and do that alright this episode is brought to you by mercury they are the finance platform of choice for over two hundred thousand companies 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 a really cool feature i highly highly recommend it like i said i use it self 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 so do another question yeah okay make good to take this alright thanks question alright alright what i got i love it alright if i reset your bank account andrew your followers change your name and face so i reset you to zero basically drop you in another drop you in another life not another country how long do you think it would take you to get rich again and what rich rich would be let's say the name of this podcast my first million to make a million bucks get a million bucks in your bank you're and what would be the approach so you're you're back to to name was face alex alex yeah well having lost everything twice i'll tell you what i did which was i find a local business that's typically a service that i think i can sell for a lot of money and they're typically under charging and so i will say hey how cheaply will you let me sell basically if i if i send you a hundred customers how cheaply would you do it that would you charge me to do that and so i get an agreement on price from them and then i saw for whatever they i brought you volume yeah what's the lowest you could deliver the service for that volume yeah and so this say it's a bad cracker that's a chiropractor or whatever and i say okay how much will you crack back spread the absolute chiefs and he says twenty five bucks a session i say okay cool so i can sell packages of ten for two fifty and you're cool with it and he says yes so i'm gonna go and sell packages for three grand right and i'm gonna make the spread and it's because i know how to sell and know how to get leads right and so i mean this is what i did i mean obviously did in the gym space but it that's that's what i did when i lost everything i just went to gyms and said hey but for them i could i negotiated zero so like you already have all your cost basis i'll just add you customers and then after the first month exactly so i i would take the first the five hundred bucks i like i to keep that and then after six weeks you can confirm memberships for all yours so zero c for you i take all the risk i do all the work right and that's and then i would i did about a hundred grand every twenty one days doing that is there a better or worse type of service business that you'd go for like knowing what you know now like can i gym i for sure do health care health care oh my god health care means what white lab coat anything service health suit like pseudo i call pseudo medical okay so that's where like i mean why like teeth whitening that's we have a chain of twenty eight twenty eight stores like i love pseudo medical stuff so laser you know laser laser skin stuff laser hair removal you know the the chemical peels i love all that stuff like the the beauty medical like intersection you you can just sell your eyes out it's the way what's the why you love it because of the demand because it's huge supply demand inequality so there's if you if you look at the stats there it's insane like the amount of demand if like boomers and all the stuff you like wanna stay young and the supply side on is so low and the reason i this is because every single men's spot that walks in these doors is killing it and i talk to the founders and i'm like whoa and i'm like so how do you mark they're like we just kinda like open up we just we just announced that we're there website no they're like have a phone number people just kinda come in i was like they don't know that's not that's not how it works that's not how most that's how that that's how crazy the supply demand differences is and they don't think pricing and like they think about nothing they just and they make you know forty percent or they have no idea right and so that's why i like signal for you yeah that's yeah a hundred percent i when i a of people who don't know what they're doing all making money i'm like okay there's something there that's good and so that's what i would do because that's what i did do right alright alright okay away let me get another question here that i wanna dig because i got a couple yeah because it's like if you need to make a hundred grand a million bucks you can do that like if you just if you know how to generate leads locally and sell you just get a service business that agrees to take customers for a price and then you just sell as much as you can alright go ahead man well then you remind me to burn you can ask what are you're doing what did you get most wrong in the past three years okay i'll tell you this i started with a bit of a portfolio approach mh so i kinda had this thing where i was like i don't wanna operate but these guys are operating well i can add a bunch of value similar to what you guys do private equity or whatever and i took minority stakes yep in several companies that have done well but basically when they do well and i add a value i just sit there wondering why the hell on i own wore this company and i realized that i could've have made more and really simplified my life with one great business like it doesn't take many great businesses to get to the next levels of wealth you business can be worth hundred million five hundred million like they can get very big and so i would have been better served doing less here and i got it wrong i thought that i was being i thought i was playing the game at a bit of a higher level when in actuality if i just kept it simple yeah picked one of those business or built one one great business i could've done better than i did spreading my focus with less work i made the same mistake alright right we did we did twenty four deals in twenty four months and then we consolidate down to five yeah like you it's it's i means it's eighty twenty yeah you're like i was down power law applies yeah basically all well it still rules yeah let's do the next one alright alright now i've now i've got my i gonna move the the that's four just ask you whatever alright i was gonna ask you this one's funny should entrepreneurs should successful entrepreneurs get a pre shit's it's tough as a as a frame if it's your kid it's is my kid well if they're mike that they're gonna have my money so yeah i'd yeah get it i mean for me i i ask leila basically it's like when you you wanna you wanna have a pre up in the when you have somebody who doesn't wanna sign a pre note like that's like that's the only that's only way i could say yeah it it's actually just so like leila and i i thought i was like rich when i met leila rich i wasn't but like i thought i was rich and i said we signed a pre up and she was like sure like i don't care i don't want your shit and so we were on the way to the courthouse to get it the not or whatever and in a dramatic flare i tore i tore i tore and throw it out the window because i i'd like it was so not a thing she was like i don't want your shit like it's fine and i believed her and like we've built everything together so but i think that is very risky advice and so i'd say the vast majority of people should have like should strongly consider romantic i like it alright here go i'm gonna give you one okay i like this question so i'll take this one oh perfect bumped in and out don't know this is easy one there's actually not that tough question if you could only follow three people on x meaning if you into slim your content diet now it's a really good body builder mode where it's like a chicken and broccoli or whatever mh who's your chicken and broccoli of your content diet people you genuinely you genuinely value what they're putting out there on i think maybe twitter's is one of your big platforms yeah x it is i mean elon will be one so i have two more two more people to to to use you know it's weird i've actually i've totally like used twitter like a like i just like let it serve me whatever right and so i just like love all the spread yeah i just like kinda like just let it feed me whatever trying to think about the other accounts that i would be like oh i would i'd miss them if i didn't see them right it's actually hard feels like i'm years were two yours neville would be one okay is a good one you know the others i mean i would cheat and be like the news ag so it's like at least i get all that but i wouldn't actually pick that you know who who actually think this really good cuts anchor for carrie okay yeah i actually like his stuff a lot interesting yeah i like his stuff that's probably my second one i just the very tactical oh you know i i love george back stuff yep george mack although i'd i'd cheat i'd be like just text me the thing yeah just george is really good i actually really like george yeah now i'm thinking about it it's like say help put good stuff out obviously williamson puts good stuff out so like yeah now that i'm i'm thinking through it's like you i like this blank but no i like i think george george has some of the most unique takes right and i think that's why like a stuff a lot yeah alright well thank you for playing yeah thank you gonna take it you took the tough questions mo hot hands hard questions yeah the the three you know the biggest errors man that's because it's like which ones cost me the most and then which ones did i miss the opportunity the most so since it's like i have it's like i it because like just based on the like i i i thought i've really beat myself on this i have missed more hundred million dollar net gains and multiple one hundred million dollar net gains than i have made right which makes me really angry but then i thought about it i was like you always say no to more deals than you say yes to so as a number always going to miss you're literally gonna miss more winners than you have right but like but like ever i could tell you all like like i say their names before i go to sleep at and night like i've like one of them our stark yeah and some of them i'm like i should like this one was in the like either not like there was a gym franchise like buddy of mind i've known him for years he's been in the business for thirty years he finally went on and an to start franchise and then i i was like we need to do the business this way and he's like i just i just wanna run it i like just probably own a all it's a great model and i was like i'll fund the whole expansion and he's like i've already sold forty units like you know i wanna foot back and and so i ended up like not doing the deal and he'll exit for probably a hundred twenty million and this is in three years and i i was gonna it was for fifty percent of the company and i was just was like he was a friend it was fitness for i was like there's i should not have missed this deal you what i mean there's a content creator that i that i love and have followed for more than ten years talk to them you know we had a we were gonna get a thirty three percent stake in the company and from the time that i we said no to the deal i'd say twenty four months later they're now probably a hundred and fifty million dollar company and it's just like i have a i have like four or five of these ones that i'm just like i should like that was like that one i said no because i knew the amount that he he slash they wanted from me was gonna be more than i wanted to right commit to like i could they it was like i think they saw thought as like an aqua hire and i was i'm not gonna like i will to this but i'm not gonna dive it i had a moment like this and is silicon valley yeah i thought i was saying my big miss yeah i was like i forgot which one was maybe it's like calm or something you guy's buddy with alex and you know he's like raising it probably like a four or five million dollar valuation it's now two billion right so so i i could've have easily written in a check to come disregard the fact that at the time i had no money there's not angel invested there's many reasons i missed that in addition to just not thinking it was gonna be a winner yeah but besides that i i was telling some story about one of these one of these misses and i thought i was like sounding cool because i missed it and literally i just got a big dog by this guy looking out he was just like he's like okay welcome to silicon at he's like what are you talking about everybody anybody has yeah baskets of these are you kidding me you wanna start like yeah i could how much your time you guys facebook number one uber first and second exactly he's like i wrote the check i missed did the date you know how many different versions of this and he but he said something smart you know he was first it was like shut up basically he's like shut up you think this is like a really cool unique story yeah not only is this not cool and unique it's actually just a standard cost of entry if you're gonna play this game totally so like what are you talking about yeah but the second thing you said was he's like i think you're taking the wrong lesson from this because i was focusing so much on what i missed out on yeah versus what the root cause analysis of why didn't i do this okay and if actually since then changes us where it's like actually a lot of these misses were like deals i liked i wanted to do they wanted do we just didn't chase i kinda follow ups yeah enough to like make sure a transaction goes through because doing a deal sure takes a sprint at the end and we actually like operationalize a bunch of those once we once we got over ourselves in the the kind of weird ego of missing you know life got a lot better for us but i had to i had to learn that the hard way but that's that was probably a big one i and then a lot of my big misses have been like strategic mess ups like one of the big like one of the biggest areas i ever made at launch was i started allan the software company right and i should have built a crm for gyms and that was like i had the right idea what did alan do if it wasn't it just it worked leads because the biggest pain point they had was working leads serum wasn't a pain point from a monetization perspective if i had put them all on the platform that i went all tricks i would control revenue there's so many things i would have been able to use the pain to get them into like forever product hundred percent and so like that was like that was probably a three hundred million dollars miss and so like that sucks like i've it that that's probably like my biggest strategic miss i've made we're i'm like i literally allocate a capital to build technology and i built the wrong one right like but i didn't know it i mean i was twenty seven you know on the other side of the coin one of the biggest hits that have happened post the gym launch and whatever this building so this was like an unexpected like wow this was way way more alpha than i of it what what it would about that like the literally the real estate value or you mean serendipity the fact so i got this building before we did any like it was just like i just wanted to place of have a gym so i was like i'm gonna i'm gonna buy the building and leila was like we don't like we're all remote and we have like you know with the on on the just the pure hold i think at the time like fifteen employees just on the investment side and i was like and so and so anyways i was like i really want this building because it was the was old building it's just kinda cool i was like i will figure out a way that it will pay for itself right and so the only reason the advisory practice got stood up was because i was like well we have this space i was like let's just i'll make a post to see if anyone wants to come out and then that's what sprung was like there's huge demand for that in person versus remote stuff and so then it was like great so we meet all these businesses and we generate cash flow so it's like both things but like this fore shirt like that whole thing would not have happened if we didn't ever book like zero chance i wouldn't have done it because i it was just like i have the space let's try i just would never have taken that leap right so that was probably a huge like didn't guess it was gonna be a win win that's probably like the biggest the biggest one that's like that plus i mean you've got like you know michael and a bunch of we're here all the time now which i think it was very tempting and very easy to be fully remote yeah and i think remote works remote works yeah but in like the business olympics the people who are serious about it they're gonna be together they're gonna be c located yeah you know like i paid diego i was like move across the country i'll pay you more just live as like the rule is here's a five minute radius from like we don't where i live yeah pick a place you know that that's the only rule of coming out here because there's you know you can't really replace that oh totally we're eighty so now we're eighty percent in person and so i think we're at like ninety ish employees something like that and so the only thing that we allow as remote is infrastructure right so hr actually hr here so like but finance can be remote certain tech roles can be remote legal can be remote actually become my favorite podcast question i don't know if you have good answer to this because i think you're so locked in and focused on what you do but it just what are you what are you like really interested in lately like what are you very obsessed with lately that's not your core day to day work meaning not like a hobby but just like just i'm kinda of fascinated by this or just like keep reading about this or i keep wanting to meet people in this this thing what what's that thing i only have two and they will not be well once the trident answer is just like i'm reading up on ai just like you are and i spend a ton of hours looking into it the other thing is completely unsurprisingly is that i'm actually really into gym equipment like i i like my instagram is gym equipment as gym equipment are we talking like novelty gym equipment or what are we like like kind of like i get all these like your nut cracker killing like commercial like giant industrial yeah yeah like like the stuff that you see at jim like and why are you so interested that what's what's get me interested in it well if you like if you train hard like you start to notice like some machines are better than others and like why are they better and then you start looking like forced curves for like okay where it is the you know worth tension the highest and then it's like does it correspond with where hypertrophy maxed out for like the range motion for the muscle and like just the like what's the feel of the of the of the equipment and the range of motion and the adjust ability and and like what like what kind of bearings are that you like you can get you can go like pretty far into this yeah and so i'll say this there's the there's this a new thing that came out it's called the volta i'm not sponsored by beyond power and i think that i think in i think ten or fifteen years gym equipment will look very different and it has not changed for a very long time and it's because basically magnetic resistance hasn't wasn't a thing and now it is so like a vulture for example is it's like a brick it's literally the size of a brick it's this big it can get to two hundred pounds of resistance right but not only that you can do single pound increments which is amazing for strength work because like most people the like side up for anybody a lot of reasons you get stuck at a at a at a machine or on dumbbells is because the percentage jump is too big like girls with dumbbells it's like the worst they go from twenty to twenty five pounds for a girl it's a twenty percent jump in in in in weight and so they just can't make the jump they just get stuck whereas like the perfect gym would have literally a hundred dumbbells that are one pound two pound three pound four all the way up and then you can make this progressions much easier so anyways it goes single pound increments you can also change the eccentric so you can have a be way harder on the way in versus the way out the next thing is you can change the curve so you can make it like really hard at the front for any kind of pulling moving when heavier here because you're stronger here lighter here on the flip side if you're doing pushing movements you wanna be lighter here go have your here you do that by just telling at the movement you the curve you can change the curve you can you can manually change curve and the so because of this the european company by the way yeah i don't know i i somebody sent me this they were like because i was buying the the both likes like adjustable like two dumbbells but you could do all these weights he's like really wanna get it get these and i think i that's new bell one that's totally new bell okay maybe that was the one that's probably what it is but yeah the the best ones right now are the rep slash pep in adjustable they go to one twenty and they're all metal there's no plastic and was i mean like i can talk to him but that is probably my i'll circle i'll close the loop on the on the vulture thing the reason i think it's so interesting is that like all the select pieces you see stacks of weight right you put a pin in it there's the stack those they take up so much room because you have to have room you have to balance the the piece of equipment from when people are moving it and the stack takes a huge amount of space and from a shipping perspective it's so expensive to ship four hundred pounds right plus the machine right and so it takes more square footage it's more expensive it has smaller increments you can't change the strength curve there's all these reasons and so they find like the tech is finally there where i think that there will be a next generation of machines where they will only have the electronic yeah exactly and you just literally plug it into the wall and the thing the square footage will be smaller the actual machines will be cheaper because the this is v was is gen one as to like the like in five generations it'll be two hundred dollars right now two thousand for the brick but it'll be cheaper than weight as soon as it's cheaper than than mass based iron yeah yeah as soon as it's cheaper than mass based iron there's there's basically no point right to having mass based resistance so i i get very excited about that stuff because i think it's gonna be really cool for gyms because i i mean i've come from that space but the amount of things that you can now be able to do as a gym owner now i don't own a gym now i do wanna a gym it's just not commercial there's so many more things you can do with customers right that like your ability to do like true hypertrophy training in a large group setting when you have that type of resistance it's safer you can't get hurt on it like there's all these things that are beneficial for so i think that that's my that's my ten year call yeah that people are expecting i think it'll i think a huge amount will be magnetic because be cheaper for gym owners they don't break as off in incremental all the reasons i said and it's less space did that sick answer like that was the one i was like i don't even know if gonna ask i feel feel like because totally like i really like writing this book and i'm like great that that's equipment you see joke no i i'll was show i got yeah that's cool yeah you'll you'll see it and be like oh chris ted geek out on ai anything like what's you you use it over a ton what do you use it for yeah i use it a lot i use it i mean i feel like i i just say i'm ashamed i use it all the time and i am ashamed it i'm my use cases i know i should be using it better which i think many people feel that way but i feel like at all levels everyone feels like they should be using it more but this should be a word for like ai guilt yeah yeah just like overwhelming sense of ai guilt the el elon has ai guilt you so i would say like i'm the the most interested part that i'm in for like where i'm focused on ai is actually phones because obviously from the sales background and so that use case like i want phone call what phones like salesforce calls customer support calls like right now we have we have fully implemented ai support and it's crushing it's doing so it's like it's amazing so right now over ninety percent of all tickets are being resolved entirely with ai which is i mean you have any commerce that are multiple right like it's so it's amazing and like the like i'm getting i'm getting these thinking emails like you guys rock like this was two minute response like you guys are on it and like the whole thing's ai right and so i'm like that it's obviously the text based side is there but like it's weird because the if you let you like g four i'm sure you got the upgrade or whatever the voice keeps getting better like i g the one i use for voice right so it's the only one that i do voice stuff with i do all the other stuff with the other ones but i'm like why like it's so close like the latency is so close that i just that's the use case that i'm waiting to crack like we've been working on one for a year now and the late seats but it's it's still like it's it's like not it's not good enough that i'd be like i wouldn't waste money on you know leads for it to call but it's like maybe it's six months but that's the one that's the one that i had tried finger like on the pulse yeah that's great yeah i do dude i heard a ai tutor like you guys say every week because i'm like it it's a full time job to keep up with nope do hundred cases so i i'm gonna sit down i was like pay five hundred dollars an hour yeah what you're gonna do is you're gonna come with a list of like blow my mind point one blow my mind point too but i get to drive yeah right because like you you set it all up but then like i get to be cave man that's how i learned everything yes you know like yeah this how learned hunter on facebook peter said fifteen hour and i said just explain to me how you're doing this and then i'll learn it i learn literally coaches are like coaches for adults yeah is like i don't know why this maybe an embarrassment factor or like the lack of imagination or creativity i think it's like massively underrated i money also the difference it says like engineering right like they tell like ten x engineers there's be like average coach a good coach and like the best coaches is these orders of magnitude jumps and how good they are so the other thing people do get wrong is they just take the first coach that they have versus like be really ubiquitous and like you know go date around and like go find a coach that will just like rock your world because whether it's fitness or food or what i have like probably six or seven coaches like in rotation right now in my life for ai or in general of ai not just general like i ai i have a like a my food girlfriend she calls me every morning helps me think about like okay how am i gonna eat today yeah and helping me like all my bad habits through that i my personal trainer does like i just some very specific like functional training thing that i i i like and i i do they got a basketball coach okay and there's people like are you going you i go to the nba what we're doing it's like well i love playing basketball i decided like being better at basketball not suck not like this is more fun it's like i can go to cardio or i can have like an maybe nba a trainer train me oh it's so way better than just doing cardio and you so why am might why would i i do that so i just have a bunch but like it's it's become to the part like comic it's like yeah i'm just like looking for an excuse like no but i mean what other coaches is gonna add to mouth piano teachers everything i'm such an advocate of this for anyone who if we're still even rolling but they've all left they all left yeah we're just hanging of it no but like i think the some of the highest roi money you can spend is one on one tutoring like just like like every time i really need to learn something what you said like i just like i will pay you a huge amount of money to just sit with me the way the killer ai use case right it's like that's gonna be the thing where once we get it i forgot what it's it i've heard like the bloom two sigma thing basically there's this long term size people wanna fix education so if rich people fund like how do we do it and then they go do the research they're basically like the number one way to get like an actual two sigma which is like standard deviation jump in outcome is one on one tutoring problem is doesn't scale so we they wrote it off yeah so for the last thirty years we just been like well we know the thing that works yeah it doesn't really scale it doesn't you know it can't be affordable so we'll try all these other things yeah but it's like hey wait a minute it's that's now that's now viable and so let's see what happens you know you austin no i mean barr use a barr alpha school yeah joe yeah so i talked to i talked to joe about alpha school and yeah i mean the the stuff they're doing is wild but the the issues that they're encountering has nothing to do with education yeah is everything to do with policy right such a pain but it's like okay two hours a day we're moving at twice the speed so that's that's so one fourth the time twice the speed they're moving at eight times the speed of a normal school and their scores are top ninety eight percentile so it's like eight times the speed and the quality metrics there and then the other six hours of the days the kid just learns whatever they like they code apps they do public speaking and they do budgeting they learn all these other life skills and this is like god did you hear did you see that clip by alexander wang hopefully i didn't yeah scale yeah yeah which clip was well we he's like put i wanna get into a until until it's native and i was like man that was one of the more insane statements i've ever heard yeah in in the good like that's the good weird of silicon valley you're run into peep very easily edge we'll say bats shit insane stuff with a straight face and then you're like wait to mind saying yeah or is he insane i can know yeah he's he's probably right yeah but he's crazy it is way more context on that which is what scares it's like when you have one of those it's like well you have to know some like if we have the the same information you might be crazy by my standards right but if i assume that you are intelligent and can make good decisions that it means you know something i don't know and so that's what that's what fred me from the ai have different values but yeah yeah exactly like the peter till had a great one of his the great peter till like sort of insights was when he was went around and he was like university as a bubble and he was basically saying like you have to look at university as a bundle yeah education great sure ten percent yeah you know babysitting you know know maturation of eighteen to twenty two year olds old this what what's their social there's a insurance policy for parents where you're like i don't know just go to college because like that's what i needed to do for yeah and there's like a filtering thing which is like well we trust that harvard filters you so we've yeah yeah we'll just trust their filtering process yeah so like college just all these different jobs yeah and his take was basically like if you wanna disrupt it you don't just disrupt the whole thing you have to un bundle the bundle and figure out what to do and so like i feel like this is just such a common business thing which is like oh health care sucks or this sucks to get sucks cool but until you've realized that that thing is actually a bundle yeah you really have no shot at like up bending it in any way right you gotta take one part of that bundle and just ten x that yeah and figure out a way where the other stuff doesn't apply to you because you didn't promise that and if you could do all that like it works you know yeah like you know the way i think about what you do is you're a teacher on youtube which not surprise to you but like people think of youtube is like either a social media okay maybe another is just content it's entertainment right but like did i get a little kids miss rachel is the best preschool teacher in the world yeah she has thirty four million preschool students yeah who watched her on her app great like that she is the best teacher therefore she should get this huge outs size number of students so and like khan academy was great teacher you you're a great business teacher like i literally look at youtube like it's a high school there's just cut classes to offer like yeah i can go to david turner and get the history of entrepreneurship that's a an elective i designer totally and like you're basically like business one on one or business or whatever you know business fundamentals yeah and it's like great i can go take business fundamentals with my professor you know rosie and like i think when you start to look at youtube is also a bundle yeah of music and entertainment and education then you start to think about how i might use it differently than the average person right because like both of you and i probably wish you started on youtube ten years earlier yeah and it was the people who saw youtube as more than what others saw it mh that actually got that advantage yeah no i think that's really good yeah i think that it reminds me that a ball quit that i like a lot which is technology democrat consumption and consolidate production and so it's like which means if you're the best in the world you get to do it for everybody right and so yeah i actually i think about that a lot when we talk about our channel which is like how do we how do we just make this the best business content you know possible and that's i mean that's the whole i we just keep doing that then we'll be okay yeah i think it driven him alright pretty damn a good job of it i appreciate it our her hard part is i'm curious how you do this because at one point in time i think even talked about some podcast i was like i think he's great and smart but then the problem with youtube yeah because the goddamn views public yeah is they gave you an outer scorecard to use yeah that may not be the one you want right and it was like i i remember once i looked at your channel and it was like if you're broke do this yeah if you don't have enough money for chipotle do this i was like dude just gonna attract broke people yeah that's the opposite of what kind of like hundred percent once you know or like it's easy to optimize guess what there's more broke people who are more desperate that are on youtube with bunch time to kill you're gonna get two million views on the broke guy video yeah but like i'm never gonna click that and you probably want some people like me clicking some of your content totally and so like i think that's the challenge with youtube overall is like oh if you take their metrics yeah as your metrics you might have a big problem it's a hundred percent it's a so yeah it's it's a thousand percent of problem and we i'd it's like we just we'd put as many controls in place as we can and it's still tough and so right now here's where it gets like let's let let's peel layer back yeah so work gets really interesting is that if i make six videos this our actual cadence five of them i want to be business first business deep whatever we wanna call it and then one out of six i say i'm okay to just like make it wide brutally on a truth about whatever right that one video we'll get more views than the other five together and so then how much does that actually weight the brand so even if i actually think about my production versus consumption right so if i actually put my like i might have a fifty percent philosophy brand and fifty percent or you know motivate whatever you gonna call it right like mindset etcetera and then fifty percent business e but in terms of my production it's ninety percent of my time is business it's just like doesn't get the reach and so it's actually one of the things that frustrate me in some ways because like if i like if i get off from the street i'm always curious like what was the you know what was the thing and so but like business owners for me because like i see to be walking in the door and you have to be at a certain level to walk in there anyways it's like they're are more more listening and reading in general and like we have the we have a whole series of do call called cash cows which is kinda like what we did with the hotline but i have them in person and then i do the whole the whole thing and it's like an hour and those ones right now average like a hundred and fifty thousand maybe two hundred thousand views per video but like a really honest mill like it's just like i could do like we can get like what doing right now and like i know what like i know exactly what we're gonna say it but the but when i ask who here likes those who shows up they're like please keep making those right and so i have i i keep asking them just because i need to reinforce yeah of course see no you need an interested i need something outer scorecard as long gonna tell you one thing so you have to like instrument like an antenna on yourself to get the signal that you're actually leave for in a way that's not necessarily biased but yeah if i don't put up an antenna there is no generic antenna for you like also a little a little tiny thing that maybe maybe how useful but we actually just this quarter switched our metric so we used views as basically the way that i did it before was like we will make content about these topics and then as long as they're within these topics then we will maximize views so that's the that's the constraint and then maximize within that constraint we have now switched to subscriber count subscriber growth even though the subscribers matter zero right it's just yeah it doesn't matter for distribution but it's a great quality loyalty exactly it's a quality score of like i thought this was valuable enough that so now i could still do the same constraints on on the content but then use the subscriber because that gives us the because subscribers still has baked into it some element of reach but if you if i make a brew honest this video i'm not gonna get the same amount of subscribers i am as like thirteen years of business advice like one of my best videos ever that's but hardcore for business yeah so they was just something that we've switched to just this quarter i i i can't figure it so i i i basically figured out what do i want which i can't measure so first was what do i want i was basically like i created it but like you know you know in popularity you gave the q score okay so i basically was like give me the z score what's the z score does z score me as a trust score so i was like alright pro about t score okay i think about but yeah it was the z score which is basically i realized that all content what you actually want is number of people reached times the quality of the person reached sure times the depth of their trust in you sure and basically that's the equation you ultimately care like you can reach a lot of people on tiktok but if they're just like you know if they're not the people you're trying to do like to yeah yeah exactly you know it's you have to discount factor because you're not your second variable is not very good and then the third which is like how much do they actually trust you not like they watched that piece of content or they like that thing or they hate watched it and like yeah i got views but like actually they're like this is an idiot or like and i hate this guy right so that's that's why i wish this now that's never gonna exist so had to back channel it and basically a shame metric so i said if if i make a thing do i wanna go put it in my favorite group chats me myself being like i made this guys there's a lot of shit i make that can get pop that's popular that i i would cringe putting it there yeah because they'd be like bro what the fuck is this great we don't bar we don't need this or care about this is like what is this for well i did you put this here versus other things like i did this one thing that went nowhere viral viral i did this like i spent like two months just studying the process of creativity yeah i really to realized with ai is like productivity values going down and creativity values going it's was like how do the most creative people in the world world work i've studied v elon and all those guys but i actually have no idea how you know sign at all all these other guys how they operate so i studied that i put it together and i put it out there again with nowhere it could put but i like internalize these lessons deeply so still a win but that was the one where if i put it in my group chats yeah my most successful peers were actually like dude this is actually sick like i actually have i didn't know this i took this i needed this blah yeah so i've had to use basically like my own cringe factor of like yeah if i wanna put this in there or would i feel like kinda stupid doing that i what i feel like i need to soften it with some context in some excuses to put it in yeah that's i think i mean i think what you hit on is like such a painful part of of creating content is that the entire the reinforcement system leads you away from the actual business goal i mean if you if you do this for business which i do like it leads you away from your business goal which makes it vary you just have to have a lot of discipline of like right this is the stuff i'm gonna make and it will under perform and that is okay and it gets harder when you when you get when you know how to make the stuff that really hits from of views and all that stuff perspective the more you know yeah yeah i mean but you know it's i mean this has been a it's probably one of the largest focal points that we have as for our brand and i i i feel it's an accordion it's like you know if we we do just hardcore hardcore business content and then we'll be like alright let's let's make a little bit of personality stuff like show a little bit and then it's like oh that did and when i they're like oh fuck we're way too wide and and then like i think we just kinda os one thing i wish you did more of just my personal request was that you did something is like a short or something you i know who made this somebody this room might have made this but it was like you were just talking about your figure gear you talking about your shoes right and bought the darwin and a and so yeah so yeah you hold her your darwin out here you're like i can wear this in the rain it will pool and then i can get out the pool go to a restaurant and it works i can go for hopefully works tomorrow and you know i think that's great because first of all and first of all i didn't feel like i'm trying to be the kardashian kardashians so it didn't feel like you were trying to show me something it was just like oh you wanna know like something i do in my life here here's something i do in my life yeah what i thought was interesting about that was a those it was good find you actually put real like your own nerd into like something for your own lifestyle so i was like it meant something but b every time i wear those shoes yeah i think if you and there's something to physical anchor totally in additional world that like actually matters i'm a huge believer in yeah side note a huge so i think this is like a little sauce there and i think the other part of it was i saw said my i like made a a mission for the year like a for the year and like i thought it was like it should have been about you know business or like getting in great shape or whatever but when it was like oh i know i wanna do i was like i wanna learn to jam out on the piano i was like and so i just made that my mission and i took it incredibly seriously and like had a great time going in and so just yesterday i just turned i've just turned on a live stream on twitter i was like mh i they have this feature i live was up doing like a piano practice not even like a performance i was just like fucking around like trying to learn these songs i'm not good i've been doing this month dude i got so many dms from like again the same thing like the people who i don't wanna send my content to because i'm like you're a billionaire what do you how to get rich right it's from a guy who ten times less rich than you yeah but i got them be like dude i've been wanting to brett i love love how you made time this is that what you which one did you get what who's that teacher how'd you find or do you get teacher's better than the apps and i got so many of those that was like there's something to the lifestyle content when it's really jen i could gym equipment for example like you could probably see that i like i'll light up when i talk about it exactly it if it if it genuinely lights you up and it shows it's like four other to people who i don't like i've read all the books now i don't really need a lot of like like how to grow my business i'm actually pretty good at that sure and so like one cool way i thought your lifestyle stuff worked was it attracted me to that i probably wouldn't watch like ten of the other videos but that one i was like kinda interested in really interest from a different angle and i think you you kinda turned this spigot it off on that i noticed this but like my referral request is you give me ten percent of that back yeah so this is the the dichotomy that has to be managed which is the the the thumb print of the creator in my opinion should be the representation of their current life which means it can change right and so it's like i spend maybe it's like ten percent of my time is finnish oriented and so like maybe ten percent of my conscious be fitness oriented and then probably eighty percent of my time is business oriented then maybe ten percent my time is philosophical and maybe five and this is now a hundred and five but is is relationship whatever right and so it's like that that's my mix and maybe in a different season and it'll change and so the content should be i i was thinking it was like should be glass it should be like when someone meets me it's exactly as the expectation yeah the only thing that fucks that whole thing up is the algorithm yeah because i can absolutely make that that that thumb it's just that this one will get ten times the views and so then if you're trying to manage the mosaic of your brand and with all the little all little shorts as tiny little squares it's just that you can't control how big the square is in the middle of the fucking face that you're trying to build so that makes sense but that's what i'm saying like those that thing about your shoes didn't get a lot of views but it made an imprint on me yeah i would say like i would carry more weight than like i say a thousand random views tim ferris at this he's like do i want ten thousand random people are selected at random i'm somewhere in the world yeah you like my stuff or half of da to be like to really respect what i do it's like one's a big number one's big the one's big value right like which one do i want yeah i think there's something similar there and also like you know you were talking about like they have different wallets or different stomachs oh yeah it's like i leave a certain wallet or stomach for like mh educational business me reminding myself i need to do more at work yeah right i actually have other wallet share to give you interesting on another area my fitness wallet share you can get some of that yeah you can get some of my outfit wallet share on my relationship wallet share as an entrepreneur dealing with you know busy but relationships right like so think of it maybe with your own analogy yeah not i really like that that's i mean it's always i we need to be reminded more than we to be taught yeah so i'm with it good alright we should we should appreciate you fun thanks for thanks for having thanks dudes i feel like i could rude to where to know why i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a road 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 hubs spot 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 fear courage and all that great stuff so again if you like my first million check out billion dollar moves it's brought to you by the hubspot podcast network again billion dollar moves alright back to the episode

