AI transcript
All right. So we got to talk about this. This business is really, really cool.
It’s a product I want to use, and I think it’s a business that could be kind of big.
Revolutionary maybe.
Yeah. You probably saw this because it’s been going viral over and over and over again. And I
always look for products that have this playground virality, meaning anytime somebody shows you
that you’re using it or they share a picture of it, it immediately sparks a big reaction.
And so I saw, I’m going to share these three posts, so there’s like, check these out. The first one
is this Reddit post. And so I go on Reddit and I see this post, and it’s in the r slash. Damn,
that’s interesting. Subreddit, which is one of my favorite subreddits. And it’s basically
a video of somebody inside this venue. And it’s like a sports bar meets IMAX. So you’re sitting
there, you’ve got a beer, you’re just hanging out with your friends. But there’s a giant screen,
it’s almost a dome that’s over you, where it looks like your front row at a football game in
this case. And they’re cheering and their crowds went crazy. But it looks like you’re in the stadium,
but you’re not in the stadium. You’re just in a bar. And this is called COSM, or as I’m calling
it, the mini sphere. Some people have probably heard, you’ve probably seen the sphere in Las
Vegas, this giant, huge dome that’s, you know, in the middle of Las Vegas. And it’s this insane
$2.3 billion project that is, you know, just remarkable. It looks like it’s kind of cool.
It’s like one of those things where it’s like humans built the pyramids, and then we built the
sphere. It’s like it is marvel of engineering and technology. Well, the COSM is basically a
mini sphere. So it’s like a 2000, you know, seat venue that you can use for sports games and all
the stuff. And now they got a couple of them popping up. I think this is really cool. I think
it rides on a bunch of big trends. So it’s, you know, out of home entertainment, I think is a
big deal. I think people are looking for places to congregate, to drink, to eat, and to enjoy
themselves. And movie theaters are sort of stale. Like I think streaming has sort of kicked movie
theaters ass in a way. And now this is the out of home way of punching back. This thing, I think,
is going to be a much better way to watch live events, live sports than sitting at home.
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for free. Back to this episode. Yeah. So basically, if you’re listening, if you see the photos, it’s
as if they, so they build this massive, it’s not even a bar. It looks like, it looks like a sign
center. It’s like a huge building that they’re building just for this thing. And you go in,
and it’s like as, did you ever go as a kid to the sign center where it has the, it was called
omnimax? Yeah. Like a planetarium where it screens all above you. That’s basically what it is.
But they had to raise $250 million to build this because it’s like a massive. No, they just raised
that. So they just raised that a few months ago. They built the first two without, or they built the
first one at least without that because that was in July. Who funded that? So the story of this is
there’s a guy who’s behind it. And he started one of the biggest real estate property management
software companies, I think called Real Page. The guy’s name is Win. Oh yeah. Something Win.
So he has this thing called Real Page. Real Page got bought by Thomas Bravo for like $10 billion.
This guy made a couple billion dollars out of it. He then starts his own kind of,
by the way, you might be confusing the name. Steve Win is the guy from Las Vegas, the casino guy.
Yeah. I think this guy’s name is also Win, but it’s W I N N. Oh, really? Yeah. So
it’s a different Steve Win that is, that is behind this one. And so he, he’s got this
venture capital firm, Marysome Capital. So he basically, what he did was actually producing.
So you said it’s like a planetarium. No, no, no. It is a planetarium. Do you know the backstory
of this? No, I, no. So he went and bought three companies. So he bought the companies that make
the science planetarium things for every, you know, museum or whatever, like, you know,
science place. So they, he bought that company. Then he bought another company that, you know,
did the LED screen part of that. Then he bought another company that was like the cameras and
technology part of it. So it’s a roll up of three or four companies now at this point that he did.
And because of that they have, you know, they’re basically the monopoly on, I mean, it’s not a
monopoly as in nobody else can do it, but they’re the biggest player in developing this type of
technology, these types of screens. Wow. What he did was realize, hey, this is cool, but it doesn’t
have to just be for, for the planetarium. Like you could use this for sports. If you send your own
video crew to go film, like the sort of court side or field side seats at these different venues.
And so they do, they’re basically a full stack thing. So they have the rights with the leagues,
like UFC, for example, they have the rights with the UFC, they have the rights to certain football
leagues and they go, they send a full production crew there. So it’s not just what you’re, it’s not
just what you see on TV, but bigger. It’s its own thing. And so they have like crews that are almost
like VR where you see like, they’re right there by the end zone. And then as the guy crosses, the
camera’s turning with them. And then they have a live production team that’s basically cutting
between the different cameras that they have to show what’s going to be on that huge screen.
And so that’s how they actually made this. That’s the backstory of how they did this.
That’s, that’s amazing. I did not realize that that’s how it started. I really want to go to one
of these. I’ve had a friend who, his name’s hat. I think you, you know, hat. He went to the one in
Dallas and he sent me a video of it. I do not have a friend named hat. Who’s, who is our friend named
hat? He, he messaged us about it. He hosted the Dallas MFM friendly, your friendly with a guy
named hat. And he, he sent me a video and he was like, Hey, I’m in Houston. And it was some sports
games, some sport game. And I was like, that game’s not in Houston. And he’s like, no, no, no, this
is a screen. Right. I’m not here right now. This is a screen. And I genuinely thought he was there.
And so like I would pay, I’m, I, as soon as UFC is on this, I’m going to be paying money.
It is this weekend, actually. So this weekend’s sphere, the fight card they’re having at the
sphere, I believe is going to be shown in the Cosm. So they, they basically have a, a mix of
things. Cause it’s not just sports. So there’s sports, but then they got Cirque du Soleil. And
so if you want to go see, Oh, but you want to see, Oh, like in the best seat that ever existed,
plus the backstage, plus follow one of the performers, plus in the air, you can go watch
Oh, at this thing. And so I was doing the math on this and I don’t have the exact numbers here,
but here’s, here’s the rough math on a venue like this. So they have general admission,
which is kind of like standing room only. You can literally, there’s people just sitting on the
floor and those are 22 bucks. So super cheap. And they’re going to make the money on those people
through, you know, beer and French fries or whatever. Then they have the like booths or tables
type of thing, which is each seat there is kind of like between 50 and 200 bucks, depending on the
day and the event. And they can fit, you know, a thousand general admission and a thousand, you
know, premium people into this thing. But they have shows all the time because they have like
the Cirque du Soleil thing, they have this like art exhibit thing, they have a orbital thing that’s
space, then they have sports. And so they have 64 events this month, barely in the next coming
month. And I don’t know what, I don’t know how, you know, what the occupancy is like, but it’s
pretty easy to see that this thing is probably somewhere between, you know, four to six million
a month in revenue right now, not counting all the alcohol sales. So, you know, that that might be
double, you know, over there. So I would say low end, maybe three to four million on tickets.
And on the high and then, you know, double that once you once you factor in all the food and
alcohol purchases. I talked to this guy the other day for money wise, we did this podcast with him.
And he basically made something like $25 million. He like owned a tech company. He sold it. He got
$25 million in cash. He still owns $25 million in equity in the business. And he’s based out of
Canada, inside of a 2000 person town. And he sold the business, made his money, whatever, and he
still has his office in that small town. And he said in the small town of 2000 people, he employs
roughly 50 of them. And he owns the fanciest office building on the main street. And they have barbecues
and shit like that every week where the community can come and hang out, whatever. And it made me
sad that I make money on the internet and that I make money remotely with the remote staff,
because it’s hard to see the magic that you’re working so hard to create. Or hopefully your
output is magic where you create products and services that people love. And it made me really
bummed. And I was like, I want to get into like more physical stuff or to be able to like physically
see my creation, even if it’s just like employees in an office. And when I see products like Qasim,
it seems trivial. Like, oh, we’re just doing it just like a place where people can drink beers and
watch sport. But that’s it’s more than that. And to see this as your output of like, I’m creating
something that is physical that I can go and see and be proud of while people are watching and enjoying
it. I’m envious of that as someone who does mostly digital sport, drink beer, but they can watch
sport drink beer in front of a huge screen, a big ass screen. No, I know what you mean. I would feel
that way. But I’ve done a restaurant. I have an e-commerce thing that has physical products.
And I’ve also done some events. And every time I’ve done any of those things,
I hate it. I’m like, oh, my God, this would be so much easier. I would enjoy my life so much more.
If I could, I am so much happier sitting behind the computer on my laptop in my boxers.
You know, I told you the Peter Levels photo of him sitting on a couch with his neck scrunched
in the worst posture, no shirt, boxers, laptop on. That to me is the Jordan logo. Dude, that is
the Jordan logo. That is somebody dunking from the free throw line of life. And that’s what I want.
I don’t want any of this shit where I have to like have a brick and mortar venue. I know it
sounds romantic, but no. Look, you’re in luck. That’s the perfect segue to today’s sponsor.
Because look, if you like to create content, doing what you and I do of having a podcast,
it’s kind of hard because you have to have like a schedule all the time and you got to go and
perform. Doing video is even worse because video is like impossible to edit and it’s just a pain
in the ass. Writing is without a doubt the best in terms of having the best lifestyle because
you can just write late at night. You don’t have to be dressed. You can do it in your bed, whatever.
It’s also the best because it might be, a newsletter might be, one of the most profitable
creator outlets. I think there is in terms of like CPM and willingness to
people to buy subscriptions. Can we tell the story of when you were doing the hustle? I remember
you had a blog and you were doing these viral blog posts that were these like guys, you know,
micro dosing LSD. You like paid some, some dude like 200 bucks to micro dose LSD.
Another guy was living on Soylent for 30 days straight and like documenting it every day.
And these posts were getting millions of views and then you came into my office and you’re like,
yeah, I’m switching to a newsletter. I was like, newsletter, that’s like old. What do you mean?
What are you talking about? And you were way ahead of the curve and you told me, you were like,
yeah, I think these things make like 50 bucks per thousand impressions, like $50 CPM.
And I was like, no way, dude, a YouTube video, a video,
like video ads got to be higher. Like YouTube, a YouTube creator is making like $4 CPM.
Why would a newsletter make $50 CPM? And you were absolutely right. Of course, you know,
six years later, I started a newsletter company doing the same exact model for the same exact
reason and ended up, you know, selling it, you know, just the same way you did. It’s amazing
how well that business model works. And if you’re going to do a newsletter, where should you do it?
Here, you should do it be high, of course. And we’re going to give that plug, but I want to give
you the math behind the thing that you just talked about, which was basically, let’s say that when
I was doing those newsletters or those blogs, let’s just say that like one or two went viral
and I would get like 250,000 visitors that month or 200,000 visitors that month. I made like a
thousand dollars. Let’s say I had a newsletter that had a hundred thousand subscribers and I
wrote to them daily. That’s five grand a day that I would make if I could get $50 CPM, which I was.
Exactly. So it’s like the math was like, so I literally went from like 5,000 to $300,000 per
month. Right. And in one, you have to pray to the viral gods to go viral. In the other, you
basically just, you told me, you called it your pirate ship. You’re like, I’m a pirate. This is
our pirate ship. And every new email subscriber is a little wind in our sales. And I love that
metaphor. And I think it’s the same way that I know a ton of people who are on Beehive that have
like a newsletter with 10,000, 12,000, 22,000, 32,000 readers that are, it’s great. They get to
put out to the world their thoughts, their ideas, and they get paid to do it. I think it’s an
amazing thing. So check it out. If you’re looking for a place to do a newsletter, beehive.com, it’s
B-E-E-H-I-I-V. The worst thing about them is the spelling of the domain. Everything else is flawless.
Can I tell you something that’s going to sound stupid and ridiculous, but I think it’s true
and it’s going to make a lot of money? Stupid and ridiculous, but I think it’s true. It’s going
to make a lot of money. Damn, dude, you just do a personality test. That was awesome.
Describe yourself. Is that your bio?
Yes. There’s people who are like E-F-G’s or whatever. I’m like, an I-D-O-I-T.
It’s a new Myers-Briggs, dude. That was awesome.
I-D-I-O-T. Oh, what are you? Oh, are you an M-O-R-O-N?
Listen to this. So you know how like, let me think. What’s the best way to phrase this?
Because we’re coming from a moron’s perspective. All right. There’s something that I think has
not been touched on forever, or at least in the startup world. It bothers me. The reason why it
bothers me is because Tesla, when that came about, that was like, oh my god, this is like the craziest
thing I’ve ever known, whatever touches. But it has worked and now Rivian and there’s other now
car startups. Same with SpaceX. SpaceX, when they started, it was like, this is ridiculous. You
can’t make a hardware company that goes to space. That’s ridiculous. Now we have Andrew. We have a
bunch of other stuff like that. And they’re getting funding and they’re proving that like,
this is a good idea. There’s a category of products inside your home. You probably have
used this product today that it boggles my mind why there’s no innovation. So to put this in
perspective, I believe, all right, so there’s about 15 million cars sold per year. There’s
about 13 million units of this product sold per year. Basically, everyone in America has them.
They cost thousands of dollars. The lifespan of these products is like five years. And that is
the washer and dryer. It boggles my mind while we have not seen more innovation with the washer
and dryer. And yes, I’m going to say I say washer because with an R, that’s a weird Midwestern accent.
I’m going to get that out of the way because people are going to make fun of me. But what’s been killing
me is and I’ve said this for years that there’s not a good two and one washer and dryer. So this
company called LG, they came out with this like washer and dryer the other day that it’s a two
and one washer and dryer. And it was on the Wall Street Journal and there’s videos on YouTube
talking about this washer and dryer. These nerds like me who are like into this technology,
they’re like going bananas that this technology has actually is actually coming to fruition,
which basically being the main critique of the washer and dryer and one is that it was really
hard to create a so when you have a washer, that means it has to be water sealed. But when you
have something that’s water sealed, it’s hard to increase the temperature. So how do you put
heat in there to dry your clothing? And that technology is actually really hard. But these
guys have actually like they’re slowly getting around to where it’s actually working. And
it’s amazing how big some of these businesses are that sell just mostly washer and dryer. So if
you look at Whirlpool, I believe Whirlpool is publicly traded. Last year, they had $22 billion
in sales and about half of that revenue was from washer and dryers. And what’s crazy to me is
that that’s compared to Rivian, which is a venture startup. Now I think it’s publicly traded $2
billion a year in sales. And so like it’s crazy to me that a lot of these sexier industries in the
hardware space, cars, rockets, self-defense are getting funded and are like popular. But the
washer and dryer in particular, I’m making a prediction that in the next 10 years, maybe 15,
we’re going to see a lot of movement in the space. And I think the appetite is big. And I’ll give you
another example. There’s this company called Impulse Labs. Have you heard of Impulse Labs?
