0:00:06 in most areas of life, you shouldn’t be hoping for like the miraculous save, right? The one thing
0:00:10 that’s going to turn your business around or the person who’s going to meet you and just give you
0:00:13 that opportunity, just hand it to you. But there is an exception.
0:00:27 All right, Sean, I want to make you feel good. I want to make the world feel good. I saw an
0:00:31 inspirational story this weekend, and I want to share it with you. And it’s going to involve
0:00:37 some audio and involves pop culture, which you don’t know anything about. So I think that some
0:00:40 of our listeners might know about the story, but I think it’ll be particularly cool for you.
0:00:45 All right, so there’s this singer-songwriter guy I love. His name’s Noah Kahn. Have you
0:00:53 heard of Noah Kahn? Noah Kahn. I can’t say I have. He describes himself as the Jewish Ed Sheeran.
0:00:58 So he’s like a good songwriter. He’s a great singer, but he’s got a little folk in his sound,
0:01:04 almost like Mumford and Sons meets Ed Sheeran, but based out of Vermont. Like, do you know anything
0:01:08 about like, do you know anything about like New England, like folk music? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m
0:01:13 into that kind of music, actually. So he graduated high school, decided not to go to college and was
0:01:19 able to get a small record deal. The record deal, it was only okay. That sounds like a big deal,
0:01:23 but it’s like you just kind of barely get by and they’re almost like buying an option on you
0:01:28 that you’re going to be like a big deal. He has a couple songs that are kind of hits. I think one
0:01:32 time he got to go on the Stephen Colbert show and play one of his songs. I mean, that’s a,
0:01:35 that’s pretty awesome. But if that’s all you’re known for is doing it one time, you’re still kind
0:01:40 of like, oh, shit, like I got to go get a job. I’m not sure if this is going to work. So the pandemic
0:01:44 hits. He’s living in LA at the time, trying to make a big, but he’s like, shit, what am I going
0:01:49 to do? I guess I’ll just go back home to Vermont where my parents live and I have a little bit more
0:01:54 space. And he kind of like gets depressed where he’s like eating bad food and smoking weed all
0:01:57 day. And he’s like, what the hell do I am I going to do with my career? I can’t go out and play.
0:02:03 Like I’m a nobody right now. What am I going to do? So he’s like, well, TikTok, I guess seems kind
0:02:08 of neat. Let’s try that. And so he starts posting some of his songs on TikTok and a few of them do
0:02:15 okay. I think he gets like 50,000 followers or something like that. So again, it’s like a mediocre
0:02:21 success. But then one night he comes up, it took some 20 minutes and he writes a verse to a song
0:02:26 and the song is called stick season. And he plays this one verse on TikTok.
0:02:55 All right. So this is just a 20 second video
0:03:02 that he posts on TikTok. It’s good, but he posts it and like two or three hours later, like no one
0:03:06 replies. He’s like, this sucks. I’m just going to delete this thing. But let me finish kind of
0:03:10 getting high because he was said he was eating edible when he posted this. He’s like, let me finish
0:03:14 getting high. He ends up passing out and sleeps through the night and he wakes up and this video
0:03:21 gets like 200,000 likes and like 100,000 comments. And he’s like, shit, I better finish this song
0:03:25 and actually complete this song because it sounds like people like this verse. Now he plays the rest
0:03:28 of the song and you could actually see the full song that he plays.
0:04:01 All right. So this all happened in about 2021. So he finishes that song. It blows up. Now,
0:04:07 this guy’s from New England, last week he sold out Fenway Park, the stadium for like, you know,
0:04:33 whatever, 50,000 people. So he writes that song. He puts it out. It blows up. It goes viral. The guy,
0:04:38 a matter of three years, goes from just a dude in his parents house playing on TikTok,
0:04:43 posting a verse of a song. And what’s funny is that in 2019, right when he was doing this,
0:04:47 he tweeted out, he goes, I’m probably not going to ever sell out Madison Square Garden. In fact,
0:04:51 I’m probably not even going to sell all the shows that I have for this tour. But as long as you’ll
0:04:55 have me, I’ll keep writing some songs. And he played Fenway Park and sold it out. And actually,
0:05:00 a few days ago, he sold out Madison Square Garden three nights in a row. And I wanted to share this
0:05:07 story with you because it makes me feel awesome. It also shows that if you put your shit out there,
0:05:10 this is what the internet’s for. If you put your stuff out there, even if it’s incomplete,
0:05:12 people love seeing progress.
0:05:17 All right. I want to tell you about a really cool feature in HubSpot that I don’t think
0:05:22 most people know about. It’s called the marketing and content hub. All right. So here’s how it works.
0:05:26 You’re doing content marketing. That’s what I do. That’s how many brands do. It works really,
0:05:30 really well, but it could be very time consuming. So what they do is they have tools like content
0:05:34 remix, which will take one piece of content and immediately turn it into a bunch of pieces for
0:05:38 all the different platforms in one click. Or they have lead scoring, which will basically shine a
0:05:43 light on which leads that you have or most likely to purchase. And then they have the analytics
0:05:47 suite. So you get reports, KPIs, and all kinds of AI-powered insights that you can share with
0:05:51 your team and not be flying blind anymore. So if you’re doing content marketing, highly recommend
0:05:56 you check out the content hub and marketing hub for HubSpot. You can visit hubspot.com to get
0:06:01 started or free back to this episode. Dude, that’s right up my alley. So I have two or three things
0:06:06 that that reminds me about. The first is, I forgot who it was we were talking to recently, but
0:06:13 I was having a discussion and the idea came up that in most areas of life, you shouldn’t be hoping
0:06:19 for the miraculous save, right? The one thing that’s going to turn your business around or the
0:06:22 person who’s going to meet you and just give you that opportunity, just hand it to you.
0:06:28 But there is in content an exception, which is that in content, you’re really one hit away.
0:06:34 And just because your earlier stuff hasn’t taken off, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad. So you
0:06:39 get a lot of false negatives. But then sometimes you get these breakout positives. And this is an
0:06:44 example of that where, you know, the guy goes to sleep with no comment. You know, he’s basically
0:06:48 planning to just delete the video, thinks it was a bust. And he was just one hit away from his
0:06:52 entire life changing. And there’s something that’s pretty magical about that when it comes to
0:06:58 only a few areas of life. Like I think this is true in all the arts, so movies, music,
0:07:04 content, but also even games. When we had Dan Porter on, he was talking about his company and
0:07:08 his company was failing. And he’s basically had a few weeks left. And he’s like, let’s make one
0:07:13 last game. And I’ll make it this time, even though I’m not a game designer. And he just made draw
0:07:18 something that’s like stupid, simple app that just took off like wildfire. And so being one,
0:07:23 being one hit away, it’s sort of a last bullet in the chamber that you can, that you can think
0:07:28 about and sort of continue to operate with some, with some hope on. I think that’s pretty powerful.
0:07:32 Which, which implies, by the way, that you’re taking lots of shots.
0:07:36 Dude, so my most viral Twitter thread was that Clubhouse thread when Clubhouse was like, you
0:07:42 know, all the rage and I came out and I posted this like really long thread, like 30, 40 tweets long
0:07:45 about how I thought, you know, everybody thinks Clubhouse is going to take off or is the next
0:07:50 big thing, but I don’t think it’s going to work. And the very first comment was this guy who worked
0:07:54 at Facebook. And when we were getting acquired by Facebook, he was like the principal engineer who
0:08:01 was like vetting all of our team. And I post this thread and you know, when you, you know, you push
0:08:05 stand, it’s like that MailChimp GIF where the finger is shaking right above the button and you’re
0:08:11 like, you know, you’re putting yourself out there a little bit. And his first thing is like, dude,
0:08:16 this is way too long. Like nobody’s going to read this. This is too much. And he said it in a way
0:08:20 that wasn’t even like a hater. He was just like concerned, like, what are you thinking, man? Like
0:08:24 this is ridiculous. And I was, I was straight up about to just delete the whole thing. And I just
0:08:30 decided, let me just let it ride for like a couple more minutes. And then it started to just like
0:08:34 immediately get a bunch of other positive replies. But I was very close to just deleting the thing
0:08:38 right there. And that was a thread that went so viral that all of a sudden Malcolm Gladwell
0:08:43 is following me. And there’s all these crazy things going on in the next, you know, three days of my
0:08:48 life because that 10, 20 million people read that. And so it’s just a reminder of don’t count yourself
0:08:53 out too early if it doesn’t have the initial success. That’s the first thing. Second thing,
0:09:01 you found my fetish. I am a sucker for amateur singing talent. I have entire folders on YouTube
0:09:06 and TikTok. I don’t want to see like famous people on stage polished. I like, you know,
0:09:10 when it’s like the seventh grade boy and he just starts singing and like the rest of the
0:09:15 class is like, what Jacob, what you could sing. And like, there’s all these clips on TikTok that
0:09:20 are like that. And I’m a sucker for that stuff. And you know who has a moment like that? Justin
0:09:25 Bieber, you know, right? Get discovered on YouTube. You know who else got discovered a very funny way
0:09:29 like that? You said this guy is the Jewish Ed Sheeran Ed Sheeran himself. Have you heard the
0:09:33 story about Ed Sheeran? No, I didn’t, I didn’t know he was discovered. I know that he’s been famous
0:09:37 since he was like 16. So I guess it must have been when he was young. So there’s a couple interesting
0:09:41 things. We should play this clip, but there’s a clip of Ed Sheeran on a talk show. And he’s like,
0:09:46 everyone’s like, oh, Ed, you’re so talented, blah, blah, blah. He goes, listen to me when I was 14.
0:09:51 He’s like, I kind of started to blow up in my like, you know, 17, 18, 19 age range I got discovered.
0:09:57 But here’s me 13, 14. And he plays an audio clip on his phone of him singing. And it is awful.
0:10:01 I mean, it sounds like if I pick up a guitar right now, and I genuinely tried to sing,
0:10:05 it sounded that bad. He’s like, yeah, I just, he’s like, that’s how I started. He’s like,
0:10:09 it was really bad. And he’s like, I kept practicing. So what, what ended up happening with Ed Sheeran
0:10:15 is he knows he wants to make it. And he has like a little bit of a small following because he’s from
0:10:20 the UK. So he comes to LA and he’s like, I’m going to, I’m going to just come to the mecca and just
0:10:24 try to figure out how to make it in this scene here. And he does, he gets a couple of fortunate
0:10:31 breaks. So he’s, he goes to like an open mic night type of thing. And he performs on stage. And
0:10:35 you never know who’s in the crowd. In the crowd is Jamie Foxx’s like business manager.
0:10:41 And he sees him and he’s like, oh, this white boy is good. He’s like, he’s like intrigued by him.
0:10:45 So he tells Jamie the next day, he goes, Jamie on your, Jamie was doing a radio show in the morning.
0:10:49 He’s hosting it. He goes, I have a guest for you. I want you to have this guy come on five minutes.
0:10:54 So Ed Sheeran comes on Jamie Foxx’s radio show. He plays his like, you know, five minute bit.
0:10:59 And Jamie Foxx is like, all right, I’m interested. So he’s like, what’s your deal, man? Who are you?
0:11:03 You signed with, what’s your situation? He’s like, no, I mean, I’m not only may not sign,
0:11:06 I’m homeless. I just came out here to LA. I don’t have money. I don’t have anything.
0:11:13 So Jamie’s like, come sleep on my couch. Yeah. And Jamie Foxx has actually done this with many
0:11:18 artists that have, have gone on to make it. But he would just, he’s like, if you have talent,
0:11:21 you got something, he would just be like, just come stay at my house. I got tons of extra rooms,
0:11:25 just come stay here. And Jamie Foxx is notorious for throwing epic parties. He’s like, he’s like,
0:11:29 he’s like one of the most connected guys in Hollywood because he’s a movie star. He’s a
0:11:34 musician. He’s just, he’s, he’s a comedian. He’s very funny. And so he would throw these almost
0:11:39 like salons where he’d get people from movies, from music, from comedy, all come hang out at his,
0:11:44 at his house. Neville Medora and Noah Kagan went to one of them and they told me all about it.
0:11:49 What did they say? They said he has a piano there and the, in the other room and like,
0:11:53 people just slowly work their way towards the piano and it’s almost like an open mic night.
0:11:57 He’ll just start performing, right? Yeah. And like he’ll, Jamie starts and someone like raises
0:12:01 their hands and someone else pops in and like, it’s oddly, a salons a great way to describe it.
0:12:06 It’s like a place to discover one another. Exactly. And so he, Ed Sheeran’s there and he’s,
0:12:09 I think he does that. He like plays at one of the parties at night and people are like, oh,
0:12:13 this is kind of cool. So the next night, Jamie’s like, all right, I’m going to test this guy.
0:12:20 So he takes him to some club. That’s basically like a all black club. And every artist on stage
0:12:28 is like either slam poetry, rap, R&B, hip hop. And then here you have this like redhead, freckled,
0:12:34 teenage boy holding a ukulele and they’re like, Ed Sheeran and Ed Sheeran comes up on the stage
0:12:38 and he’s literally with a ukulele and, and literally Jamie Foxx is like, I was in the crowd.
0:12:42 He’s like, and the, my guy was like, and Jamie, come on, why you got to fuck up the vibe? Like,
0:12:47 who’s this guy? Why you got to put this guy on the stage? And so he improvises and he starts off
0:12:52 doing his own song. And then he’s like, all right, read the room a little bit. So he transitions
0:12:58 into a freestyle version of 50 cents in the club. And while he’s on his ukulele basically,
0:13:04 and he plays like a Ed Sheeran version of a 50 cents rap. And literally during his performance,
0:13:09 people get so hyped that the, the MC who was like pretty skeptical, which gets on stage with him,
0:13:13 starts performing. This girl gets up on stage, starts performing with him. And it just turns
0:13:16 into this kind of thing. And Jamie goes, that’s what I knew. If he can win over this crowd,
0:13:20 he’s going to win. And then he made introductions and ended up getting him signed.
0:13:23 Dude, I love those stories. Doesn’t that make you feel good? Yeah.
0:13:28 That makes me feel so good. I love those stories. You have another inspirational story
0:13:34 about my favorite thing on earth, the Olympics. Yeah. So the Olympics is going on right now,
0:13:39 the opening ceremony just happened. And I saw this story that I hadn’t heard before. You,
0:13:42 you might know it because you’re an Olympics guy. Have you ever heard of Eric the eel?
0:13:48 No, I haven’t heard this one. Okay. So there’s this guy, Eric, and Eric is from
0:13:54 the Equatorial Guinea, which is, I guess, a country. And at the 2000 Olympics, it’s happening in
0:13:58 Sydney. There’s this footage. So I, let me just work for, I don’t know who this guy is. I just
0:14:03 see this footage. The footage is this. It’s the Olympic swimming like trial. And you see a guy,
0:14:07 a black dude, he’s got goggles on, trunks, and he’s just feeling nervous. And there’s two people
0:14:12 next to him. And it’s about, they’re at the starting blocks. And they’re about to say go.
0:14:16 And the two other guys fall start. They just jump in too early. This guy doesn’t move.
0:14:21 And so now this is the qualifying heat and his two competitors are disqualified.
0:14:26 And so you’re like, Oh, this guy gets a free run. But what you don’t know is that this guy,
0:14:30 Eric, who’s about to, about to have a free pass into the thing, it’s not a free pass because
0:14:37 this guy basically doesn’t know how to swim. Yeah. Yeah. And like some background, basically,
0:14:41 in most cases to qualify the Olympics for the running or anything that’s timed,
0:14:46 there’s a qualifier. So you have to hit a certain time. But for some countries, I don’t know how
0:14:51 they decide who they just get to have like, it’s just a wild card draw. So it’s like a lottery
0:14:57 raffle. Yeah. And then they go to the country, they go, just send us your best. And so he wins
0:15:01 this thing. And he has eight months now to prepare for the Olympic games. Can you just imagine that?
0:15:05 You randomly win this draw. And in eight months, you’re going to be swimming in front of the
0:15:10 whole world. This is a guy who’s never left his home country. He’s never swam before.
0:15:16 And so he gets at, he’s given access to a hotel. And in the hotel, there’s a pool that he could
0:15:21 swim in for an hour a day, five a.m. to six a.m. The pool is 13 meters long. He’s swimming in the
0:15:26 hundred meter freestyle. So he’s training in a 13 meter pool. He’s going to have to swim 10 times
0:15:31 this distance in the thing in the real Olympics. And he has one hour a day to train for eight months.
0:15:35 Now pretty quickly, Eric realizes, all right, one hour a day, not going to be enough.
0:15:40 So he starts just going to like rivers, oceans. He’s just trying to learn to swim. He doesn’t
0:15:44 actually know how he doesn’t have a coach. And so when he’s swimming in these rivers, there’s
0:15:48 literally fishermen who are watching him. They’re like, son, you got to use your legs. What are
0:15:53 you doing? And they’re trying to teach him how to coordinate his body on a float. And this is
0:15:57 what’s happening. So fast forward eight months, it’s go time. He shows up at the Sydney Olympics,
0:16:02 take some three days to travel there. He’s never flown before. He gets the Olympic facilities,
0:16:09 jaw drops. He sees the pool size. He’s like, oh my God, I’ve never swam in a pool this large.
0:16:12 And so he’s preparing for the event. And basically the other coaches and swimmers are like,
0:16:16 why is this guy so nervous during the practice? He’s not even going in the water. He doesn’t
0:16:20 know what to do. And so the South African coast starts helping him. These other guys start helping
0:16:24 him. And they’re like, do you need goggles? And he’s like, yes. And then they give him goggles.
0:16:28 And they’re trying to show, trying to teach him like in the day before the event, he’s cramming
0:16:32 for the exam, cramming for the exam for a language that you just learned two weeks ago.
0:16:36 And everyone in the world is watching you take the exam. And if you fail the exam, you drown.
0:16:42 And so that’s the problem because when the other two guys fall, start, he’s going to get a free pass.
0:16:47 All he has to do is finish, but he’s never swam 100 meters consecutively. He’s trained in a 13 meter
0:16:54 pool. And so he jumps in and he starts okay. And he’s going, he’s going, and he starts getting
0:16:59 really tired before he even hits the turn, the 50 meter turn. And he finally gets to the turn and
0:17:04 at the turn he stays under for so long. There’s literally like gasps in the crowd. They think
0:17:08 he’s drowned. Like he’s just caught in like a riptide basically. It looks like finally he comes
0:17:16 up and he’s going so slow. It looks like he can’t make it. He is so exhausted. And the crowd just
0:17:21 starts going nuts. They’re like, go, go, go. They don’t know why this guy’s going so slow.
0:17:24 Why is this Olympic? They don’t know at this point, but they know something’s wrong.
0:17:29 And they just want to like get on his side. It’s like a Jamaican bobsled moment.
0:17:36 Exactly. He finishes in a minute and 52 seconds, which is like an extra minute past what it should
0:17:40 have been, which is a very long time for something like this. These races are decided by tenths of
0:17:48 a second. And so he qualifies. And so he gets into the actual Olympic trial. He obviously then loses.
0:17:54 But this guy embodies that Olympic spirit that anyone anywhere in the world can do something
0:18:00 amazing. Crowd goes nuts. He ends up becoming the national coach for his country decades later.
0:18:07 And that’s the story of Eric the eel. Did they ever produce any legit swimmers?
0:18:13 Well, let’s keep the story inspirational. So I’m going to no comment that one. I don’t know
0:18:19 if there’s ever been a medalist from Equatorial Guinea. That’s awesome. No, I remember watching
0:18:24 this years ago and it is inspirational. Do you want to do your sleep at thing or do you want
0:18:30 me to tell you about a car thing? Let’s do your car thing. All right. So I want to buy a new car
0:18:33 and I want to tell you about two interesting things that I’ve discovered. We’ll start with
0:18:38 courage. So it’s a pretty genius business idea. And these guys have been quietly building up a
0:18:44 pretty epic business. So the story of this business is that it was started by a father and son duo.
0:18:50 The father’s name is Ray. The son is Zach. The father, he basically managed car dealerships for
0:18:56 years. And he was like, Oh, there’s like, I know the ins and outs and his son, I think was 24 or
0:19:01 25 at the time. And his son always wanted to start an internet business. And he also liked
0:19:06 YouTube. And he was like, Hey, dad, what if I just asked you some questions on YouTube about like,
0:19:11 you know, how do you properly negotiate at the car dealership or how much a profit car dealerships
0:19:16 make? So we know better what to ask for, you know, things like that. Love it. Gonna work. Yeah. And
0:19:22 within, I think something like eight weeks, they got 13,000 followers on this YouTube page. And
0:19:25 they were like, you know, we’re going to buy all these fancy cameras, but then we just got like
0:19:29 our iPhone and made it kind of janky. And it just people kind of liked it. And it was during the
0:19:34 pandemic. So people were watching a lot of that stuff. And so they parlay that into starting a
0:19:38 business called courage. And so if you go to courage.com, what’s it said? You see the headline?
0:19:44 Yeah, it says your personal car shopper is here. No hassle, always fair prices. So basically,
0:19:49 they will help you buy a car. So the way it works is there’s this thing called an auto broker or a
0:19:55 car broker. I think you got your car now from a friend of ours who’s a car broker. The industry is
0:20:01 typically like mom and pop. And a lot of times if you Google like car broker, New York City,
0:20:05 you’re going to go to like kind of a mom and pop website. And you get on the phone or send an email
0:20:09 to this person, you tell them what type of car you want. And they have relationships with tons
0:20:15 of dealers. So they know, they know the ins and outs of the car business. You pay them a fee $500
0:20:20 to $2,000. And they typically will go and buy the car for you. But the savings that you get in the
0:20:24 price of the car is typically better than the fee that you pay them. And so it’s no big deal. And
0:20:29 they do all the negotiating for you. So it’s not uncomfortable for you. Whatever, cool. What these
0:20:34 guys did is they took like kind of a startupy internet vibe, and they created a nice website
0:20:39 for it where you go to their website, and they you can you can search different cars and they
0:20:43 will rather they have a variety of products. So like one, they have got this thing, it’s I think
0:20:47 it’s like 80 bucks a month or 50 bucks a month, and they will just like give you tons of information
0:20:51 like a database on what the profit margin is on different cars. So you can go negotiate
0:20:56 themselves. Or you can spend $1,000 and tell them the car that you want, and they go and buy it
0:21:01 for you. And they’ll even organize it so it gets shipped to you. And they do all the organization
0:21:06 and all that work. And if you don’t save at least $1,000, you just get your money back.
0:21:10 And they built this massive business because if you go to their YouTube page, I think they
0:21:15 now have 600,000 subscribers on their page. And it’s this really cute dynamic between a father
0:21:20 and son. All the pictures on the site, by the way, are like the dad giving the son a noogie.
0:21:27 It’s like just just wholesome, just so wholesome. And that father and son like dynamic for the brand,
0:21:32 it makes you like them a lot. And they they’re like, you know, there are a bunch of car podcasts,
0:21:35 but we basically what they described what they wanted to do is they probably have no idea who
0:21:39 we are. But it’s what you and I do have just kind of like riffing a little bit less professional.
0:21:45 You’re the father? I would assume. Am I? You’re older than me. You know how there was this big viral
0:21:50 thing where it was like, you know, PewDiePie versus T-Series, like who can have the most
0:21:54 subscribers on YouTube? Yeah. So these guys currently have 533,000 subscribers.
0:22:01 Your boys have 529,000. We are 4,000 subscribers behind CarEdge.
0:22:07 I’m just going to leave that there for our loyal army, who doesn’t want to see us lose to this
0:22:13 father son car buying duo. Go to YouTube and subscribe. All right. Yeah. Back to the subject.
0:22:21 This business is now doing so he has a video where he breaks down the revenue. So he pulls up
0:22:24 their QuickBooks and you can see it, but he blurs out the numbers and I messaged him and I was like,
0:22:29 “Hey, I have this thing, this podcast.” And he goes, “Yeah, you know, I’ve heard of it.”
0:22:33 I go, “Just can you tell me the numbers and I can talk about it?” And so he did.
0:22:38 And so this business is now doing roughly $10 million a year in revenue. I think it’s only
0:22:43 two years old or so. And it seems like a great business. These things could be really cool,
0:22:47 I think. Honestly, I thought it’d be almost bigger because looking at the traffic, they get almost
0:22:53 like 2 million visitors a month to their site. And so that is a huge amount of traffic to your
0:22:57 website for this thing. So I’m extremely impressed. This is only two years old.
0:23:00 Ish. Yeah, it could be three, but yeah, something like that.
0:23:03 Is this something you normally do when you buy cars? You use car brokers?
0:23:07 I haven’t, but I’ve heard of them. We actually talked about it years ago of people who,
0:23:10 you know, we brought this up in one of the early episodes. I’ve never actually used it,
0:23:14 but I remember last time I bought my car, I was in the dealership for like four hours,
0:23:18 like signing paperwork, wiring the money. It took forever. And I was like,
0:23:22 “I’m never doing this again.” And so I just started googling car brokers. I was like,
0:23:24 “I want to try one.” And that’s how I found these guys.
0:23:26 And were they YouTube first? So it was an audience first play?
0:23:28 YouTube first. Yeah, YouTube first.
0:23:32 Did they even plan to launch this as a service or did it start as just let’s make a YouTube channel?
0:23:38 The kid, Zach, has a blog where he’s been blogging since he was 22. And previously, he ran
0:23:43 some small information business that was doing like $150,000 in revenue. And it’s cool. You could
0:23:46 see him blogging as he goes. And he’s like, “I’ve always wanted to learn how to make money on the
0:23:51 internet and start an internet company.” And so you could see like he had like two or three businesses
0:23:57 that weren’t huge or anything, but it was very promising for a 21-year-old. And I have a feeling
0:24:01 I kind of like clicked their LinkedIn and looked around. I think the mother passed away from cancer.
0:24:05 And so I think there was like a feeling of like Zach, the kid was like, “You know,
0:24:08 I want to be with my father more. Let’s see if we can do something together.”
0:24:12 Yeah, he’s got some cool blog posts. So you’re getting your first customers is really hard.
0:24:15 And he talks about the getting their early customers for this. And then another one is
0:24:19 from 10,000 to 14,000 subscribers in three weeks. Here’s what we learned. Here’s what happened.
0:24:21 And here’s what I learned. And then I haven’t read these yet, but I’m just looking at the
0:24:23 titles. These are cool. I’m going to check these out.
0:24:28 Yeah. This is a cool kid. I think now, I think he’s only 25. I think he’s young.
0:24:33 And it’s just a really promising business. And on some of the blog posts, he talks about how he’s
0:24:39 now I have to project financials so we can decide when to hire people. And so you’re actually
0:24:44 seeing him do this in real time, but he’s not in you and I’s world. And so it’s a really fun business
0:24:47 to pay attention to and see what this guy, what is he going to build?
0:24:52 Isn’t how cool is his father, son businesses? Like, or just like, you know, parent kid, but
0:24:58 in not in a succession, you know, hand me down type of way. So a couple examples of this.
0:25:04 We had Al Done come on and talk about Missouri star that the biggest quilting store on the internet.
0:25:11 And it’s Al and his mom. And he’s like, you know, Alan, I think his name is Debbie. I don’t know.
0:25:16 He’s like, yeah, like, same thing, YouTube channel where she makes content and she’s the star.
0:25:21 And Al was the like, cool, I’ll figure out the internet and like e-commerce part of this.
0:25:26 And let’s make this a thing. And this is a nine figure business that sells quilt supplies
0:25:32 to other moms across the country. It’s amazing. And it’s the best mom that do that, that business
0:25:38 together or an Al does a thing that I love when he refers to his mother. He doesn’t say my mom.
0:25:42 He goes, yeah, I was just hanging out and mom wanted to like quilt, you know, like when they
0:25:48 use, when they use mom as like, as a proper down, I love, I’m like, whatever I hear someone do that,
0:25:52 that like when they just refer to them as mom, not my mom, it’s very cute.
0:25:56 So it’s Al and Jenny, they basically created and she and her YouTube videos are great,
0:26:00 by the way. I’ve like randomly watched, even though I have no, I have no interest in quilting,
0:26:04 but I’m interested in her videos because she’s so wholesome and she’s so good on camera.
0:26:09 So I think that’s a great example. We had the guys from Farm Con and Ag Swag. Same thing,
0:26:15 father and son doing business together, but not in a legacy, you know, you could take over my
0:26:18 business, but they started new businesses together. And I just think that’s so cool.
0:26:20 You know, if my kids want to do something like that, that’ll be a blast.
0:26:25 I would love that more than anything. I think if I had to bet more often than not,
0:26:30 it turns negative. But if you get the right, if you get the right parent child relationship,
0:26:32 it’s like magical. It seems like the greatest thing on earth.
0:26:35 Yeah, but they, they say that about everything, like doing business, doing a business with your
0:26:40 friends, like, oh, don’t mix business and friends or family. Like I’ve done both. I’ve done business
0:26:43 with my wife, with my sister-in-law, with my best friends. Like I’ve done businesses with all of
0:26:45 them and- But it’s high risk, high reward.
0:26:49 When it works, it feels like a cheat code because the trust is there, the fun is there.
0:26:52 And it’s like, why wouldn’t I want to do life with these people? Of course.
0:26:56 And when it goes wrong, you’re like, what the hell was I thinking?
0:26:59 Well, do you know who Coco Goff is? She’s the tennis player who was the flag bearer in the
0:27:03 Olympics. I was reading about her last night because she’s, she’s been inspirational lately.
0:27:09 And her father was like, man, when she was like nine, we’re like, wow, this, our little girl is
0:27:15 like very promising. So both the mom and dad quit their job, moved to Florida where their extended
0:27:20 family was to help care for their, their kids. And they went all in on trying to teach her tennis.
0:27:23 And so the father who was, I think a college football player, didn’t know anything about
0:27:27 tennis, learned about tennis, became her coach. And she would say, yeah, it was really challenging
0:27:32 that relationship, but we came up with a really good solution. The center of the court was Switzerland.
0:27:36 And if him and I had an argument, we would come to the middle and then mom would come
0:27:40 and be the third party and decide who was right and who was wrong and would help us like figure
0:27:43 things out. And so like, they built like a good system where they could communicate effectively
0:27:46 for the last, you know, 20 years, however long they’ve been coaching together.
0:27:48 All right, let me tell you one last thing about this car stuff that I found.