we have a bunch of friends not gonna name names but they've already earned the last dollar they will ever spend in their life and so now they're trading great hours for useless dollars which is like such a wake up call of a bad trade to make once you have the power to get whatever it is that you want then the priority shifts to wanting the right shit i feel like i could rule to word to i know i could be what i want to from at all in and like a day's off on go you have back yeah we're start yeah it's so funny i did a pod with tim i don't know last year or something like that and i hyper prepared for it because i was like oh my guys tim ferris this is the guy this is the reason i did a podcast in the first place i wanted to be at tim ferris that was was like that was part of the north star this time i had the exact opposite opinion i was like i don't have any agenda coming into this meaning like i just wanna know what's up i wanna know what's new what's exciting what are you nerd out about i just kinda wanna hear what's going on like what is tim ferris up to nowadays and i have your game here and actually you told me about this even when were doing that last podcast you said i just spent a few days with one the world's best game designers i didn't realize that was our mutual friend elon and yeah he's the man he came on this podcast guest too recently he he's the man so you went and did you went and made a game with him maybe just i don't know let's start there why did why'd did you make a game yeah two years in the making believe it or not so i grow up with d and d i still have all my original modules stunt the dragons and played a lot of video games and as i was looking at what to potentially experiment with next because every few years i try something that's very much off menu or unrelated to what i'm currently doing right so there was the first book and then the angel investing was sort of a waiting into identity diversification so i wouldn't get pigeon hold in one place as a business author for instance and then the podcast after for our chef and there have been a number of other examples some out some don't in the case of the game this came about i think pretty naturally because as i was kinda late to therapy in life but better late than never i guess and when people do a lot of therapy or they do psychedelic experiences or when they've just had a couple of glasses of wine with friends at a certain point what comes up a lot is yeah you know i just take stuff so seriously and it's so heavy and i'm constantly doing ab or c i just need to have like more play more play or play and it's several and if i look back at the books sever it and it's like yeah okay productivity efficiency effectiveness learning there is a serious ting to it if that makes sense but i feel like analog getting off of screens and play is more important than ever and trying to find something that's a lighter lift than dungeons and dragons seemed like a fun challenge and i love lonely the guy such a poly of epic proportions and worked on the first x xbox halo is created entire our genres of gaming has not just one hit but it has a track record of creating hit after hit after hit with tabletop games and love the guy he's just a sweet soul awesome hilarious guy so to be able to develop a friendship with him i was like alright if i'm choosing projects as i usually do based on skills i'll develop knowledge i'll learn and relationships i'll build that could translate outside of that project because a lot of projects are gonna fail so if it's setting it up in a how do you win even if you lose i was like this seems like a very good bet it's something that's kinda near and dear to me something i want more of in my life so if you're gonna make a game what you have to do you have to play a lot of games so also way just forcing myself to get off of laptops and phones spend time with my friends and here we are it's it's it's landing in like eight thousand retail locations walmart target everywhere it's been exclusive to walmart for a few months has been a best seller three hundred million plus social views of gameplay which is nuts and we'll see by the way you in two thousand and fourteen you had a guy working with you named charlie home that i talked to a little bit charlie is really cool yeah i am great and i remember he wrote a blog post on play yeah do you remember that i did i absolutely do yeah and the whole point of the blog post i was like these guys idiots they don't know how have fun you can't go out and play and then as i've gotten older and i take things way more serious i it's very strange that i have empathy for that now and i feel that where i'm like oh my god like i need to go out and have fun it just like not everything needs to make money or not everything needs to have a purpose or be an ice plunge that helps me optimize the morning and i just need to do stuff just because it's fun that's what i used to do oh totally and it's made all of i shouldn't say all but a lot of the sort of socially reinforced drivers and behaviors and so on are around this they're orbiting around this emotional surveillance of taking things seriously and there's a place for that there are a lot of places for that but what i've also realized if if you're serious all the time you're gonna burn out or imp or just wear yourself out before you get the truly serious stuff done right so it's like right now i'm dealing with family medical crises and i don't wanna get into but i'm dealing with that there's a bunch of harry's shit going on and obviously the state of the world is pretty exciting to put it one way and having some type of recreation play for plays sake with social interaction right it have to be a gay it doesn't have to be a a card game or a tabletop game could be playing tennis could be anything watching you seen with your friends doesn't it doesn't really matter right i think as a psychological release valve and as a way to recharge your batteries so that you can get back into the fray fully charged and resilient is super super super important so for all those reasons and frankly it's like look i wanna have a family i wanna do all that it's a my top priority and the short things you wanna practice before you need to have them right and i feel like getting back into exploring some of the things that made me so happy and gave me so much joy as a kid makes some sense and and the older i get the more i realized how reliable a lot of that stuff is right i wanted to be a colorful pencil forever and just getting into digital painting on an ipad and taking walking through some tutorials on youtube with pro create it's like oh wow how did i forget about this this is just so nourishing for me is this gonna be like a good money maker for you like is this a good business decision in addition to a good kinda life fun creative quest that you went on a creative side quest i think it could be if it's successful a nice little annuity that rolls in that is reasonably passive if it hits escape velocity if i were just trying to make money this is not the way to do it like a low priced physical product that is shipped from overseas particularly with tariffs and everything like this is not if you if you're trying to make your riches i i would put this kind of in the same category as like streaming music on spotify or writing books do you care about making money like are you motivated for more not really what when did do you remember when that happened or you're like i my cup is full yeah i was probably when i had my first one or two real startup up exits which was what that's that's shopify well what what was the there were a bunch of the first few hits that were meaningful were like shopify uber both of which were were were sizable right for me for me it's not big look i'm not gonna be subs a presidential campaign or buying buying a mega but i don't i don't wanna do any of this are you comfortable saying publicly a number where you're like you know i don't i'm not motivated by more because a lot of people will listen to this pod and they're like when will i feel that and and i'll give you an easy pass if you don't wanna say that number yeah i don't wanna say it what i will say is that the number for most people will move and i think that's both un unsurprisingly and dangerous so a lot of my friends were like once i have five million i'm gonna create a woodworking shop in oregon and just do the things i really enjoy and then they get to five and then it goes to ten then it goes to fifty then it goes to a hundred then it goes it just keeps going in part because they haven't developed other gears and other interests the only thing they know how to do well where they feel confident and furthermore they have their self worth wrapped up in is putting points in the score board in the in the form of money and that's why i think identity diversification and trying other things where you can feel good about yourself in sharp progress whether that's piano archer any number of other things doing complete off menu weird stuff like making a board game or a card game it is also insurance against having a fixed gear cycle fixed gear psychology right that is a risky risky risky place to be and but for me i've i've i think i'm maybe fortunate and that i was raised in a family didn't have a lot of money we were always looking for interesting adventures it that didn't cost very much and as i've gone older when i block out say a week to do stuff with my friends these are my very old friends in some cases and some of them do not have or make much money and that's totally fun i mean i pay for stuff or in some cases it's not always but the stuff that we actually want to do together is some type of activity right it's doing wilderness training in the rockets which i'm doing in two weeks it's going on a ski trip doesn't have to be to ae in japan you can do it you can go to colorado utah whatever it doesn't need to be crazy or it could be back country skiing where you're touring in which case you have many more options does not have to be expensive and this stuff that we talk about the whatsapp groups that started for an event that are still active or always some activity like that so the stuff that i spent my money on is stuff like that it's like i'm not afraid to spend money at don't money is evil i think it's a great tool but it took me a while to psychologically get comfortable with a bunch of other gears it wasn't the number right like i passed my number and i felt like i needed more i didn't have a fixed number but i felt like i needed more to have some degree of psychological safety and then everything will be okay right and then my problems would go away and then you realize that's bullshit like money solves money problems like you got plenty of work to do alright i read a ton i would say almost a book a week and the reason i read so much is because my philosophy towards reading is i wanna see what works for the winners that i love and what strategies they use and then i wanna see what mistakes where did they all make where were the common flaws that they all had and i just wanna avoid that and so hub hubspot asked me to put together a list of the books that have changed my life so far in two thousand twenty five and i did that so i listed out seven books that made a meaningful difference in my life and i explained what the differences that they had on me or what actions i took because of the book and then also i listed out my very particular ways of reading because i'm pretty strategic about how i read and how i read so much and how i remember what i read and things like that and so i put this together in a very simple guide it's seven books that had a huge impact on my life and you can scan the qr code below if you wanna read it or there's a link guys know what to do there's a link in the description just go ahead and click it and you'll see the guy that i made so it's the seven books that had a massive change in my life this year so far and then also how i'm able to read so much so check it out below well have you guys read that i think bloomberg has a great article where they had high ultra high net worth bankers survey their clients and it was fairly consistent at fifty thousand dollars in net worth all the way up to fifty million dollars in net worth the answer to when do you think you're gonna have enough was almost consistently always two times more than what they currently have so if you have fifty thousand you think when i have a hundred i'm gonna be a little breathe i have a million when have two i can breathe yeah so when i'd had heard that i i was like yeah that makes sense relatable i've been there and i could see that but it would also left me defeated it like okay so then what is there is there simply no answer is that the right answer and i think what tim is saying is kind of where i've landed which is for most people it's an imagination problem they haven't spent the time to think about what else they want in life and therefore they just move the goal post a little further on the on the money game or the the success game that they are super familiar with and so it's not even a question of hitting a benchmark it's simply like you have you have not put sufficient resources into thinking about the other things that will give you that same sense of purpose of progress of a of achievement of fulfillment you know what framework sean do you use because like i i mean i i struggle with that or i'm like well i don't know what to do i've been doing this this is i've got one i've got one okay that's maybe a little less visible which is the the social traps involved with making more money and here's what i mean by that as people make more money sometimes end hanging out with people who have more money and a lot of humans if they have enough wherewithal with to make like a hundred grand year or they wanna make two hundred grand a year now they start hanging out people make two fifty a year k and now those people have new toys new goals more ambitious film in the blank and it becomes this social relative wealth slash competition and i've seen this over and over again then people kinda trade up again in a sense they start spending more and more time in wealthier circles and now people are comparing which jets they have and oh really you have that place in fill the blank state oh yeah well if you're ever were interested right i think there might be one lot left at the yellowstone club or fill in the blank right and there's a there's a social risk of having people who are at your level of wealth or above because the natural inclination is gonna be to roll uphill and for that reason i try to spend a lot of time around people and with people not just old friends because some people are like hey where i grew up it's like we diver diverse so so far in our paths i don't have those friendships anymore that's fine but spending time with like some of the world's best fill the blank right archer swimmers super high level piano players who make next to no money but who you can respect really really really deeply who fun to spend time with who seem to have in many instances great lives and are more content than the rich people who are chasing the next the next phantom whatever that happens to be and there are well adjusted awesome people with wealth who don't suffer from this keeping up with the jones but they are actually very few in my experience so the social piece is really important i corey spending time with and if they're all at your level of of income net worth were higher the very natural evolved instinct is i think gonna be to roll uphill into more a more and more expensive and money dependent path yeah what's your answer to that sean that do you have a framework or or or anything to say about it well the first was kind of the wake up call right like i would say like beginning a career twenties it's i don't even have the ability to get what i want regardless of what i wanted it didn't have the skill i was too feeble i was too passive i was too dumb i was too un skilled i didn't have the you know the the hustle i didn't have the marketing chops i didn't know how to get even what i wanted the first part of my career was just to actually figure out how to even get what you want and i started with a very simple want which is like oh i wanna be successful i wanna make money i wanna be financially independent right and i looked around and i saw that okay most people those people are you know on a bit of a financial treadmill they're never gonna make enough where they can be financially free to have total freedom to choose what they want and they seem to be dread going to work they didn't seem to be enjoying the thing they were doing either now so they couldn't get out and they didn't like where they were then you saw you know a few people made a lot of money but they didn't really like the way that they had to make the money these are the bankers the consultants and the people who were you know they were maybe traveling a lot maybe it low creativity type of jobs but hey paid paid really well and then there was the lucky few you who seemed to have both right it's like they're were making go money doing creative work that they loved and they forgot what the day of the week it was because they were just so excited to get get it get up and do their projects and i just was like okay cool that's kind of the first thing i've that's the first thing to want and when i when i got to that point then i realized and looked around me you and a bunch of our mutual friend sam like you realized that some people never re never went back and asked the question what do i want now so that maybe that was the right thing to want when i was twenty or is my best idea then but when i turned thirty that was the best idea anymore of what to want and we have a bunch of friends not gonna name names but like they just keep putting points up on the score board they've already earned the last dollar they will ever spend in their life and so now they're trading great hours for useless dollars which is like such a wake up call of a bad trade to make and you know at least they have fun doing it and they do feel like a sense of you know power and autonomy and you know creativity making it happen but it became pretty clear that once you have the power to get whatever it is that you want right or are you you believe in yourself to be able to make it happen then then the priority shifts to wanting the right shit you what do do you actually want and you i looked at myself and was like cool my bank account got fat but then so did i so a new thing to want i wanna i wanna not be embarrassed at how i look i wanna feel proud of myself for you know having self control and like break some of these terrible habits that are gonna cut my life short and you know make me sort of you know i mobile you know as the older i get and so that became a thing to want and then why did i pick the piano this year because i was like i don't know what are the what are the real joys that make me happy i love playing basketball of sport the other i think thing that like people really can get lost in and like get into a flow state and just truly enjoy themselves as music and like one is either either i'm gonna go to a bunch of concerts but i got three little kids it's probably not in the cards for me to go on tour and go go to a bunch of festivals this year what if i played music but what if i made a little dad garage band that seems like fun and and i stole the word from tim on this he i think was talking apology he said he he called him post economic and i don't know if tim i don't think you you'd ever used that before at least i hadn't heard anyone use that before did you make that up no i didn't make it i heard it from somebody in silicon valley oh we see we totally so we stole it from you and sort of almost like as a joke like it's just like a cool it's like people who are instead of being you know investors they're capital all are like you know but the aioli of versus mayo so i was like post economics because it's a great way to sam rich we had an an m t shirt that's that's post economics i kinda laughed about it it has century versus fucking crazy yeah right it's so then i was like well what does that actually mean what the definition of it is isn't that you have all the money you ever want it's that you no longer need to make decisions based on money as the primary like motivator which is how i had made a lot of decisions so sam to answer your question i think it's all of that getting to the point of realizing that the most important question now is what are the right things to want realizing that the decide of what to want isn't money anymore it may maybe that was right when i was my twenties maybe was wrong but at least it's no longer needs to be the case and now pick a new word mine is fun so i wanna do the things that i enjoy active of doing them not like doing them for some future payoff and i i told you this you know piano is a great example of this because i thought man it's so cool to be able to play the song and i realized nobody gives a shit if you could play the piano like if anyone could play the piano they just are they sort of nod like oh you could play the piano cool they've moved on they don't wanna sit there and listen to a seven minute you know beethoven you know second menu like they don't care about any of that so you literally can't show it off even if you wanted to it's only fun because it's really fun to play and it's a great like you know so pick things that are in that category another other thing sam the other trick is writing it out so like i think when you're write you you force in a level of honesty in yourself if you do it right if you write something that doesn't feel true it stands out to you as soon as you set it as soon as you put it down on paper and then you can you know sort of edit that and i find that most people do not edit their thoughts very much right they they're only the author they're rarely the editor and i sort of just take most of the things i think and do as first drafts that need a really great editor come back in and tried to make this good and so i try to edit it like i have a post on medium i don't even use medium anymore but i wrote what i want out of life age twenty eight and i wrote like a stream of consciousness as a ramble but i write that like i kinda wrote that over year even in in the post i wrote i wanna rewrite this every year so i could see myself evolving and figuring out what i actually want out of life right like i think being intentional in that way has helped trade great hours for useless dollars that's great that's cool cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty impossible but that's exactly what sandler training did with hubspot they use breeze hubspot ai tools to tailor every customer interaction without losing their personal touch and the results were incredible click through rates jumped twenty five percent qualified leads quadruple and people spent three times longer on their landing pages go to hubspot dot com to see how breeze can help your business grow tim you said this on last pod you go i've been i've met enough well of people to know it's like food you know you could be starving you can eat you can eat till you're full you can eat till your stuff you can eat till you make yourself sick you know it's not my money isn't the answer it's sort of obvious you know once you say it like that yeah let me i'll just rip on that too because as as you were mentioning how you think about this and approach it a couple things popped to mind it's just having seen i mean dozens and probably a hundred plus people go from not having money to having more money than they'll ever need and also just seeing people do well they don't have to be millionaires but it's like they've they've done really well for themselves right they have enough is the the the first i would say is much like you hear it's the economy stupid see perfect does the economy stupid i think it's it's the relationship stupid let me explain what i mean by that if you want to be everybody wants to be happy that's a very old defined term times but it's like spend try to spend your time around happy happy people that's it i mean it sounds so dumb and obvious but it's like took me while and figure this out it's like the most reliable way to make yourself happier more upbeat is to spend time around default upbeat people right it's like it works all the time and similarly it's like if if you don't wanna complain don't like spend time around people who don't really complain right if you wanna fee around people if you want to make a lot of money sure you can spend time around people who make a lot of money but those are often not the same people and for me when i'm booking these trips every year i'm blocking out time to be with those types of people because my default historically are like hyper vigilant super focused obsessed with detail i generally i would say like a lot of humans don't love the overwhelming uncertainty of the world so i like to exert control on something to feel like i have a toll hold and if i can't find anything else it's probably gonna be investing making money who knows right for lack of a better option and so blocking out that time where it's like gets the relationships stupid if you wanna have a low conflict life spend time around low conflict people have you because of your job and i mean we experienced this to a minor a bit but because of your job you're able to meet like you you have the best fame which is you're still famous mainstream but the famous people the cool people the experts like you they they they love you which is really neat who would you put in like the top three of like your best buddies that are from your podcast oh good question well i mean just because it's top of mind honestly it becomes super close and that is hard for me as an adult i've also been very i've always been very guarded and slow to trust so even when i was in college i didn't make a lot of friends i mean i was very hesitant so the fact that we held so well and have become really close is just awesome mix because excite i if you had ask me like you think you're gonna make any super close friends right if you had a parking lot of twenty spots of your absolute closest friends in the world does anyone new gonna potentially take one of those spots be like absolutely no way so elon was on the our pod probably six months ago so if you're listening to this go back and listen deal and it out he's the man he's awesome so he would be one i would say there are a lot of friends with whom i've just deepened relationships and the podcast has been a pretext to just hang out right and like in person will have dinner the night before hang out do a podcast but there's all of this social interaction around it that's true for a lot of my friends i mean i will use the podcast just as a way to ensure that too busy friends actually remain friends so on your list oh there's so many i mean josh waits would be one people don't know who he is they should check him out absolute masterclass and just about every type of skill acquisition i mean just the people who come to mind like someone like a scott be maybe like you know having chase jarvis kevin rose doing the random show on a regular basis which is this format where we just catch up i mean kinda like we're catching up right now talking about what's new what's going on what's on our minds new technology whatever that we come across so doing that regularly with kevin is like a a foundational way that we actually keep connected in real time right because we can i mean i probably text with kevin every other day but it's not the same it is not the same as like sitting in person or even on video and having a real conversation long form it's not the same right so i'd say i use the podcast for that try to think of of some other folks i think rick rubin first long form podcast ever was all my podcast we did it in his son at s lab before a burned down in malibu and i had met him prior to that a bunch but you know we became pretty close so we're not in touch all the time but like we're we're definitely friendly people like lair hamilton the surfer and gabby reese i'm just thinking of malibu now the list is really really long it's like if you look at the people who i initially met during the launch of the flour hour workweek week i try and i mean i'm borrowing from naval here but it's if you're not gonna work with someone i think he says for a lifetime don't work with them for five minutes or something like that and neville nevada i i would trust to actually stick to that i think mine is is a little softer around the edges but it's like if you can't see yourself spending real time with someone for five years doesn't have to be personal but like professional personal or combination like don't spend five hours with that person or five weeks that person and they're gonna be exceptions of course that you have to make just to make life work but i really try to i really try to select my guess that way when possible you also one of things you just said about like you do the podcast but you get dinner the night before you hang maybe you work out together you do go for a hike whatever those types of things one of the great i think hacks is you had this term lifestyle design but there's sort of like lifestyle sampling because when you go hang out with somebody you go into their world for a little bit yeah totally you could just see like yeah what are they thinking about all the time what do they do how do they interact with their family like how do they shrug what is their day to today because i think from the outside it's pretty easy to see what somebody's accomplished after like a ten year arc or like what they have versus like how they live and i think how they live is much more informative to picking up like you know they're sampling at costco like oh i like that actually i wouldn't have ever really thought of it i couldn't have really experienced it but once i saw it i couldn't really un it and so i think like figuring out how to sample from other people does a lot for that like imagination this does a lot for you figuring out what you really want or or a contrast it's like oh my god i thought that what this guy's done is so respect respectable and admirable but i would not wanna live this day this is his day he lives this three hundred days a year i would not want this day for three days but that he does sure great for him but i now know with absolute clarity it's not a intellectual exercise like i felt it i know it visceral doubt that that's not what i want yeah yeah the the sampling and window in is incredibly helpful also for deciding who you actually wanna model also who you might wanna imitate because it's very easy to look at such and such and i know some amazing awesome say hedge fund managers but they're also a lot of very very wealthy miserable concept there and you know like one guy carries divorce papers in places brief briefcase around just in case yeah and it's like wait what yeah incredible yeah yeah yeah and and was like okay you could look at yeah i know but you could look at the score right if you just read the profile on the midas list or whatever and you'd be like oh my god i want like i wanna get that guy's playbook i wanna imitate it but there might be side effects to that playbook right like sure maybe the guys that do shout out of the box but it could be also that the behaviors and the habits and the way here she has built their company and manage their people also directly contribute like all of the family strife and multiple divorce and disasters right it could be that they're actually there's a causal link not just a correlation so if for that reason i mean i really do try to spend time getting into the personal with a lot of my guests and i spend a lot of people who have cross functional ability professionally and personally so when when so people for instance like i mentioned layered and gabby like amazing parents really tight family and i i really like their dynamic as a couple and their parenting style i've seen it i've i mean i've seen a lot of it kelly star at and his wife juliet started at who's like a powerhouse behind in the scenes with everything the way that they've raised their kids at who i've known since they're really small now and they've turned out like they're in college and like okay they've shipped a fully awesome human and they have a very tight relationship with them that is not the standard at least in the united it's from what i've seen and for that reason like okay we might as well take whatever their professional accomplishments are and i mean i i if they had ten twenty times as much money it would not shame it would not necessarily increase the amount that i want to emulate them it's just sean in my i reference this all like who's live do we admire like all all facets of it if as a whole my answer was lair did you have an answer sean jesse is yeah jesse is would also be yeah you just say a name because it's like dumb i'm not i don't don't know the guy that way you know and i'm not trying to like he's my friend i'm not trying to make him a god but like but if i think about blueprints he has this you know he has this approach to like just adventure that i didn't have in my game so you see it and you're like oh wow this guy's really trying got just more unforgettable days and so i i have this like this is cheesy but i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna debut this i'm gonna take this out of the closet alright sam but this is how i've been living my year okay sam you're not a you're not a real sports guy you're like skateboarding and like just like only lifting weights like but in in real sports where people play games and there's you know like the guys who who who are famous that we all admire there's these stat there's these statistical clubs so like in in baseball there's the thirty thirty club which is like you hit thirty home runs and steal thirty basis two things that usually don't go together power and speed and this year like i haven't even cared about baseball for you know ten years but s time i'm like this japanese guy hit fit he at the fifty fifty club first guy ever oh and he's actually a pitcher too like babe ruth i gotta who is this guy i i must know who has put this like on these things that each individually are great but it's like am extremely great right he could do it with those hands type of thing and so basketball there's the fifty forty ninety club it's like who's truly an elite shooter you can measure it statistically and so i created the twenty twenty twenty club for myself and it's basically hold on you're gonna make fun of me for exercising but you could have your own twenty twenty club that you've written down come on yeah these are of similar levels of nerd ness of course if you if you spot it you got it baby so like twenty twenty twenty plan here is it's lose twenty pounds that's the fitness side of of where i'm trying to be greater than i was last year there's twenty which is like a business term is to add twenty million of equity to the to me and ben's like small boy portfolio and then there's twenty off script days and this is what i really stole from jesse and got me like excited about doing this which was he basically just i i love my routine i love my normal day but it's like you said like what any extreme strength carries with it and extreme weakness i can just live a routine life and all my days blend together and i just do the same shit i really have low adventure because i'm so i'm so comfortable and so so pleased with my so content with my day to day so creating these like twenty off script days where i'm like i'm gonna throw away the routine and i'm gonna plan out twenty off days this and i've been doing it and i'm like this has led to a a a a a different like i don't know level of intentional of how to live life that that's been been good for me this year but i felt so easy about it i didn't tell anyone that's pretty good it's how do you have an un script today what does that look like it's off of my normal script you know it's it's so you you what i mean it's like i have a script i wake up i go workout i do this i do that and i like that day that i've architect yep but i need some serendipity i need some forced adventure and but i it's not just gonna happen by default by default i won't do it so i have to like block out the but like that's me on the calendar it's blue i know what a blue day is blue is i gotta do something i totally wasn't gonna do totally never do so what's an example of so that's every two weeks basically or something like that roughly two weeks yeah yeah give me what was your last three okay so my last three my last one was on friday i i hired a professional basketball trainer to take me through a workout that he puts pro basketball players through so i woke up cool and i cleared the calendar this is why i missed the pie podcast guys by the way i cleared the calendar i woke at six am and i went and trained for three hours seems like you said you were sick with yeah like i was late because i was doing this and i lost track of time because i so like en gross in it you know what i mean another one i again cleared the whole calendar and i just read all my favorite fiction books as a kid i read two two harry potter books basically in the two day span to totally just get let myself indulge in something that's fun that's kinda like nostalgic i would never have the time to go do this but oh my god had i had such a blast doing it another one i tried to make a song i've never made a song before i was like today i shall try to make a song and and some inspired by tim when when we were hanging out you said something like i was like what you do today like what what's a day in the life and you had told me you had i think you had been painting or like archer or something like that some like totally random fun pursuit but the way you said it in like classic tim ferris fashion where it's not just like yeah i just did this because i liked it it was like well if you think about it sort of systematically here and he was basically like i have like a creativity gym it's like a place i go for an hour or forty five minutes and i get creative reps and it just helps me be more creative and i thought well i kinda makes i kinda like that i i like that justification you know i'm good with that and so i started doing a creative gym tim this year i picked i you know mis so jesse it's okay came on here and talked about the concept of basil a one a challenge that sort of defines the year and i should have done it in something that was practical i think when i sat down with pen and paper i was like cool this is definitely gonna be something about getting in shape or it's gonna be something about making money it's just gonna me something about growing the podcast it's gonna be something like that and then i just just and then somehow thirty minutes later i was like i'm gonna learn to play the piano and suddenly i'm going to piano lessons i think that's gonna be so much better for you it what it already is i mean i'm six months in now but i've been going to these lessons i go to my teacher i walk in with my beginner one day book i'm like giving brandon like you know a fish punch if fist pound on the way in like you know everyone else in the room is seven years old you know there's other parents there but they're with their kids and they're like where's your kid and i'm i'm the kid here and i just started take in this philosophy you know more and more seriously my my trainer says this great thing he goes kids dogs and dead people i was like what what does that mean he goes that's who you wanna like spend your time with he's like dogs haven't it figured out dude dogs that you know dogs are unconditional lovers they're you know they're here for play they're they're they're loyal there's so much you can learn from a dog kids you know like our kids my kids coming in and interrupt our workouts all the time and they wanna play obstacle course they wanna play this they wanna play that and like and we actually integrated it into our workout but because my trainer wants to spend more time with kids and the last one is dead people which is like you know the wise people who've written books over time like how do you spend more time with with the time list versus the time lee and so you know it's easy to get caught up at the news versus you know go read seneca or something like that so you know those have been little i don't know parts of my compass of like where where do i put my focus where do i put my attention yeah death totally i've have just a quick side bar story that's similar to european