No, I’ve never heard of them. So Impulse Labs. And you can make the same case that I made for
washer and dryers. You can make that case for ovens or stove tops. But if you look at stove tops,
the majority of homes in America have electric stove tops. And electric stove tops are a huge
pain in the ass because the way they work, I believe, is that there’s basically only one
temperature. And so it’s like an on or an off. And so when you use an electric stove top, even
though you put it on high, that just means that it’s going to self-regulate to where it’s going
to stay on for a certain amount of time and then turn off for a few seconds and then turn back on
and then turn back off to a point where it’s high. Then with medium, it’s going to turn off for longer.
And then you don’t mean it’s going to like try and stay at that same time. That’s actually
like makes a huge difference in your cooking if you’re into like cooking nice meals.
And it’s a huge pain in the ass. And so these guys called Impulse Labs, they have built this
technology to where you have a battery that’s charging all of the time and that battery when
you want to use your stove, it like turbocharges your stove top so it keeps the heat at a steady
temperature and it gets hot really, really fast. And so they’ve launched these new stove tops.
And when I hear their argument about how big this business can be, I kind of have bought into like,
I think this actually can work. Now the downside is that you have to raise hundreds of millions of
dollars potentially. But when you’re thinking about stove tops and washer and dryers, these are
actually really, really big markets. Like similar size of car companies, but are drastically under
funded, potentially have less competition than a lot of these other industries because there’s not
a lot of startups attacking this. Well, I think this is pretty interesting, but I’m going to poke
a few holes in your argument. There’s many, but this argument that I presented, it’s like,
we’re going to call this string cheese. Swiss cheese. I think it’s just the way you look.
No, it’s string cheese. There’s ways around it. I’ll pull back some holes in this string cheese
here. Let’s keep the analogy going. So the problem with the kind of rockets and/or cars, and let’s just
take cars for example, I think the reason that Rivian and Tesla have so much, had so much heat
when they came out, even though they weren’t selling that many units was people see that their,
first of all, cars are much more expensive than washers and dryers. So that’s the first thing.
Oh yeah, that’s true. It’s multiple of maybe 10x higher price per unit. So yes,
they sell the same number of units, but at least 10x higher, maybe 20x higher in a lot of cases.
On top of that, you buy multiple of them. So like, I don’t know when you get, like, I haven’t
replaced a washer and dryer in five years since I’ve been living in a place. Have you lived in
one home for one place? Probably not for more than five years. Have you lived in one house for five
years? But is that the shelf life of these things? You have to replace them after five years?
Ish. Okay, gotcha. The other part of it that I think is hard is, with Tesla and Rivian, I think
the thesis is that all cars eventually go electric. So you basically take the entire fleet of cars,
and you say these are all going to have to switch to electric, and that the traditional car makers
are not going to be, these guys will figure out how to ramp production before the traditional
car makers figure out how to go electric. And I don’t know if that’s proven out to be true or not.
I mean, Tesla has obviously beaten the traditional car makers, and I think Tesla is worth more than
like all of the other, you know, next five car makers combined type of thing. It’s ridiculous.
And whereas I don’t think the two and one necessarily, maybe it’s true that two and one
basically replaces all, all combos, I’m not sure. The last thing I would say is that a lot of these
have like switching costs. So for example, you know, the stove top, even if I like it, I’m not
going to rip out my stove to do this, it’s only going to be let’s say new builds that are going
to put something like this in like this stove top. Whereas with a car, the switching cost is
lower because I can always get a second car, I can, I can trade cars, it’s not the same as like
ripping up my kitchen and her to get these. So I think that’s the hard part about some of these is
you have a lot of capital and a lot of difficulty, but some pay out, you know, 10 or 100x.
And that’s why the funding goes to the space companies goes to the military, you know,
weapons companies and goes to the car companies before it’s going to go to some of these.
That being said, I have the, I have the June thing. I have the June oven. And
I got to say it’s good, but it’s complete overkill. And so I think the hard part of this is like,
like, I don’t know if you’ve ever used it, but there’s a camera inside of it. So you put
a bagel inside and it just says, wait, wait, wait, I got it. Bagel. And I’m like, yeah, cool,
still get a push toast. Like the fact that this camera was in here that recognized the bagel
is like a cool demo, but ultimately like not that important of a feature compared to, you know,
just like not being a thousand dollars, right? I think the June oven is like a thousand dollars
or more. So yeah, I’m not super convinced on these, but I do like where your head’s at, which is
what are these sleepy industries that need innovation where size is there, sleepiness is
there, but the innovation is super low that in general is a good place to go if you’re really
determined and can make some shit happen. You know who kicks ass in one of these places is
Shark Ninja. Have you heard of Shark Ninja? Like they make Ninja and Shark. It’s two different
brands, but under one company, Shark Ninja. I believe it’s a boot shop company. It started in
1994. It got bought and went public, but within six years, they were doing 100 million in revenue,
which in within the year eight, they were doing $250 million in revenue based out of Boston,
American company. The products that they make amazing. They have made some of the best products.
So like their vacuum is amazing. I own the creamy, which is like the greatest thing ever.
They helped innovate and create the air fryer. Some of these appliance businesses have been
shockingly good and surprisingly bootstrapped. Well, you know, my favorite one of these that’s like
not as hard to do, but also kind of a sleepy industry is Hexclad. Do you have Hexclad? Do you
have any other pans? I’m thinking about buying some. So commit to me why I should buy them.
Well, dude, I don’t know. I think, you know, one of the things here is like
customer has like a different like awareness and sophistication level. So I don’t actually
know what would make a great pan if there, I’m sure there’s people out there who are like, no,
no, no, only cast iron or only this type of pan or it’s all marketing, whatever. But I’m in the
bucket. That’s like the fat part of the bell curve where it’s like, yeah, marketing just kind
of works on me. I saw that Gordon Ramsay invested $100 million into Hexclad, which is a stunning
amount of money. And how does Gordon Ramsay have $100 million to invest in the startup?
Let me make sure that I have this right. So I guess it’s his studio. So Studio Ramsay Global,
a partnership between Fox and Gordon Ramsay is investing 100 million into Hexclad. So not
him personally, let’s say, but him and his venture studio or whatever his venture venture firm.
Their website is beautiful. And I want to buy Hexclad right now because of their website.
So I bought it. The pans are pretty good. I don’t know, again, if they’re the best pans ever,
but they’re, they’re good. And the branding is great. The visual of it. So like the pan itself
has little hexagons as the bottom of it. So it’s an instantly recognizable product. Like when I
look in my cabinet, I have like all my generic pans. And then I can literally just see the
difference of a Hexclad pan and it’s like ties to the name. And then you have Gordon Ramsay as
the influencer behind this. And it’s just pans, dude. It’s like a sleepy industry that everybody
needs. It’s high value, high AOV product. And these guys crush, they do hundreds of millions in
revenue. And, you know, they’re sold in Costco. They have like amazing distribution. I think
they’re one of the biggest Shopify stores overall. And it was such a non like, I don’t want to
disparage them by calling it non innovation, but it’s not rockets and it’s not electric cars,
right? It’s like nonstick pans. But it is, it is very well done. And I’m very impressed with
their execution and it’s a great business. Was it just a person? Here’s what it says. In 2013,
the two co-founders, Danny and Cole, they had worked for a now defunct cookware company and
decided they wanted to start their own. So they started, you know, working on it. They dabbled
with a couple of products. They started selling in 2016. 2017, they get to deal with Costco.
And the business has doubled almost every year since 2017. They’re one of the top Shopify sellers
in the world. They have one of the biggest Black Fridays of any, they said, “I have never heard
of anyone who’s sold more than us on Black Friday,” which I think is just pretty dope.
It’s a very, very well done product. They make you feel elite, you know, by buying this pan,
whether the pan is elite or not, is sort of secondary. It’s an amazing example of just like
what brand marketing and influence can do for you. Speaking of food and cooking,
do you have any plans for the holidays? Because I’ve got some, I got an idea for you.
Okay. You’re inviting me over or what’s happening right now?
That’s even better. This is even better. Are you free?
I’m free. All right. I’ve got like a little like eight week little project for you.
If you’re interested, you know, it’s no big deal. It’s just a little small. It’s like the
equivalent of like a super Lego. Okay, go for it. Weight Watchers. Do me a favor and Google
Weight Watchers stock right now. Okay. What’s their market cap at?
Oh, geez, 58 million. What happened? Oprah, what happened?
That’s what happened. Oprah left. Oprah’s gone. Are you serious? That’s what caused this?
Well, and they lost $110 million last year and the business declined by 10%.
Osempic hit them? What happened? I think Osempic hit them.
Well, let me make an argument as to why Weight Watchers is going to start selling
Osempic and why Sean is going to own 10% of the company. So listen, that’s your little,
your eight week project, your holiday project. So Weight Watchers was started,
I think in the ’60s and the way it started was there was this housewife in New York City and she
was a little overweight and she got a bunch of dieting tips on how to lose weight and then she
created like an eight-person support group where she got her friends to give her $2 per meeting
and they met once a week and it helped everyone lose weight. They were held accountable and they
loved it. She did it for about a year and then eventually this one man and his wife or his wife
was like, “Hey, you need to lose weight. You go to this woman’s support group. I bet she’ll lose
weight.” And this guy was a businessman and he was like, “Hey, we should definitely make this a
thing.” Like her name was Gene. He was like, “Hey, Gene, this should be like a business. This was
amazing. I actually like lost weight and it changed my life a little bit.” And so they come up with
this idea to franchise the business and they launched it in 1963 and by 1968 they had a million
members each paying a monthly fee in order to attend a local meeting that was based off of their
dieting advice, but a local meeting where you would go once a week or once a month in order to
have your support group. And then by 1968, they sold the business for $751 million then,
which is something like $400 million in today’s money. Oddly, they sold to Heinz, Heinz Ketchup,
which is like the maker of a lot of foods that are the opposite of what Weight Watchers would
suggest. But anyway, they do their thing and then Oprah comes into play. And so Oprah comes into play
and when she comes into play, the stock takes off to where she buys a bunch of stock and then
within weeks or something like that she has tripled her money and it booms and it takes off. Well,
over the last handful of years, her Weight Watchers plan has been shedding her weight to watch her
stock and she’s been losing a bunch of her stock and selling it and now it’s plummeted. And so the
stock is horrible. And so my opinion is if I’m Weight Watchers, I think I’m just going to start
selling Osempic. That’s what I’m going to become. I mean, if I have millions and millions of members
who are subscribed to me for weight loss tips, if I needed to just only care about money, my new
game is, well, by the way, they have 3.8 million paying subscribers. The name of my game is,
hey, for an additional $300 or $400 or $500 a month, we really can guarantee that you’re
going to lose weight. They’re definitely going in this direction. So I didn’t realize this, but
do you know who the CEO of Weight Watchers is? No, who? Her name is Sema Sistani. And the reason
that name sounds familiar is because she was formerly the CEO of Meerkat. Do you remember
Meerkat, the live streaming app? What? Yeah, so she worked with Ben Rubin and when they turned
into house party, they ended up getting acquired. Sema ends up now being the CEO of Weight Watchers
and she recently wrote an email to the team. So this is a couple months ago. And it says,
“Team, as the week draws to a close, I want to take a moment to address
some of the breathless media coverage I’m sure you guys have seen.” And basically it says,
“Hey, we’re in a good cash position. We have strong liquidity. The work we do matters. Our
business is healthy.” And it says, “We’ve repositioned the company to grow with a clear
differentiator. We’re going to offer a full spectrum of weight care from behavioral,” which is
the thing what they’ve been doing, “to clinical.” And clinical being the sale of essentially
semi-glute type products is where they’re going with it. So I think it’s kind of interesting
what you’re saying because I don’t know what is the price of a Weight Watchers subscription.
If you don’t have insurance, semi-glute type is somewhere between $500 to $1,000 per month.
Exactly. And your insurance will cover it if you have diabetes or if you’re obese.
And I think, isn’t there government proposal to make free Osempic to everybody? Isn’t
there some proposal that’s going to cover it and that the government would somehow cover this?
Well, the Osempic issue is basically highlighting an issue with the healthcare system. And it’s
funny that Osempic is like the straw that’s breaking the camel’s back. But they’re like,
“Dude, in Europe, this drug is $5. In America, it’s $1,000. What the hell? What’s going on?”
And so it’s kind of like… No one noticed, which is like the company that makes Osempic.
They’re not only, I think they are now the most valuable company in Europe,
but on top of that, I think they spend more on lobbying than like any other company right now.
And so they are pushing very hard for U.S. lobbying, which is insane. So Weight Watchers
subscription is $9.99 a month right now for the first nine months. And if you just take
the idea that they’re going to go from making $100 a year per paying customer to even a fraction of
the audience decides, “Yes, I’d like to push a button and start to get Osempic or start to get
whatever their generic version is going to be called,” they’re going to jump to $5,000 or
$10,000 a year for those customers. So if you believe that they have the right distribution
and they have the end customer relationship, they might be swapping out training wheels for
Harley-Davidson in terms of business models. And the business is quite large. Unfortunately,
they’ve lost a lot of money. But last year, they did $900 million in revenue and had $100
million loss. So those are huge numbers, but their market cap as of today is $60 million.
And so I don’t care, but it’s going to be fun to watch because there might be a roller coaster
here. And it’s so here, by the way, one of the reasons the business is not doing great.
So by the way, your project for me was to what? To take Osempic or to buy the stock?
Because I might do both. Well, maybe a little down and do both.
Maybe a little bow. When Oprah did it, the estimates are that she made a quarter of
a billion dollars over 10 years of owning and then selling the stock. So basically,
she announced that she was part of Weight Watchers. The stock doubled in a matter of days.
And so in February of this past year, 24, the stock went down by 25%. Just when she announced,
like, “All right, that’s ran its course. I did my thing. I’m out. I’m no longer involved.”
I think Sean Perry is going to be the new Oprah. I think that, look, for $2 million,
you can own 4% of this company. Did I math that right? Or close to 4%. I think, and then
just announcing it, we’re going to do a good old fashioned pump and dump.
You just got us flagged by some agencies out here. Dude, they’re listening to podcasts now.
You know, we’re big in the SEC right now, right? This podcast is going viral there.
I’m joking, by the way. But I do think that a $16 million market cap for a business that has
these large numbers, even if it is a massive loss, and a reputable brand.
I’m just reading about them on the fly here while you’re talking about this. But it looks
like they made a $100 million deal to buy Sequence, which is a telehealth business
that lets you do virtual prescriptions for patients who want weight loss drugs,
and that they will start doing the semi-glute head stuff soon. So we’ll see.