0:27:54 So there’s this hilarious TikTok series created by car dealership.
0:27:55 This is Mohawk Chevrolet.
0:28:01 Yes, it’s called Mohawk Chevrolet. It’s just a normal like Chevy truck dealer.
0:28:03 Dude, is this like the office? Like what’s happening?
0:28:10 Listen to this. They hired this young woman to be a social media person. She’s 23 from Kentucky
0:28:15 or what do you university of Kentucky, something like that. And within six months in the job,
0:28:22 she films a video where they place or she put a bunch of random ducks like rubber ducks all over
0:28:26 the dealership. And everyone’s trying to figure out who put the ducks there because it’s kind of
0:28:34 annoying. And she films this office like series of her interviewing people and then showing like
0:28:41 cutaways of what’s going on. And it hits on TikTok. And so eventually she creates a 10 episode series
0:28:46 about the dealership where it’s all they’re all improving, but it is like, you know, like an
0:28:50 Emmy award winning like series. Wow, dude, this is such a good find. This is so cool.
0:28:55 So people. So I think they’ve got millions and millions of views. And the young woman who did
0:29:02 it is like I said, 23 and Chevy and Geico and all these huge brands are commenting and making jokes
0:29:07 on the TikToks. And so many people are like, for real, this should be on Netflix. Like, I want to
0:29:14 watch this. And some Twitter person, I guess, I think a substacker, her name’s Rachel Carton,
0:29:19 I want to give her a shout out. She discovered this and interviewed Grace on substack, on her
0:29:23 substack. And she did a really cool interview where she talks about the process and she’s like,
0:29:27 well, me and Ben, my partner, we just come up with interesting ideas. We don’t write scripts.
0:29:32 I just go into the corner of this, like as if she’s Pam, she’s like, I sit there like Pam,
0:29:36 and I just kind of babble. And we like find like a few minutes of like gold and we build a story
0:29:42 off that. And then we go and make episodes every week. And she is wonderful. This is the greatest
0:29:47 thing I’ve seen where people are like, Hey, what’s going to happen next episode? And the characters
0:29:51 are just other people in the dealerships, like the mechanics or whatever. The episodes will be like,
0:29:58 today, my boss, Jim, the owner of the dealership wants me to make a video about electric
0:30:02 Chevy’s because no one wants to buy them because they’re afraid of them. I don’t know what I’m
0:30:07 going to do. And it’s like the episode is like her trying to figure that out. It is so good.
0:30:12 That’s amazing. Yeah, I want to check this out. And also, Grace, you said her name is?
0:30:17 Is that her name? Grace Kerber. Yeah. I haven’t even seen a single video yet. I just heard about
0:30:23 this literally a minute and a half ago. Grace, I’d like to make you a job offer. Whatever you’re
0:30:30 making currently at the dealership, we’re tripling it. Come work for us. You got to do this at a
0:30:35 different scale than the local car dealership. But that is so impressive. This is amazing.
0:30:39 He’s a really good actress. Like she like leans into it. Yeah, you can just see from the thumbnail
0:30:45 here. It’s like so good. And the most impressive part is imagine a 23-year-old coming into a truck
0:30:49 dealership, which is probably all dudes, particularly like frat bros. And she’s like,
0:30:53 “Yeah, we’re going to do it this way. Let’s just do it.” It’s so beautiful because they’re probably
0:30:58 like, “We’re not even doing TikTok. We have nothing to lose.” When you have nothing to lose,
0:31:04 you can try something new here. You could never do this at the corporate account for Cadillac or
0:31:09 whatever. Someone on Twitter was looking at the search traffic for Mohawk Chevrolet. And as expected,
0:31:14 it’s through the roof. So I guess it’s working. So those are my two car stories.
0:31:18 That was great. Great segment. Good finds. Okay, I have a cool find for you.
0:31:24 I want to tell you about a wellness and health app that’s doing over a hundred million a year.
0:31:31 You might think, “Is this healthcare? Is it AI? Is it biotech?” No, no. I’m talking about Pokemon
0:31:38 Sleep. Have you ever heard of Pokemon Sleep? No. Just check this out. Pokemon, the Pokemon
0:31:43 company, has created a sleep tracking app where you just take your phone and put it on your pillow
0:31:47 right next to you while you sleep. And depending on how well you sleep and how long you sleep,
0:31:53 you catch Pokemon in your sleep and you wake up in the morning and it’s a sleep tracker that catches
0:31:59 Pokemon based on how well or how poorly you slept. A gamified sleep tracking. Now,
0:32:05 this app is blowing up. It is huge in Japan right now. I think like 40% of their users are all in
0:32:11 Japan. And they’ve done over a hundred million in revenue on this app already. Isn’t this insane?
0:32:16 What? How? Well, this in-app purchase is basically.
0:32:19 What do you buy? Go look on Reddit. So if you go look on Reddit,
0:32:23 you can find people talking about it. So I’m just going to read you a couple of Reddit posts.
0:32:26 It says, “To be honest, my true intent with Pokemon Sleep is just to have a consistent bed
0:32:30 time.” And it definitely helps with that. I was never the type to lay in bed on my phone playing
0:32:35 games, but this does help me just put away my phone, put it on the pillow. And even though it’s
0:32:39 not super accurate, it is helping me. Another one is like, “I did move my bed time from 2am
0:32:43 to 10pm daily because I was getting frustrated at having to wake up with so little sleep.
0:32:47 I tried so many things. They all failed. Pokemon Sleep managed to make a lifestyle change that
0:32:52 $2,000 in therapy has not. I’m even willing to spend money on occasionally buying bundles in
0:32:56 the app because it’s actually cheaper than what I was paying to try to improve my sleep before this.”
0:33:01 Oh my God. This is insane. Is this owned by Nintendo or whoever?
0:33:04 Yeah, it’s owned by Pokemon. Like if you go to the sites, Pokemon Company International,
0:33:10 it’s like corporate.Pokemon.com is like the thing behind it. But it’s got 10 million users,
0:33:15 only 17% are in the US. So I think there’s an opportunity to basically what they’re obviously
0:33:18 going to try to grow in the US. But I think there’s an opportunity to just replicate the same idea,
0:33:25 which is I’ve had this thought, which is health tracking right now is all quantitative and nobody
0:33:30 really just does a remix of it. That’s fun. Step tracking is a super common thing. Everybody
0:33:35 likes step tracking, but step tracking has just been the same. So everybody just looks at, “Oh,
0:33:40 did I get my 10,000 steps today?” And it’s just me versus me really, and it’s step tracking. And
0:33:44 even the ones that try to make it social where you might be able to add friends and whatever,
0:33:48 it’s not really a social thing to do. And I had this idea years ago of like,
0:33:51 why don’t they just make it look like Mario Kart where it’s me and my eight friends at the
0:33:55 starting line each day. And then as we’re taking steps, we each have our little car that’s ahead
0:33:59 or behind the other person, and it’ll tell you if you get passed by somebody during the day.
0:34:03 Like, “Oh, Sam just passed you.” And then you look at the map and you’re like, “Oh,
0:34:06 shit, Sam’s like a thousand steps ahead. I’m going to actually go get some more steps in.”
0:34:11 And you would have your car that you could buy your skins or whatever, make it look however.
0:34:16 It’s like, take the same idea, but just make it more, do the fun variants, do the social and fun
0:34:23 variant versus the hardcore data tracking version. Me and four friends a few years ago,
0:34:27 we did it a couple of years in a row where I think it was every January. We would wear,
0:34:34 was it a whoop band? And we would… The person who burned the most energy for the entire month,
0:34:40 won. And so it becomes like this crazy competition where it’s like, “Shit, I can’t go to sleep right
0:34:44 now because John is beat.” I got to go burns of calories like John’s winning. And it’s just who
0:34:50 can exert the most energy in January. And it’s exhausting. It is so exhausting.
0:34:52 I think Joe Rogan does that with his friends, right?
0:34:56 Yeah, we definitely stole that idea from him. What does he call it? Sober October.
0:34:58 Sober October, yeah.
0:35:02 Yes. But when he started it, the bands didn’t really exist. And so once they came out,
0:35:05 we took the bands and we did the same thing.
0:35:13 So here’s the deal. I made most of my money from a newsletter business. It was called The Hustle.
0:35:18 And it was a daily newsletter at scale to millions of subscribers. And it was the greatest business
0:35:24 on earth. The problem with it was that I had close to 40 employees and only three of them
0:35:27 were actually doing any writing. The other employees were growing the newsletter,
0:35:33 building out the tech for the platform and selling ads. And honestly, it was a huge pain in the butt.
0:35:39 Today’s episode is brought to you by Beehive. They are a platform that is built exactly for this.
0:35:42 If you want to grow your newsletter, if you want to monetize a newsletter,
0:35:46 they do all of the stuff that I had to hire dozens of employees to do. So check it out,
0:35:57 Beehive.com. That’s B-E-E-H-I-I-V.com. Those competitions, 100% work. There’s a guy
0:36:04 I follow on Twitter who walks 30,000 steps a day. And then everyone else will post their steps,
0:36:11 like their step counts, that night, just to compare. It 100% makes you want to walk more.
0:36:15 Right. So actually, I had an interesting conversation at this event. I was at with
0:36:21 Nick Gray. So Nick Gray, who said, “No, I’d be my favorite person.” He’s a treasurer.
0:36:25 He was talking about, he’s like, “Dude, the my first muscle challenge you guys did was so wholesome.”
0:36:28 He’s like, “It was so fun. I did it with my friends.” He’s like, “My buddy who I did it with,
0:36:33 who didn’t even listen to the pod before that, started listening.” He’s like, “Now,
0:36:36 if he’s just like traveling and needs a quick workout, what can I do in 15, 20 minutes?”
0:36:39 He’s like, “He just does that again.” And he texts me every time he does it.
0:36:46 So I think Nick created a version of that called Done, which I loved. He’s like,
0:36:48 “You should steal this.” He’s like, “You guys should do this.” He’s like,
0:36:51 “Keep the momentum of the my first muscle challenge.” So he has a thing called Done.
0:36:55 It’s like a group of people that all agree we’re going to do X every day. And I forget what X is.
0:37:00 It might be a walk a certain amount of steps, might be cold plunge, might be whatever it was.
0:37:04 Let’s assume you set the bar. And what he did was he made a WhatsApp group.
0:37:10 And in the WhatsApp group, you only can send one word, Done. And that’s it. Every day,
0:37:14 people just say Done whenever they did the thing. And you can’t say anything else,
0:37:17 but you get the momentum from other people saying Done. You’re like, “Shit, I got to get mine in.”
0:37:21 And then he has his assistants. He’s got his assistants of the Philippines who will go in.
0:37:23 And if you haven’t said Done for like three or four days, they’ll DM you,
0:37:27 they’ll nudge you. And they’ll be like, “Come on, man. You can do this. Stay at it.”
0:37:32 And I just thought that was great. And he’s like, “You should definitely keep that alive
0:37:37 in some ways. Do the Done group. It’s amazing.” And so I think we should come up with a new
0:37:42 challenge like that and just do it the way Nick did with one word, keep it super simple, Done.
0:37:46 I think what we need to do is do the My First Muscle Challenge again,
0:37:50 except, well, tell people when it’s happening. I think people… I mean, I know I would train
0:37:55 to get… Because if you don’t work that energy system, it’s quite hard. I would train for it.
0:37:59 Did you… You were with Nick this weekend. Did you meet any other people at this event?
0:38:06 I met a ton of people. What would you like to know? So here’s a fun way we can maybe do this.
0:38:12 So I came home and I brain-dumped all of my notes into this doc. But I did it almost like a Twitter
0:38:20 thread where I… It’s not like a long blog post with one coherent message. I just bullet pointed
0:38:25 like 30 bullet points. So I want you to just pick a number. Let’s do three of them. I won’t
0:38:30 do too many of them. Pick three of them. Just pick random numbers. And between one and 30,
0:38:32 and I’m just going to read you whatever that bullet was. And these are notes to myself,
0:38:36 so I’ll have to add some context. But… Well, I can’t see them. That’s all right.
0:38:44 Yeah, you can’t see them. Just say the number. Well, one. Okay, one. The best advice is free
0:38:49 by definition. Okay, so what does this mean? At this event, there’s lots of talk,
0:38:53 speakers on stage, that sort of thing. Are you going to say what the event is? We didn’t actually
0:38:58 say… Oh, yeah, sorry. So Andrew Wilkinson, our buddy, Andrew, host an event called Interesting
0:39:03 People. And this is the second year he’s done it. So he invites a bunch of people out to where he
0:39:07 lives in Victoria, Canada, and is supposed to just be a mixing of interesting people that either he
0:39:11 knows really well, like some people he grew up with, some people he knows from the internet,
0:39:14 and some people he doesn’t know, but they sounded interesting when they applied. It’s probably 80,
0:39:20 90 people, super well-run event, had a blast. So while I was there, I was thinking about
0:39:26 conferences in general, and I realized the best advice is free by definition. And what I mean by
0:39:34 this is this. Advice that is truly great is actually incredibly simple advice. If it would
0:39:40 apply to you almost in a generic way, it’s going to be simple and almost like hilariously uncomplicated.
0:39:44 Like if I said, Sam, you know nothing about me, but you know that I want to get in shape,
0:39:48 tell me what to do. You have like, you know, 15 seconds, go ahead, tell me what to do.
0:39:54 One gram of protein per pound, lift weights three days a week, walk 10,000 steps a day.
0:40:00 Great. Now if I said, if you wanted to create a course around that, maybe you could, but you’d
0:40:04 have to make it complicated. You’d have to add a whole bunch of other things. Like the best advice
0:40:09 in the world tends to be incredibly simple, so simple that you couldn’t charge for it.
0:40:14 So the best advice is free because either the great advice is so simple, you couldn’t possibly
0:40:18 charge for it. It would be laughable to charge for something like that, to say, well, yeah,
0:40:22 eat whole foods, you know, try to get enough protein, walk and get good sleep, right? Or
0:40:26 whatever, right? Exercise three times a week, do weight lift. These are such simple things,
0:40:30 you can’t create a whole course or program around it in that simple way.
0:40:36 And the other side is advice that is non-obvious like that, the non-common sense advice,
0:40:43 is like hard one, like wisdom usually comes from people who are so successful that they’d be willing
0:40:48 to give it away for free. So the advice from the real winners of life, they’re not charging you
0:40:54 for it because they’ve won, they’re fully abundant, and they’re happy to pass on what worked for them.
0:40:57 And so I realize that the best advice comes at either end of that barbell.
0:41:01 It either comes from people who are so successful that they wouldn’t think to charge for it because
0:41:05 that’d be beneath them. Or it’s so simple that you couldn’t possibly charge for it because it
0:41:09 takes a minute to tell you the answer. And after that, it’s about you following it.
0:41:13 And so I think that that is a general way that I’m now thinking of advice. Anything that falls in
0:41:19 the middle is the mid-wit. It’s basically advice that is overly complicated. You’re paying for it.
0:41:24 And ultimately, you haven’t actually found the most useful version of the advice.
0:41:28 Were there any people who you met who were shockingly amazing or interesting?
0:41:35 Nick Gray. Greg Eisenberg. So Greg, a lot of people know Greg because he’s on Twitter or
0:41:41 whatever. Greg is 10 times more fun in person than he is online. You might even like his online
0:41:46 content, but I’m saying he’s that much better in person. He’s just like a walking vibe.
0:41:53 Whenever I’m around him, it’s just fun. I’m laughing. And it’s very interesting what’s
0:41:58 going on. And I guess the way I approach these events is I’m just looking for two or three people
0:42:05 that I think are amazing. And I’m looking for people who just have a certain energy about them,
0:42:11 a certain way of being that is good to interact with because I already have a day-to-day life,
0:42:16 a routine. If I’m getting out of my routine to go to something, I don’t want to spend it with…
0:42:22 I don’t want to spend my time out of my routine doing the same things I would do in my routine.
0:42:25 So I try to make an effort to hang out with people who are maybe people I don’t hang out
0:42:31 with all the time or hang out in a way that is not just my normal zone that I’m in.
0:42:36 – Was there anyone else that fell into that category or any insight that you got?
0:42:40 – Okay. I’ll give you one note here. Not necessarily something that changed my mind,
0:42:46 but something that I thought was pretty insightful. So Patrick Campbell did a breakout session.
0:42:50 And Patrick’s talk was basically like after he sold his company, and Patrick’s been on the pod
0:42:56 before talking about how he sold his company for like $250 million and what happened after that.
0:42:59 And he said something that I really liked. The question I asked him, I go,
0:43:05 if your brother sold his company now, you can give him some advice on what to do in the year
0:43:09 after you sell. I just sold, how should I think now? Knowing what you just went through,
0:43:15 what would you advise him? He said, well, first thing, probably don’t make any major moves
0:43:20 for like six to nine months. No major purchases. I think you did this too, right? No major purchases
0:43:24 for six to nine months. He said it well. He goes, don’t worry, you have the rest of your life to
0:43:30 spend this money. So you don’t have to be in a rush. The money’s there. The next thing he said was
0:43:38 he hired a guy, this coach, Jack Skeen, and he helped them do kind of like a life 360, kind of
0:43:42 like a, you know, people do these like 360 reviews where they interview like 10 people around you.
0:43:46 Andrew’s done this, Patrick’s done this with the same guy. And they’re basically this guy who
0:43:50 interrogates people. When this guy stood up to do his intro during the event, he goes,
0:43:58 he said, my name’s Jack. And when I was 30 years old, I found the thing that I could do
0:44:03 better than anybody I’d ever met. And I realized that that’s the thing I should be doing with my
0:44:07 life. He’s like, you’re not going to ask me the thing? And we’re like, what’s the thing? And he
0:44:14 goes, I look into people’s eyes and I can see their soul. He’s like, basically I can meet people,
0:44:17 I can talk to them, I can ask them questions, I can figure out who they really are, what they’re
0:44:22 really all about. So Patrick said, he’s like, you know, he asked me a bunch of questions and he’s
0:44:25 like, he really interrogates you and the people around you to try to figure out who is this guy,
0:44:29 what’s he all about? What does he love? When is he at his best? When is he at his worst?
0:44:33 That sort of thing. And what Patrick said was, he took a very intentional approach to this
0:44:38 introspection. He’s like, he’s like, me and my wife did an offsite. He’s like, we did an offsite and
0:44:42 at the offsite, you know, we talk kind of like, what do we want out of life, you know, the material
0:44:46 part of our life, the emotional part of our life, the lifestyle. He’s like, and we made a list and
0:44:50 then we kind of talked about it together. And he’s like, we compared, we said three things. He goes,
0:44:57 I would share something that I wanted out of life. And either it would be cool, go for it,
0:45:03 like, you know, you do you, or it would be cool, I want to do it with you, let’s do that together.
0:45:08 Or I’m not down with that. Like, I don’t think that’s congruent with what I want.
0:45:12 And he also said that he made a scorecard for himself. And he said one thing on the scorecard
0:45:17 that I really liked. So on a scorecard, he was like, you know, I check in every six months or
0:45:21 so, whatever. And I think about, you know, accomplishments, I’m proud of my wins. Things
0:45:26 that I’m bad at that I’ve accepted that I’m bad at. So like, things I’m bad at that I’m not working
0:45:32 on improving, but I’m at peace with the way they are. Then it’s things that I’m working on. And
0:45:38 the last one is like losses I will no longer live with. And he’s like, this is L’s that I’m no longer
0:45:43 willing to take. So things that are not okay in my life that I need to make a change, but I’m not
0:45:49 already making that change. And I thought it was very useful to do this bucketing because
0:45:53 when he said these, none of them sounded that surprising, but I had never really asked myself
0:45:57 those questions. You know, what are the, you know, all four of those, what are the wins? What are
0:46:00 the things I’m bad at that I’m accepting? What are the things that are bad at that I’m not accepting
0:46:05 I’m working on? And what are the areas of my life I’m no longer willing to tolerate? The losses I’m
0:46:11 no longer willing to tolerate. And what I like about these is it normalizes having kind of these
0:46:16 highs and lows in your life. And I know that most people try to bury things like, you know, here’s
0:46:20 some areas of my life I don’t feel great about, but I don’t really want to address them because when
0:46:25 I do, I just feel like ashamed and kind of guilty. And I feel like bad about myself when I do. So
0:46:30 because I feel bad about myself when I address these, I don’t address them. I just stash them.
0:46:35 And I thought it was a very useful way of thinking because it brings it all to light and says, well,
0:46:40 yeah, of course there’s these buckets. And it would be silly of me to not have anything in one of
0:46:43 these buckets. Like, of course, I’ve got to have some wins. I’ve got to have some things I’m bad at.
0:46:46 I’ve got to have some things that I want to change. I’ve got to have some things that I feel like I’m
0:46:50 making progress on. Like, and every bucket should have something in it. And that’s nothing to feel
0:46:55 bad about. I thought that was just a very useful exercise that I think more people could benefit
0:47:01 from. I think a takeaway that I’ve had of hanging out with people like Patrick and other people who
0:47:06 maybe people earlier in their career look up to, of which Patrick should be that type of person,
0:47:14 you think that when you quote make it, you don’t have doubts and you don’t spend money on foo-foo
0:47:21 shit like a life 360. You spend even more on that type of stuff because it’s still incredibly
0:47:26 necessary. Do you know what I mean? Like I’m more necessary than ever. I’m reading this Jack Skeen
0:47:30 website and this is something that previously I would look it back out on and be like, who needs
0:47:34 that? Like, if you’re going to kick ass, you’re going to kick ass. Now I’m reading it and I’m like,
0:47:40 I want this. I need answers. I have no answers. This man has the answers. I mean, the headline says,
0:47:45 “Discover your true life purpose and direction with the roadmap.” Right? You know, if I hit that
0:47:49 normally, I’m bouncing. But when you hear about it in the context of a story and your friends have
0:47:53 done it and you’re at a certain time of your life, it makes total sense to invest in things like this.
0:47:58 This is awesome. Well, that’s good. It was a good trip. It was a lot of fun. It’s also, I mean,
0:48:03 it was cool because I would say 60, 70, 80% of the people there like listen to MFM, which is great.
0:48:09 You’re popular? Well, yeah, but like more than that, I mean, a lot of people had cool stories
0:48:13 of stuff that we’ve talked about that they could, they would come up and share. They’d be like, oh,
0:48:18 dude, like whether it was just like, oh, I hit my first million. And I’m like, yeah, cool. I’m
0:48:21 like a genie. I appear when you hit your first million. That’s it. You just say the words and
0:48:27 it happens. Or there’s people who are like, yeah, you guys talked about this. And I went and did all
0:48:31 these things. And here’s what’s happened since. And normally you don’t get that feedback loop,
0:48:34 right? When we get on here, people don’t realize like, I just treat this like I’m just hanging out
0:48:38 with you. And I’m trying to tell you interesting things. You’re telling me interesting things that
0:48:43 I get excited. And then we get off and like, that’s kind of it. Only now we’re starting to be involved
0:48:47 even with like the thumbnails and the titles to be like, Hey, guys, like, can we just like,
0:48:51 I don’t care if it gets less clicks, just make us look less stupid, please.
0:48:57 You know, like that’s kind of like our level of involvement post post episode. But we definitely
0:49:01 don’t really get as much feedback as there is. So that was, I would say the most fun part was
0:49:05 people coming up and having stories that were that branched off of something that we talk about.
0:49:09 One time, you and I talked about this World War II book that I was reading about.
0:49:16 And we talked about Hitler because he was part of the book. And like the headline that we had
0:49:24 used or somebody picked for the video was like leadership lessons from the third right. And I
0:49:30 was like, Oh my God, no, do not do that. Delete, delete, delete. That is not what I meant. Oh,
0:49:34 dude, I also had a lesson learned. So I gave a, I gave two talks at this event. I had one good talk.
0:49:40 And I had one dog shit talk. And that was a great lesson to learn of just eating shit
0:49:45 and realizing five minutes into the talk. Oh, I’ve made a huge mistake. So the first one was
0:49:49 just a breakout session. And she was like, well, you could just do whatever you want. And I was
0:49:54 like, cool, I’m not even going to have a topic going in. I’m going to talk to the people there.
0:49:57 And we’re going to, we’re going to like, figure out what do people want to talk about? And then
0:50:03 we’ll improvise, we’ll riff. So I’ll tell you about the good one and then the bad one. So the,
0:50:07 I actually talked about the bad one first. So here’s what went wrong with the bad one. These
0:50:12 are lessons learned in public speaking. So I, I get up on the stage and I grab the microphone.
0:50:18 And I can’t help myself, but try something that I’ve never done before that I have not
0:50:23 prepared for, but I just want to see what happens. So I go for that, which was actually that part
0:50:28 was okay. So they had Matthew Dix, the storytelling guy, give like the opening talk at the event. So
0:50:32 he, he was like the nine a.m. And I was like the four p.m. So at the nine a.m. thing, he gets on
0:50:36 there and he tells a great story and he’s got, he’s like a, he does these speeches everywhere.
0:50:42 So like he’s ready to tell us how in business storytelling can be super valuable. So I’m writing
0:50:47 a ton of notes and I’m inspired. I’m already a believer in storytelling. So you’re preaching to
0:50:51 the choir, right? It’s like the Kool-Aid man burst through the wall and I already had my cup ready,
0:50:57 pour it on in. And so he convinces us to how important storytelling is. But the next 10s,
0:51:00 you know, five speakers or whatever, they already knew what they were going to say. So
0:51:06 they get on stage and they don’t really tell a story. And I’m like, dude, we all heard that,
0:51:09 right? Storytelling is the shit. So I was like, I’m going to try to tell a Matthew Dix story
0:51:14 at the start of my talk. And so 15 minutes before I’m supposed to go on, there’s like a little
0:51:19 break and I decided to like try to write a story that I’m going to tell, which is probably not
0:51:22 enough time to do that. But whenever I gave it a shot, I was like, I’m here, I’m going to get my
0:51:28 reps in. So I got my rep it. I tried to give the talk, I would say, okay, at least I get credit
0:51:33 for trying something new. And everybody understood why my story was like not so great was because
0:51:39 I just obviously made it up like, you know, a few minutes before. Now, after that, I decided,
0:51:44 I’m like, you know what? Conferences are these, usually it’s like, you get on stage and you’re
0:51:47 supposed to have the answer. Like, here’s how you do it, right? Here’s how you do X. And you’re
0:51:51 supposed to be the know it all genius who like, you know, that’s what the guy on stage is doing.
0:51:56 So I decided, you know what, I’m going to be different. And being different, the thing that
0:52:01 I’ll tell you about being different is when it works, awesome. When it doesn’t work, you’re just
0:52:06 fucking weird. And so I decided to go on stage and tell people about all the ways that I have failed
0:52:13 and lost money. So specifically, the decisions I’ve made that have been the worst for me in terms
0:52:17 of success and finance, how I’ve lost, you know, $100 million to these seven or eight
0:52:22 really poor decisions. And I get on stage and I start giving the talk and what I realized is,
0:52:29 this is a downer. This is an absolute downer. And even though my information might be good,
0:52:34 and the principles in this might be good, I am basically making everybody in this room state
0:52:40 change downward. I should be leaving them on a high note. It’s the end of the event. We should be
0:52:45 like, you know, lighthearted, everyone’s done a full day. They’re tired. They’re not looking for
0:52:51 something heavy. And I came in like a weighted blanket on that crowd. And so five minutes and I
0:52:56 was like, Oh, this is a bad idea. I shouldn’t have done this. And I didn’t have the skills to,
0:53:02 you know, pull out of that nosedive and change my topic. And I’m sure to them it was fine. But I
0:53:06 know in my head what a good talk feels like when I give it, it could be electric, you know, like
0:53:11 people are laughing and they’re writing notes furiously and they’re feeling good and afterwards
0:53:16 they’re buzzing. They want to run through a wall afterwards. This was like the wall ran through them.
0:53:22 And so I feel like that was a big mistake on my part there. What was the winning one?
0:53:26 The winning one was basically the opposite of that. So I, as soon as the talk happened or as
0:53:29 soon as they’re like, all right, getting a breakout session, everybody and mine was in the main room.
0:53:33 So they were like, people just like stayed in their seat. It was like a five minute break. So
0:53:36 everyone just like stays in their seat. They’re like kind of on their phone checking their email.
0:53:40 But and I was like, Oh, no, no, I got to, I got to shift the energy first and foremost. It doesn’t
0:53:44 matter what I’m going to say. I got to shift the energy. So I had the, the insight at that point
0:53:49 to do it. I just didn’t have it at the other talk. And so I, I immediately was like, all right,
0:53:52 everybody come over here to this side of the room, bring a chair. Let’s make a circle.
0:53:55 Like circles have a different energy in general than somebody on stage and everybody sitting
0:54:00 in a crowd facing them, not seeing each other. And I had to move, bring their chair, come over here,
0:54:05 quickly make a circle. And then I did a little bit of crowd work, almost like a comedian. There
0:54:11 was a guy in the group who, who I had known and had a funny encounter with before this. He used
0:54:15 to be in like a mastermind group of mine before this. And I kicked him out because I was like,
0:54:19 it was like four straight meetings where he would say the same thing and be stuck at the same plateau.
0:54:24 And I kicked him out. I was like, dude, Alex, like, honestly, I think the best thing I could do
0:54:29 for you is not even let you come here and say this same story again, because you’re just like
0:54:36 getting into a rut. Don’t come back here till you’ve doubled revenue. I just like kicked him out.
0:54:39 And actually he’s like eight X since then, and they’re like three years since then. And so he’s
0:54:45 done incredibly well. And so I was like, I haven’t seen you in a while. Like, how are things going?
0:54:51 Any attention here? No, dude, it was great. I’m a next. It’s all good. And so anyways, and I had,
0:54:55 I did this thing where people were like, how do you do X? Whatever. And I had us do like a,
0:54:59 like a pushup thing to like change the energy, like in that, in that moment, like let’s get the
0:55:04 blood flowing. Because one of my principles is good decisions come from good energy. So if you
0:55:08 are trying to figure something out, you’re trying to make a decision, or you’re trying to rally
0:55:14 your team, if you’re doing it from a state where everybody’s tired or stressed or afraid of what’s
0:55:19 going on or just literally like half paying attention, that is not where great ideas or
0:55:24 great decisions come from. And so the first thing you do is you shift your state and then you make
0:55:27 your decision. Then you try to ask yourself the question of how are we going to make this happen?