piano story whether like where's your kid so i have as you alluded to been taking archer super seriously i mean it's fun it's definitely not practical and i also like trying to figure out a system for training and all of these things right so they're not usually mutually exclusive and i just love archer and i've had the the opportunity to train with some amazing folks like jake ka two times silver medal and i've trained with a number of kinda legendary folks in short short stint right so i flew to california i trained with one such person and he invited me to his house he's like come straight in my house alright so i show up at the house and every single person shooting on the line is somewhere between i would say six and twelve right every single one asian right because a lot of the asian countries especially south korea just dominate everyone historically there are just many many standard deviations beyond anyone else it's it's pretty phenomenal south korea million levels is an interesting case study kinda like singapore anyway and at one point i'm doing my thing like off to the side because i'm still very remedial i'm like the shirt school bus version and these kids are just slang they're all training to compete and stuff and at one point the coach pulls me over and he's like join the circle turn the circle i'm like okay and so he pulls all the kids together and he's giving them that's motivational speech but it's a very like tough love east asian motivational speech anyone who's listening who has like first generation paragon or parents who are born in like korea japan channel will know what i'm talking about and he's given this sort of tough motivational speech and then he and then he turns to me and he goes he goes this is tim he is an old man very old man but he is taking this very seriously in training hard and i was like oh i see the the case study old guy and i was like i'm good with it i'm totally good with it and i find that freeing though right because it's like i'm not competing against these kids these kids gonna grow up to be far better than i am and so that kind of i need to do this to be the best is something you just can't even justify as a delusion or an obsession you know what i mean so you have to just figure out how to enjoy it for what you're able to do yeah i i i still haven't left like the uncle rico phase where i'm like you know i was pretty fat i i could still i might gotta make the olympic team in the bobs blood like i still like you know like am i like it's i'm not old i'm getting to the point now where i'm about phased out of that where it's like dude your past prior not a chance but i still i'm like i could think i i could probably do that you wanna be and it makes exercise not fun sometimes because it is like it because you are always so serious i need to but in about two years it's gonna be like well past my prime with like you don't have a chance but i do find it hard and i you you did something funny one of the first times we hung out i asked you it's very similar to what sean just said about how you had a very specific reason about something i said you know that's a cool dog leash and you're like oh this dog leash you see this dog leash it's made of horse hair and it's perfect because it it has doesn't have any allergy i don't there's like a you had a very specific reason for like something like relatively small and i was like that's exhausting have you had to tell yourself sometimes like i need to be it's hard the reason you are where you are is because you are so precise and so exact which i don't think a lot of people know this like i i've worked with you and i've quoted you i'm like in the hustle before and i think i messed up in a pasta free and you got on me and you're like no i said it this way and i was like you you're totally right and you are this is why you are so who you are is because you are so precise and also that can wear you out sometimes yeah yeah it can it can be exhausting i mean i have i think a certain unusual endurance for that type of thing and i mean i'll read legal documents that three or four layers have comb over and like within thirty seconds all spot stuff it's just i an eye for that which is a blessing and curse right it will go like if i walk into a room and something i remember this is gonna be this isn't really selling it but i remember at one point did this renovation in a bathroom and i walked in and my girlfriend at the time loved how everything turned out and i walked in and i was like mirrors off center and she's like what are you talking about like how you can't even tell that it's to stand like fifteen feet away and i was like no an eighth of an inch too far to the left and then shame we measured in as an eighth of an issue too far on left but it's so the downside is that kind of stuff can drive you crazy and exhaust you you also copy with the dog training that would have been right in my like obsessive period of trying to figure out dog training with my first first dog adults so yeah i would have had a reason for everything and and what might be unexpected for folks is like i actually as a kid and certainly with my friends if i just had a gathering friends five days ago like a couple of my oldest friends like i'm a goofy motherfucker but it doesn't come out that much and i subconsciously or consciously don't let it come out a whole lot and when i've asked for instance something i've done with friends in the past is we we don't do a whole lot of year's resolutions and stuff like that but occasionally for years resolutions and also if there's a word to focus on for the year well we'll be like okay we get to assign each other those things right like i'll give you a new year's resolution you give me one you give us the board to focus on i'll give you one and two one of my friends is just like goofy that's your word for the next year he's like i see that side to you nobody really sees that side of you he's like for for not just other people but especially for you you need to do more of that and so i have really tried to block out time especially weeks with friends or a long weekend with friends that's one of the first things i do every year i block that out i reserve something i pay for and i'm just like you guys have to show up and it's a sunk cost it's the right kind of sunk cost right so i do think about this and yes the precision and the and attentive and all that can be exhausting you know at least what i like about you is you don't do the elon musk thing where he's like you don't wanna be me it's painful being me right like almost like marty it up where he's like you know yeah he like looks off into the distance and pauses dramatically and then just sort of you know really ham it up about that stuff or anything yeah a more balanced thing is like well it really serves me in this way and it's not fully true i also do these other things and i'm working on that it's like i don't know just a much more human way to deal with it yeah yeah it's useful tool i mean it's like a really sharp knife but imagine if you had a really sharp knife was all blade no handle right things it's like if you squeeze that too tightly you're gonna hurt yourself and i feel like that's true with a lot of super superpower like when you find somebody who seems to have a strong power whether that's nature nurture or some combination the the biggest weaknesses or the biggest curse are typically sitting right next to it or just the other side of the same coin they're they're typically very very closely related what do you think was there super superpower because you you you for anyone listening i i assume you're definitely still a big deal for the twenty somethings but when sean and i were twenty somethings you are the guy you still are the guy you inspired all of us to do this and it sounds funny to say it because what you were doing now or then it's so common now but it was it was so weird that would you wrote you wrote some of these things that were like oh that's so obvious you taught all of us how to do it and you sort of coined on the terms you invented a lot of the stuff what do you think was your superpower too if you had to pick one that allowed you to kinda be i mean you're you tim ferris is like a noun that you're the tim ferris of this i mean what that allowed you to become that i think there are a few things i mean one that comes to mind is i was born premature had a lot of health issues the kid so when my mom put me in to say kitty wrestling i couldn't thermo regulate i owed overheat and that's still true to this day so i started trying to experiment with different ways to train different ways to compete didn't do that seriously until maybe like twelve or thirteen but wrestling has weight cutting so you sort of have an in built experimentation at a certain point and then i was like oh okay well how can i wait up more effectively i need to figure out how to lose water weight okay the things that you do tail with water loss are called diuretics what are the risks of diuretics okay let's figure out are there anything over the counter that i as a high school student can get that acts as a potassium spa diuretics blah blah by the way guys don't do that terrible for your body but i i think that that experimentation became a habit really early on and then for for instance for the four hour work week i mean i wrote and tossed a lot of that book multiple times and the only way i was finally able to write it and feel good about it was to sit down and write it as if i was writing an email to two very specific friends one friend who felt trapped in a job that he didn't like which was like a finance job and he was had gold at handcuffs space i mean at the time it wasn't a lot of money for a recent grad it was it was not bad and he felt like he was he knew he was going down a path that he didn't wanna travel but he couldn't educate himself and then the other one was a friend who had started those his own business and felt the same way he's like i've created this thing i can't just quit like an employee now what now what do i do and i sat down and basically wrote the book as if i had two glasses of wine and was emailing two friends which meant like all the war all the worries all the petty concerns and the weirdness that they would be familiar with they would know all of that about me i just put it out there and i think that that contributed another another peep i think that contributed a lot frankly like the personal being the most universal if you're writing and you try to sound smart you're you're almost i mean i i think it can be a huge handicap like big possibility of dead on arrival is high for something like that so embracing your weird self i think can go a long way and then the last piece is i'm i am naturally very very very curious and i do have that tolerance for mono monopoly and repetition that a lot of folks have trouble with whether that's language learning artery tree or just in the early days before or before whoop before any of this like my patience with doing something like trying to find a first generation continuous glucose monitor which was in the four hour body which cannot two this in intense so i probably started messing around two thousand and eight two thousand nine as far as i know i may have been the first non diabetic to use one of those and then to deal with all the pain and frustration using this basically beep side h to like capture data export the data and comb through it it was so manual but for whatever reason that kind of stuff doesn't bother me so i i was able to run experiments i think other people would find torture and then i'll add one more thing and like i'm guessing to the best of of my ability right it's hard to say exactly why things turned out the way they turned out the last one is i do think i'm pretty good at identifying trends and also identifying trends that are gonna converge in interesting ways i don't know why that's the case but i i do think that i'm pretty good at it being in silicon valley or both to my generation certainly you're like relatively early getting there in two thousand and staying through two thousand seventeen also allowed me to just have a very very very high density of serendipity and seeing technology even if you're not a venture capital shirt at angel investors like if you live right there in switch box it's in the air right you just hear conversations you bump rand at cocktail parties or whatever so you you if you're really paying attention taking notes you can sometimes figure things out so i'd say those are a few that come to mind 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 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 when you create content or you blog you write you podcast it seems like you make a you make a decision and that decision is about what you're interested in but also kind of who would be interested in this is kind of baked into it so for example there's things you can do that might get more views on youtube but it might be views of people who are not that interested in attracting right like whereas i've seen that for you the people that probably you respect and i respect they respect your work and then you've gotten to this like wonderful outcome there of what i like sort of like i don't i wanna call it like luxury content but it's definitely like up market in a way right it's not kinda just lowest common denominator content is that were you intentional about that or like i guess do you think about that because i don't think this is a bit of content nerd but like you know from one kind of creator to another like how do how do you balance those trade offs or think about that those those omni opportunities those options there's forks in the road of like i'll give you an example we just had alex for mo on the podcast and i think he's doing a great job on youtube but there was a season where if you looked at his youtube like thumbnail history his title history it was like if you're broke and do this if you're totally stuck and like you know do this and every single title had if you're broke do this and then he was like surprised that you know he was attracting a bunch people who were broke to you know his content well you kind of that was the magnet you created for variety it whereas i think other people do it do it slightly differently he's made adjustments by the way he that's not yeah yeah his whole thing but as just an as an example yeah yeah so it has been super super deliberate on my side not to aim upscale but never to deliberately dumb things down or pretend to be interested in things that i'm not interested in i would say also one thing i left out of maybe that prior list of factors is i took and still take but especially during the let's just call it kind of nineteen ninety eight even prior to that but especially like nineteen ninety eight to the publication of the first book i took writing incredibly seriously incredibly incredibly incredibly seriously man i i don't think that is a skill that is gonna go out of style even with ai i i really feel like and part of that is the practice of writing makes you a cleaner thinker a crispr thinker a more capable thinker even if you never share what you're writing what is taking it seriously look like on a daily basis well taking it seriously for me looked like at the time you know i was in school and i took the hardest writing classes i could find and took one class by john mc when pulitzer surprise and it's just this legend and non fiction writing and that was an ass kicker of a class and just to just to make it really concrete what can happen i was shocked by this i didn't expect it this was as a kid a college kid this was in college yeah this is my senior because it was my senior here in college and the the class consisted of like twelve students he apply playa was hard to get into and then there's a three hour seminar a week where he would talk about john mc would talk about structure he's he's very well known for how he structures different pieces of writing and then you'd have a writing assignment and then he would do a one on one with you to review your writing assignment which let's just say it's like a three to ten page piece and he would always hand edit those pieces and give them back to you beforehand and you might have let's just say three pages of typed out writing so right printed out writing and you'd get it back and his red ink would be it would seem like it's the same amount of ink as your black ink and and most of it was like this word makes no sense you have no idea what this man's this is pea soup which means just like word salad he's like this is redundant and he could make the piece fifty percent shorter without losing anything and as i got trained to be more concise and just have higher kind density of of meaning without the fluff my grades and all my other classes went up even though that class took a ton of time which is wild and and then taking a seriously otherwise means that i'm reading books writing so anything i get a ahold of like writing by stephen and king favorite which is not even my genre right bird by bird by an mo also not my genre these are both mostly focused on fiction books on screen writing irene read screen reilly to try to understand story arc by the way you can apply that to non fiction now you can get all sorts of other books draft number four by john mix fee which is based on the class that he's taught of princeton for ages and talks a lot about structure i think it's writing well or something like that it's by william z but i just devoured all these books and kept my notes i still have a three ring bite with my notes from john mc class from college i still have all of my notes and also paying people to review your stuff or asking people to review your stuff so even before i had published anything when i would write something if you have friends who are in law school or went to law school even if they don't practice law great pro perpetrators because what are they paid to find anything that's ambiguous anything that's redundant if they're accustomed to doing contract review like lawyers or people who are trained to be lawyers great at proofreading is this only non fiction stuff that you like to that you were referring to i was i was exclusively non fiction what does that mean like a advice i mean you're only twenty one were you giving advice or is it just like no no it could be it could be not not necessarily advice actually most of it would not be advice most of it would be something like for instance a writing assignment might be really broad so he would say there's a statue in this courtyard a mile from here right three write three pages and it has to have as a theme that sculpture and so the students in the class would come at it from every possible angle like you could you could take it anywhere you want you could it could be like the grandson of the person who made it and you tell the story of the grandson and the you know the the the mother or yeah it could be the aesthetics anything so he would deliberately keep it pretty broad or he would say i have an assignment that's like interview someone and i'm making this up because i i remember how i executed on it but he'd be like go interview someone you would normally never have reason to talk to i was like okay so like find somebody who's like sweeping the floor and like interview them for an hour or two and write your entire piece on that person again keeping it pretty broad she'd get a lot of different types of pieces and so i would have something like that that you could you could get proof and then as when i graduated i was still practicing writing but i didn't have a class right so i would i would try to write pieces for at the time you know like black belt magazine or maxim magazine even as even as a student just for fun i was trying to get stuff published in in big magazines didn't always succeed but occasionally got something in fortunately now i mean you can find the curriculum of so many good classes online from so many amazing universities and teachers it's like just get a couple of friends and go through it together and then proof for each other stuff ko critique each other stuff i mean it it's like you can do that now it could take some planning but you could certainly do it and then to come back to your question sean i figured out pretty early on and i'm not sure when i first read it but reading kevin kelly's one thousand true fans i mean my philosophy was always pretty tightly aligned with that because when i lost when i launched my sports nutrition company way back right the for the first real company that i launched i tried various things before that when it finally worked is when i applied very tight constraints and i said okay i'm not going after x market which is huge i'm not going after why market like sports performance which is too still too big and too expensive for me to reach with paid marketing for instance mean this is before effectively all social media i was like okay i'm gonna focus on certain powers sports like power lifting olympic way lifting i'm gonna focus on boxing but particularly mma which was very early days i mean to give me an idea like it was it was affordable for a start up to sponsor the and beyond pay view right it was early early days and i'm just gonna go after these very small segments with the idea that and matt cuts at the time of google had a great presentation on this i think he called it kat mad which was a video game reference but we basically start with something he was talking about it in the context of a blog you start very very narrow and then over time as you build an audience you can broaden you can broaden and this you're sort of rolling a ball that collects more and more until you have a lot of latitude attitude to write about or do kinda whatever you want which is fortunately where i feel i am now more or less right but in the beginning it was very tightly constrained and i suppose if you're honest with yourself and you're your weird self the stuff i already talked about and if the personal is the most universal and you're kinda scratching your own itch because the four hour workweek was the book i couldn't find for myself right you would go to the bookstore and either it was like how to run a fortune five hundred company by jack welch or it was like the minimalist guide to convincing yourself that money doesn't matter and it was like okay well i'm not gonna like recycle my lint and do all make my own sheets and do all this stuff i'm not i'm not that person right i don't wanna be that person with super extreme reality and sort of living a purely aesthetic lifestyle but i'm i also have no desire to be jack welch it's she's like well where is the stuff in between that i actually care about and there were some books on small medium sized businesses but i couldn't find it so when i scratch my own itch did all these experimentation and then wrote it if you are sufficiently authentic yourself and that word is so overused but if you if you actually are truthful in how you represent yourself at all the quirks it's not gonna resonate with you know eight billion people at least not off the bat right your early adopters are gonna be pretty tightly confined and i think there was an element of luck in so much as i was in silicon valley i was tech forward i was focusing on new tools some of that some of that ended up after the fact being deliberate with launch strategy for the four hour workweek week but they also happen to have incredible capability of broadcasting right and and that that also contributed but my feeling is and when i put up a blog post or i put out a podcast episode and you know i i've my team has also been sort of ind into this just because i've been doing it for so long is i don't want a hundred percent of my audience to like any episode i want ten percent of my audience to love each episode or each blog post i want a very very strong reaction positive like i'm i don't i don't i don't fully subscribe to the pt barn you know just measure the value of p by the and kind of thing i i don't totally subscribe to that and i assume over time people are too busy to read all my stuff are listening to all my podcasts anyway but it's like over time if one out of every ten is like a holy fucking shit this is for me then if you have the endurance part of that is scratching your own itch i don't i think it's very hard to sustain something over the podcast is ten plus years now if you're not scratching your own itch that you end up just occupying a very unique type of mind share for your audience and they are much more interesting much more powerful as a result of that one thing i wanna ask you is you know this is we're well sometimes we ask you about stuff like basically for hour workweek week which is i don't even know how many years old at this point but like almost twenty years old twenty years old what's crazy yep and that's like what you were interested in learning out about then right you're interested learning out about like how do i free myself how do i dis associate my time and my money how do i automate things how do delegate things how do i do fear settings so that i can live a a rich life that i wanna live right now i'd be really intentional about it i'm sure some of those things just things are still interested but some of them you're probably like cool that's a mountain night climbed ten years ago and i'm you know less interested now so i'm curious what what are what of the things are just most interested in right now like what are you learning out about what are you obsessed with what do you find yourself drawn to right now yeah we can go in all sorts of weird directions so i'll i'll also say for people who might be curious like i still use almost everything in the four hour workweek week minus the tech tools obviously like go to my pcs not something people are gonna default to but i still use all that stuff but it's necessary not sufficient right for our body same story like a lot of that stuff is in the news now cannot two thousand ten right like exercise micro snacks and glucose transporter on muscle cells like that's in the four our body it's it's making the news rounds now because there's more a scientific literature to to support it but i still use all that stuff like the edible swing slow carb diet added crunch and all that stuff i still use it all so as i've progressed i think i've identified more and more for me and maybe for other people missing pieces right in the game right coyote is a good example of that right it's like okay yeah sure you can be the the this the most incredible productivity machine of all time and still be miserable and make your friends and family miserable right it's actually more the rule than the exception mean it's like there are a lot of people who fit that bill and a lot of my exploration these days i would say since two thousand fifteen when i started tsa foundation for funding science related to mental health therapeutics primarily and huge chunk of that was psychedelic assisted therapies starting with like the earliest dedicated centers in imperial college london johns hopkins etcetera but it's a it's it's not just that it's brain stimulation of different types it's some longevity research for instance related to rap mice and canine all sorts of stuff and i'd say these days i am spending a lot of time on the a lot of it is science and specifically what i have is a working hypothesis not not not the only person but i think i'm looking cross disciplinary at a number of different areas and they they seem to resonate with the same possible commonality which i'll say and that's looking at m adaptive or chronic inflammation as a shared underlying driver of a lot of problems that are solved with different tools so for instance the psychedelics are now topic azure heavily des a lot of experimentation on state and national levels being done some super fascinating stuff happening on the scientific front and some people say well it's because of the content other people are like nope it's because it hits the serotonin type 2a receptors for certain types of psychedelics blah blah blah and you know there are a lot of incentive involved like some people want strip it out because it makes for an easier business model if people aren't totally sn but it turns out that a lot of these compounds have profound very very strong and in some cases durable anti inflammatory effects okay so let's put that aside for now but i do think some of the anti inflammatory effects of psychedelics could account for a lot of what we see that is now often explained by other means for instance if you give people with depression just straight up anti inflammatory and and you can find this on pub pretty easily frequently you will see an anti depress effect or reported improvements so what's going on there right if you look at long covid you look at lyme disease if you look at alzheimer's if you look at certain neuro diseases so alzheimer's often referred to as type three diabetes but there are elevated levels of certain inflammatory cytokines each the list goes on and on and on so i'm i've been doing a real deep dive on different means of safe anti inflammatory approaches to address chronic conditions right so that could be for instance sam already mentioned it but something like cold punches i i do think there's a place for that i am looking really closely there's a lot of bullshit floating around about this but i'm gonna interview who i consider to be the most credible scientist in this domain shortly but vagus nerve there's a lot of charlotte action in this particular subject there's a lot of questionable devices being sold but i do think there's something very very interesting with vegas nerve stimulation which is actually two basic basically transatlantic cables running down either side of your neck with like a hundred thousand fibers on each side and some of the effects that you can see with respect to autoimmune disorders by the way some psychedelics seem to help with that so what the hell's going on right it also inflammatory conditions of of different types depression anxiety etcetera etcetera etcetera etcetera so when you look at say the effects of psychedelics on inflamed micro p cells in the brain which they do a bunch of things where but they're kinda like the cleanup crew in the brain well what happens if they're not functioning properly interesting you know i have bunch of neuro disease in my family and the more you look at this the more it seems and inflammation i'll shut up in a second it's kinda like it's kinda like saying oh do you do business well you're like what kind of business there a million types of business same thing with inflammation there are so many different markers so many different inputs and outputs that's currently what i'm going full return on like i've i've just been going into all the science calling calling scientists emailing scientists reading books going through all the dense stuff the other piece that i've that that maybe something people are immediately interested in and again i think some of the pathways are the same is fasting yet again i mean i've paid a lot of attention to fasting wrote about it in tools of titans and kinda gave some of my protocols that i tend to follow for many many years i was doing a three day water fast every quarter and a week long fast every year and then i lapse and i stopped doing that but intermittent fasting is i think a more easily comp with experiment that people can run so looking at sixty eight fasting and there's there's a lot of good science out out there about this not relayed to this and to the person who popularized it is really martin bi who's just swedish body builder he is a he's a pretty abrasive personality but he's quite smart and i love that guy's blog yeah since and starting back in the day lean gaines he had one of the largest cohorts of people who were experimenting along with him on these protocols combining weight training with sixteen eight fasting sixteen eight fasting just means sixteen hours of fasting eight hours as a feeding window so could be like noon to eight or two to ten and so credit where credits do he did he he had for a long time maybe still one of the most interesting cohorts and datasets sets of real world results with this and for instance i mean i have i've done all sorts of extended fasting three days seven days ten days i don't recommend people just hop into that without proper medical supervision because you can get yourself into some trouble if you're doing that degree of pure fasting but with the sixteen a as i mentioned my my family's got a bunch of health stuff going on at the moment and there's a lot of metabolic dysfunction in my family just writ large across the board and a lot of it seems genetically driven right so i can try almost any dietary intervention i can try almost any exercise intervention really doesn't seem to move the needle much and i get i get comprehensive like the most comprehensive draws and your analysis and everything you can imagine probably every three months and after doing not very long four to eight weeks of intermittent fasting my results on an oral glucose tolerance test just to look at insulin sensitivity and so on remarkable like the turnaround was just absolutely incredible and if you do it right then let's just say you follow something like what martin does and you're you're combining weight training properly you can gain muscle mass and not lose muscle mass let me ask sean real quick have you do you know who he's talking about with this guy martin no i've never heard of this person oh my gosh this is like if you're listening to this and you're below the age of thirty you guys go watch learn about this person so this was like right when tim was in like coming up martin was a blogger this was sort of like around like the pickup artist days with the game and things like this and he was a guy who taught you how to get ripped and look good but it was sort of like he was everyone's father and he had this really fame and and it was called lean gaines lean games dot com by the way tim the the website sent it around but he had a cult following and it was mostly sent around this one attitude he had a very he had a strong and he had this famous blog post called fuck around titus yeah fuck titus yeah and it was this his whole philosophy on life was most people have fuck around titus which is you just go on the gym and you're gonna lift a little however you feel you're gonna do this maybe you'll eat a little food you'll get a little protein but like you know we're just gonna do everything average and his whole thing was nope that's fuck around titus and that's how you live a life of mediocrity and if you wanna get after in the gym you gotta get rid of fuck around titus this guy's copy on his stuff is great is instagram bio the high priest of intermittent fasting then on his website his book i think is the lean gaines method the art of getting ripped research practice and perfect and then he says i'm martin bi the thinking man's muscle hut not my words but hey it's true yeah you he's he's not gonna die of lack of confidence if anyone is reading this or listening to this and you want inspiration on like how be a great creator go back it's been a long enough time that most people have no idea who this guy is just steal a lot of his stuff i mean he was he was really good he was ahead of his time he was also a massively prolific and thoughtful contributor on some of the very very early message board stuff yeah alongside lyle mcdonald and other folks and because this is around the same time that i was getting online you know in college and then just post college so i was a lurk on a lot of these message boards and he was very very very productive and to always tried to cite research when possible to his credit and also got very strong right i mean he also demonstrated some real strength so the point being intermittent fasting for a lot of people i think is not just something that will be easier to adhere to the first week is gonna suck i'm just gonna tell you for most people you're gonna be grumpy you're gonna be piss you're don't send too any sensitive emails because you're you're definitely gonna regret it and then after a week or so your body adapts and you really start feeling very very sharp at least that's true for me and it affected me in a way that the three days once a quarter or one week once a year which i think has some benefit with respect to possible purging of pre cancer cells and things like that which is not pure speculation or something to it but the purpose is in in some census are different and i would say very much complimentary so the intermittent fasting rhonda patrick has had a number of scientists on her show found my fitness related to this that i think are are worth checking out it's easy to test along with that i've been geek out on exogenous ketones that you yet again so supplemental ketones to make the transition periods a little easier so so sometimes i'll just not eat for a day and then eat the next day or in the first week of that transition to boost cognitive performance especially looking at supplemental ketones there's one that's pretty easy to find called i think it's just ketone q i t o n e that you can add into your coffee in the morning and treat as creamer if you've never had this stuff before i would recommend us most people are fine i would say stay close to a bathroom you may have a rapid onset of possible disaster pants and you'll wanna be close to a bathroom so don't have it for the first time as you're driving to the airport for an international flight talk do that hey have you ever heard this idea there's like a a funny like phrase where it's like whatever the silicon valley nerds are doing on their weekends that's gonna be mainstream treatment five years hundred a percent you're who they were talking about like you know like the many of the things that you are writing about in four hour workweek week is now common and you were one of the guys and and you also said when your skill sets was spotting trends what do you think are the things now what what what are the early things now that in five years are gonna be quite common yeah i think i think one is definitely in simple terms electricity over pills so different types of whether it's brain stimulation something like accelerated tms people should look into accelerated tms and take a look at that the interview i did with nolan williams of stanford is a good starting point but the results that a lot of patients are able to get from treat or is resistant in depression ocd anxiety etcetera with five days of accelerated tms rival a lot of the results that you would see with some of the best outcomes with psychedelics which are already in terms of effect size and so on well beyond most conventional treatments that's a that's a great phrase too electricity over pills like that's yeah and i think i'm borrowing because i think i think one of the many things i've been reading one is from a scientist named kevin tracy and i think he said maybe it was microchip over medications so wanna give credit work credits do but i have been looking at this very very closely because psychedelics are not for everyone let's be very clear i mean that is nuclear power within the psychiatric and psychological realm and people there are people who should not take psychedelics there are risks very real risks and it's it's like seventeenth dimension neurosurgery there's a lot going on there's a lot to be learned and there are certain conditions that typically at this point are exclusionary criteria so if you have these conditions you cannot be part of a clinical trial taking psychedelics schizophrenia bipolar disorder etcetera etcetera etcetera right borderline personality disorder there's a pretty long list and it looks like these conditions might be treat through different types of brain stimulation and the safety profiles very very very good also separately and it's and this comes back to the anti inflammation and all all these things tied together it's not just anti inflammation to be clear but metabolic psychiatry another thing that is very inter related a chris palmer of harvard is someone to look up on this front basically ketogenic diet so ketogenic diet at that people may know the atkins diet people may have heard of the ketogenic diet a it was used very effectively i wanna see in the early nineteen hundreds with epi children for whom it was devised in in this particular way with heavy cream and similarly when people would be having like a sc or psychotic break sometimes hundreds of years ago they would just be put in a room and fasted and then lo and behold after a few days quote unquote the demons would go away okay well what's actually happening there right so metabolic psychiatry along with brain stimulation i think can address a lot of segments of the population that will not be candidates for something like psychedelics psychedelic therapy and also well i could go on and on and all but those are yeah a few examples so you have electric electric over pills metabolic like psychiatry three anything else i'm very curious to continue looking at the the vanguard of exogenous ketones because getting people to follow ke ketogenic diets is very difficult i have i think a lot of discipline in the dietary area and i've done i did i did cyclical ketogenic a cyclical ketogenic diet for a very very long time people that that that has gone by different names i think mar d pas sq saying name correctly i read that book in college she calls at the ana poll diet but it it requires you to be very very meticulous and i did that for years but today at this point in my life i find the ketogenic diet not to too technical boring is fuck it is so boring and you end up feeling like a human cheese cloth it's just it's not that fun you think it's gonna be fun you're like cheeseburgers every day that sounds awesome like yeah talk to me in day twenty and for that reason and particularly when we're dealing with let's say more older people elderly patients who are not gonna change their ways is it possible to use supplemental ketones to get some of the benefits and it seems like the answer is yes there are case studies in the literature that you can find but there are some open questions that i have and this is beyond my pay so i need to talk to someone but if you have really elevated glucose levels and you also have very elevated say levels of b b is that good for you long term like what are the implications of that long term if any right because it sounds a lot like keto in diabetic which is not a desirable condition so elevated i i do think there's a lot to uncover here unfortunately some of the ketones higher quality mono and d can be very very expensive but and by expensive i mean like you're spending forty bucks of serving right so tb i hope more people begin to look at this because the more demand there is the more people experimenting the cheaper these things will get with with economies of scale so that's that's what i'll throw out there i'm sure we could talk about tech stuff if you wanna talk about that actually i'll give you one more and that is i am so long analog like analog and social i'm super long analog and social i'm not sure we're gonna have like a full blown but larry and ji to refer to dune which is the the rising up and destruction of the thinking machines but i think there's gonna be a lot of pushback and blow back and kind of retro how i say retro but i think there will be a heavy shift for a lot of people in the world towards human made analog and or social interaction and you already see certain signs of that right a lot of younger people are just like fuck this dating up nonsense and social media stuff and they're they're going to running clubs for their for for trying to trying to find people to date have you seen that sean do you know about this yeah we've talked about running clubs one when i just was reading that recently it was book clubs book club apparently like just on declare right now and they're doing kinda like a twist on the book club which is basically like they'll do silent reading everybody gets together you don't talk you're just reading together in the presence of each other or to be like yeah wine and reed or beer and read right like just kind of like books as an excuse to go hang out in person together they're doing yes have you guys seen that young kids like the twenty and nineteen year old kids are usually the same cameras that you and i we all use when we were seventeen so you remember when you're like seventeen and you use like a canon digital camera and you make like a facebook photo album on whatever that's what kids are doing now like yeah like they don't wanna use their phone they wanna use like film thirty pictures type of thing well they'll yeah but no they'll use like you remember the canons it and it has a much simpler lcd screen and there's like when you out your friends and you post like friday october fourteenth two thousand and fourteen that's like the title on facebook of like your photo album that's what kids are doing now and that and i think that's just the very very very tip of the iceberg of this feeling of less connection or less yeah digital two yeah and isolation loneliness all this stuff i mean like the younger generations aren't stupid right and sometimes they're are these sort of commentaries from the older wiz folk they're like oh those kids don't know what they're doing themselves like oh i think they have a pretty fucking good idea probably more so than you do and i other examples would be huge game nights in say new york city and other cities like huge hundreds of people right started with two or three people announced that hundreds of people playing games simultaneously so i find that an interesting thread to pull on do i know how to bet on that no i'm not in a rush tim you're i feel this way times when i get done talking with you where i'm like you are cooler than i remember wait basically just means like like i we don't know each other that well but like i i read about you and i listen to your podcast and then i actually hang out with you every once in a while and i'm like that's why he is who he is you know don't like doesn't it feel like you just had a podcast guest from the future come in because he's he's saying words he's like you accelerated tms i don't even know what tms is let alone accelerated to your mess i'm writing them words like i know the i know enough to know that these are gonna be a big deal in five years i should probably start going pay attention because he's done that four times already over the last twenty years i should just i should just pay attention to this this alien from the future who just came in the what hang up you know what it's sort of like you guys ever met so you watched professional athletes on tv and then you meet him in real life and like i remember like meeting one in real life and and he just like jumped to do his warm up and his jump in the air was like have i was like oh my god like that's kinda i feel like when hang out with tim where you're like oh yeah that's why he's a pro thanks guys it's you know you gotta sacrifice some hair along the way that's that's i how you look great forget that thanks thanks thanks so much alright that's it that's a pod thank you tim i feel like i could rude world i know i could be what i want to put my all in it like a days off on a travel never looking back alright of my friends i have a new podcast for you guys to check out it's called content is profit and it's hosted by luis and ph ka after years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like red bull and orange theory fitness luis and fans are on a mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue in each episode you're gonna hear from top entrepreneurs and creators and you're gonna hear him share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit so you can check out content is profit wherever you get your podcast