Yeah, I just thought this was interesting. I want to put it on record that we’ve discussed this,
because maybe this could be one of those big opportunities.
But because $60 million for a brand that’s so reputable in some circles, but everyone knows
what that means, that’s pretty amazing to me. Okay, I like it. Sam Stockpix,
whether there’s a great YouTube… By the way, any Stockpix I have just don’t listen to anything
that I ever give advice on, because regarding the stocks, it’s horrible.
What’s that guy? There’s a guy who does this YouTube channel called Good Work. I think he’s
part of Morning Brew, and he put out this video that I thought had the best YouTube title that
I’ve seen. I know. Is it Zed? No, no, not the Zed one. His Zed one was also great. The Zed one
was, “Is Zed going to kill me and the boys?” And now the new one is, “Can this extremely loud man
make you rich?” And it’s a picture of Jim Cramer, who’s shilling some stock. I thought it was awesome.
Dude, there are videos. He’s the best, like I did. He’s the absolute best.
I want our YouTube team to just look at these titles and thumbnails.
This is what winning looks like. This is what we need to do.
I’m just going to read you some of their other titles, his other titles.
“Saudi Arabia going sicko mode on its sci-fi city-state.” It’s the picture of that giant
wall that Saudi Arabia is building. “Helping a fourth-grader explain her loser dad’s
stupid hedge fund job, LOL.” Yeah, it’s great.
Yeah, I’m a big fan of this guy. He’s really good. Austin’s one of my best friends,
the founder or the CEO of Morning Brew. I give him a hard time for a long time because Morning
Brew has not been able to hire interesting talent. Hiring and retaining and developing talent on a
media as a media company, that’s really, really, really hard. You’ve got to find interesting people,
which is hard. The most interesting creative people are typically also the biggest pain in
the asses to work with and to retain them. This guy, and a few others actually, but this guy is
a really good example of how a media company finds talent and nurtures it and makes him huge.
Yeah, he’s doing amazing. Good job. What is his name, by the way? I don’t know this guy’s name,
but Dan Toomey. Yeah, Dan, you’re doing a great job.
So I moved to this new city. It’s called Westport, Connecticut. It’s a 35,000-person town. I’ve been
reading all these books about biographies of politicians and stuff lately, so I thought,
“I don’t really know anything about politics. I’m going to see if getting involved is even
interesting.” So I just emailed the mayor, which I didn’t know if that was a thing or not,
but I just found her email, and I emailed her, and now we’re going to go get lunch together.
What’d you say? I’m going to get lunch with the mayor. I said, in a small circle of the
internet, a very tiny corner, I’m a little bit popular, and I’m not sure what that means to you,
if anything, but I’m just trying to make myself look a little bit important to you,
and I would love to hang out and introduce myself with no agenda, and that’s all I said,
and she said, “Absolutely.” So what’s the plan here? What are you going to do?
I don’t know, yeah. I got to figure out how to be conniving and how to take over a town.
I don’t have a plan yet, but I just thought it was interesting.
Are you going to binge two seasons of House of Cards or something and just start to get
yourself in the mindset? Yeah. I’m just going to come with armed guards and just take over.
I’m going to do a coup. It’s going to be a coup. I don’t know. I think local politics are a really
interesting way to actually have real impact, but it just seems fun, and so I didn’t know that you
could email a mayor, and they would reply, but they did. It reminds me of when we got to college,
my buddy Dan, you’re given a school ID, a school email address, so his was, I don’t know,
DNC6@duke.edu, and so the first thing he did, which I would have never thought to do, but he’s
a weirdo and a genius, and so he emails DNC4 and DNC5, and he’s like, “Fellas, I’m here. I don’t
know who you are. I don’t know what those initials stand for for you, but I’m here to carry the
torch legacy. What do you guys do?” And one of them is a banker somewhere, and it could have led
to an internship, basically, just by sending out a random email being like, “Hey, I’m the new guy
in town that has the same… I’m the next in the alphanumeric sequence here for us.”
And do they become friends? I don’t know. I feel like he just would open up all these doors
and just look inside, be like, “What’s in this closet?” When someone comes into your house,
they’re like, “Oh, what’s this over here?” Have you seen people do that with their phone number?
They change one number in their phone number, and they text them and say that their phone number
comes in? Yeah, exactly. You said something a few weeks ago that had an impact on me, and I’ve
been meaning to bring this up to you, but I had to test this out. So you told me that there’s been
a few weekends where Friday to Sunday, you did phone lists, and I thought that’s a great idea.
The problem is, is that I’m an addict of all types of sorts, and just like everyone else,
getting rid of my phone is really hard. So I looked for a solution, and I found this thing.
This isn’t a sponsored thing. I’ve never talked to these guys. I just think it’s cool.
Have you seen this? It’s called Brick. Yeah, I’ve DMed these guys. They’re young guys.
Did you look them up? Yeah, so I looked them up. So let me explain what this product is,
but I think it’s only $49. So for people listening on your headphones and not looking at a screen,
I just showed a Brick. It’s like a two-inch by two-inch square that’s made out of plastic,
just like 3D printed plastic. And the way it works is you download their app,
and you say which apps are allowed. So in my case, I think I’ve allowed texting,
phone calling, and email. And basically, I use this Brick, and I touch my phone with it,
and it bans or makes every app on my phone, except for the ones that I’ve allowed,
it makes it so I can’t use them unless I touch this Brick again. And there’s an emergency button
within the app, but only three times can I click like emergency override, and I could override,
like if I’m away from this Brick. But if I leave this Brick at home, I can only use the apps that
I’ve allowed on my phone. Shockingly good. This works. I like it. I love it. And I think these
kids who started it, I think they started it when they were like 20-year-old college kids. Is that
right? Yeah, something like that. And I think this business might be amazing. You know, it’s only
50 bucks. It’s hard to make a lot of money on $50. But what’s interesting is that we build all this
technology to like get, we want new, we want more convenient, we want better. And then after a while,
you get used to this life, and it gets better and more efficient and more addicting, and you want
to create things now that will undo all of that. And so I’ve been testing leaving my phone at home.
I’ve been testing, but that’s a little bit inconvenient sometimes because what if there’s
like a real emergency? So do I have to buy like a dumb phone? But then to buy a dumb phone, I need
a whole different cell phone plan. It’s like a safe for the pantry. You like put your snack in it,
and then you lock it. It’s like, this can only be open at 7 p.m. Yeah. Well, and one time I broke
it to get to my phone, like it’s fucked up how bad I am. And so this brick so far, I think,
is the best solution I have found. That’s cool. Yeah, I looked into this because I was curious
about it. I think it’s a really cool idea. I like the design of it too, by the way. I like the name
of it, how it just bricks your phone. I loved how bricked up you are about this whole thing. So I
think it’s a great, I think it’s a great product. I don’t use it personally, but I have thought
about doing the kind of dumb phone, smartphone thing. And this does seem better than having two
phones, but I would lose this brick for sure. So what is it? So if I lose this brick, I can just
through my own phone, just put it in the emergency and be like, Hey, I need my phone back.
Yeah, but only like three or five times. I forget the number. But after a certain number,
then the app, like the brick doesn’t work and you got to go buy a whole new one.
It’s like a nicotine patch for cell phones.
Yeah. And it’s awesome. And that’s exactly what it is. And I think it’s actually pretty good.
And it’s cheap enough that I’m going to just like start gifting these out.
It’s a great passive aggressive gift, right? Yeah, it’s like getting your appellate out, I guess.
Hey, asshole. There’s something you need.
Yeah. But these are awesome. By the way, I think it’s a, it’s called NPC. Is that the technology
that they use for this? NFC, I think. NFC, sorry. Which is like, it’s like a very, very, very tiny
chip. And then the rest is just like 3D printed plastic. And so there are like interesting ways
to make this fun. Like you can 3D print anything and just touch your phone. And so like, for example,
if you have a music event or not a music event, like a small club or something at your home,
like if you have like an event, something where it’s like a book club or you have 10 people coming,
you just touch your thing, everyone touched the other thing and that breaks your phone.
Like there are like a bunch of cool ways to make this fun. Wait, so that can break anybody’s phone
or just your phone? If you, if you have the app, I think it could break anyone’s phone.
Okay. Well, there’s a, there’s a next level to this.
Of course. Of course. But it’s actually quite cool. And then you have, you’ve seen the things
where you go into comedy shows and you put your phone in one of these like air tight bags.
I hate those things, but I understand. I hate them too. They’re at the local school that I live
at. They’re starting to do that for the school. So you have to leave your phone in these bags.
Yeah. My four year old is in TK and she’s told me her friend has a phone. She’s like,
yeah, she showed me the real phone in her bag. It’s hers. And I have somebody that I’m like,
we’re like friends with the parents. I’m like, do I just text the parents be like,
yo, you got your kid a phone or, or do I just text the kid and be like, is this a real phone?
What’s going on? That’s insane. Can I finish with just a pro tip, a life pro tip, a little
framework, a little bit of value here at the end. I feel like we gave some dessert and now it’s
time for a quick vegetable. All right. All right. So I have a friend who is named Stan and Stan
is a Silicon Valley OG. And what’s interesting about Stan is that
for many years, Mark Zuckerberg personally tried to recruit Stan and he always said,
no, no, no, no, no. And, and Zuck just kept reaching out, kept trying to recruit him and
eventually got Stan to join Facebook and he ended up running Messenger, the, the bit, you know,
the, the multi billion user product inside of Facebook. What does the recruitment from Zuck
look like? So he’s, you know, he’s not, uh, he just don’t want to kiss and tell. So he didn’t
give too many details and brag about it too much. But I got the sense that not only was he recruited,
but he had been, he had reached out to him many times across the years and eventually made him
an offer, you know, too good, so good he couldn’t refuse. And so he joins and I asked Stan and I
go, Stan, what are you like, why are you so good? And I was like, no, no, no, bad question. Let me
ask a better question. Like, what are you doing differently than the average person here in Silicon
Valley who has maybe the same skill set as you, but isn’t having the same result as you?
Are you asking why Zuck wanted him or why he’s had success throughout his entire career?
I knew Zuck wanted him. I didn’t ask why Zuck wanted him. I asked him specifically. I said,
why does somebody who, why are you having more success than the average person who has the
same skill set as you? Like, is it that you’re just working 10 times harder? Are you 10 times
smarter than somebody? Or do you, do you know something or do you do something? And he told
me one thing that I thought was interesting. He said a few things, but the one that stood out,
this was many years ago, by the way, so this still sticks with me, is he said, you know,
in Silicon Valley, we’re big on being data driven and data, data, data and data is awesome.
But he goes, what I found is that most people, when they look at data, they already have a story
in their head about what they think happens or what we need to do. And then they simply just
search for data that’s going to confirm that story, or they just like squeeze the data until it fits
that cookie cutter story that they want. He goes, I’m, he goes, I’m different because I just do
one thing different. I look at the data and I ask a simple question. What story is the data telling
me? And what story is the data telling me is a much better question. For example, we were just
looking at the Weight Watcher stock and I was like, what happened? And you go Oprah, I was like,
Oprah, what happened? And you go, Oprah happened. But if you actually look like the stock falls off
a cliff as soon as like the Osempic trend started, right? Like that was the, that was the date.
Oprah left, I think in like 2014 or something, she left like a long time ago, but the stock
really fell off a cliff when Osempic took off. And the data is telling us that something happened
in early 2023 that really hurt Weight Watcher stock. And then you go look at what actually
happened. And I’ve, I just felt this in one of my companies too, where we, in my e-com stores,
like we’ve been beating every month forecast. And then August was the first month we didn’t beat.
And I asked the team, I said, what happened? Am I CMO? We’ll give one answer. And our chief
product officer will give another answer. And then the website guy will give a different answer.
And how am I supposed to figure out what answer? And the way I figure it out is I tried, I just
told them, I said, post the data first, and then tell me the story. Cause what, what always happens
is they tell me the story, and then they’ll go find some data that might, some cherry pick a
bit of data that might support that, but they’ll leave out a bunch of other data.
Well, it’s like, you ever played those things where it’s like, find a word.
And like, it’s like the puzzles in the New York Times, like find, find this word.
It’s like, if I already know, I’m looking for this word. Yeah. Word is like, if I know I’m
looking for this word, I think I can find it. But if you tell me that I got to find a variety
of words, I might find those first. Exactly. Exactly. And so what we did, I just flipped it.
I just said, before you give me your, your idea of what happened, what went wrong. Can you first
just show me the picture of the data, like the full, full set of the data of what happened.
And then it should tell us a story. So then we just started asking the question, what data,
what story is the data telling us? And I think that that is just a much better way to approach
data decision making. And I think that is a great hack that this guy who’s had an amazing
success in his career says, you know, this is one thing I do differently that I think it leads to
a different result. Because every time I do that, you know, it’s like, how do you be right more often?
One way is just remove a bunch of your bad habits and bad biases that’s causing you to
make bad decisions. And I think this is a good habit that would lead you to make better decisions.
So I wanted to share that. That’s kind of a weird, that’s if, for you to think,
for him to think, why am I so successful? Not weird, weird’s the right word. That’s a very
particular. Well, I specifically asked, what are you doing differently? Not why are you so successful,
but what do you do that’s different than the average person who’s got the same skill set as
you? What is it that you do differently? So for example, I know that, you know, Sam, you’re a
great writer. I’d be like, you know, why are you a great writer? And you might say, well,
I practiced a bunch or I read or I naturally have a gift for it. A different question is,
what do you do differently than other people who also write blog posts or write newsletters?
What would your answer be? I potentially am significantly more honest than most people. And
I explain all of the bad sides and the good sides up front in a particular story, which makes people
like and trust me more. So like I try to be the opposite of sensational. Yeah, you wrote an email
to the mayor, and you said your honest thing was in a small corner of the internet, I’m popular.
I don’t know if that matters to you, but I’m trying to impress you because I don’t know if that
worked. But I’d like to say that I say that to impress you. Nobody would say in the email,
I say that to impress you. Obviously they do that to impress them, but nobody says that out loud.
I think your gift is that you are willing to say the honest part out loud and that that endears
people to you and that makes it more likable and that makes it more distinct and that makes it stand
out versus reasons that other people, their writing might stand out. So I think that’s a
great example of that question of what is it that you actually do that’s different
versus how do I become successful or how did you become successful? People have different,
they’ll give you a different answer depending on the question.