0:55:31 And so I showed people like how quickly you can change your energy, like watch this, like 15
0:55:36 seconds, 20 seconds, you’ll be feeling different than you are right now. And so that was a much
0:55:40 better thing where it didn’t really matter what I said, but crowd work in order to make it more
0:55:44 interactive keeps everybody on their toes because they don’t know when I’m going to talk to them.
0:55:51 And then shifting the energy first and worrying about information later was the smart move there.
0:55:56 So it was a good trip then. I mean, I, it looked awesome. I saw the list of people going.
0:55:58 Yeah, it was cool. Tons of great people.
0:56:13 All right, that’s the part.

0:00:04 11 years ago this month, I gave up alcohol and in today’s episode
0:00:06 I want to share some of the things that I’ve learned along the way
0:00:16 All right 11 years ago
0:00:19 I gave up alcohol and in today’s episode
0:00:24 I want to share some of the things that I’ve learned since then so the reason I’m doing this is
0:00:29 My at my one-year anniversary of giving up drinking. I wrote this blog post
0:00:35 You can Google it. It’s called six things. I learned from not drinking for a year and today I thought I’ll recap that
0:00:42 blog post but also share some of the things that I didn’t add to that blog post that have kind of come true in the last 10 years and
0:00:50 I’m sharing here on my first million because I think a lot of people would enjoy this but also because this isn’t just about giving up alcohol
0:00:56 So it doesn’t matter if you’re giving up drinking or you want to get up drinking or you want to just create a new habit
0:01:02 I have found that these things that I’ve learned they can apply to anyone trying to make a major life change. And so
0:01:07 Lesson number one figure out your why and go all in on that. And so let me explain
0:01:13 So I started drinking in my late teens with just my friends just like most people when they start doing it
0:01:21 But what I noticed was that it dulled my anxiety a ton and I am a pretty anxious person
0:01:26 I don’t know if you can tell if you listen to this podcast. I bet you can but I have a fairly high anxiety and
0:01:32 I noticed that when I started drinking my anxiety it just like kind of went away and
0:01:38 So as I got more and more into drinking, I was just like this feels awesome. I don’t feel anxious
0:01:42 I’m gonna keep doing it. So it was a very much self medication and by the time I was like
0:01:46 21 I was super into alcohol to the point where
0:01:52 Probably ages 22 to 23. I was intoxicated basically 24 hours a day
0:01:56 I was drunk 24 hours a day first thing in the morning you start you go all day
0:02:02 And then you wake up a little drunk or a little hung over and you just keep going and so I realized
0:02:07 One night I was blowing it. I always felt I was kind of special
0:02:10 I felt like I had this fire in me that I could do something interesting
0:02:19 But I was completely blowing it and I felt I wanted to feel life because I didn’t really feel like a lot of emotions
0:02:26 During that period because they were hidden and so my reason was I wanted to feel life and I wanted to not ruin my potential
0:02:32 And so like funerals wedding celebrations meeting someone you like breaking up with that person
0:02:38 I think I and many of the people we would drink because for some reason we didn’t want to face reality whether it’s
0:02:42 Trauma you had or I’m not sure why other people experience it
0:02:47 But you want to like cover it up and I’m not against alcohol and drugs for other people
0:02:54 But for me it basically just like masked how I felt and I hated that and then I realized that when I got sober
0:03:00 Facing challenging situations. It felt like this massive adrenaline rush
0:03:07 I felt like so good about facing things that I previously was nervous about so it took about six months of after getting sober
0:03:14 But on on month six months seven month eight, I noticed that I would face these challenging situations like for example
0:03:21 I was 23 24 when I quit and like like every single 23 24 year old guy
0:03:26 I’m meeting girls is like the number one focus in my life and I noticed that when I was like six seven months in I
0:03:29 At first I was super nervous to go up and talk to a girl sober
0:03:34 But then I did it one time and I felt oh my god. That was a rush. I gotta feel that again
0:03:38 I gotta feel that again. I gotta feel it again, and I noticed that it happened with business
0:03:42 It happened with so many other facets of my life that I got to feel this extreme
0:03:46 Emotion that for a lot of sober people. It’s probably just that’s just how they feel
0:03:49 But it felt awesome and so I felt like I was alive again
0:03:51 And so I actually loved like
0:03:57 Confrontation I loved like nervous feelings because it felt like a rush to experience some of those things
0:04:02 And so it was important to lean into that and I had to sit down for a minute and figure out
0:04:05 Why am I doing this and I just always try to remind myself that
0:04:10 And I think that that’s the case for any goal that you try to do when you change your life
0:04:13 Is you got to constantly remind yourself. Why are you actually doing this?
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0:04:49 Lesson number two
0:04:51 tell your friends so
0:04:55 I originally tried giving up booze because I
0:05:01 Was in college and I was like like this is a problem. This is just a huge issue that I have
0:05:05 I was basically living by myself my senior year of college and
0:05:10 Starting my sophomore year of school. It was like full blown an issue
0:05:14 And so I went two years like that and I lived by myself basically so like no one would
0:05:21 Know that I was screwed up and I also had a hot dog stand and that was like my business
0:05:23 I’ve talked about here a lot of times the reason I had that business was
0:05:27 You could own a hot dog stand and sell hot dogs from 11 to 3
0:05:32 And being toxicated and most people won’t know because I just think that you’re acting goofy
0:05:35 And so that’s one of the reasons why I did it and so I basically didn’t tell anyone
0:05:41 And then the first time I got sober I just went cold turkey and I got super sick a lot of people don’t
0:05:45 Talk about this but with alcohol, but I’m pretty sure there’s only two drugs
0:05:50 You can die from if you try to do it on your own and you could have withdrawals and die and that’s alcohol and opioids
0:05:57 And so I got really sick like five days into giving up booze and I went to my college doctor
0:06:01 And they like measured my blood pressure and they’re like, man, your blood pressure is like through the roof
0:06:06 What the hell is going on and I had to explain to them what the issue was and that was the first time that I ever vocalized it
0:06:11 And so we had to go to the hospital that day and I had to tell the hospital that was an issue
0:06:16 And it was like really embarrassing and I felt horrible about even like vocalizing that I remember I was like in tears practically
0:06:18 I was like, oh man, I can’t believe I just said that out loud
0:06:21 But it definitely felt better
0:06:25 But I didn’t tell anyone once they got out of the hospital. I still didn’t mention it to anyone
0:06:28 And then eventually after a few months
0:06:33 I was going to graduate college and I moved to san francisco to try to make it in the internet world
0:06:37 And I relapsed because when I got off to san francisco, I wanted to meet new friends
0:06:42 I wanted to impress these guys who I moved in with even though I doubt they were impressed by drinking
0:06:46 I somehow felt I needed to impress them and I was like, yeah, let’s go party. Let’s go do this
0:06:51 And we went out and I got pressured and I caved in and I and I ended up drinking again
0:06:55 And then it took about another year of kind of going crazy
0:07:02 And I eventually went to a homeless clinic in san francisco. It was called the san francisco south of market
0:07:08 Mental clinic. I think is what it was called. It was for homeless people pretty much like at the time
0:07:12 I had just left my job to start the hustle and I didn’t have any income
0:07:17 And so I had technically qualified to like go to this homeless clinic. But in a weird way, I was like
0:07:25 I’m a I’m a I’m basically a bomb like I deserve to be here like I’m ruining everything
0:07:26 I deserve to be with these other
0:07:32 Addicts and I met this doctor named jocelyn porquez. I saw her up until recently actually
0:07:37 She gave me this advice. She was like, you should tell your your friends tell your roommates that you’re having an issue
0:07:43 I was so freaking afraid to do that. And so I kind of worked up the courage with her encouragement
0:07:47 And I eventually told my roommates and I was like, hey guys, I I’ve got a drinking issue
0:07:52 Um, and so, uh, you can live your life the way you want to live your life and I’m not going to judge you
0:07:54 I’m totally fine with you guys doing what you want to do
0:08:00 But from this point on I’m sober and I’m not going to drink alcohol and I would love it if you could encourage me
0:08:07 And I felt like the biggest weight lifted off my shoulders and I noticed that when I felt that weight
0:08:11 It will go away. It it became so much easier
0:08:15 And so I had no problem after that telling a bunch of other friends and a few of my friends at the time
0:08:17 they kind of bailed on me
0:08:22 And I was kind of bombed for a minute and then I was like, you know what if they’re willing to bail on me
0:08:25 Over this then fuck them. I don’t want to be friends with those guys anyway
0:08:30 And it felt amazing if it felt so good to be able to talk about this with people
0:08:33 And I talked to a bunch of other people who have struggled with this
0:08:38 And a common feature that people have when they’re trying to break any type of addiction
0:08:41 Or a habit is they don’t talk about it with people because they’re embarrassed
0:08:44 And I have found that talking about it
0:08:50 It makes me not embarrassed because a lot of other people struggle with the stuff and it humanizes someone
0:08:54 Because I know that a lot of people listen to me and might look up to me. It’s cool to help them
0:08:58 But I mostly do it for me. It’s a selfish reason why I talk about it because
0:09:02 it makes me feel better and it makes me feel like it’s no big deal or
0:09:08 It kind of normalizes it. And so in my opinion, if you’re trying to change a habit, whether it’s addiction
0:09:10 Whether trying to start a business
0:09:14 I think that you should tell people and the reason you should tell people is because of lesson number three
0:09:18 Which is I think it’s important to recreate your identity
0:09:24 So Robert Green is one of my favorite authors. He’s got this awesome book called the four eight laws of power
0:09:26 And I remember reading it when I was trying to get sober
0:09:31 And I think it’s like chapter 25 and he’s got this chapter about recreating your identity
0:09:37 And he wrote the book in terms of like how to gain power which you could argue is or is not good
0:09:40 But doesn’t matter the lesson though was awesome for me
0:09:47 And he gave examples of like celebrities for example lady gaga lady gaga was this like fairly like normal woman when she was like
0:09:52 18 years old and then she’s like, you know, I’m kind of quirky. I’m going to lean into like this weird thing
0:09:53 With my identity
0:09:58 I’m going to make my whole brand about it and she became that person and that is like the lady gaga character
0:10:00 And I found that to be very empowering
0:10:06 And so I started changing my language to not I’m going to get sober or I’m going to try and be sober
0:10:10 Or I’m going to try not to drink too. I am sober. I am an alcoholic
0:10:13 And I found that labeling
0:10:16 To be powerful. I think a lot of people
0:10:21 Don’t like to label themselves labels can be really bad for you if you do like I am depressed or
0:10:23 I am weak or whatever it is
0:10:30 And so I just changed the label that I gave myself and I found that that kind of was like the seed for recreating an identity
0:10:35 so my identity before getting sober was like I’ve got a strong tolerance or
0:10:38 I can be the life of the party or
0:10:43 I just don’t give a shit. I’m down for whatever like these stupid labels that I gave myself
0:10:48 I was still ladling myself. So instead I decided I’m going to recreate my identity and I’m going to give myself the label of
0:10:52 I am sober and I have other examples of doing this. So for example
0:10:53 um
0:10:58 I’m going to talk about this in a second, but after giving up drinking. I totally got addicted to sugar
0:11:04 And I got pretty like fat and like two or three years ago. I told shawn
0:11:05 I go shawn
0:11:11 I’m now a fitness influencer and if you go to my instagram, you’ll see all these old posts where I like it was silly
0:11:13 I was I was
0:11:16 Kind of being silly about it. But I was serious. I’m like, I am a fit person now
0:11:20 I am an athlete and so I got super fit because
0:11:26 I started working at it, but I labeled myself and labeling myself as an athlete or as someone who works out every day
0:11:30 I didn’t want to ruin that label. And so I exercised every single day
0:11:35 And I think labeling yourself as a good person a loyal person as a business build
0:11:39 Builder as a for as a force of nature as a fitness freak
0:11:44 I think those labels are incredibly important because it makes sure that you recreate your identity
0:11:50 And I like to tell people that and to this day. I still do that with a bunch of things. So for example
0:11:54 If I need if I meet someone new I’m not going to be like, yeah, I’m an alcoholic. I’ve got issues
0:11:57 but if they offer me a
0:11:59 A beverage or something a beer
0:12:03 I just say no, I don’t drink because I like it too much and they usually get the message
0:12:09 But I do like little subtle things like that where it’s kind of puts my foot down of I do not drink alcohol
0:12:11 and I I felt this
0:12:14 Lowed lighting from my shoulders to like put it out there
0:12:20 But it put pressure on me to never break that because I didn’t want to disappoint others and I didn’t want to disappoint myself
0:12:27 And so I like recreating my identity and I like using labels and I think it’s really important. So whether you want to
0:12:31 Start a business. This is a business channel. We’ll talk about business. Why do you want to start a business and you’re working somewhere?
0:12:36 It’s like, oh, I’m only working here temporarily, but I’m actually building a company right now
0:12:40 Because I’m an entrepreneur. I like labels. I think labels are
0:12:42 incredibly effective
0:12:44 lesson number four
0:12:47 I’m not trying to be perfect. I’m just trying to be mostly good
0:12:52 And I think that that is true for many things and let me give you an example. So
0:12:55 I read so many books when I was trying to get sober
0:13:02 Uh, I talked about the 48 laws of power. That was a great one mastery by robber green. That was another good one
0:13:10 And then the third one was the power of habit the takeaway for that book for me was that a habit doesn’t go away
0:13:13 It just gets transferred
0:13:18 And so what that means is that when you want to change a habit, it’s important to look at your loop
0:13:23 So usually it’s a there’s some type of uh stimulus that makes you want to do something
0:13:27 And then you react to it and you typically do that over and over and over again
0:13:30 And that’s how a habit is created
0:13:32 And so what I had to do when I
0:13:37 Was giving up booze was I had to look at what my behavior was and I had to like break the pattern
0:13:42 And the pattern wasn’t necessarily going to go away. It was just going to get transferred to something new
0:13:49 And so when I transferred my habit to something new I was under uh doctor supervision under the uh for this
0:13:51 And I told the doctor i’m like man, i’m trying to
0:13:54 Not drink and i’m on day three
0:13:59 I am craving sugar so much because when you drink like I drink like 30 beers a day
0:14:03 You’re like craving carbs constantly because that’s a big part of alcohol
0:14:09 And the doctor was like just go and eat m&m’s just eat m&m’s all day just go like who cares
0:14:12 Just you can figure that out at a later date
0:14:15 But right now the goal is not to be perfect and live a perfect life
0:14:18 It’s just to be better than you were
0:14:23 And I thought that that was so relieving because I thought I had to be perfect as like no i’m making this massive life change
0:14:26 I can’t screw anything up and I was like no just improve this one thing
0:14:31 And give into the sugar and then at a later date when you’re confident with that the alcohol thing is
0:14:35 Is away and you’re not craving it as much we’ll address the sugar thing another time
0:14:42 And so I did I drink uh or I ate tons of m&m’s that was my candy for a long time was peanut m&m’s
0:14:46 And I loved non-alcoholic beer. I drink so much o-duels
0:14:52 Uh, I would drink like 15 to 20 o-duels a day because I noticed when I created beer
0:14:56 I just went and got no duels and that’s a non-alcoholic beer if you don’t live in america
0:15:03 It doesn’t taste very good, but it was an awesome, uh replacement and I got pretty fat because of that
0:15:07 But I was okay. It was better to be fat and not on alcohol than
0:15:10 Whatever I was before but drinking as much as I did
0:15:15 And then I transferred that habit from non-alcoholic beer and sugar
0:15:20 I’ve mostly have successfully transferred it to diet soda and carbonated drinks
0:15:24 So I drank a ton of like carbonated water like all day, uh, and I love diet soda and diet soda
0:15:28 You could say that’s not good for you, but that’s okay. I’m not trying to be perfect. I’m just trying to be mostly good
0:15:33 All right, if you’re listening to this pod, I already know something about you
0:15:36 You my friend are nosy
0:15:42 You want to know the numbers behind all of these things that we’re talking about how much money people make how much money people spend
0:15:46 How much money businesses make you want to know all of this people’s net worth all of it?
0:15:51 Well, I’ve got good news for you. So my company hampton. We’re a private community for CEOs
0:15:55 We do this thing where we survey our members and we ask them all types of information
0:15:59 Like how much money they’re paying themselves how much money they’re paying a lot of their employees
0:16:05 What their team-wide bonuses are what their net worth is what their portfolio looks like we ask all these questions
0:16:09 But we do it anonymously and so people are willing to reveal all types of amazing information
0:16:14 So if you really cannot google you can’t find anywhere else and you could check it out at joinhampton.com
0:16:18 Click the report section on the menu click the salary and compensation report
0:16:21 It’s going to blow your mind. You’re going to love this stuff. Check it out
0:16:23 Now back to the pod
0:16:26 Now lesson number five
0:16:29 Being sober attracts more people. Like I said before
0:16:32 How was 23 24 25 when I went through this journey?
0:16:38 I was single at the time and what does every single guy care about?
0:16:43 Meeting girls or mean whatever you’re into but basically meeting someone
0:16:48 Uh, and my number one fear. I remember this when I was trying to get sober
0:16:53 Was what girls think about me? I didn’t want them to think I was like
0:16:56 A freak at the time. I was like, oh, what do they think? I’m a freak. What do they think?
0:16:58 I think I think that I’m like religious. What are they?
0:17:04 Which is done wrong being religious, but I ain’t and I was like, are they going to be turned off?
0:17:06 Are they like not going to be into me because I’m going to be boring
0:17:14 And I remember my first sober date. I was scared shitless. I was so afraid
0:17:20 And I decided to just tell her when we uh, something it came up. I don’t remember how
0:17:23 Uh, I think because I didn’t order like a drink when she ordered a drink
0:17:28 She’s like, oh, you don’t drink and I was like, no, like I’m basically an alcoholic and it’s been like six months since I drank
0:17:31 and I remember she leaned in like she like
0:17:35 Put her elbow on the table and like leaned in and I was like
0:17:43 Bingo, she’s interested. What the hell that and I don’t think you should do something like this for other people
0:17:47 But at the time I was like, I’ll take any advantage that I can get
0:17:54 And the fact that I was afraid to meet women and girls because I was an alcoholic and and that their
0:18:00 Made her maybe like more interested in me. I was like, I’ll take a leg up anywhere I can get it
0:18:05 So I leaned into that and I noticed that women liked me more at least the right type of woman
0:18:11 The type of woman I wanted to attract they liked me more because of that and uh, I’ve been married now for a long time
0:18:16 And so meeting girls is not in that ways and actually something I care about anymore
0:18:20 But men were attracted to me more too. Like I because I had this
0:18:26 Newfound confidence. It felt as if I was walking around all day and I remember I used to think
0:18:33 I’ve got a string attached to my back and I would try to pull it up and so I would try to walk up like perfectly straight
0:18:38 Because I was like, wow this whole drinking thing. It’s changing my confidence
0:18:41 I’m going to lean into other things that create a real sense of confidence
0:18:43 so I started changing my posture and
0:18:49 It was awesome and what happened was that created this cycle of confidence where I was like, oh, I could do this without beer
0:18:53 I could do uh, I can meet a girl. I can go and start a business
0:18:56 I could do all these things and it created this like crazy cycle of confidence
0:19:02 I kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and it was the best feeling on earth lesson number six
0:19:09 Finding inspiration is 100 worth it and helpful and it’s okay to be corny
0:19:12 so
0:19:15 I remember when I was 24 I met this guy named Joe Garvey
0:19:20 Joe Garvey actually had a kind of an interesting business. It was called clash
0:19:23 It stood for like the california league
0:19:27 of scavenger hunts or something like that
0:19:31 And when I was trying to start my business, I didn’t have any income coming in
0:19:38 And so I met Joe somehow through a friend of a friend and he was like, man, I host these scavenger hunts
0:19:44 For companies they like pay me $10,000 and I do a scavenger hunt all over the city
0:19:48 Where you got to like go all over the city and find like certain things and it was a blast
0:19:51 And he would let me work some of the scavenger hunts
0:19:54 And he would pay me like $200 or something and it was a big deal
0:20:01 And at the end of a scavenger hunt you ended a bar and you drank and he would like
0:20:04 Be there being the life of the party. He was this big
0:20:09 He was a big tall guy and he was in the center like getting everyone to rattle up and do all these like team building stuff
0:20:10 But it was like cool
0:20:13 And but it always involved alcohol and I remember
0:20:15 after working with him
0:20:19 He told me I don’t remember how but I was like
0:20:23 Joe you don’t drink. He’s like, oh, no, like, you know, I had a problem
0:20:26 I don’t drink anymore. I’m sober and I was like you can do that
0:20:30 While being the life of the party. That’s insane to me. How do you do that? And like
0:20:35 He had a ton of friends and women loved him and I was like, you’re the man
0:20:36 You’re my hero
0:20:40 I can’t believe you just admitted that you had a drinking problem and yet you’re still like the man
0:20:45 People still like you and stuff and I got so much inspiration from that and it made me feel feel so good
0:20:51 So I started reading all these inspirational books like the tony robbins of the world all that stuff
0:20:53 I read it like crazy
0:20:55 I even had this jar
0:20:59 I had this jar where every day that I didn’t drink I would put a penny in
0:21:03 And then it was like every day that I exercised I put a penny in
0:21:09 And then it turned into where I put three pennies in if I didn’t drink if I exercised and I ate well
0:21:11 I would put a penny in
0:21:15 And I my goal was to fill this jar all the way up and I looked back at that and I’m like, yeah, that was like
0:21:18 maybe a little
0:21:24 Corny but it helped so much and like leaning into some of these like cheesy things
0:21:29 It’s really powerful and and I know a bunch of because of this podcast and because of my work
0:21:35 I know a bunch of like quote powerful people. I know a bunch of billionaires people who like sometimes many other people will look up to
0:21:42 A lot of them do this corny shit because and I still do it by the way we do it because it
0:21:51 Inspiration is awesome. I was already a motivated person. I don’t think you can make someone who’s unmotivated motivated
0:21:54 But I think you can inspire them
0:22:03 An inspiration is just having something to reach towards or it’s reading something or being or consuming some type of content where it helps
0:22:08 Point your your car in the right direction. I always have viewed myself
0:22:12 I viewed myself as this like fast car whose back tires
0:22:17 Were lifted in the air and I was like had my foot on the gas and I was just flooring it
0:22:20 But I wouldn’t go anywhere and that and that was like my motivation
0:22:23 I was already a motivated person my wheels were moving quickly
0:22:27 But I had to like let the tires on the ground and I had to be pointed in the right direction
0:22:32 And that’s what I use inspiration inspirational stuff for so I like a lot of these cheesy
0:22:35 movies where it’s like
0:22:38 a guy doing something that’s totally unrealistic
0:22:44 But it makes me feel good or reading up the tony robbins books reading a lot of these books that I
0:22:47 Will definitely make fun of now, which by the way, I still read
0:22:51 It made me feel so much better and gave me inspiration
0:22:56 and I think it’s important to like lean into that whether you’re starting a business or whatever you’re doing because
0:23:01 Dude, it’s scary like giving up alcohol starting a business
0:23:06 meeting a girl trying to approach a woman who you who you who you like
0:23:09 Moving to a new place. It’s scary
0:23:16 And you need every advantage that you can get in order to like get over that hump and to actually make these things
0:23:18 become a reality and so like
0:23:24 Lean into some of that stuff. There’s a lot of like really good inspirational stuff
0:23:27 out there sometimes it’s my first million this podcast
0:23:34 But I think it’s cool to like consume a lot of that information because that rubs off on you
0:23:39 And you need any advantage you can get in order to get ahead and to accomplish
0:23:41 Whatever it is you want to accomplish
0:23:45 It’s still like a little uncomfortable for me to talk about some of these stuff
0:23:48 But I do it because it definitely makes me feel better and I acknowledge that
0:23:52 I think it will make a lot of you guys feel better if you’re trying to achieve anything
0:23:55 Whether it’s giving up booze or start a business do whatever
0:24:01 At the end of the day, this is all about like getting over your fear. I think it’s it’s about how to uh, kind of
0:24:07 Jump off a cliff and um, there’s a reason I have this horrible tattoo
0:24:10 I’m not going to show it right now, but on my feet on my left and right feet
0:24:14 I’ve got the word act and on the right foot. I have now
0:24:17 It’s a homemade tattoo when I was getting sober
0:24:21 I like used a needle and I like tattooed my feet because like I said, I like inspirational stuff
0:24:25 But I think that this podcast hopefully is a little bit of inspiration
0:24:29 But also practical ways that I can get you guys to act now
0:24:32 And to change whatever it is you want to change
0:24:37 I’ll be in the comments on youtube whether you’re listening to this on youtube or
0:24:41 A podcast app, but go to our youtube page my first million
0:24:44 And comment on this video and I’ll try to reply to a bunch of them
0:24:50 But if you are struggling with something say what it is you’re struggling with and what you’re going to do to
0:24:54 Approach it and get over it because I think it feels good to put that stuff on paper
0:24:58 Like I said, it feels good to label yourself about what you what you are now versus what you were
0:25:02 But let me know in the youtube comments what you think about this and that’s the pot
0:25:06 I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to
0:25:12 I put my all in it like no days off on the road. Let’s travel never looking back
0:25:14 (upbeat music)
0:25:24 [BLANK_AUDIO]

0:00:04 I think it is worth talking about the fact that there are ways to make a million bucks
0:00:06 and then like ways to make a million bucks that could turn into a billion bucks.
0:00:08 Right. And I think we should talk about both.
0:00:10 Are we here? Do we hit record already?
0:00:12 Yeah. That’s the intro. All right.
0:00:22 So what do you mean by that?
0:00:25 You saying there’s ways to make a million bucks
0:00:27 and then there’s ways to make a million bucks that could turn into a billion bucks.
0:00:29 You have my interest. Let’s go.
0:00:30 Okay. Okay. Let’s go.
0:00:33 So I think maybe, and I don’t mean this any dismissive way.
0:00:38 I think venture capitalists are very often accused of dismissing something
0:00:41 as like a cash flow lifestyle business or whatever. Right.
0:00:45 Which, by the way, for anyone who is not in the VC world, you go to a VC,
0:00:47 you say, I’ve got this great company.
0:00:50 I think it can make five million in profit in year eight.
0:00:52 And then after that, maybe we can grow this for another 50 years.
0:00:53 And one day it could be a thing.
0:00:57 And they say, that’s that’s a really nice lifestyle business.
0:00:59 It’s like them saying, that’s cute. Right.
0:01:00 I remember that’s cute.
0:01:02 Yeah. I remember my first time doing that.
0:01:06 Of course, the thing is, is that anyone who actually is an entrepreneur,
0:01:07 including anyone who’s a VC,
0:01:10 they know that you can oftentimes get richer and have a less stressful life
0:01:13 if you have a quote lifestyle business.
0:01:18 Yeah. So I’d say like there’s many type of valid businesses, right?
0:01:21 And then also a lot of things that have become very interesting start very small.
0:01:22 So I want to recognize that.
0:01:29 But I think a reasonable analogy is if you can figure out Internet distribution
0:01:33 and then get, you know, super powerful models getting increasingly powerful
0:01:37 to just do something useful and a niche, those two things together,
0:01:38 that’s like the new drop shipping.
0:01:41 You know how like for maybe seven or eight years,
0:01:43 I’m like too old to know what the exact timeline was.
0:01:47 But there’s a period of time where people are like, oh, you know, I’m an Internet kid.
0:01:50 I’m going to figure out some drop shipping thing and like make my first hundred thousand dollars.
0:01:51 I think this is it.
0:01:54 Yes. So basically for people who don’t don’t really know,
0:01:56 you could go on Alibaba or Aliexpress.
0:01:58 That was like the open AI in this case, right?
0:02:03 So it was like this thing exists that you didn’t have to build, but it’s magic.
0:02:04 Watch this. You could push a button.
0:02:06 You never had to make the product.
0:02:07 You never had to warehouse the product.
0:02:08 You never have to ship the product.
0:02:11 It will just magically appear at your customer’s door, you know,
0:02:14 somewhere between one and three weeks later.
0:02:18 All you have to do is the marketing bit and kind of what you’re saying is open AI
0:02:22 and the other AI companies have built this magic that basically will take
0:02:24 a piece of tax and turn it into a video or a song or whatever.
0:02:26 And if you just do the marketing bit,
0:02:30 you can actually almost like drop ship a product or a service to the customer
0:02:33 without having to make it yourself. Is that the idea?
0:02:35 That is. Thanks for explaining it.
0:02:39 And I think it’s like easier with a few examples, right?
0:02:42 Like copy editing is probably a prototypical one, right?
0:02:50 You can do not amazing, but like reasonable copy generation with these models today.
0:02:54 And so there are a series of companies where you just have some templates
0:02:58 that make it more obvious to somebody writing marketing copy,
0:03:02 how to use these models, and then you have a website with decent SEO.
0:03:05 And then like you add some stripe integration and you’re in business.
0:03:06 What’s an example?
0:03:11 Well, I think like copy AI and Jasper, these companies started this way, right?
0:03:15 And then I have several friends who shipped like AI companionship apps.
0:03:18 Just look at paid apps in the app store by charting.
0:03:22 And some of these people are generating a million dollars of cash flow for themselves.
0:03:24 It’s not because they’re deep AI people.
0:03:29 All right, let’s take a quick break to talk about our sponsor today, HubSpot.
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0:04:01 >> When you say companion, you mean like a digital girlfriend?
0:04:03 >> Or boyfriend, right?
0:04:07 I think people think that is skewed toward girlfriend in a way that’s not necessarily true.
0:04:12 And you can have your own ethical points of view about whether or not that’s good for people.
0:04:14 But it’s a pretty basic human need.
0:04:15 And guess what?
0:04:19 People want all sorts of different things in terms of niche companionship
0:04:20 and how you might distribute that.
0:04:22 >> And aren’t these quietly very huge?
0:04:28 Can we do some ballpark, give people a sense of the size and scale that these have gotten to?
0:04:32 So there’s replica, I think that’s probably the most well-known one,
0:04:34 which is a digital boyfriend or girlfriend.
0:04:41 They kind of try to say friend, but I think the use case is a little bit more in the relationship side of things.
0:04:45 And I don’t remember their exact numbers, but I don’t think I would be crazy for saying
0:04:48 they’re doing like 50 million a year in revenue.