i believe that video is the native tongue of the internet yeah you go to a country and what language do they speak they speak english they speak spanish they speak mandarin the internet speaks video i feel like i could rule the world to know i could be what i want to from at all in in like a days off on a road less travel let me tell it's a really interesting that's light so listen to this so let me explain how i got into this so go to creator camp dot c okay i'm here at creator camp defining cinema for the internet age oh i know these guys i've seen these guys on twitter and so i just slapped you their notion page which is actually way better i've i've seen this because i saw their videos on twitter and i was like these guys are great what are you guys doing and they sent me this notion doc and i was like you know i have with this i like you guys yes so let me give a little bit of background here of of things that i've noticed i've noticed that on both long form content on youtube being like ten twenty thirty fifty minutes on youtube but also even on short term short clips on instagram young folks gen z they are doing this different type of content and the type of content you and i are used to it's well produced sometimes it's fictional and it's like acted out but it's not like logan paul vine acted out where he's like walking and he slipped on a banana and falls but like acting like a script and i've noticed this happening a ton and i'll give you an example of one have you heard this guy called wesley wang yes i have you've heard of him what do you know about him i've watched his youtube if people haven't seen this they need to go to youtube what is the video what's the movie called nothing except everything so i stumbled on this one night i don't know how i it was like not presented to me i i i had no expectations for it sounds like somebody sent me this and i was like hey this is gonna be great i just saw it somewhere clicked it this thing is eight million views this guy is a high school who made like a short film it's like a twelve thirteen minute movie that was so good so well made so like it looks so legit for a high school with his high school crew and his high school classmates as actors i couldn't believe it and i tried to hunt the guy down i'm like you're the most talented guy i've seen in the last you know three months who are you how do i back how do i fund you he's already he's already like you know made it basically like somebody signed him or whatever he like he has some he got something i forgot what it was like he got into school or he got signed he got something no he was at harvard and he got a message from i think a twenty four or what one of these like big time directors or yeah production companies he got many of them and one guy sent him a message i i don't know anything about hollywood but as a prominent guy and he says how do i could convince you to drop out a harvard and so he he's signed with a with a production company but explain what saying somebody already found a be a yeah percent explained what what what this movie is well this was like a year ago that i saw this i can't tell you the plot of the movie it's a twelve minute movie like there's actors they're like it's a real movie but transcribing it like cave like there's people but they not who they say they are well but it's on youtube they are acting and most you well most youtube are a lot of youtube it's like a day in the life or it's a vlog right and so it does not fit that it's ci it has really good cinematography it it has good scripting whatever it's a great movie it has soundtrack it's awesome and it went viral got nine million views i think last year the kid's only nineteen he spent something like thirty thousand dollars to make it so not a lot of money and it was a huge success and then i just noticed i've noticed that there's this other thing going on so go to instagram so just it's only a a a thirty second video so watch this guy's from yeah check this guy damn hell that is a beautiful word that isn't my that man is where they've not her that hat is not wearing his oh imagine that hat was like where it yeah what they even look like that is a wild image okay watched it love it it's it it these are basically like people who have the ability to make cinematic videos in short form it has like gone up ten x not even really because of the tech the tech helps but really it's just people seeing other people doing it and then being like how do i do that too and i i had this happen about a year ago i saw this girl post this tiktok of herself and her parents she was like in her parents bedroom and she's like hey i'm maddie and instead of going to school i'm gonna spend the summer making films i wanna be a filmmaker and she but the editing was amazing the color grading was amazing even know what these terms are but i was like there's whatever she's doing the sound design why is this so high like highly produced for like a kid you know you're you're you're a high school or something and i got like really hooked and i made her an offer two hundred thousand dollars to come fly out and work for me to term me down she's like nineteen years old was the literally her parents bedroom and she's like no i'm gonna make my own movies i was like whoa okay respect alright so everyone talks about content and how you should do content marketing to get more customers the problem is that it's really hard how do you make something that blows up that goes viral that actually gets you customers versus what most people do they make something it's completely ignored well when i ran my last company of the hustle i had to study this and i eventually made content that reach tens sometimes even hundreds of millions of readers and so we were able to dial in between what works and what doesn't and we made it fairly repeatable and so with the help of hubspot i made a guide called the twenty ways to craft irresistible content that looks at the books that i read to learn all this but then also the tactics the twenty different tactics the twenty different strategies that we use at the hustle in order to help things go viral so we actually got customers from the content that we made and so if you wanna create content that people actually read you can check it out there's a qr code that you can scan or you click the link in the description not back to the episode i i'm am i'm pretty obsessed with this trend actually and i have no idea how to do it by the way i'm such a old man like i remember when my week when computers came out remember when we used to have like a computer room in our ass yeah and my grandfather came over and he's probably like eight eighty something years old and he insisted on learning to type and i was like let me just do it for you because he was going so slow but he practiced every day to learn that because he wanted to learn how to use a computer and now looking back i really respect at the time was pretty annoyed you know only one purse could be on the computer at a time back then so i was like he was taking up all my computer time but now i respect the hell out of that what an unbelievable thing and i don't know if you remember on this podcast if we talked about this like i don't know a year ago where i was like hey i've been watching like how people are using short form video and it's kind of amazing i was like i feel like we're two guys standing next to our horse carriages and we're smoking to cigarette and we're we've been the we're the man and when it comes to horse carriages around this town and like a tesla zoomed by yeah and i looked at you and you looked at me and we're like what the hell was that that's what tiktok is like that's what this short form video trend is where people can make this type of content but it's different just so like tiktok used to be i don't know okay so of all we have to categorize or describe what we're what what what we're saying this trend that we're saying it's like scripted it's acted out it's well polished for a years call it's cinematic that's the genre is that what they call it yeah for years that was not cool for years it was like you know i'm just gonna be a selfie i'm gonna be wrong i'm gonna be and and there was still like acting in that sometimes in funny skit but it wasn't like this i think the closest thing for me was casey neistat growing up watching casey neistat or it was it was raw but it was very well planned and it was meticulous but i'm seeing this trend that i absolutely love and this is this guy who we just showed who's this guy actually i don't even know what saying matt mali he has only two hundred thousand followers but if you look at some of his videos the one i sent you it'll have two hundred thousand likes another one being the wesley wang this this guy's name named bat molly and then bat molly i don't even know his name a t and like i don't it dresses cool so sometimes i'm like is he guess he has advertisers who are clothing companies i'm not sure but whatever he's doing and i love and yeah i just there's just there's just a vibe about it that i like and what i've how do you describe it that i don't know what's he selling no you're tear your sentiment it it's like the first time i saw somebody like you know k walk and i was like i don't know what your feet just did but i sure did appreciate what that was that was cool yeah it's it's hard to explain tear you guys are gonna kinda have to follow and if you're listening on audio go to our youtube page will link to this guy but the thing is he's not even special this is just one of like a million people now that do this they could just do this as like it's like when you meet people who could do rubik's cubes or something i like oh wow that's like i know it seems like that looks like a miracle to me is this a very common thing yeah yeah this is like a a growing genre a lot of people could do this i love it and so back to camp studios are the companies click camp studios but the product they're selling i think is called creator camp but so basically what these guys are doing is the the guy who created it is a youtuber and he makes these style of videos and so they set up an office in austin and i don't know where the money comes from maybe it's their own money the guy has like eight hundred thousand followers on youtube so maybe he's he's making money but they basically are gonna find people who are making these cinematic style videos and they're gonna help fund them and what they're trying to do is make videos or movies basically movies is the better way to describe it for a hundred thousand dollars that can make millions of dollars and so there's we've always heard these stories of like one off examples of this like remember up movie paranormal activity oh yeah was that the one no it was you're some the one that was like the handheld cam like that was blair witch project so there's a so there was blair witch where it was do you hear these stories of like a twenty or thirty or fifty thousand dollar budget and it makes a hundred million dollars and then a paranormal of activity was another one and there's a bunch of examples but these guys are actually creating a business that makes those hits where it's a hundred thousand a two hundred thousand dollar video or movie and then they try to actually get it in theaters and i think it's pretty freaking cool i think this is actually a really cool business this is something that you had described a while ago it's a little bit different you actually wanted to create like a school but yeah this is like a pretty cool thing and when you go to their website and you see like the people who are students are part of the accelerator or whatever they wanna call it it's this totally new genre this new style twenty one year old that i love well there's the fashion of it which is like you're right you know we used to think the best content is the more raw more authentic more personable and that's that was what was working for a period of time but you know the pendulum always swings when you go when everything becomes super raw u g it creates a craving a demand for something that's a little more produced a little more cool a little bit dramatic little the dialogue is snap because it's like planned right so there is the fashion side of it which is like oh this interesting i kinda like this style of content now style right fashion fad trend but then there's what i'm seeing just underneath at the infrastructure which is i believe that video is the native tongue of the internet yeah so like you go to a country and that's what what language do they speak they speak english they speak spanish they speak mandarin the internet speaks video if you open you know the facebook feed ten years ago the instagram feed ten years ago it looked dramatically different than it does say today it's essentially ninety percent video even if there's an image it's like an image that has like text and music on top that's essentially a video so the internet speaks video which means that for guys like you or i we're screwed if you suck it making video you don't speak your esl baby yeah get you get you go to the you go to the after school you know like program you gotta work on your grandpa paul you know you and i when we were eighteen we were these guys and your grandpa was your grandpa we are the grandpa now yeah which is crazy because we're like in our mid thirties right when i been like you know he was eighty at the time but i feel this way i feel like i don't speak the a tongue of the the the native tongue of the internet i don't speak the language of the internet because i i can't make great short videos short video is the dialect cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty impossible but that's exactly what sandler training did with hubspot they use breeze hubspot ai tools to tailor every customer interaction without losing their personal touch and the results were incredible click through rates jumped twenty five percent qualified leads quadruple and people spent three times longer on their landing pages go to hubspot dot com to see how breeze can help your business grow i have decided that i'm gonna develop this skill to speak this language in the same way that you know decided to learn the piano or somebody might say i really wanna learn spanish this year and they start doing fifteen minutes of what day on duo language i don't say i'm gonna be become the best but i need to be a professional at this but i do need to be able to speak the language so that's the first thing hold on what's that mean like i'm making videos i'm like literally like right what am i gonna do after this i'm opening up cap cut and i'm editing a video of one of my like and it doesn't need to be about what anything in particular it's not like i have some agenda i'm not trying to sell anything i'm not trying to tell i'm not trying to make a movie i just wanna be able to say okay the same things i would wanna share before through a text update or an image update i should try to be able to share that same nugget in a interesting way of video like interestingly through video right and like okay the easy way is me just setting up this camera and talking to it but that's kind of the boomer that's typing with two fingers that's right it's like doesn't that's not quite how you're supposed to be doing it i'm gonna try to do it the way that you know these cool people are all doing that's the first thing and if somebody wants to join my video team and help you do this great tell me the second thing is you said that thing about the college i've gotten more and more serious about this idea i actually think it's gonna be incredibly needed to train people to have the skill set to do modern marketing modern media and marketing so like modern media and marketing is some combination of you know video content whether it's tiktok youtube podcasting you know creating you know short form ads and commercials it's communicating updates and you know even corporate communications that are done through a video like all of that is gonna be the modern media and marketing stack is something that i don't think the world is training young people for i think the old model like go to film school was like one really like narrow thing which like maybe you wanna go be in hollywood but the whole world is now hollywood like every company has to make video every creator has to make video every you know everybody who wants to have an audience needs to be able to create this type of content and to do that you need a bunch you don't need to be the person on screen necessarily you people who are gonna hold holding the camera who are gonna at editing who gonna animation who are gonna all sound design all sorts of other stuff and so i've actually started exploring this i don't know if i'm gonna be able to pull the off but my goal would be to find a physical campus that i can buy find an existing college that i can buy re brand and basically hire a a sort of a dean or a ceo who's gonna run this as an actual like for profit or college that's gonna teach people the modern stack of of media and marketing and i really wanna do this so if people are excited or inspired by this email me at sean at sean p dot com because i don't know how to do this i i don't have all the details i know the campus is i don't know who's gonna run it i know exactly how to do this but i do know a couple things i have the connections to do this with like some pretty big creators that i think bring a lot of attention and legitimacy to this and i think this needs to exist and there's no chance that the traditional incumbent universities are ever gonna serve this need properly mister beast jimmy what did he say didn't didn't what's r with you on this no i haven't talked to him about it but like you you know i will go to him with this once we have it packaged up better right like once we identify the site and we identify the the ceo to run it you know that's when i would go loop in a few people that would bring pretty serious capital a pretty serious like influence to this that's cool but don't you think that needs to exist like how are people gonna with like the world the supply versus demand right like the demand for video for great video content entertaining interesting educational video content the demand for that is like as big as the as big as a number can get and then the supply of people who know how to create it is so much smaller than that demand it's for it's like so imbalance today yeah i'm whenever i watch these videos i they feel like the the i'm like you're at baby genius who's like how did this how wanna hurt did this person learn how to do this it's like it it really does feel like a different language like i couldn't even begin to to to do it and i follow fifteen years fifteen years ago if somebody was young would you have told them you would probably would've have told them hey you should probably learned a code right like it the internet's gonna be a big deal computers are bigger bigger deal if you're gonna learn a language don't learn spanish learn you know javascript learn c plus learn python right those are the languages that you needed to learn i kinda feel like today that that thing for non highly technical people you know if you're super technical go learn engineering go go learn computer science like that's great but for a lot of people that are not super super technical i think this is it i think this is the thing you need to learn is how to create media and marketing that actually works in the modern world well guys when it comes to banking the only time i feel truly happy is when i'm using mercury and that's today's sponsor for the show that is the banking product i use for not long not two but actually eight of my business and i have eight mercury counts accounts i just went counted i use it for every one of my companies it's an absolute no brainer over two hundred thousand other fast growing ambitious companies use mercury it's one place you can go where not only you can of course have your money there but you can send invoices you can pay bills you can create reimbursement for your team pretty much all of your financial needs can be housed under mercury and the product is beautiful to use and the reason why because it's a product that was not made by finance people it was made by a founder i mod he's been on this podcast before and he used tons of products as a starter founder and this is the one that he wished he had and i actually reached out to them to become a sponsor for the show because i'm such a big fan of it so if you need a banking product for your startup use mercury you will not regret it it's amazing for more information check out mercury dot com mercury is a financial technology company not a bank check show notes for details and i've noticed so for example i filed this guy in youtube name the iron snail and he just does like he tells you the history of like jeans so incredibly like niche topic or he'll tell you the history of like it'll be a video on like why clothing is worse today than it was before the niche topics where like only nerds like me would be into it why is his name the iron nail i don't know we don't know he's just don't know okay yeah that's but great names are like that they're just weird you know it's kinda like roaring and kit kit video or whatever they just are so he's got three hundred and eighty one thousand subscribers and like just to give you an example of some of the videos why you're paying more for worse clothes and it has a picture of us clothes versus trying to close what makes japanese salvage denim i don't know what that is so so special yeah nerdy stuff stuff like that and and what i've noticed i've started following him when he had a hundred thousand followers and what i noticed is that his rate of growth is significantly higher oh i forgot to add this guy does cinematic style videos on really nerdy topics you don't even know what salvage denim is by the here's the ratio that matters he's got three hundred eighty one thousand subscribers his average video is getting like two hundred to two hundred a million two hundred thousand to a million views yeah so this is what you wanna look for the view to subscriber ratio and like he's he's basically like over performing which means his video really good and it's just a matter of time before his sub count explode and that's my point so his videos this guy reviews jeans this is a very nerdy niche topic but he approaches it with this the cinema cinema tab cinema top what do we what we're cinematic i don't give a shit these ci bonds are here fantastic but he pro he approaches it in this way where there's like a normal youtuber which is like us in front of a camera just talking and then there's one where it ads all these features or all this music all these cool cuts that are very purposeful very meticulous very thoughtful and i've noticed two things one if you read the comments the top comment on most of his videos are basically i am not interested in jeans but i can't stop watching your videos so that's like a common feeling that people have right the i don't care about blake but i just love how you did it therefore i'm all about it and the second thing that i've noticed is that whenever i see these types of videos the ratio of current subscribers they have as well the views is significantly in their favor and so my opinion is basically if you my opinion is basically this is a trend where these people are going to significantly outperform and give them two years and the people who are gonna be huge in two years are doing this style of video this isn't like you know i'm not predicting we're going to mars next year like this isn't like that groundbreaking of a of a like a prediction trend but but if you are a company and you make products whether it's just you just sell anything on e com or you sell what i sell any it doesn't matter what you're selling i'm just saying that if you do wanna get in the video this style of video is seems to be what's hitting yeah yeah hundred percent and there's other ways to take advantage of it like this creator camp there's this guy another guy michael mc have you seen this guy no what what's his how do spell is that same mc v m a c k e l v i e alright so this guy's story is pretty crazy so i saw this guy's video he did a video about like the nfl draft or something like that some like again you're you're denim for me is like basketball football and i watched this video and the nfl draft and i'm like i don't know what i just watch but again top comment is like did i just stumble on to you know like youtube premium like what is this why is this so good why is this so well made i i almost hesitate hesitate to give this guy out because i'm like this guy such a gem but the secrets out guy's gonna be phenomenal same thing two hundred sixty thousand i found this guy when he had probably thirty thousand youtube subscribers now you know in a year whatever he's up to two sixty eight but again every video gets between you know two hundred thousand to a million views it's great ratio and he makes absurd high quality sports content and i'm like oh i gotta find this guy he's like a filmmaker or something i don't know who this guy is but clearly you know classically trained filmmaker type of guy and i go look at his bio and it's like a link to schedule a call with like a cpa like a financial advisor like what this guy's just literally like i think he's i think he's a financial advisor because you can't find him on his like there's no link to his website here is there's no like course he's selling no nothing like that i find him on linkedin and he works for a very boring finances company and so we talked to him more like michael future videos are incredible what's up and he's like oh yeah if you go look if you sort by oldest look at his videos it's him talking about like the value of a college degree in today's market like not sports content at actually i think he's deleted a bunch of them because they're gone out but it was like tax planning with a cpa or like which type of trust should you incorporate and which state is the best one to incorporate your trust in it was like content like that so this guy's story is pretty crazy he was creating content like that and he was the only guy on youtube it wasn't it wasn't cinematic but it was like there just wasn't a lot of supply of that content on youtube but youtube is a search engine so people would search for like new delaware trust tax laws and he had the only video about it and so again four hundred views but he would book like two hundred calls off of four hundred views because it was like if you needed that he was the authority because he he had the only video about it and so he builds this huge book of business and he ends up getting acquired by this like bigger finance company and they're like dude you've created this incredible business and he's like yeah i just make youtube comment and content and they're like oh we're so regulated i don't know if we're comfortable with that we'll ask you know like our compliance department if you could do that just hold on for a while so he guy has to sit on the shelf for like a year doing nothing and then they're like no we don't want you do in that content stuff too risky just you know sit here and he's like oh this was boring okay so i'm gonna go make content about my second favorite you know like sports instead of nerdy tax law and that's how we started creating this content and he now creates the most premium sports content on youtube and it's not a full time job still no he still works at the whatever and he's like it tax finance guys that's insane this guy should quit immediately his stuff's great i'm just like i i can't listen to it but i because i'm just watching it and i'm oh this is clearly a home i think he did have a pretty sweet deal with the acquisition i understand but i think yeah i would guess that it's just a matter of time until these you know full time on this by the way i one more for you if if people wanna nerd out on this rabbit hole ryan t who's a pop very popular youtuber twenty million subscribers you know okay he makes videos just like a normal youtuber like i ate a penny every day until i had to get my stomach pumped whenever whatever like you know i did a crazy thing he did like a i walked across the country or like just like it's like stunt stunt yeah i tested every one star hotel in america you know stuff like that by the way all those videos are pretty great he's in he's an incredible creator oh he does this great thing where he has the stunt but as soon as the video starts it's no longer about the spectacle and he's super like quirky likable doesn't take himself too seriously i love it he does he nails that vibe whereas everybody else is like bigger batter bigger explosions you know he he actually like kind of is like super likable and relatable i think he's gonna be one of biggest creators something i think he is me obviously obviously he's on his way but like you know that twenty million i think i would buy stock at twenty million subscribers you know what mean like i think he's got significant headroom hey bull old predictions saying a guy with twenty one million subscribers on youtube is gonna be a big deal he's gonna be big so check this out he's got this video called we need to talk it's a video that's promoting his candy brand you know he's got like a candy brand what i forgot call enjoy right right yeah joy right and i watched this and i go i have no interest in candy in general let alone his candy i watched every second of this video and about two minutes in i just sort of had to pause and i was like oh every other candy company is screwed like if this guy can create this what is a normal company supposed to do when you're competing with this this is incredible like the quality of the content i was like i'm i've signed me up to watch this commercial every week like it it was unbelievably done by the you know just a kid like he's young it doesn't have like a it's a seven minute we didn't it's a seven minute video and the top comment it's pretty funny it fits exactly what we're saying that was insanely cinematic so it's a exactly and then the next one i just got tricked into watching a commercial and i'm not even mad next one that was the best commercial i've ever watched next one i just watched to semi a commercial and it was better than half of the movies i've ever seen storytelling was imma at it this is what i'm saying this was my feeling i was like how if i'm a candy company and i see this this i have like an existential crisis because i'm like i cannot believe the gap between what a kid who's not even like farming this out in a twenty million dollar contract to some big ad agency like this is just like him was his team making something it was unbelievable is this is unbelievably i it broke my brain so go watch that thing so this company so he founded joy red yeah and they've raised thirty three million dollars so this is kind of a go big play here yeah wow this is crazy this is cool i this got almost six and a half million views yeah i think he used sticks to produce it what's well like yeah sticks is like a another youtube channel that's like they make cool stuff you check them out too but yeah unbelievable i i i didn't make this mean didn't mean to makes sense sound like he's holding a camera doing like a vlog like it's not just tammy but obviously a lot of people are involved in this what i just meant is like you're not talking about like a multi billion dollar conglomerate hiring you know the best ad agency in professional hollywood actors and you know of the effects studio whatever like this is like the creator economy bottoms up punching and like wow their punch is actually kind of amazing this entire episode is basically it's what did you say what did you say the the squares and circles or the triangle said was different is better than better different is better than better that's what this entire episode is that's basically every story was about that we should make the thumbnail like that guy's nothing is at what is it nothing is everything or what what is that i guy's video i don't know nothing except everything or i already i know if they already forgot the dumb the thumbnail is just like whatever some like you know cute girl turning back like us as if you're like in love with her it's like blurry and like you know like cinematic thumbnail and like vague title we should do that for this evans nothing happens except every we should try to be cinematic the boys try to be cinematic oh man we try to be cinematic my delete later dude you need to be like one of us needs to be like a hot chick like reaching out with our hand back to grab our boyfriend's hand because that's what this is yeah actually after this can you that we should legitimately do this can you take a picture if you that pose will blur it like that and we'll use that as a thumbnail that's so funny alright let's try alright 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 in like a day's off on a road travel never look bag alright of my friends i have a new podcast for you guys to check out it's called content is profit and it's hosted by luis and ph ka after years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like red bull and orange theory fitness luis and fans are on a mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue in each episode you're gonna hear from top entrepreneurs and creators and you're gonna hear share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit so you can check out content is profit wherever you get your

alright this is super cool this type of stuff only happens i think on m but here's the deal i have a friend named wade foster he started a company called zapier zapier is a business that was bootstrap to hundreds of millions in revenue and it's worth five or ten billion dollars and i had the ceo and founder on wade i had him on m and i said look share your screen and show me how you're using ai to save ten twenty thirty hours a week it's pretty amazing he did it and he broke down like three or four different ways that he has automated parts of his life and his business and it's really really cool because this guy has an incredible perspective because he has such a large company but because he helped create this whole automation industry so if you wanna save a bunch of time this stuff is not complicated i don't know ai that well and i'm going to implement a ton of the stuff that i've just learned and by the way if you're listening this with audio only you might wanna go to spotify video or youtube to watch this it has a lot of visuals you can still get a ton of value on audio but it's just better i think on youtube so give it a watch give it a listen let me know if you dug it talk soon i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a travel back i'm thinking about how to introduce you but basically i met you in two thousand and sixteen or seventeen something like that when you spoke at one my events and i asked you to speak at one of my events because you founded and ran a company called zap you know you guys took off before ai was way before it was ever but you basically if i remember correctly you only raised at the time a million dollars but you got it to nine figures in revenue and then eventually raise a series a at something like a five billion dollar valuation is that about those numbers about right close so the seed run was one point two and then the five billion number that wasn't that was all secondary so none of that stuff went on to the balance sheet of the company how much did you guys raise was that public it wasn't we didn't raise anything we you took money early investors early employees like got some liquidity from it but nothing came to the company how big are you guys how is the public number i don't know the a public number nine figures is public though nine you're at nine figures in revenue and dude it just it's it's one of my favorite companies i never thought a million years out to be fired up about such like a do product like connecting apis but basically my entire company and everyone i know our entire companies run off his zapier well it's it's wild like the so the first decade of existence it that do company thing like hundred percent true like no one cares about workflow automation is like like we think it's cool and there's like definitely people who do think it's cool but like the silicon valley wisdom is you know raise a bunch of money throw bodies at the problem like blitz scale go like nuts and so like people like say they they cared about automation but their actions sort of like betrayed them in a lot of cases certainly in tech and so we're kind of like a out here doing our thing not a lot of people sort of in our space now you get into the ai world and it's sort of totally inverted where everyone cares about automation everyone cares about ai and so the market potential for us has just balloon enormously but of course there's a lot more players in the space now yeah at the time when i like when you guys were just getting going it was basically you and maybe one other company doing this mh now there's so many more yeah and you know everybody has their angle their knees shell vertical this vertical that you know more dev centric less dev centric like yeah so there's you know there's just everybody's kinda trying to get a piece of this what is you know gonna be you know a trillion dollar opportunity in ten years how big do you think your company will be in terms of revenue ten years well shoot i think we should be well past a billion an arr if we do our jobs right thing and you think you will still not have raised the money i don't think we will so you're gonna you're gonna be one of the largest one of the larger ever companies that only i mean i don't know if you still say bootstrap but the only is you trying to you're trying a million dollars into something worth tens of billions of dollars i mean that's gonna be one of the more efficient stories ever yeah you know this is how they used to do it though mh you know if you look at you know microsoft's and how their fundraising trajectory went if you look at amazon and their fundraising trajectory now those companies obviously went public much earlier in their life cycles but yeah they didn't raise huge jobs of money yeah how much did google raise i think they raised like low tens a millions yeah i think it was something like that google and google was a lot like google had a big route i think it was their a or their b that was huge and people were like whoa this is this is nuts and nowadays like yeah what the the the ai companies the the foundation model companies they'll do like a billion dollar series a yeah like the world was different so it's different i wanna ask you about all of that but someone like i i've noticed that i have better conversations with people while we are doing stuff and that doing stuff is this thing where we basically have asked people like you so people who run big companies how many how many employees do you have a seven hundred and change okay so you have seven hundred employees and you're trying to get everyone to use ai at your company and you guys are an ai company at this point you we're kind of an ai company a little bit for that was we really popular the thing that i wanna do that i've loved doing lately is i want you to share your screen and show me how you're using ai and really practical use cases and you said that sounds good and so while you're showing the screen i might ask you questions about like the background of a company and things like that so i asked to make a list you you have a list one of them suck out right do you wanna tell me where that was well so the first one this is like a pretty basic like thing that i use day to day which is like a instant dossier creator so you know you can use it for all sorts of things like it's handy it's particularly handy when you're sort of like out and about like you're going to a dinner or your an event and you gotta list of names or you're sitting down and there's name tags everywhere and you're like okay who are these people and so that use case you know i usually just like feed claude some details on the the person and then claude will just return like a quick little dossier that includes you know public details about the person but also like what's going on like are they a customer or is there any details in our hubs about account like is there anything that zoom info can tell me just to kinda just like get some quick hit to be like hey is there something i can sort of talk to this person about it's sort like you if ever watched v so you're breathing like yeah like has gary and her ear like you know what you're just saying like these things and so you kinda get like your own little version of this and so do you do a lot could you do a lot of these dinners with customers and potential investors things like that a reasonable amount of him but the cool thing about this one is you can use it in all sorts of ways so you know if you're just sitting in your home office and you've