And I guess what I’m saying is it’s probably him weird is not the right word because that sounds
negative. What I mean is that’s such a particular and unexpected answer of like, oh, you just look
at the data and you’re like not judgmental about it versus coming to it with an emotion or a story
to prove. So it’s like you’re black and white about different information and you’re not
coming with an agenda. Right. It’s a weirdly specific answer. I agree. The caveat is this was
like 10 years ago when he told me this. And also, I bet if I asked him the same question today, he
would give me a different answer. Maybe that was just top of mind because of what was going on that
day in his world or what he had noticed recently. Why did you, well, why did you just remember this
now? Because I saw the problem pop up in my own company where I was like, oh, this is hard. I can’t
get to the truth because everybody already has a pre-baked answer. And then when I told him,
hey, can we figure out what went wrong? They say, yeah, I’m going to go figure it out. But really,
it’s just, oh, wow, they never changed the answer when I just said, hey, what went wrong?
And they say, can somebody dive in and they come back with the same answer every time?
It’s like, wow, what’s the point of diving in if you already had the answer? And then when you
dive in, you simply just go find one or two cherry-picked data points that support that.
And then if I go look and I say, well, is that really true? Because what about this?
And it kind of violates the narrative. So it’s more like, maybe you’re right, but that doesn’t
explain all of this, correct? And then they’re like, oh, yeah, that’s true. And so I need my own
team doing it. And I think in general, if more people did this, they would be more successful,
myself included. I’m guilty of this as well, where I have an immediate reaction of what we
should be doing or what’s bad about what we’re doing or what’s not working. And then I try to find
data or examples that support it versus first looking at the actual data and feedback and
then saying, what story is this telling me? When you go through that, how often do you question
if you are right or wrong or put differently? What level of certainty is your average big monthly
decision? That’s a great question. What percent certainty is my average monthly decision?
In the situations where I have data, because there’s two types of decisions. There’s data
where there’s decisions where we have information. And there’s decisions that will actually go
create information, meaning we’re only going to know this by trying this and that will gather
more information. Here’s what I mean. Every month or quarter or so, a business that is
in the 5 million, 10 million, 20, like some range where it’s like, all right, this definitely is
working, but I don’t know if it’s going to be massive, medium, or it could even go out of business
eventually. But there’s something here. So for those types of businesses, every quarter or month,
there’s a decision that can potentially change the trajectory entirely or not impact anything at all.
And I’ve noticed that it’s monthly or quarterly. And I asked myself wondering, before I was very
certain, like, if I do this, I’m going to do this, or we’re going to figure it out. Now,
I’m actually realizing the decisions I make for during those periods can actually be very
impactful, both in a negative and a bad way. Like, you can make a decision today that you
pay for in 18 or 24 months. And so I used to be very confident. Now, I’m less confident of like,
I think this, but I want everyone to know I don’t know anything. Right. So what I’m asking for you
is, do you come to these decisions with high certainty or low certainty? I don’t really think
about it like that. If I had to answer that part, it would probably be high certainty for the next
phase, the next chunk, meaning I know that I’ve looked at what the options are and what the
information we have is. And of those two things, and once I take those, you know, I have the menu
of options and I got the information that we have, I can make the right decision for this moment.
That doesn’t mean it’s going to end up being right. It means, given what I had, that had to
be the right decision. There was a only other suboptimal decisions from there. But there’s
still some probability that that’s not going to be true. But I couldn’t have known that because
I just didn’t have the information. I think I’ve done a good job of hitting the ball into the net
where I look back because I do this often. I look back and I say, could I have known
this? Or did I already know? Did I actually know deep down? And I ignored it. Or did I know,
or could I have known, but I rushed? And I have cut those down a lot, mostly honestly, because
I work with Ben and I talk things out loud. And when I’m talking out loud, I can literally hear
like, I can litigate against my point. I can hear the holes in my argument.
Right. And I’m comfortable enough with him to be able to be saying it out loud and not feel stupid
to mid-sentence, be like, but actually, I think that doesn’t matter at all. But actually, that might
not even be true. I might just be saying that. Or I’ll stop midway and just say, but honestly,
of all those things, the most important thing I said was this. And that actually wipes out all
the other shit. And so never mind. Let’s go for a no instead of a yes. And I’ll just edit it midair
because he makes me feel comfortable enough and already have enough trust built up where
it’s only about getting it right. There is 0% about appearing right, which in my other companies
before, I think it was much, much more tied to having to feel like I needed to maintain some
appearance of being smart and in charge and knowing things. And I wouldn’t litigate my own
thoughts. I would not cross-examine them enough. And I think that led to a lot of bad decisions
before. And the reason I’m bringing that up is I’m feeling this is a similar thing as I
get a little bit older and sometimes have more success and sometimes not.
What I’m learning is that there’s a million different ways to get different things done.
And they’re like, for example, we saw go viral this founder mode thing and everyone loved it.
And maybe that is right for certain people. I could point to many examples of successes that
are not that exact opposite. It violates exactly what that person is saying is the law. And as I
grow and start getting to some of these decisions, I’m learning a little bit. It’s more becoming
them. I don’t know anything. Let’s just do what feels good. And so I guess it’s like surrendering
to the world of like, I know nothing. You’re kind of back to where you were when you were 18 years
old of like, I don’t know the right way. Whereas when you’re a little bit younger, you read all
these books. Like according to the startup, what’s that startup book about lean MVP?
Lean startup. According to the lean startup, we have to do this, this, and this. And so you just
do that. And sometimes it works. But there’s just, there’s so many different ways to make the same
thing work. Because of that, I want to get some of these decisions. I’m significantly less confident
in having the right answer, but I’m kind of okay with it.
Well, I think there’s a difference in confidence and certain. So I’m definitely less certain.
That doesn’t necessarily mean I’m less confident, meaning I can be confident that this is the
right decision to make. But I can agree that, Hey, there’s low, low certainty here that this is going
to work or that this is correct. One of the things that’s helped me is to figure out some words to
describe this. Because what I found was that one of the big leaks was that I was miscommunicating
my own certainty to others, meaning I talk in a very confident way, or I’ll say, let’s do this.
And even though in my mind, I’m like, let’s do this. And then we’ll know by next Friday or we’ll
try it three times. And then we’ll know after three times, whether this was the right path or
the wrong path. But I want to go try it three times, right? I want to go give it three weeks.
So I want to go give it three months. I know that for certain, but that was coming across to
other people like this is the way and this is the right answer. And then they got very,
they got a lot of whiplash when that would change. And I’m like, why are you getting whiplash?
We were looking for, we wanted to try it to know if this was the correct path or not. And
turns out we’re going to turn. And so I found that I use this phrase a lot now, which is,
let’s turn over another card, which is like a poker term, right? So it’s like,
in poker, you operate with, you have your hand, first you have your two cards. So you just know,
is it, should I fold here, or is it worth, worth seeing the flop? So I’ll say that let’s see the
flop here. What’s the flop is, let’s take the call with the person, let’s take the meeting,
let’s make the prototype, let’s draft the thing. Let’s write down, let’s, let’s write down the
plan. And then let’s see after that, if we want to do it or not. And then sometimes we’ll say,
you know what, let’s turn over another card, which means let’s get to the next milestone
of information to get to a point where we will have more certainty of whether this is the correct
thing to do or not. And that language at least taught kind of like my little team, which is,
it’s, they know now how much, like, yes, we are doing this, we’re committed to doing this step,
but we’re not committed to doing the next 1000 steps, because we’re going to turn over another
card and we’re going to find out some more information, we’re going to find out, right?
Oh, we think this guy’s really great. Should we hire him? Let’s turn over another card. Let’s do
some reference checks. Let’s give him the project, right? We don’t need to debate more. We’ve already
debated as much as we need to, given the information we have. At this point, it’s about getting more
information. And the other thing that’s helped a lot is be specific about what information. So
often Ben will hit me with a like, well, let’s see. Or like, yeah, I just want to like look into it
more or like, I want to try it out. And then we’ll just pause be like, cool, what, what specific
information do you think you lack right now? Like if we don’t have enough information to make a
decision, what is the information we need? And then you often realize you’re like,
and actually, it’s just I didn’t feel confident enough to make a decision right now. I don’t
even really know what I’m looking for. So even if I spend another few weeks thinking about this or
exploring this, I’m going to do it haphazardly because I don’t have clarity on even what I’m
looking for. I don’t know what question I’m trying to answer here. So therefore, probably
going to have probably going to still be as uncertain three weeks from now as I am today.
But when you kind of try to pin down like, well, what do we really need to make this decision or
what extra information do we need to know? You might be able to like make this decision that
afternoon. Yeah, I mean, I guess I’m become old. But like, I thoroughly enjoy it. Like,
like, these are the things I think about lately. It’s just like, am I making the right decision?
You know, like, what’s that one smart dude say a life unexamined is a worthless life?
What’s that dude’s name Socrates? And so I’m like examining like some of my decisions and things
like that. Anyway, I can talk about this stuff all day, but it gets pretty nerdy. I think I have
another little exercise for you. I do this thing. It’s on the wall over here. You can’t see it. But
I take every month and I just make a box. So it’s like a 12 box grid. And in it, we’ll look back
and we’ll say, okay, last six months, a 12 box. So it’s like January, February, each, each month
is a box. Okay, so I just make it make a calendar looking thing. And then what we do is we just
go and we look and we just say, what’s the one thing we did or like, what are the things we did
that month that were the like big, the things that actually made an impact? We worked, you know,
24 days out of the month or whatever, we did so many things. But like, when you zoom out,
and you just look back, you’re like, what were the things that actually mattered that month?
Similarly, we’ll say, and in that could be a decision, it could be, you know, a product you
launched or a thing you did, it could be a buy sell decision, it could be a hiring, firing decision,
it could be whatever, right? But it’s all big font. So it’s like, it’s got to be something
you can read from like, you know, 10 feet away, meaning you can’t just write in there your entire
to-do list. And when we do that, it’s amazing, because every month has like, an embarrassingly
low number of things that actually mattered, like one to three. And everything else was just
the cost of doing business. Everything else was just the noise that it took to get to those one
to three things that even mattered in a month. And when you do that, you start to, but the good
thing about going back and looking at it is, the more you go back and look at it, the more that
in the moment, you start to realize like, oh, this is probably going to be the thing for the
month that actually matters. Let me really like focus and get this part right, because it’s probably
going to make up for like all the rest of the random activity, the random motion that I’ve
been doing this month, because you start to see patterns of like, what even could make it into
this box? And, you know, those are the things that matter. Okay, this month, this seems like it’s
probably going to be the thing that we’ll end up writing in the box for the month.
And you never write it before?
Well, I don’t know before exactly, right? Like, I just on a given day, I kind of know what I’m
focusing on in a given week, I kind of know what would make for a good week. But when I zoom out,
it’s like, you know, the decision to invest in X or the decision to bring on this person,
this trip that we took that had those five meetings in person that would not have been
the same over zoom, you know, spending that two days with that person who we think is like just
awesome value add to our life is such a fun, awesome person, and going deep with that person
rather than keeping it surface level, like little things like that, or it’s the decision to stop
working on X project was the main thing we did that month. And that was huge, because had we not
done that, we wouldn’t have had the time and the bandwidth to do this thing the next month.
So it’s usually things of that at that level. That’s pretty good. I’m gonna start doing that.
Is that it? Is that the pod? Are we doing a Sarah’s list on Wednesday?
Next episode, we’re gonna do Sarah’s list. I got I got probably six or seven companies right now.
That I think are good contenders for it. And if you don’t know Sarah’s list, we’ll do the teaser
here. Sam’s wife, Sarah blew my mind. Me and Sam were entrepreneurs, we’re taking maximum risk,
we’re living off of nothing, you know, like Sam spent himself like 20 grand a year or something
like that at the time. And I just looked at what we were doing, which was this kind of like
one in 20 shot of success, mostly eating shit every day, had to be innovative, had to take
high risk. And then we looked at Sarah, who joined, I think Airbnb and Facebook companies that were
like, we I could have told you in my sleep that those were winners. And she joined as like employee
400 or 1000 or something like that, like not even betting on it when it was the first 10 employees.
And the basic math was that if you get a job that’s what to say, I don’t know her number,
so I’m just going to make this up. You get a job where you’re making,
let’s call it $150,000 a year based salary, and then they give you a stock option grant that’s
going to give you $40,000 a year of stock on top of that. So you get, let’s say a $200,000 ish
stock package that if that company just basically four X’s, five X’s in a four year time span,
you’ve made a million dollars without taking any of the risk that we were taking as entrepreneurs.
And she did it multiple times. She did that multiple times. And we realized, wow,
there is a set of companies that are like, they’re past the point of like,
they’re out of there going out of business, they’re out of the death trap of or, you know,
like the highly likely to die, you know, area. These are great businesses that will just keep
growing, keep compounding. You could join them today as employee 500, and you will become a
millionaire without doing any of the entrepreneurial stuff. If you could just identify the kind of
like 10 companies a year that fit that mold. And so we take a stab at identifying those 10
companies. And that’s, that’s what we call Sarah’s list. And that episode, we’re going to record
Wednesday. So I got to prepare for it. I got a couple, but it’s really hard. This is actually
a hard list to make because I don’t want to like, you’re not exactly giving advice, but
some people take it as such. So I want to make sure that it’s good. Well, we’ve also done the
look back at the last time we did it. And I think our hit, we’ll do it again. We’ll go, we’ll go look
at, we’ll go look at an update, see what was the hit rate of the ones we did last time. We do not
proclaim to be, you know, that these are all going to work. No way, right? That’s not, that’s not
it. And the hit rates are good because we pick things that are obvious and they get big and it’s
like, duh, it’s all relative to the current valuation of the company. Right. So, oh yeah,
that was already a billion dollar company. Cool. It’s six now. So it’s six X, right? Your $200,000
stock package is six X now. All right. That’s today’s pod. We’ll talk to you Wednesday.
I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to put my all in it like no days
on on the road. Let’s travel never looking back.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
It’s a product I want to use, and I think it’s a business that could be kind of big.
Revolutionary maybe.
Yeah. You probably saw this because it’s been going viral over and over and over again. And I
always look for products that have this playground virality, meaning anytime somebody shows you
that you’re using it or they share a picture of it, it immediately sparks a big reaction.
And so I saw, I’m going to share these three posts, so there’s like, check these out. The first one
is this Reddit post. And so I go on Reddit and I see this post, and it’s in the r slash. Damn,
that’s interesting. Subreddit, which is one of my favorite subreddits. And it’s basically
a video of somebody inside this venue. And it’s like a sports bar meets IMAX. So you’re sitting
there, you’ve got a beer, you’re just hanging out with your friends. But there’s a giant screen,
it’s almost a dome that’s over you, where it looks like your front row at a football game in
this case. And they’re cheering and their crowds went crazy. But it looks like you’re in the stadium,
but you’re not in the stadium. You’re just in a bar. And this is called COSM, or as I’m calling
it, the mini sphere. Some people have probably heard, you’ve probably seen the sphere in Las
Vegas, this giant, huge dome that’s, you know, in the middle of Las Vegas. And it’s this insane
$2.3 billion project that is, you know, just remarkable. It looks like it’s kind of cool.