0:04:51 And I believe she had bootstrapped it for a while, at least,
0:04:53 or raised very little money to get there.
0:04:54 Is that right?
0:04:54 Tell me if I’m off base.
0:04:55 I might be wrong on some of that.
0:04:58 >> Yeah, Eugenia has built a very cash-efficient business.
0:05:00 >> Okay, is that like a code for something?
0:05:01 Are you an investor?
0:05:03 >> No, I’m not an investor.
0:05:05 >> Dude, you just said everything without saying a thing.
0:05:09 It was basically like your friends are there, you know the number, and they’re killing it.
0:05:12 >> Are they killing it from your perspective?
0:05:16 >> I think they are making a lot more revenue than most startups.
0:05:19 I don’t think it’s fair for me to give the number, it’s not my number, right?
0:05:20 >> Okay, what are the other ones that are interesting?
0:05:25 So there’s character AI that has like some absurd amount of traffic,
0:05:28 but I’ve also heard some things about like, I don’t know if this is all legit traffic or what,
0:05:31 but there’s character AI, what are the other ones that are interesting?
0:05:35 >> I want to touch on character for a second because I think like,
0:05:38 you know, when you look at consumer companies,
0:05:41 one of the things that I learned was that the behavior patterns,
0:05:47 like when something just really, really stands out from all other products in their category
0:05:49 or previous categories, that’s when you pay attention.
0:05:54 It’s like the, you know, dumbest metric, but it is really clear
0:05:56 when something has special consumer behavior around.
0:05:59 And the thing that is really interesting to me about character
0:06:05 or the companion apps that work really well is like people spend hours with them, right?
0:06:07 Like, you know, in terms of the number of products,
0:06:11 like how many products do you spend hours with every day?
0:06:13 Not a lot, like social media?
0:06:17 >> Sean, that’s like my product that I spend hours a day with.
0:06:18 >> Yeah.
0:06:20 >> You were a great luck, I think, when they invested in Discord.
0:06:23 I think the timing is there and Discord was one of those things
0:06:28 that was probably overlooked because it was like, you know, mostly teenagers
0:06:31 who play video games that were using this thing and it kind of looked like a chat room,
0:06:33 but you’re like, “Oh, well, how is it going to make money?
0:06:36 It’s not like Slack where you can charge the company.”
0:06:39 But the stat was people were spending like seven hours a day or something on Discord,
0:06:40 something ridiculous like that.
0:06:43 Just living in Discord, it was their social life.
0:06:45 And so you’re like, “Well, there’s definitely something there.”
0:06:48 And they were able to make a ton of money just even selling emojis at that point
0:06:52 because if you have that much engagement, you can’t fake that.
0:06:53 >> Yes.
0:06:55 >> By the way, I just went to Character AI
0:06:58 and there’s an option to chat with Elon Musk.
0:07:00 And the preloaded question, “Why did you buy Twitter?”
0:07:04 So I click it, so it starts a chat with Elon Musk as a character.
0:07:07 And then the first response literally goes, “You are wasting my time.
0:07:09 I literally ruled the world.”
0:07:12 >> Okay, so by the way, according to SimilarWeb,
0:07:17 which is like you multiply it by two or three and then you divide by two or three,
0:07:18 and that’s the huge range.
0:07:25 But according to SimilarWeb, it says that Character AI has 310 million monthly uniques.
0:07:27 Are you kidding me?
0:07:29 >> I mean, that’s more than the Wall Street Journal.
0:07:31 It’s more than like a bunch of…
0:07:32 >> That’s insane.
0:07:34 Is this company really that big?
0:07:38 >> I think people want companions.
0:07:42 This is why I’m saying that the engagement characteristics around this stuff is real.
0:07:46 And so for anybody starting a new business,
0:07:49 one person company shipping AI companion up to a niche,
0:07:52 like generating a million dollars of cash flow for themselves.
0:07:54 >> So do you know how these things grow?
0:07:57 So, I mean, 300 million monthly visits is no joke.
0:08:01 What’s the growth channel for something like this?
0:08:05 >> Well, I think that’s going to be like an advantage in the future.
0:08:08 I do think one of the weird things about these AI capabilities
0:08:13 is they are so novel and unique that they do drive word of mouth.
0:08:17 For example, with Character, you can make new characters and people share them, right?
0:08:20 So there’s inbuilt virality there.
0:08:24 But like maybe I’ll give you like two other examples of just like when I say
0:08:26 the capabilities are just really new
0:08:28 and they’re powerful and people want to talk about them.
0:08:31 Like, I don’t think you can engineer that,
0:08:32 but it’s just characteristic of these companies.
0:08:36 Okay, so one example is I am an investor in a company called Hagen.
0:08:38 You can make a video avatar of yourself.
0:08:40 You cannot tell the difference.
0:08:44 And reaching that bar of quality is new as of this past year.
0:08:47 And like people create content that is unbelievable and they share it.
0:08:50 And so like now Hagen is in tens of millions of revenue.
0:08:53 Great. They’ve never spent a dollar on like paid marketing.
0:08:55 Sam, have you seen this thing before, by the way, Hagen?
0:08:58 This is one of those products that I’m seeing all over the place.
0:09:01 But it felt like it was just like people younger than me talking about it.
0:09:02 So I felt embarrassed.
0:09:06 Well, this is not like like the character AI was like, you know,
0:09:07 that’s like teenagers kind of sharing stuff.
0:09:09 Some more like Wattpad or something.
0:09:11 This is a corporate use case.
0:09:16 So this is basically using like I make a digital AI of me or of a or or just
0:09:18 like a fake character altogether.
0:09:20 And then it can be used in training videos.
0:09:23 It can be used in intro videos with customers, things like that.
0:09:27 So you could basically create a you don’t have to actually set up a camera,
0:09:30 film a video, have it edited and then post it in order to send a video
0:09:34 to a prospect or send a video internally to an in a training system
0:09:35 or educational product.
0:09:37 And so that’s what this is.
0:09:40 And that’s why they just as it says at the top raised 60 million in funding.
0:09:42 But I think the chart I saw was pretty absurd that, you know,
0:09:46 they basically raised 20 million in ARR very, very fast.
0:09:48 Holy crap.
0:09:51 Some of the usage actually also, yes, it’s a business use case,
0:09:55 but it’s like all kinds of businesses, like creators, SMBs, like high end
0:09:56 enterprise advertisers.
0:09:59 And so like for you guys to be like, OK, well, like actually,
0:10:04 I bet there’s a lot more demand for Sean and Sam talking than the amount.
0:10:07 I’m sure you’re hanging out on the pot a lot, but like then even each
0:10:10 of you can contribute.
0:10:15 And so if the marginal cost of more time of Sam talking is free,
0:10:17 like you probably do more with it, right?
0:10:19 I think that’s just what people are discovering.
0:10:20 Have you guys used this?
0:10:23 Is it the landing page makes it look amazing?
0:10:26 Like is it amazing or is it still up and coming?
0:10:27 No, it’s like pretty good.
0:10:33 This this cross this one crosses the line, I would say of usable in real life
0:10:35 versus cool demo, which is the hard thing with AI.
0:10:36 You get a lot of cool demos.
0:10:38 Then you go in and you’re trying to use it for your use case.
0:10:40 And you’re like, how come the tweet had such a good output?
0:10:44 But mine is kind of whack every single time or like, well, this is good,
0:10:46 but it won’t let me change the text on it,
0:10:49 which is what I would need to use it in my real thing.
0:10:52 I would say this one is definitely production ready.
0:10:53 They wouldn’t have, you know, tens of millions in revenue
0:10:56 if they weren’t actually usable like customers.
0:10:59 Well, and they just did like a public campaign with McDonald’s, right?
0:10:59 Like an advertising.
0:11:00 But there’s some good limits, right?
0:11:02 Like you can’t be like moving around.
0:11:04 It’s like a face on camera.
0:11:06 At least that’s what it used to be when I tried it like six months ago.
0:11:07 Yeah, there’s some new stuff.
0:11:10 You should try like, you know, you can be walking around now.
0:11:11 Oh, okay.
0:11:13 I stand corrected.
0:11:15 All right, Amber back.
0:11:17 Can they just, can we just upload our YouTube page
0:11:20 or do we have to stand in front of it and film?
0:11:25 You have to stand in front of your web or phone camera for two minutes and film.
0:11:28 And it’s more of a safety thing than anything else
0:11:32 because they don’t want people being able to take your YouTube and make you.
0:11:35 If that makes sense, like they want, they want you saying specific words
0:11:39 about like, I, Sam Parr, say it’s okay to make this avatar.
0:11:42 And you said that you started the podcast by saying there’s like a lot of,
0:11:44 you had a really, the line you said was awesome,
0:11:46 which is like, there’s a bunch of ways to make a million dollars
0:11:47 that could eventually become a billion.
0:11:50 Is this one of those companies where it started that way?
0:11:54 I think, I mean, I think the market for this company is very deep
0:11:57 because people like, they want a lot of video.
0:12:01 And I think more like, if you just think about the domain of making video,
0:12:02 you guys know much more about this than me.
0:12:06 But like people want a lot of control, right?
0:12:07 They want quality.
0:12:11 They want specific expression and brand and motions
0:12:15 and they want like one person, two people, three people, like person walking around,
0:12:17 product, whatever it is.
0:12:21 And so I think there’s actually a lot, like there’s a lot we still cannot do
0:12:24 with research and the company wants to continually pull,
0:12:27 like push the bounds of what you can do.
0:12:29 And so I think this is a good example of like,
0:12:32 I think there’s a billion dollars of video generation revenue
0:12:34 for them or for others.
0:12:38 But like, you know, you actually have to invest in the product pretty deeply,
0:12:44 but it doesn’t mean that your wedge can’t be really powerful across a single use case.
0:12:49 Sam, have you seen the ones that do this for DTC products?
0:12:51 The AI for DTC product ads?
0:12:54 So go to icon.me.
0:12:56 If you scroll down, you can watch the video.
0:13:00 So see the video of the Asian dude who’s holding like a college in peptides thing.
0:13:03 So that’s an AI generated video.
0:13:05 It’s the product in his hand.
0:13:07 That’s not actually in his hand with a script that was written.
0:13:09 He never recorded it.
0:13:13 And now you have a UGC very authentic looking ad for an influencer.
0:13:14 You go to the next one.
0:13:15 Look, he’s holding a different product.
0:13:17 That’s because he didn’t reshoot it.
0:13:20 They just put a different product in his hand and it looks super fucking real.
0:13:21 Am I right?
0:13:22 What?
0:13:23 Isn’t this wild?
0:13:25 This is amazing.
0:13:27 And so he’s got another one with ramen.
0:13:28 And so what he’s doing is interesting.
0:13:32 What he’s doing is he’s letting actual and so these are not AI generated people.
0:13:33 This is a real person.
0:13:36 This is like an Instagram guy who’s got like whatever hundreds of thousands of dollars.
0:13:40 So he’s letting popular Instagram people say, hmm, okay, I’ll do it.
0:13:46 I’ll create my digital twin that will be able to do my brand like my brand of content.
0:13:50 So a brand can come in request from a listening Instagrammer with a million
0:13:52 followers and say, I want you to sponsor this video.
0:13:53 Here’s the script.
0:13:54 Here’s my product.
0:13:57 And if I click yes, then it will AI generate that video.
0:14:01 I never needed to like open up a package, grab a thing, you know, take take 20
0:14:05 minutes, set up my tripod, record an ad, send it to the brand, ask them if it’s
0:14:07 okay, then they say yes.
0:14:09 And then I get paid instead of this case.
0:14:10 It’s basically like, I just approved the brand.
0:14:12 He uses my digital twin to make the ad.
0:14:15 If I’m cool with the ad, I get paid.
0:14:16 And that’s it.
0:14:17 And so that’s what he’s doing.
0:14:18 Our cad’s is the same thing.
0:14:20 If you go to our cad’s, it’s like pretty fucking wild.
0:14:22 And in their case, these are fake actors.
0:14:26 So these women that you see on the thing that are like promoting stuff.
0:14:28 These people do not exist.
0:14:33 This is an AI generated woman who looks like a real person that is promoting some
0:14:36 product and you script it and you can, you know, get these made.
0:14:41 I these are the or it might be like a real person, but they’ve said like license
0:14:41 to the company.
0:14:42 You can do whatever you want with it.
0:14:43 Yeah, exactly.
0:14:46 I think in this case, they might have started with a couple of those.
0:14:49 Like I think they found one of the girls from this like on five or something.
0:14:53 Um, but the idea would be, I don’t know too much about the under under the hood
0:14:54 stuff of these.
0:14:55 I just started playing with them.
0:14:59 But the idea would be that, you know, people are not going to know what
0:15:00 the hell’s real and what’s not this.
0:15:04 These look like real people in their home, giving a genuine endorsement of
0:15:08 some product that they like, and it is very simple to create.
0:15:11 I think Sarah, this is the type of idea you’re talking about where two people
0:15:16 can kind of take the existing models, you know, maybe customize them, uh, here,
0:15:19 but then it’s just in a wedge in this case.
0:15:22 It’s for e-commerce companies and they’re going to try to build a business here
0:15:26 that will do, it’ll be these, both these businesses very quick to get to, you
0:15:29 know, mid seven figures of revenue, uh, without, you know, much marketing
0:15:32 spend or much of anything, just cause the product is such a wow product.
0:15:36 And then, you know, from there, who knows if it can get, you know, really
0:15:37 enormous or not.
0:15:38 Yeah.
0:15:41 And I think a piece of it is just like for, for me, like, okay, what’s the
0:15:46 difference between like the first million and the next 999 million?
0:15:51 It is whether or not the capability exists in the company to make the
0:15:55 product deeper and keep expanding scope for what you do for your customer.
0:15:56 Right.
0:15:57 And, but there’s a ton of these wedges.
0:16:01 So it is staying with visual content.
0:16:04 Uh, you can use this category of models.
0:16:09 They’re open source to be fine tuned for different use cases that are super commercial.
0:16:09 Right.
0:16:14 So it could be models or creator videos for e-com as you described.
0:16:18 It could be renderings for like interior design or buildings.
0:16:20 I don’t know if you guys have ever looked at a floor plan.
0:16:25 Like maybe I just have terrible visual spatial reasoning, but I can’t
0:16:28 look at a floor plan with like a couple blocks and then like a fuzzy piece of
0:16:31 fabric and be like, yes, I see it.
0:16:33 I’ll put my life savings into this.
0:16:37 And our friend, Peter Lovell’s has a thing where you take a picture of
0:16:40 your home and then it does interior design for you and shows you mockups,
0:16:41 which is pretty cool.
0:16:42 Yeah.
0:16:46 But, but I’d say like those, you know, those renderings traditionally
0:16:49 generated costs like thousands of dollars, right?
0:16:51 And now if you can give it to people for very little incremental costs,
0:16:53 like that’s an interesting wedge.
0:16:58 Like there’s a handful of AI headshot companies making revenue.
0:17:01 If you guys have ever gone like a professional headshot taken.
0:17:02 Yeah, dude.
0:17:06 I so this actually, this is kind of actually interesting version of the
0:17:06 dropshipping idea.
0:17:09 So these are, this is, I bet you this would work.
0:17:11 So there was an ad I saw on Facebook.
0:17:14 I think it was a Facebook ad and basically it was a guy and he had a headshot.
0:17:16 I think of somebody who I recognize.
0:17:17 Maybe it was a VC in Silicon Valley.
0:17:21 It was basically like, if you’re in San Francisco, I take awesome headshots for
0:17:24 you, you should have a great shot for your website, for your LinkedIn, whatever.
0:17:25 It’s good for business.
0:17:26 It’s good for your career.
0:17:28 And you click a site and it’s a bunch of people in the tech industry.
0:17:31 And it was like $300 or $400.
0:17:34 And I went to some warehouses type of place in some, some little like
0:17:39 photo shoot studio in San Francisco, stood there awkwardly, got like headshots
0:17:42 made and paid this guy, you know, 350 bucks.
0:17:44 And he was running Facebook ads profitably to do that.
0:17:47 So he was able to put in and he was acquiring a customer for whatever 70
0:17:50 bucks and he was generating 350 bucks off them.
0:17:55 And now you could run that same funnel just without the San Francisco
0:17:58 studio and without the guy taking the picture and without any of the costs.
0:17:58 Right?
0:18:00 Like you just say, awesome.
0:18:02 Give me a couple of your photos and then boom, here you go.
0:18:06 And I’ve seen a couple of these go viral of like viral headshot viral your book
0:18:09 ideas, but I haven’t seen too many people just like running paid on them and
0:18:12 making them work, but I’m pretty sure that you could create a paid funnel that
0:18:16 would print cash for a period of time and maybe not forever, but an arbitrage
0:18:16 period of time.
0:18:18 Yeah, but what’s what’s an example?
0:18:23 So I’ve seen the same ones where it’s like you look like a 80s glam shot model.
0:18:27 Remember, I think the professional one people are willing to pay more, right?
0:18:29 So if it’s actually going to be for your, what’s an example of one?
0:18:30 Yeah, look, look at this.
0:18:33 Look at this company Aragon dot AI.
0:18:34 Oh dude, look at this landing page.
0:18:34 This is genius.
0:18:38 They just have a side scrolling carousel and it’s the before’s and then
0:18:42 there’s a line and then they just that same photo becomes the after that is
0:18:43 very well done.
0:18:44 How good.
0:18:48 Sarah, how hard is something like this to make?
0:18:52 So like there are a million of these wedges, right?
0:18:55 And I think that means like it’s an amazing time to, as you were saying,
0:19:00 like be good at distribution, understand like how to make a funnel and
0:19:04 how to market something and like to be an idea person, right?
0:19:07 Fundamentally, like if you run into problems all the time and you like see
0:19:10 the basic capabilities, you’re like, oh, I can think like you guys are both
0:19:13 like, oh, I can think of like five other use cases for this, right?
0:19:15 And by the way, you know, the distribution thing.
0:19:16 So this is a good example.
0:19:21 The, so I invested a little bit in Jasper and Jasper was started by guys
0:19:25 who were internet marketers first, not AI researchers, not AI, you know,
0:19:28 engineers, not, not even frankly, very good engineers.
0:19:32 Probably they were just like internet guys, internet, internet business guys.
0:19:35 And they were, I think they were doing something before this that wasn’t
0:19:38 really working very well, but they had spent a lot of time building
0:19:39 like internet marketing funnels.
0:19:44 And so when they got access to probably chat GPT three or something like
0:19:47 that, they were kind of back before, sorry, before chat GPT, just
0:19:51 when it was GPT three, they got access to the API and they built Jasper,
0:19:55 which was a took that same capability, but now made it useful for marketers.
0:19:57 So if you’re a marketer, you need a blog post written or an email
0:20:01 or you needed, you know, copy written for an ad, whatever it was.
0:20:04 They just made a standalone tool that would do that under the hood.
0:20:08 It’s, you know, the open AI model is doing 80, 90% of the work.
0:20:12 They’ve maybe customized the last, last mile of it, but they were so good
0:20:14 at internet marketing that they started running Facebook ads on this thing.
0:20:18 And it’s the fastest company I’ve ever seen get to 50 million in ARR.
0:20:22 They get to 50 million ARR in one year, which is to go from zero
0:20:26 to 50 million in revenue in one year is just absurd.
0:20:29 And the way the reason they were able to do that is because their background
0:20:32 as internet marketers as guys were like, as soon as I have anything that
0:20:35 works, I will just plow the maximum amount of cash into Facebook ads
0:20:39 as I can and I will just keep optimizing the ads until I get this thing.
0:20:42 You know, a dollar in equals a dollar 50 out or a dollar in equals $2 out.
0:20:45 And that’s why they were able to be so successful early on because
0:20:48 they had a different skill set than most of the Silicon Valley people.
0:20:50 Most people in Silicon Valley don’t ever run paid ads.
0:20:52 That’s just like a pretty crazy thing.
0:20:57 I think like if we just go to the difference then like a challenge
0:21:00 for anyone in these companies that gets this wedge and like is rare
0:21:02 to see zero to 50 in one year, that’s pretty special.
0:21:08 But even if you get like a product to hit in terms of initial adoption,
0:21:14 then I think the like the next 999 million of revenue has to be like,
0:21:19 I think more traditional modes because the problem is if it was,
0:21:23 I’m not saying the distribution piece was easy, but let’s say you were just
0:21:28 first with an idea and like you hit it on Reddit because it’s a novel
0:21:34 capability. Like I think then you need to get to traditional like reasons
0:21:37 companies get really big, product velocity, depth of product ability
0:21:40 to serve the customer or social engagement or something, right?
0:21:46 So like if you think about companions, it could be like what are the arguments
0:21:49 for like why somebody gets to dominate that business?
0:21:54 There’s a version of a companion business or any business with paid spend
0:21:58 and you know this really well, that is like just a treadmill, right?
0:22:00 Like I make money, but I have to keep putting money in.
0:22:05 It’s the opposite of compounding and if I like stop working hard
0:22:09 or other people compete with me like the treadmill gets steeper or I fall off.
0:22:14 And I think one simple answer is on companions.
0:22:16 Do you guys ever play The Sims growing up?
0:22:16 Of course.
0:22:21 Sure, like it’s very hard for me to not imagine The Sims better
0:22:27 if the characters are like smarter and like richer in interaction
0:22:31 and have like what looks like realistic video and voice.
0:22:35 And so like technically instead of it just being like I’m talking
0:22:39 to a person, it could be, you know, that person has some combination
0:22:43 of memory of me, other interactions, goals and like the media experience
0:22:45 of them is richer and we haven’t gone there yet.
0:22:48 But I think like there’s a version of that company that’s somewhere
0:22:51 between like a companion and a game world that will be very big.
0:22:53 It’s kind of an interesting exercise.
0:22:56 Well, if I could just get to a million, then I’ve increased
0:22:59 my likelihood and then maybe I can get that to 10 and then a hundred
0:23:00 and then a billion.
0:23:04 I actually firmly believe that if something can scale to 10 million
0:23:08 there, it may take a while, but if it can get to 10, it can almost
0:23:09 always get to a hundred.
0:23:12 Like there’s enough people in the world to make that work.
0:23:15 But it’s actually an interesting exercise to think of all the things
0:23:17 that you need to do in order to make those jumps.
0:23:21 Now getting it to a billion I’ve actually that’s been that’s been hard
0:23:22 for me to figure out how to do that.
0:23:24 But that’s a fun exercise to think.
0:23:26 Well, if I just get to a million, I bet you I can get to 10.
0:23:28 And if I get to 10, I know for a fact I can get to a hundred.
0:23:30 Yeah.
0:23:33 By the way, the Sims lifetime sales five billion dollars.
0:23:37 So without AI, the Sims was able to get to five billion in sales.
0:23:40 If you made it more engaging by by AI powering all those characters,
0:23:42 that’s going to be even stickier.
0:23:44 It’s going to be a big business, right?
0:23:46 Hey, Sarah, why?
0:23:49 Dude, you’re like pretty in the know.
0:23:50 Fuck this fun thing.
0:23:52 Like why don’t you just go do this?
0:23:54 Go make one of these go make one.
0:23:56 This sounds way more fun than investing in it.
0:24:02 I get to I like really like doing the zero to one thing repeatedly.
0:24:03 Right.
0:24:07 And so I think you just have to figure out what you’re motivated by.
0:24:12 I am really motivated by working with people that are entrepreneurs
0:24:14 that I like and respect and I think are super special.
0:24:19 And I do not like working with people that that I don’t have as
0:24:21 much enthusiasm about, right?
0:24:24 That’s like a very specific personality trait and like law of large
0:24:28 numbers, as soon as you manage very large teams, not everybody is going
0:24:29 to be at the same level.
0:24:35 And so like doing investing and making being able to contribute to other
0:24:38 people being successful that are really special and then the competitive
0:24:42 nature of be right with skin in the game and then know what is happening.
0:24:46 Like I like all of that, but I never say never.
0:24:50 I think we we incubate companies where like it’s essentially like,
0:24:52 uh, I see it, I see it, I see it.
0:24:56 And then there’s frustration that like the right, you know, a set of
0:24:59 people you’re really excited to back just hasn’t come together around a
0:24:59 certain idea.
0:25:03 Sean, you are more technical than me, but you’re still not technical.
0:25:06 I would say, but you’re more than me.
0:25:08 But Sam Park classic compliment.
0:25:09 Thank you very much.
0:25:10 You’re not tech.
0:25:12 You’re more technical than me, but you’re not technical.
0:25:13 You’re also not technical.
0:25:14 You’re almost good looking.
0:25:19 You’re harder than me, but I’m a one year at three.
0:25:24 Uh, did you, uh, when you’re, I know you’ve been like studying this stuff.
0:25:28 When you like, this seems like a really fun weekend thing just to play with.
0:25:31 Are these actually, would it be really hard for me to learn how to do this?
0:25:33 Would it be hard to build one of these?
0:25:35 Just like a really simple project.
0:25:38 Cause I know she’s, Sarah’s getting me all hyped on this show.
0:25:40 I’m like, this looks really fun to mess around with.
0:25:40 Yeah.
0:25:41 I mean, I think it’s like anything else.
0:25:41 You got it.
0:25:43 You’d have to have a partner to speed you up.
0:25:47 Like you learning to code to be able to do these things.
0:25:51 It would be the slow way of doing it versus the easy way is you find an engineer
0:25:54 who’s excited about this and doesn’t have clarity of vision around it.
0:25:57 Maybe doesn’t have a, doesn’t want to run the business side of things.
0:25:59 And you say, great, hey, let’s, let’s build X together.
0:26:01 I have a clear idea that X will work and I’ll handle the marketing side.
0:26:04 You got to make this product do, do this.
0:26:06 And, um, that’s not so hard.
0:26:07 That’s, that’s pretty easy.
0:26:08 This is exciting.
0:26:10 Uh, you can see a lot of cool shit.
0:26:13 Let’s, uh, let’s do some of your like specific kind of thesis.
0:26:15 So you have this website, conviction.com.
0:26:16 Good website.
0:26:17 By the way, how’d you get that domain?
0:26:19 I’m an internet person.
0:26:20 Yeah.
0:26:20 Okay.
0:26:21 Did you see her website?
0:26:26 She has a website for her, uh, I think it’s the incubator where you got to like
0:26:28 code in order to get access to it.
0:26:30 You don’t really code, but like the menu is set up like that.
0:26:32 It’s a little, it’s like, yeah, it’s a little CLI.
0:26:34 What’s, what’s that URL?
0:26:36 Um, I think it was called commit.
0:26:40 It was like our program for like hackathons, college students, et cetera.
0:26:40 Yeah.
0:26:42 It’s commit.conviction.com.
0:26:44 Sean, it’s a pretty cool website actually.
0:26:44 Oh, you open up.
0:26:45 It’s a terminal.
0:26:46 Yeah.
0:26:47 Oh God.
0:26:48 Uh, let me see.
0:26:49 Let me try to do this.
0:26:50 So run.
0:26:56 No, uh, type, type in help.
0:26:59 So if you type in help, it like gives you the menu anyway.
0:27:01 It’s flash is like a folder.
0:27:01 I don’t know.
0:27:02 I don’t know how to do this.
0:27:03 Um, all right.
0:27:07 So you have a website with a bunch of basically like request for startups or,
0:27:11 you know, things that you think are going to, going to be built in, in, uh, in AI.
0:27:12 So let’s run through some of these.
0:27:15 Cause I, that’s actually why I initially was like, we got to have her on the
0:27:18 pod to, to kind of, um, to talk some of these out.
0:27:21 So let’s do one that’s you call your personal seller.
0:27:22 Do you remember this?
0:27:24 He might have wrote this a while, a while back, but your personal seller.
0:27:28 It might have been one, like my partner, front of readys or something,
0:27:29 but we can certainly talk about it.
0:27:29 Yeah.
0:27:30 Okay.
0:27:31 I’ll give you the summary.
0:27:34 So the summary is, uh, your personal seller.
0:27:38 I think the idea here is that there’s a bunch of places online to sell stuff at
0:27:41 C and eBay and Amazon and a bunch of different places to sell things.
0:27:45 Um, but actually like doing that is a bunch of work.
0:27:49 Like creating the store listings, changing prices, writing the copy, all of that.
0:27:54 And I think what you’re saying is somebody should be able to just like have a
0:27:59 product and then the AI should be able to like do the actual econ management of
0:28:02 this, of the sell of the, of setting up the shop and running it.
0:28:03 Is that what that means?
0:28:04 Yeah.
0:28:08 I think like, um, it’s probably it, it matches like a larger theme that I really
0:28:14 think is exciting about AI, which is like, because all of these skills and it
0:28:19 could be, um, run a basic like social marketing campaign, right?
0:28:25 Or like send email to your customers that are likely to be repeat customers or
0:28:28 improve your website for indexing.
0:28:33 Like there are a bunch of things that, um, are probably not related to let’s say
0:28:38 it’s a, let’s say it’s a Shopify drop shipping store for like a particular
0:28:41 type of sock and you love socks as an entrepreneur.
0:28:45 It’s not like related to the merchandising decision or the design decision of like,
0:28:47 what is the sock I want to give the world?
0:28:47 Right.
0:28:52 And like that’s kind of the essence of like why, like sometimes people become
0:28:53 entrepreneurs.
0:28:57 And so can you, can you take a bunch of these tasks that require skills and all
0:29:03 these different domains and just automate them at least at a basic level?
0:29:04 Like, I think you can now, right?
0:29:10 And I think like that they’re the platforms, um, Shopify and Square, etc.
0:29:14 They’re, they like, you know, they now have native assistant products that help
0:29:16 you use the platforms better.
0:29:23 But I think across the spectrum of how to be a good internet entrepreneur, like in
0:29:26 the e-commerce sense, I think there’s more opportunity there.
0:29:27 Um,
0:29:29 How do companies do that now?
0:29:32 So let’s just say you’re a company with 10,000 SKUs.
0:29:36 Um, how do you get accurate descriptions for all of them?
0:29:40 Well, usually if you have 10,000 SKUs, you have like, it’s a, you have like,
0:29:43 you don’t have 10,000 unique, uh, totally variant.
0:29:44 Yeah.
0:29:47 But you could have color, size variants, things like that.
0:29:50 So like, I’ll give you, uh, I’ll tell you in our case, right?