got a string of meetings coming up you can do it for all the people that you're about to meet that day if you've got leads coming in on your website and you wanna go rich those and send those over to your sales reps you can do the same thing so like this process works in all is applicable in all sorts of different scenarios and mostly what you're doing is you're just sort of like amending how you utilize it based in the the situation you're at cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty impossible but that's exactly what sandler training did with hubspot they use breeze hubspot ai tools to tailor every customer interaction without losing their personal touch and the results were incredible click through rates jumped twenty five percent qualified leads quadruple and people spent three times longer on their landing pages go to hubspot dot com to see how breeze could help your business grow so i can maybe do a a screen share on this yeah you know claude i do a the the thing i love about claude is claude has tools connected and so the zapier mc server is available here and you can see you know if you click into here like you can connect all these different things but you know with zapier here you have access to eight eight thousand different tools so i can just like turn on all sorts of different tools to to use within claude so for example you can see here we've got eight tools turned on but basically these tools are a series of hubspot capabilities like finding contact information finding company information finding deal information and zoom info endpoints so like finding again contact information and finding company information and the other thing you can do inside of claude is you can make projects so i don't know if you've used project before so i use it with chat like i have a health project i have like a therapist project i have like a business project there you go so you can assign these tools like to or you can give these projects like certain system props to like help them do a certain task and so within one of the projects i have it basically sort of coaches it on how to do like contact information for me where i'm hey make these these dossier for myself so we can actually use the i actually made a quick one for us which is this my first million demo and i have like a i got a buddy who's gonna be cool if i use them their their name on this stuff so tell me more about lars from a social puppy and so what was in that file that you uploaded so i didn't upload any files basically what this chat has access to is it's got access to the zapier hubspot account and then it's got access to our zoom info account and then it knows my like system instructions which basically say hey a step one is look up the contact and company inside of hubspot step two is look up information inside a zoom info step three is go find anything on the web to to go do this now you might have seen there were some errors popping up here this is one of the the tricky things about mc p and claude right now is that it's still is little buggy like mc is technically like a it's been out for like maybe i don't know two or their tool stuff has been out from me two or three months and so it mostly works what does mpc stand for and what is mpc yeah mc is called model model contacts protocol so effectively what this is is a way for agents to talk to data so you know in the old world we would have apis where you know you would say hey i wanna talk to the gmail api or wanna talk to the hubspot api or the slack api and these were ways for like saas companies to talk back and forth to each other and so that protocol works really well for these saas tools with agents they don't exactly know how to utilize like all those api endpoints and so mc is basically this layer that sits in the middle that helps them go find different tools that they can go use and then take advantage of them so unfortunately right here you can see this one is oh it it worked but the cool thing you can see is it's iterating over a bunch of different endpoints so it's saying hey this didn't work let me try more approach okay that didn't work so this is claude trying to figure out how to go do this task they're like hey i you know i'm not exactly sure i've got access to a bunch of different tools some of these things might work some of these things may not work and then at the end it'll spit out information on it so it pulls up you know linkedin url you can see that lars is a product manager at zapier he's got you know he's hanging it out in vancouver you can see all the different things that sort of we know about them and then social puppy happens to be his side mh it's this way for people who own dogs to to do meetups together of course he's not paying for hubspot so you know they've took a look in hubspot and was like yeah there's no deal associated with this for for lars you see what it says it said colleagues describe him what wait what was that colleagues describe him at what is this it yeah incredible drive and enthusiasm for the goals incredible for the goals yep okay eddie he's known for being fun and energetic do that's cool okay and i would say that that's act knowing mars i would say that's accurate yeah so when you're going to let's say you have a worked in dinner let's say you're you're flying like to a different city and you wanna meet with like ten customers and just like host like a cool hang with them to get the know they're big customers would you just upload all six of the names and then just sell it like make this in note card format or i mean how would you do it well okay so i wanna show off some something separate so if i was doing that i would actually do this is an internal tool that we built now this that i was just showing off this is kind of for like basic on demand stuff yeah so you can see like it it did a good job but you know if i'm trying to show up to like a dinner and i know who's gonna be there in advance i wanna come in well equipped like i don't wanna do this sort of like on the fly sort of thing i wanna come in having done my research so we built an internal tool this is a company brief generator now it uses zapier interfaces so this is like a pretty easy thing to to build and then what it does is you put in a domain name so you could put in netflix or shopify or slack or whoever you know you're meeting somebody from this company and then what this does is it goes and retrieves information from three sources so one it pulls from a web search so it just goes and finds like what what do we know about this company based on what's on the internet two it does a glean search so we use this tool called glean internally which is like an internal like google you can think of it go search all your sort of like internal stuff glean if busy i've been trying to use it it it's you just log in to everything and then it makes yeah okay and so it'll we'll search like slack and google drive and you all the tools you give it access to so we'll do a clean search and then the third thing it will do is it will hit our actual customer database well a replica of it in data bricks and help understand like what usage is going on inside the company then on the other side it spits out a report and so i actually did hampton before this call oh my god let me see alright you wanna see it and gonna be using this and and at your company what roles are using this everybody uses this internally so if your customer facing it all you do this so it doesn't have like a crazy amount of information on on hampton but you can see here the company summary so this is like public pulling a bunch of like public data on it now i did some like research on it and it's it's sort of correct like i'm betting your spotting things here that you're like oh that's not quite right i think the goal of having this if if you're if your intention to connect with me at a dinner or something like that like you have ammo there exactly and that's what i'm getting out of this i'm not you know like i like i looked up before like it doesn't look like jordan is the ceo anymore right so that's a thing where i be like okay you know i probably don't wanna talk about that but there's you know this oh it's a membership community it's in new york like you know here's some things that i can you know r with you on you know it pulls up a bunch of information then you can see here's our glean summary where it's got you know more issues about like what's going on with the account and things like that and so you know maybe there was a payment issue with you all at some point in time so so i guess some yeah and so i can be prepared where i'm like if you come up to me and you're like wade like you really screwed me over in twenty twenty four like i i can be like yeah hey i'm really sorry about that here's what we did to fix this we did this this this and this and all of a sudden you're like okay it's really on top of it like i feel better about you know as zapier as a as a vendor versus like you if if i didn't have this and you were just like wade i'm still pissed about what happened in december and twenty four and i'm like what happened like i don't i don't know what happened and so now you're like man he doesn't even know what's going on in his own company and so you have a tool like that and then lastly it didn't actually pull much i don't know how much usage is going on here but for companies that are really using zapier the visualizations area pulls up a whole bunch of metadata about how their account has being used so i can see like oh you know they use slack and hubspot and google and they're using ai or not using ai in the account here are the users that are using it all that sort of stuff well who built this i think it was like one of our data analysts built this tool on like replica or something no this is mostly just a zap so hits you know a zapier your interface so you put in a domain name then there's a zap that goes out and it hits those three area so it hits does a web search probably a step one it does a glean search a step two and then it does an internal search on our data instance a step three and then the output is an html file what would i google to find the landing page that allows me to make this so we have a bunch of templates that you can check out so zap dot com templates slash use cases this has like a bunch of places where you can go figure out how to do versions of this for yourself so like anything under lead management is gonna give you like great examples for ways to like build a version of this for yourself and then the second place you can check out is we have this this project that's it's product called agents which is in beta but it has its own templates which these are pretty slick as well too so you can you know company research is the number one thing here so you can go build a version of this to to help you with company research have you seen on the office they they show like i guess michael stole dwight notes on his customers but he forgot out how to like he didn't know how to like read him and he was like oh i see you are eric from pa right and you have a gay son right he's like well they're like weird it's like green is color coded green is color coded to mean this to mean this which means stop you're just yeah man hold up just a a a really quick break i know you're watching this and you're thinking this is a ton of information our producer ari she just listened to the entire episode and she wrote out all the important stuff if you wanna go and implement a lot of these workflows whatever you wanna call them she wrote them all out and so you can use the qr code on the screen or there's a link below in the description you can click that and you should still watch and listen to the rest of the episode but so the thing that she made it's a pdf and it has everything written out so you just click and link off to all the important great stuff alright back to the episode alright what's the second one because you have a bunch here yeah so the we could go to the agents manning inbox one or there's another even more basic one like how basic do you wanna get you drive baby i i like i'm basic i'm pretty i i i'm a i'm a i'm a huge n when it comes to the alright so here's one that i do all the time alright so what's this use case i you know if you're if you're run a company you probably get like a google doc like of a business review or a strategy memo or something like that shared with you all the time and you're trying to figure out like what's going on in this thing and you know the use case that i like to do is i like to just talk to like just go back and forth with chat to try and better understand this so i didn't wanna share our own internal stuff so i actually pulled the some of you might have seen this like mister beast put out this like leaked had this leaked memo of like how they do their production stuff so i figured we could just trust for the viewer about a year ago mister beast the famous youtuber he has a production company he has like a fifty or a hundred page document that sort of breaks down how he wants his team to behave in different situations so like yeah example one famous thing is and he was like i want you to hire consultants consultants are amazing they'll like save you time whatever i want you to post this many video so he like had the outline for the company processes and culture so here's what i like to do i like to give it to chat basically tell it what it is for i like to say it's a rough draft and then i want it to su distinctly describe back to me what is in the doc so i mostly just don't want it to i don't want it to like put its opinion on it so you know you'll do that and then you know it kinda describes back to you like okay here's what it is you know the cord philosophy what makes a youtube video go viral you know it kinda just goes through the doc a little bit but it's kinda it's kinda generic so i'm like like i don't know that i love this so then i might just say like hey b a hundred x you know more specific and i stole that from this woman who's the runs product at whoop hillary i saw a youtube video where she did this and i found that to be like okay now you start to get like alright a lot of really good nitty gritty details inside of this where you can see what's going on and all the while you know for zapier your internal stuff i i'm able to now try and get a better sense of like what is this team trying to tell me so when would you use this so and you're using the mister beast one as an example but give me a realistic gap like so you're within your company hey we're trying to decide you know maybe i'll give you an example like we're trying to decide should we launch a voice agent or not right okay hypothetical thing and some product team will say hey i wanna go make a case for it and they'll write up a strategy memo to say here's why we should or shouldn't do this stuff now if there like really good at making their case they'll have you know qualitative data to support their evidence they'll have quantitative data to support their evidence they'll have multiple options for like how to go tackle this you know we could go route a we could go route b we could do you know a hack version here's what like the all in version looks like and then they'll have their like strong recommendation for how to go do this stuff yeah that's like what i great like strategy memo looks like to me but not everyone like sort of comes in and does that and they don't always tee up the information in the way that like i invest at interpreting it and so i will usually start by reading the raw document myself so that way i like okay i i understand what the team is trying to say in their own words then i'll upload it like this to chat and start going okay what does chat think about this stuff to start to augment it and get like a a thought partner on what am i gonna sort of try what what types of question should i ask the team you know what types of things am i trying to get at at the end of the day got it okay so that's how i end up using this but the the interesting question is like you kinda ask it a couple questions like this and so chat starts to get a warm up and then you ask it like the real questions the one hundred times more specific one that's a really good hack another good hack that i use is i able tell chat gp the problem i'm trying to solve and what i think the prompt should be and then i just say mh now write the prompt for me totally yeah meta prompting right you're like i need a prompt to do x yeah yeah and so this is like the the the way that i see like some of the the people that i'm like holy cow you're like really using chat pizza d or like using these tools exceptionally well is they don't just like ask their question right away they usually ask like these warm up questions where they're trying to like gather a bunch of contacts get a bunch of specific information going and then once they sort of have enough of like things in memory for chat then they start asking like the real things they wanna know which is like where are my blind spots but the blind spot question is so let's say that you're using the voice ai so you're saying where are wade blind spots and deciding if this is a good idea is that what you're saying well basically you know because i'm presenting it as my own idea it and then when i ask where is the blind spots sorry i'm scrolling really fast i'm i understand what to so where am blind you're really saying the author where's the teams yeah where's the team's blind spots it got okay yep and you know as you read through this now so like if i was you know mister beast and i was going through the blind spots you would say oh okay interesting role specific guidance yeah there are different roles inside the team so should i add like you know training that's specific to different roles or should i not you know there's no feedback system for creative do i care about that or not and now when i ask this blind spot question i'll find that like there's usually one or two things that chat will catch where i'll go oh yeah that's a good one and then there'll will be a bunch of things while be like nah i i'm good like that that's not an actual blind spot like that's not real like we'll we'll be fine with that and so it's like i find this just like simple back and forth to be like good at just catching stuff like it just catches like simple errors that are obvious it doesn't do the work for me doesn't do the thinking for me but it just it augment it it's like just having a thought partner there that can help you navigate any of the sort of tricky decisions that you're they're you're talking to what are some other good warm up questions you had you had a good one which was the meta prompt the second thing that you can do is just bla a bunch of context to it so a lot of folks use things like super whisper or whisper you talk to it you talk to it yeah i love so yeah my c cofounder founder goes on like long walks with his dog and he will literally just talk back and forth back and forth back and forth and then he'll take the transcript of that and then input that and say hey based on all of this now i want you to go write a strategy memo on x y z thing versus saying hey just write the strategy memo on this can you actually walk walk me through that you know i i take i'm like a history buff and i like go for a walks with ai with chad see and like we're just con about world war two mh and like it's so funny that like i it's great like i'm like wait so why do they do this and how did these people react to that like that's like i have my i have like a historian who i have come conversations with obviously using it this way significantly more productive could you walk me through his conversation with that like is it on chat and then does he say like at the end now transcribe all of this he i see i'm trying to think how he does it so you if you talk to chat it does give you the transcript and so i suspect he'll just take the transcript out of it i maybe he he might have it he might actually just tell it like hey give me the whole transcript of this conversation in json format or something like that because he's an engineer and he likes stuff json format and he'll be able to do something more sophisticated with it and then upload it back into the next prompt got it okay this is awesome so good ways to warm up question so i like the meta prompt you like be a hundred x more specific another one that i like to do that i think people a lot describe it back to me oh that's a good one you'll say describe it back to me i'd like to say before we get into it if there's any questions that you think you need answered so you have full context please ask them now yep i do that as well that's a hundred percent a great one like i i have a really long running chat project around like my personal health and wellness and so there's a whole bunch of stuff i don't know in health and wellness space and so i'll just take exports of like i have a workout app that i have and i'll just like upload the outputs of that i have like a sleep app and i'll upload that and i'm like here's a bunch of stuff data on me you know i wanna know how to improve my overall health and wellness but tell me if i can give you more information that gives you better better suggestions for me yeah dude this is awesome so you've basically like this whole episode it's turning into like i thing where it's like how can you save me twenty or thirty hours per week yeah you you've done a good job so far of of saving time what are a few other ways that you're using this stuff so zapier agents is another one that's interesting to go give a try to so most people when they talk about agents they are usually talking about like chat agents where you're going back and forth with chat or you're going back and forth with claude what's different about zapier agents is these are fully automated agents like these are things where you can say hey i want you to just go do this job for me always so for example let's make an agent that replies to your email and actually i don't want it to reply to my email because i'm a little scared that it might reply in a way that is not up to my standards so what i actually want you to do is make drafts for my emails so i'm just gonna do like a really basic thing here which is let me start from scratch here so you can just do like new agent here and we're just gonna do a custom agent we're just gonna like do like just kinda blob into this box here so what is this this is zapier this is zapier agents and so it has access to all of zapier tools and it has access to zapier trigger infrastructure meaning these agents wake up based on all the events that might happen in your world so if you get a new email you get a new lead you get a new customer you have a new project come in like all the things that you can think about that happen and all the saas tools you use and your software you can use that to wake up your agent and have the agent go do something so in this case we're gonna use gmail anytime you get a new email to wake this agent up because then we want that agent to go reply to the email so we're gonna just do some a really basic prompt this is not a prompt you would actually use but i wanna show off how this works so you would say hey anytime i get a new email write a draft reply for me so this is like super basic and we're gonna see what this thing goes and does so you can see you know building these agents takes a little bit of effort to do it but you get this c copilot that starts to like suggest like okay we're getting ready to go build this agent with you i'm gonna i'm gonna help you make this workflow but i need some more details so that question you were saying sam which is like hey ask me more quick questions to help me make this better like it's baked into the experience here because we know that like when you say hey anytime you get a new email right or a draft reply for me if that's what you're going with like you're probably not gonna actually have a great agent like you need to provide these agents with tons of details to actually make it good so you know it's asking me like what email service do you use i'm like oh i i use gmail for my email two i want you to save it as a draft reply inside gmail and then reply content what should the draft reply include you it should you like come i don't know like what should include like i get a lot of different types of emails that's interesting this like email filtering should this apply to all new emails only emails from specific so it starts to ask you questions that start to make you think yeah so maybe like only internal only my coworkers or something yeah well so i was thinking actually i don't want it to draft or reply to every email what i really want it to do is reply to everyone that is asking about a job at zapier because i get a lot of people that are emailing me and saying like i love the work it's app here this would be an amazing thing it's basically just like a like a super smart vape like yeah like when i on in yeah you used to have like these auto responders but they were like all those auto responders were like pretty dumb dude and this is great because like we get you know for m we get dozens a day of people wanting to come on the podcast and totally ruins is my inbox yeah alright okay so now here we're going right so it's starting to build the actual control prompts for the agents you know when a new emails received in gmail analyze the content it's herman if the sender is asking about a job or a career opportunity look for keywords like job career position hiring application blah of blah so like we're making it it's actually making a really good prompt for ourselves so now i start to go this is interesting so i can come in and edit this directly so yeah thank them for their interest zapier here yeah i'd like that direct them to the career page yep that sounds great mention that they can find current opera openings and apply directly through the career page yep i like that keep the tone welcoming and professional i like that okay but you know what i really wanted to do is rub them the wrong way know but you know let's see i want them to be polite but really brief because i find that these agents like get really word and that's not how i write an email like i do really short emails i'm like hey thanks for thanks for checking us out did you check out the jobs page you know maybe i actually should ask maybe and say thank him for their interested in zapier here and ask if they've already applied for a job something like that yeah if i was being really fancy what i could do is say i want you to actually go look inside our applicant tracking system and go that's crazy if they've already replied so you can do something like that say this as a draft reply in gmail so you can you know re you and send it manually if the email is not job related take no action right that's really important like i do not you know i do not want you writing draft emails for i don't know a customer so there you go and i can be like alright so this feels pretty good here i like this so you good to test the agent and and turn it on and so it'll go in now and look at my own inbox and see you know hey do i have anybody that is asking for a job in my inbox right now and i actually cleaned out my inbox before this so it's probably not gonna find anything which is why there was a problem testing this agent here how hard has it been to encourage i guess you're i mean your company is very technical but how hard has it been to encourage your staff to really embrace this stuff so for us i think we have it better than the marginal company because we're an automation company like our employees nerd out over this stuff we have a company value that's don't be a robot build a robot so we're literally trying to teach people that automation is a core primitive but even for us there still is a learning curve like yeah we employ a bunch of engineers but you know we have accountants on staff and hr folks on staff and you know folks that you know probably haven't by default been exposed to this stuff as much and so we really do make it our mission to help people help make this technology a lot more accessible so like you could see when we are building this agent like we're just assuming that somebody's gonna come in and do a bad prompt like we just know that because most people don't come in breaking the problem down step by step by step by step like this do you have like at a a like you you you know at seven hundred people you almost need like a five person team and it's like all i'm going to or or did you just send them a bunch of youtube channels i don't know like how do you train because the shits changes every three weeks we had a wake up call when chat launched because we were like holy cow our road map and how we are operating the company it needs to shift like it is there's so much more opportunity and candidly threats to our business if we are not paying attention to this stuff and so we did a handful of things that has gotten our usage of ai from effectively zero to now just shy of a hundred percent the last time we we did stats on it we were right around ninety percent of our employees using this stuff daily and so the three things were first we called the code red and we did a hack where i stopped the company for an entire week and i said i don't care what job you're in you know if you're in hr accounting or support or sales or engineering we're all gonna press pause for the whole week and we're gonna go build stuff with ai you if you're engine here maybe you're gonna build a feature for our products if you're in recruiting maybe you're gonna go and see how you could use chat to write job descriptions or you know how you could do basic research you know this is two twenty twenty three i think right so it's pretty basic stuff back then so that was really important for people to just start to get familiar with the tooling then from there at the end of the hack we did show and tell so we said hey everybody's gotta show off what they built that does two things one it promotes accountability so people are actually gonna take this stuff seriously because they gotta show it off to their teammates two it also promotes knowledge sharing because now you get to see how other people do this stuff and i have found that that's been the most impactful for my own learning like oh tell me what prompt you did there like show me how you did that because there's just like a bunch of people out there that are like constantly experimenting and nerd out on this stuff in ways that i just simply don't have time on my hands to look like trial all this stuff so i benefit a lot from just like watching how other people are are using this stuff then the second thing we did is we said we are gonna go do these hack every so often so about every three to six months we do it again now we don't do it for a full week usually we just do a day or two but that gets people to keep coming back to the watering well to see what's changed what's new and that helps again people get like refresh their mental model of what these models are capable of what the tools are capable so awesome man this is so awesome alright so when my employees join hampton we haven't do a whole bunch of onboarding stuff but the most important thing that they do is they go through this thing i made called copy that copy that is a thing that i made that teaches people how to write better and the reason this is important is because at work or even just in life we communicate mostly via text right now whether we're emailing slack blogging texting whatever most of the ways that we're communicating is by the written word and so i made this thing called copy that that's guaranteed to make you right better you could check it out copy that dot com i post every single person who leaves a review whether it's good or bad i post it on the website and you're gonna see a trend which is that this is a very very very simple exercise something that's so simple that they laugh at they think how is this gonna actually impact us and make us write better but i promise you it does you gotta try it at copy that dot com i guarantee it's gonna change the way you write again copy that dot com do you wanna do one more or do do you have one more or no i don't i can't demo this one because it's a lot more sophisticated to demo but i wanna show like what great can actually look like i mostly what i've showed today is candidly like pretty basic starter stuff but this is where if you have a couple people embedded in all your functions inside of a company you can really start to use ai at a pretty impressive rate so for example couple weeks back like the internet went viral because there was this guy who had been hired by a bunch of different yc companies he was he had like five or six jobs at once tell tell that story so basically i think i forget the guy's named but because guys i started mix panel called them out but he was like just so you know i just caught this one employee working for us and turns out he's had another job and then like dozens of other companies were like dude he worked for me too turns out hundred percent he got called out then he did a podcast where he was like yeah i've been working three to four to five jobs at any give a point i've been doing this for two to three years and everyone said the same thing which was he passed the he was amazing like he i thought he was just amazing employee and he nailed the job interview and then looking and everyone was like how that that was the most impressive part which is how on earth did this guy crushed the interviews so well that he got these positions so that's the story yeah yeah and it turns out there's a whole subreddit about this there's a subreddit called like over employed it's crazy it's crazy it's it's like i mean hats off to them like i think if these people worked that hard at like starting a business or like just even in their core job i think they would be incredibly successful these folks obviously have some unique skills they just employ them in like you know nefarious ways yeah it's in various ways it's i've always thought like i think there was a book freaking economics for a book where they like look at drug dealers and like how much of work they do and they like damn turns out they only make like fourteen dollars an hour for how much work and like the conclusion was like you guys are you should do normal jobs you if you could make more money and you're clearly very hardworking working totally so what is this this is a this is a template that i think would have caught this guy it's a candidate wrist detector so effectively what you do here is it hooks into things like ash slack ver i the an ip api and you run through applicants and then it tries to score their risk on is this applicant potentially fraudulent and so effectively you know you get an applicant that comes in it takes the details of what came in from the applicant and then it runs checks on the ip address phone numbers and a whole bunch of other metadata and then it compares them to other applicants to try in spot mismatch or suspicious patterns or things like that ten years ago this would have been like machine learning engineers that are like building this type of stuff they'd be like you know you you really would have like it would have really been tough to go set this up but this was built by casey who is on our talent team she just just part of the talent team like that is good at casey like frank nelly jr where you remember the catch me care movie where they like he gets he's like a check fraud and after twenty years gets caught and the fbi is like hey do you want a job catching other fraud so the casey have like ten jobs to new carter no she didn't but that would make a better story yeah if it if we did casey should've have done more illegal stuff yeah and so you can see pretty much here like how the the the process how the template actually works do you do does it weigh your business work so if you scroll up it's a a kit a kit this is like an agent that someone made or do you guys call agent or templates yeah this is a this is an eight this is actually i mean you could call it an agent this is actually just a straight up workflow in this case but it has ai as part of it so are you guys gonna become a platform where people can sell their agents that they make i like that idea so promise yeah understood yeah i mean that that's a no brainer you know is a the the the the that's a no brainer so that would be awesome and it would f definitely like blow you guys up i mean very similarly to microsoft and shopify like the platform model like is is an amazing model yeah and these are the types of templates you could sell right the think like the thing i was showing before about the like email reply thing it that's that's super simple but this this takes some effort like casey you know she probably went i don't know i i'd have to ask her but i would guess this probably took her a couple days of just like trying to think through break it down into all the different steps you know find all the tools she needed to to to use but at the other end you know it saves our hr team like a huge amount of headaches because now we're like not having to go spend time on these candidates that are you know maybe trying to pull one over on us what what do you call your industry automation like platform automations so what we think about this as like ai orchestration at the end of the day it's like ai orchestration workflow automation like ai automation this is the kind of stuff that like the most sophisticated teams are are doing right now is they're building things like these candidate risk detector for hiring teams and they're using that to like solve problems that candidly they couldn't solve before or like do work that they just couldn't do before who who's the biggest in your space are you the are you guys the big guys there i mean i yeah we are like it's us it's you know microsoft got a product that does stuff like this you know work c that's like you know much has started like much much much more enterprise oriented though these days zapier is like very enterprise oriented as well too and then yeah there's a can't handful of like small startups that are doing stuff like this as well too dude this is awesome i am do you remember what so i used to have this trick and you're the first person who was a victim of this trick that i will admit that this was my trick so i had so for years from the age of like twenty four to like twenty eight i would host this event called hustle con where i would get people like you to come give a talk and i would lie to everyone the speakers i would be like you know you you're talking at three o'clock you have to be there at ten am for the mic check and all that stuff and at conferences there aren't mic checks the mike's the mic work it's the same mic idea it was time the reality was is i wanted you to come back backstage to just hang out i wanted to like not necessarily hang out with me but i wanted to see wade talk i think it was like i was in the room you were in the room and then like the founder of the athletic and i would just sit and listen to you talk and and just like it was it was very inspiring that was i think sixteen or seventeen i forget exactly when and you were there of i didn't even have to lie to you were there from like eight to seven two days at a row just sitting on this couch with me and i don't know if you were doing this this at the like on purpose but i'm pretty sure you were doing the same thing i was doing it was awesome because that that i that was the biggest impact i've probably on my business that ever had because or my life because i remember it being with you and the founder of we work miguel and casey neistat and all these baller and i was like wade might be a little different but most all these guys they're not that much smarter than me but they're like i was like they're not a thousand times smarter than me but they're are thousand times more successful than me why why does that gap exist it's because they are fearful but they do it anyway or you know things like that and it was very inspirational well i think that's like there's this meme that goes around the internet of like you can just do things yeah and i think that that is like if i could sort of like go back to my former self or just talk to the graduating class or whatever it's like just do stuff like it's like you know i think most people are so scared that they're gonna have egg on their face but usually what happens is it when you fail nobody even noticed nobody even cares like that's what usually happens and so if you mess up who cares nobody saw it like tried in and so there's just so much advantage to be had around just like trying stuff well you did just do stuff you you did the damn i'm thing so i appreciate you coming on here and doing this no thank you for being so gracious and and making this happen you bet when i come back we'll actually have to do the m thing and like jam on business ideas and stuff like that right after we get done hitting you know off this we'll we'll get you scheduled we'll do the second one right i'm down no i'm we're alright god bless thank you that's it that's a pod i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a goal travel never looking back alright my friends i have a new podcast for you guys to check out it's called content is profit and it's hosted by luis and ph ka after years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like red bull and orange theory fitness luis and fans are on a mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue in each episode you're gonna hear top entrepreneurs and creators and you're gonna hear him share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit so you can check out content is profit wherever you get your

cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty impossible but that's exactly what sandler training did with hubspot they use breeds hubspot ai tools to tailor every customer interaction without losing their personal touch and the results were incredible click through rates jumped twenty five percent qualified leads quadruple and people spent three times longer on their landing pages go to hubspot dot com to see how breeze can help your business grow i have felt like a little bit of a like pinch moment where i've realized don't all pinch me still say that one pinch me yeah i will pinch you if you ever say that again and i'll just say ow yeah i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a travel never looked what's going on over there what has been going on we haven't seen each other in seven days and we've both talked to a bunch of interesting people have you enjoyed your time away i have by the way people are like why do they do these separate and it's like dude did we live on the other side of the i live in california sam lives on the far east coast and so for us to do it in person recording it's like would you like to fly across the country for this day today just to record this podcast and both of us have little kids neither of us wanna to do that so if you see us doing one on one interviews with people don't worry mean and sam are still good we just we live really far apart okay so here's the deal in the last ten days both you and i have gone a dead podcast podcasts that have not come out yet i think this will come out before those with guests who are incredible so i think all i think all of them are either billionaires or soon to be billionaires but that's the the money is almost the least interesting thing about each one of them like what they did and how they how they roll how they live is more interesting and we did them in person so for example i went to las vegas i went to tahoe and i'm basically staying at the person's house and i'm hanging out with them all day and then the podcast is just kind of like a one or two hour recording in the middle of that day but i'm spending twelve twenty four hours with this person and when you do that you pick up a lot and neither you or i've talked and bop both you and i are kind of students of the game of life and one of the ways you'll be a student of the game of life is you don't just try to do all the experiments on yourself right that's a pretty slow and painful way to do things a faster easier way is to go again a little costco sample of somebody else's life i never had a fig before let me try let's we get my feet almond butter and is this something i like am an almond butter diet and so i went and sample these people's lives and you did too and so what i wanted to do if you're down for it is i think we each have three names of people we hung out with and i wanna take the one thing that stuck with you that was not in the podcast man we get to hang out with so be amazing people it it absolutely wears off on you our world is business but frankly i find like just the money part to be a little bit empty and i think you agree with life is more more rich than just money but it just so happens that we like being people who are experts at their field and the field is business so we've there's probably only thirty five hundred or forty five hundred billionaires in the world and i feel like every year we get to hang out with like thirty of them and again the the the money is not the important part but the fact that it's just like so if there's only been forty five hundred people of all the people on earth who are in this category it's pretty exciting to be around someone who's the best at their field and it one hundred percent wears off to you wears off on you where you start normalizing being in the one percent of whatever activity you're trying to be in totally yeah and your money point is right which is even if we were just like if i ran into ko on the street i'd be like this guy is the i'd be like honey this guy's is the greatest hotdog dog eater of all time now she wouldn't care to be clear but i would be like it'd be like meeting kobe right he's the kobe of eating dogs and so you know excellence in any form is interesting to me and anybody who is gets an outlier result in the field that many people to go try to choose because this was how did you get that because if you're interested in becoming an outlier on your field you can actually learn from it in any field anyways so you're right that our quote unquote job gets us access this now the giving part here is we don't wanna be selfish to just kind of keep for ourselves you know what we picked up so let's let's jump in alright so i go hang out with this guy hayes barn most people don't know who hay barn is but his story is pretty crazy so the the short version of his story is guy grows up single mom kind of you know from the dirt in actually in in missouri and he ends up sort of hustling his way into a job a sales job did a tech sales job then he ends up at oracle and he works for oracle in the nineties when larry ellis was you know basically he was flop between larry ellis and bill gates is like the wealthiest band in the world and and he's it's so he becomes basically a competitive salesman and so he becomes a a top sales guy at oracle just by like working harder than everybody so he's like i would just get in earlier i would stay later i would work every weekend those guys you know most of the sales guys who were doing well by three pm they would leave they go play basketball or tennis or racket ball and i would just stay the extra three hours and i say the extra four hours and would just do it that every single day and i just added it up so he ends up becoming a top guy at oracle but he sees that some of the other top guys at oracle go leave and start these huge companies so mark ben off the leaves and go start salesforce this other guy leaves and go starts this other company and so he starts to think maybe i'm unlike them right and maybe i should go do that and so he leaves and he starts a a mortgage company where he's like maybe the same way i could sell complicated enterprise software using a call center and some online ads maybe i could sell a mortgage right most people at the time felt that mortgages were too complicated like you needed a in person you know a local bank branch with a local banker who's gonna talk to you and hold your hand and all this stuff and he's like i don't know i think with like radio ads and a call center in sacramento i think i could just sell mortgages over the phone the same way i've just been selling oracle databases did he know anything about mortgages or no but his friend from childhood is like best friend from like fourth grade or something like that he kinda knew a little about mortgages and he's knew a lot about selling so they leave to go start this thing in the o eight mortgage crash he survived because they had been underwriting conservatively so they were the one mortgage company that was like not giving out subprime loans so they survived the mortgage crisis but during that time he divers diversified because he's like instead of just selling mortgages what if i go into the energy business what if i what if i branch what if i instead of just selling mortgages could we sell solar and help people with their utility bill so if if like what if i gave you a thing that's cleaner for the environment saves you money on your electricity so he starts a company that does that for solar now that solar company gets bought by solar city it it he ends up driving he's not actually installing the solar so like you know solar city would actually go install the solar if you don't know solar city was start by elon musk and his cousin and so he was selling the solar and then solar city would go install it at one point i think they made up like fifty percent of solar city's revenue it was like insane that he was driving so much revenue for them and so solar city acquire them solar city that ends up getting acquired by tesla for two or three billion dollars and and then you know tesla gone on this crazy run like you know whatever thirty then so here's this guy hayes who is you know he grew up nowhere in missouri he has d and former of d where he ends up flu out of the first grade because he can't read properly you know he works on a farm he's a subway sandwich artist and somehow this guy now one of the wealthiest men in america okay he's a self made billionaire now so i go i i wanna do a podcast with hayes so i hit him up in my hey would you do i know you don't do a lot of these what you do this he says yeah yes sure no problem now the thing about haze hayes though is that hayes does not do anything at like a chill level so like he was the most un unsure person i've ever been around well he's fun to be around he's actually extremely fun like he's very funny he's fun but like if he chooses to do something he doesn't half to do anything you know he's only this is his thing he says he's like we play full out so sam normally when we book a guest especially like let's say one of the like more on the higher end of the range of success of guests what is the normal prep experience like maybe a week before just walk walk through that well so sometimes we wanna do a call with them but then other times if someone's really successful you're like embarrassed to ask them like can i spend like an hour of your time there's brainstorming and so sometimes ari will call sometimes one of us will call it depending on how successful they are to not disrespect them and so it's quite challenging the more successful they are it's like can i waste an hour of your time like just prepare or do i just show up with stories that i ask your friends and hopefully it goes great yeah and sometimes we send them a like a doc which like hey here's some can you fill this out this will help us and then i would say half the time they do fill it out but half the time it's like they give us either nothing or half half filled out something like that and we just show we say we gotta make it happen we understand hope it works this experience was completely different so hey not only calls me he calls ben two or three times before the podcast and he starts discussing you know what could we talk about tell me what what's you think is gonna be interesting how do we make this amazing he just keeps asking this question how do we make this amazing so instead of just saying what are we gonna talk about that's the average question here's was how do we make this amazing and he keeps calling back and he's basically like what and he says this he's like i don't say yes to many things but if i do say yes i go all out and so first in the pre prod the the pre pod prep he's you know really active and he keeps asking how's how's is gonna be amazing this idea he comes up with he's like you know most of the time you sit down and people ask the same five questions about like how'd do you do it you know what do you think about ai blah blah blah like these same questions and you get these robotic tech answers from these like you know these tech people and he's like let's do it different so he's like why don't you just come out to tahoe people come to my house let's spend the whole day together come to my morning routine is be it's a mate you're gonna love it's gonna be great alright a few episodes ago i talked about something and i got thousands of messages asking me to go deeper to explain and what i'm about to do so i told you guys how i used chat gb as a life coach or a thought partner and what i did was i uploaded all types of amazing information so i uploaded my personal finances my net worth my goals different books that i like issues going on in my personal life and businesses i uploaded so much information and so the output is that i have this gp that i can ask questions that i'm having issues within in my life like how should i respond to this email what's the right decision knowing that you know my goals for the future things like that and so i worked with hubspot to put together a step by step process showing the audience showing you the software that i used to make this the information that i had chat ask me all this stuff so it's super easy for you to use and like i said i use like ten or twenty times a day it's literally changed my life and so if you want that it's free there's a link below just click it enter your email and we will send you everything you need to know to set this up in just about twenty minutes and i'll show you how i use it again ten to twenty ten today alright so check it out the link is below in the description back to the episode and so we go to tahoe and we're like cool we'll we'll be there tuesday we'll see you wednesday for the recording hey he goes awesome be at my house at five am oh my god am what what are we doing here so we show up at five am and he's like boys good morning he's already like i'm like roman the like boo out of my eye and he's like awake and he's he goes let's go down to the lake like okay so we go down to the to the boat and we take this boat out for two minutes into the middle of lake tahoe it kills the engine and we're like okay what's happening it's was completely dark out by the way sun hasn't even rose yet he's like so we're gonna do my morning routine he's like you're gonna love it he didn't just say like i hope you guys like this or thanks for you know like thanks for coming like i hope you have a good time he was just like you're gonna love this this is gonna be amazing he basically brain me before even out there of like i do love this this is kind of amazing he was he was so cares about he he was just having a good he was genuinely excited that's the thing he's not like trying to sell us on anything like he's doing us a favor inviting us into his life but he was genuinely excited for us and he's like he's my my friends right out here this is great you're gonna love this so he heals the engine he turns on he's like there's a little woo but just would are you guys willing to play ball like just let's do this today and you'll like it so he puts on this breath work routine and he's like i met this guy you know on an island with from the guy who you know the guy who started a cirque sole guy or whatever his name is he's like i met this this kind of breath guru on his island and he's amazing i've been doing this for like twenty years since then or something like that and so he we do this fifteen minute breath work and then he's like alright boys stand up let's go we jump in the lake and we're like we do this kinda like cold plunge in the lake basically and lake tahoe in the summertime is still freezing yeah so we jump in immediately like you know lose all feeling in my body and then he's like okay we're gonna go down do a breath hold down underwater and for a minute and like this is gonna be great it's gonna feel like you're in space open your eyes like i don't have goggles you he's like open your eyes i was okay and so we go under underwater open my eyes and it literally looks like you're it's floating in space he's right by the way can only hold by breath for no joke seven seconds i don't know what happened well when it's freezing it's hard so i immediately go down and i'm like nope i'm done pop back up he's underwater so he comes up he's like okay let's do that again i like okay yeah i need a a redo because that was you know it's pretty short so we do it again and then he's like you know what i heard this thing this is amazing thing hey and it said basically that like you know as you get older you really wanna make the most of your life you guys are still a little bit younger than me you'll you'll feel this too like you get the sense of urgency about like you realize you know your friends started getting sick you know your parents getting older you realize like you know this time is not you know time is time is really precious and there's a time hack you guys wanna know the time hack right yeah for sure but what's the time act and he's like if you do something new every day you sort of mark the day because like mean if i ask you sam what did you do five days ago it's probably pretty hard to remember what you did five days ago even yesterday it's pretty hard to remember and that's because when we're in these routines and routines do serve us but they it causes all the days to blend together but if you do one new thing a day it sort of marks today you want you're not gonna remember every single day but it it makes that day more memorable she's like let's figure out what we could do new today and we're we're like back on the boat shiver and he's like you see those rocks i always see rocks out this routine but i've never gone out there you guys down to swim out there it's well i'm my yeah let's go i'm not gonna say no so we jump in the water and we start swimming and he's swimming like you know a shark basically out there we are like i'm like dying basically and behind me i'm like i don't even know if ben can swim i look back at ben like his glasses are like foggy i'm like well i don't know what's going on diego has like shoulder dislocation problems i'm like diego for sure gonna dis his shoulder and just sink like a rock to the bottom of tail we're all dying and anywhere swimming from rock to rock like little kids he's like let's like plank tag basically he's like let's go over there alright race receipt to this one and we go and he wants to get to the he's said like look at that big rock let's get to the big rock we go to the big rock he ends up getting the big rock jump off the big rock i had this great moment come back to the boat and this is all like before eight am and he he's like i do this every day and i remember just having this feeling which is like this guy basically lives his life at a level he plays at a at a like a full out level he plays with a level of intensity on everything that he was doing whether it was like the podcast his morning routine like each of the things i would do at a seven he just does at a ten and if you think about that like how does that stack every single day right like that extra three units of intensity that he puts in and by the way it's not like he's it's not like hard work in a sense like he's just like he just goes for it right he's having more fun he's willing to play more than us and we went and play pickle ball with we did whatever we did that day he was like this and he told the story during the podcast of this where you know he was a certain way but he's like once i worked for elon and he worked for elon for ten years he's like it broke my frame of reference because i was telling him was like you kinda broke my frame like i have a morning routine but it's not like this right like i have a and i was like by the way it's not the money like yes you've got this beautiful was it a sick house oh my god dude unbelievable and to the point where he was like he's was like yeah i prefer not to film this and i'm not trying to show off i'm like yeah the people who try not to show off i have the things worth showing off of course and so i'm like it's even if i had that house what i like this is honest question i had i was even if i had this house and i had that boat and i had this little like you get this like freaking like willy won elevator to get down from the house to the boat and i'm like would i wake up at five am every day and do this no chance i'd be cuddle up in bed with you know like i would be the little burrito tucked in with my just my eyes peeking out of the covers at five in the morning but he does it right that's like kind of the difference pitch between name in me is that he he plays full out and so that was this the big takeaway for me from that whole experience was do you wanna live like that like i i like i think so when i'm around i've around people like this like they're crazy people and i think i admire so much about this and i wanna take a little bits but i don't i don't wanna replicate that like i don't i'm not a high energy person like that all the time i'm only a high energy person like that some of the time hey hayes was like at all the time i was around him he's energy rich yes i do wanna be like that because i think that because i think that well first the feeling i had by eight am i was like oh so i've conquered the world already like what what what could you do to be today that's gonna make me feel bad right because is anything really gonna mess with my mood or my you know myself today like it's pretty hard to do that when you like conquer the morning like that but like forget the morning routine i'm like freaking a five am like that's sort of secondary is it the point was if you're good to do something like just actually like do it fully and the thing you the prerequisite for that is to beat energy rich to not beat energy poor like i went there because i'm like oh this guy is so successful he's money rich and when i walked away i was like the money rich thing is the is a byproduct and a complete secondary footnote to being incredibly energy rich and two of the guys guy said the same thing i don't know if you remember this i said this when we went hung out with mister beast i was like this disguise like the energize bunny and we were talking about like literally the when he walks his walking pace is faster than the average human being by like you know two notches the two two of the guys out and i came with this they're like just see how fast hey walked out was like hard to keep up with them he's like just literally has a pep in his step and i think just i think being energy rich is one of the more attractive things like you see people who are contact rich it's like oh wow they know all these famous people you see people who are money rich oh wow they got all these dollars in the bank account to me energy rich is very very appealing to give like an example of this guy hey he's not talked about at all he's very under the radar for how big a big of a big shot he is we're with you and me and a bunch of people were with jesse edge who is a very greg darius loud personality in a great way like he is also energy rich and i remember being in this room with these guys in in asana actually and hayes took over the room because of his stories and his energy and one thing it led to another in and they are apparently haze hobby is that he used to be into hip hop and he loves to freestyle style wrap which is a very strange thing because the sky is like hey he looks like me but like fifty five he's just like a blonde hair mid missouri guy and he is it amazing freestyle rapper they went and freestyle rap and he was beat boxing for like six or seven minutes and they went at they went and did this thing it was so good and i remember talking to him and being around him and i i don't think i've ever met someone whose oven burns that hot like he was on fire the whole time yeah exactly he's an incredible dude the other amazing thing by the way hung out with them maybe twelve hours straight and did he work all literally taking the day off so he was like he's like i i was like dude you don't gotta do this man like i appreciate it but like you don't have to you know it's not like normal for podcast to this he's like no you guys came all the way out here i wanna make the time well i know i know you guys took the time i wanna make at the i'm he's like i i thought this would be correct i thought that'll be so rude if i just show up when we record and then you leave like no i wanna make the time one thing that he that's stood out he did not check his phone a single time in twelve hours and i told him at the end i was like is that normal like i know you're getting the emails i know you're getting slack message it's like just like all of us right like ten times more than all of you run a ten billion dollar company he's the ceo of a ten billion dollar company and he did not check his phone a single time and he's just like well you know like if i'm with you guys i wanna be with you guys and if i'm working i'm gonna be working and i was well if you say it like that yeah i guess i'm little bit for yeah we put this away then to no amount of people or stories that i can tell or probably you also can tell from that is gonna be the hayes carl hang session that was really good did ben and diego have a great time too oh i think ben is at home making valentine's crunch for his right he's just like i love that man i like i do too honestly i do too what he if you google his name too this is all public he like his side hobby was there's a famous hotel in tahoe or maybe reno i figured exactly where it is and he owns it and he was telling me about the renovation and everything like that and it was like an epic thing i forget exactly the story is the story is this he's in the lake doing the morning routine every day and he's like he's like i didn't think about like manifesting i don't even know what that word really means but he's like i was in the lake and i was thinking about my life and like you know what i want and i was full i was just filling up with kind of like the feelings that i want and he's like and i see this hotel and there's this hotel that was kinda like on the you know over the hill a little bit it on the on the other side of it he's like and it's too it's so literally like one minute from his house and he sees that hotel while he's in the while he's doing his cold plunge in lake tahoe and he just decides looking at it because i'm gonna buy that hotel i don't know how but i'm gonna buy that hotel and then he starts working on it he he finds out it's owned by larry ellis his old boss right his old boss's boss's boss or whatever and he goes and he purchases the hotel and they're turning it into a proper hotel in tahoe and he he walked us through the construction of it or whatever and even that you know he's architect his life it's not like he's doing it to make money he was like we're gonna put pick all career pool here this year this all these activities he's like i want a place to do activities i wanna a place for my friends to come and stay during the summers like this will just make my life so much better if we if we if we generate this if we make this happen incredibly generative guy cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty impossible but that's exactly what sandler training did with hubspot they use breeze hubspot ai tools to tailor every customer interaction without losing their personal touch and the results were incredible click through rates jumped twenty five percent qualified leads quadrupled and people spent three times longer on their landing pages go to hubspot dot com to see how breeze can help your business grow alright let's do the next one them alright man this is gonna that you you you start really strong there it's hard to follow alright this person i actually just hang hung out with i didn't do a pod with them yet because they refused to come on so i'm gonna say a little bit of information about it enough to make it awesome not enough that i'm would totally blow up their spot but have you heard of the company buck mason fuck mason i've heard it what do they do instead of g know what is it sorta sorta so they started in two thousand and thirteen and they started in two thousand thirteen selling something very simple a t shirt and their goal was just to make the best t shirt i'm actually wearing one of them right now and they didn't they tried to raise money he was like i i tried to raise as much money as i could that i got lucky because i was horrible at fundraising and i could raise no money and so they bootstrap this company i think it actually started with like a kick starter or some type of auction like that like a pay and then we'll make a type of vibe and they build this company and over time they've grown it and grown it and grown it and i suspect you didn't tell me but i suspect they do somewhere in a hundred and fifty million dollar arr a a year range and the s forty two stores now so when you go to book mason dot com what do you see yes well see this is like this nostalgic i see i see this like video of these guys from what is it maybe like the eighties or what i don't know what what error is it's like a california cowboy eighties vibe yeah yeah exactly and i see a bunch of t shirts and and colored shirts and jeans pants so i love this brand and i became friendly with them because i've dm him to get him to come on the podcast and he refuses to come on and i ask him why and he says i just want the brand to be the face i don't wanna like it too popular i i don't wanna be the face of the brand i'm with the brand to be the brand which is always like the whenever i hear someone say that i'm like oh you're the best you're you're gonna you're amazing yeah like oh so you're yeah whenever you hear someone say that it's like okay so you're absolutely going to win and you have the right attitude and so he started this company in two thousand thirteen and clothing companies are pain in the butt you and i know people in this industry we know e comm guys it's really really hard and it takes a long time i think to figure it out but basically they got to the point in ten or fifteen years now it's gels thousand thirteen so twelve years where it's really starting to fire on all cylinders he's grown into fifty two stores and i started talking to about the history and everything like that and i started realizing it's not that crazy to do this like it's really hard but i was thinking about every project that i've started since two thousand and thirteen so in two thousand thirteen i had just graduated college you remember where you weren't it was two thousand thirteen sushi era no that's when i moved to san francisco monkey for now so what was sushi eleven yeah two thousand ten eleven so imagine you starting a sushi store in twenty eleven and you just you were chained to that company and you just had to stick with it you had no other options you just had to i have a feeling it would be a huge success and i have a feeling that if i had done the same with whatever i was doing that there's definitely a world where i would be five or ten times more successful than i am now because of just compounding of sticking with something and i i sort of felt first of all twelve years it sounds like not a long time but when i thought about well where was i in two thousand twelve twenty thousand thirteen and what all what all have i jumped from thing to think the thing and should i have just stuck to one thing and done that the entire time and where would i be now because he was telling me his story and i love where this guy sasha is named sasha cohn i love to hear the story re now which is like i got this amazing team or firing on cylinders i just get to like work on the really exciting projects and it's just going great cash flow not an issue whatever etcetera it doesn't feel like that leading up to it obviously it's really really hard and the majority of the time i would think you'd wanna to quit and the majority of time i would think a guy like came mean didn't this i'm guessing if someone offered to buy the company from him at different weeks throughout the year i bet he would've said yes just because it's it's really freaking hard and but i just remember thinking like i wish i had the foresight to to yes and like i wish i would have i i i regret that a little bit when i see where i'm like i don't i don't exactly wanna pay the price that you had to pay because that was really hard but when i see where you are now it seems very attractive yeah that's a great one honestly they actually that was pretty common amongst all the people i met with actually two of them even said this they go i have very high pain tolerance and what they were the reason why they were saying it was actually not as a brag they were like you know one of the problems is i have a really high pain tolerance i will keep doing something even when it's not you know quite right or not obvious there probably was a better way or a better idea i could've done i don't know i'm just that's who i am i just keep going haze even said this kinda off the record i was like what do you what do you think is the difference about like you know you and a bunch of other the people who were like you know what i was really interested in was and i i probably didn't say this right but when we were talking about the morning routine he said he has a different friend come and do with him every morning and so he was like yeah yes whatever his is like tony gonzalez did this with me yesterday the hall fame tight end and he then he was like oh yeah over the week he's like oh he had this thing on his knee and i was what happened about your knee like you got cut up there he's like i was mountain biking with i think his name was linden like the the elon cousin from solar city he said we were mountain biking yesterday we went to see that mountain we went all the way over there i was like god this guy so active was unbelievably active this man but i'm also like he's hanging out with hall fame like he was talking about elon and his son went and worked at spacex and he's like i was oh you didn't have him come work with you and he's like no i wanted him to go see what it's like to work with elon he's was like i just wanted him to like it took me a while to go see what the the hardest working person who tackle the biggest problems on earth you know i i work ten years in my career fifteen years my career before that happened i wanted my son to get like right away but yeah just incredible stick to it for all of them because i'll do my next one yeah so next one is h so i go to las vegas and i hang out with alex h and a lot of people know h because he's still he makes so much content i don't think i actually think alex h doesn't get enough credit every time i hang out with them i think to your you're really wise like that's the very legit so okay so i have a bunch of things that i could say is by taking me but i promised one so here's my one of h student of the game okay so what does this mean we're talking and i asked him i said you know you i get a lot of emails but you put out so much more content you have a bunch bigger audience you must be getting a hundred emails a day from entrepreneurs who want some advice you or want some help or want you had to invest and then he does these workshops every weekend with a hundred entrepreneurs so i was like so you're saying another maybe five hundred plus maybe thousand plus entrepreneurs in your workshops that are in person and then you have all the deals that you look at maybe another few thousand deals that you look at probably looking he's probably meeting i don't know five thousand entrepreneurs a year at the minimum and i was like what do you think is the mistake the the biggest mistake you see them make i ask him this and he says they're only studying their business they're not a student of the game of business so what you mean goes well when you start a company you're very like narrowly focused on your business your industry your business model so he's like you know sam you're doing a you're doing the hustle newsletter you probably knew a ton about newsletters right you know everything about other newsletters and you knew everything about maybe the media industry as a whole and i think you're very good about being student in the game but i was say most people were probably you know even one tenth that's curious as you but then you might also have gone and looked at the events business and then the saas business and other businesses to try to understand like oh is that a better business to be in and actually you started in the events business then you went into the media blogging business and then you found your way into the newsletter business and you were like that's a better business to be and now you're in a paid community business it's actually a better business to be in than even the one one were before and the reason why is because you're a student of the game of business not just your business and alex basically it was like i made this mistake you know i was basically a gym operator i had one gym and then i had two gyms i had three gyms and i was gonna own and operate gyms and i got really good owner operating a gym but the best thing he did was he went to this mastermind and i think russell b was there and they basically were like you're a ten out of ten entrepreneur going after a two out of ten opportunity like forget opening and running gyms it sounds like you're amazing at getting a gym to have no members to go to like a ton of members why don't you sell that create a you know sell the sell the ability for any gym to fill up there to get more members and so then he's like okay that's smart and he goes and he learns about other business models he realizes that he should do this thing called jim launch where he would fly to a gym and he would basically say hey look if i can get you five hundred more members can i keep the first month of their membership and then you are you know the there's the six weeks of the of of pay that they're gonna pay up upfront and you get to keep all the recurring membership bam behind that they're like alright sure he's like no risk to you you pay me nothing i'll run my own ads but i get to keep what i kill and so that became jim launched and that became the thing that was really really successful and now he's in a better business you know like let's say private equity and he's buying saas companies so he's gotten into a but even better business than that right private equity is a better business and so he's like i think most people are in the game a student of the game of business and so and at the end of we we basically talked for i don't know two and a half hours we do like a two part episode and he had before that he had done two podcast podcasts so this guy's done like you know basically eight hours straight of talking and where i think most people would be like passed out on the floor or just ready to go home or just wanna go eat or like just be like can you guys get out of my office now he was super curious still and he's asking me a ton of questions after the pod and he asked me a question is like you what would you do differently if you were me and you know me i can't like hold my tongue so i'm like yeah honestly like i think this and i am a very blunt and honest answer of like i think you're amazing at this but i think this part of what you do doesn't do you justice i think it actually makes you look that's like bad for your brand and i think you're you're you you shouldn't be doing that how did he receive that extremely well and this is kind of like kudos him for abe being curious and then b being not defensive and so he he text me the next morning didn't even give him my number but he he gets my number from somebody and he says this he goes i just wanna say thanks again for the pod i've been thinking a lot about what we talked about at the end then he goes it's her by the way and then he goes i'm gonna make some change it because some content changes i appreciate you caring enough to say something i thought i was just like a a really kind message but also like you know a testament to him for for being extremely open minded and being a student of the game and being like having that mindset of i'm here i'm gonna try to learn something for every single person i meet that's just such a positive attribute to have in general i'm good friends with a guy who bought one of alex's companies so alex started the thing called allen software and my friend was the buyer of it and that is an interesting place to be in so the person who you buy the the buyer of your company they know all of your they know the truth they all your dirty secrets yeah they know all the dirty they do everything and i was like lloyd this is when alex first started getting popping before we ever even had him on the pod i was like lloyd is this guy legit like this seems too could be true and to this day lloyd is like he's the smartest person i know about business like he like knows everything about alex that's what due diligence is and he is knows everything and he still is like this guy's the best where i need advice it's like your doctors given you a colonoscopy he's like yeah he's got a great guy yeah he he he and and so that like tells a lot about him and what's funny is alex comes off as a very serious guy and he is a a pretty serious guy but he's a lot more fun like i'm able to have fun with him whenever i'm with him he's way more fun than he gives off that was one of the things i told him i was like you come off so serious but you're actually you have a great sense of humor you should show that and show yourself having fun and not just like i paint the windows black and a grind right there that is part of you but there is another part of you and i think you don't really do self justice in like not showing in that side this is so funny as we are texting my friend lloyd just texted me about alex a compliment about alex the same guy referring to this just out of that blue just now out of the at twelve forty nine this is it's twelve fifty two right now he just he just texted me a thing about how alex just gave them some great advice which is pretty funny that's that's pretty awesome did you they're seminar our business so basically well a lot of people don't know this but acquisition dot com either buys or invest in companies whatever pretty normal but they also have like a seminar business which is like on paper if you were to think about it like the worst business to be in you're you're selling your time for money yeah yeah they own u c's old headquarters and people spend five or ten thousand dollars to come for a three day like seminar and according to alex but also i just like random math i know you could like see like the schedule how fold it is i think that thing is killing it so that that was my runner up takeaway which is turn there's a business more practical business lesson turn your cost centers into profit center so he said two things about this the first is the on the workshops that you're talking about are the seminars so he was like well we're doing acquisition dot com and we're because of that we're talking all these companies and we're diligent all these deals and i'm basically that's a big cost to right i'm paying i have a team of people that's diligent all these business we meet the entrepreneur we ask a bunch of questions we dig into their business and you know we're only doing one deal out of every so many right so he's like all the others are just the cost of doing business and it's costing me a few million dollars a year so he has the idea like how do i turn my call center into a profit center so he's like well let me just try this so he says alright i'm gonna invite whatever fifty entrepreneurs out to our headquarters come spend two days with us we will dig into your business we'll learn what's working what's not working and we'll help you sort of unblock and like you know maybe if you're a great fit like you know we should have a conversation but like this is really about understanding what's going on in your business how to unblock you okay so that's what they did and basically he turned a thing that was losing him a few million dollars a year of people cost into i think like ten million dollars plus a free cash flow and he said the same thing about content he goes and he goes i don't make content as i enjoy it i make content because it builds my brand and i was i really i i do it because i like i like doing this he's like well is like the way i think about it is this the old in the old world let's say the tv era or the radio era you had to spend millions of dollars of your money to build your brand in the consumer's mind the crazy thing about social media is you get paid to build your brand so he's like yeah like i make all this content i'd i'm building my brand but i'm making money doing that so he again he turned a cost center into a profit center on the content side too he and but he he loves it by the way i he absolutely loves that i think you and alex actually have very similar attributes which is you both like teaching yeah and so like i've have been talking to him i've been buddies them for a little while and we'll just be talking about what what's up what are you doing and he's like oh i'm making a google document for my staff on how to sell better or how to do this like he loves process and he loves touching yes yeah yeah yeah that's that's all and i the part i think he really loves his writing like i actually like writing out stuff like almost in textbook style alright you wanna do another one or you want me to go alright here's a a a quick one do you know the company zapier yeah i do zapier was founded in two thousand eleven another company by the way that it was founded way it's way older than i thought so zapier is a company that they now they're basically an ai company like they make ways for you to connect a different ai stuff so like if your jet could be like you know make a whenever i get a calendar invite do this and use chat to be due to it whatever they start in two thousand eleven now i think they do something like four hundred or five hundred million dollars a year in revenue and they've only raised a million dollars of funding and they founded the company out of jefferson city in missouri which is the capital missouri or near where i'm from the smallest town you could think of it's like nothing it's like when you think of in the middle of nowhere missouri you're gonna take think of jeff city and i met wade because years ago i used to host this event called hu khan and you spoke there a bunch of other people spoke there and wade showed up wade wasn't supposed to speak until like two o'clock and he showed up at like eight am and him and i sat backstage the entire time and we for two days actually it's a two day event he sat with me the whole time and the reason he sat with me is i would have all the speakers come to the green room two hours in advance and i always lied to them and i think you know the story where i would say you have to come mic check but of course there is no mic check the mic works perfectly but we just wanted to hang out like the there's no bike check for a a conference like if you just put the lapel on and it works it works i would tell people oh you have to speak at three make sure you're hear at one for mike check the reality was is i just wanted to hang out with him backstage and there was one time like i distinctly remember it was like casey neistat at the founder of we work it was wade from zapier and then like the founder of class pass and tucker max if you know tucker max and we were like all at a room and i was like how wild is this and i wouldn't say a word i would just listen to all these conversations people were having and wade was with the one guy who stayed the entire time with me and we just sat and listened to people talking it was so fun and that's i got to know wade i had him on the pod last week because i wanted to see how he's using ai and it was crazy this guy because he's weighs a billionaire so way is probably thirty five years old i think he started the call the company when who was a senior in college and i think he graduated college in two thousand eleven zapier they're