It’s like one of those things where it’s like humans built the pyramids, and then we built the
sphere. It’s like it is marvel of engineering and technology. Well, the COSM is basically a
mini sphere. So it’s like a 2000, you know, seat venue that you can use for sports games and all
the stuff. And now they got a couple of them popping up. I think this is really cool. I think
it rides on a bunch of big trends. So it’s, you know, out of home entertainment, I think is a
big deal. I think people are looking for places to congregate, to drink, to eat, and to enjoy
themselves. And movie theaters are sort of stale. Like I think streaming has sort of kicked movie
theaters ass in a way. And now this is the out of home way of punching back. This thing, I think,
is going to be a much better way to watch live events, live sports than sitting at home.
All right. I want to tell you about a really cool feature in Hubspot that I don’t think most
people know about. It’s called the marketing and content hub. All right. So here’s how it works.
You’re doing content marketing. That’s what I do. That’s how many brands do. It works really,
really well, but it could be very time consuming. So what they do is they have tools like content
remix, which will take one piece of content and immediately turn it into a bunch of pieces for
all the different platforms in one click. Or they have leads query, which will basically shine a
light on which leads that you have or most likely to purchase. And then they have the analytic suite.
So you get reports, KPIs, and all kinds of AI powered insights that you can share with your
team and not be flying blind anymore. So if you’re doing content marketing, highly recommend you
check out the content hub and marketing hub for Hubspot. You can visit Hubspot.com to get started
for free. Back to this episode. Yeah. So basically, if you’re listening, if you see the photos, it’s
as if they, so they build this massive, it’s not even a bar. It looks like, it looks like a sign
center. It’s like a huge building that they’re building just for this thing. And you go in,
and it’s like as, did you ever go as a kid to the sign center where it has the, it was called
omnimax? Yeah. Like a planetarium where it screens all above you. That’s basically what it is.
But they had to raise $250 million to build this because it’s like a massive. No, they just raised
that. So they just raised that a few months ago. They built the first two without, or they built the
first one at least without that because that was in July. Who funded that? So the story of this is
there’s a guy who’s behind it. And he started one of the biggest real estate property management
software companies, I think called Real Page. The guy’s name is Win. Oh yeah. Something Win.
So he has this thing called Real Page. Real Page got bought by Thomas Bravo for like $10 billion.
This guy made a couple billion dollars out of it. He then starts his own kind of,
by the way, you might be confusing the name. Steve Win is the guy from Las Vegas, the casino guy.
Yeah. I think this guy’s name is also Win, but it’s W I N N. Oh, really? Yeah. So
it’s a different Steve Win that is, that is behind this one. And so he, he’s got this
venture capital firm, Marysome Capital. So he basically, what he did was actually producing.
So you said it’s like a planetarium. No, no, no. It is a planetarium. Do you know the backstory
of this? No, I, no. So he went and bought three companies. So he bought the companies that make
the science planetarium things for every, you know, museum or whatever, like, you know,
science place. So they, he bought that company. Then he bought another company that, you know,
did the LED screen part of that. Then he bought another company that was like the cameras and
technology part of it. So it’s a roll up of three or four companies now at this point that he did.
And because of that they have, you know, they’re basically the monopoly on, I mean, it’s not a
monopoly as in nobody else can do it, but they’re the biggest player in developing this type of
technology, these types of screens. Wow. What he did was realize, hey, this is cool, but it doesn’t
have to just be for, for the planetarium. Like you could use this for sports. If you send your own
video crew to go film, like the sort of court side or field side seats at these different venues.
And so they do, they’re basically a full stack thing. So they have the rights with the leagues,
like UFC, for example, they have the rights with the UFC, they have the rights to certain football
leagues and they go, they send a full production crew there. So it’s not just what you’re, it’s not
just what you see on TV, but bigger. It’s its own thing. And so they have like crews that are almost
like VR where you see like, they’re right there by the end zone. And then as the guy crosses, the
camera’s turning with them. And then they have a live production team that’s basically cutting
between the different cameras that they have to show what’s going to be on that huge screen.
And so that’s how they actually made this. That’s the backstory of how they did this.
That’s, that’s amazing. I did not realize that that’s how it started. I really want to go to one
of these. I’ve had a friend who, his name’s hat. I think you, you know, hat. He went to the one in
Dallas and he sent me a video of it. I do not have a friend named hat. Who’s, who is our friend named
hat? He, he messaged us about it. He hosted the Dallas MFM friendly, your friendly with a guy
named hat. And he, he sent me a video and he was like, Hey, I’m in Houston. And it was some sports
games, some sport game. And I was like, that game’s not in Houston. And he’s like, no, no, no, this
is a screen. Right. I’m not here right now. This is a screen. And I genuinely thought he was there.
And so like I would pay, I’m, I, as soon as UFC is on this, I’m going to be paying money.
It is this weekend, actually. So this weekend’s sphere, the fight card they’re having at the
sphere, I believe is going to be shown in the Cosm. So they, they basically have a, a mix of
things. Cause it’s not just sports. So there’s sports, but then they got Cirque du Soleil. And
so if you want to go see, Oh, but you want to see, Oh, like in the best seat that ever existed,
plus the backstage, plus follow one of the performers, plus in the air, you can go watch
Oh, at this thing. And so I was doing the math on this and I don’t have the exact numbers here,
but here’s, here’s the rough math on a venue like this. So they have general admission,
which is kind of like standing room only. You can literally, there’s people just sitting on the
floor and those are 22 bucks. So super cheap. And they’re going to make the money on those people
through, you know, beer and French fries or whatever. Then they have the like booths or tables
type of thing, which is each seat there is kind of like between 50 and 200 bucks, depending on the
day and the event. And they can fit, you know, a thousand general admission and a thousand, you
know, premium people into this thing. But they have shows all the time because they have like
the Cirque du Soleil thing, they have this like art exhibit thing, they have a orbital thing that’s
space, then they have sports. And so they have 64 events this month, barely in the next coming
month. And I don’t know what, I don’t know how, you know, what the occupancy is like, but it’s
pretty easy to see that this thing is probably somewhere between, you know, four to six million
a month in revenue right now, not counting all the alcohol sales. So, you know, that that might be
double, you know, over there. So I would say low end, maybe three to four million on tickets.
And on the high and then, you know, double that once you once you factor in all the food and
alcohol purchases. I talked to this guy the other day for money wise, we did this podcast with him.
And he basically made something like $25 million. He like owned a tech company. He sold it. He got
$25 million in cash. He still owns $25 million in equity in the business. And he’s based out of
Canada, inside of a 2000 person town. And he sold the business, made his money, whatever, and he
still has his office in that small town. And he said in the small town of 2000 people, he employs
roughly 50 of them. And he owns the fanciest office building on the main street. And they have barbecues
and shit like that every week where the community can come and hang out, whatever. And it made me
sad that I make money on the internet and that I make money remotely with the remote staff,
because it’s hard to see the magic that you’re working so hard to create. Or hopefully your
output is magic where you create products and services that people love. And it made me really
bummed. And I was like, I want to get into like more physical stuff or to be able to like physically
see my creation, even if it’s just like employees in an office. And when I see products like Qasim,
it seems trivial. Like, oh, we’re just doing it just like a place where people can drink beers and
watch sport. But that’s it’s more than that. And to see this as your output of like, I’m creating
something that is physical that I can go and see and be proud of while people are watching and enjoying
it. I’m envious of that as someone who does mostly digital sport, drink beer, but they can watch
sport drink beer in front of a huge screen, a big ass screen. No, I know what you mean. I would feel
that way. But I’ve done a restaurant. I have an e-commerce thing that has physical products.
And I’ve also done some events. And every time I’ve done any of those things,
I hate it. I’m like, oh, my God, this would be so much easier. I would enjoy my life so much more.
If I could, I am so much happier sitting behind the computer on my laptop in my boxers.
You know, I told you the Peter Levels photo of him sitting on a couch with his neck scrunched
in the worst posture, no shirt, boxers, laptop on. That to me is the Jordan logo. Dude, that is
the Jordan logo. That is somebody dunking from the free throw line of life. And that’s what I want.
I don’t want any of this shit where I have to like have a brick and mortar venue. I know it
sounds romantic, but no. Look, you’re in luck. That’s the perfect segue to today’s sponsor.
Because look, if you like to create content, doing what you and I do of having a podcast,
it’s kind of hard because you have to have like a schedule all the time and you got to go and
perform. Doing video is even worse because video is like impossible to edit and it’s just a pain
in the ass. Writing is without a doubt the best in terms of having the best lifestyle because
you can just write late at night. You don’t have to be dressed. You can do it in your bed, whatever.
It’s also the best because it might be, a newsletter might be, one of the most profitable
creator outlets. I think there is in terms of like CPM and willingness to
people to buy subscriptions. Can we tell the story of when you were doing the hustle? I remember
you had a blog and you were doing these viral blog posts that were these like guys, you know,
micro dosing LSD. You like paid some, some dude like 200 bucks to micro dose LSD.
Another guy was living on Soylent for 30 days straight and like documenting it every day.
And these posts were getting millions of views and then you came into my office and you’re like,
yeah, I’m switching to a newsletter. I was like, newsletter, that’s like old. What do you mean?
What are you talking about? And you were way ahead of the curve and you told me, you were like,
yeah, I think these things make like 50 bucks per thousand impressions, like $50 CPM.
And I was like, no way, dude, a YouTube video, a video,
like video ads got to be higher. Like YouTube, a YouTube creator is making like $4 CPM.
Why would a newsletter make $50 CPM? And you were absolutely right. Of course, you know,
six years later, I started a newsletter company doing the same exact model for the same exact
reason and ended up, you know, selling it, you know, just the same way you did. It’s amazing
how well that business model works. And if you’re going to do a newsletter, where should you do it?
Here, you should do it be high, of course. And we’re going to give that plug, but I want to give
you the math behind the thing that you just talked about, which was basically, let’s say that when
I was doing those newsletters or those blogs, let’s just say that like one or two went viral
and I would get like 250,000 visitors that month or 200,000 visitors that month. I made like a
thousand dollars. Let’s say I had a newsletter that had a hundred thousand subscribers and I
wrote to them daily. That’s five grand a day that I would make if I could get $50 CPM, which I was.
Exactly. So it’s like the math was like, so I literally went from like 5,000 to $300,000 per
month. Right. And in one, you have to pray to the viral gods to go viral. In the other, you
basically just, you told me, you called it your pirate ship. You’re like, I’m a pirate. This is
our pirate ship. And every new email subscriber is a little wind in our sales. And I love that
metaphor. And I think it’s the same way that I know a ton of people who are on Beehive that have
like a newsletter with 10,000, 12,000, 22,000, 32,000 readers that are, it’s great. They get to
put out to the world their thoughts, their ideas, and they get paid to do it. I think it’s an
amazing thing. So check it out. If you’re looking for a place to do a newsletter, beehive.com, it’s
B-E-E-H-I-I-V. The worst thing about them is the spelling of the domain. Everything else is flawless.
Can I tell you something that’s going to sound stupid and ridiculous, but I think it’s true
and it’s going to make a lot of money? Stupid and ridiculous, but I think it’s true. It’s going
to make a lot of money. Damn, dude, you just do a personality test. That was awesome.
Describe yourself. Is that your bio?
Yes. There’s people who are like E-F-G’s or whatever. I’m like, an I-D-O-I-T.
It’s a new Myers-Briggs, dude. That was awesome.
I-D-I-O-T. Oh, what are you? Oh, are you an M-O-R-O-N?
Listen to this. So you know how like, let me think. What’s the best way to phrase this?
Because we’re coming from a moron’s perspective. All right. There’s something that I think has
not been touched on forever, or at least in the startup world. It bothers me. The reason why it
bothers me is because Tesla, when that came about, that was like, oh my god, this is like the craziest
thing I’ve ever known, whatever touches. But it has worked and now Rivian and there’s other now
car startups. Same with SpaceX. SpaceX, when they started, it was like, this is ridiculous. You
can’t make a hardware company that goes to space. That’s ridiculous. Now we have Andrew. We have a
bunch of other stuff like that. And they’re getting funding and they’re proving that like,
this is a good idea. There’s a category of products inside your home. You probably have
used this product today that it boggles my mind why there’s no innovation. So to put this in
perspective, I believe, all right, so there’s about 15 million cars sold per year. There’s
about 13 million units of this product sold per year. Basically, everyone in America has them.
They cost thousands of dollars. The lifespan of these products is like five years. And that is
the washer and dryer. It boggles my mind while we have not seen more innovation with the washer
and dryer. And yes, I’m going to say I say washer because with an R, that’s a weird Midwestern accent.
I’m going to get that out of the way because people are going to make fun of me. But what’s been killing
me is and I’ve said this for years that there’s not a good two and one washer and dryer. So this
company called LG, they came out with this like washer and dryer the other day that it’s a two
and one washer and dryer. And it was on the Wall Street Journal and there’s videos on YouTube
talking about this washer and dryer. These nerds like me who are like into this technology,
they’re like going bananas that this technology has actually is actually coming to fruition,
which basically being the main critique of the washer and dryer and one is that it was really
hard to create a so when you have a washer, that means it has to be water sealed. But when you
have something that’s water sealed, it’s hard to increase the temperature. So how do you put
heat in there to dry your clothing? And that technology is actually really hard. But these
guys have actually like they’re slowly getting around to where it’s actually working. And
it’s amazing how big some of these businesses are that sell just mostly washer and dryer. So if
you look at Whirlpool, I believe Whirlpool is publicly traded. Last year, they had $22 billion
in sales and about half of that revenue was from washer and dryers. And what’s crazy to me is
that that’s compared to Rivian, which is a venture startup. Now I think it’s publicly traded $2
billion a year in sales. And so like it’s crazy to me that a lot of these sexier industries in the
hardware space, cars, rockets, self-defense are getting funded and are like popular. But the
washer and dryer in particular, I’m making a prediction that in the next 10 years, maybe 15,
we’re going to see a lot of movement in the space. And I think the appetite is big. And I’ll give you
another example. There’s this company called Impulse Labs. Have you heard of Impulse Labs?