0:29:56 So I have an e-com store and we have, we spend, uh, let’s see, probably like five
0:30:00 or six grand a month on just Shopify plus or whatever, like the enterprise
0:30:01 Shopify thing.
0:30:03 So that’s just the Shopify costs on top of that.
0:30:09 I would say we probably have another, um, three to five grand a month on Shopify
0:30:11 apps, so you need an app for search.
0:30:15 You need an app for, uh, bundles, you need an app for this, that, you know,
0:30:16 there’s like a ton of things that Shopify doesn’t provide.
0:30:20 So my all in just software costs is at least 10 grand a month, probably
0:30:23 a little bit more on top of the fees they take of every transaction.
0:30:26 Then I have an e-commerce store manager.
0:30:28 His job is just to like run the store.
0:30:31 Like we have new products coming up, make sure those launches go well,
0:30:31 move things around.
0:30:32 Oh, this is broken.
0:30:33 There’s a bug, whatever.
0:30:35 We then have a merchandiser.
0:30:38 The merchandiser goes every day, looks at the collections and says,
0:30:39 this thing is sold out.
0:30:40 It shouldn’t be at the top anymore.
0:30:43 We don’t have sizes for this or we don’t have colors for this.
0:30:46 So let me move this other thing to the top or hey, the season just ended.
0:30:48 These need to be rearranged.
0:30:49 So there’s a human being that does that.
0:30:52 There’s also apps that do that, but you kind of need the app plus the software
0:30:54 today because the app’s not quite good enough to do it by itself.
0:30:59 We then have VA’s that go in and they do all the product pages, the descriptions,
0:31:03 the templates, the tagging, so that our inventory data is correct.
0:31:05 Cause we need to be able to analyze your inventory to do that.
0:31:07 You need to tag every product accurately.
0:31:11 So there is like four or five people that are just making sure the store runs
0:31:14 in addition to five apps that make the store run.
0:31:19 That all today is shouldn’t be the lead like future state of things.
0:31:20 That’s just the current state of things.
0:31:26 And Sean, I think the future state is for entrepreneurs who cannot recruit,
0:31:30 manage, pay the five people it takes to run your store.
0:31:32 Like what do they do?
0:31:35 As Sam said, like I think it will be easier in the future.
0:31:35 Right.
0:31:35 Yeah.
0:31:41 I think it’s also kind of like similar as an idea to all of the another area
0:31:47 that we are, and I’m like personally really interested in is the voice
0:31:48 automation market.
0:31:52 I think like a lot of your listeners will have seen the GPT for O demo where
0:31:56 it’s like a voice that may or may not sound like Scar Joe talking like in real
0:31:57 time.
0:31:59 Well, we played with 11 laps.
0:32:01 No, but that’s dubbing.
0:32:05 She’s talking about just being able to like Alexa, you just talk to it and it
0:32:07 just talks back and it’ll sound like Scar Joe.
0:32:09 So just like chat GPT, but you don’t have to type.
0:32:10 Yeah.
0:32:14 Both of these things either like it could be in your voice or like some
0:32:19 spokesperson for a brand or a company, but like the ability to give reasoned,
0:32:22 you know, knowledge based responses in a human voice.
0:32:24 I think it’s just really powerful.
0:32:25 Right.
0:32:29 And I don’t think people are thinking enough about the opportunities here where
0:32:30 you mentioned 11.
0:32:34 There’s like exactly one independent voice API business and tens of millions of
0:32:35 revenue and that’s 11.
0:32:35 They’re great.
0:32:36 That’s amazing.
0:32:38 I think there are other opportunities.
0:32:42 So like there’s a company called Cartija that does like more real time voice
0:32:42 for example.
0:32:44 You think 11 is by the way 11 lab.
0:32:46 Do you think they’re at tens of millions of in revenue?
0:32:48 They are.
0:32:51 They’re definitely at, you know, a large number that is in the tens of
0:32:52 millions of revenue.
0:32:55 Hopefully I’m not surprising surprising a market with that.
0:32:59 But you know, a lot of developers will immediately gravitate like toward API
0:33:03 business, but that is not how the rest like the world is full of niches and
0:33:06 people running businesses that don’t think about API’s and won’t use them.
0:33:07 Right.
0:33:11 And so like just to just like, you know, your personal seller.
0:33:15 I think they’re going to be a bunch of interesting voice services for
0:33:20 everything from restaurants to HVAC companies to dental reception that
0:33:21 are just like answer the phone.
0:33:25 I think that’s one of the ideas we had and it could be informational.
0:33:32 Like we are open from 8am to 6pm or a lead generation business where I’m
0:33:36 like, well, like my plumbing broke and like, are you available tomorrow at
0:33:36 3pm?
0:33:40 I’m a huge believer in this huge.
0:33:43 Like and watch on this, this simple idea.
0:33:47 So you know, like when the, when the internet came out, it was like, um,
0:33:49 oh, it’s going to be so crazy.
0:33:51 But like one of the obvious things was like, Hey, every restaurant just kind
0:33:52 of needs their menu online.
0:33:55 Like you should put your, you should put your restaurant exists where it’s
0:33:57 located and then put your menu up there.
0:33:59 Even as a PDF, that’s still like value add for you.
0:34:01 It’s like, it became where every business needed a website.
0:34:04 And now what I think it’s going to have is that every business needs an agent.
0:34:07 And so what’s the agent for most small businesses?
0:34:10 So like I called pest control because we always get a little bunch of like
0:34:14 mice jumping in our pool for whatever reason and try calling pest control.
0:34:16 Nobody ever picks up the damn phone.
0:34:19 And because there’s usually, it’s usually run by like, it’s like Mike’s pest
0:34:24 control and Mike’s out in the field doing things all day, actually doing work.
0:34:25 And so he doesn’t pick up the phone.
0:34:28 And so then you leave a message and you’re like, you, and then you call 10 of
0:34:31 them because you’re not sure if Mike’s going to get back to you.
0:34:32 So then it becomes whoever gets back to you first.
0:34:35 Mike loses business because Mike doesn’t pick up the phone.
0:34:38 Mike also is not going to hire somebody to just sit there and wait for
0:34:40 the three phone calls a day that he’s going to get.
0:34:41 It just wouldn’t make sense.
0:34:46 But now you go and I built one of these in our like AI, uh, like weekly
0:34:47 tutoring session that I have.
0:34:49 Basically, I was like, I want to build one of these.
0:34:53 So we have the same problem for our offshore recruiting business.
0:34:55 So we own an offshore recruiting business called somewhere.
0:34:56 It’s like, you can fire tip.
0:34:57 You can find amazing talent.
0:34:58 They’re just somewhere out in the world.
0:34:59 You just have to find them.
0:35:01 So what somewhere does, they find you elite talent.
0:35:04 Now the big problem, if you go to somewhere.com, it’s like, you say, okay,
0:35:09 I’m looking for a designer or I need somebody who could do, who get me leads
0:35:11 for my marketing business or my real estate business, or I need somebody
0:35:12 to do data entry, right?
0:35:13 So you have all these jobs.
0:35:17 Now the button on the site is basically like, you want to start hiring?
0:35:18 Fill out this form.
0:35:21 So you fill out the form and then it’s like, awesome.
0:35:22 We will get back to you soon.
0:35:24 Or it’s like schedule a call.
0:35:26 Here’s the call tomorrow or two days from now.
0:35:32 And no matter how many sales agents we have, a call tomorrow is not as good
0:35:34 as talk to me right now about what I need.
0:35:36 Cause right now is when I’m interested.
0:35:37 Right now is when I’m on your website.
0:35:40 Right now is when I’m not thinking about other variations of how I might solve
0:35:42 this problem and you have an opportunity to sell me.
0:35:46 And so Sam, I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but like check out bland.ai.
0:35:48 This is the one I built on.
0:35:50 If the answer is, have you seen this?
0:35:53 Assume it’s no and my mind is being blown by all this stuff.
0:35:55 But basically it lets you build a phone agent for yourself.
0:35:57 So I went on here and I built a phone agent.
0:36:01 So I built a guy who can answer the phone so that when somebody goes to
0:36:03 somewhere and they want to, they want to hire somebody, it’ll be like, awesome.
0:36:04 What are you hiring for?
0:36:05 Have you ever hired overseas?
0:36:06 And you’re like, yeah, I have.
0:36:07 It’s like, cool.
0:36:09 Um, tell me what you’re looking for.
0:36:10 A couple, you know, a couple sentences.
0:36:10 Oh, great.
0:36:13 It sounds like what you’re looking for is somebody who could be a developer
0:36:14 for your Shopify store.
0:36:18 Our, our noble budget for that is 2000 a month.
0:36:19 Would that work for you?
0:36:21 Or are you looking for something a little bit more, a little bit less?
0:36:22 And then it answers it.
0:36:25 It basically does the intake, the initial sales call for you.
0:36:26 And it’s like, no problem.
0:36:30 We’ve hired this month for 85 other Shopify brands who are looking
0:36:31 for Shopify developers.
0:36:32 You’re in good hands.
0:36:34 Uh, we do this all the time.
0:36:36 We will, uh, I’m going to start looking for candidates.
0:36:38 Now I’m going to email you tomorrow with three candidates.
0:36:39 How does that sound?
0:36:40 And the person’s like, great.
0:36:44 I guess I can just like wait for that to happen or it’ll, or it’ll pull from
0:36:47 our existing database and be like, here’s an example, resume.
0:36:49 This is the type of person we’d be looking for with this person.
0:36:50 Fit your needs.
0:36:50 Yes or no.
0:36:54 So then the human sales person will come into work and see a ticket.
0:37:00 That’s like the AI agent did the initial sales call and found the customer’s
0:37:03 requirements and kind of already warmed the sale up and told the customer what
0:37:06 they needed to know the things you repeat every time on the phone.
0:37:10 And now you could follow up with the more bespoke answer for that person.
0:37:11 That’s the future that I see.
0:37:12 I wasn’t able to fully build that.
0:37:17 I did like a prototype of it, but that’s what I think websites, even like ours,
0:37:20 which is an internet business should have, which means that every plumbing
0:37:24 and pest control and restaurant, they’re going to have their version of that.
0:37:27 This is 100% way better than having a call center.
0:37:30 Or it might, or it will be when it is long, so long as it works as good.
0:37:32 But this is absolutely the way to go.
0:37:32 All right.
0:37:33 Let’s do some more.
0:37:35 So you have another one on here.
0:37:36 That’s, I think an easy one.
0:37:37 That’s cool.
0:37:39 Next gen auto complete.
0:37:43 And I think the idea here is you do a Chrome extension or a browser extension
0:37:48 that not just like auto complete helps you fill in the next word.
0:37:50 It thinks you’re going to say or how to spell a word.
0:37:53 But what you have here is that it starts to learn your voice so it can write
0:37:57 your, it can help you write your emails or your blog posts in your voice,
0:38:00 which is kind of like the next level up from auto complete next level up from
0:38:01 Grammarly.
0:38:05 It doesn’t just kind of correct or spell check your stuff, but it actually
0:38:08 writes the way you write because it has watched the way you write.
0:38:09 Is that the thesis here?
0:38:10 Yeah.
0:38:10 Yeah.
0:38:11 Absolutely.
0:38:15 And I think it can be, you know, lots of different types of business communication,
0:38:17 but especially like email.
0:38:21 So I don’t know if this is, this is actually my friend, Mike Vernals idea.
0:38:22 I think he suffers from the same thing.
0:38:27 I do that might be true for you, which is like I’m an incredibly picky writer.
0:38:33 And so I will use the models today for generation of basic content,
0:38:37 or I’ll ask my amazing EA to like draft emails for me.
0:38:40 And then I will go rewrite the whole thing because I don’t like the tone
0:38:43 because it doesn’t sound like me or because it’s not tight enough or because
0:38:44 I want to use a certain phrase.
0:38:49 And I think the next level of like value and impact is definitely going to be
0:38:51 fine tuning to specific voice.
0:38:54 And nobody wants to write like chappy GPT.
0:38:56 Like nobody wants to be the generic AI either.
0:38:59 So what everybody wants is the thing in between.
0:39:01 This shit’s all wild to me.
0:39:03 Is there anyone right now doing that that you like?
0:39:05 Because I would like to use this today.
0:39:09 I mean, superhuman has like really interesting AI features, but I think
0:39:11 though the unlock is going to be the personalization.
0:39:15 And what’s your overarching investment thesis?
0:39:19 So you have this thing called software 3.0, which by the way, most VC thing to do
0:39:23 to be like, Oh, software 3.0, web 3.0, you’ve done it.
0:39:25 You have you have gone full VC.
0:39:26 What is software 3.0?
0:39:27 Yeah.
0:39:28 Okay.
0:39:33 So the seed for that phrase software 3.0, it comes from actually
0:39:37 an essay that Andre Karpathy wrote years ago about software 2.0.
0:39:43 And the base premise here is that like you had to write a lot of software
0:39:47 by hand in a prior generation before machine learning.
0:39:51 And then software 2.0 Andre, you know, worked at Tesla was working
0:39:55 on autopilot was really about data set labeling.
0:39:56 Right.
0:40:02 You are teaching a machine learning model by the data you choose to
0:40:06 put into the pipeline, how to do new tasks.
0:40:10 Software 3.0 is the idea that the next generation of software, a lot of it
0:40:14 is about manipulating foundation models and they’re called foundation models
0:40:17 because they have a lot of capability out of the box.
0:40:20 You don’t need to train them from scratch.
0:40:24 You just need to give them like guidance, reinforcement, the information
0:40:26 specific to your business.
0:40:30 And so an example would be like Sean was talking about for his lead capture
0:40:34 intake form voice bot, like he doesn’t need to go train a model.
0:40:38 He doesn’t need to go like collect data for that software application.
0:40:40 Like the voice agent is a software application.
0:40:45 He just needs to like make sure it’s plugged into his scheduling system
0:40:51 and his database of candidates and be able to retrieve the right
0:40:55 information about the business and like, you know, respond consistently
0:40:57 to customers in a certain tone.
0:40:57 Right.
0:41:01 And so that’s more about like manipulating a bunch of this base work
0:41:04 that people like labs have already done for you.
0:41:08 And the premise here is like that last mile of getting a foundation
0:41:12 model to be like something that serves all these use cases in the real
0:41:15 world that, you know, maybe the research labs think of as niches.
0:41:18 Like the world is composed of very large niches.
0:41:21 And so I think it’s a thing is really big opportunity for entrepreneurs
0:41:22 and for us.
0:41:26 So here’s the deal.
0:41:30 I made most of my money from a newsletter business.
0:41:33 It was called the hustle and it’s a daily newsletter at scale to millions
0:41:36 of subscribers and it was the greatest business on earth.
0:41:41 The problem with it was that I had close to 40 employees and only three
0:41:43 of them were actually doing any writing.
0:41:45 The other employees were growing the newsletter, building out the
0:41:47 tech for the platform and selling ads.
0:41:50 And honestly, it was a huge pain in the butt.
0:41:53 Today’s episode is brought to you by Beehive.
0:41:56 They are a platform that is built exactly for this.
0:41:59 If you want to grow your newsletter, if you want to monetize a newsletter,
0:42:03 they do all of the stuff that I had to hire dozens of employees to do.
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0:42:09 That’s B-E-H-I-I-V.com.
0:42:16 What are some of your like hot takes or maybe your contrarian takes?
0:42:20 Anything that you think that might be counter to what the most people say,
0:42:22 most people do, most people are betting on.
0:42:25 Do you have anything that is against the grain?
0:42:28 You know, I’m going to give a like a somewhat arrogant answer,
0:42:31 which is I don’t spend a lot of time trying to figure out what the entire
0:42:33 market thinks actually.
0:42:34 So I’m like, I don’t know which of these things are contrarian.
0:42:39 I can tell you where like my opinion has changed dramatically.
0:42:42 Like, let me give you one example for many years in including,
0:42:44 you know, the tenure of my investing at Greylock.
0:42:46 I was one of several people who were like, okay,
0:42:48 we’re going to go understand healthcare and digital health.
0:42:50 And I was like, oh, healthcare sucks.
0:42:50 Right.
0:42:52 It’s a quarter of the economy.
0:42:53 It’s really important.
0:42:54 How could you not want to work on this mission?
0:42:59 But it is so slow and the incentives are so screwed up that like trying to enter
0:43:04 that market with technology or the speed of entrepreneurship that,
0:43:08 you know, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are seeking is like not a good idea.
0:43:13 And we just did a healthcare administration automation company.
0:43:15 So I’m like, oops, like changed my mind.
0:43:16 Real hypocrite here.
0:43:20 And like one of the reasons being, I’m like, well, if you think about the
0:43:26 mind numbing work that happens in healthcare administration, like billing,
0:43:31 authorization, coding, claims, processing, like all like even not even mind
0:43:34 numbing, but just like expensive and manual like patient support.
0:43:37 It’s actually really fertile for an AI company.
0:43:40 And, you know, we back something that’s like growing really quickly in one of
0:43:41 those domains.
0:43:41 Right.
0:43:46 And so I just say like, I guess I’ve changed my point of view on healthcare.
0:43:48 I went to the pediatrician yesterday.
0:43:53 My doctor is with my baby there and I’m sitting there and she’s got her iPad on
0:43:57 like a table and there’s a video like there.
0:44:00 And I’m like, who the fuck is that guy?
0:44:03 And they’re like, oh, that’s just like my scribe.
0:44:07 I, uh, he’s just listening in and he’s, and he’s taking notes, but she was like,
0:44:11 I used to stay up until three AM taking notes on all of my patients.
0:44:12 They just do it for me.
0:44:14 And obviously the wheels are turning in my head.
0:44:18 I’m like, yeah, that, that job is going to be unnecessary in a few years.
0:44:20 But it was amazing to have a medical scribe.
0:44:21 I’ve never seen such a thing.
0:44:23 And she’s like, oh, this has been around for a long time.
0:44:24 I was like, I’ve never seen that.
0:44:25 Yeah.
0:44:29 I do think one framework for like your listeners, like thinking about different
0:44:35 ideas is like what parts of work have been outsourced services already?
0:44:36 Right?
0:44:39 Because like it used to be the doctor taking the notes and they’re like, wow,
0:44:43 we pay this person a lot and like they should see more patients and think
0:44:44 about their patients more.
0:44:48 Like let us outsource that to a cheaper tech in our office.
0:44:52 Let us like outsource that tech to India or the Philippines.
0:44:55 And now there are a number of scribe businesses in, um, medicine that are
0:44:59 growing really fast, like a bridge, Nabla freed, like it is happening.
0:45:02 And so I think that will happen in a bunch of different areas where like
0:45:07 basically if you can create separation of that work already to outsource it,
0:45:10 then maybe you can outsource it to a machine as well.
0:45:10 Yeah.
0:45:12 Sam Moment had a good thing.
0:45:14 He was like, everybody worries about AI taking your job.
0:45:16 You have a, that’s not the right way to think about it.
0:45:18 It’s AI will take your tasks.
0:45:22 Uh, like you have to think about it not at a job level, but at a task level.
0:45:24 There are certain tasks it can do really well.
0:45:25 There’s certain tasks that can’t do really well.
0:45:26 There’s certain tasks today.
0:45:28 It can’t do that in the future.
0:45:28 It can do.
0:45:32 And so eventually a job becomes a bundle of tasks.
0:45:36 Um, but, but for now it’s you can’t think of the whole bundle because it
0:45:40 can’t replace the whole job, but it can replace specific tasks, which might
0:45:43 be just the way it works in the long run is that there’s a huge slew of tasks
0:45:45 that can be, that can be done by AI.
0:45:47 And then there’s people that bundle those tasks together to make
0:45:49 sure that they’re getting done well or at the right time.
0:45:53 I think that’s like approximately right, but to be intellectually honest,
0:45:58 like that there was a scribe in that outsourced BPO that had that job.
0:46:02 And so it’s not taking the doctor’s job, but it’s taking the piece of the job
0:46:06 that like the doctor’s job that already got separated out the task that they
0:46:09 didn’t like, but that became a job of its own.
0:46:12 Yeah, the job goes back to being a task basically in this case.
0:46:12 Yes.
0:46:13 Yeah.
0:46:13 Yeah.
0:46:14 It’s a good framework.
0:46:19 Sarah, are you, are you investing exclusively in AI related businesses?
0:46:21 I am a technology investor.
0:46:22 I’m not a machine learning researcher.
0:46:25 I’ve been working on this stuff for a handful of years and I really believe
0:46:28 it, I think it’s like the most important thing to happen in technology in a long
0:46:33 time, but I’d say like I’m also here to just invest in great tech companies.
0:46:35 And so you’re also here to get paid.
0:46:38 I am also here to work on things that will work that are important, right?
0:46:43 And so like if a, if an entrepreneur that I think super highly of or like
0:46:46 that I’ve worked with before or whatever comes to me and says like,
0:46:49 I have a great idea, nothing to do with AI.
0:46:51 I’m still definitely going to be really interested in that.
0:46:55 If you ask me like, what are the ideas that we think about or hunting?
0:46:56 It is all in AI.
0:47:01 I do want to put one more thing out there, which is definitely not a idea
0:47:03 that just anyone can go after.
0:47:10 It’s kind of the opposite of the like easy wedge idea in terms of how can
0:47:16 I put distribution around like one functionality for a niche on a model
0:47:19 like a AI headshot application or something.
0:47:21 But I do really want to hear from anyone who has a point of view on what
0:47:25 happens to the like NVIDIA compute monopoly and overall what’s changing
0:47:26 in the data center.
0:47:29 I don’t know if this is a hot take to your former question, but like,
0:47:33 I think a lot of people intellect in technology really the intellectual
0:47:39 like are like, oh, yes, of course, workloads are changing from not AI to AI,
0:47:43 but they don’t actually think about like what that means in terms of scale
0:47:44 and market cap.
0:47:48 Like that means like chips, memory bandwidth, networking, energy,
0:47:50 storage, optimized system design.
0:47:55 Like that was a lot of technology company market cap before.
0:47:58 And so like, if that’s true, there’s going to be a bunch of different like new
0:48:02 specialized solutions and it’s trillions of dollars of value at stake.
0:48:06 And it’s not just like single direct attack on NVIDIA.
0:48:08 That is like the opportunity.
0:48:09 What else would be in that category?
0:48:12 If it’s not just like, hey, our chip is better than NVIDIA chip.
0:48:13 What else is what is that?
0:48:16 What’s another shape of a company that could be in that space?
0:48:21 So I guess an example would be like, well, what are other bottlenecks?
0:48:23 Like memory bandwidth?
0:48:26 What like, what if you design storage to be specific for AI data centers?
0:48:29 What if you like, you could do cooling systems or like there are,
0:48:35 if you just reimagine the entire data center around like big AI inference,
0:48:38 I think you end up with like totally different needs.
0:48:41 The New York Times had this article the other day.
0:48:44 And I don’t remember the stat entirely, but it was something like the amount
0:48:49 of AI capacity or in chips like currently created right now.
0:48:54 We need to create like another like four trillion dollars in market cap
0:48:58 in order to satisfy like the amount of capacity that we have.
0:49:02 And they were sort of running it in a way of like, I don’t know
0:49:03 if we’re going to be able to do that.
0:49:07 But then when you think about it the other way around where you think
0:49:10 about, well, in 1998, if you said like, you know, what, how big is the
0:49:15 internet going to be? I’m sure it went far beyond virtually 100% of
0:49:18 the expert’s opinion as to how big it will get.
0:49:21 And I remember reading this article the other day and I was like,
0:49:23 that’s just absolutely astounding that we’re in one of these moments.
0:49:27 Sequoia, Sequoia came out with a sort of blog post or I don’t know,
0:49:28 PDF or something like that about this.
0:49:31 The thing they called it the $600 billion hole or something.
0:49:34 It was basically saying, well, we’ve invested this much or we’re
0:49:36 investing this much in capex.
0:49:40 So if you invest that much in capex, what do you need to get out to make
0:49:43 that, you know, return, you know, that’s a VC saying that, which is,
0:49:46 which is not just like some journalist who doesn’t get it.
0:49:46 Who doesn’t get tech?
0:49:49 Sarah, what was your reaction to that and what’s your take on that?
0:49:53 I think it is a lot of capex.
0:49:59 I think if you put it in context of like, how does it compare to
0:50:03 other big capex spends in the past?
0:50:06 Let’s say like the broadband build out, like, well, we wanted the internet,
0:50:09 you know, like we spent about $2 trillion on broadband to date.
0:50:12 Like we’re not there yet, right?
0:50:13 That was worth it.
0:50:17 And so what I would say is yes, like it’s a totally valid question.
0:50:18 We’re spending a lot of money.
0:50:19 What are we going to get out of it?
0:50:20 I think we’re going to get a lot of value.
0:50:23 We had Darmash on the Darmash founded HubSpot.
0:50:24 Darmash is amazing.
0:50:28 Yeah, he’s really wise and he’s tends to be right more than he’s wrong.
0:50:31 And I think he said something great when I asked him, I’m like, man,
0:50:34 I’m a little nervous about a lot of the stuff where the world is going to go.
0:50:36 And he’s like, well, I’m fairly educated.
0:50:39 And I think that it’s not going to be as good or bad.
0:50:40 As you think it’s going to be.
0:50:43 Do you agree with that sentiment?
0:50:45 No, I think I think it’s actually pretty bimodal.
0:50:48 I think it could be like bad or it’s like it could be much, much better.
0:50:51 So it’s the opposite.
0:50:53 It’s either going to be much worse or much better.
0:50:54 It’s kind of your take.
0:50:56 Well, what’s the bad?
0:51:00 Like what’s the bad situation look like where like, like, for example,
0:51:02 I think the bad situation and I’m fairly uneducated.
0:51:04 So take it with a great assault.
0:51:06 The very bad situation is that there’s just going to be this massive gap
0:51:07 between the haves and the haves not.
0:51:11 And like, if you have money now, that’s going to grow and you’re going to be awesome.
0:51:13 A bad situation is AI kills us all, right?
0:51:15 That’s the doom situation.
0:51:16 That’s a bad situation.
0:51:19 But then they’re in route to that.
0:51:21 There is just this massive separation of the haves and haves.
0:51:22 Not you have not.
0:51:23 You know what I’m saying?
0:51:24 That kind of freaks me out.
0:51:28 What’s your what’s your where do you see the bad situation going going towards?
0:51:35 So I think it is not necessarily that correlated that your your resources
0:51:40 or your capital today mean that you most take advantage
0:51:43 of the of the AI revolution, right?
0:51:46 I actually think people have a lot of agency in this, right?
0:51:48 Then go start these businesses, make a million dollars.
0:51:50 That’s such a small group of people.
0:51:52 Why does it have to be because of human nature?
0:51:53 How many people know about this shit?
0:51:56 You go to your well, your parents are tech entrepreneurs,
0:51:58 but go ask Sean’s mom and dad.
0:52:00 I go ask my parents, go ask my brother and sister.
0:52:02 Like, yeah, most people are not entrepreneurial.
0:52:06 Even if this widens the number of people who could be successfully entrepreneurial,
0:52:09 it’s not going to like it’s going to go from point one percent or whatever one
0:52:13 percent of the population to I don’t know, not 50, right?
0:52:14 And it’s not going to go that far.
0:52:15 Yeah.
0:52:20 I don’t know if it has to express in pure entrepreneurialism versus like you will
0:52:26 get increased productivity for people in lots of different types of jobs.
0:52:27 And it’s not obvious to me.
0:52:31 That’s like just the people who are already most highly paid today.
0:52:33 You’re somebody who thinks a lot about AI.
0:52:36 You spend your time in the ecosystem.
0:52:41 A lot of very smart people are actually worried about the doom scenario.
0:52:44 Ever, you know, from Elon Musk to we had Emmett Shearer on the podcast
0:52:45 and Emmett’s a smart thoughtful guy.
0:52:49 And he’s like, you know, the P doom, the probability of actual doom here
0:52:51 is it’s pretty scary.
0:52:51 It’s not zero.
0:52:54 And here’s here, you know, here’s where I think it is.
0:52:56 What do you think about that?
0:53:01 And what are the odds that AI truly is a sort of like a critically dangerous
0:53:05 thing, you know, I don’t actually spend a lot of time thinking about this
0:53:10 problem because the because it is like conjecture in the future of both
0:53:13 the objectives of these models and capabilities of these models that are
0:53:16 kind of like hand wavy, right?
0:53:21 Like I think when you talk to experts about some of the suggested scenarios
0:53:23 like here are two classic ones.
0:53:27 Oh, you know, people are going to use this to design a virus that kills us
0:53:36 all by weapons or somebody is going to make the objective for a foundation
0:53:40 model that is super powerful to be like make the most money or generate
0:53:43 the most paper clips and it’s going to take over all of the resource
0:53:44 in the world and kill us all.
0:53:46 There’s no linear path from here to there.
0:53:52 And so when when people ask me about like the doom scenario, like I am
0:53:54 much more concerned about abuses.
0:53:56 We actually do understand.
0:54:00 So for example, like what if people don’t understand what information
0:54:05 is true or not or like people are going to use this stuff for hacking and fraud
0:54:10 and lots of like bad activities today and like we should go understand
0:54:13 that and react as quickly as possible to that.
0:54:17 And as a country like probably want to stay ahead on these capabilities
0:54:18 technically.
0:54:21 Well, have you heard and what’s a wild example of how people use this
0:54:22 for hacking or for fraud?
0:54:27 Oh, I mean like for my company, we get emails from me.
0:54:28 It’s not really me.
0:54:33 And sometimes it will have or like I’ll have a link to something
0:54:34 that sounds like it’s in my voice.
0:54:37 Yeah, I think that’s the simplest example, which is.
0:54:44 Well, like what happens if you can create really authentic sounding media?
0:54:48 Like, you know, are your parents like, you know, going to not pick
0:54:51 up the phone if it’s a spoofed phone number and it sounds like you
0:54:54 when you say you need something like that’s a bad scenario.
0:54:58 And so I think we need more tools to protect against that.
0:55:00 And general education about it.
0:55:02 So I worry more about that.
0:55:07 And then I’d say like, I think of the probability of a bad scenario.
0:55:10 I said was like, it is possible.
0:55:12 I can’t see exactly how we get there.
0:55:18 And if you ask me like, what are the reasons in which broad use
0:55:20 of cheap intelligence are going to be great?
0:55:23 I can give you so many reasons, right?