they they did a funding round i think three years ago six or seven billion dollar valuation i asked them where they think they're gonna be in five years he told me a billion in revenue so the i don't know what that means the company's worth but i know that it means that on paper he's a billionaire and i was like why are you living in jeff city missouri he was like well where my family lives and i like it here and i was like wait does anyone know how big of a big shot you are there who's like no the people here don't use zap why would like so they have no idea and i was like do you have like a fancy house like do you stick out he's like no like no one has any idea like i'm just like a guy and i thought that it was so cool to see because i was hanging out with sasha this guy who started buck mason in a very cool brand i was hanging out with eric who has founded rampant and is the hottest thing going and everyone knows in the tech world what ramp is and some one of the fastest growing companies and people know zap and everything but they don't know wade the founder and it was so interesting how he was just a guy it was and he was just he was just guy that's all he was he and he very had that every man mentality or every man vibe and he came on the pod to talk about ai and he was just like da he was a nerd like he was in the weeds he and he loved it and he was incredibly passionate and his he didn't have a fancy webcam it was him and it looked like a small very small office in his house and it was just totally una assuming and i loved it and so i think my biggest takeaway with him was how passionate he was about this game that he turned into a career and how inspired was that he was not flexing and he truly like it was the opposite of haze where not that hayes flexes i mean where haze is just full of energy and he's like i wanna manifest i wanna do this mh this was the opposite it was an introvert nerdy guy who just did what he loved and it just it worked out and he just was really happy to go lucky and it was really fun because i'm used to these hayes guys i'm not quite but like these like alpha like let's get it let's get after life let's manifest let's have fun let's do this and it's awesome to get the opposite of that because i think when people listen to this podcast i hope one of the takeaways is that there's a million ways to get done what you wanna get done there's a million of ways to achieve your dreams there's a million ways to get rich there's a million ways to go to where you wanna go and where you wanna go to be anywhere and there's there are maybe some best practices but i can give you tons of examples of people in the exact opposite and they're are just as happening and just as effective so that was my big takeaway with wade i like that yeah there's you know you get to create your own little heaven on earth and this one of the cool things when you go and you meet these people you get to sample what they chose for themselves and you pick up like oh i really want that or in some cases oh i really wouldn't want that you know there was one guy who won't be won't be named that not in this trip but in previous one where this huge house and fancy cars and all this stuff but also like huge headaches with all of that oh i gotta get the this repaired in this and then that car got scratch and then this has this and it was like man you own these things and then they own you and it's like oh wow like definitely for me is a tote that would be a total trap to fall into good i'm glad i saw it first hand so i can avoid that whereas with other people for them that is they're having on earth they want that they they they actually prefer that trade off of you know and so you wanna it's good to sample the difference sort of styles so you can get you know get a feel for what what you think is gonna work for you because i think people had this idea of like oh you just gotta do what you want reality you don't know exactly what you want till you're even exposed to certain things then you sort of develop taste about what it is that you like and what it is that how you wanna be you could sort of you can modify yourself based on you know what you're what you're exposed to so you guys know this but i have a company called hampton join hampton dot com it's a vetted community for founders and ceos but we have this member named la von and la saw a bunch of members talking about the same problem with hampton which is that they spent hours manually moving data into a pdf it's tedious it's annoying and it's a waste of time and so la like any great entrepreneur he built a solution and that solution is called mo mo uses ai to automatically transfer data from any document into a pdf and so if you need to turn a supplier invoice into a customer quote or move info from an application into a contract you just put a file in into mo and it auto fills the output pdf in seconds and a little backstory for all the tech out there built the entire web app without using a line of code he used something called bubble io o they've added ai tools that i can generate an entire app from one prompt it's pretty amazing and it means you can build tools like mo very fast without knowing how to code and so if you're tired of copying and pasting between documents or paying people to do that for you check out mo dot ai i m o l k u dot a alright back to the pod alright so let's do i'll do eric gl so for those who don't know ramp is a company that does credit it's like a basically a credit card for startups they're worth something like ten billion dollars and i think they do eight hundred million in revenue eric who's the founder and ceo is thirty five years old and it's just absolutely breathtaking how fast they've built this company because i think the company is only four or five years old like it's brand new still and my biggest takeaway i had two takeaways the first is that he was so nice so if you google eric gl nice there's all these posts that talk about how nice this guy is but it's very you go home and do that did you google eric gl nice well i was like shirley everyone talks about like like he was the kind person i have ever met like when he looked at me it was like i was the only one in the world that mattered at that moment and like i talked to ari i go ari who only talked to him on the cell phone and i go ari was this guy the nicest guy you've ever met and he goes when he talked to me i fell in love like i like i wanted to keep talking to him he felt it felt like i was the only one that mattered to him at that moment and he did such a good job and like he wrote a follow up email and he wrote like i was truly blessed with by our conversation i i'm so thankful whatever he was so nice but what i found strange was you don't meet people who are nice and intense and so i asked him a question about something he goes look ramp is two thousand fifty three days old and we're only just now and i was like wait dude what did you just say he he goes yeah ramp is two thousand and fifty three days old and i was like you know exactly to the day how old rampant is he goes yeah of course like i'm trying to get this done by this amount of time like i know exactly to the day and i just want it very strange that you can be both incredibly intense at having a company and intense about life and also a very generous kind nice person those two things typically are not in the same package and so my big takeaway with eric was how you can be not a jerk you don't have to be you know a big like pumping your chest big ego highly confident guy you can be very soft you could be really kind but also a complete killer and savage it it's a weird dichotomy but you could be both yeah i talked to him before i think i told the story start before i bet i met him many years ago before we ever started ramp and also super sweet guy and then what they that the other thing i've said before is i can't believe ramp one in that same way because at the time i remember that b was b looked like the runaway winner it was the yc company it was based in instead silicon valley it had raised a bunch of money i think it launched earlier the ramp and it just seemed like ramp this company out of new york just seemed like the natural second place winner and instead ramp has crushed it and actually brexit is the second place winner in that space or third or whatever and he had a whole answer to that so most people when they start a company it's like it was cool or i had this problem or whatever he had a four point list where it was like well because i asked i asked the same question i was like you know was already around this was already around whatever and he's like well the frank dodd act or something like that was passed which meant this this and this and that also matt and then he had like it was a four point list and it was incredibly intentional and he's like i saw at capital one it took this many days to a approve an account i figured if we could reduce that to only seven point three days and since there's this many potential businesses in the world if we do that and we do this many businesses per day it was like incredibly detailed and exact and precise way which isn't typically how i think about building a company a lot of times it's like off energy or like vibes like this feels a certain way it he did not have that at all it felt like everything like and it it was very intense amazing alright let me do one now this is a more practical business one i'll was say was this with your brother yeah my brother lost chief okay so this episode i think i think this one will have come out already but in the middle of it he tells the story where okay so the the headline of this is this guy basically my brother has built a real estate portfolio he owns basically over a billion dollars of real estate that he accumulated in about ten years with no outside money and so no no sorry no like he had like lenders but no no investors at the time he's incredible he's just like an act absolute animal at what he does and i always knew he was smart and i always knew he was like really like ambitious and was like you know he's just a winner i and that part i know i've known the guy for ten plus years so like fact that you're as successful as you are and your your your second place to in neuro a family maybe third i think my wife's dad is a pretty amazing guy too so yeah he he he wins and in not not not just the success but the guy's a saint so yeah he wins it in his own way alright so what is it about this guy that i picked up so the the the short version of the story is he he goes to law school gets his nba first in interns with the lawyer so he's like working on actually the the scott peterson case like the least peterson or whatever and then he meets somebody but he also in turn he has two interested that's one he has second internship with a real estate guy he's like the real estate guys always you know he's he's at home at a good time he's in his kid's life he's got passive income like this seems like the better model i'll go towards that so he goes to real estate he has no money and so he can't buy any real estate so he starts off as a broker you know he does his first deal make sixty k but by the time he's like twenty five twenty six twenty seven he's making millions of dollars a year as a broker he would like he'd be like cool you got this empty space let me lease it for you you you wanna sell this let me buy let me be your buy side broker and your sell side broker and i'll lease it for you y'all get all three i'll bag all three commissions somewhere along the way he basically makes a and he's like yep this is where you know youth ketchup up youth and like you know ego catches up with you so there's one guy who's like ex he's like a jack in the box franchise so he's he's got like i don't know thirty jack in the boxes or something like that and so my brother loves and g is doing deal after deal with him and so finally the guys is like at some point instead of just leasing the place to him but the guy would say i wanna be over there so he say okay cool i'll buy it i'll build it for you and then i'll sell it to you so i'll i'll buy i'll develop it and i'll sell it to you and the guy like i want these twenty locations so he goes and he he takes out fifteen million dollars of debt to go by twenty locations like you know three days after it closes you know that guy gets pop for like he didn't pay his payroll taxes or something he goes to jail my brother law's on the he bought he borrowed fifteen million dollars and now has these twenty locations or whatever that need to be jack in the boxes that the deed is tied to that guy's name that guy's now in jail he can't develop them so he's basically kinda screwed and you know he doesn't want declare bankruptcy so he decides he's gonna try to pay off fifteen million dollars even though he has nothing and so he's like okay how do i do this so he's he's just like depressed and his wife is like you know what like i don't know have i've ever seen you like this you need to go to the gym i don't know what we're gonna do in business but just go to the gym so that you you know get out of this fun and he goes to the gym and while when he's there he this guy he he always used to see working out there at night he used to work out like eleven or midnight at night because like after work he would go there but today he went there in the daytime because he you know doesn't have shit else to do and the guy who he always sees working out i was like behind the desk he's like y you work here he's like yeah dude i own the place he's like what he's like hey hey he's like yeah come check out the the office and then when he's there the guy's tells him like he's ready to sell he actually wants to sell the business and my brother works out a deal to basically buy the business from the guy with no money down because a little bit of money down he pawn his wife's wedding ring and they go all in you they're at this point they're living in their like parents like they're his old childhood bedroom and they owed fifteen million dollars and they're like i don't know how we're gonna get out of this pickle but i'm gonna basically i'll use the cash flow from this gym to just pay the monthly thing we owe and then we'll try to open up a second gym maybe and we'll figure out how we do this anyways he ends up building like the largest private gym chan eighty two gyms in california otherwise her brother law like really is he jacked yeah he he he was one of the first like indian body builders basically in college he was gonna go pro and then like you know but he decided not to like go full on but yeah he he was he was huge before he's big now basically like go this is this is the deflate version of me i like wow that's that's crazy so again whatever this guy chooses he does with like crazy intensity so with real estate i'm like so how does you okay all all that you told me so far is the gym business like how'd you do the real estate side so this is the business lesson so he's like you know along the way when i would go lease these gyms i realized i had a little bit of leverage right i'm coming in i'm as the like the the big tenant in the shopping center and so i just added to the lease an option to buy and he's like i just added a a a no risk option whereas i have the option to buy within five years or whatever i can buy this at four million dollars and at the time that sounded like a high price for the guys the guy had no problem putting it in free option and he's like by the way i have no money and no plans of how i would ever buy this place but why not why not take an asymmetric bet where i have no downside but i have possible upside and so his start in real estate was he's working at the gym that a guy comes in to buy the building and the guy assumes that he owns the building which he didn't and he's like we would make an offer somewhere around the ballpark of seven million dollars oh got it and so he's like oh amazing and he's like cool i have an option to buy this before but i don't have any money so i actually cannot physically buy this but i'll do a double escrow so if you agree to buy it on this date basically he's like i'll sell this to you for seven i'll take the seven i'll give this guy four so i'll own the place and then i'll buy this and then i'll sell you this thing and i'll keep three million dollars of my profit it's the old the hey mom says i can go if you say yes or she'll say yes you just say yes yes alright exactly and so he got his the entire empire that he built was because he baked in one asymmetric bet one no risk option i thought that was kind of inspiring like you know and he by the way he probably had ten of that didn't pan out but the the one that did got him his start he took that three million dollars and then he used that to to buy and buy and flip buy and flip by and flip by somebody he compounded that over ten years into a billion dollars of real estate from that one option and i thought that was just like an incredible lesson i takeaway to have and and by the way now so i invest with him now so i'm able to like it's probably my biggest investment of the past two years has been investing in his deals and i'm just getting incredible returns and one of the reasons why is because he keeps doing the same model so he just he's the master of der risking so he goes into a that's let's say there's a a shopping center with like you know two big vacancies so he'll while he's putting it under purchase contract he already has leased it he has a signed lease and signed purchase contract so the same day we buy he has the tenant in place and he sells the thing and so we get these incredible returns because he's d risking all these properties so far in advance it's like a such a like the same it's like you know you find one unfair advantage and then you just keep playing it does have an awesome house oh yeah crazy house is this house as crazy real estate guys always have obviously amazing houses there there's one other little hack that he had that i liked i i think this is another tidbit i think people can take so i was like when he's doing these things i'm like dude how do you do this like you were buying these properties they're you know maybe there's a vacancy or whatever and like how are you cutting these deals beforehand to get them you know oh i know the buyer trader joe's i know the buyer at whatever chipotle i know the buyer at the the the real estate guy at this place and i'll get it under contract and he's was like it's he always just said this vague work oh know real estate a relationship business and i i hate answers like that that sound like general and so i dug in with him i was i was like tell me how you approach this idea of relationships and he he said this great thing he was like you know if you think about the word commercial real estate it sounds like this vast universe like this huge industry right he's like the trick is how do you make a big thing feel small like how do you break it down into an achievement like into a chunk that you can actually you know you can actually digest so he's like kind of he's like one day i sat down with piece paper and i realized alright who do i who's my ideal person to know he's like well it's a national retailer who's still expanding and growing and they don't wanna own their own real estate because i'm a developer i wanna own the real estate i wanna lease it to them and he's like once i did that i realized this it's actually like i don't know a hundred and fifty names and he's like i took this big idea of commercial real estate felt like a ocean and he's like i turned it into like a little goldfish pond a hundred and fifty he's like i could i could fit a hundred fifty people in this room i could meet a hundred and fifty people over the next two years if i tried and i could form a relationship with them and i could they i get so that they know me and i know them and they'll call me and i'll call them when we have something that fits and that's literally what he did and i just thought that was like a great like i don't know how i don't know where else you could do that in other businesses but i suspect that that idea of taking something big but then of ref framing it and in realizing it's actually much smaller and more achievable than you think is is probably something that applies to a lot of businesses is he a billionaire or a billionaire ish i was at like ugh not not not there himself right because you know if you own a billion dollars real estate in his case i like forty percent or fifty percent is equity and the other half is like debt so you know on paper you know that's whatever that's let's say five hundred million dollars i don't i'm i don't know his actual thing to be clear but like hundreds of millions of dollars net worth of the six people that we talked about five of them are there or give or take park we give or take their and i just think that that's i think it's crazy i think it's crazy i don't know how many billionaires are in the world five or ten thousand i'm not sure whatever is like forbes heads i would like multiply it by like some number and it's crazy that over the past ten days we hung out with five of them or something like that and get to learn from these people and again i don't i i'm almost embarrassed when i say to name my first million because what i tell people i'm like you know it's actually is not always about money it's actually about like things greater than that and because i do think life's richer than just money but it is interesting to be able to rub shoulders with people who are in the point zero zero one percent of their field and it's it's lucky yeah and also like i think now we're a little bit like oh you know it's not about the money but like us ten years ago very much about money main goals was like y get that money get that money and then figure out the money doesn't make you have won't look sure i believe you it's not the end be all but i still want it i'm still even gonna try to get it i'm still gonna try to make awesome definitely exactly it definitely seems pretty great to have but i'd rather have it than not have it and so you know i think as much as we're like oh you know like i think both are true like it is true that there's a lot more to life but also to these people and like you know you pick up a bunch of different things but also it is kinda crazy to to to make that happen and it's fun also to make that happen you know if if if business is your sport well howard are points tallied they're tallied in dollars right there's a guy i don't pay attention to golf but i'm sure you do but do you know scott is it s sc he won what did you win this weekend the us open open yeah i don't know how about sports but i know that i saw like his one year old kid like crawling up the green to give him a how gonna kiss after he won so i guess scott like one he set the trophy on the ground and his kid crawls up to to to play with the trophy and nike took out this amazing ad the best at ever it was a two page ad or two like swipe on instagram the first one it says a picture of scott holding his son and it says you've already won and then the second slide is but another major doesn't hurt doesn't hurt and i think that's that's kind of like the takeaway here is like yeah it feels good to like i i won already like i have a lovely family i feel secure it don't hurt to you know sixty succeed a little more and i thought that was such a great ad and i thought that was kind of a representation of this episode that was a beautiful ad one it oh my god like nike is at the top of its game and it does stuff like that yeah that was pretty good alright that was a good episode that's it that's the pod i feel like i could rude world to 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 my friends i have a new podcast for you guys to check out it's called content is profit and it's hosted by luis and ph ka after years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like red bull and orange theory fitness luis and fans are on a mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue in each episode you're gonna hear from top entrepreneurs and creators and you're gonna hear him share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit so you can check out content is profit wherever you get your

ten years ago this guy owned zero dollars of real estate and today he's got a portfolio of about a billion and a half dollars and he did that with no outside investors just starting from scratch one property after another flipping flipping flipping compounding until he built a billion dollar portfolio he's also my brother all and i've known the guy for ten years i've been asking him to come on the podcast and he likes to keep a low profile but finally he agreed to come on and tell his story and the story is a little bit crazy he started off as a broker ends up making a few million dollars doing deals as a broker and then gets caught holding the bag when one of his clients i don't wanna say screw him over but leaves him holding the bag and he ends up fifteen million dollars in debt and instead of declaring bankruptcy he decides to try to pay it all back piece by piece by piece he does he pays it all back and he ends up with a billion dollar plus real estate portfolio using a very specific strategy so in this episode i asked him how he did it to tell that story and to explain the strategy and his approach to real estate because it's a little bit different than anybody else so enjoy this episode with my brother love s aka the rhino of real estate i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a less travel never looked back my brother we're here your story is a roller coaster you have crazy highs complete lows where you lose at all and then rebound build back up twenty times bigger than the first time so i wanna go into that story so today you are sitting here you've got a collection of real estate assets that you've built up over the last ten years that's now how big roughly a little about billion and a half in total billion and half so one point five billion today and that's really in kind of just a decade so i wanted to go through the steps of how you got there so what where did the career start you in the name of the podcast my first million right right how you made your first million yeah i you know for me it started i i went to the law school did an nba did you plan to be a lawyer you thought i was full set and being a lawyer you know went to law school worked for a very famous layer mark ga out of la he we were working the scott peterson case and it was very intriguing you know in criminal incremental law when i met my my now wife or my wife she was very much me against me being lawyer for some reason she was always programmed that you know you're gonna you're gonna you're gonna do certain things to win cases so we'd always talked about know gonna work for lawyer for five years and then i'm getting real estate okay she goes why do you need to why do you need to work for five years why don't you just do it man me thinking think like oh wow that's a different thought yeah i don't have a answer to that got it you know so i ended up opening a real estate brokers office went back to my hometown where i grew up town modest and opened up this you know real estate brokers license and i had small hundred foot office and a phone start calling people trying to understand the market and really i think my first high came when i sold my first building i called someone and actually i needed to grow in my office and i called this person and i hey what if i lease your office we let me sell your office bill he said yes if you lease it i'll let you sell so if you become a tenant you could be the broker when you got it i i i never had a was that planned or it just happened to be that way no i i know those was planned it was kind of just like you know sometimes you never asking you never know right right and so at that moment i had asked it was an older and i sold sold the building for them quite fast and i made sixty grand and from there i started you know doing real estate brokerage i started understanding and i started meeting different tenants in in retail you know i was working for jack in the box auto own dp different tenants that i would help get them spaces for now tell me because today you're of real estate developer but this essentially you started as a broker i think many brokers want to become developers it rarely gets to the scale that you got to right what were you like as a broker are you just dialing for dollars what were you doing i mean yeah gosh man i would i would be knocking on doors i'd be calling i you know i i learned early on that if you don't ask you don't get right and so it was no real like shame in my game it was kinda like you know it's just like hey i'll ask and so you know oftentimes we'd be going to anywhere whether we go to an indian party whether we go anywhere it's was growing up i'd what do you do how do you do it oh you own your doctor oh you in this office building would you ever sell it right no but i'll lease it great i'll take on the leasing business anything to anything at that point to build up my cv resume up of things that i was able to get done right and so i felt kind of into a a deal with a jack and box operator and you know this person was probably the first person in my life that ever you know i would call i thought was a mentor or even like a father figure okay my dad was a little bit different and i kinda drank the ko aid and so i started doing really well because what would happen is i have this relationship with these jack box guys and i know where they wanna go i didn't have the money to do it myself because i was just starting out so what i would do is i would basically do development in a box i would go and i would find the property i get the tenant and i go to another developer and i'd say hey give me the buy sale lease commission give me all three i'll manage the process for you then as time went on i started to manage their construction process i didn't have the money to do it but i was doing it and that went really well for me until the jack box operator you know basically didn't pay their payroll taxes you know kinda fell and dire straits and you know a week before maybe let's say three days before we're supposed to close a big deal and i was gonna make my first ten million not even my first million just on the commissions from the buy sale lease on or so what had happened was we started buying property with these guys buying it so in essence we would buy it we do all the work and then they would buy it later on using their lines of credit right and so what happened was this this person that we were developing for was the largest jack and the locks franchise in sacramento and then what ended up happening was they didn't pay their payroll taxes but you had bought it on spec thinking this guy's he's good for it he'll take it off me yeah and i still remember it's funny i i would sit there at night and you know though there's an old rule you know people said never count your money but i man i would be looking at that sheet every night yeah baby well let's go you know because you're taking a big risk and yeah you know at that time i didn't understand the risk but you know at that it was a big risk i look back now and i said wow that was you know i think i borrowed with like fifteen million dollars how are you able to borrow fifteen million dollars at the time i mean it was all private lending you know i'd i went to private lenders you know when you when you come out of school you get a w two or ten ninety nine i was ten nine was a broker banks didn't under underwriting it right the banks looked at it and said oh you went from this to this wow how we don't understand understand it we don't understand it right and so you know as they don't understand it then all of a sudden you know you're like oh okay well where's my options and so we had you know we had everything kind of lined up and you know literally three days before were supposed to close and we were we were getting ready to close and you know this person's not in their phone person would talk to me daily they would call me the were first person my life to ever call me son right you i i was i drank the ko aid harder than anybody and then you know this happened where they where they ended up getting in trouble and you know could put the deals kinda got soft right how many did you have it was ten total so you committed to ten you borrow almost fifteen million dollars you're ready to make your first ten million bucks you're looking at the sheet every night three days before the guy gets pop for whatever he was doing outside of what you guys were doing together yeah and now you owe this money and there's no way up because you signed it you're you're you're in the contract base no we bought property and we we owed the debt of the money of you we we we spent the money it was there and so you know i still remember you know and and this is where the low start right i still remember you know going home to my wife and you know three days i cry you know literally crying grown man just like tears coming out of my on my eyes and my wife says you know look you always like to work out san like go to the gym get out of the house go to the gym and so normally i used to go to the gym at like nine ten o'clock at night and there'd be two three guys in there you work out you know the gym was always an interesting atmosphere because you have no clue who the other guy is right it could be you know homeless he could be a billionaire you know nobody asked you hey what do you doing in gym right hey bro let me can i get a spot and me help you so there was a guy i used to work out with that nighttime and there there'd be very few of us in the gym and so we would always say hey how are you we talk about life but we had i generally had no clue who he was or what he did and so this random day we walk in i walk in the gym at two o'clock and this sky standing behind the front desk i look at them and i say what are you doing today behind the desk he said oh come into my office you got an office there i so a manager he owned the place he owned the place he was the owner and he's actually said hey i'm trying to sell this place alright so i've built a few companies that have made a few million dollars a year and i've built two companies that have made tens of millions of dollars a year and so i have a little bit of experience launching building creating new things and i actually don't come up with a lot of original ideas instead what i'm really really good at what my skill set is is researching different ideas different gaps in the market in reverse engineering companies and i did invent this by the way we this guy brad jacobs i guess we talked him about on the podcast he started like four or five different publicly traded companies where tens of billions of dollars each he actually is the one who i learned how to do this from and so with the team at hubspot we put together all of my research tactics frameworks techniques on spotting different opportunities in the market reverse engineering companies and figuring out exactly where opportunities are versus just coming up with a random silly idea and throwing it against the wall and hoping that it sticks and so if you wanna to see my framework you can check it out the link is below in the youtube description i grew up body building at a young age and so i was always you know very fascinated by the fitness business i was a trainer when i was in college and you know for it was like oh my gosh you know and i asked him makes does it make money yeah i says yeah nets thirty thousand dollars a month like oh quickly i'm starting to think alright i can do my real estate i can buy this gym i can do all is still while you're on the hook for the jack of the boxes i am all the way on the hook is and and how long of a period did you have to like kind of resolve this we what what was your plan you're gonna start open up jack about what were you gonna do i couldn't open up jack in the boxes because i went to jack box corporate and i recorded a deed restriction on these properties so basically i recorded something before closing again you learn later on in life right never do that but you you know and and so i was kinda stuck with this could only be that it could only be that and that was what that it was a random deed restriction that we had did created and and i couldn't get it off because the guy was still alive yeah so i couldn't quit claim it i couldn't do certain things it was kind of a very unique situation right and so you know so i in essence i bought the gyms to pay for my real estate and then you know the first month then you know i still remember wait so how how'd you buy the gym so the guy says it's betting thirty rent a month guy says i'm netting thirty grand a month i need to get out of this he says you know i i have a big tax bill so i don't wanna get paid up upfront how about you take it on and pay me over time okay oh okay paying his home pissed alright i i went home i asked my wife says you know hey i wanna buy the gym we work out and she laughed you know no way and then thirty days later sure enough we bought the gym right and needless say she doesn't laugh in anything i tell her we're gonna right now she's you know who bought the gym in thirty days in you know i i go to the bookkeeper and i'm like hey where's my check yeah where's thirty grand where's the money yeah let's go and she says actually you need to write check for twenty two thousand i said what twenty two thousand dollars how right i was gonna make thirty at least give me fifteen you know what's and so she just she showed me did you not diligence the thing at the time i didn't understand how to read a profit a profit and loss there's a difference between cash and cruel and right all these things that you show and you know he had slim it down not to show every manager right he showed it you know and not in a bad way he just showed it the way that he literally him thought yeah yeah that's what he saw i wasn't what it was actually there so how old are you at this time roughly i am twenty eight this thousand eight and there was a period of time so the way my wife tells us her so we're brother you're my brother with the way what my wife tells the story is you start dating her sister yep and you're this guy that comes out of nowhere you are like this hotshot real estate guy young right like i think you're pretty twenty five twenty six you're twenty five twenty six and you were making millions dollars of broker which is not common correct like you must have been a top top performer is that fair i mean i know what you had that time i was i mean you know and you're buying nice gifts that you're living this great life and when the jack of the box thing happened at some point i don't maybe i don't know if you've got to this part of the story at some point you're like you have to move back to your to the parents house yeah you have to move back into your childhood bedroom is that already happened or am i jumping in the this is actually so what happened was you know basically you know at long story short we're paying for the real estate i have to go become the general manager of store and we didn't have enough money to pay everybody so my wife ends up becoming the zoom instructor and you know know this and and so she's teaching like you know she been teaching thirty forty classes a week maybe more and she was great at it but you know or just at the gym all day long in order to pay for our stuff you know we went from a range rover to afford fusion right and we we we got out of our house to pay for pay again we're paying the bills we were always like let's pay right and so we then ended up at my my childhood high school room and i still remember this the first night and my wife was a little bit upset you know we went from this standard down to this you know naturally you know it was it was a it was a very big culture shock right and what i didn't tell you was that in order for us to buy the gyms and not a lot of people know i had to come up with a little down yeah my wife pawn her wedding ring for us to buy the gyms so she's a writer die when you talk about a rider dialect that girl's been with me through at all and so by the way are these because i know her and but i don't know her back then her idea your idea you're like hey you know only there was a way we could come up with this one how did that conversation guy i know it was definitely not her idea but you know she got on board with it fairly fast and she understood that if we fail we failed together and if we the we feast we feast together right and so you know at that point we were feast or famine right we're either gonna be able to try to figure out how to eat or we're starving here and you know and and in life you know it was a it was a big up and a big dump because you know you're twenty seven we're driving a brandon range rover we're living in an eight hundred thousand dollar house this is amazing you know she's got a nice fancy everything on the outside look great on the inside we have owe owe all these people money right who who do you go to by way when this stuff's going down do you because you didn't you're not a big mentor network guy like you you've always been a lone wolf as long as i've known you really win shit's hit in the fan obviously you telling your wife but how did you try to get out of the pickle because that's a unbelievable amount of money to oh you owed fifteen million dollars i mean and and you know honestly i was crying in the fetal position at home my wife just literally said get out of here shut up i have this story i tell my kids the light bulb story right and what it is is i'll plug in a light bulb for my kids a lamp and i'll just turn the bulb a hair and the bulb turns off and i asked my kids i said what what does this mean to you and my kids look at me they're young wrong means that success is just this much forward the difference between a successful light and a broken light is a hair and so i always had that kind of mentality you know i'm almost there i'm might not always been there right but my mentality oh baby i was let's go i mean you know that was and so we we lay down at night and we turned the light off when we're the first night back and we look up and in my age group i'm a little older than you we used to do these stars and like stickers all the door the glow in the dark turn off in the the whole world appears and we turn off the light and we hadn't stayed in this room for you know forever we just we had our own place and we both just start laughing out loud and i told her you know i said give me nine months give me nine months i'll figure it out and you know the switch kinda clicked for me then you made a promise i made a promise i gotta stick to it you know it's almost like when people take a a a weight loss challenge right right i've got a reason to do it this is my timeline let's do it but i have no plan yet or you have a plan or not well i you know i i said i'm gonna grow the gyms yeah right i i i had i'd we started to turn it around the first one and then we're like let's open up a second one and you know we we ended up being able to build a second store it took us a long time it took us a little bit and it takes about a year and you know we we just started working harder and and honestly like i just you know i would go to the gym if we need to pay a bill i would go to gym and sell memberships myself i'd some nights work till midnight till we close you know we were twenty four hour in the first storm so i would just if i needed need if i needed to get it we had to go get it and we we lived very very you know within our means you know we would i still remember we would share food for probably about five years we wouldn't go anywhere and eat you know two meals right there would be one meal she would eat whatever's left i would eat and you know vice versa to some nights you know don't get me wrong there was times when you know i eat first but most of the time it was sharing and trying to get there and so as we started to build the gyms up that's when we started getting back to like okay we're paying everybody good things are happening let's go could you not just declare bankruptcy with the jack in the box situation to at least get to zero again i could've have and that may have been the smarter path you know i went to law school so you know my law school professor was always like you know bankruptcies a immoral no it's not