No, I’ve never heard of them. So Impulse Labs. And you can make the same case that I made for
washer and dryers. You can make that case for ovens or stove tops. But if you look at stove tops,
the majority of homes in America have electric stove tops. And electric stove tops are a huge
pain in the ass because the way they work, I believe, is that there’s basically only one
temperature. And so it’s like an on or an off. And so when you use an electric stove top, even
though you put it on high, that just means that it’s going to self-regulate to where it’s going
to stay on for a certain amount of time and then turn off for a few seconds and then turn back on
and then turn back off to a point where it’s high. Then with medium, it’s going to turn off for longer.
And then you don’t mean it’s going to like try and stay at that same time. That’s actually
like makes a huge difference in your cooking if you’re into like cooking nice meals.
And it’s a huge pain in the ass. And so these guys called Impulse Labs, they have built this
technology to where you have a battery that’s charging all of the time and that battery when
you want to use your stove, it like turbocharges your stove top so it keeps the heat at a steady
temperature and it gets hot really, really fast. And so they’ve launched these new stove tops.
And when I hear their argument about how big this business can be, I kind of have bought into like,
I think this actually can work. Now the downside is that you have to raise hundreds of millions of
dollars potentially. But when you’re thinking about stove tops and washer and dryers, these are
actually really, really big markets. Like similar size of car companies, but are drastically under
funded, potentially have less competition than a lot of these other industries because there’s not
a lot of startups attacking this. Well, I think this is pretty interesting, but I’m going to poke
a few holes in your argument. There’s many, but this argument that I presented, it’s like,
we’re going to call this string cheese. Swiss cheese. I think it’s just the way you look.
No, it’s string cheese. There’s ways around it. I’ll pull back some holes in this string cheese
here. Let’s keep the analogy going. So the problem with the kind of rockets and/or cars, and let’s just
take cars for example, I think the reason that Rivian and Tesla have so much, had so much heat
when they came out, even though they weren’t selling that many units was people see that their,
first of all, cars are much more expensive than washers and dryers. So that’s the first thing.
Oh yeah, that’s true. It’s multiple of maybe 10x higher price per unit. So yes,
they sell the same number of units, but at least 10x higher, maybe 20x higher in a lot of cases.
On top of that, you buy multiple of them. So like, I don’t know when you get, like, I haven’t
replaced a washer and dryer in five years since I’ve been living in a place. Have you lived in
one home for one place? Probably not for more than five years. Have you lived in one house for five
years? But is that the shelf life of these things? You have to replace them after five years?
Ish. Okay, gotcha. The other part of it that I think is hard is, with Tesla and Rivian, I think
the thesis is that all cars eventually go electric. So you basically take the entire fleet of cars,
and you say these are all going to have to switch to electric, and that the traditional car makers
are not going to be, these guys will figure out how to ramp production before the traditional
car makers figure out how to go electric. And I don’t know if that’s proven out to be true or not.
I mean, Tesla has obviously beaten the traditional car makers, and I think Tesla is worth more than
like all of the other, you know, next five car makers combined type of thing. It’s ridiculous.
And whereas I don’t think the two and one necessarily, maybe it’s true that two and one
basically replaces all, all combos, I’m not sure. The last thing I would say is that a lot of these
have like switching costs. So for example, you know, the stove top, even if I like it, I’m not
going to rip out my stove to do this, it’s only going to be let’s say new builds that are going
to put something like this in like this stove top. Whereas with a car, the switching cost is
lower because I can always get a second car, I can, I can trade cars, it’s not the same as like
ripping up my kitchen and her to get these. So I think that’s the hard part about some of these is
you have a lot of capital and a lot of difficulty, but some pay out, you know, 10 or 100x.
And that’s why the funding goes to the space companies goes to the military, you know,
weapons companies and goes to the car companies before it’s going to go to some of these.
That being said, I have the, I have the June thing. I have the June oven. And
I got to say it’s good, but it’s complete overkill. And so I think the hard part of this is like,
like, I don’t know if you’ve ever used it, but there’s a camera inside of it. So you put
a bagel inside and it just says, wait, wait, wait, I got it. Bagel. And I’m like, yeah, cool,
still get a push toast. Like the fact that this camera was in here that recognized the bagel
is like a cool demo, but ultimately like not that important of a feature compared to, you know,
just like not being a thousand dollars, right? I think the June oven is like a thousand dollars
or more. So yeah, I’m not super convinced on these, but I do like where your head’s at, which is
what are these sleepy industries that need innovation where size is there, sleepiness is
there, but the innovation is super low that in general is a good place to go if you’re really
determined and can make some shit happen. You know who kicks ass in one of these places is
Shark Ninja. Have you heard of Shark Ninja? Like they make Ninja and Shark. It’s two different
brands, but under one company, Shark Ninja. I believe it’s a boot shop company. It started in
1994. It got bought and went public, but within six years, they were doing 100 million in revenue,
which in within the year eight, they were doing $250 million in revenue based out of Boston,
American company. The products that they make amazing. They have made some of the best products.
So like their vacuum is amazing. I own the creamy, which is like the greatest thing ever.
They helped innovate and create the air fryer. Some of these appliance businesses have been
shockingly good and surprisingly bootstrapped. Well, you know, my favorite one of these that’s like
not as hard to do, but also kind of a sleepy industry is Hexclad. Do you have Hexclad? Do you
have any other pans? I’m thinking about buying some. So commit to me why I should buy them.
Well, dude, I don’t know. I think, you know, one of the things here is like
customer has like a different like awareness and sophistication level. So I don’t actually
know what would make a great pan if there, I’m sure there’s people out there who are like, no,
no, no, only cast iron or only this type of pan or it’s all marketing, whatever. But I’m in the
bucket. That’s like the fat part of the bell curve where it’s like, yeah, marketing just kind
of works on me. I saw that Gordon Ramsay invested $100 million into Hexclad, which is a stunning
amount of money. And how does Gordon Ramsay have $100 million to invest in the startup?
Let me make sure that I have this right. So I guess it’s his studio. So Studio Ramsay Global,
a partnership between Fox and Gordon Ramsay is investing 100 million into Hexclad. So not
him personally, let’s say, but him and his venture studio or whatever his venture venture firm.
Their website is beautiful. And I want to buy Hexclad right now because of their website.
So I bought it. The pans are pretty good. I don’t know, again, if they’re the best pans ever,
but they’re, they’re good. And the branding is great. The visual of it. So like the pan itself
has little hexagons as the bottom of it. So it’s an instantly recognizable product. Like when I
look in my cabinet, I have like all my generic pans. And then I can literally just see the
difference of a Hexclad pan and it’s like ties to the name. And then you have Gordon Ramsay as
the influencer behind this. And it’s just pans, dude. It’s like a sleepy industry that everybody
needs. It’s high value, high AOV product. And these guys crush, they do hundreds of millions in
revenue. And, you know, they’re sold in Costco. They have like amazing distribution. I think
they’re one of the biggest Shopify stores overall. And it was such a non like, I don’t want to
disparage them by calling it non innovation, but it’s not rockets and it’s not electric cars,
right? It’s like nonstick pans. But it is, it is very well done. And I’m very impressed with
their execution and it’s a great business. Was it just a person? Here’s what it says. In 2013,
the two co-founders, Danny and Cole, they had worked for a now defunct cookware company and
decided they wanted to start their own. So they started, you know, working on it. They dabbled
with a couple of products. They started selling in 2016. 2017, they get to deal with Costco.
And the business has doubled almost every year since 2017. They’re one of the top Shopify sellers
in the world. They have one of the biggest Black Fridays of any, they said, “I have never heard
of anyone who’s sold more than us on Black Friday,” which I think is just pretty dope.
It’s a very, very well done product. They make you feel elite, you know, by buying this pan,
whether the pan is elite or not, is sort of secondary. It’s an amazing example of just like
what brand marketing and influence can do for you. Speaking of food and cooking,
do you have any plans for the holidays? Because I’ve got some, I got an idea for you.
Okay. You’re inviting me over or what’s happening right now?
That’s even better. This is even better. Are you free?
I’m free. All right. I’ve got like a little like eight week little project for you.
If you’re interested, you know, it’s no big deal. It’s just a little small. It’s like the
equivalent of like a super Lego. Okay, go for it. Weight Watchers. Do me a favor and Google
Weight Watchers stock right now. Okay. What’s their market cap at?
Oh, geez, 58 million. What happened? Oprah, what happened?
That’s what happened. Oprah left. Oprah’s gone. Are you serious? That’s what caused this?
Well, and they lost $110 million last year and the business declined by 10%.
Osempic hit them? What happened? I think Osempic hit them.
Well, let me make an argument as to why Weight Watchers is going to start selling
Osempic and why Sean is going to own 10% of the company. So listen, that’s your little,
your eight week project, your holiday project. So Weight Watchers was started,
I think in the ’60s and the way it started was there was this housewife in New York City and she
was a little overweight and she got a bunch of dieting tips on how to lose weight and then she
created like an eight-person support group where she got her friends to give her $2 per meeting
and they met once a week and it helped everyone lose weight. They were held accountable and they
loved it. She did it for about a year and then eventually this one man and his wife or his wife
was like, “Hey, you need to lose weight. You go to this woman’s support group. I bet she’ll lose
weight.” And this guy was a businessman and he was like, “Hey, we should definitely make this a
thing.” Like her name was Gene. He was like, “Hey, Gene, this should be like a business. This was
amazing. I actually like lost weight and it changed my life a little bit.” And so they come up with
this idea to franchise the business and they launched it in 1963 and by 1968 they had a million
members each paying a monthly fee in order to attend a local meeting that was based off of their
dieting advice, but a local meeting where you would go once a week or once a month in order to
have your support group. And then by 1968, they sold the business for $751 million then,
which is something like $400 million in today’s money. Oddly, they sold to Heinz, Heinz Ketchup,
which is like the maker of a lot of foods that are the opposite of what Weight Watchers would
suggest. But anyway, they do their thing and then Oprah comes into play. And so Oprah comes into play
and when she comes into play, the stock takes off to where she buys a bunch of stock and then
within weeks or something like that she has tripled her money and it booms and it takes off. Well,
over the last handful of years, her Weight Watchers plan has been shedding her weight to watch her
stock and she’s been losing a bunch of her stock and selling it and now it’s plummeted. And so the
stock is horrible. And so my opinion is if I’m Weight Watchers, I think I’m just going to start
selling Osempic. That’s what I’m going to become. I mean, if I have millions and millions of members
who are subscribed to me for weight loss tips, if I needed to just only care about money, my new
game is, well, by the way, they have 3.8 million paying subscribers. The name of my game is,
hey, for an additional $300 or $400 or $500 a month, we really can guarantee that you’re
going to lose weight. They’re definitely going in this direction. So I didn’t realize this, but
do you know who the CEO of Weight Watchers is? No, who? Her name is Sema Sistani. And the reason
that name sounds familiar is because she was formerly the CEO of Meerkat. Do you remember
Meerkat, the live streaming app? What? Yeah, so she worked with Ben Rubin and when they turned
into house party, they ended up getting acquired. Sema ends up now being the CEO of Weight Watchers
and she recently wrote an email to the team. So this is a couple months ago. And it says,
“Team, as the week draws to a close, I want to take a moment to address
some of the breathless media coverage I’m sure you guys have seen.” And basically it says,
“Hey, we’re in a good cash position. We have strong liquidity. The work we do matters. Our
business is healthy.” And it says, “We’ve repositioned the company to grow with a clear
differentiator. We’re going to offer a full spectrum of weight care from behavioral,” which is
the thing what they’ve been doing, “to clinical.” And clinical being the sale of essentially
semi-glute type products is where they’re going with it. So I think it’s kind of interesting
what you’re saying because I don’t know what is the price of a Weight Watchers subscription.
If you don’t have insurance, semi-glute type is somewhere between $500 to $1,000 per month.
Exactly. And your insurance will cover it if you have diabetes or if you’re obese.
And I think, isn’t there government proposal to make free Osempic to everybody? Isn’t
there some proposal that’s going to cover it and that the government would somehow cover this?
Well, the Osempic issue is basically highlighting an issue with the healthcare system. And it’s
funny that Osempic is like the straw that’s breaking the camel’s back. But they’re like,
“Dude, in Europe, this drug is $5. In America, it’s $1,000. What the hell? What’s going on?”
And so it’s kind of like… No one noticed, which is like the company that makes Osempic.
They’re not only, I think they are now the most valuable company in Europe,
but on top of that, I think they spend more on lobbying than like any other company right now.
And so they are pushing very hard for U.S. lobbying, which is insane. So Weight Watchers
subscription is $9.99 a month right now for the first nine months. And if you just take
the idea that they’re going to go from making $100 a year per paying customer to even a fraction of
the audience decides, “Yes, I’d like to push a button and start to get Osempic or start to get
whatever their generic version is going to be called,” they’re going to jump to $5,000 or
$10,000 a year for those customers. So if you believe that they have the right distribution
and they have the end customer relationship, they might be swapping out training wheels for
Harley-Davidson in terms of business models. And the business is quite large. Unfortunately,
they’ve lost a lot of money. But last year, they did $900 million in revenue and had $100
million loss. So those are huge numbers, but their market cap as of today is $60 million.
And so I don’t care, but it’s going to be fun to watch because there might be a roller coaster
here. And it’s so here, by the way, one of the reasons the business is not doing great.
So by the way, your project for me was to what? To take Osempic or to buy the stock?
Because I might do both. Well, maybe a little down and do both.
Maybe a little bow. When Oprah did it, the estimates are that she made a quarter of
a billion dollars over 10 years of owning and then selling the stock. So basically,
she announced that she was part of Weight Watchers. The stock doubled in a matter of days.
And so in February of this past year, 24, the stock went down by 25%. Just when she announced,
like, “All right, that’s ran its course. I did my thing. I’m out. I’m no longer involved.”
I think Sean Perry is going to be the new Oprah. I think that, look, for $2 million,
you can own 4% of this company. Did I math that right? Or close to 4%. I think, and then
just announcing it, we’re going to do a good old fashioned pump and dump.
You just got us flagged by some agencies out here. Dude, they’re listening to podcasts now.
You know, we’re big in the SEC right now, right? This podcast is going viral there.
I’m joking, by the way. But I do think that a $16 million market cap for a business that has
these large numbers, even if it is a massive loss, and a reputable brand.
I’m just reading about them on the fly here while you’re talking about this. But it looks
like they made a $100 million deal to buy Sequence, which is a telehealth business
that lets you do virtual prescriptions for patients who want weight loss drugs,
and that they will start doing the semi-glute head stuff soon. So we’ll see.
Yeah, I just thought this was interesting. I want to put it on record that we’ve discussed this,
because maybe this could be one of those big opportunities.