0:55:27 So Andre Carpathi just started a company around education.
0:55:33 And like the, the, the fields that have been super resistant to
0:55:37 cost improvement, basically healthcare, the government and education.
0:55:43 Like, I think this will actually move the needle on some of the domains
0:55:46 that matter a lot to all of us humans.
0:55:49 And I think like when, when people talk about like the doomsday,
0:55:53 it’s really fun and scary to talk about the dystopian doom scenario.
0:55:57 But I think the opportunity costs of not exploring the ways in which like,
0:55:59 you know, you can have an economy of abundance.
0:56:02 We need to talk about that.
0:56:03 And that is really what I focus on.
0:56:05 Sam, do you know who Andre Carpathi is?
0:56:07 No, but I love his name.
0:56:10 It’s a lovely name.
0:56:15 Andre is a, is a amazingly well respected research scientist and educator
0:56:21 who’s trying to create like an experience that is AI powered in education
0:56:26 where like the most amazing expert in a domain is like a personal tutor
0:56:28 taking you through the material interactively.
0:56:32 And he’s one of like the five big thought leader type guy.
0:56:36 He ran Tesla’s AI program in terms of self-driving cars.
0:56:40 He was like one of the, let’s say, five most known and respected guys
0:56:40 about that.
0:56:42 He then went to open AI.
0:56:43 He then quit open AI.
0:56:46 It says he’s listed as a co-founder of open AI.
0:56:50 So I guess he’s the man who’s like the early, early mind behind it.
0:56:54 And at Tesla, he was basically the guy leading their entire self-driving unit.
0:56:57 I think he’s, I forgot what his title was, but he’s like, you know, chief AI guy.
0:57:00 When I lived in San Francisco, it was a fun period.
0:57:05 I lived there from 2012 to basically 2020 or 2022.
0:57:11 And back then it was like the Airbnbs of the world and Tesla or Uber.
0:57:15 And we had sidecar back then where it was like, holy crap,
0:57:17 we’re going to get into a stranger’s car.
0:57:18 And this is so exciting.
0:57:19 This is so new.
0:57:24 And, and you’d go to hackathons and people are working on like meal delivery services.
0:57:25 And that was like really cool.
0:57:30 I went recently or this was about a year ago and I was walking around the fairy building.
0:57:33 And this kid recognized me.
0:57:34 He’s like, oh, Sam, you know, I like the pod.
0:57:36 I go, what’s up, man?
0:57:40 And he said, I’m doing a hackathon right now in the fairy building upstairs.
0:57:42 Doing your wife want to come up and like see what’s going on.
0:57:44 And I was like, hell, yeah, let’s do it.
0:57:47 And so we go up there and it was so invigorating.
0:57:49 I was like, dude, we used to do these exact same thing,
0:57:53 but it was around like the sharing economy and all this stuff and stuff.
0:57:55 And they were, I was just talking to people at what they were building.
0:58:00 And I remember thinking like this is like totally, I guess it happens in San Francisco a bunch.
0:58:01 I was like, this is like the Renaissance.
0:58:05 Like there’s something really, really cool going on and everyone was doing AI stuff.
0:58:07 And I just thought it’s magical.
0:58:09 Right when I moved there, it was like mobile was the thing.
0:58:11 It was like, oh, X for mobile.
0:58:16 Everything we got to make, we got to make it work on an iPhone and an Android.
0:58:21 And then you would see like, you know, some like false flags, like front back came out.
0:58:22 It’s like, oh, shit, this is the next thing.
0:58:24 This is the next big social app.
0:58:25 And then it would kind of die.
0:58:29 But then, you know, Instagram, Snapchat, you know, they actually, they stuck.
0:58:32 And I remember the early days of Musically that now become TikTok.
0:58:35 And so mobile was like the big thing at the time.
0:58:38 Then it became crypto and it became the crypto hub.
0:58:41 But it started to lose a little bit of the steam for crypto
0:58:43 because crypto was a lot more international.
0:58:47 But now it looks like for AI, San Francisco, at least as back as the hub.
0:58:49 Sarah, are you in San Francisco?
0:58:52 Yeah, we’re in the mission in San Francisco.
0:58:58 And like, I think we really believe in the sort of like community aspect of not in the
0:59:01 like, maybe in the squishy sense of the word, too.
0:59:04 But like, if you’re thinking about looking for ideas for companies
0:59:08 and being inspired to like be committed to the grind and have the right ideas.
0:59:11 Then the right thing to do is not do it like alone in your basement.
0:59:17 What you have in San Francisco are people who are optimistic and then like work oriented.
0:59:19 They believe lots of things are possible.
0:59:20 They’re learning about what’s going on at the frontier.
0:59:24 And we actually do this grant program in bed, embed.commiction.com
0:59:27 to create that kind of community and a bunch of other stuff.
0:59:30 But it is, it is around this idea that people want to have the experience
0:59:35 that you described, Sam, which is like, well, like not all of this is going to work.
0:59:41 But what are smart people trying that is some version of the future
0:59:42 in this area of AI?
0:59:46 And like that will probably educate and inspire me and some of it will be really big.
0:59:51 Yeah, I think that like if you’re 22 and you’re young and single
0:59:54 and you’re into this shit, I would just say two words.
0:59:57 I would say go West, go West, young man.
1:00:00 By the way, people always talk about San Francisco.
1:00:02 It’s dangerous, it’s dirty, it’s lawless.
1:00:04 That’s the appeal, baby.
1:00:07 You can say you made it in the war-torn city of San Francisco.
1:00:10 You don’t want to be a billionaire who is coddled.
1:00:14 You want to be a billionaire who grew up on the mean streets of San Francisco.
1:00:17 Yeah, not that mean.
1:00:20 All right, I think we have to wrap up.
1:00:21 Tara, thanks for coming on.
1:00:24 Where should people find you and where should they follow you?
1:00:28 You can just Google Sarah Goa or conviction.com and I’m on Twitter.
1:00:30 All right, that’s it.
1:00:31 That’s the fun.
1:00:31 Thanks, guys.
1:00:34 I feel like I can rule the world.
1:00:40 I know I could be what I want to put my all in it like days on the road.
1:00:42 Let’s travel never looking back.
1:00:44 (upbeat music)

0:00:01 But anyway, this is my Sunday brainstorm.
0:00:04 My Sunday brainstorm was, here’s three cool ideas.
0:00:06 ♪ I feel like I can rule the world ♪
0:00:09 ♪ I know I could be what I want to ♪
0:00:12 ♪ I put my all in it like a days off ♪
0:00:13 ♪ On the road let’s travel ♪
0:00:15 – Dude, let’s do like a life update
0:00:17 because frankly, you and I mostly talk to each other.
0:00:19 I mean, we spend so much time on this podcast
0:00:20 but I don’t even like talk that much.
0:00:21 I want to know what’s going on with you
0:00:24 and I’ll fill you in on what’s going on with me.
0:00:27 – I did a thing I’ve never really done before.
0:00:28 It’s not background breaking.
0:00:30 I’m sure you or many people have done this
0:00:33 but I hadn’t and Friday hit
0:00:35 and I just put my phone in a drawer
0:00:36 and I didn’t touch it till this morning.
0:00:40 So I had a no phone weekend, which was pretty awesome
0:00:43 and very unusual for me.
0:00:44 – You’re not good at that.
0:00:46 Like you’re hardcore about your phone.
0:00:48 So tell me how that felt.
0:00:50 – It felt like it withdrawals from an addiction.
0:00:52 Like I would find myself, there was like funny things
0:00:55 and then there was like little moments
0:00:56 where I would notice it a lot more, right?
0:00:58 So like grabbing your pants all the time.
0:01:00 – I would just keep patting my pocket.
0:01:02 Like I would put my kids in their car seat, shut the door
0:01:05 and I’m walking around the car to get to my side
0:01:08 and I instinctively, I’m trying to pat to check.
0:01:09 Like why do I need to check my phone
0:01:12 in this three second break that I have walking around my car?
0:01:13 It’s pretty crazy.
0:01:16 And there was just like a hundred moments like that
0:01:18 where I instinctively wanted to go
0:01:20 and you know, just pull to refresh basically.
0:01:21 I needed to go see a feed.
0:01:22 It’s like I need to get my feed.
0:01:24 And so, you know, it was nice to do that.
0:01:25 I found myself doing randoms.
0:01:27 I was like humming a lot, I read a lot.
0:01:30 I was just like, our kids are kind of picky eaters
0:01:32 and we haven’t really taught them to eat very well
0:01:33 on their own.
0:01:36 And so like we feed them every meal basically still.
0:01:38 And so I’m sitting there and I’m feeding them.
0:01:41 And normally I’ve got my phone, they’ve got their cartoons.
0:01:42 We’re basically all just cartooned up
0:01:45 and I’m just shoving bites of mac and cheese in their mouth.
0:01:47 And it really slowed me down.
0:01:50 Like time went way slower,
0:01:52 but not in a bad way necessarily.
0:01:54 It was a lot more peaceful, I would say also.
0:01:58 Was part of the upside of not having my phone.
0:02:01 – Did you use your computer or Apple TV or cable TV?
0:02:02 – Yeah, so the rule was I don’t have to be like
0:02:04 without the internet or without any entertainment.
0:02:06 I didn’t go Amish.
0:02:09 I was allowed to watch TV and I was allowed to use my laptop
0:02:12 if the opportunity presented itself.
0:02:14 But on the weekends, I’m pretty much fully in dad mode.
0:02:18 So we’re not, I’m not really on the computer a whole lot.
0:02:20 And even just the physical distance of like
0:02:23 the computer that’s in your pocket all the time
0:02:25 versus okay, I guess if I wanna go on the internet,
0:02:27 I’m allowed to, I’m allowed to go on Twitter if I want to,
0:02:30 but I just have to go to my computer, open it up,
0:02:32 type in the thing and then like, you know,
0:02:34 I can only be on my laptop for so long basically.
0:02:36 So that was a good, a very good break
0:02:37 and something I’m gonna do a lot more of
0:02:41 because I don’t like the idea of being addicted to something.
0:02:44 And I would say by any definition,
0:02:46 I’m completely addicted to my phone.
0:02:48 If I don’t have it, I kind of freak out a little bit.
0:02:49 I’m like, I gotta go get my phone.
0:02:50 Hold on, wait, wait, wait, whatever we’re doing,
0:02:52 I gotta get my phone, I left my phone in the other room.
0:02:53 I gotta go get it.
0:02:55 And it’s pretty crazy that that’s the case,
0:02:58 finding myself instinctively reaching into my pockets
0:03:00 or like really wondering like, what time is it?
0:03:00 Did somebody text me?
0:03:01 It’s like, who cares?
0:03:03 You know, I don’t really need any of this.
0:03:04 – Did you follow the news?
0:03:06 – Well, that was of course the craziest thing is
0:03:09 while I’m not on my phone,
0:03:11 my wife was like, oh my God, Trump got shot.
0:03:13 I’m like, oh man, this is the one thing
0:03:16 that like the craziest news in the world happens
0:03:18 testing my resolve here.
0:03:22 All right, let’s take a quick break
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0:03:55 – And so I did get on my laptop a little bit later
0:03:56 and check out what was going on
0:03:58 and read all the crazy stuff.
0:04:00 But I stayed off my phone, so that was good.
0:04:02 – Have you ever heard of NoFap November?
0:04:06 – So, I like how you just said that
0:04:09 as if it’s like a scientific phenomenon.
0:04:11 Like you were like, have you ever heard of mitosis?
0:04:12 It’s when the cells split?
0:04:17 Like have you ever heard of non FAP November?
0:04:21 (all laughing)
0:04:22 – So like, I think that’s a great movement.
0:04:24 And they like mix it with humor or whatever,
0:04:26 but there’s like a reason, whatever.
0:04:28 And so basically for people who don’t know,
0:04:30 it’s just guys who don’t jerk off for November.
0:04:32 And I don’t know if the rules are,
0:04:34 you can’t have sex or if it’s just masturbation.
0:04:35 I don’t know what the rules are, but.
0:04:36 – I don’t know, never paid,
0:04:38 but never made it past day two, so couldn’t tell you.
0:04:39 – Yeah, clearly not into it.
0:04:43 We gotta have a cute, funny brand for like NoFo,
0:04:45 weekend, NoPhone or something like that.
0:04:46 You know what I mean?
0:04:47 No Scroll Sundays at least.
0:04:48 – No Scroll Sundays is good,
0:04:50 but a lot of my Jewish friends and family,
0:04:55 they do no phones from Friday evening to Saturday evening.
0:04:56 And they all say the same thing.
0:04:59 There’s like, this is the best, like it’s wonderful.
0:05:01 So we have to like do a take on that.
0:05:02 And we’ll have to have like a,
0:05:05 sometimes a cute way to do like Friday to Sunday,
0:05:06 no phone.
0:05:06 – Right.
0:05:08 – Have you seen people who raw dog flights?
0:05:10 – Yeah, dude, that is so funny.
0:05:12 (all laughing)
0:05:14 I’ll explain what it is for people who don’t know.
0:05:18 So like, so raw dogging a flight is what,
0:05:19 I think it’s mostly men.
0:05:21 So men are like-
0:05:23 – I can’t imagine a girl would ever care to do this.
0:05:26 – Raw dogging a flight is when it’s like,
0:05:28 when a guy goes out of like a Delta plane,
0:05:30 and you know how like, when you fly,
0:05:32 you see the plane going across America.
0:05:33 And that’s all you see.
0:05:35 And it’s guys who will just stare at that
0:05:37 for the entire time.
0:05:39 No phone, no phone, no books.
0:05:42 They just raw dog it.
0:05:46 And I think it is the funniest thing going on right now.
0:05:48 I love raw dogging flights.
0:05:49 – Yeah, yeah, exactly.
0:05:51 I think it’s hilarious.
0:05:52 I’m big on this though, this like note,
0:05:54 like control your inputs.
0:05:57 I think in all facets of life, right?
0:05:59 Control the foods that you put in your mouth,
0:06:02 control the information you put in your mind,
0:06:04 control the people you let in your world,
0:06:06 control the amount of the number of problems
0:06:08 you are willing to make your problem.
0:06:12 I think that that is probably the most underrated skill
0:06:15 you can have as somebody who’s trying to lead a good life
0:06:17 is learning how to control your inputs.
0:06:19 – So we’re doing like a little bit of life update.
0:06:21 And I was gonna say, that’s one of my updates
0:06:24 is I am not really reading the news a lot.
0:06:27 And I’m honestly like, I don’t have Twitter on my phone.
0:06:29 The news man, particularly this weekend
0:06:31 when a lot of crazy stuff went down,
0:06:33 it is exhausting me and like current events,
0:06:35 I find it to be, it wears me out.
0:06:40 And I’m just, I’m trying to refer like mostly to books
0:06:41 when I want like entertainment
0:06:42 as opposed to just scrolling through news.
0:06:45 It kills me, dude, where’s he out?
0:06:46 – 100%, 100%.
0:06:47 And I used to get a lot of shit for this.
0:06:49 I haven’t, I don’t watch the news.
0:06:52 I haven’t, I never have a news app on my phone.
0:06:55 I don’t follow like new social accounts typically.
0:06:58 You know, obviously some news just brute forces
0:06:59 its way into your world.
0:07:00 That’s kind of what happened this weekend
0:07:02 with the shooting and stuff like that.
0:07:07 But for the most part, I completely abstained from the news.
0:07:10 And I used to feel somewhat ashamed of that,
0:07:11 like kind of ignorant.
0:07:12 That just wasn’t really interesting.
0:07:14 It wasn’t very hard for me to abstain from it.
0:07:18 – But I called you out on that one time
0:07:19 when we were just hanging out off air.
0:07:21 I was like, you’re not a good citizen.
0:07:23 And now I’ve done a 180.
0:07:25 I’m like, no, it’s not important.
0:07:28 What’s going on like in most cases isn’t important.
0:07:30 – Well, my trainer gave me a great perspective on it.
0:07:32 He was like, it was one of the years
0:07:33 when the election was going on
0:07:35 or maybe it was like the state elections
0:07:36 or some shit like that.
0:07:37 And everybody was talking about voting
0:07:39 and every time it was kind of getting heated
0:07:40 as politics tends to do.
0:07:41 And he just said something in passing.
0:07:43 He was just like, he’s like, I don’t worry about the government.
0:07:45 I’m trying to govern myself.
0:07:48 I found that I can’t even govern myself.
0:07:49 What am I worried about what’s going on
0:07:51 across the country in Washington, DC?
0:07:53 I can’t govern myself yet.
0:07:54 And so he’s like, I focus on that.
0:07:55 And he’s like, if we all did that,
0:07:57 society would be actually in a much better place.
0:07:59 If we all learned to govern ourselves a little bit better.
0:08:02 And so when he was talking about the current election cycle,
0:08:03 somebody was criticizing, they’re like,
0:08:07 oh, well, you’re not doing your civic duty.
0:08:10 He’s like, I don’t know what you think your civic duty is.
0:08:11 He’s like, I’m in the grocery store.
0:08:12 I’m helping the old lady.
0:08:13 I’m over here.
0:08:14 I’m talking to a friend.
0:08:15 I see a kid doing something.
0:08:17 I give him a compliment.
0:08:20 There are many ways that you could be a good member of society
0:08:22 and just being like fully up to date on the news
0:08:23 and having an opinion on everything
0:08:26 or downloading today’s big problem
0:08:28 is not necessarily the only way to do it.
0:08:31 I kind of like that of like govern yourself first,
0:08:36 then be like a positive influence in your grocery store,
0:08:37 in the place around you.
0:08:40 That seems like a much better way to actually have an effect
0:08:45 than just siphoning off CNN all day.
0:08:47 What else you got in the life update corner?
0:08:48 Anything else, kid?
0:08:51 – For me, so I’m currently in Connecticut
0:08:52 where I’m staying for a little while.
0:08:54 I go to the beach every morning
0:08:56 and I go to the beach most evenings at 8.30
0:08:57 after the baby’s gone to sleep.
0:08:59 I’m nine months–
0:09:00 – What do you do, walk-in?
0:09:01 Or what are you doing on the beach?
0:09:05 – Dude, I have a scooter, like an electric scooter.
0:09:06 It has an odometer.
0:09:08 – ‘Cause there’s sand, what do you mean?
0:09:10 – No, like I ride from my house to the beach a mile away.
0:09:13 I have 2,000 miles on this scooter.
0:09:15 I drive it everywhere.
0:09:16 Sometimes I’ll go two weeks without driving a car.
0:09:18 I just drive a scooter everywhere.
0:09:20 I’m nine months into having a kid.
0:09:21 It’s the best.
0:09:22 I’m so freaking happy.
0:09:26 Like, I genuinely feel like a happier human being.
0:09:29 And I had a little mini, not midlife crisis,
0:09:30 but I’ve been asking myself,
0:09:32 like, what’s the point of this or that?
0:09:34 Like, you asked yourself,
0:09:35 I’ve asked myself about all types of things.
0:09:36 Like, why do I care about this?
0:09:37 Why am I doing this?
0:09:38 Being more intentional.
0:09:40 And I think it’s because I’m so happy.
0:09:41 Like, when you get happy
0:09:43 and you have less of a chip on your shoulder,
0:09:44 that’s kind of a weird feeling
0:09:47 if you’ve spent years grinding and things like that.
0:09:48 – Oh, you’re saying you’re asking the question
0:09:49 because you’re happy?
0:09:51 – Yeah, because I’m happy.
0:09:52 I’m like, why am I doing this or that?
0:09:53 Like, you know what I mean?
0:09:54 You start questioning things.
0:09:57 So I’m really happy right now.
0:10:00 So that’s kind of like the biggest update from me.
0:10:00 – I’m with you.
0:10:01 I got two things.
0:10:03 I saw a great Seinfeld clip the other day
0:10:06 and it said, Seinfeld talking to, he goes,
0:10:07 “You know why I believe in God?”
0:10:08 And the guy goes, “Why?”
0:10:11 He goes, “God made it so that people who don’t have kids
0:10:13 don’t know what they’re missing.”
0:10:15 And that’s the nicest thing they could ever do for somebody.
0:10:16 And I thought, oh, wow,
0:10:18 that’s a really like powerful way of putting it.
0:10:19 ‘Cause I’m the same way.
0:10:22 Like, I just, my cup feels incredibly full
0:10:24 just because of what’s going on in my house,
0:10:26 regardless of it really anything else,
0:10:28 which not to get too sentimental, but it’s pretty awesome.
0:10:30 And for everybody who’s out there on the fence
0:10:34 or wants to wait or whatever, it really is amazing.
0:10:38 And it is a hard to describe phenomenon,
0:10:39 how good it feels to just say,
0:10:41 especially like your kid’s pretty young, right?
0:10:44 She’s only less than a year old.
0:10:45 Once they’re like two, three, four,
0:10:46 and you can play with them,
0:10:50 it is like such a golden period of time.
0:10:52 I do have a life story here.
0:10:54 A life hack.
0:10:55 What’s that?
0:10:57 So we go to a birthday party, kid’s birthday party,
0:11:00 and there’s a bunch of three or four-year-olds running around
0:11:03 and it’s at a park and there’s like a park
0:11:04 with like a splash area
0:11:06 where there’s like water coming out of the ground.
0:11:08 And we show up and I noticed something.
0:11:09 I noticed that there’s like,
0:11:11 all the parents are standing on one side,
0:11:14 kind of like standing in the heat, sweating,
0:11:15 trying to get shade.
0:11:16 Just I don’t know, kind of like, you know,
0:11:17 kid runs up, needs a drink of water.
0:11:20 They give him water and then the kid runs back and plays.
0:11:22 And the parents are all making sort of awkward,
0:11:24 small talk with each other.
0:11:27 And you can just see the like, they’re looking at the watch.
0:11:28 They’re ready to get out of there.
0:11:29 It’s like, okay, we’ll be here for an hour,
0:11:31 then we gotta go do the next thing.
0:11:34 And so my kids run in and I’m like,
0:11:36 I just see like, while we’re walking up to the party,
0:11:37 I see like a fork in the road.
0:11:39 It’s like, I can take the right path
0:11:41 and I can go hang out with these parents.
0:11:43 Or I could just go run around with my shirt off
0:11:44 in this splash pad.
0:11:46 (laughing)
0:11:47 And so–
0:11:48 – Wait, was this during–
0:11:51 – I chose the road less traveled.
0:11:52 (laughing)
0:11:54 And I went down to the splash pad.
0:11:55 And I had so much fun.
0:11:57 And I just played with my kids.
0:11:58 I’m up in the playground.
0:12:00 We’re going on a splash pad, we’re playing tag.
0:12:02 We’re doing like water, like kind of like water fight.
0:12:04 And I just have a blast.
0:12:06 Two hours go by, I look over.
0:12:10 All the other parents are still just sweating and waiting.
0:12:13 And what I realized was like the great parenting hack.
0:12:14 ‘Cause before I had a kid,
0:12:16 I did read a couple of books about like,
0:12:18 what to expecting when she’s expecting or whatever.
0:12:20 Like, you know, how to be a dad.
0:12:21 I know I want to be good at something.
0:12:22 I’ve read a couple of books
0:12:23 to see if there’s any good information in there.
0:12:25 I now have a book that I’ll write,
0:12:26 which has one line in it,
0:12:29 which is don’t worry about being a dad, just be a kid.
0:12:33 And the best part about kids is that they keep you fresh.
0:12:34 They keep you playing.
0:12:36 They keep you, you have to act like you’re astonished
0:12:39 and things are fascinating to get them excited about things.
0:12:40 And actually it kind of makes you excited
0:12:42 and it makes you more curious
0:12:43 ’cause you’re doing that for them.
0:12:46 But the other part of it is the easiest way to be a parent
0:12:49 is to literally just play with your kid 80 to 90% of the time.
0:12:52 And sure 10% of the time you snap back into adult mode
0:12:53 and you make sure that, you know,
0:12:54 the train doesn’t go completely off the rails.
0:12:58 But I found that I have so much more fun as a dad
0:13:02 if I just lean in and just like completely play with them
0:13:03 all day.
0:13:07 And I don’t know why more parents don’t do this.
0:13:08 Like I’m in gymnastics class.
0:13:10 I’m doing like literally cartwheels.
0:13:11 I’m on the trampoline.
0:13:13 Like I’m doing all the things with them.
0:13:15 ‘Cause if I have to be there anyways,
0:13:16 I might as well have a good time.
0:13:17 That’s contagious for them.
0:13:18 They have a better time.
0:13:20 I’m in a better mood, which makes me a more patient.
0:13:22 You know, like it’s a complete life hack.
0:13:25 – Dude, I can just see you like bounce around gymnastics
0:13:26 and break some kid’s fucking femur
0:13:27 because you sit on it.
0:13:31 – Well, definitely not everything is built for me.
0:13:35 So, you know, there’s definitely been some spills.
0:13:36 But yeah, it’s great.
0:13:38 Like, yeah, I woke up yesterday.
0:13:42 I literally woke up, we go to a coffee shop,
0:13:44 go to a hit up a donut shop, go to soccer class.
0:13:47 I’m playing soccer in the soccer class.
0:13:48 And then after soccer, we just wanted to play
0:13:49 some more so we’re playing.
0:13:50 And now four other kids just joined me.
0:13:52 And where it’s me, my kids and four other random kids
0:13:54 that are all just like playing soccer afterwards.
0:13:57 Then we go to the pool and we’re in the pool
0:13:58 for three hours and we come home.
0:13:59 They were playing smash cart,
0:14:01 which is this like version of Mario Kart
0:14:03 that my kids are able to play ’cause they’re like toddlers.
0:14:04 We’re playing that.
0:14:06 Then we eat a little bit of dinner, we read some books
0:14:07 and then we go to bed and it was like,
0:14:09 I was just a kid for the whole day.
0:14:11 And therefore I had a great day.
0:14:12 – Are you gonna have more?
0:14:13 You’ve got three.
0:14:15 How many more would you want to do?
0:14:16 – No, my cup run is over.
0:14:17 I’m full.
0:14:19 I’m completely happy as is.
0:14:22 I don’t really feel the need to have any more kids.
0:14:24 – I’ve got Sarah bought into three, but in my head,
0:14:26 I’m like, yeah, you know, like,
0:14:28 but if we’re gonna go three, like five would be interesting,
0:14:29 right?
0:14:31 Like, you know what I mean?
0:14:35 I definitely am currently in the more is better at camp,
0:14:38 but like, I don’t have to push it out.
0:14:40 So it’s easy for me to say, which is,
0:14:43 but no man, being a dad, it’s awesome.
0:14:45 It has to completely change things.
0:14:48 I tweeted this out before we had kids like years ago
0:14:51 and I was like, because I had a bunch of friends
0:14:53 who were doing psychedelics because they felt lost.
0:14:55 And some of them kind of went over the edge
0:14:56 where they took too many.
0:14:58 And like, they started acting a little weird
0:15:00 where I’d be like, hey, are you okay?
0:15:03 And I just think that having a child kind of filled
0:15:04 that void for me where I didn’t feel like
0:15:06 I needed to do psychedelics
0:15:07 because I didn’t have a lack of meaning.
0:15:08 – Right.
0:15:09 – And so it’s been, it’s been really,
0:15:11 it just makes me happy.
0:15:13 But you’ve got a lot of interesting topics here.
0:15:14 I got a lot of interesting stuff.
0:15:17 Okay, so I have three ideas that I wanna pitch you.
0:15:19 And I’m gonna basically tell you about a cool business
0:15:22 and then I’m gonna tell you a idea
0:15:23 I think somebody could start
0:15:24 that’s similar to that cool business.
0:15:26 So the first one is sketchy.
0:15:28 Have you ever seen sketchy.com?
0:15:32 It is kind of an incredible business idea.
0:15:35 I’m sort of jealous I didn’t start this business.
0:15:38 So if you go to sketchy.com, what do you see?
0:15:40 – All right, learning made unforgettable.
0:15:42 – Sketchy turns what you need to know
0:15:45 into creative visual stories you’ll remember forever.
0:15:46 Oh, this is awesome.
0:15:47 – Right.
0:15:49 Basically it’s learned to take the MCATs
0:15:53 or the medical board exams with cartoons and drawings
0:15:55 instead of like boring textbooks.
0:15:58 And what they did was they created a Kaplan
0:16:02 or like a, what are the big like test prep Princeton review.
0:16:04 They created a test prep type of business
0:16:05 but they did two things.
0:16:09 One, they focused on a specific niche.
0:16:11 So basically med students.
0:16:12 So before you get into medical school,
0:16:14 you wanna take the MCATs or after you’re in med school,
0:16:17 you’re going through your medical classes
0:16:19 and then eventually the boards.
0:16:22 And second, the twist was they were like, cool,
0:16:24 but some people will prefer to learn
0:16:25 in a way that’s way more visual
0:16:30 and way more sort of like visual friendly,
0:16:35 easy to remember rather than kind of traditional learning.
0:16:38 And I love this ’cause A, that’s how I like to learn.
0:16:40 That sounds more fun, sounds more interesting.
0:16:42 And there’s actually like a bunch of science around
0:16:45 why we learn better through visuals.
0:16:48 So the same way we talked about last time about jingles,
0:16:50 how audio like a catchy earworm
0:16:52 is a much better way to remember something.
0:16:54 – So it’s basically storytelling and cartoons
0:16:58 to teach you things, specifically for doctors
0:16:59 for test prep.
0:17:01 And do they make all of the cartoons
0:17:02 and you pay a monthly fee?
0:17:04 – Yep, that’s exactly right.
0:17:07 – And so this business, I saw this, I was like, wow,
0:17:08 this is a great idea.
0:17:10 And so there’s also just like a cool business.
0:17:12 It’s like a cool thing to do with your life.
0:17:14 It’s kind of like Khan Academy,
0:17:15 where the guy’s like, yeah, actually like,
0:17:18 I just kind of want to make like a course
0:17:21 for everything on the internet for free.
0:17:22 And it’s just me kind of talking
0:17:24 and writing things out and trying to explain things.
0:17:26 I’m a pretty good explainer.
0:17:27 And that’s how he started to just explain things
0:17:29 to his own nephews or whatever.
0:17:31 And then he published on the internet and people liked it.
0:17:33 And so I really liked this business
0:17:35 ’cause I think it has like a cool mission.
0:17:37 I think it’s a cool business model.