right you know but but you know these thoughts are putting your head in life that you know you don't know where it came from by the way spoiler here is you end up creating i think at one point the largest gym chain in california northern california we were one of the largest we were definitely the largest private operator we didn't have partners so we ended up getting to eighty two stores and we were growing the business and we had done some really smart moves along the way i would option properties which we can talk about right do certain things in our leases that we just started learning and we built a great culture we had almost two thousand employees and it was a fun run cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty impossible but that's exactly what sandler training did with hubspot they use breeze hubspot ai tools to tailor every customer interaction without losing their personal touch and the results were incredible click through rates jumped twenty five percent qualified leads quadruple and people spent three times longer on their landing pages go to hubspot dot com to see how breeze could help your business grow so the brick by brick is the first one the guy basically says paving as you go give me a little down payment you pawn the wedding ring you get the down payment yep you turned that gym you thought it was profitable turns out really wasn't the cash flow really wasn't there you start to squeeze it by working asshole great a year later you get the second store give me a sense because i've never owned a jim a gym like this you know what do they what do they net like f go to a if i see a gym around the corner i think these were gold gyms at the time yeah we went to five with gold and then and then you create your own concept then we create our own concept and then so give be a typical like a gold gym what are these things make revenue profit roughly i mean it depends on the gold gym if you're in gold gym la which was kinda like the mecca they're making eight to ten million a store you know and and the gym revenue or gross revenue i mean jim is a fixed cost business once you've paid your employees and your rent and your lights doesn't really go up right i mean what may vary is if you do personal training it may vary on certain services but generally it's a fixed cost business so you wanna get to a certain number of members and then after that everything is profit and so it's a higher margin business you know most people you know jim said at one point where forty percent profit margin now it probably say they're closer to twenty twenty five because labor has increased and membership prices haven't increased as much as maybe they could or should but there's also a lot of competition right there's only so much pie in every corner or every other corner there's jim's being opened up so what did you figure out what did you do differently that let you build this eighty two store chain well we started out gold gym operators and you know we realized the gold gym was a body builder model you know there was people that were come in the gym they work out for three hours a day heavy protein you know people are fart germs sitting there for you know and might be the worst type of customer to yeah they abuse your weights then you know they but they use it right and then you look you know you start to look at this model called planet fitness where they're signing up fifteen thousand people at a low price and when we were in the gym business they were just coming up and and so we wouldn't and saw one understand man this is actually interesting they were serving pizza and bagels things that we just never even like understood like why now we understand it's because people will come any eat pizza twice a month or every week and they'll get their nine ninety nine worth right so they were they were they were smarter than most they were already ahead of the game and we then started seeing other brands like we said oh gold has some good stuff and so we started combining the models to create our own model and we created basically a large box high volume low price model with classes and group training and we basically combine gold gym and orange theory and a planet fitness all in one and in that process we started doing really well did you figure out any great insights along the way like you know my first business was a restaurant business and restaurant business location really really matters one thing we figured out very quickly was chipotle spends i don't know forty million dollars you're figuring out the best locations to be you could just go go to ever go try to get next to every chipotle is actually just like now you spend zero but you get the benefit of all of their locations scouting right we figured out that you could look at the receipts and if you understood how to read the code you would know how many customers this chipotle gets versus this one so i could even compare within that which location is better than the other right so like we started getting a little smarter about how to play the game better were there any moments like that for you in the gym business that you you start to figure out maybe how to pick up members faster or you know how to take the average value of a customer from ten dollars a month to up upsell them in some interesting way do you any any good business insights from that you know what we did was we create a really unique referral mechanism and so what we did was we we realized people love things for free right i mean a lot of the people i've heard talk on your podcast it's like give them a deal that they can't ever say no to right and i i i think that's always a great business tool of keeping the back of your mind and you're starting anything or doing anything so you know we created this me and john who's my it was my coo and and like family to me he's been with me a long time and we sat in a room and we're talking back and forth what what would make a member wanna refer someone and john said you know joking give it to for free you know i said yes that's what we're gonna do and so we're like how do we do that and so we're like alright well sean's is paying you know let's say this for every person sean refers that joins he could get a dollar office dues and so in that process sean is thirty dollars a month or twenty dollars a month sean has referred twenty twenty dollar month for that twenty dollars and we found that our members like when we did our sales we said hey sean you know our membership is thirty nine nine nine but you can get it for free would you like to know how you get it for free people be like yeah great just refer your friends your family your coworkers anybody you want here's the pass we're gonna write your name on it sean how many passes you want sean i want i want forty because i'm paying forty dollars right great and now when they sign up they come in and give us sean's pass we would we would connect it to their membership sean dues would now go down by a dollar it was amazing what we saw where people were so motivated even for a dollar that worked and it was amazing for people for even for like you know because you'd have people that would go down from forty to zero and all of a sudden two people quit so their memberships now two bugs who the two people you know and you're like well okay just start shaking people down start calling people and like how did you how did you get out of the i mean i watched it happen myself so we created this referral concept that was really good and you know that kind of escalated us and then we started to realize look we gotta as we grew the gyms right we we learned what we did right and we learned what we did wrong for example like you know we would build pools in some of our gyms well there's nothing wrong with having a pool but the reality is you're gonna have two to three maybe four people in at a time it's gonna take ten thousand square feet right six thousand it's ten thousand square feet that's a lot of footage for four people right and so we started just realizing what our model was as we went forward and then we just decide okay we're gonna give a great value at a great price and then we're gonna incentivize you to refer people right and it works so how long did it take you to get out of the holes so the initial mistake was big fast forwarded in two thousand eleven k i now have twelve gyms and i'm with cold jim twelve goals gym two thousand eleven i had bought some property and one property i had i paid four million dollars k i owed seven fifty i've been paying them every month at thirteen percent for three years and so i go to this lender i actually went to high school with this guy's granddaughter and they were good old boys from where i grew up you know and i went to them and i said hey look if i give you fifty thousand dollars and for me fifty thousand at that time was all i had right will you rewrite my note and give me another year and change my interest rate because i'm now starting to climb up on the cash right and and my my sales i have twelve gyms they're all doing well and so the guy said sure chop bring us to fifty thousand dollar cashier check tomorrow said okay let me have my lawyer draft up a dog you don't trust us chop you need a lawyer and again no mentor no coach go get the fifty thousand cashier check bring it in put it on their desk two weeks later i get a fore foreclosure notice now and call them what's going on so oh well we think this property's worth four million dollars so we're gonna take it from whoa so in the initial time i start calling around and and then i go to gold gym the next week i go and the guy has now passed away but he's a president of gold gym at the time and i go in and there's this big gold convention every year but there's was vegas la san diego it was at the time was in vegas i still remember i went met with them and i said hey look i've opened up twelve stores in three years you know i'd like to open up fifty and he laughed i'm a afraid you can't open up fifty we can't even open up fifty he said but look i'll do you a favor so you can have open up a gym for every time you have one million dollars in the bank so you wanna open up fifty show me fifty million remember fifty thousand for me was so i have this franchise green and so i called this lawyer really trying to save the property right i called but somebody i knew from law school and said hey man i got this property you know can i sue the lender what can i do and we're not really in the lawsuit type of thing about at that point and so to fall bankruptcy i said no tomorrow i can't do it and then we started looking at the benefits at the time we were paying everybody and you know long story short we ended up file chapter eleven we were able to re brand we paid everybody a hundred cents on the dollar that was secured and we started growing the gyms after that and and in the process we we we reorganized our life we paid all the the all the people we all the fifteen million we owed we pay with interest but that also built me on the next round that we'll talk about right i i i was i was very like some of those lenders are still great friends to today where i can pick up the phone and call and say hey we're from the bay area like so i called them and said hey can i get alone i just called one and they said yeah we'll do it for you in harp you don't need anything no we know you stood behind and so you know so we started building the gyms and we started building more gyms and then really we had no real estate at this point we had sold their house we'd had sold our cars we just had gyms we were just a gym operator and i think by two thousand and fifteen we gotten into to about thirty three stores and besides some life like i wanna get back into real estate and but i didn't have i didn't have the seed cap but real estate was always capital intensive and so i looked through my portfolio and sure enough i remembered i option that second gym in oak so i basically used that option to buy the center and then i sold it to someone else based on my new lease sorry so to explain how this works so what i if i've never done real estate understand how this option buys out what do you mean what you what in our lease we put this option let's say you're mister seller right and we say mister seller we have the right to buy this at we'll rent it for now correct but we have the right to buy at a defined price correct okay at at this defined time okay and in order for us to do that we just have to tell you we're buying it and we have sixty days ninety days to close right so we knew there was a buyer who wanted to buy gyms and do other stuff in the market broker approached us and said hey would you sell this they didn't know i didn't own it right but they said would you sell it and i said actually you know and so we had option that it like i think it was like three or four million bucks we sold it at seven million and so you knew risk free in a way because you have the option to buy at a defined price you already know there's a buyer lined up so you're not speculating as much as long as you believe that they would close that they would actually buy the thing yeah and there's no engineer's risk because if that buyer blows out i didn't have the money to buy thing anyway those you know so but you mean you did like a double escrow base basic in essence we did a double escrow and we made you know several million dollars and we're like wow and so now that i've invested with you you do this a bunch and it is like the the two sweetest swirl and thing this is like which are double escrow which basically is like we agree to buy a thing but before we even have to take the money out of our pocket we sell it so the same day they asked us for the money we just take the money from this guy we give them their their share weak pocket the profits yeah you bought the thing and sold the thing on the same day without ever having to take the money out of your pocket beautiful and you've done you do this all the time that's great yeah get you know we i'll do a deal with you and you're like by the time we get to buy this we're already gonna have sold ten million seven million dollars worth of the equity you know because we already have buyers lined up yeah and so you did this for the so that's how you did your first deal that's how i i'm my first seed money to buy real estate and then i just started buying and flipping for you know for years and you were doing it the same way gym options or no that was just like that did a few gym options that i did a few gym sales then i got enough money to go buy a property and build a gym and then i ended up hooking up with this company called harbor freight tools and so as i started getting into fifteen sixteen we started getting the higher number of gyms we're like sixty five seventy we bought this building in san francisco yeah remember on markets street street yeah one two three four markets i think you actually came there the vanity the address i remember it's thinking you got one two three four market i was yeah no and and there was you know every everyday we go up pick up the needles that were outside it was it was crazy but you know like at that time we had a store there and in a non nonprofit a mosque you know approached us and said we'd like to put our church here and we negotiated a deal and we said well we wouldn't make that money and probably like ten years running a years of running the gym so we sold it and then you know like we're like oh wow made some money here and as i was building my next door somebody from harbor freight tools randomly called me and said we'd like to we'd like to lease that box so go home and tell my wife what do you think you know i wanna build this gym i'm used to building all these gems she's just why don't she just do it right and so we did it and we ended up building a very big relationship there i'm a big relationship guy a lot of the tenants we work with with worked for years and we ended up doing over a hundred for those guys as time went on but but yeah just kinda kind of evolved this time went on and then we got to seventeen and you know my dad was not really the i won't say bad things but he wasn't a loving type a little bit abusive a lot abusive at times but you know he was just a different character so you know my thing was whenever i have kids you know we can't change the past but we can sure as hell changed the future right yesterday gone but tomorrow has not been written yet and so i kinda always have that philosophy but i wanted to be a great dad but during this time from two thousand eight to two thousand and probably sixteen i work seven days a week probably eighty to a hundred hours every week i mean i would get up at five thirty and being the gyms and then i come home by midnight i'd come home every night just wanna see my wife and kids and i'm thinking i'm doing a good job because i'm busting my butt but i'm still you know i'm still trying but my table was wobbly you know we talked about this i know give the table of metaphor so i always have this belief that there's three your life is like there's three legs to a table right your your your family your job and your faith and your faith doesn't have to be god it could be your faith and fitness it could be your faith in the way you eat it could be the faith the way you treat people a code it's a code you live by it's whatever you believe your faith is in for you to feel like you are foundational sound well if any one of those legs you know let's say my job is strong but my family life is weak what happens the tape it wobble remember my faith may be weak and my job may be strong my table wobble and so for me i was you know i was working a lot i was making money it was a great relationship with my wife but one day i'm driving home from this from santa maria i had a gym in santa maria was probably on the coast it was probably gosh i'd say four hundred miles from my house three four and i would drive in the morning and i would come back the same night i'd i go train i go meet the managers i'd walk my store i wanted to see and touch and feel and anyways my my second son chase your nephew calls me crying hysterical it's mom on the phone my wife gets on the phone honey what's he saying and she's crying says you know he's really misses you and he wants you to come visit he doesn't think you live at home and i'm going home every night on purpose right like i'm driving four hundred mile i'm like i'm gonna be there i think i'm being a good dad you know i'm kissing him every night and i'm i'm watching them i you know and and so the whole day it didn't sit right with me and that's when i decided for myself i said i'd built this great business but i can't do this long term because for me to do it right or the way i wanted to do it i was unable to do it and be a good father and so that kinda changed my path of where i started focusing more on real estate right and the type of real estate you do because real estate the big word brand word it could be anything you do shopping centers mostly you've done other stuff too but now you do retail shopping centers yeah and as a tech guy and so we can valley that always felt super random like like retail shopping center is like okay oh you're you're like at archaeologist you do dinosaur things thank i get it yeah like yeah what are you talking about dude like but it's this incredible and now i invest i invested a ton of money with you because i'm like blown away by this but so so and just explain kinda like even just the space you this the sandbox you play in why you play in that sandbox like you know what's your model what do you do you know two thousand ten all the news was retail dying you know but what it really did was the insulated retail because what happened after two thousand ten people started building way more multi family storage industrial but they didn't build retail shopping centers no they built these pads a lot more post covid because what happened in covid right you were closed unless you gotta drive through right and so those businesses that had to drive through they crushed you and as time went on you know there's been a lot of retailers that have left it's no doubt but retail has sustained and it's kinda become a supply and demand thing where it's like you know and what we are is we're value add retailers so we're developer so basically what we do is we find things that we feel we can add value to whether it's new tenants whether it's breaking it up and selling in pieces whether it's construction we always have a game plan to go in and do something you know and i often get asked why didn't the other guy do it right why the guy before you do it i don't know you know sometimes it's just there and sometimes people just been in a project too long i give you times i've times there's some times i've been in a project for five six years and i'm like i just wanna be done right right and then there's been projects i've been in for five minutes and i'm like let's go it it just happens in that in this business and so you know we built a lot of good relationships with a lot of tenants and you know the good part is that we can email these tenants or their brokers within you know we buy we're looking at a center we can we can find out generally who wants to be give a sense of what good looks like in real estate what have you been able to do in your track record you know i i typically what i we see is we see people trying to compare or you know match the s and p or kinda be standard you know seven eight percent a year they get some depreciation you know and they're happy they're diversified they're diversified they you know they can do certain things and and we're more we target for our folks now mid twenties to low thirties irr annually and in order for us to get there we actually have to go do something you went from having zero zero real estate assets to over a billion dollars in real estate assets in ten years how do you do that don't we all wanna know i i mean i think you have to find someone who's already kinda figured out that game and kinda run with them i would say i'd also say that like it's it's compounding you know it's you buy one deal and you sell it you made some money now it's when you do it again and again and again and again and again and so in our business i was able to compound it by doing it again and again and again and again and again for many years and so i would tell anybody who's young like you know you're gonna start with something right and then you you gotta figure out how to make that make money and move on to the next because if you stick to just one there's a lot of people out there have one building they enjoy it but they didn't it to really get to where they could have you you'd also told me one of the deals we did you know i'm learning about this as you and you're like oh we're buying the center and you're like there's a so and so grocery store and one of the reasons we're getting this price is that that grocery store they only have like a year left on their lease but they have an option to extend it like twelve or fifteen years but they you know they're not picking it up because they don't have to yet they one or two years left right now and i was like okay so what's the plan like i'm gonna get them to extend it and i was like but why why would they do that how do you know and it was a combination of intelligence were like well i know it's a high performing store i know they should want to extend it but they want they don't have to do proactively but i do know the the person who's like runs their real estate she used to run real estate for this other company and actually one time she left me holding the bag she pulled out of a deal last minute and i ate the loss and i didn't i didn't hold it against her i didn't what you know i treated her well even though we took a big financial loss on that i believe she's gonna treat us well here and then sure enough like you know we buy this thing and suddenly we got a fifteen year lease extension in that property's value you know skyrocket from that so sometimes it's also about taking a loss well not just when somebody wins yeah it's all you know it's easy to high five when things are going great but how do how do you act when things don't go your way defines the character and defines the relationship right hundred percent i mean you know how you act on a loss is almost more important than how you act on a win right well your kids play sports do you teach them this and you when they're when it comes to their baseball they're pitching their you know what they're doing you try i mean they're young they got a lot of emotions so it's it's it's kind of a fine balance because you don't want them to want to lose right but you want them to understand how to lose because in life in order for most entrepreneurs out there most guys have had some sort of failure in their life and then boom it clicks right and they use that as like a catalyst to just skyrocket right not every business person is super successful right out the gate and most guys who have made it really far have i've had to grind their way through right and so you know i i'm for my kids that's that's what i want i wanna see them i wed to do baseball baseball is support a failure right you hit three out of ten you're in the ml v right you're you're hall fame right three that's thirty percent of the time you're touching the ball right we're hitting the ball so i like the sport because mentally and i also believe like you know the sports are a great way for kids to learn to compete you know and and have healthy competition but at the same time you have a lot of people teaching their kids that i've seen they think they're competing with other kids i try to teach my kids that you're competing and i would tell any adult not to look at everyone else right because i can only do what san can do i'm competing with me yeah there's a there's a guy who came on this podcast it's great phrase because he's an investor and he talks by investing in founders what do you look for man what's the what are some of the key things and he goes i wanna know if they're pre fall or post fall he said all great men have a fall i love it if they're already post fall because i know that they know what it takes to come back up i know that they're gonna have a certain level of maturity and humility because they're post fall right and pre fall y'all always have to be wary because somebody who's only ever seen the ups you don't know how they'll handle the downs you don't know if they'll even anticipate that there can be down they might get so full of themselves that they don't actually see that that's a possibility and they don't guard for it and you know watch for the wall and make the turn as you need to do when you're when you're right in the race so i've always remember that then in guys that red line are push the limits they're gonna have some falls yeah until you get to the edge it's kinda like one of those things so you know some of those people have never had a fall maybe they're playing it we're not the playing the game as hard as they maybe could be right what are some other like core i don't know philosophies that you have yeah i mean i think core philosophy i always think of this what would i advise my son to do what's an example where maybe if you had just been thinking from your own perspective yeah you can talk yourself into something but when you think about it like advise my son to do they answers much more clear do can you think of an example yeah i mean like when when like when a tenant burns you or when people burn you and you say man i wanna call that person and tell them i'm not gonna do any more business with you you know we're gonna use the the the stick right and what do you gain with that right what what would my son what would my son shade didn't gain from that okay they're the person knows you don't like them they're not gonna bring any deals they're not gonna do anything or you could say you know what this one didn't work out let's find another one to win together on right there's this a long game it's not a short game life is a long game you know that's what that's it's like things go full circle right the people say what going full circle means it means as you're going on longer and longer different opportunities come up it comes all the way around and and so for that it would be an example where i would probably tell him like hey look you know don't kill a relationship build the relationship find another way to wendy with that person don't hold on to the you know that's the problem as most people hold on to memories that are you know the right word i would say the memories that affected them in a negative way so they carry these negative ways instead you can forgive you don't have to forget right right i mean and so it it's so there there's been times in my life that i've even had to use this for my own like i i tell people lot times like you know i will sometimes have to make a decision and i will think as if my sons or my daughters are the ones having to make that decision and i ask what would i tell them and most times it takes me five seconds and this is something that i had a conundrum about in my head but then for weeks you know ox times i talked to you and we're outside and you say things so common sen you know i'm like well why i've been thinking about this for two weeks sean got this to me like thirty seconds that's right alright listen the two most beautiful words in the english language are email subscribers you need more email subscribers i guarantee it and i don't care how many you have you need more of them but i need more of you need more of them we all need more email subscribers because email is an amazing way to build your business to build an audience and to build a direct relationship that's not dependent on the tiktok algorithm the instagram algorithm it's how you get people to engage directly with you so you can get them to trust you to like you click products check them out check out your stuff that's how you build a relationship with people and so email subscribers are key and they're free it's amazing tool and the tool i use for my email subscriber base is behalf it's a tool that i was built by the folks who were actually running morning group so they were running growth at morning group they grew it to four million subscribers and along the way they had to build out all these special tools in house that made morning brew great and helped it grow faster helped it make more money helped it nurture the email subscribers and so they took all those tools that they built internally and they said could we provide those as a separate startup for anybody to use and not just morning ingrid and so that's they made it available to everybody because before high you were duct taping five different apps together google docs mailchimp stripe a spreadsheet and your dream i was all bundled together well now e hive is just one tool that does it and it's a single purpose thing it's what i use for my newsletter i send a newsletter to over a hundred thousand people and that's what i use and so for listeners with my first million i should do in a special code so if you're thinking about hey i have a newsletter i should have subscribers i kinda wanna build an audience that way well check it out they'll give you thirty percent off use the code m m thirty go to b h dot com that's b e e h i i v dot com and use the code m m thirty i'll put the link in the description to make it easy for you start scaling your content today what have you seen just in because you're in retail like what have you seen as the trend what's going on like what what's changing maybe what's dying what's exploding yeah what can you teaches because you see a different part of the world than than we do it and you you see more of the leading indicator you know who's expanding you know who's contracting right you know which which locations are thriving or which ones are struggling what have you say i guess what's what's going on so for retail specifically there's been a lot of new things called experiential retail it's come out you know and and fitness centers we've been there for a long time but now there's pickle ball tram lean parks you know retail is important for any centers to drive traffic so retail used to be like you like you know where that now it's let's say pi mall or a tram park it would have just been go by clothes at the store right that is basically like that's the shift that's happening is like people buying you know maybe more of that stuff's is being bought online but you can't buy the experience online yeah and and and there's there's places that are thriving like ross dress for us or burlington code or tj j maxx my wife loves home goods or tj maxx your wife loves it it's like a treasure behind the trade right and they're they're sourcing things that people can go and they're looking for that trash look at all the junk bought the deal we got deal amazing here the experience for that so that that also becomes but it also becomes where it it it's it's not stuff you can easily find online right and so online has definitely had some form of effect where you've had some brands that are going away for example as a recent big lots went away joanne went away you know right aid it is in bankruptcy and you said when's the last time i went to a big lots when's the last time i went to a joanne they never adapted into today's market to be able to do both because really all all retailers should have the retail also being their distribution right and so an e commerce person needs distribution so now if you can do both and that's where the smarter retailers that have gotten where they'll ship out of stores yeah they'll do certain things to create where now they have a they don't have to do a hundred fifty thousand square foot distribution because they got a best buy in this part of wisconsin that part can ship everywhere and i think retail is also changed the fact that you've got more you know offices uses now going to retail you know you have lawyers and shopping centers you have insurance people you have doctors they're going where the foot traffic is right right and so and then food has become a big component right and the experience of food is what you know and you can door dash anything you want but even you know the ghost kitchen concept has been tested door dash door ghost kitchens they close majority of the reason is because people like the experience they wanna pick what they want and yeah you can order it from your house you can go there near forte but you can get it the kitchen has value and so i think it's the the fundamentals is at the locate and and and when when we see things we also see where retail over ninety percent lease right now a very high occupancy and there's certain parts of retail that are no longer viable you know you you think about the old town like where i grew there's was a small town and there was a jc c on one side right and then lowe's tj j maxx home goods all went to the other side of the freeway everybody went on the other side target everybody's there well that other side of the retail it's hurting because it's not in the right location right so location also another key thing i didn't really understand when people would tell me when i was younger location location location now yeah location location location and and you know and i think in any real estate it's important to understand like when you're trying to make money in in real estate or i would say any business you really make money on the buy if you're thinking you're gonna make money on the sale immediately you're speculating but if you bought something right i buy i could buy a car and i know the car's is worth thirty thousand and i buy it for twenty eight twenty nine whatever that is i did alright right i made money on the buy whereas people buy things on speculation and when that speculation doesn't come to fruition that's when we get her exactly you you've also like you've you've done a much of these like electric car charging stations and stuff like that like new new retail uses you know coming up as well right electric cars we do recycle stuff we're doing fireworks everywhere anything that we can bring traffic in you know and we we want you to bring your you know your tesla to the shopping center because you plug in and you're gonna go eat twenty minutes yeah you you got you got time to go do something right and so you know but the number of retailers has reduced over the years because a lot of those concepts were either you know the kind of tough part for retailers there's been a lot of private equity that pi them they put heavy debt and then when any change in the market happens or they don't adapt anything can't can't right right and and that's what happened to like joanne or you know even you know big lots big lots outside to two billion dollars in debt and but they also never adapted it one of the things i always wanted to do was you do you when you own the gyms you would do these like sales trainings you do just like motivational talks you do a lot of these things that you you know maybe you i don't know if you like doing them but like at some point you probably were happy it to to be done doing it for a little bit but what would have been the highlights what were that what were your best what are your best bets not i'd often talk about kobe bryant right i always love you know kobe ryan's analog where he would say you know i look at it like this i worked two hours extra a day every day now you gotta take that time five days it's ten hours you know a week take that time four weeks a month there's forty hours take your times twelve it's four hundred eighty hours over my fifteen year career i've almost done eight thousand more hours or ten thousand more hours than anyone else stacked days so i a lot of my motivation was how do you stack days the other thing that i was always very important on in training was when you're there be there what does that mean right well when you're at work be at work when you're at home be home don't be at work thinking about home and at home thinking about work and people don't get that off because you only get so much time so when i when my game faces on let's go and when i'm with my kids let's go when i'm on my own that's what i get to do well let's go right for myself but a lot of people don't understand that like when i talk about the commodity of time right it's limited and now so if you're here thinking about here you're here thinking about hearing and you're doing all the stuff like so that's something i think that every entrepreneur or young person should focus on themselves right right and then i also would teach them to how a game plan make a list sometimes i don't need a list when you write it down majority people are visual learners i'm for me i'm a visual guy if i write it down i'll remember it you tell me that there's a good chance i forget it right so what's the way you remember what's the way that you're gonna remember what you're doing because you gotta write down your goals and kinda get to the next step about of taking that time and really put you big on that like kinda writing down a vision or writing down whether it's affirmations or a vision or a goal like were you a big kind of like self motivator in that way did you did you have any habits that served you well i never really wrote down affirmations or any this stuff but i would always ask myself why why am i doing this what is my goal here and for sometimes it was my goal was to make money because i gotta pay bills you know i'd mean at the gym at ten thirty at night calling someone randomly saying hey if you come in with your entire family to tonight by eleven o'clock and spend two thousand dollars we'll give you an extra year for free right whatever it was right looks because i needed the two thousand dollars so at that time it was money motivated other times it was because i wanted to actually like for my employees or even my kids i really wanna see them succeed and i wanted them to learn away i mean there was employees that we had come in and never had made more than eight dollars ten dollars an hour at that time and they started making hundred fifty two hundred band a year and i wasn't just sales i was also treating people right it was also understanding you know what what motivates people and you know when i i was told a story like sometimes i would tell when i was young my dad used to always do a thing that was pretty you know when i say abusive of what does that mean my dad would take me you need a few drinks he's was a indian guide you'd you sitting at the table doo till probably like twelve or thirteen he would come and grab you by the neck and he'd take you to the restroom and he put your head near the toilet and he say see that that's what you are and you know and i said i was tell people you know that that could've have affected me in two ways it could've have completely demo me or i could've have used it as i never wanna be that and so everybody's experience is different from the others that's why i always tell people you're not competing with someone else yeah like you're kind of the be be there wherever you are be here now is is so i think even more underrated now because in a world of distraction on tap i'm bored i can solve it right away half here i'm tired i can solve it right away i'm annoyed i can i can i have this pacifier in my hand like i i have a little baby i have wonderful year sorry i have a pass right here at any time i could just suck on this and i'm gonna have i'm gonna have my problems soon for a moment and so being able to just beat wherever you are but be there fully and like there's a my sister had this situation where she was in business school in indiana she went to indiana university for for business school they're in bloom indiana now bloom is not the nicest place didn't wanna be there and the next semester they were gonna go to italy so they had this like next semester were in italy but while they're in bloom they didn't bother going out and making friends they didn't bother like checking out the area they didn't you know they were just kind of going through the motions and the reason why it was they thought oh bloom lane italy italy's gonna be amazing though can't wait do you know how we're gonna be when we're there we're gonna be oh i'm gonna be speaking italian i'm gonna be gelato and cafes if i'm gonna be so it's gonna be so amazing and i was like that's great you're not there yet and while you're in bloom you wish you were in italy guess what when in italy you're probably gonna wish you were back in the states you you know because you you're might get them miss certain other things be if you're in bloom be in bloom make this your italy right you can choose to to have that italian so you have whatever experience you want in the place you're at and i've now seen over time this has become a superpower where like you said like you know you're at work you're you think about home you're at home you're thinking about work with your kids which you're half thinking about work you know the half in half out the dim light versus being able to go off and then shine bright when it's time to shine bright but if you're always flickering at this sort of dim level on all things you're just gonna feel unsatisfied in all aspects of your life right and so i think that's a great simple reminder that's in everybody's control don't any talent to really do that no yeah it just takes a little bit of awareness and so that's the one i'm gonna take with me the most out of this whole thing i think we hit everything i think we had the highs the loads and the build backup up dude i appreciate you doing this i know you're not you're not a big kinda get out there and and and and go toot your own horn but i appreciate you doing this it's great to be here and and i appreciate it alright that's a wrap i feel like i could rule to world to know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a gold travel never looking back alright my friends i have a new podcast for you guys to check out it's called content is profit and it's hosted by luis and ph ka after years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like red bull and orange theory fitness luis and fans are on mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue in each episode you're gonna hear from top entrepreneurs creators and you're gonna hear him share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit so you can check out content is profit wherever you get your podcasts and