But because $60 million for a brand that’s so reputable in some circles, but everyone knows
what that means, that’s pretty amazing to me. Okay, I like it. Sam Stockpix,
whether there’s a great YouTube… By the way, any Stockpix I have just don’t listen to anything
that I ever give advice on, because regarding the stocks, it’s horrible.
What’s that guy? There’s a guy who does this YouTube channel called Good Work. I think he’s
part of Morning Brew, and he put out this video that I thought had the best YouTube title that
I’ve seen. I know. Is it Zed? No, no, not the Zed one. His Zed one was also great. The Zed one
was, “Is Zed going to kill me and the boys?” And now the new one is, “Can this extremely loud man
make you rich?” And it’s a picture of Jim Cramer, who’s shilling some stock. I thought it was awesome.
Dude, there are videos. He’s the best, like I did. He’s the absolute best.
I want our YouTube team to just look at these titles and thumbnails.
This is what winning looks like. This is what we need to do.
I’m just going to read you some of their other titles, his other titles.
“Saudi Arabia going sicko mode on its sci-fi city-state.” It’s the picture of that giant
wall that Saudi Arabia is building. “Helping a fourth-grader explain her loser dad’s
stupid hedge fund job, LOL.” Yeah, it’s great.
Yeah, I’m a big fan of this guy. He’s really good. Austin’s one of my best friends,
the founder or the CEO of Morning Brew. I give him a hard time for a long time because Morning
Brew has not been able to hire interesting talent. Hiring and retaining and developing talent on a
media as a media company, that’s really, really, really hard. You’ve got to find interesting people,
which is hard. The most interesting creative people are typically also the biggest pain in
the asses to work with and to retain them. This guy, and a few others actually, but this guy is
a really good example of how a media company finds talent and nurtures it and makes him huge.
Yeah, he’s doing amazing. Good job. What is his name, by the way? I don’t know this guy’s name,
but Dan Toomey. Yeah, Dan, you’re doing a great job.
So I moved to this new city. It’s called Westport, Connecticut. It’s a 35,000-person town. I’ve been
reading all these books about biographies of politicians and stuff lately, so I thought,
“I don’t really know anything about politics. I’m going to see if getting involved is even
interesting.” So I just emailed the mayor, which I didn’t know if that was a thing or not,
but I just found her email, and I emailed her, and now we’re going to go get lunch together.
What’d you say? I’m going to get lunch with the mayor. I said, in a small circle of the
internet, a very tiny corner, I’m a little bit popular, and I’m not sure what that means to you,
if anything, but I’m just trying to make myself look a little bit important to you,
and I would love to hang out and introduce myself with no agenda, and that’s all I said,
and she said, “Absolutely.” So what’s the plan here? What are you going to do?
I don’t know, yeah. I got to figure out how to be conniving and how to take over a town.
I don’t have a plan yet, but I just thought it was interesting.
Are you going to binge two seasons of House of Cards or something and just start to get
yourself in the mindset? Yeah. I’m just going to come with armed guards and just take over.
I’m going to do a coup. It’s going to be a coup. I don’t know. I think local politics are a really
interesting way to actually have real impact, but it just seems fun, and so I didn’t know that you
could email a mayor, and they would reply, but they did. It reminds me of when we got to college,
my buddy Dan, you’re given a school ID, a school email address, so his was, I don’t know,
DNC6@duke.edu, and so the first thing he did, which I would have never thought to do, but he’s
a weirdo and a genius, and so he emails DNC4 and DNC5, and he’s like, “Fellas, I’m here. I don’t
know who you are. I don’t know what those initials stand for for you, but I’m here to carry the
torch legacy. What do you guys do?” And one of them is a banker somewhere, and it could have led
to an internship, basically, just by sending out a random email being like, “Hey, I’m the new guy
in town that has the same… I’m the next in the alphanumeric sequence here for us.”
And do they become friends? I don’t know. I feel like he just would open up all these doors
and just look inside, be like, “What’s in this closet?” When someone comes into your house,
they’re like, “Oh, what’s this over here?” Have you seen people do that with their phone number?
They change one number in their phone number, and they text them and say that their phone number
comes in? Yeah, exactly. You said something a few weeks ago that had an impact on me, and I’ve
been meaning to bring this up to you, but I had to test this out. So you told me that there’s been
a few weekends where Friday to Sunday, you did phone lists, and I thought that’s a great idea.
The problem is, is that I’m an addict of all types of sorts, and just like everyone else,
getting rid of my phone is really hard. So I looked for a solution, and I found this thing.
This isn’t a sponsored thing. I’ve never talked to these guys. I just think it’s cool.
Have you seen this? It’s called Brick. Yeah, I’ve DMed these guys. They’re young guys.
Did you look them up? Yeah, so I looked them up. So let me explain what this product is,
but I think it’s only $49. So for people listening on your headphones and not looking at a screen,
I just showed a Brick. It’s like a two-inch by two-inch square that’s made out of plastic,
just like 3D printed plastic. And the way it works is you download their app,
and you say which apps are allowed. So in my case, I think I’ve allowed texting,
phone calling, and email. And basically, I use this Brick, and I touch my phone with it,
and it bans or makes every app on my phone, except for the ones that I’ve allowed,
it makes it so I can’t use them unless I touch this Brick again. And there’s an emergency button
within the app, but only three times can I click like emergency override, and I could override,
like if I’m away from this Brick. But if I leave this Brick at home, I can only use the apps that
I’ve allowed on my phone. Shockingly good. This works. I like it. I love it. And I think these
kids who started it, I think they started it when they were like 20-year-old college kids. Is that
right? Yeah, something like that. And I think this business might be amazing. You know, it’s only
50 bucks. It’s hard to make a lot of money on $50. But what’s interesting is that we build all this
technology to like get, we want new, we want more convenient, we want better. And then after a while,
you get used to this life, and it gets better and more efficient and more addicting, and you want
to create things now that will undo all of that. And so I’ve been testing leaving my phone at home.
I’ve been testing, but that’s a little bit inconvenient sometimes because what if there’s
like a real emergency? So do I have to buy like a dumb phone? But then to buy a dumb phone, I need
a whole different cell phone plan. It’s like a safe for the pantry. You like put your snack in it,
and then you lock it. It’s like, this can only be open at 7 p.m. Yeah. Well, and one time I broke
it to get to my phone, like it’s fucked up how bad I am. And so this brick so far, I think,
is the best solution I have found. That’s cool. Yeah, I looked into this because I was curious
about it. I think it’s a really cool idea. I like the design of it too, by the way. I like the name
of it, how it just bricks your phone. I loved how bricked up you are about this whole thing. So I
think it’s a great, I think it’s a great product. I don’t use it personally, but I have thought
about doing the kind of dumb phone, smartphone thing. And this does seem better than having two
phones, but I would lose this brick for sure. So what is it? So if I lose this brick, I can just
through my own phone, just put it in the emergency and be like, Hey, I need my phone back.
Yeah, but only like three or five times. I forget the number. But after a certain number,
then the app, like the brick doesn’t work and you got to go buy a whole new one.
It’s like a nicotine patch for cell phones.
Yeah. And it’s awesome. And that’s exactly what it is. And I think it’s actually pretty good.
And it’s cheap enough that I’m going to just like start gifting these out.
It’s a great passive aggressive gift, right? Yeah, it’s like getting your appellate out, I guess.
Hey, asshole. There’s something you need.
Yeah. But these are awesome. By the way, I think it’s a, it’s called NPC. Is that the technology
that they use for this? NFC, I think. NFC, sorry. Which is like, it’s like a very, very, very tiny
chip. And then the rest is just like 3D printed plastic. And so there are like interesting ways
to make this fun. Like you can 3D print anything and just touch your phone. And so like, for example,
if you have a music event or not a music event, like a small club or something at your home,
like if you have like an event, something where it’s like a book club or you have 10 people coming,
you just touch your thing, everyone touched the other thing and that breaks your phone.
Like there are like a bunch of cool ways to make this fun. Wait, so that can break anybody’s phone
or just your phone? If you, if you have the app, I think it could break anyone’s phone.
Okay. Well, there’s a, there’s a next level to this.
Of course. Of course. But it’s actually quite cool. And then you have, you’ve seen the things
where you go into comedy shows and you put your phone in one of these like air tight bags.
I hate those things, but I understand. I hate them too. They’re at the local school that I live
at. They’re starting to do that for the school. So you have to leave your phone in these bags.
Yeah. My four year old is in TK and she’s told me her friend has a phone. She’s like,
yeah, she showed me the real phone in her bag. It’s hers. And I have somebody that I’m like,
we’re like friends with the parents. I’m like, do I just text the parents be like,
yo, you got your kid a phone or, or do I just text the kid and be like, is this a real phone?
What’s going on? That’s insane. Can I finish with just a pro tip, a life pro tip, a little
framework, a little bit of value here at the end. I feel like we gave some dessert and now it’s
time for a quick vegetable. All right. All right. So I have a friend who is named Stan and Stan
is a Silicon Valley OG. And what’s interesting about Stan is that
for many years, Mark Zuckerberg personally tried to recruit Stan and he always said,
no, no, no, no, no. And, and Zuck just kept reaching out, kept trying to recruit him and
eventually got Stan to join Facebook and he ended up running Messenger, the, the bit, you know,
the, the multi billion user product inside of Facebook. What does the recruitment from Zuck
look like? So he’s, you know, he’s not, uh, he just don’t want to kiss and tell. So he didn’t
give too many details and brag about it too much. But I got the sense that not only was he recruited,
but he had been, he had reached out to him many times across the years and eventually made him
an offer, you know, too good, so good he couldn’t refuse. And so he joins and I asked Stan and I
go, Stan, what are you like, why are you so good? And I was like, no, no, no, bad question. Let me
ask a better question. Like, what are you doing differently than the average person here in Silicon
Valley who has maybe the same skill set as you, but isn’t having the same result as you?
Are you asking why Zuck wanted him or why he’s had success throughout his entire career?
I knew Zuck wanted him. I didn’t ask why Zuck wanted him. I asked him specifically. I said,
why does somebody who, why are you having more success than the average person who has the
same skill set as you? Like, is it that you’re just working 10 times harder? Are you 10 times
smarter than somebody? Or do you, do you know something or do you do something? And he told
me one thing that I thought was interesting. He said a few things, but the one that stood out,
this was many years ago, by the way, so this still sticks with me, is he said, you know,
in Silicon Valley, we’re big on being data driven and data, data, data and data is awesome.
But he goes, what I found is that most people, when they look at data, they already have a story
in their head about what they think happens or what we need to do. And then they simply just
search for data that’s going to confirm that story, or they just like squeeze the data until it fits
that cookie cutter story that they want. He goes, I’m, he goes, I’m different because I just do
one thing different. I look at the data and I ask a simple question. What story is the data telling
me? And what story is the data telling me is a much better question. For example, we were just
looking at the Weight Watcher stock and I was like, what happened? And you go Oprah, I was like,
Oprah, what happened? And you go, Oprah happened. But if you actually look like the stock falls off
a cliff as soon as like the Osempic trend started, right? Like that was the, that was the date.
Oprah left, I think in like 2014 or something, she left like a long time ago, but the stock
really fell off a cliff when Osempic took off. And the data is telling us that something happened
in early 2023 that really hurt Weight Watcher stock. And then you go look at what actually
happened. And I’ve, I just felt this in one of my companies too, where we, in my e-com stores,
like we’ve been beating every month forecast. And then August was the first month we didn’t beat.
And I asked the team, I said, what happened? Am I CMO? We’ll give one answer. And our chief
product officer will give another answer. And then the website guy will give a different answer.
And how am I supposed to figure out what answer? And the way I figure it out is I tried, I just
told them, I said, post the data first, and then tell me the story. Cause what, what always happens
is they tell me the story, and then they’ll go find some data that might, some cherry pick a
bit of data that might support that, but they’ll leave out a bunch of other data.
Well, it’s like, you ever played those things where it’s like, find a word.
And like, it’s like the puzzles in the New York Times, like find, find this word.
It’s like, if I already know, I’m looking for this word. Yeah. Word is like, if I know I’m
looking for this word, I think I can find it. But if you tell me that I got to find a variety
of words, I might find those first. Exactly. Exactly. And so what we did, I just flipped it.
I just said, before you give me your, your idea of what happened, what went wrong. Can you first
just show me the picture of the data, like the full, full set of the data of what happened.
And then it should tell us a story. So then we just started asking the question, what data,
what story is the data telling us? And I think that that is just a much better way to approach
data decision making. And I think that is a great hack that this guy who’s had an amazing
success in his career says, you know, this is one thing I do differently that I think it leads to
a different result. Because every time I do that, you know, it’s like, how do you be right more often?
One way is just remove a bunch of your bad habits and bad biases that’s causing you to
make bad decisions. And I think this is a good habit that would lead you to make better decisions.
So I wanted to share that. That’s kind of a weird, that’s if, for you to think,
for him to think, why am I so successful? Not weird, weird’s the right word. That’s a very
particular. Well, I specifically asked, what are you doing differently? Not why are you so successful,
but what do you do that’s different than the average person who’s got the same skill set as
you? What is it that you do differently? So for example, I know that, you know, Sam, you’re a
great writer. I’d be like, you know, why are you a great writer? And you might say, well,
I practiced a bunch or I read or I naturally have a gift for it. A different question is,
what do you do differently than other people who also write blog posts or write newsletters?
What would your answer be? I potentially am significantly more honest than most people. And
I explain all of the bad sides and the good sides up front in a particular story, which makes people
like and trust me more. So like I try to be the opposite of sensational. Yeah, you wrote an email
to the mayor, and you said your honest thing was in a small corner of the internet, I’m popular.
I don’t know if that matters to you, but I’m trying to impress you because I don’t know if that
worked. But I’d like to say that I say that to impress you. Nobody would say in the email,
I say that to impress you. Obviously they do that to impress them, but nobody says that out loud.
I think your gift is that you are willing to say the honest part out loud and that that endears
people to you and that makes it more likable and that makes it more distinct and that makes it stand
out versus reasons that other people, their writing might stand out. So I think that’s a
great example of that question of what is it that you actually do that’s different
versus how do I become successful or how did you become successful? People have different,
they’ll give you a different answer depending on the question.