0:17:41 And I think that it’s a fun product that I’m glad exists.
0:17:42 – And what’s the business model?
0:17:45 Because it looks like educators use that.
0:17:47 So how’s it work?
0:17:48 Do they work with schools?
0:17:49 – I’m sure they do a bunch of things.
0:17:53 My thinking is that this is, it’s very simple.
0:17:55 It’s your student who wants to pass an exam,
0:17:58 that’s the bleeding neck problem, right?
0:18:00 That’s the highest urgency problem.
0:18:02 And so they’re going to-
0:18:03 – Is bleeding?
0:18:05 – Yeah, I probably can’t say that anymore, huh?
0:18:09 Is bleeding, is bleeding neck problem your friend?
0:18:12 – It used to be hair on fire.
0:18:13 That’s what Dave McClure said.
0:18:14 And then somebody said bleeding neck.
0:18:15 I like that too.
0:18:16 – Oh my God, all right.
0:18:19 – So I think that’s the thing.
0:18:20 Somebody wants to pass a test.
0:18:22 They need to help studying for it.
0:18:23 They see this and they’re like,
0:18:26 oh, this seems like more fun to do than the other way.
0:18:31 And you pay something like 25 to 50 bucks a month for this.
0:18:33 And you sign up for a six, 12 or 24 month plan.
0:18:34 And then you go through it and you’re like,
0:18:36 wow, that was actually a really useful way to study.
0:18:37 And now the next test happens.
0:18:40 Maybe it’s your board exam,
0:18:42 or maybe it’s just a really hard course in med school.
0:18:45 And so they have like kind of the supplemental thing
0:18:48 for anybody on their like med school journey.
0:18:52 – Wow, and the only article I could find about them
0:18:55 is in 2020 where it says that they were doing,
0:18:57 I think $8 million in revenue.
0:19:01 And then did they also raise 30 million bucks?
0:19:02 – Yeah, they raised 30 million bucks.
0:19:04 It says on their website that 500,000 students
0:19:06 have used their thing.
0:19:07 That’s a big number.
0:19:11 But I think a business like this is set to dominate a niche.
0:19:14 And I think that Test Prep is a proven business model.
0:19:16 This takes a 20% twist on it,
0:19:18 which is the visual cartoon thing.
0:19:20 And by the way, what an amazing name, sketchy.com.
0:19:23 I think that’s such an awesome name for a business like this.
0:19:25 I think this is a great business.
0:19:27 Congrats to the people who did this.
0:19:28 I think this is really cool.
0:19:30 So now, what’s the idea?
0:19:34 So I tried to convince, do you remember Dylan and Henry?
0:19:36 The guys behind…
0:19:37 – Clips.
0:19:38 – Smart Nonsense and Clips.
0:19:40 Basically, if you don’t know them, they’re young guys.
0:19:42 We met them because they came to our house
0:19:43 and built out our podcast studio.
0:19:44 They were fans of the podcast.
0:19:45 – When they were in college.
0:19:47 – And then what they started doing was they,
0:19:49 they had their own podcast and they would cut clips.
0:19:51 They would cut clips for our podcast.
0:19:53 Then they started cutting clips for All In.
0:19:54 So right when All In blew up,
0:19:57 they were the ones doing the animated clips for them.
0:19:59 And so they got popular there.
0:20:01 Then they created an agency called Clips
0:20:04 where you can hire a video editor from them.
0:20:06 A video editor in the Philippines is a really good animator
0:20:10 who can, for a monthly fee, be your animator.
0:20:11 And that business is doing well.
0:20:15 So I got to kind of like low seven figures of annual revenue.
0:20:17 And then they started using their own animators
0:20:19 to do their own YouTube content.
0:20:20 And they both blew up on YouTube.
0:20:22 And so like Henry has like, I don’t know,
0:20:24 millions of subscribers now on YouTube
0:20:26 and he’ll just do like really short form animated videos.
0:20:27 – His shorts are really good.
0:20:30 Like I’ve never seen someone take shorts that seriously.
0:20:33 So for the listener, it’s basically him talking
0:20:36 and he’s clearly, you got a green screen behind him
0:20:39 because you see all these weird, interesting animations
0:20:42 pop up to interact with him and what he’s saying.
0:20:43 It’s awesome.
0:20:44 – And so those guys are awesome.
0:20:46 I really see a lot of myself in them.
0:20:47 I don’t know how old they are.
0:20:49 I think they’re like 25-ish years old.
0:20:51 And they remind me so much of how I was
0:20:53 when I was 24, 25, 26.
0:20:55 And so I really like these guys.
0:20:57 And I think they do a bunch of dumb shit by the way,
0:20:58 but that’s okay.
0:20:59 I did so much more dumb shit when I was there.
0:21:01 I was there way ahead of where I was.
0:21:02 – Like allegedly showing up to a meeting
0:21:04 without a shirt on.
0:21:06 (laughing)
0:21:07 – Well, you can tell that story.
0:21:08 That’s a good story.
0:21:10 – I don’t remember if it was them,
0:21:13 but that seems like something in the wheelhouse.
0:21:14 – So they’re a genre?
0:21:17 – The story is we got them a contract with HubSpot
0:21:19 to do clips for us and other things.
0:21:21 And I guess they showed up to one of the video calls
0:21:24 without a shirt on, which is cool by me.
0:21:27 I actually, you know, common practice where I’m from,
0:21:30 but I guess didn’t fly so well in the Fortune 500.
0:21:31 So maybe they lost that contract.
0:21:33 I don’t know exactly if that was the reason
0:21:35 or maybe a contributing factor to them.
0:21:39 – They get a pass because they were like 21
0:21:41 and they’ve redeemed themselves.
0:21:42 So I think they’re doing good.
0:21:43 I don’t wanna shit on them.
0:21:44 – They’re doing great.
0:21:46 And so I went to them.
0:21:48 I was like, guys, you should make this,
0:21:51 but for the SATs.
0:21:55 So do this for the SATs or for APs or IB exams,
0:21:56 start wherever you want to start.
0:21:57 – That’s a great idea.
0:21:58 – But I was like, this is a great idea.
0:22:00 And there’s no one on earth better built to do this
0:22:03 than you two because of their skill set.
0:22:05 They’re amazing storytellers.
0:22:07 They are really good with animated cartoons and stuff.
0:22:08 I don’t know if you’ve seen their newsletter,
0:22:10 but they have like an oatmeal style newsletter.
0:22:11 It’s great.
0:22:12 They created this like character
0:22:14 and they tell great stories through it.
0:22:15 I’m like, dude, just do that.
0:22:16 But instead of doing it for free,
0:22:19 for random subjects on the internet,
0:22:20 charge for it and do it for something
0:22:23 that people are willing to pay for, which is test prep.
0:22:25 Like people need to pass this test
0:22:26 and move on to the next phase of their life.
0:22:27 – Why would they not do that?
0:22:29 That sounds so much better than,
0:22:30 I mean, I was in the newsletter business.
0:22:32 The newsletter business is hard.
0:22:33 – It’s hard. – This sounds way better.
0:22:34 – And I tried to tell them, I was like, guys,
0:22:37 that’s, if that’s okay or good,
0:22:40 this is what great would look like in the same genre.
0:22:41 Like the same work you’re doing,
0:22:43 just applied in a different way.
0:22:45 And they were like, we agree with you,
0:22:47 but we just don’t wanna do it.
0:22:49 And we were gonna have more fun doing this other stuff.
0:22:50 Like we don’t know what,
0:22:52 but maybe these are the three ideas.
0:22:53 And I was like, hey, honestly, more power to you.
0:22:55 Like that’s actually cool.
0:22:57 I support you guys in that.
0:22:58 But now I can give the idea away for free out here,
0:23:00 which is like, I wrote them a business plan.
0:23:02 I wrote them like a Google doc and I was like,
0:23:03 here’s how I would do it.
0:23:04 Here’s how we’ll go to market.
0:23:06 Here’s the, here’s how we’ll charge for it.
0:23:08 I’ll fund it, like just do this guys.
0:23:10 This is like, this is how you disrupt a Kaplan
0:23:13 or a Princeton review is you take a,
0:23:15 you take your black belt that they have
0:23:17 in social media content.
0:23:22 Like they are top 1% level content creators,
0:23:25 but instead of competing for free views
0:23:28 in the free market of social media,
0:23:31 apply it in this place that’s like really backwards
0:23:33 and stodgy and hasn’t changed in 30 years,
0:23:35 which is test prep for the SATs
0:23:37 or test prep for the GMATs or whatever.
0:23:41 And so I think somebody could still go do this.
0:23:42 I think somebody could take sketchy
0:23:43 and do it in another niche.
0:23:44 You could do it in whatever it is,
0:23:46 dentistry, nursing, whatever.
0:23:47 And I’m sure sketchy will try to do some of those things.
0:23:48 It doesn’t matter.
0:23:50 I think this pie is big enough.
0:23:52 And I think if you just take the principles
0:23:53 of what they did,
0:23:55 I think you could have a lot of success with it.
0:23:56 So that’s idea number one.
0:23:57 What do you think of that idea?
0:23:58 – What was sketchy?
0:24:01 So that’s actually one of the better ones
0:24:02 that we’ve talked about,
0:24:04 but sketchy wasn’t always sketchy.
0:24:05 What were they doing before?
0:24:07 Because they launched in 2013,
0:24:10 or did it take seven years to get to 7 million in revenue?
0:24:10 ‘Cause that’s some pretty–
0:24:11 – I don’t know.
0:24:12 I don’t know their full backstory yet.
0:24:14 And then I see, of course,
0:24:16 churning group is the one who put 30 million into them.
0:24:17 I’m like, “God damn it.”
0:24:18 Everything I find that I’m like,
0:24:20 “Ooh, this is cool, this is interesting.
0:24:21 I’m ahead of the curve.”
0:24:25 It’s like, you know, yeah, churning funded us a year ago.
0:24:25 Right?
0:24:28 Like we did an episode on the guy,
0:24:30 the gardening guy at Epic Gardening.
0:24:32 And I’m like, “Dude, this guy can be big.
0:24:33 Actually, this could be really huge.”
0:24:34 I’m trying to like tell people,
0:24:35 they’re like, “What?
0:24:35 Gardening? I’ve never heard of that.”
0:24:36 And I’m like, I go and I’m like,
0:24:38 “Hey, dude, I will write you a big check.
0:24:39 Like, let me fund you.”
0:24:40 I really believe in you.
0:24:41 I’m like, “We’re all good on funding.”
0:24:42 Churning gave me like, I don’t know, whatever,
0:24:44 20 million bucks a year ago.
0:24:46 And it’s like, “Oh, damn.”
0:24:48 Wow, how are they ahead of me on all of these?
0:24:50 – I’m gonna give this a nine out of 10.
0:24:51 I think this is great.
0:24:52 I think this is awesome.
0:24:54 All right, I think this is a sketch.
0:24:54 She’s a great one.
0:24:57 Now the next one, Babylon B.
0:24:59 – Yes.
0:25:00 – Have you lived under a rock a little bit?
0:25:02 – I’m not saying this is new,
0:25:03 but I don’t think for most people,
0:25:04 they really appreciate this.
0:25:06 So if you haven’t seen this,
0:25:10 it’s a satirical news site.
0:25:12 So it’s like the onion,
0:25:14 but it’s just like a variation of the onion.
0:25:16 They have been around for a little while,
0:25:18 but they just seem to be getting more and more popular.
0:25:19 And I think a big part of it is that
0:25:21 Elon retweets them a lot.
0:25:22 And so if you’re on Twitter,
0:25:25 you see them because, A, they put out good content,
0:25:27 but B, they had like a turbo boost
0:25:30 from the most popular guy on Twitter.
0:25:33 And so I just, I’ve seen this and I’m like,
0:25:35 “Wow, this business model is really interesting to me.
0:25:36 It’s a media company,
0:25:39 but it’s got a such a different approach, right?”
0:25:42 So the way a media company grows is you make content,
0:25:43 that’s worth spreading.
0:25:45 And so there’s a tension there for most companies
0:25:47 because you need to write what’s going on.
0:25:49 You want to be trusted,
0:25:51 but then you kind of need to click bait the shit out
0:25:54 of everything to get people to click and come to your site.
0:25:57 And so you’re constantly in this like too much click bait.
0:25:59 I kind of lose trust,
0:26:01 too much just trust and factuality, too much dryness.
0:26:02 Nobody clicks my thing.
0:26:04 Nobody shares this.
0:26:05 Nobody reacts to it.
0:26:07 Nobody gets outraged and reposts it and says,
0:26:09 “This is bullshit.”
0:26:10 And then that’s what gets people to share.
0:26:12 So you kind of want to outrage people
0:26:13 or you want to get them to share something,
0:26:15 but then you don’t want to be overly sensationalist.
0:26:16 So they always have this tension.
0:26:18 – And by the way, so I ran a company
0:26:21 that was a media company that made money on advertising.
0:26:23 And I hated that feeling that you’re describing.
0:26:25 I thought email would solve it,
0:26:27 a newsletter instead of a website, which it did.
0:26:28 It actually helped solve it.
0:26:29 – Yeah, the news that comes to you.
0:26:30 – Yeah, it helped.
0:26:33 And then, but I was still mad at that that existed.
0:26:36 So I thought subscriptions will solve that.
0:26:37 So we launched a subscription thing
0:26:40 that within year one was doing like 5 million in revenue.
0:26:41 Still doesn’t solve it.
0:26:43 You still got to do the same game.
0:26:46 – A newsletter monetizes so much better
0:26:48 than just a general news website.
0:26:49 So like, you know,
0:26:52 you could have a million subscriber newsletter
0:26:55 and that business should be doing
0:26:58 five to $10 million a year, I would say.
0:27:00 Broad strokes, a million subscribers should get you,
0:27:03 you know, 5 million plus in revenue.
0:27:04 If you do a news website
0:27:06 and you get a million visitors a month.
0:27:06 – That ain’t shit.
0:27:07 – That ain’t shit.
0:27:08 You might not be doing anything.
0:27:10 So like, you know, the Babylonium B
0:27:11 or whatever the Babylon B,
0:27:15 these guys are, they’ll do 25 million plus visits
0:27:16 to their site.
0:27:17 The biggest newsletters in the world
0:27:19 don’t have 25 million subscribers, right?
0:27:20 So it’s our readers.
0:27:22 So it’s a, it’s a different game.
0:27:24 It’s a volume game when you’re trying to get the,
0:27:26 you’re trying to make a media destination
0:27:27 versus a newsletter.
0:27:30 Anyways, I guess like the thing I’m trying to say is
0:27:32 an underrated part of these media sites is this tension.
0:27:33 There’s an air intention between trust
0:27:36 and viral kind of like spreadability.
0:27:39 And so the beautiful thing about this category
0:27:40 where you go and you try to be the onion,
0:27:46 you do fake news as a service, you do, you know, satire is,
0:27:47 it doesn’t need to be factually correct.
0:27:49 So you only have to win on that one dimension,
0:27:50 which is shareability.
0:27:51 And in this case, you’ll share,
0:27:53 people will share because it’s funny
0:27:56 and it’ll share because it strikes a chord with people.
0:27:58 And that’s why this has spread so quickly.
0:28:01 And so the backstory of this is,
0:28:03 I think it started by one guy
0:28:06 and then he kind of like sold it to the two writers of it.
0:28:09 – Well, you’re missing a big part here, which is,
0:28:11 so the onion, which is a satire website,
0:28:15 although most satirical websites are left leaning.
0:28:16 This one is right leaning.
0:28:20 I think also has a Christian component to it a little bit.
0:28:23 So whereas many of these things tend to be left of center,
0:28:24 this is right of center.
0:28:25 – Exactly.
0:28:26 So that’s where I’m going to get to with the opportunity.
0:28:27 So the guy who started,
0:28:29 he calls himself a Christian entrepreneur, right?
0:28:31 He started off for doing Christian cartoons.
0:28:33 And then it became, now the guys you write it,
0:28:35 it’s more just about,
0:28:38 it’s lean’s more conservative than it does the other way.
0:28:41 But I think there’s a lot more,
0:28:43 like the world is not just liberal and conservative.
0:28:45 There’s like a hundred other variations
0:28:46 and segments of the market
0:28:48 that could be served with this same category.
0:28:50 So I’ll give you two
0:28:52 that I think somebody should go do.
0:28:53 So I think somebody could go do
0:28:56 the far more right-wing version of this.
0:29:00 So I think that they’re like super right.
0:29:02 So these guys I think are conservative,
0:29:05 but they’re still kind of like more centrist
0:29:07 than they are full right.
0:29:09 But like if you go read like dredge or info wars,
0:29:11 like there’s a whole appetite in the world
0:29:14 for like really drudge, really far drudge.
0:29:15 Really far right-wing stuff.
0:29:17 So I think you could go do that.
0:29:19 But here’s another angle altogether.
0:29:20 It’s not political at all,
0:29:23 which is just do the onion,
0:29:25 but only for fake news articles
0:29:28 that appeal to just like the millennial mom.
0:29:29 And cause like, you know,
0:29:33 the millennial mom follows a certain set of news subjects.
0:29:37 So, you know, you maybe it’s a little bit less on sports,
0:29:38 but maybe they watch the bachelor.
0:29:39 So they understand the bachelor means,
0:29:42 maybe it’s that they are following the Taylor Swift stuff.
0:29:43 Maybe it’s that they’re following whatever,
0:29:45 whatever topics are of interest,
0:29:47 do the onion for that category,
0:29:49 cause it’s a very valuable category.
0:29:50 And by the way, this might exist already.
0:29:51 I have no idea.
0:29:53 I don’t know, I don’t even know how you search for this.
0:29:55 But I think that that would be a very successful version
0:29:58 of the onion that’s not, or the Babylon B,
0:30:00 which is not political at all,
0:30:01 but it’s the same thing.
0:30:05 It’s poking fun at a certain set of popular subjects,
0:30:08 but make those popular subjects a different customer
0:30:09 than the one who reads the onion
0:30:11 or the one who reads the Babylon B.
0:30:13 – Here’s to why I know that that’s true
0:30:14 about the millennial mom.
0:30:16 So we had this couple over that have a one year old
0:30:19 overdure house and the kids started crying.
0:30:21 And so I go to grab a bunch of toys to like entertain him
0:30:22 and like show them off.
0:30:23 Like, oh, I bet you haven’t seen this thing.
0:30:26 And I start like using this puppet or whatever.
0:30:28 And the mom is like, yeah, we have this toy.
0:30:29 We have that toy.
0:30:31 In fact, all of the toys that you have,
0:30:33 we have the exact same words.
0:30:35 And I’m like, well, you guys just clearly follow
0:30:37 like the same like three people on Instagram
0:30:38 and you read the same blogs.
0:30:40 Cause you have bought all of the same stuff.
0:30:42 And like I couldn’t impress this kid.
0:30:45 I’m shocked at how the millennial mother,
0:30:47 like there’s probably like six buckets.
0:30:50 And it’s like just a different persona for each thing.
0:30:50 But for each bucket,
0:30:53 like just buy all of this stuff, read all of this stuff.
0:30:54 It’s so interesting.
0:30:55 Do you know what I mean?
0:30:56 – Yeah, exactly.
0:30:57 But I think every segment’s that way, right?
0:31:00 I think, I think there’s a Joe Rogan bro version of that
0:31:02 where it’s like, oh, let me guess.
0:31:05 Favorite podcast, Rogan, Huberman, right?
0:31:06 Let me guess you, you cold plans.
0:31:07 Let me guess you do this.
0:31:09 Let me guess if you could kind of predict their life
0:31:11 if you know one or two things about them.
0:31:14 And there’s, I don’t know, a giant cluster of people
0:31:15 that will fit that description.
0:31:16 Not everybody, of course,
0:31:17 but there’s a giant cluster of people.
0:31:19 That’s kind of what you need when you’re doing media
0:31:20 is you need a giant cluster of people
0:31:22 who kind of have a taste match.
0:31:24 And so I think you take that business model,
0:31:25 apply it to a new segment.
0:31:27 And again, this might already exist.
0:31:28 It doesn’t really matter.
0:31:29 You don’t have to be the first.
0:31:31 You just have to be successful at it,
0:31:32 which means just do a good job at it.
0:31:34 And I think the way to start this, by the way,
0:31:36 would just be Instagram.
0:31:37 You just make an Instagram account.
0:31:38 You don’t even need a website.
0:31:39 And just make an Instagram account
0:31:42 that’s doing these kind of like funny news things.
0:31:44 Like there’s a version of this in sports that I follow
0:31:46 where they’re supposed like funny sports,
0:31:49 like fake sports headlines that make fun of the NBA.
0:31:52 And I think that can be done so many times over.
0:31:53 And I think it’s probably one of the easiest ways
0:31:55 to build a media business.
0:31:56 – You know, what’s interesting is the guy
0:32:00 who started the Babylon B, you said he sold it,
0:32:03 his website, his personal website.
0:32:05 It’s called adam4d.com.
0:32:08 It’s all dedicated to webcomics.
0:32:10 It’s just a webcomic website,
0:32:13 which is intriguing because that’s similar to what,
0:32:15 what’s his name, Dylan and Henry do.
0:32:19 Who owns Babylon B now?
0:32:22 – I think it’s those Seth and Dan.
0:32:25 There’s like these, I think the main writers now.
0:32:28 It says in 2018, he sold it to them.
0:32:29 He kept a stake until 2023,
0:32:32 when he sold the remaining stake to the Dylan brothers.
0:32:34 – Do you know who owns the onion?
0:32:36 – Oh, is it with a guy who started Twilio or something?
0:32:37 – The guy who started Twilio.
0:32:40 So instead of like rich billionaires, you know,
0:32:42 they liked Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post,
0:32:44 one of those Facebook guys bought, I forget,
0:32:47 some other one, you know, Mark Benioff, I think,
0:32:50 bought Time, Jeff Larson, I think his name is,
0:32:51 he bought the onion,
0:32:54 but it’s actually like an interesting purchase.
0:32:55 – Yeah, I think that’s a great idea, by the way.
0:32:58 That’s, that’s what I like my billionaires doing, right?
0:33:00 Do interesting things.
0:33:01 Go buy the onion, make sure the onion doesn’t die,
0:33:03 ’cause I think the onion was kind of dying, right?
0:33:05 He like is trying to save it.
0:33:06 He’s trying to like reverse it out of like,
0:33:07 pretty much bankruptcy.
0:33:08 – Yeah, so the onion has been around,
0:33:11 I think since 1988, so it’s been around forever.
0:33:13 And it’s just like, it’s a shit business
0:33:15 to have to run for a little while,
0:33:17 particularly in the last like eight years
0:33:20 where digital media has just been crap.
0:33:21 But yeah, it’s hard, it’s a hard business.
0:33:24 ‘Cause also, when you think about what’s advertised,
0:33:26 or what’s the media business, it’s advertising,
0:33:30 who’s gonna wanna advertise on an article that’s fake?
0:33:31 Do you know what I mean?
0:33:32 Like–
0:33:35 – Maybe, I don’t know, I think that if you could curate
0:33:37 the right high value audience,
0:33:41 and they trust your voice to talk about a subject,
0:33:42 it’s kind of like comedians, right?
0:33:44 Why do people sponsor comedy podcasts?
0:33:46 Like, dude, these guys are vulgar,
0:33:49 they’re just saying random shit.
0:33:51 This is not like smart information, this is whatever.
0:33:53 But it’s, they have a trusted audience.
0:33:54 The audience trusts them.
0:33:58 And so when they do the ad read, people dig it.
0:34:00 That people trust them because they’ve, you know,
0:34:02 they’ve kept it real on all these other subjects.
0:34:03 ‘Cause I think you could do it there.
0:34:04 And I think there’s not that big of a gap
0:34:06 between, you know, a comedy, you know,
0:34:08 brand and a comedy podcast, for example.
0:34:10 – Yeah, I think the difference is that a lot of people
0:34:12 think that the Babylon B and stuff like that,
0:34:13 I think they think that– – It’s real.
0:34:16 – They’re real, and they share them as if it’s real.
0:34:17 Do you know what I mean?
0:34:19 – Yeah.
0:34:20 – Like that’s actually a massive issue.
0:34:24 Let’s do the last one, toxic tampons.
0:34:28 – Yes, so I saw this tweet about a TikTok that went viral.
0:34:31 So there was a TikTok of a woman walking through
0:34:34 kind of like a store, and she’s in the aisle,
0:34:37 the tampon aisle, and she’s talking about,
0:34:40 you see all the big brands, she’s Tampax, you see whatever.
0:34:42 And five million people saw this video
0:34:46 because Berkeley released a paper basically saying,
0:34:50 hey, the popular tampons all have like toxic metals,
0:34:52 arsenic, and other contaminants in them.
0:34:55 And so that’s concerning.
0:34:58 And so there’s like a moment here where I think,
0:35:00 I don’t know who is the leading player,
0:35:02 who’s doing native deodorant for tampons,
0:35:04 but whoever that is, they’re in a good position.
0:35:06 And whoever, if nobody’s doing it,
0:35:08 somebody should go do that.
0:35:09 Or even if somebody’s doing it,
0:35:11 I still think it’s a good idea,
0:35:13 which is it seems like there’s a general trend
0:35:15 of people being concerned about gut health,
0:35:17 about microplastics, about, is your water clean,
0:35:21 or is there like contaminants and heavy metals in your water?
0:35:22 Well, this seems like another category
0:35:24 that’s I think gonna get transformed, right?
0:35:26 I think people are not gonna,
0:35:28 if you can use the fear and uncertainty
0:35:33 and doubt around the safety of tampons,
0:35:35 I think you could build a new kind of like
0:35:38 alternative clean brand around it.
0:35:41 What I’m trying to prevent here is a bunch of dudes
0:35:43 talking about shit where like every woman’s listening
0:35:47 and they’re like, yeah, we know we use these eight brands.
0:35:48 Do you know what I mean?
0:35:50 So I actually, I have no idea.
0:35:52 – Could very well be and I would love to be educated.
0:35:53 Feel free to DM me.
0:35:56 – I’ll tell you what, in my home,
0:35:57 I only see the popular stuff.
0:35:59 – Yeah, and in general, like, I don’t know,
0:36:01 how many a hundred million dollar companies,
0:36:03 how a hundred million dollar year revenue businesses
0:36:04 are there that are doing this?
0:36:06 There will be, trust me, there will be one,
0:36:07 there will be two, there will be three
0:36:08 that are in this category.
0:36:11 Like, the current incumbents will either adapt
0:36:14 or be replaced by alternatives
0:36:17 that are gonna play on these health concerns.
0:36:19 This is not gonna go nowhere, right?
0:36:21 Look at your detergents, look at your soaps,
0:36:22 look at your deodorants.
0:36:24 This has happened in pretty much every other category.
0:36:25 They’re gonna do it here.
0:36:28 And this is a great product because high margin,
0:36:31 repeat purchase, and you know, like the other thing is that
0:36:35 it’s usually women’s products tend to be underserved
0:36:38 compared to the ideas that most guys have
0:36:40 around what businesses that they’ll go start.
0:36:44 So you kind of can compete in a less saturated field
0:36:46 than, you know, making to-do list apps
0:36:51 or whatever, whatever the average bro idea will be.
0:36:53 – Yeah, and what’s interesting is that
0:36:55 with a lot of these brands, like they’ll be like,
0:36:57 I need to come up with some innovative new thing.
0:37:01 And our friend Moyes, when he was selling native deodorant,
0:37:03 the buyer of the company was like,
0:37:05 well, how are you going to expand?
0:37:07 He’s like, well, can you write the word native
0:37:09 on some all-natural shampoo?
0:37:10 And they’re like, yeah, he goes,
0:37:11 that’s how you’re going to expand.
0:37:13 – He’s like, do you guys have a printer to do that?
0:37:14 – Yeah.
0:37:15 – Would you guys be able to type this?
0:37:16 If I give you the font,
0:37:18 could you type it on a shampoo bottle?
0:37:18 – Yeah.
0:37:19 – All right, sweet.
0:37:20 We should be good then.
0:37:23 (all laughing)
0:37:24 – And so with a lot of these brands,
0:37:27 you don’t really need like a significantly more innovative
0:37:30 thing other than you have to be able to make it clean enough
0:37:33 that you can accurately describe it as a better for you
0:37:35 alternative, but it doesn’t need to be
0:37:36 a significant thing.
0:37:39 And it’s not like native deodorant was original.
0:37:41 There was plenty of people selling it.
0:37:44 They just weren’t savvy go-getter entrepreneurs.
0:37:46 They were like hippies, you know,
0:37:48 who was selling it on Etsy?
0:37:50 And in fact, let’s do this.
0:37:52 Go to Etsy and look up tampons.
0:37:54 Let’s just see what’s available.
0:37:55 – I like how you’re making me do it.
0:37:57 So I get targeted for these ads.
0:38:00 All-natural, there we go.
0:38:04 Getting some interesting results that are not–
0:38:05 – Well, I was going to say–
0:38:06 – Exactly what I’m looking for.
0:38:08 – Is an all-natural tampon really like a cup?
0:38:11 (all laughing)
0:38:12 – Not that natural.
0:38:18 – I don’t know what I found, but we can take this out.
0:38:20 So I find this one, right?
0:38:23 The Honeypot Company, 100% organic regular tampons,
0:38:26 unscented, organic cotton with bioplastic applicator,
0:38:27 no chlorine, no pesticides, no fragrance.
0:38:28 I’m like, oh, great.
0:38:29 – In.
0:38:30 – In.
0:38:31 – First review.
0:38:32 – Very good coffee.
0:38:34 (all laughing)
0:38:39 All right, looks like we’re going to still get to work
0:38:41 to do with this idea.
0:38:42 – Wait, wait, wait, go back to that.
0:38:43 What’s going on with them?
0:38:44 Why is that like that?
0:38:47 – I think it must be that the shop has other products in it
0:38:48 and that’s for the shop.
0:38:50 It’s like reviews from the shop, not the product.
0:38:51 – Yeah, okay.
0:38:54 The shop has herbal teas and other things too.
0:38:56 – A tampon coffee company.
0:38:57 – Yeah.
0:38:59 (all laughing)
0:39:01 – But anyway, this was my Sunday brainstorm.
0:39:04 My Sunday brainstorm was, here’s three cool ideas.
0:39:06 Sketchy, which is doing visual learning
0:39:08 in the medical space.
0:39:11 The Babylon Bee, which is taken off as a satire news website
0:39:13 for kind of conservative political news.
0:39:15 And then this TikTok that was going viral,
0:39:18 obviously tapped into some concerns people have resonated
0:39:21 with the public around the toxicity and the metals
0:39:26 and the arsenic that’s in the popular tampon brands.
0:39:28 And for each, I think you could just take a 20% remix
0:39:29 and do it.
0:39:30 I think for Sketchy.
0:39:31 – I agree.
0:39:33 – You can do Sketchy for another test,
0:39:34 another customer segment.
0:39:37 Maybe it’s AP students or it’s SAT takers
0:39:39 or it’s some obscure test.
0:39:40 Who knows?
0:39:43 I think you could do it for, I think that the Babylon Bee,
0:39:45 I think could be done for other customer groups,
0:39:46 other customer segments,
0:39:48 like the millennial mom is the one I would go for.
0:39:53 And third would be this dood-native deodorant for tampons.
0:39:55 And maybe there’s somebody doing it,
0:39:57 but this is my Sunday brainstorm of three ideas
0:39:59 that maybe they’re not great ideas,
0:40:01 but they’ll at least get the wheels turned into your brain.
0:40:03 It’s kind of the promise I have here.
0:40:04 – I think this is, we gotta keep your phone away from you
0:40:05 for, from other weekends.
0:40:06 This is good stuff.
0:40:08 – Yeah, ’cause this is what happens when I don’t have
0:40:09 my phone.
0:40:09 – I want to talk about one more thing.
0:40:12 I don’t want MFM to like talk about politics,
0:40:13 ’cause I don’t think that that’s fun.
0:40:15 And I think this is like a little bit of an escape.
0:40:17 – I was gonna start the podcast with, you know,
0:40:19 Sam and I have both sold newsletter businesses.
0:40:22 So we feel pretty qualified to chime in here
0:40:25 on what’s going on in our country.
0:40:29 And that’s how every like business attack podcast is.
0:40:31 They’re just like, you know, as a venture capitalist,
0:40:32 where I start my career, you know,
0:40:34 investing in the early stage tech companies,
0:40:37 I just feel pretty qualified to talk to you about
0:40:39 what’s going on in the Supreme Court right now.
0:40:40 – It’s maddening, man.
0:40:41 It’s, that’s maddening.
0:40:43 And I don’t want to become that.
0:40:46 But I saw that you’re into Teddy Roosevelt.
0:40:48 – Well, I went down this rabbit hole, right?
0:40:51 So I’m like, the crazy Trump stuff happens.
0:40:52 And I’m like, wow, that’s crazy.
0:40:53 You got shot.
0:40:56 I’m like, I was like, I wonder how many presidents
0:40:57 have been shot at?
0:40:59 – So can I tell you, wait, let me,
0:41:00 and let me, don’t answer that question.
0:41:01 Don’t answer that question.
0:41:04 But let me tell you something, why I’m happy.
0:41:07 I have read not only the biographies
0:41:08 of all of those presidents,
0:41:12 but also multiple books on each assassination.
0:41:14 And one of my, and one of my,
0:41:16 so this is why I’m happy that you’re able to talk about this.
0:41:17 – I’ve walked into your wheelhouse.
0:41:19 I’ve stumbled into your wheelhouse.
0:41:20 – Welcome home, Sean.
0:41:21 One of the reasons, and here’s,
0:41:24 this is a trivia question that I would ask people all the time.
0:41:27 How many presidents and name them who have been assassinated?
0:41:30 Virtually no one gets the second two.
0:41:31 The first two are easy.
0:41:34 – So, okay, easy, easy assassinations
0:41:38 that I can remember, let’s say, Lincoln, Kennedy, right?
0:41:39 Those are easy.
0:41:42 Let’s see, what are the hard ones?
0:41:47 McKinley, ’cause he was, he died right before Roosevelt.
0:41:49 So that was, I think Roosevelt was the VP, right?
0:41:51 Is that how that happened?
0:41:52 He became president?
0:41:53 – I don’t remember exactly,
0:41:55 but they’re in the same ballpark.
0:41:56 I don’t know if Roosevelt was the VP,
0:41:58 but he could’ve been.
0:42:00 – Okay, so we’ll leave it there, he could’ve been.
0:42:01 And then, the last one. – Oh, you’re right, by the way.
0:42:03 I’m looking it up, yes, good job, you’re right.
0:42:04 – The last one I wouldn’t have got,
0:42:07 but I see it here, the notes is Garfield, Andrew Garfield.
0:42:08 I wouldn’t have got that one.
0:42:12 – And both of those guys, when they got shot,
0:42:15 it was a very solvable problem.
0:42:19 So basically, up until like the 1910s or 1920s,
0:42:20 we didn’t really believe,
0:42:23 or we didn’t know that germs were a thing.
0:42:24 And most of these guys, when they got shot,
0:42:27 they got shot, and then you go digging around
0:42:30 and with a dirty surgeon’s hand or a dirty instrument,
0:42:32 and they get infections, and that’s how they died.
0:42:33 – Exactly.
0:42:35 So like McKinley died like, I don’t know,
0:42:38 eight days later of gangrene caused by the wounds,
0:42:40 not from like the bullet itself, you know,
0:42:41 hitting him in the heart or something like that.
0:42:43 – Garfield died like six weeks later.
0:42:44 – So, I was pretty mind blown.
0:42:46 So basically, I wanna know how many presidents
0:42:48 have been shot at, either hit or missed,
0:42:50 but a gunshot has been fired at them.
0:42:51 Do you know the number for this?
0:42:53 – I think it’s seven or eight or nine,
0:42:54 like right around there?
0:42:55 – 13.
0:42:56 – Oh my God.
0:42:58 – And there’s only been 40, what, six presidents,
0:42:59 some of that, so it’s basically–
0:43:00 – A 10%.
0:43:02 – More than that, 25%.
0:43:05 25% chance of being shot at if you’re a president.
0:43:06 Dangerous. – That’s insane.
0:43:08 – Dangerous job. – That’s insane, right?
0:43:10 – And then of those, four have died.
0:43:14 – So here’s the deal.
0:43:17 I made most of my money from a newsletter business.
0:43:18 It was called The Hustle,
0:43:20 and it was a daily newsletter at scale
0:43:22 to millions of subscribers,
0:43:24 and it was the greatest business on earth.
0:43:27 The problem with it was that I had close to 40 employees,
0:43:30 and only three of them were actually doing any writing.
0:43:32 The other employees were growing the newsletter,
0:43:35 building out the tech for the platform, and selling ads,
0:43:38 and honestly, it was a huge pain in the butt.
0:43:41 Today’s episode is brought to you by Beehive.
0:43:44 They are a platform that is built exactly for this.
0:43:45 If you wanna grow your newsletter,
0:43:47 if you wanna monetize a newsletter,
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0:43:53 So check it out, beehive.com.
0:43:56 That’s B-E-E-H-I-I-V.com.
0:44:01 – The crazy one that I,
0:44:03 so there’s actually two that I found pretty interesting.
0:44:04 So I tweeted about one of them.
0:44:04 I didn’t talk about the other one.
0:44:05 Can I tell you about the two
0:44:07 that I found that were pretty interesting?
0:44:10 This is me just beginner level on Wikipedia.
0:44:11 – So I know you know it was Roosevelt.
0:44:13 Was the other one Andrew Jackson?
0:44:14 – Jackson, yes.
0:44:16 The Jackson one is crazy.
0:44:18 So here’s my understanding, fill in the gaps for me.
0:44:22 So the story is Jackson is going to a funeral.
0:44:24 He, and he’s 67 years old.
0:44:25 He walks with a cane.
0:44:28 He’s a kind of an old guy and he’s not very popular.
0:44:30 He’s walking, he’s at the funeral.
0:44:32 He’s walking into the funeral, whatever.
0:44:34 And a guy approaches him with a pistol
0:44:36 and the guy shoots at him.
0:44:38 The gun goes off, but the bullet doesn’t come out.
0:44:39 It’s a misfire.
0:44:40 So the powder explodes,
0:44:43 but the bullet doesn’t leave the gun.
0:44:46 And Jackson becomes angry.
0:44:48 Charges at him with his cane,
0:44:49 swinging at him with the cane,
0:44:51 trying to beat him up with his cane.
0:44:53 – He almost beat him to death.
0:44:54 – He almost beat him to death.
0:44:55 Well, there’s a conflict of course.
0:44:57 One is he beat him up and the other ones he misses.
0:44:59 And so I don’t know which one’s true.
0:45:02 The other, and then the guy takes out a second pistol,
0:45:04 does the same thing, shoots him with a second pistol,
0:45:06 also misfires.
0:45:08 Other politicians who are there jump on him,
0:45:09 kind of tackle the guy.
0:45:13 And they then take both of the guns
0:45:15 and they’re like, man, we got lucky that this guy,
0:45:17 or maybe he didn’t really mean to do it,
0:45:17 are these fake guns?
0:45:18 What happened?
0:45:21 We heard the gun fire, but no bullet hit.
0:45:23 And so then they shoot the gun again
0:45:25 and the bullet comes out.
0:45:26 And both guns were actually functioning.
0:45:28 And they basically said that the odds
0:45:31 of both pistols misfiring and jamming like this
0:45:33 was like one in 150,000.
0:45:34 That’s what they estimated.
0:45:35 – That’s insane.
0:45:38 – The odds of that happening are so low.
0:45:39 That’s pretty crazy, huh?
0:45:41 – And what’s here, here’s what’s even crazier
0:45:46 is when up until probably the 1960s after JFK,
0:45:50 secret service wasn’t really much of a thing.
0:45:52 So the secret service wasn’t a thing.
0:45:55 I don’t think it was a thing when Garfield got shot,
0:45:59 which I think was at 1900 even or so, maybe late 1800s.
0:46:03 When JFK got shot, there was only like 150
0:46:06 secret service agents.
0:46:09 It was not big and the budget was tiny
0:46:11 and they were overworked and tired all the time.
0:46:14 And when Andrew Garfield got shot,
0:46:15 after a look at the date–
0:46:15 – 1881.
0:46:19 – 1881, Lincoln was shot 20 years prior.
0:46:21 You could still, after Lincoln got shot,
0:46:22 you could walk into the White House
0:46:23 and schedule an appointment.
0:46:25 Anyone could go see these guys.
0:46:27 And when Garfield got shot,
0:46:30 he was walking from the White House to a train.
0:46:32 Him and a buddy were just walking
0:46:33 and someone walked up and shot him.
0:46:35 It was insane how like you could get away
0:46:36 with all this stuff.
0:46:39 And it’s wild to think about that.
0:46:42 – So the Teddy Roosevelt story was the one
0:46:43 that just blew my mind.
0:46:46 So the Teddy Roosevelt story goes as follows.
0:46:50 He’s supposed to give a speech, he’s having dinner,
0:46:52 he leaves the dinner, he’s getting into his car.
0:46:53 And as he’s walking up to his car,
0:46:57 a guy comes up to him and shoots him and hits him.
0:46:59 Hits him right in the chest.
0:47:01 And Roosevelt got lucky for two reasons.
0:47:04 I’m sure you already know, what are the two reasons?
0:47:07 – I believe the first one was he had his speech
0:47:09 in his chest, in his chest pocket.
0:47:11 – A 50 page speech printed out
0:47:14 and rolled up into his jacket pocket.
0:47:17 – And the second reason I think is that he was strong.
0:47:20 His chest muscles were just like, he was a buff dude.
0:47:23 – The second one was he had his glasses case,
0:47:25 which was made out of steel.
0:47:25 – I was making that up.
0:47:27 – The bullet went through both of those.
0:47:28 So it went through the speech,
0:47:29 it goes through the glasses case,
0:47:31 but it kind of took a lot of the heat off of it.
0:47:33 And it still hits him in the chest.
0:47:34 And the story’s crazy, he’s like,
0:47:40 so his secretary was an ex football player
0:47:41 and just tackles the guy.
0:47:44 And then he’s like, you know, people are swarming.
0:47:46 He’s like, no, no, no, bring him to me, bring him to me.
0:47:48 He’s like, I want to look him in the eyes.
0:47:50 And they bring the guy up to his face and he goes,
0:47:52 why did you do it?
0:47:53 And the guy doesn’t answer.
0:47:54 And he’s like, all right, forget it.
0:47:55 Take him away.
0:47:56 He’s like, but no violence on this guy.
0:47:58 Like I don’t want this guy hurt in any way.
0:48:02 Like I want him, you know, through the judicial system.
0:48:05 So I put him in the car and I guess he’s like a hunter
0:48:08 and like an anatomist, like a casual anatomist.
0:48:10 So he’s like, you know, I’m not,
0:48:11 they’re taking him to the hospital.
0:48:13 He’s like, I’m not coughing up blood.
0:48:14 I don’t think it’s hit my lung.
0:48:17 So I think the bullets lodged in there,
0:48:20 but I think it’s okay because it didn’t puncture my lung
0:48:21 or my heart.
0:48:25 So he’s like, take me to the speech.
0:48:28 So he goes and he still delivers like a,
0:48:30 something like a 50 to 90 minute speech.
0:48:32 And they have the shirt that he wore
0:48:35 and the blood is just soaking out of the shirt.
0:48:37 Kurt Schilling style with the sock.
0:48:38 Just as he’s giving the speech,
0:48:40 they now have this like whatever in a museum
0:48:42 and he’s giving the speech.
0:48:45 And he’s like, he says, ladies and gentlemen,
0:48:47 I don’t know whether you fully understand
0:48:48 that I have just been shot,
0:48:51 but it takes more than a bullet to kill a bull moose.
0:48:55 And that was the line that he gave during the speech.
0:48:58 After the speech, he then goes to the hospital
0:48:59 and they’re like, they take the X-ray.
0:49:00 They see the bullets in there,
0:49:02 but the technology wasn’t that good at the time.
0:49:05 They’re like, look, we could try to take it out,
0:49:06 but it’s risky.
0:49:07 I think this is how McKinley had just died.
0:49:10 – Well, the technology for the X-ray
0:49:13 basically was sort of invented for Garfield.
0:49:15 So I forget what the scientist’s name was,
0:49:18 but around the World’s Fair time,
0:49:20 they were trying to invent X-ray
0:49:22 and Garfield got screwed up and they were like,
0:49:24 dude, we’ve heard that you have this thing.
0:49:26 Can you, can we be your test patient?
0:49:28 You gotta find this bullet on Garfield.
0:49:33 And so like the X-ray, basically it kind of
0:49:35 was being developed because of,
0:49:37 yeah, because of this one or two examples.
0:49:40 – Well, in the end, the doctor decided just to leave it in
0:49:42 because they’re like, it’s too risky to take it out.
0:49:44 And so he lives with it for the rest of his life.
0:49:45 And people asked him, they were like,
0:49:47 do you feel, do you still have pain from that?
0:49:48 And he’s like, it doesn’t bother me more
0:49:51 than if it was a bullet sitting in my pocket.
0:49:52 – What a badass.
0:49:54 Did you know that he was partially blind
0:49:57 because Roosevelt was a crazy person.
0:50:01 So he liked to box and he was a man’s man.
0:50:05 And there’s a story where I think it was one of his aides,
0:50:07 but a professional boxer would come in and he’d be like,
0:50:08 oh, you like the box?
0:50:10 – No, he would invite people to spar him
0:50:10 in the White House, right?
0:50:12 – He’d be like, prove it, let’s see.
0:50:14 Like, you like the box, let’s box.
0:50:16 And he would box with these guys, like professionals.
0:50:19 And he would make people get out and they would spar.
0:50:23 Well, one time a guy, I think it was his aide
0:50:26 or a partner of his damaged his eye.
0:50:28 And so one of his aides was blind.
0:50:29 And during the boxing match, he was like,
0:50:32 hey, look, we can’t tell anyone about this.
0:50:34 Like no one could know that we were fighting in here.
0:50:36 Otherwise, I’m gonna get into a ton of trouble.
0:50:38 So he didn’t tell a lot of people,
0:50:40 but he was blind in one eye.
0:50:44 – Yeah, he got a detached retina from the boxing match.
0:50:47 And then he switched to Jujutsu instead.
0:50:51 There’s also, I guess, some story.
0:50:52 – It was hard.
0:50:54 – I guess when he was born,
0:50:57 he was born with some condition where his organs
0:50:59 were too small for his body or something like that, right?
0:51:00 Isn’t there something like this?
0:51:02 – And that’s why he was so active.
0:51:04 So he was born with a bad,
0:51:06 they were like, you’re probably gonna die young.
0:51:09 – They told his parents he’ll probably die as a teenager.
0:51:10 And he’ll be in bed most of the time
0:51:12 and he’ll die as a teenager.
0:51:14 – And so that’s why he was so invigorated with life
0:51:17 because they were like, A, he expected to die.
0:51:20 And B, his father was like, we have to get you strong.
0:51:23 You have to be strong so you can survive.
0:51:26 And so he wanted to exercise and do all the stuff
0:51:27 so he could live.
0:51:30 And so that’s one of the reasons why he was so active.
0:51:32 – Yeah, this is like the tip of the iceberg.
0:51:33 I think there’s a bunch of other crazy stories
0:51:34 about Teddy Roosevelt.
0:51:38 Also, the teddy bear named after him, didn’t know that.
0:51:39 – I believe it’s named after him
0:51:43 because he was known for hunting, bears and stuff like that.
0:51:45 And so one group was like, hey, we’ll take you hunting.
0:51:50 Turns out they had a bear chained up to a tree or something.
0:51:52 And Teddy sees this poor bear.
0:51:54 And he’s like, no guys, this is not how we do this.
0:51:56 You got to release that bear.
0:51:58 And so it was something involving that story
0:52:00 involved him having the teddy bear.
0:52:03 They call him a bear or teddy bear.
0:52:05 – He didn’t like being called teddy either.
0:52:07 – Yeah, I don’t think people call him to his face,
0:52:09 but there’s a whole book called “The River of Doubt.”
0:52:10 And so basically the river of doubt,
0:52:12 you hear that title and you think,
0:52:14 oh, that has to do with you making good decisions
0:52:16 or bad decisions and doubting your decisions.
0:52:18 No, there was a river called Doubt.
0:52:20 I think in Brazil that had never been explored
0:52:22 after he was president.
0:52:25 He was like, well, I’ll go figure out what’s,
0:52:26 and let’s, we got to like map that out.
0:52:27 Let’s make a map, I’ll do it.
0:52:30 And so he goes and he does this river
0:52:32 for weeks or months or something like that.
0:52:33 And he almost dies.
0:52:35 And this is just him wanting to explore it.
0:52:38 There’s all these crazy stories about him, like,
0:52:41 a lot of people accuse him of starting a war
0:52:42 just so he could go and fight.
0:52:44 ‘Cause he had, it was called “The Rough Riders.”
0:52:47 It was his own crew of like these military folks, but no,
0:52:49 – M, DMX, who else?
0:52:50 (laughing)
0:52:51 – And their own anthem.
0:52:53 – Teddy was pretty hard.
0:52:55 Teddy was an interesting guy.
0:52:58 – And by the way, he lost the election.
0:53:00 After the guy does this, gives his speech during,
0:53:03 with a bullet in his chest, he ends up losing to,
0:53:05 because I guess he had his own,
0:53:07 he was a third party candidate at this stage,
0:53:08 which is pretty crazy.
0:53:10 – He was an interesting guy.
0:53:13 He also, his wife died giving birth.
0:53:17 And so the same day that his daughter was born,
0:53:20 his wife died, and then in the same house,
0:53:22 that day, his mother died.
0:53:25 And he has the story where he said,
0:53:27 he used to journal every day.
0:53:29 And that was one day where he wrote in this journal,
0:53:31 he goes, “The light has left my life.”
0:53:33 And that’s all he wrote, and it’s a very touching story.
0:53:35 And then he goes on this tear,
0:53:37 where for the next year, he’s crazy active.
0:53:38 And they go, “Why are you being so active?”
0:53:42 And he writes, “Ceiceless action outruns depression.”
0:53:45 And so he was basically like doing all these amazing things
0:53:48 in order to outrun the sadness of that day.
0:53:49 And so it really-
0:53:50 – That’s wild.
0:53:53 Are his journals like published anywhere,
0:53:54 or his diaries or whatever?
0:53:55 – He was a prolific writer.
0:53:56 So his first book was actually,
0:53:58 I think he was in his teens or early 20s.
0:54:00 His first book was on zoology.
0:54:02 So he used to collect animals and take them apart
0:54:04 and explain like he loved Darwin.
0:54:06 He was like, he tried to discover species.
0:54:09 And he wrote, I think dozens of book,
0:54:12 or if that doesn’t a book, books like six or eight books.
0:54:14 So he wrote many, many books.
0:54:15 So yeah, he was really prolific.
0:54:16 So you can go and read all of his writing.
0:54:17 He was a really impressive guy.
0:54:20 – What’s the best book on him that you’ve read?
0:54:21 – I would read his biography.
0:54:22 His biography is amazing
0:54:25 because he had a lot of bad shit happen to him in his life.
0:54:27 And he was very optimistic.
0:54:28 – Wow.
0:54:30 What a guy, Billy of the Week, I guess.
0:54:32 – Well, he was, his father started MoMA.
0:54:33 – The museum?
0:54:34 – The museum.
0:54:35 His father, James Roosevelt,
0:54:38 like founded that because he was a wealthy guy.
0:54:39 – Oh, no way.
0:54:42 – But Teddy Roosevelt, by the way, horrible businessman.
0:54:43 He was a horrible businessman.
0:54:44 That was the one thing that he sucked at.
0:54:46 He like would invest in like horses and stuff.
0:54:49 And he would start ranches, really bad businessman.
0:54:51 He was, he blew a lot of money.
0:54:53 – Was he a good dude overall or a bad dude, right?
0:54:56 Cause he’s definitely like a sort of man’s man
0:54:57 in all these interesting ways.
0:55:00 It has like legendary feats.
0:55:02 He really lived a very interesting life,
0:55:04 but character wise, was he a good guy?
0:55:06 I mean, I’ve never read anything about it besides this.
0:55:08 – I think he had a strong character.
0:55:09 I have one massive critique of him.
0:55:11 And this is when I kind of were the phrase,
0:55:13 all great men can be bad men.
0:55:17 For example, he wasn’t, I felt like the most present father.
0:55:19 So when his wife died, he goes to North Dakota or whatever
0:55:21 to do his thing, the Badlands to do his thing.
0:55:23 He left his newborn daughter for like a year and a half.
0:55:26 And you could say like, maybe he was like suicidal,
0:55:27 depressed and he’s like, I gotta get away.
0:55:29 And you could argue that.
0:55:32 But he kind of wasn’t always around for his daughter,
0:55:34 I felt, but in general, he had high character.
0:55:35 Yeah, he was a good dude.
0:55:37 – Interesting.
0:55:38 All right.
0:55:40 Well, I think that’s a fascinating podcast.
0:55:42 I’m so glad that you have this.
0:55:44 You and Shane Gillis, by the way,
0:55:49 why is Shane Gillis like such a history like PhD?
0:55:52 – He has a major, he studied history.
0:55:55 – I’m a biology major, couldn’t tell you three things.
0:55:58 How does he know, he knows a lot about history,
0:56:00 like too much about history.
0:56:02 – Yeah, he knows way more than me.
0:56:04 He has a good like series of history podcasts
0:56:06 and he’s really talented at it.
0:56:08 I think it’s really fun to read stories.
0:56:13 So like you’ll read in the biography about Andrew Jackson
0:56:15 beating up this guy and you’re like, you’re just reading it.
0:56:17 But then you can take this other thing of like,
0:56:19 put yourself there and you’re like, that’s hilarious
0:56:20 or not hilarious, but like, that’s wild.
0:56:21 You know, that’s someone who would do that.
0:56:23 And so it’s fun to read in between the lines
0:56:25 and like actually imagine some of these stories.
0:56:27 It’s just, I think it’s fascinating.
0:56:30 I think it’s also cool to avoid the mistakes
0:56:34 that people make and just copy the winnings that they do.
0:56:35 So I love that.
0:56:36 – I don’t read any biographies.
0:56:39 And I, but I read a lot about people
0:56:40 and I don’t know what a word for this is,
0:56:44 but I basically will study the ideas
0:56:49 and the ideas and kind of like core plot lines.
0:56:52 But I don’t care where they grew up, how they grew up,
0:56:55 who they grew up with, what the scene was like,
0:56:56 what their family life was like.
0:56:59 I don’t really care about a lot of those things.
0:57:03 And so I find myself fascinated by people,
0:57:05 but I really want to know their philosophy.
0:57:08 And then the action of how they implemented that philosophy,
0:57:10 like the stories of them implementing that philosophy
0:57:11 or living up to that philosophy
0:57:13 or failing on that philosophy.
0:57:14 That’s really all I care about,
0:57:16 which is like a very weird sub-genre
0:57:19 of studying history or these people.
0:57:20 – Well, let me give you two recommendations.
0:57:23 So the first recommendation is a book called “Man Hunt”,
0:57:26 the 12-day chase for Lincoln’s killer.
0:57:27 The reason it’s interesting
0:57:29 is because you’ve heard the name John Wilkes Booth.
0:57:31 That’s the guy who assassinated Lincoln.
0:57:34 He was, he’s an intoxicating character.
0:57:36 He was sort of like a cult leader.
0:57:38 He was a famous actor, not quite,
0:57:40 but almost like Brad Pitt at the time,
0:57:42 where everyone recognized him.
0:57:43 – He was a celebrity?
0:57:44 – He was a celebrity.
0:57:47 And he was a bad, he was a bad dude, like crazy racist.
0:57:48 He was a horrible guy,
0:57:49 but he definitely had this intoxicating,
0:57:52 like I want to follow you to the death type of vibe
0:57:55 where he was really charismatic and he entranced people.
0:57:58 And so the Lincoln assassination, by definition,
0:57:58 was a conspiracy.
0:58:02 It was a group of like 30 people who worked together
0:58:03 to make this happen. – Conspired to do this.
0:58:06 – Yeah, and he was gone for 12 days.
0:58:08 So they assassinated Lincoln
0:58:10 and he escaped for 12 days and he almost got away with it.
0:58:12 He was very closely getting away with it.
0:58:14 And so the 12-day manhunt,
0:58:15 the 12-day chase for Lincoln’s killers
0:58:18 is a book about the 12-day manhunt.
0:58:20 And it’s a very good page turning read.
0:58:21 It’s very easy.
0:58:22 The second one is hellbound.
0:58:25 And it’s about the assassination of MLK.
0:58:26 A lot of people don’t know this,
0:58:28 but James Earl Ray, the guy who shot MLK,
0:58:30 and MLK was a great dude.
0:58:32 He had some downfalls.
0:58:34 He cheated on his wife a bunch,
0:58:35 but he was a net positive.
0:58:38 He was a great guy in general, but he had flaws.
0:58:43 James Earl Ray shot MLK and not only did he escape,
0:58:44 he escaped for months.
0:58:45 So basically when he shot MLK,
0:58:48 he escaped to, I think he shot him in Memphis
0:58:50 and then he drove all over America.
0:58:52 Then he went to Quebec and then he went to Europe.
0:58:53 And when he was in Europe,
0:58:56 he was flying around from country to country.
0:58:57 And the only reason he got caught
0:59:01 was he was in London on his way to Rhodesia,
0:59:02 which is basically South Africa.
0:59:04 At the time it was run by a racist regime.
0:59:07 And he was like, they’re gonna accept me with wide arms
0:59:08 ’cause I just killed MLK.
0:59:09 They’re gonna love me.
0:59:11 He gets through security.
0:59:12 Once he walks through security,
0:59:14 the security guard who lets him in,
0:59:18 he says, thank you, sir, and looks down.
0:59:20 And he sees that he has an additional passport
0:59:22 in his pocket.
0:59:23 And they’re like, whoa, whoa, whoa, dude.
0:59:25 Why do you have two passports?
0:59:26 And they pull it out and they’re like,
0:59:27 oh, shit, the one you gave me was fake.
0:59:28 I just got the real one.
0:59:32 And he was seconds away from getting away from all this.
0:59:34 He was gone for roughly six months.
0:59:36 He was gallivanting all over Europe.
0:59:37 He was all over Canada.
0:59:39 He was very close to getting away with it.
0:59:41 And a lot of people don’t realize that about that story.
0:59:43 And that book, I believe, is called Hellbound,
0:59:44 also a page turner.
0:59:45 So if you wanna read about assassinations,
0:59:48 those are my two favorite assassination books.
0:59:50 – Dude, we should make a, you know,
0:59:52 like a blue ribbon when you were a kid or whatever.
0:59:55 Like, we should have our own list of like books
0:59:59 that we think are awesome and some commentary around them.
1:00:01 Like, I wish we just had our own,
1:00:04 we should just make a separate YouTube channel
1:00:06 of just us doing like a book club
1:00:08 or doing like read a book, talk about it,
1:00:10 and curate for people like the books that we think
1:00:12 are just like really unbelievable books for the year.
1:00:14 – Yeah, I would love to do that.
1:00:16 Those two rank really high.
1:00:19 Those are some of, like I go through series.
1:00:21 So like, I got obsessed with shipwrecks.
1:00:23 So I read like 10 books all on shipwrecks.
1:00:25 I can tell you like, in my opinion,
1:00:26 what are some of the coolest shipwrecks.
1:00:28 And then I did assassinations of famous people.
1:00:30 And the reason why I love these books
1:00:32 and the reason why I think you don’t like biographies,
1:00:35 biographies don’t have a very good beginning
1:00:37 and a middle and an end.
1:00:40 Whereas I try to read books that are about an event,
1:00:41 ’cause an event typically has a beginning
1:00:43 and a middle and an end, where it’s, you know,
1:00:47 it’s more succinct as opposed to 1200 pages.
1:00:49 And so I like books that are on events,
1:00:50 particularly events in America,
1:00:52 so I can relate a little bit more.
1:00:53 – All right, this was fun.
1:00:55 I’m glad we did this at the end here.
1:00:56 – That’s the part.
1:00:58 ♪ I feel like I can rule the world ♪
1:01:01 ♪ I know I could be what I want to ♪
1:01:04 ♪ I put my all in it like no days off ♪
1:01:06 ♪ On the road let’s travel never looking back ♪
1:01:07 Bye.