And I guess what I’m saying is it’s probably him weird is not the right word because that sounds
negative. What I mean is that’s such a particular and unexpected answer of like, oh, you just look
at the data and you’re like not judgmental about it versus coming to it with an emotion or a story
to prove. So it’s like you’re black and white about different information and you’re not
coming with an agenda. Right. It’s a weirdly specific answer. I agree. The caveat is this was
like 10 years ago when he told me this. And also, I bet if I asked him the same question today, he
would give me a different answer. Maybe that was just top of mind because of what was going on that
day in his world or what he had noticed recently. Why did you, well, why did you just remember this
now? Because I saw the problem pop up in my own company where I was like, oh, this is hard. I can’t
get to the truth because everybody already has a pre-baked answer. And then when I told him,
hey, can we figure out what went wrong? They say, yeah, I’m going to go figure it out. But really,
it’s just, oh, wow, they never changed the answer when I just said, hey, what went wrong?
And they say, can somebody dive in and they come back with the same answer every time?
It’s like, wow, what’s the point of diving in if you already had the answer? And then when you
dive in, you simply just go find one or two cherry-picked data points that support that.
And then if I go look and I say, well, is that really true? Because what about this?
And it kind of violates the narrative. So it’s more like, maybe you’re right, but that doesn’t
explain all of this, correct? And then they’re like, oh, yeah, that’s true. And so I need my own
team doing it. And I think in general, if more people did this, they would be more successful,
myself included. I’m guilty of this as well, where I have an immediate reaction of what we
should be doing or what’s bad about what we’re doing or what’s not working. And then I try to find
data or examples that support it versus first looking at the actual data and feedback and
then saying, what story is this telling me? When you go through that, how often do you question
if you are right or wrong or put differently? What level of certainty is your average big monthly
decision? That’s a great question. What percent certainty is my average monthly decision?
In the situations where I have data, because there’s two types of decisions. There’s data
where there’s decisions where we have information. And there’s decisions that will actually go
create information, meaning we’re only going to know this by trying this and that will gather
more information. Here’s what I mean. Every month or quarter or so, a business that is
in the 5 million, 10 million, 20, like some range where it’s like, all right, this definitely is
working, but I don’t know if it’s going to be massive, medium, or it could even go out of business
eventually. But there’s something here. So for those types of businesses, every quarter or month,
there’s a decision that can potentially change the trajectory entirely or not impact anything at all.
And I’ve noticed that it’s monthly or quarterly. And I asked myself wondering, before I was very
certain, like, if I do this, I’m going to do this, or we’re going to figure it out. Now,
I’m actually realizing the decisions I make for during those periods can actually be very
impactful, both in a negative and a bad way. Like, you can make a decision today that you
pay for in 18 or 24 months. And so I used to be very confident. Now, I’m less confident of like,
I think this, but I want everyone to know I don’t know anything. Right. So what I’m asking for you
is, do you come to these decisions with high certainty or low certainty? I don’t really think
about it like that. If I had to answer that part, it would probably be high certainty for the next
phase, the next chunk, meaning I know that I’ve looked at what the options are and what the
information we have is. And of those two things, and once I take those, you know, I have the menu
of options and I got the information that we have, I can make the right decision for this moment.
That doesn’t mean it’s going to end up being right. It means, given what I had, that had to
be the right decision. There was a only other suboptimal decisions from there. But there’s
still some probability that that’s not going to be true. But I couldn’t have known that because
I just didn’t have the information. I think I’ve done a good job of hitting the ball into the net
where I look back because I do this often. I look back and I say, could I have known
this? Or did I already know? Did I actually know deep down? And I ignored it. Or did I know,
or could I have known, but I rushed? And I have cut those down a lot, mostly honestly, because
I work with Ben and I talk things out loud. And when I’m talking out loud, I can literally hear
like, I can litigate against my point. I can hear the holes in my argument.
Right. And I’m comfortable enough with him to be able to be saying it out loud and not feel stupid
to mid-sentence, be like, but actually, I think that doesn’t matter at all. But actually, that might
not even be true. I might just be saying that. Or I’ll stop midway and just say, but honestly,
of all those things, the most important thing I said was this. And that actually wipes out all
the other shit. And so never mind. Let’s go for a no instead of a yes. And I’ll just edit it midair
because he makes me feel comfortable enough and already have enough trust built up where
it’s only about getting it right. There is 0% about appearing right, which in my other companies
before, I think it was much, much more tied to having to feel like I needed to maintain some
appearance of being smart and in charge and knowing things. And I wouldn’t litigate my own
thoughts. I would not cross-examine them enough. And I think that led to a lot of bad decisions
before. And the reason I’m bringing that up is I’m feeling this is a similar thing as I
get a little bit older and sometimes have more success and sometimes not.
What I’m learning is that there’s a million different ways to get different things done.
And they’re like, for example, we saw go viral this founder mode thing and everyone loved it.
And maybe that is right for certain people. I could point to many examples of successes that
are not that exact opposite. It violates exactly what that person is saying is the law. And as I
grow and start getting to some of these decisions, I’m learning a little bit. It’s more becoming
them. I don’t know anything. Let’s just do what feels good. And so I guess it’s like surrendering
to the world of like, I know nothing. You’re kind of back to where you were when you were 18 years
old of like, I don’t know the right way. Whereas when you’re a little bit younger, you read all
these books. Like according to the startup, what’s that startup book about lean MVP?
Lean startup. According to the lean startup, we have to do this, this, and this. And so you just
do that. And sometimes it works. But there’s just, there’s so many different ways to make the same
thing work. Because of that, I want to get some of these decisions. I’m significantly less confident
in having the right answer, but I’m kind of okay with it.
Well, I think there’s a difference in confidence and certain. So I’m definitely less certain.
That doesn’t necessarily mean I’m less confident, meaning I can be confident that this is the
right decision to make. But I can agree that, Hey, there’s low, low certainty here that this is going
to work or that this is correct. One of the things that’s helped me is to figure out some words to
describe this. Because what I found was that one of the big leaks was that I was miscommunicating
my own certainty to others, meaning I talk in a very confident way, or I’ll say, let’s do this.
And even though in my mind, I’m like, let’s do this. And then we’ll know by next Friday or we’ll
try it three times. And then we’ll know after three times, whether this was the right path or
the wrong path. But I want to go try it three times, right? I want to go give it three weeks.
So I want to go give it three months. I know that for certain, but that was coming across to
other people like this is the way and this is the right answer. And then they got very,
they got a lot of whiplash when that would change. And I’m like, why are you getting whiplash?
We were looking for, we wanted to try it to know if this was the correct path or not. And
turns out we’re going to turn. And so I found that I use this phrase a lot now, which is,
let’s turn over another card, which is like a poker term, right? So it’s like,
in poker, you operate with, you have your hand, first you have your two cards. So you just know,
is it, should I fold here, or is it worth, worth seeing the flop? So I’ll say that let’s see the
flop here. What’s the flop is, let’s take the call with the person, let’s take the meeting,
let’s make the prototype, let’s draft the thing. Let’s write down, let’s, let’s write down the
plan. And then let’s see after that, if we want to do it or not. And then sometimes we’ll say,
you know what, let’s turn over another card, which means let’s get to the next milestone
of information to get to a point where we will have more certainty of whether this is the correct
thing to do or not. And that language at least taught kind of like my little team, which is,
it’s, they know now how much, like, yes, we are doing this, we’re committed to doing this step,
but we’re not committed to doing the next 1000 steps, because we’re going to turn over another
card and we’re going to find out some more information, we’re going to find out, right?
Oh, we think this guy’s really great. Should we hire him? Let’s turn over another card. Let’s do
some reference checks. Let’s give him the project, right? We don’t need to debate more. We’ve already
debated as much as we need to, given the information we have. At this point, it’s about getting more
information. And the other thing that’s helped a lot is be specific about what information. So
often Ben will hit me with a like, well, let’s see. Or like, yeah, I just want to like look into it
more or like, I want to try it out. And then we’ll just pause be like, cool, what, what specific
information do you think you lack right now? Like if we don’t have enough information to make a
decision, what is the information we need? And then you often realize you’re like,
and actually, it’s just I didn’t feel confident enough to make a decision right now. I don’t
even really know what I’m looking for. So even if I spend another few weeks thinking about this or
exploring this, I’m going to do it haphazardly because I don’t have clarity on even what I’m
looking for. I don’t know what question I’m trying to answer here. So therefore, probably
going to have probably going to still be as uncertain three weeks from now as I am today.
But when you kind of try to pin down like, well, what do we really need to make this decision or
what extra information do we need to know? You might be able to like make this decision that
afternoon. Yeah, I mean, I guess I’m become old. But like, I thoroughly enjoy it. Like,
like, these are the things I think about lately. It’s just like, am I making the right decision?
You know, like, what’s that one smart dude say a life unexamined is a worthless life?
What’s that dude’s name Socrates? And so I’m like examining like some of my decisions and things
like that. Anyway, I can talk about this stuff all day, but it gets pretty nerdy. I think I have
another little exercise for you. I do this thing. It’s on the wall over here. You can’t see it. But
I take every month and I just make a box. So it’s like a 12 box grid. And in it, we’ll look back
and we’ll say, okay, last six months, a 12 box. So it’s like January, February, each, each month
is a box. Okay, so I just make it make a calendar looking thing. And then what we do is we just
go and we look and we just say, what’s the one thing we did or like, what are the things we did
that month that were the like big, the things that actually made an impact? We worked, you know,
24 days out of the month or whatever, we did so many things. But like, when you zoom out,
and you just look back, you’re like, what were the things that actually mattered that month?
Similarly, we’ll say, and in that could be a decision, it could be, you know, a product you
launched or a thing you did, it could be a buy sell decision, it could be a hiring, firing decision,
it could be whatever, right? But it’s all big font. So it’s like, it’s got to be something
you can read from like, you know, 10 feet away, meaning you can’t just write in there your entire
to-do list. And when we do that, it’s amazing, because every month has like, an embarrassingly
low number of things that actually mattered, like one to three. And everything else was just
the cost of doing business. Everything else was just the noise that it took to get to those one
to three things that even mattered in a month. And when you do that, you start to, but the good
thing about going back and looking at it is, the more you go back and look at it, the more that
in the moment, you start to realize like, oh, this is probably going to be the thing for the
month that actually matters. Let me really like focus and get this part right, because it’s probably
going to make up for like all the rest of the random activity, the random motion that I’ve
been doing this month, because you start to see patterns of like, what even could make it into
this box? And, you know, those are the things that matter. Okay, this month, this seems like it’s
probably going to be the thing that we’ll end up writing in the box for the month.
And you never write it before?
Well, I don’t know before exactly, right? Like, I just on a given day, I kind of know what I’m
focusing on in a given week, I kind of know what would make for a good week. But when I zoom out,
it’s like, you know, the decision to invest in X or the decision to bring on this person,
this trip that we took that had those five meetings in person that would not have been
the same over zoom, you know, spending that two days with that person who we think is like just
awesome value add to our life is such a fun, awesome person, and going deep with that person
rather than keeping it surface level, like little things like that, or it’s the decision to stop
working on X project was the main thing we did that month. And that was huge, because had we not
done that, we wouldn’t have had the time and the bandwidth to do this thing the next month.
So it’s usually things of that at that level. That’s pretty good. I’m gonna start doing that.
Is that it? Is that the pod? Are we doing a Sarah’s list on Wednesday?
Next episode, we’re gonna do Sarah’s list. I got I got probably six or seven companies right now.
That I think are good contenders for it. And if you don’t know Sarah’s list, we’ll do the teaser
here. Sam’s wife, Sarah blew my mind. Me and Sam were entrepreneurs, we’re taking maximum risk,
we’re living off of nothing, you know, like Sam spent himself like 20 grand a year or something
like that at the time. And I just looked at what we were doing, which was this kind of like
one in 20 shot of success, mostly eating shit every day, had to be innovative, had to take
high risk. And then we looked at Sarah, who joined, I think Airbnb and Facebook companies that were
like, we I could have told you in my sleep that those were winners. And she joined as like employee
400 or 1000 or something like that, like not even betting on it when it was the first 10 employees.
And the basic math was that if you get a job that’s what to say, I don’t know her number,
so I’m just going to make this up. You get a job where you’re making,
let’s call it $150,000 a year based salary, and then they give you a stock option grant that’s
going to give you $40,000 a year of stock on top of that. So you get, let’s say a $200,000 ish
stock package that if that company just basically four X’s, five X’s in a four year time span,
you’ve made a million dollars without taking any of the risk that we were taking as entrepreneurs.
And she did it multiple times. She did that multiple times. And we realized, wow,
there is a set of companies that are like, they’re past the point of like,
they’re out of there going out of business, they’re out of the death trap of or, you know,
like the highly likely to die, you know, area. These are great businesses that will just keep
growing, keep compounding. You could join them today as employee 500, and you will become a
millionaire without doing any of the entrepreneurial stuff. If you could just identify the kind of
like 10 companies a year that fit that mold. And so we take a stab at identifying those 10
companies. And that’s, that’s what we call Sarah’s list. And that episode, we’re going to record
Wednesday. So I got to prepare for it. I got a couple, but it’s really hard. This is actually
a hard list to make because I don’t want to like, you’re not exactly giving advice, but
some people take it as such. So I want to make sure that it’s good. Well, we’ve also done the
look back at the last time we did it. And I think our hit, we’ll do it again. We’ll go, we’ll go look
at, we’ll go look at an update, see what was the hit rate of the ones we did last time. We do not
proclaim to be, you know, that these are all going to work. No way, right? That’s not, that’s not
it. And the hit rates are good because we pick things that are obvious and they get big and it’s
like, duh, it’s all relative to the current valuation of the company. Right. So, oh yeah,
that was already a billion dollar company. Cool. It’s six now. So it’s six X, right? Your $200,000
stock package is six X now. All right. That’s today’s pod. We’ll talk to you Wednesday.
I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to put my all in it like no days
on on the road. Let’s travel never looking back.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
Episode 628: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) break down the business behind the sports bar Cosm and the massive trend coming to out-of-home entertainment.
—
Show Notes:
(0:00) Cosm’s playground virality
(10:38) The Tesla of home appliances
(18:13) $100M sleepy industries
(23:11) The rise and fall (and rise?) of Weight Watchers
(40:42) “What story is the data telling me?”
(48:54) What certainty level is needed to make a decision
(53:49) Confidence vs certainty
(57:22) Shaan’s monthly impact grid
—
Links:
• Cosm – https://www.cosm.com/
• Impulse Labs – https://www.impulselabs.com/
• Rivian – https://rivian.com/
• Brick – https://getbrick.app/
• June Oven – https://juneoven.com/
• Shark Ninja – https://sharkninja.com/
—
Check Out Shaan’s Stuff:
Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it’s called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd
—
Check Out Sam’s Stuff:
• Hampton – https://www.joinhampton.com/
• Ideation Bootcamp – https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/
• Copy That – https://copythat.com
• Hampton Wealth Survey – https://joinhampton.com/wealth
• Sam’s List – http://samslist.co/
My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano
