0:00:02 Your life is already a three-act story.
0:00:04 You have the rise to meteoric fame.
0:00:05 -Mike Posner. -Mike Posner.
0:00:06 Great through Otters of the Year award.
0:00:08 Then you have the crash.
0:00:09 My career had plummeted.
0:00:11 I had a hit, and my career plummeted.
0:00:12 And then you have the rebirth.
0:00:16 One of Spotify’s top 10 most streamed songs of all time.
0:00:19 Mike Posner is enjoying sweet success.
0:00:21 At the time, it was scary.
0:00:23 The fame, the adoration, the money.
0:00:24 Really the fame.
0:00:25 Really the fame.
0:00:28 The money and all that stuff was nice, but it was the fame, man.
0:00:31 So what I’m supposed to do is ask you to walk me through that.
0:00:32 But I already know that story.
0:00:34 So I said, “What am I actually curious about?”
0:00:36 And it’s why you would climb Everest,
0:00:38 why you would walk across America.
0:00:41 What’s the philosophy that drives somebody to do those things?
0:00:42 I’ve never been asked that before.
0:00:44 Okay, let me try to tell the truth.
0:00:57 I want to ask you about some things back when we were at Duke.
0:00:58 So people who were listening who don’t know this,
0:01:01 me and Mike actually were at Duke at the same time.
0:01:03 Same year, freshman class.
0:01:06 I remember hearing stories that there’s a white boy rapper
0:01:08 in the dorm next door, and we were like,
0:01:09 “Who is he trying to make?”
0:01:09 And whatever.
0:01:11 Didn’t really think too much of it.
0:01:14 And then I suddenly started to see a couple of interesting things.
0:01:18 The first interesting thing I saw was that at some point,
0:01:21 I opened up my laptop and I went to iTunes.
0:01:24 And I saw you at the top of iTunes.
0:01:25 But it wasn’t the top of iTunes.
0:01:27 It was the top of iTunes U.
0:01:28 [Laughs]
0:01:31 And iTunes U was like this little part of iTunes
0:01:32 that was like for lectures.
0:01:34 In Silicon Valley, we call this a growth hack.
0:01:37 Sometimes you got to be clever and you got to use your,
0:01:39 turn your disadvantage to an advantage.
0:01:40 Can you teach me about this?
0:01:41 Because I’ve always known half the story.
0:01:43 I didn’t know the full story.
0:01:44 Yeah, absolutely.
0:01:47 So I was a giant hip-hop fan.
0:01:48 So I started rapping when I was eight.
0:01:51 Got to Duke, you know, 12 years later.
0:01:53 And I started to sing.
0:01:58 But really, I was singing almost from a hip-hop perspective.
0:02:03 I used these complex rhyme schemes, polysyllabic rhyme schemes.
0:02:05 Even in my first hit song, “Cooler Than Me,”
0:02:07 it’s got a complex rhyme scheme.
0:02:11 So you got designer shades just to hide your face.
0:02:15 So it’s not just the last syllable that rhymes shades in face,
0:02:18 but also designer rhymes with hydra.
0:02:19 This is a rapper thing, right?
0:02:23 And so I was combining hip-hop with melody
0:02:25 in a way that I thought was dope.
0:02:26 I thought was cool.
0:02:28 And I hadn’t heard anyone do it before, really.
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0:03:09 And so I started to share my music,
0:03:12 and I was getting a little bit of traction
0:03:14 on these hip-hop blogs,
0:03:17 which were important in hip-hop at the time.
0:03:20 Blogs like “Too Dope Boys,” “Nah Right,”
0:03:23 even Kanye’s blog, which is a really big deal at the time.
0:03:27 And this is the era of piracy.
0:03:29 So everyone, you probably remember when we were at Duke,
0:03:31 we did not pay for music, you know?
0:03:33 So you’d go on–
0:03:33 Lime wire–
0:03:36 Lime wire, BitTorrents, that whole thing.
0:03:39 And so I knew Nolan was gonna pay for my music
0:03:41 because we weren’t paying for Kanye’s music.
0:03:43 We weren’t paying for Jay-Z.
0:03:45 The artists we love the most, we were stealing their music.
0:03:48 So no one’s gonna pay for my music
0:03:49 because no one knows who I am.
0:03:51 So I understood that.
0:03:52 And I understood it was important.
0:03:54 I was on these hip-hop blogs,
0:03:57 but then I was gonna have a shy kid
0:04:00 and I was really into my music.
0:04:03 So I’d always stay in and then my friends would come back.
0:04:05 They’d stumble into my room drunk,
0:04:06 interrupt my song and push them out.
0:04:07 And this whole thing–
0:04:12 And one day I go to this kid’s room down the hall
0:04:14 named Xander, he was a really cool kid, you know?
0:04:19 And seemed to have a more robust social life than I did.
0:04:21 There’s only cool Xanders.
0:04:22 I’ve never met a not cool Xander.
0:04:24 Yeah, exactly, dude.
0:04:31 And so he said to me, “Hey, Posner,
0:04:34 at the party last night, they played your song
0:04:37 and all the sorority girls knew the words.”
0:04:40 I said, “What, really?”
0:04:44 Mind you, I’ve been making music 12 years now.
0:04:45 That’s never happened.
0:04:47 He goes, “Yeah.”
0:04:50 And dude, they played it twice.
0:04:52 They played it twice in a row
0:04:53 and everyone’s saying the words.
0:04:57 So then I said, “Wow, okay.”
0:05:02 The next day my mom calls and she says in passing,
0:05:04 “By the way, I really like that song you make cooler than me.
0:05:06 I don’t know how she heard it.”
0:05:08 And her, you know, friends sent her–
0:05:10 I was in my MySpace at the time.
0:05:13 So I said, “Okay, that’s kind of peculiar.
0:05:15 It’s on the hip hop blogs.
0:05:18 The sorority girls like it and my mom likes it.”
0:05:22 The next day, my friend, Big Sean calls
0:05:24 who I came up with in Detroit
0:05:26 and he had gotten a record deal with Kanye.
0:05:29 He’s a rapper from Detroit and a dear friend of mine.
0:05:31 And he said, “I love cool to me.”
0:05:32 He goes, “I think that could be a hit song.”
0:05:35 I said, “Hold on.
0:05:41 If Sean, mom and the sorority girls all like the same song,
0:05:44 something’s going on here that never happened before.”
0:05:46 Because I’ve been making music for 12 years
0:05:49 and nobody seemed to particularly give a fuck besides me,
0:05:52 including my mom, right?
0:05:53 Always supportive and loving.
0:05:58 She, you know, paid for music less supportive
0:06:00 but never told me she liked one of my songs.
0:06:02 I’m 20 years old.
0:06:09 So I realized the way these hip hop blogs work was
0:06:13 you’d go on the site, there’d be a blog entry with your song
0:06:19 and then you had to do some kind of right clicking
0:06:20 and there was always these weird links
0:06:23 that would throw you off into some sketchy websites
0:06:25 and you had to click the right thing
0:06:29 and then save file ads and that’s how you download the song.
0:06:34 But it was really convoluted and hidden behind advertisements.
0:06:38 And I just realized that these sorority girls
0:06:39 were never going to do that.
0:06:41 They were never going to,
0:06:44 hey, they’re never going to go to these hip hop blogs
0:06:47 and if, you know, snowball chance in hell they would,
0:06:48 they wouldn’t ever be able to download the song.
0:06:52 So I realized iTunes was just starting to come out
0:06:54 and it was this safe place you could get music.
0:06:57 And so I knew I needed to get my music there
0:07:00 but then I had this other rub that I alluded to earlier
0:07:03 which is no one’s going to pay for it.
0:07:06 So I needed it to be free like it is on the blogs
0:07:11 but I need to be on iTunes and then I saw iTunes U.
0:07:15 So iTunes U was this section of iTunes
0:07:19 that was set up for professors to post their lectures.
0:07:22 And if you weren’t there, you went to a different school,
0:07:25 you could, you could listen to this professor’s lecture
0:07:29 and this was purely educational and the cost was free
0:07:30 for everything on iTunes U.
0:07:31 There was no charge.
0:07:34 It was an educational arm of iTunes.
0:07:37 So I said, I got to get my music there.
0:07:41 Now this is where life capital L comes in.
0:07:42 I’m from Southfield, Michigan.
0:07:44 It’s a suburb of Detroit.
0:07:45 I was born in Detroit.
0:07:47 I moved to Southfield when I was two years old.
0:07:48 I grew up there.
0:07:49 I lived there until I’m 18.
0:07:50 I go to Duke University.
0:07:54 I do some searching and I find out
0:07:57 who’s in charge of iTunes U for Duke.
0:07:58 So if you’re a Duke professor
0:08:00 and you want to post your lecture,
0:08:00 how do you get up there?
0:08:04 I find out it’s a man named Todd Stabley.
0:08:06 I called email type.
0:08:08 Remember you could type in any name
0:08:09 and the director could get the email.
0:08:10 So I get Todd’s email.
0:08:14 I called email him and we do a phone call.
0:08:17 He gives me his number and his number
0:08:19 is the same area code as mine.
0:08:22 Hey, man, you got two, four, eight areas.
0:08:23 He goes, yeah.
0:08:24 He goes, I’m from Southfield, Michigan.
0:08:25 Where are you from?
0:08:27 I said, come on.
0:08:30 No, so I get the goosebumps still to this day.
0:08:32 I said, look, this is what I’m trying to do.
0:08:38 I’m a student artist and I want to share my album, you know,
0:08:40 and I want to put on iTunes U.
0:08:41 He goes, oh yeah, man.
0:08:44 From Southfield, you’re a student.
0:08:46 We could put on iTunes U. No problem.
0:08:48 Life set that up for me, man.
0:08:53 So I got my music on to iTunes
0:08:55 and you just search on iTunes like any other thing.
0:08:58 But when you went, my album came up, the price was free.
0:09:06 Any other music out cost a $1, yeah, $99, whatever it was.
0:09:06 Mine was free.
0:09:10 And so then I got busy on Facebook.
0:09:14 I created a Facebook event and there was a link to that album.
0:09:19 And I activated all my communities.
0:09:22 So I was from Michigan and a lot of my friends
0:09:24 went to different colleges across the country,
0:09:30 including Michigan, Michigan State, gosh, friends in Northwestern,
0:09:35 friends at Marquette, just wherever they went.
0:09:41 And then my friend, I was in Fraternity and there were these,
0:09:42 we had pledges.
0:09:44 So these older guys do mean things.
0:09:46 These pledges make them like do, you know,
0:09:48 thousand push-ups or whatever.
0:09:50 I said, look, you guys are going to do something for me.
0:09:51 You’re going to send–
0:09:52 Pause the push-ups.
0:09:56 You’re going to send the invitation to this Facebook event,
0:10:01 to everyone in your Facebook network, every single person.
0:10:04 And there’s a way I had a protocol, five steps,
0:10:05 and you could send it out.
0:10:08 And all of you are going to change your profile picture
0:10:09 to my album cover.
0:10:12 And all my friends, they all changed their profile picture
0:10:13 to my album cover.
0:10:15 And my friends did the same thing.
0:10:18 My fraternity brothers, they all did the same thing.
0:10:20 So all their friends that were at different schools,
0:10:20 they sent it out.
0:10:23 And then here’s that.
0:10:25 The last thing is the music was good, right?
0:10:28 So if the music wasn’t good, none of this shit matters.
0:10:31 But and my music wasn’t always good.
0:10:32 Like I said, I’m 20.
0:10:33 I started when I was eight.
0:10:37 So it’s 12 years making songs, a lot of songs,
0:10:41 to get to that one song where my mom likes it, right?
0:10:42 And Sean likes it.
0:10:47 So this iTunes U thing, yeah, was a thing that was pivotal for me.
0:10:48 Pivotal.
0:10:54 And so from there, pretty much every college in the U.S.
0:10:55 was listening to Mike Posner that year.
0:10:59 And it started off smaller, 50 people.
0:11:02 And I’d get a show at Dayton, Ohio.
0:11:05 When I’d go to Dayton, Ohio, I’d be booked to play at some bar.
0:11:08 You know, at colleges, there’s always a hustler guy
0:11:10 that throws the parties.
0:11:12 And so those guys would book me.
0:11:14 They’d say, “Posner, come play Friday night.”
0:11:17 And are you even getting paid to do this at the time?
0:11:19 Or at the start, 500 bucks.
0:11:22 So I’d go, my boy, Pat Klein, became my manager later.
0:11:25 He booked me at Dayton, Ohio.
0:11:27 I go there and there’s 25 to 50 people.
0:11:30 I do my set and they know every word to my song.
0:11:33 A month later, he’d book me to come back
0:11:36 and there’d be 300 people there, every word to my song.
0:11:40 And so I just started to expand like that.
0:11:46 And yeah, the iTunes U was a really great hack.
0:11:49 I’ve never heard that story, that’s amazing story.
0:11:52 So because what you did then, you kind of stacked these, right?
0:11:55 So you did that, then you started doing the shows,
0:11:58 which normally, correct me if I’m wrong,
0:12:00 normally you kind of, you did it backwards, right?
0:12:02 So like, it seems like normally you’d have a label,
0:12:04 they would get you set up with tours.
0:12:05 You were kind of underground.
0:12:06 So you, if I remember correctly,
0:12:09 because you already had tours and fans,
0:12:12 then when record labels were interested, you’re like,
0:12:13 “Yo, I’m de-risked.
0:12:16 Like I’m more de-risk than the average artist
0:12:16 because look at this.
0:12:18 Like I’ve already, I’m already playing shows
0:12:21 with real fans all around the country.
0:12:23 And I remember being at Duke and we would hear
0:12:25 like dude flies out every weekend.
0:12:27 It just does a show at a different college
0:12:28 and flies back and like takes his time.
0:12:30 That’s what you were doing.
0:12:31 – We’re doing two or three, man.
0:12:32 I got crazy.
0:12:34 Yeah, I would do two or three.
0:12:36 And that senior year I had set up.
0:12:40 So all my classes, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday,
0:12:43 I’d leave Thursday night, rip Thursday night,
0:12:44 Friday night, Saturday night.
0:12:47 I get three checks, come back, have a bunch of cash,
0:12:51 go to the bank, put in the bank, come back in my house,
0:12:55 this dirty, filthy house, you know, like go to class again.
0:12:58 It was just insane doing homework on the planes.
0:13:00 Like it was insane, insane.
0:13:03 – It seems like one of the unique things about you is like,
0:13:05 you may not be the best rapper or the best singer
0:13:08 or the best kind of beats producer guy,
0:13:11 but because you’re good enough to be dangerous on all three,
0:13:14 you were able to be like a one man machine
0:13:18 that was able to get a bunch of practice reps in
0:13:20 and get, you know, keep trial and error
0:13:23 where you weren’t dependent on somebody else’s time
0:13:25 or somebody else’s interests or tastes or whatever.
0:13:26 Is that fair?
0:13:28 – No, I don’t think so.
0:13:29 – How would you say it?
0:13:30 – I would say, yeah, I’m probably,
0:13:32 yeah, I’m definitely not the best singer.
0:13:34 Definitely not, you know, I can’t dance or anything
0:13:37 or do any cool runs, but I’m a damn good writer.
0:13:41 – Writer, that’s like your A plus skill.
0:13:46 You know, people connect to me, I think, because of the writing.
0:13:48 You know, yeah, I can’t.
0:13:51 If I did American Idol, I’d lose, you know, right?
0:13:53 You know, I can sing, but not-
0:13:55 – One of the things that inspired me
0:13:57 when I was doing the research was that
0:13:59 at some point in the middle of your career,
0:14:01 so not like before he made it,
0:14:04 but like actually after you had the initial burst of success,
0:14:06 it seemed like I read something that you went back
0:14:09 and almost like took music lessons and singing lessons
0:14:10 and enrolled in a college
0:14:12 and you said something like, you know, I’m in this class
0:14:14 and I’m not the best singer in the class.
0:14:16 I’m supposed to be this, you know,
0:14:17 I’m supposed to be this guy who’s the star, right?
0:14:19 They all want to be artists.
0:14:21 I actually even have the credentials,
0:14:22 but I thought that was kind of an amazing,
0:14:26 humbling move to just, of course,
0:14:28 why wouldn’t I dedicate myself to the craft?
0:14:29 Can you talk a little about that?
0:14:31 There was something in that that resonated with me
0:14:33 because I think that’s unusual.
0:14:34 – Yeah, well, there’s two things in that.
0:14:37 One, I think it speaks to the point I just made
0:14:38 where there are these people,
0:14:42 at that time in my career, I was in a cold spot.
0:14:46 So I said, hey, let me use this time to get better at my skills.
0:14:48 And if I’m being honest, yeah, I don’t know how to play,
0:14:50 like I had a hit song, but I didn’t know how to play guitar.
0:14:51 I didn’t know how to really sing.
0:14:53 I was a rapper who had started singing.
0:14:55 I didn’t know how to play piano.
0:14:59 So why don’t I learn some of those things?
0:15:00 And I remember I was at a,
0:15:06 at a, it was kind of like a campfire kind of situation.
0:15:09 And that guy, Si was there, do you remember him?
0:15:10 – Yeah. – Obengongo’s there.
0:15:12 And Tori Kelly was there.
0:15:15 And they were passing the guitar around the fire.
0:15:17 And Tori Kelly sang this song.
0:15:18 It was so beautiful.
0:15:20 And then I had just written a song that day.
0:15:22 I wanted to sing it.
0:15:24 And I was at, I said, could you play the guitar?
0:15:25 These chorus of things.
0:15:29 She’s trying to do it for me because I couldn’t play the guitar.
0:15:31 And I really wanted to sing my song, but I couldn’t do it.
0:15:33 And it didn’t really work.
0:15:36 And I remember leaving, I go, that’s stupid that I can’t do that.
0:15:38 That’s never going to happen again.
0:15:39 I’m going to learn to play the guitar.
0:15:42 And you’ll be able to sing my song at a campfire.
0:15:42 You know?
0:15:45 So that’s one part of it.
0:15:47 You know, it’s this lesson and go, hey, you know,
0:15:54 being an artist is about, it’s similar to being a human.
0:15:55 It’s about growing.
0:15:58 It’s about being a better artist than you were a year ago.
0:16:02 And you can always, your relationship to the music deepens.
0:16:06 Or the art, any art form deepens your whole life.
0:16:09 Art is not like the NBA, you know?
0:16:13 It’s not like you peak at 30 and, you know, you can’t jump as high anymore.
0:16:15 So you, no, this is a lifelong thing.
0:16:19 You can always get deeper.
0:16:26 So that’s part A. But then part B was, yeah, I realized kind of to the point
0:16:29 right before this point was I’m in a singing class.
0:16:31 I took Berkeley School of Music online.
0:16:32 There’s these great singers in there.
0:16:38 And yeah, I was almost like, you know, in the bottom quartile of that class.
0:16:41 But I was a successful recording artist.
0:16:44 And those people all wanted my job.
0:16:51 And I realized I had something that most people don’t, which is my writing.
0:16:57 But I have a way of connecting the music I make, whether it doesn’t matter.
0:16:59 Music is not about hitting the high, it’s like life.
0:17:02 It’s not about hitting the perfect note in the run.
0:17:09 It’s about does it, does this part of my humanity speak to that part of your humanity?
0:17:10 I’m raising my hand.
0:17:11 And I’m taking my clothes off out here.
0:17:12 And it’s vulnerable.
0:17:15 I’m going, this is what it’s like for me to be a human.
0:17:16 Anyone else?
0:17:21 And if I do a good job, someone else hears it.
0:17:28 And I’m so glad you said it because that’s how I’ve been feeling for years.
0:17:30 And I didn’t know how to articulate.
0:17:33 And now I don’t feel as alone.
0:17:35 That’s what an artist does.
0:17:40 And so I realized in that singing class, I already know how to do that.
0:17:48 I can add colors and refinements and make things more sophisticated by, you know,
0:17:49 adding to my skills.
0:17:54 But at the end of the day, even if you got no skills and you can do that,
0:17:55 you’re a great artist.
0:17:57 You’re a great artist.
0:17:59 Well, I love your music videos for this reason.
0:18:04 Like now that you say it, when I think about when I became a super fan of yours.
0:18:07 Like you, sorry, by the way, that’s why you’re a great artist.
0:18:08 We talked about the beginning.
0:18:10 You always say, I’m a little lowercase arts.
0:18:13 No, you’re making the thing and it obviously connects with other people.
0:18:18 You’re obviously following your own curiosity and going, hey, I’m making the thing that,
0:18:21 it’s a million podcasts in the frickin’ world, dude, right?
0:18:26 But you’re doing something in a way that connects with other humans.
0:18:28 And you’re not doing it because you’re trying to,
0:18:31 you’re doing it by trying to connect with yourself and connect your own creativity
0:18:37 and curiosity to the art you’re making or the, you know, the pieces that you’re making,
0:18:38 whatever you call them.
0:18:39 And so, yeah.
0:18:42 And by the way, I used to approach it very differently.
0:18:45 I used to approach it very analytically, logically.
0:18:46 Duke kid, right?
0:18:49 Like, you know, there’s a certain set of skills that gets you into Duke.
0:18:55 And those skills were, I was trying to sort of map the market out and the opportunity.
0:18:56 Where’s the white space?
0:18:58 And my coach, my trainer, I’ve mentioned before.
0:19:01 He’s like, the white space is you, bro.
0:19:04 He’s like, the product is you pushed out.
0:19:05 That’s it.
0:19:09 Take yourself, turn yourself inside out.
0:19:13 Whoever resonates with what you are, that’s your target customer.
0:19:15 You don’t need a market study, right?
0:19:17 That, who are the people, who are my customers?
0:19:18 The people that love what I do.
0:19:20 And he just flipped it on its head and I was like, dude,
0:19:22 you’re speaking a different language to me, different.
0:19:26 I’ve never seen this in a book, but I started to put some faith in that.
0:19:27 And that’s when I did the podcast.
0:19:28 I was like, what’s the podcast?
0:19:29 It started off as only interviews.
0:19:33 And then we would just get on the podcast sometimes, just shoot the shit about,
0:19:35 dude, did you see this app that did this?
0:19:36 It was just me pushed out.
0:19:37 Because that’s what I’m actually interested in.
0:19:39 So I just started talking about it.
0:19:42 And then all of a sudden it was getting a different result
0:19:45 because there was only one of those, because there’s only one of me, right?
0:19:47 So that was a big lesson to learn.
0:19:50 That sounds kind of obvious and almost like a fortune cookie,
0:19:51 but you’ve got to go do it.
0:19:53 It’s just courage.
0:19:54 And you have to stumble upon it.
0:19:58 You have to do the other thing.
0:20:00 So yeah, it has to be stumbled upon.
0:20:06 I had this line on my song that said, I’m in the yoga class headband now.
0:20:08 People say I’m off brand.
0:20:10 How I am the brand.
0:20:13 Therefore, anything I do is on brand now.
0:20:14 I’m on brand now.
0:20:21 It’s like, I look at my heroes and that’s what I am now.
0:20:26 People got attached to a version of me because it hurts when they see a person who’s free.
0:20:28 And I’m so grateful for all of these lessons.
0:20:33 Twice as much money, half the possessions, no drugs, now the vision’s clear.
0:20:36 All my gold jewelry just disappeared.
0:20:39 That’s the universe telling me to start switching gears.
0:20:42 The deeper the human, the deeper the songs.
0:20:45 I saw all of this three years ago.
0:20:47 It’s almost like it was me reading my poem.
0:20:51 Yeah, where it’s trying to be.
0:20:52 I like that.
0:20:55 How’d you get on the radio?
0:20:56 Because that’s a black box.
0:20:58 Like, how’d you even figure out how to get on radio?
0:20:58 Yeah.
0:21:05 Oh, the thing I was going to say to you before was the music industry has completely moved that way.
0:21:07 So these days of a record label.
0:21:09 Hey kid, you got talent.
0:21:11 We’re going to develop you for six years.
0:21:12 That doesn’t happen.
0:21:14 And now it’s even more so.
0:21:16 You only get a record deal if you already
0:21:18 have an audience.
0:21:22 So that no longer is the responsibility of the label.
0:21:24 That’s not the responsibility of the artist.
0:21:28 And there’s so much data now, right?
0:21:30 So labels can be really prudent.
0:21:32 I’m going, hey, that or that or that, right?
0:21:36 Okay, you asked if I’d get on the radio.
0:21:40 So I graduate and I sign a record deal.
0:21:42 And I’m making this new album.
0:21:44 I’m starting to work with bigger producers.
0:21:48 I’m working with Benny Blanco and making these songs and thinking, you know,
0:21:53 when I do my first real album, not an iTunes U album, it’s going to be big.
0:21:55 And I’m starting to make all this new music.
0:22:02 And the original cooler than me used to have this line in it.
0:22:06 You go, at the end of the verse would say, you’re so vain.
0:22:10 You probably think that the song is about you.
0:22:13 Don’t you, if I could write you a song to make you.
0:22:14 Right?
0:22:14 I don’t know if you remember that.
0:22:15 I remember that, yeah.
0:22:16 Yeah.
0:22:17 Is that not still the song?
0:22:18 That’s the one I remember.
0:22:18 It’s not.
0:22:22 And most people don’t know it that way because we went to then go clear it.
0:22:24 Because that’s a Carly Simon song.
0:22:24 You’re so vain.
0:22:27 So this was this two lines in the verse.
0:22:28 We go to go clear it.
0:22:32 We say, hey, you know, I use this part of your song and my song.
0:22:34 You want to give you credit for it?
0:22:34 Can we work out a deal?
0:22:36 She, yeah, she represents it.
0:22:38 No problem.
0:22:39 We’ll just take 80 percent.
0:22:42 The review is seven years.
0:22:44 So I’m like, dude, that’s like, it’s two lines of the verse.
0:22:47 So I had to change that, right?
0:22:48 First thing I was going to say.
0:22:53 Behind Jamaica, nobody knows who you really are.
0:22:54 Who do you think you are?
0:22:56 You know, so we had to change that out.
0:23:03 And then I’m thinking that I’m going to make this new hit song with Benny Blanco.
0:23:06 It’s a brand big thing because I have a record deal now.
0:23:13 And when I play the new version of Cooler Than Me without the Carly Simon,
0:23:17 my record label thinks they say it’s not as good.
0:23:19 It’s not as good anymore.
0:23:23 So I think we should use one of the new songs to be your first real single.
0:23:28 Cooler Than Me has now been out for two years to us college kids.
0:23:30 I’m in New York City.
0:23:32 I’m about to go to some meeting or studio or something.
0:23:35 Hang out with a friend and my manager says,
0:23:38 we got to do a meeting with this radio promoter.
0:23:40 His name is Ian C.
0:23:42 We need to do a meeting with this guy.
0:23:44 His job is he gets songs on the radio without you.
0:23:47 And usually the label is supposed to do that,
0:23:50 but we need to pay him to do it ourselves.
0:23:51 I said, I don’t want to go to that meeting.
0:23:52 I want to go to the studio.
0:23:53 I’m an artist.
0:23:54 You go to the meeting.
0:23:55 He goes, this is more important.
0:23:58 I go, no, it’s not.
0:23:59 He says, yes, it is.
0:24:00 I said, why?
0:24:04 Well, Cooler Than Me is your first single.
0:24:07 The label doesn’t know it, but I know it.
0:24:09 This is my manager, Daniel Weissman.
0:24:13 I said, Cooler Than Me is old.
0:24:15 It’s two years old.
0:24:19 It’s been out two years and everybody has already heard it.
0:24:23 When the sidewalk in New York City looks me in the eye,
0:24:26 he goes, nobody has heard it.
0:24:32 I’ll go to the meeting.
0:24:34 We go to the meeting.
0:24:35 We hire ENC.
0:24:36 I think we paid him.
0:24:38 What was it, five grand, 10 grand?
0:24:41 And he’s going to get the song on a few radio stations.
0:24:43 No guarantee how much they’re going to play it,
0:24:45 but I can get it on a few stations.
0:24:51 So he gets on a few stations and this thing starts catching on.
0:24:53 People are calling into the station.
0:24:54 We like this song.
0:24:59 Before Shazam really, but they have some way they test it.
0:25:00 The tests are going crazy.
0:25:05 And these few stations, Patty Moreno in Sacramento and Shorty,
0:25:09 they start playing the song 50 times a week.
0:25:10 That’s a lot.
0:25:13 And then DJ Reflex in LA, Power 106,
0:25:15 he plays a song that does well here.
0:25:16 It starts catching on here.
0:25:18 Now the label calls.
0:25:22 They go, we told you, Cooler Than Me is your first single, dude.
0:25:26 What a great idea.
0:25:29 And that’s what labels are great at.
0:25:31 It’s not so great at starting fires,
0:25:34 but if you could start a fire, they got a hell of a lot of gasoline.
0:25:37 So then they go in hyper mode, do their things,
0:25:39 start getting it on all the other stations.
0:25:41 And that was how I got on the radio.
0:25:43 And at that time, the radio drove.
0:25:44 Mattered, yeah.
0:25:49 It still matters, but you win Spotify and get on the radio,
0:25:51 or you win YouTube and you get on the radio.
0:25:53 Then it was the opposite.
0:26:00 Hey, let’s take a quick break to talk about another podcast
0:26:01 that you should check out.
0:26:02 It is called the Next Wave.
0:26:04 It’s hosted by Matt Wolf and Nathan Lanz
0:26:06 as part of the HubSpot Podcast Network,
0:26:08 which of course is your audio destination
0:26:09 for business professionals like you.
0:26:11 You can catch the next wave with Matt Wolf,
0:26:13 and he’s talking about where the puck is going
0:26:15 with AI creators, AI technology,
0:26:17 and how you can apply it to your growing business.
0:26:18 So check it out.
0:26:21 Listen to the next wave wherever you get your podcast.
0:26:27 I told you, I get more out of the research for these
0:26:29 than I do the interview sometimes.
0:26:31 And at first I got discouraged by that
0:26:33 because I was like, oh man, it’s kind of anti-climatic.
0:26:35 All the fun was in the foreplay, not the real thing.
0:26:36 We’re going to change that.
0:26:38 We’re going to change that, but then I got excited.
0:26:40 I was like, oh wait, that means when I’m doing the research,
0:26:41 look for the gold.
0:26:43 Because there’s usually like one thing that I’m like, wow,
0:26:46 that alone made this whole trip worth it.
0:26:47 And so for me, that was this one,
0:26:51 which was about, I guess, making art or making songs.
0:26:53 Do you try to make a hit?
0:26:56 Do you try to think about what the audience wants?
0:26:58 And the quote was, I just do what’s cool to me
0:27:00 and sometimes the whole world agrees.
0:27:02 I like that.
0:27:03 Can you talk about that a little bit?
0:27:05 Like where that mindset comes from?
0:27:08 That’s a good question because I could talk about that mindset
0:27:11 really easily, but you asked me something different,
0:27:12 which is where does that come from?
0:27:13 Where does that come from?
0:27:16 And I’ve never been asked that before,
0:27:17 so we’re off to a good start.
0:27:21 That’s an answer I give other people.
0:27:23 When artists are struggling, I tell them,
0:27:28 you know, your job is to make the thing that you think is beautiful.
0:27:28 Period, that’s it.
0:27:30 Don’t do what I think is beautiful are you
0:27:31 or your manager or your fans.
0:27:32 That’s it.
0:27:34 So that’s an answer I give to others.
0:27:36 Now you’re asking me a question about my answer.
0:27:37 The root.
0:27:39 So, okay, let me try to tell the truth.
0:27:41 Or find what’s true for me.
0:27:44 In part, it comes from messing it up.
0:27:51 Undoubtedly, I experienced a lot of success in my early 20s.
0:27:56 And I got addicted to it.
0:27:58 The fame, the adoration, the money.
0:28:01 Really the fame, really the fame.
0:28:04 The money, all the stuff was nice, it was the fame.
0:28:05 One of those had a higher high than the rest.
0:28:07 One of the freaking fame dudes.
0:28:14 And so I can remember trying to replicate the success I had
0:28:17 from my first hit song, which is a song cooler than me.
0:28:20 If I could write you a song to make you fall in love.
0:28:22 That’s all in it.
0:28:24 I just wanted that feeling.
0:28:27 I wanted to be that guy that everyone was looking at.
0:28:31 And so I can remember going in the studio and going,
0:28:32 I’m gonna try to make a.
0:28:33 Make a hit.
0:28:34 Make a hit.
0:28:36 Make someone everyone else likes.
0:28:42 And whenever I tried to create from that vantage point,
0:28:45 the only thing I succeeded in making was something I hated.
0:28:51 And sometimes I think, wow, even if I don’t like it,
0:28:52 maybe everyone else will.
0:28:53 It kind of checks all the boxes.
0:28:54 It’s the right BPM.
0:28:57 It’s got a catchy melody and a cool lyric.
0:29:01 It doesn’t really meet my standards for my aesthetics,
0:29:03 what I think is beautiful.
0:29:05 But who cares what I think?
0:29:08 This is about me being famous.
0:29:08 Right.
0:29:12 And of course, if you don’t like it, nobody.
0:29:17 You went from a guaranteed audience of one to zero to start this.
0:29:21 And I think life or God, I believe in God.
0:29:23 Sometimes I just call it life.
0:29:25 So I’ll use those interchangeably in this interview,
0:29:27 life with a capital L.
0:29:30 I thank God that it never gave me success with one of those
0:29:34 because it wanted me to learn that very lesson
0:29:35 that I could teach to others.
0:29:38 But gosh, could you imagine if one of those things
0:29:39 I didn’t really like got really popular?
0:29:42 Whew, that would have been even worse.
0:29:43 Right.
0:29:44 You would have been trapped on that path.
0:29:47 Yeah, I’d still be doing interviews about that song now,
0:29:50 still be singing that song at my shows now.
0:29:50 Right.
0:29:52 The original plan for this episode was
0:29:54 your life is already a three act story.
0:29:58 So from a podcast or point of view, oh, this is easy.
0:30:02 You have the come up, you have the rise to meteoric fame,
0:30:05 everything that everybody wants, your pop star, your onstage,
0:30:09 shirts off, everybody’s crazy about you, you’re the man.
0:30:13 Then you have the crash and then you have the rebirth.
0:30:15 So your story’s already like that.
0:30:17 And so what I’m supposed to do is ask you to walk me through that.
0:30:20 But then I have to do what’s honest for me too,
0:30:22 which is I already know that story and I like that story.
0:30:23 I don’t really want to talk.
0:30:25 I’ll ask you some questions about it,
0:30:27 but I kind of already know that.
0:30:28 So it wouldn’t be honest for me to ask that
0:30:29 because I wouldn’t be curious.
0:30:30 Cool.
0:30:31 I’ve already know it.
0:30:31 Great, man.
0:30:33 So I said, what am I actually curious about?
0:30:36 And I was like, I wanted to know that.
0:30:38 Like, hey, you said something that resonated with me,
0:30:41 which is my job is not to make a hit.
0:30:43 It’s to make something that’s cool to me
0:30:44 and sometimes the world agrees.
0:30:46 So that was the first place I want to start.
0:30:48 The second one is, you know, I’m not a musician,
0:30:52 but I’d like to, I’m maybe like a lowercase A artist.
0:30:53 I write, I have a podcast.
0:30:54 I do things like that.
0:30:57 No, you’re an artist, capital A.
0:31:00 Some exist now out of that used to just be an idea in your head.
0:31:03 You’re an artist.
0:31:04 You heard it here first.
0:31:05 Mike, those are things I’m an artist.
0:31:05 Here we go.
0:31:06 Absolutely.
0:31:09 The thing that’s been most helpful for me when I write
0:31:10 is exactly that.
0:31:12 So if somebody asked me, how do you write something great?
0:31:13 How do you write something that goes viral?
0:31:15 And the best thing I ever read was sit down
0:31:18 and write one true sentence, one true sentence.
0:31:20 And that just became like a calling card for me.
0:31:22 It was like, oh, I know where to start now.
0:31:25 Let me sit down and try to write one honest sentence.
0:31:29 And that’s surprisingly hard because the honest sentence
0:31:30 is usually something vulnerable.
0:31:33 And if I look at your hit songs, so if you look at,
0:31:34 you know, I took a pill in Ibiza,
0:31:37 the one true sentence right at the beginning is,
0:31:39 you know, I took a pill in Ibiza to, you know,
0:31:41 show of Ichi, I was cool.
0:31:43 Or in your new song, it’s something like,
0:31:49 There’s a part of me underneath the part that I let people see.
0:31:51 That part is the good part.
0:31:56 And I love that underneath the part that I let other people see.
0:31:58 That is the good part.
0:32:01 And I was like, man, he’s really good at the one true sentence.
0:32:03 Is that, is that a technique you use at all?
0:32:08 Like honesty to write the song or to bake the core of the song?
0:32:12 Yeah, you know, there’s all adage and studios gets thrown around.
0:32:15 And more so in Nashville and LA where they say,
0:32:17 don’t try to write a good song, write a true song,
0:32:19 and then it’ll be good automatically.
0:32:24 My music, listen, I was 13, I was a rapper.
0:32:25 All right, I started rapping when I was eight,
0:32:26 but I was around 13.
0:32:30 I started to consider creating a stage name.
0:32:32 And I’d go six months.
0:32:34 I remember I had this rapper name is acrimony.
0:32:37 And then I had this other name six months later,
0:32:40 I threw it out and I go, my name further.
0:32:44 Here on out is MCMP, right?
0:32:46 The world will know MCMP.
0:32:48 It has about 13 and a half.
0:32:50 Yeah, like aim, screen, name, status.
0:32:51 Yeah, exactly.
0:32:52 Exactly.
0:32:54 And it goes, and I had this thoughts for myself.
0:32:57 I said, my music isn’t an act.
0:33:03 This stuff I write even then was just what was happening
0:33:04 in my life.
0:33:05 It was real to me.
0:33:07 So my, I shouldn’t have a stage name.
0:33:07 I should have my name.
0:33:13 And I said, I’m going to go by Mike Posner.
0:33:15 That’s my name.
0:33:17 And that’s who I am.
0:33:20 And who I am in life is who I am in my music.
0:33:23 This came back one other time.
0:33:26 It was almost 20 years later.
0:33:29 It was right when I wrote “I Took a Pill in Ibiza”
0:33:32 because my career had plummeted.
0:33:34 I had a hit and my career plummeted.
0:33:37 And I was known as you know for doing kind of
0:33:39 frat songs and party songs.
0:33:44 I had this, you know, upbeat dance success song cooler than me.
0:33:46 And then I wrote “I Took a Pill in Ibiza”
0:33:50 and it’s this sad singer songwriter song on the guitar.
0:33:51 Which most people don’t know.
0:33:52 Yeah, the original was this.
0:33:56 And I thought, dude, like whatever is left of my career
0:34:00 will be destroyed by, and it’s funny now,
0:34:03 but at the time it was horror, it was scary.
0:34:10 It will be destroyed by me making such a drastic change in my music.
0:34:14 No, none of my fans that liked what I did before will like this.
0:34:16 It’s so different.
0:34:17 And I started contemplating it again.
0:34:21 Maybe I should change my name for this project.
0:34:25 And I remember thinking, oh, maybe I’ll change my name to the truth.
0:34:29 And I was like, no, the truth is, your name is Mike Posner.
0:34:35 And so I quickly got my head out of my ass on that one again and went,
0:34:37 hey, you know, like, this is my story.
0:34:45 And the 3X story you talk about, you know, I’ve owned it for better, for worse, or tried to.
0:34:50 Do you look for that moment where you’re like, I’m almost so scared to put this out?
0:34:52 I got to change my act name.
0:34:57 It’s so, this goes to a certain place where it’s not safe.
0:34:59 Have you now learned to look at that signal and be like,
0:35:02 maybe there’s something here if I’m feeling that?
0:35:03 Yeah, absolutely.
0:35:09 And yeah, a huge, huge barometer of something I should be writing is that,
0:35:12 I really don’t want to write this.
0:35:16 This moment was so painful, like, I don’t want to talk about it.
0:35:18 I don’t want to think about it.
0:35:24 So yeah, it’s not the only, you know, it’s not to say the converse is not true,
0:35:28 which is the only thing that should be written is something that causes you great pain.
0:35:29 That’s not true.
0:35:34 But often that is an entry point that is worth examining, absolutely.
0:35:37 We had Tim Ferriss on the podcast and I asked him a question.
0:35:40 I said, Tim, my one honest question.
0:35:43 I was like, I’m supposed to ask you about four hour work week, but I read it already.
0:35:46 I said, the thing I really want to know is how do you decide what’s next?
0:35:48 Because I knew he was kind of thinking about what’s next.
0:35:52 And I know that whenever Tim Ferriss is trying to do something, he’s methodical.
0:35:54 He doesn’t just, he doesn’t just do it.
0:35:57 He’s got like a way he’s going to do it.
0:35:58 That’s right.
0:36:00 And I was like, I kind of just hop to the next thing.
0:36:02 Like, how do you do figure out the next thing?
0:36:04 And he goes, well, I create a menu of options.
0:36:07 And he’s like, and on that menu, I make sure I have,
0:36:10 I leave room for the weirdest option.
0:36:11 I go, the weirdest option.
0:36:12 Why are you going to do it?
0:36:13 He’s like, I’m not necessarily going to do it.
0:36:18 He goes, but he goes, I treat like the weirdest idea of what I could do next.
0:36:20 This is not what I normally do.
0:36:21 This is not what I’m known for.
0:36:24 So if you’re still around, you must have, I actually need to
0:36:28 overweight you as a, as an option for me for you.
0:36:33 When you try to figure out what’s next, like, whether it’s the next song
0:36:38 or the next project, like writing a book, how do you decide where to apply your talents?
0:36:42 Well, it’s hard now is what choosing what not to do.
0:36:47 That’s the hardest part is, you know, killing things.
0:36:51 And on paper, I may be doing too many things right now.
0:36:56 I’m writing my book intensively every day.
0:37:02 A lot of time alone, my computer, I’m putting an album out.
0:37:04 We’re expanding our business in a lot of different ways.
0:37:09 So on paper, if I was making the menu, I go, cross two of them out.
0:37:10 Right, right.
0:37:12 But your question was, how do you decide?
0:37:21 And the same internal compass that I use in the, in the micro when I’m creating,
0:37:27 I’m writing a sentence in my book and I go, that word is not quite right.
0:37:29 No, not that one.
0:37:30 Boom, that one.
0:37:34 It’s an internal knowing.
0:37:34 It’s a feeling.
0:37:36 So that, that’s it.
0:37:40 Mark Twain said, the difference between the almost right word and the right word is
0:37:43 there is between lightning bug and a lightning bolt.
0:37:43 Right.
0:37:46 And it’s not the truth, right?
0:37:46 Yeah.
0:37:48 Has it happened in your songs?
0:37:48 Oh yeah.
0:37:51 Like, is there a song today that we all know that almost was?
0:37:53 Took a pill in Sacramento.
0:37:55 Didn’t have the same ring to it.
0:37:56 Just kept trying to make it work.
0:37:58 It doesn’t hit.
0:37:58 No.
0:38:03 No, but just on the song, same way.
0:38:06 A lot of times in the production, gosh, that’s not the right snare
0:38:07 drum sample.
0:38:10 We’ll work for an hour, go through every,
0:38:16 the all the sounds and that’s the one you just know.
0:38:19 There’s a quote that Rick Rubin has that I love, which he says,
0:38:22 the best way to serve your audience is to ignore them.
0:38:28 Meaning to, to not try to reverse engineer what they might want or what they might like
0:38:31 or what they might just make what you want, what you like.
0:38:33 That is the best way to serve them.
0:38:35 You know, when you hear something, you’re like, oh, that’s probably the truth.
0:38:36 I think I just heard the truth.
0:38:39 Okay, now the rest of my life is coming to grips with that truth.
0:38:41 I don’t need to search for the answer.
0:38:42 I got the answer.
0:38:45 It’s just a question of how long I’m going to deny myself, you know,
0:38:48 how many roundabout ways I’m going to avoid facing the answer.
0:38:49 Now I know the answer.
0:38:54 Has that been, it’s been easy for you kind of back to that first question about like
0:38:55 making what you want.
0:38:58 If music is pretty easy now, and honestly,
0:39:03 taking care of my finances has been a big part of that.
0:39:04 What do you mean by that?
0:39:06 I’m financially secure.
0:39:09 I don’t need to make another dollar from my music again.
0:39:14 So logically, I was able to just talk to at some point in the past,
0:39:17 talk to that part of that voice in my head and go, hey, dude, like,
0:39:25 you never need to make a song that you don’t want to make ever again.
0:39:30 You never need to be in the studio with a person you’re not a fan of ever again, ever.
0:39:33 And that made me a much better artist.
0:39:36 And I live in Silicon Valley.
0:39:40 There’s people with more money than God out there.
0:39:43 And they don’t feel like they have enough.
0:39:45 I know a lot of people who have enough,
0:39:48 who have made the last dollar they will ever spend many times over,
0:39:52 but they still do things to chase more.
0:39:54 And they don’t like to say they’re doing it,
0:39:56 but if you watch People’s Actions, People’s Actions will sort of speak
0:39:59 where they’re devoting their talents to.
0:40:06 What was useful to you to coming to peace with having enough?
0:40:09 Was it as simple as I wrote down how much I needed and how much I had?
0:40:12 And the logic part of my brain solved that?
0:40:16 Or was it a different part of you that got peace with the money side of your life?
0:40:17 Both, two-fold.
0:40:22 So I had the analysis to where they do a Monte Carlo or whatever.
0:40:25 So you spend this much or this many more years to be okay.
0:40:28 Like a money manager did that for you?
0:40:30 Yes, I was part of it, right?
0:40:31 Just knowing, hey, I’m okay.
0:40:35 You got to shift at some point, right?
0:40:37 Because when you’re coming up, you say yes to everything.
0:40:39 You know what opportunity is going to work.
0:40:42 And then when you get successful, you have too many opportunities.
0:40:43 You got to learn to say no.
0:40:49 There’s paradigm shifts along the journey.
0:40:51 And so that was one of them.
0:40:52 That’s the logical part.
0:40:57 And then the illogical part or the spiritual part
0:41:03 is realizing what true wealth or abundance or success is.
0:41:06 To me, it’s my definition.
0:41:09 True success or wealth is health.
0:41:15 It’s the ability to have joy in a present moment.
0:41:19 That’s, if you can do that, you’re a wealthy person.
0:41:22 And if you’re grateful, if you’re grateful what you have, you’re wealthy.
0:41:25 There’s a perception in the business world,
0:41:28 which is that the chip on your shoulder serves you.
0:41:31 I know investors that will invest specifically in people they know
0:41:35 are kind of like sort of damaged, semi-screwed up.
0:41:38 But they know that that gives them this sort of psychopathic drive.
0:41:40 And when somebody’s really happy,
0:41:44 I know people who don’t want to invest in somebody who’s super at peace
0:41:46 because the returns might not be there.
0:41:48 I don’t know if I believe that.
0:41:51 Do you think that the best art comes from people who are in a happy place
0:41:53 or the people who have that pain?
0:41:55 Do you think that the best success comes from the people
0:41:58 who have that big chip on their shoulder or not?
0:41:59 What’s your take on that?
0:42:04 I can’t answer in terms of where to invest your money.
0:42:06 I don’t really know that much about that stuff.
0:42:12 But what I can speak to is architecting a more beautiful life.
0:42:14 I don’t have a perfect life,
0:42:17 but it’s a hell of a lot more perfect than it was five years ago.
0:42:27 So what I can say is I don’t want a life that is hyper successful
0:42:30 in the vertical of work and finance
0:42:36 and a desert wasteland in the areas of passion and intimacy,
0:42:43 faith, spiritual growth, friendships, fun, physical health, giving back.
0:42:44 All right.
0:42:46 So I believe the way I look at my life,
0:42:51 and I do measure this, is work and mission is but one vertical.
0:42:58 And the thing I screwed up in my 20s is I thought if I crushed it so hard
0:43:01 in this vertical, meaning I got all the fame, all the money,
0:43:03 that I thought the points would carry over.
0:43:09 I thought, yeah, I can not show up to Thanksgiving
0:43:13 and not return my mother’s phone call because she knows I’m busy.
0:43:14 I’m a pop star, Mike Posner.
0:43:21 I can not see my friends or ghost them for months on end.
0:43:23 They understand I’m pop star Mike Posner,
0:43:28 Grammy nominated Mike Posner, international superstar.
0:43:33 I can never go on dates and just have one night stands after my shows
0:43:36 for years on end and never develop emotional intimacy
0:43:39 or the capacity to communicate on an intimate level
0:43:42 or vulnerable level with another human being
0:43:45 because I’m international superstar, Grammy nominated Mike Posner.
0:43:49 I can never give back with my time or not so much with my money either
0:43:50 because I’m international.
0:43:54 And what you get is just a life that isn’t that good.
0:43:57 Winning the game of life is played on all these different verticals.
0:44:00 And some of them require different skill sets
0:44:03 that you won’t find in the work vertical.
0:44:05 It’s not going to help you be a good husband.
0:44:07 It’s not going to help you be a good father.
0:44:08 I have a mission, right?
0:44:10 So it’s not saying abandon this for the other.
0:44:13 It’s how do you do it all in balance?
0:44:14 How do you have everything?
0:44:16 That’s what I’m interested in.
0:44:17 That’s what I’m building in my life.
0:44:19 I’m doing the best job I’ve ever done.
0:44:20 Am I perfect? No.
0:44:24 But boy am I proud of myself.
0:44:30 All right. If you’re listening to this pod,
0:44:31 I already know something about you.
0:44:34 You, my friend, are nosy.
0:44:36 You want to know the numbers behind all of these things
0:44:37 that we’re talking about.
0:44:38 How much money people make.
0:44:40 How much money people spend.
0:44:41 How much money businesses make.
0:44:42 You want to know all of this.
0:44:43 People’s net worth.
0:44:44 All of it.
0:44:46 Well, I’ve got good news for you.
0:44:47 So my company, Hampton,
0:44:49 we’re a private community for CEOs.
0:44:51 We do this thing where we survey our members
0:44:53 and we ask them all types of information,
0:44:55 like how much money they’re paying themselves,
0:44:57 how much money they’re paying a lot of their employees,
0:44:59 what their team-wide bonuses are,
0:45:00 what their net worth is,
0:45:01 what their portfolio looks like.
0:45:02 We ask all these questions,
0:45:04 but we do it anonymously.
0:45:05 And so people are willing to reveal
0:45:07 all types of amazing information.
0:45:08 So if you really cannot Google,
0:45:09 you can’t find anywhere else.
0:45:11 And you can check it out at joinhampton.com.
0:45:14 Click the reports section on the menu.
0:45:16 Click the salary and compensation report.
0:45:17 It’s going to blow your mind.
0:45:18 You’re going to love this stuff.
0:45:19 Check it out.
0:45:20 Now, back to the pod.
0:45:27 There’s a great clip on YouTube of Jim Carrey
0:45:28 when he gets some award.
0:45:30 And he goes up on stage
0:45:31 and he gave almost the same speech he gave.
0:45:33 He’s like, you know, I’m…
0:45:36 And he’s like, this is my second Emmy.
0:45:38 You know, I used to be…
0:45:39 Oh yeah, the Golden Globes.
0:45:40 A Golden Globes.
0:45:43 Yeah, I was probably suddenly plagiarizing that in my rant.
0:45:44 It reminded me of it.
0:45:45 It was great.
0:45:47 I was one-time Golden Globe winner, Jim Carrey.
0:45:50 And tonight, I’m terrified.
0:45:52 And he’s like, and when I go to bed at night,
0:45:54 I will dream about being three-time.
0:45:56 And he has the great quote,
0:45:59 which is, I wish the whole world could be rich and famous
0:46:01 so they would know that that’s not the answer, right?
0:46:03 You know, you got to taste that.
0:46:05 And if you found out yourself,
0:46:07 that’s not the answer for you.
0:46:08 And it doesn’t seem like it’s the answer for most.
0:46:13 I have this goofy analogy that I want to ask you about.
0:46:14 So do you ever watch the show “Survivor”?
0:46:17 When I was a kid, I watched it.
0:46:18 I guess I’m one of the doofuses.
0:46:19 They’re still watching it in season 47.
0:46:21 What’s going on with you, man?
0:46:23 Okay, so we all have a thing.
0:46:23 I got my thing.
0:46:24 Some people got weird things.
0:46:25 This is mine.
0:46:27 I want to go on “Survivor” someday.
0:46:29 That’s part of my angle here.
0:46:32 But there’s this thing that they do on “Survivor,”
0:46:33 which is, I think, a good analogy for life.
0:46:35 So in life, in “Survivor,”
0:46:37 the best thing every player wants is the immunity idol.
0:46:40 It’s this one thing that if you had it, you’re safe.
0:46:41 You can finally relax.
0:46:44 You’ve got the one thing that everybody wants.
0:46:46 And that’s been the case for many years.
0:46:48 Recently, they made a twist.
0:46:49 They call it the beware idol,
0:46:51 which is basically, you pick it up and it says,
0:46:54 “Beware, this comes with some disadvantages.”
0:46:56 And the player has the opportunity.
0:46:57 They can just put it down.
0:46:59 They don’t have to take any of the disadvantages.
0:47:02 So far, 100% of players, not a single player,
0:47:03 has ever put it down.
0:47:05 Even though it says on the label,
0:47:09 “Beware, this thing has disadvantages that come with it
0:47:11 that will hurt you in this game.”
0:47:13 And every player can’t resist, they take it.
0:47:15 And I was thinking about, I was watching “Survivor.”
0:47:17 I was prepping for this podcast and I was like,
0:47:19 “I think fame is the beware advantage of life.”
0:47:22 It’s the thing that we all think we want the money,
0:47:25 the fame, the love of others.
0:47:28 And it could say it on the label, “Beware.”
0:47:31 People who become pop stars when they’re young,
0:47:33 those aren’t the happiest people.
0:47:35 But we would all take it over again, right?
0:47:37 And so there’s something to that.
0:47:41 And I actually was curious, for you, if you could go back,
0:47:44 if there was the next mic poser, he’s 21 years old,
0:47:46 and you get 15 minutes in a room with him just like this,
0:47:49 and you could tell him anything.
0:47:50 I’m curious, what would you tell him?
0:47:52 And do you think he would listen?
0:47:57 Yeah, my smiles don’t result from good things,
0:47:58 they result in good things.
0:48:01 You have sovereignty over your own emotions
0:48:06 and the way you respond to and interpret every event of your life and life.
0:48:09 Like Naval Ramakas says, “Life is a one-player game.”
0:48:13 And you need to exercise and practice that sovereignty.
0:48:17 You need to develop rituals that give you the best chance
0:48:22 of enjoying your life to the fullest and being the joy in life.
0:48:25 Not waiting for something good to happen so you can feel happy.
0:48:28 Being happy so something good will happen.
0:48:31 Not waiting for someone to do something nice for you
0:48:32 so you can feel good.
0:48:35 Doing something nice for someone else to make them feel good.
0:48:37 And then you feel good by default.
0:48:44 So I didn’t have to handle any of that stuff when I was 21.
0:48:45 I saw a great example of that from you,
0:48:47 which was I think either you missed a flight
0:48:49 or you were delayed on a flight or something like that.
0:48:53 And I love this example because it’s so relatable.
0:48:57 Everybody’s been in this moment where it’s travel stressful
0:49:00 and then travel often feels out of your control,
0:49:02 whether it’s a flight delay or you miss your connection
0:49:03 or whatever it is.
0:49:07 And there’s the common cliche reaction to that.
0:49:09 And we actually all kind of have that reaction,
0:49:11 but it’s not always the response.
0:49:12 Can you tell that story?
0:49:14 Because I think that example is stood out to me.
0:49:18 Not everybody’s going to relate to being a pop star
0:49:19 or making great music,
0:49:21 but this was something everybody can relate to.
0:49:22 So I’d love if you could share this one.
0:49:25 I’ve been told in recording studios so many times
0:49:28 the lyric that I’m trying to write isn’t relatable.
0:49:31 Hey, Mike, you can’t put that in the song
0:49:33 because no one will relate to it.
0:49:37 Yeah, nobody else took a pill in the bees at a show of Ichi.
0:49:38 They were cool.
0:49:40 That was just me.
0:49:45 But everybody’s done something that wasn’t true to themselves
0:49:47 to try to gain the attention of someone else.
0:49:53 And so while the lyric on the surface is unrelatable,
0:49:57 the emotion underneath the lyric is universal.
0:49:59 And the same thing with all these stories.
0:50:01 My life is my life.
0:50:04 I’m the only guy I know that got nominated for the Grammy,
0:50:07 walked across a continent and climbed Everest.
0:50:09 And I did that by design, right?
0:50:11 Because I wanted to be the only guy to do that.
0:50:15 I wanted to have a life that was cool to me and unique to me.
0:50:19 Yeah, and part of it was ego that like,
0:50:20 “Hey, I want to be unique.”
0:50:24 But also I wanted my life to be inspiring to me.
0:50:29 But every element, every one of the stories we share today,
0:50:31 whether it’s a story from you or a story from me,
0:50:33 or survivor or what have you,
0:50:37 has human emotions underneath that are universal.
0:50:42 So the story you’re talking about is…
0:50:43 Yeah, I did a post.
0:50:45 I never talked about this.
0:50:47 This is a podcast world premiere.
0:50:55 I had this horrible travel day, man.
0:50:59 The day before wasn’t good and I didn’t sleep.
0:51:02 And I woke up early and we had to drive three hours to the airport
0:51:04 in Colorado.
0:51:06 And it was an accident at I-70.
0:51:11 And we just got in this traffic jam and we’re in the car seven hours.
0:51:12 Missed the flight.
0:51:15 And it was just, you know, I was feeling sorry for myself.
0:51:19 It was just stuff was bothering me in other parts of my life.
0:51:22 And it was a bad day, man.
0:51:25 I didn’t feel good physically, emotionally.
0:51:28 Everything was off.
0:51:33 And I remembered that I was on a Zoom call
0:51:42 at Tony Robbins conference about time and scheduling efficiency.
0:51:44 And in one of the breakout sessions,
0:51:46 one of the other participants said,
0:51:47 “When you’re having a bad day,
0:51:55 ask yourself, what could I do to make this a great day?”
0:51:59 And it just, it flashed back in my head while I was in that car.
0:52:01 I said, “Well, this is, okay, this is a bad day.
0:52:03 Check, here we go, we’re on the first part.”
0:52:07 I said, “What can I do to make this a great day?”
0:52:15 And I said, “Okay, if I could use the fact that I’m having a bad day
0:52:19 to do something nice for others, that would be a really cool thing.”
0:52:21 That would make me proud of myself.
0:52:24 And so I called my assistant.
0:52:25 I said, “Yeah, this is all messed up.
0:52:28 And I was missing family time.
0:52:33 I get only so many days of my family every year.
0:52:35 My mom, my sister, and I was missing one of them.
0:52:36 I was just bummed out.
0:52:39 I go, “Look, so we’re going to spend the night in Denver tonight.
0:52:43 Can you find me a place where I can just go volunteer?”
0:52:45 And I was money, actually show up, go serve.
0:52:48 And Stacey, she’s amazing.
0:52:49 She found me.
0:52:54 I forgot the name of the establishment,
0:52:59 but it was set up for people that were getting off of drugs.
0:53:01 And they could live there.
0:53:06 And they could have a house roof over their head and some meals
0:53:08 while they find a job and they get some training.
0:53:13 And I just show up to serve food.
0:53:19 And when I showed up there, I was still tired.
0:53:22 I physically had a headache, still all the same things.
0:53:23 But I was just proud.
0:53:30 I said, “Hey, I used my suffering, my having a bad day as an excuse,
0:53:32 not to go to bed, not to complain,
0:53:35 not to take it out on somebody else.
0:53:38 But I used that as an excuse to do something good for someone else.
0:53:39 So I did alchemy today.
0:53:42 I turned my suffering into a service.
0:53:44 I turned my suffering into a connection.
0:53:48 And that pride I felt in myself,
0:53:50 because I would usually not do that.
0:53:54 I would usually have a pity party in the hotel and look at my phone.
0:53:58 It just gave me all this pride.
0:54:02 And I say this, you know, when I speak a lot,
0:54:04 it’s true happiness comes from growth.
0:54:06 True happiness comes from growth.
0:54:10 It doesn’t come from getting everyone to like you.
0:54:11 It doesn’t come from getting the most followers.
0:54:13 It doesn’t come from a million dollars.
0:54:16 It doesn’t come from things going the right way for you,
0:54:18 the right way for you.
0:54:21 It comes from playing a part in the evolution of your own soul.
0:54:24 So it’s saying, “Hey, I usually do things this way.
0:54:26 What if I did something this way?”
0:54:35 And that day, I can truly say was one of the best days of my year without a doubt.
0:54:38 I went to bed proud.
0:54:41 And by the way, so much energy.
0:54:44 Yeah, there’s certain things that take energy,
0:54:46 that seem like they take energy, but actually give.
0:54:47 It’s like going to the gym.
0:54:49 Anybody who’s ever, you’re tired.
0:54:50 You don’t really want to go to the gym,
0:54:52 but you go to the gym, suddenly you have energy.
0:54:54 It’s like, wait, how’d that math work?
0:54:56 It was supposed to take energy to go work out,
0:54:58 but I have more than I had when I started.
0:54:59 It doesn’t make any sense, but it does.
0:55:01 It, to anybody who’s ever done it makes perfect sense.
0:55:05 It makes sense because if I would have stayed in the hotel room,
0:55:08 played on my phone, I would have got more and more tired.
0:55:13 Because I was engaging in an activity that I knew I don’t care about.
0:55:21 But when I engage in an activity that I know is going to do something to
0:55:26 make my soul grow, there’s unlimited energy.
0:55:29 So sometimes doing more is easier than doing less.
0:55:33 Sometimes a hard goal is easier than an easy goal.
0:55:36 Right. My trainer, he told me this story once,
0:55:38 but I love this. Very similar to your story just now.
0:55:42 He came to our workout in the morning and he’s beaming.
0:55:46 And he’s always a happy guy, but I could tell a little extra pep in the step.
0:55:49 What’s up, man? Hey, man, what’s going on, dude?
0:55:51 I thought I was looking like more fit or something.
0:55:52 I didn’t know what the reason was.
0:55:54 I was hoping secretly open, it was me.
0:55:57 But then he was like, he goes, well, for the last nine months,
0:56:00 I’ve been driving around with like an expired license.
0:56:04 And he’s like, I didn’t want to go to the DMV, so I avoided that pain.
0:56:07 But then every time I drove, I was paranoid all the time
0:56:08 that I was going to get pulled over.
0:56:10 And then if I got pulled over, it was going to become this mess.
0:56:12 And so he’s like, that was a little anxiety I was eating at me.
0:56:15 So today I woke up, I just decided I’m doing it differently.
0:56:18 So his thing is always just do it differently.
0:56:20 So do it differently than you used to do it in the past.
0:56:22 That simple thing.
0:56:24 So instead of trying to do things perfectly, just do it differently.
0:56:28 And you do that often enough, you end up getting pretty damn close to perfect.
0:56:29 And so he goes, I did it differently.
0:56:30 Oh, what’d you do differently?
0:56:34 And so he’s like, all right, where’s the local DMV?
0:56:37 He Googles it, and you know, Google, it shows you the star ratings.
0:56:40 And imagine a DMV’s star ratings, right?
0:56:43 Like there’s no DMV on earth with a five-star review, right?
0:56:45 So it’s like one and a half.
0:56:47 That experience was stellar.
0:56:47 Yeah, exactly.
0:56:50 So it’s like a one and a half star experience.
0:56:54 He’s like, oh man, the reason I haven’t been going, I’ve been dreading the DMV.
0:56:57 And I love this because it’s like everybody dreads a DMV.
0:56:59 So I love this.
0:57:01 He looks at that one and a half star and he goes,
0:57:05 okay, but I’m a sovereign being.
0:57:08 I don’t have to have a one and a half star experience.
0:57:09 That’s the average experience.
0:57:10 I’m gonna have a five-star experience.
0:57:12 How do you have a five-star experience?
0:57:13 It’s not by going in there and them giving you five-star.
0:57:16 It’s just by you walking in a five-star customer.
0:57:23 So he gets in his car, he drives to the DMV, no appointment, walks in, proud, happy, excited,
0:57:25 opens the door for some lady.
0:57:27 You know, it helps these people.
0:57:29 Hey, why don’t you guys go ahead of me?
0:57:31 Instead of everybody in the DMV rushing into line, you guys go ahead.
0:57:32 Yeah, have fun.
0:57:37 And then the lady he was joking around with while he was walking from the parking lot
0:57:40 in turns out she works at the DMV.
0:57:41 She sees him on the inside.
0:57:43 She’s like, what are we here for anyways?
0:57:45 He’s like, I’ve been driving on this expired license.
0:57:46 I’ve been so stressed out about it.
0:57:48 But I said, today is the day.
0:57:48 She goes, you’re right.
0:57:49 Today is the day.
0:57:50 Come over here.
0:57:51 Cuts the whole line, gives him the thing.
0:57:53 He doesn’t have to take the test, gives him the license.
0:57:58 He walks out of there like under 30 minutes with a five-star DMV experience.
0:57:58 Five stars.
0:57:59 And so he took that.
0:58:04 And he was like, yo, I just, like, this is like watching somebody part the seas.
0:58:07 It’s like, you have seen an act.
0:58:11 If you didn’t believe in manifestation before, if you didn’t believe that you control
0:58:13 your experience before, like, well, look what I just did with the DMV.
0:58:14 I love that story.
0:58:18 So I always held that one as like, yeah, you get to choose.
0:58:19 You get to choose your experience.
0:58:22 And like, I also like that message of like, don’t expect the world to be giving you this
0:58:23 five-star hospitality.
0:58:28 Five-star, like you be a five-star customer and watch how the universe sort of responds to you.
0:58:29 I love that.
0:58:31 So I thought you would like that one.
0:58:33 Yeah, thanks for that story, dude.
0:58:34 I want to remember that one.
0:58:36 That’s good.
0:58:38 I want to ask you about some things.
0:58:40 You mentioned Benny Blanco.
0:58:45 I got to ask you because I’m really fascinated by these people who are the influencers of
0:58:45 the influencers.
0:58:48 They’re the people who unlock creatives in some way or they’re,
0:58:50 they just have this like really high hit rate.
0:58:50 What’s going on?
0:58:52 What are they doing differently?
0:58:53 And we don’t know the answer.
0:58:55 He was telling me, he’s like, oh, I read some shitty, like, you know,
0:58:56 tries to create a safe space.
0:58:57 He kicks people out of the room.
0:58:58 He lights candles.
0:59:01 I was like, okay, I got to ask Mike about this.
0:59:03 What’s Benny Blanco’s superpower?
0:59:08 What does he do well that has enabled him to work with guys like you and get kind of great results?
0:59:12 From my perspective, it’s what you did, but it’s the intangibles.
0:59:14 It’s not the type of candle.
0:59:22 It’s he really has a gift for making artists who are a fickle bunch, right?
0:59:23 Can easily get scared.
0:59:27 Kind of like exotic birds, you know, get scared or like, you know, or sensitive.
0:59:31 In a good way, we pick up on things that other people don’t.
0:59:34 And then we can write about and help other people to see that.
0:59:36 You know, we see divine in the mundanity.
0:59:40 But as a result, you know, we can, we can feel someone’s energy.
0:59:42 A lot of artists go, yo, if that dude is weird, like,
0:59:47 it’s hard for us to write a song if there’s a weird dude in the room or, you know,
0:59:52 so he’s a master at, yeah, creating the physical space.
0:59:58 But him, he knows how to get the best out of the best people in the world.
1:00:00 You have people like that in your life, I’m sure.
1:00:04 Whether it’s family or friends that, gosh, you just feel comfortable around them.
1:00:06 So he has a gift for that.
1:00:13 And he also has great taste and his superpower, one of his superpowers is that.
1:00:19 And he’s also really fun to be around, you know, and like, I’m really driven type A.
1:00:23 When I first worked at Benny, he was the first person I did a real studio session with,
1:00:25 where it was in an actual recording studio.
1:00:31 You know, I’d written songs that Big Sean in my basement, but I’d never gone to a studio.
1:00:35 And I was always, man, we got to work hard.
1:00:37 And at that time, I’m paying by the hour for studio.
1:00:39 We got to make the song, let’s go.
1:00:43 And he was the first guy goes, dude, it doesn’t matter if we make a song today.
1:00:47 Let’s just be, and the song will come out.
1:00:50 And if it doesn’t, it’ll come next time, you know.
1:00:53 So he taught me how to collaborate.
1:00:58 He taught me a lot about, and hopefully I do that for other artists now too.
1:01:00 You know, other people when I collaborate.
1:01:01 But yeah, he has a gift for that.
1:01:06 I’m obsessed with these videos that are like, you know, some guys love the Roman Empire,
1:01:09 whatever, mine is like watching the making of these songs.
1:01:10 There’s so many of these on YouTube.
1:01:11 You’ve got a bunch of them on YouTube.
1:01:14 It’s like, you know, this grainy footage.
1:01:17 And you can hear them play the lick for the first time.
1:01:19 And they’re like, oh, yeah, I like that.
1:01:20 It’s like, that’s the song.
1:01:21 And you almost want to reach the stream like, that’s it.
1:01:24 That’s the song that we’re all going to love.
1:01:25 You just don’t realize you just did it.
1:01:30 There’s one of Benny and Ed Sheeran, I think at a tour bus where he’s like writing,
1:01:31 love yourself or something like that.
1:01:32 And they’re just messing around.
1:01:34 It was the same sort of vibe where he’s like sitting there across the leg of barefoot.
1:01:40 He’s like, it didn’t seem like there’s a lot of stress around like, what is the answer?
1:01:43 It was more just like, that’d be fun.
1:01:43 I like that.
1:01:47 You know, and he was just playful with it, which allowed them to play and be like,
1:01:48 you should go and fuck yours.
1:01:49 And they’re like, yeah, that’s great.
1:01:50 That’s a great line.
1:01:54 And it’s like, wasn’t the appropriate line, but it was the like fun line.
1:01:56 And because it got there, the song got there.
1:01:58 I’m pretty fascinated by those.
1:02:02 One of the things that I heard that Ed Sheeran said, I thought it was pretty interesting.
1:02:06 Yeah, there’s some documentary about him on Apple TV plus.
1:02:08 But he goes, it’s almost like a superstition.
1:02:13 He said, I believe that rooms have songs, rooms and instruments have songs.
1:02:17 Because to write his album, he wouldn’t just like go to a studio.
1:02:20 He would rent a farmhouse or some like cool inspiring space.
1:02:26 And he would build a mobile studio there, which was 85% as good as the like the best studio.
1:02:31 But the house would get like double the inspiration for him or the comfort for him in the band.
1:02:34 I thought that was very interesting.
1:02:39 The trade off between, you know, efficiency or, you know, picture perfect audio versus
1:02:41 creative inspiration.
1:02:45 Do you, how, what do you do with your environment to like get the most creative version of you?
1:02:46 Very similar.
1:02:49 You know, so first off, I love to work in immersions like that.
1:02:57 I have a studio in here and, you know, I mostly record myself when I’m home.
1:03:03 So my whole career, same as when I was in the dorm room, the mic’s a little better now.
1:03:08 But I have a laptop, nice mic, plugging a nice pre.
1:03:11 And I hit record on the laptop.
1:03:13 I sing until I mess up.
1:03:13 I hit stop.
1:03:15 I engineer the thing myself.
1:03:18 That way I can record whenever I want.
1:03:19 I don’t need another person.
1:03:21 I have to wait for someone else to come over.
1:03:25 But I love to work in immersion similar to what you just described with Ed,
1:03:28 which is that’s when the most stuff happens.
1:03:30 Hey, we’re going to take a bunch of talented people.
1:03:37 We’re going to go to a nice place that’s divorced from our normal duties.
1:03:40 And we’re just going to live and breathe this art for a week or two weeks.
1:03:43 Then we’re going to basically work till we die.
1:03:47 And then we take a couple of weeks off and we come back and do it again.
1:03:49 I like to work like that.
1:03:51 Is that where some of your songs have come out of?
1:03:52 Like a set up like that?
1:03:56 My songs have come from all over, you know?
1:03:59 So that’s my personal favorite way to do it.
1:04:02 But it’s not about what I like.
1:04:04 It’s, you know, the songs coming through.
1:04:05 So I get together.
1:04:06 So I’ve written songs on airplanes.
1:04:07 I’ve written songs here.
1:04:08 I’ve written songs in the morning.
1:04:09 I’ve written songs at night.
1:04:12 Written songs starting with piano licks.
1:04:14 Written songs starting with lyrics.
1:04:16 Written songs starting with melodies.
1:04:18 So pretty much every different way.
1:04:20 Hey, by the way, we having fun?
1:04:21 I’m having fun.
1:04:23 Where are we measuring up to your research, dude?
1:04:28 It’s higher because you gave me that iTunes U.
1:04:29 I’m better in real life.
1:04:32 That iTunes U story was amazing.
1:04:35 That’s like, you know, everybody’s got their favorite dish.
1:04:36 That’s my favorite dish.
1:04:40 It’s a combination of like the serendipity of things working out
1:04:42 for somebody 10 years in the making.
1:04:43 Like, I love that.
1:04:46 Everybody who’s trying to do shit, you want to hear stories
1:04:48 that, yeah, after 10 years, then it starts to work out.
1:04:50 There’s something we all need to hear those stories.
1:04:53 But then also you did engineer it in a way too.
1:04:56 Like you weren’t a passive observer to some lucky circumstance.
1:05:00 Like you took this, you took steps to like, hmm, observation.
1:05:01 Let me double down on that.
1:05:05 And you did things that there’s no textbook to say, make your pledges,
1:05:07 change their profile pictures and invite people.
1:05:08 But it makes sense at the same time.
1:05:09 So I love that story.
1:05:10 Thank you.
1:05:12 I want to ask you about the walk.
1:05:16 But also the walk or Everest or the silent meditations.
1:05:20 But I book at them all under one philosophy, which is do hard things.
1:05:24 Is that the right description of your philosophy?
1:05:25 Why you would climb Everest?
1:05:26 Why you would walk across America?
1:05:30 What’s the philosophy that drives somebody to do those things?
1:05:30 Yeah.
1:05:36 They were larger examples of the airport day gone wrong, going to volunteer.
1:05:42 My life is maybe too easy right now.
1:05:44 And that’s why it doesn’t feel right.
1:05:48 So I’m going to make a harder goal.
1:05:50 I’m going to make my life harder.
1:05:54 But then paradoxically, my life feels easier when I’m doing the harder thing.
1:05:58 So they’ve hit on a lot of things that we touched on today.
1:06:04 And I think that’s true probably of walking across the US, climbing Everest,
1:06:08 and doing some longer meditation retreats.
1:06:11 Can you take me back to one of them where you were?
1:06:15 Life is easy, but doesn’t feel quite right.
1:06:18 I don’t have the same level of joy I should be having on paper.
1:06:22 And then the decision, what the voice said that made you go do one of those.
1:06:23 Can you walk me through that?
1:06:27 Yeah, with the walk across America.
1:06:34 I was at a friend’s jewelry shop and someone across the room said,
1:06:37 my friend just walked across America.
1:06:39 And it was like a tractor beam.
1:06:41 I went, I said, what did you just say?
1:06:44 He said, my friend walked.
1:06:45 I go, you can do that.
1:06:46 I guess he did it.
1:06:48 No one else cared about it.
1:06:50 I’m like, what’s up with you, man?
1:06:57 And I said out loud in that jewelry shop.
1:06:58 I’m going to do that one day.
1:07:01 I actually don’t think I said, I said, I want to do that one day.
1:07:07 And the sentence lingered in the jewelry shop like a fart no one wanted to claim.
1:07:14 And everyone just sort of went back to whatever they were talking about before I said it.
1:07:20 Fast forward four years later, four or five years later, my father dies from brain cancer.
1:07:25 And think about six months after that.
1:07:33 My assistant at the time, Nick comes to pick me up, take me to the studio session that day.
1:07:37 And he said, hey, man, Avicii’s dead.
1:07:41 Avicii is a friend of mine that I worked with in the music studio.
1:07:43 I worked with him a few weeks before.
1:07:45 He said, Avicii’s dead.
1:07:47 I go, don’t fuck with me, man.
1:07:48 He said, I’m not fucking with you.
1:07:49 Avicii’s dead.
1:07:53 I said, I can’t, I couldn’t believe this.
1:07:58 And I get in his car, he drives in the studio and I keep saying, I can’t believe this.
1:08:01 And while I’m saying I can’t believe this out loud,
1:08:05 there’s one thought going through my head that I can’t make stop.
1:08:08 It’s, I have to walk across America.
1:08:10 I have to walk across America.
1:08:11 I have to walk across America.
1:08:12 I have to walk across America.
1:08:15 And it was this proximity of death.
1:08:22 I was saying, hey, dude, you see that man that gave you your life?
1:08:24 The one that you look just like?
1:08:26 He’s dead.
1:08:29 That’s what’s going to happen to you.
1:08:32 You see that other man who does the same job as you?
1:08:34 You guys do the same.
1:08:37 You do concerts, you’re in the studio with him last week.
1:08:37 He’s dead.
1:08:40 That’s what’s going to happen to you.
1:08:43 Maybe not in the same way, but this is a return trip.
1:08:45 Another couple of weeks pass.
1:08:50 I’m in this shitty little guest house that I’m renting in West Hollywood.
1:08:54 Bouncing around studios, trying to make my next hit.
1:09:00 And my friend Willie calls me and he goes, hey, Mike, I got bad news.
1:09:04 We’re our best friends that we grew up with.
1:09:05 His name is Ronnie.
1:09:06 He goes, Ronnie’s dead.
1:09:08 Oh, shit.
1:09:12 And I just realized, dude, I’m going to die.
1:09:18 Before I die, I want to live the life that I actually wanted to live.
1:09:19 And I wasn’t doing it.
1:09:23 I was living the life that I thought my manager thought I should live.
1:09:26 Truly.
1:09:29 I was living the life that I, I was 30 years old,
1:09:32 living the life that 20 year old me had set up.
1:09:36 And it was, it was pain.
1:09:39 I walked across America because I was in pain.
1:09:43 And I wanted to figure out a different way.
1:09:51 When you were doing it, did you, like a lot of times the reason I do something
1:09:53 isn’t the thing I get out in a great way.
1:09:56 I go in for one reason and I come out with,
1:09:58 it’s like going to Chuck E. Cheese to play the games.
1:10:00 You get all these prizes at the end.
1:10:02 You didn’t even realize that’s, that’s how the tickets work.
1:10:05 What were the prizes you got at the end of that?
1:10:14 Found a part of myself that was, that was so much stronger than I ever knew was even there.
1:10:18 Not only found a part of myself,
1:10:26 unleashed a part of myself that I previously didn’t know was there.
1:10:30 Dude, I got bit by a poisonous rattlesnake.
1:10:32 I spent three nights in the ICU.
1:10:33 I got airlifted.
1:10:35 I got told by dispatch.
1:10:36 I might not live.
1:10:37 I got told by doctors.
1:10:39 It might take me eight months to heal.
1:10:42 I got, you know, told by other doctors.
1:10:43 I might lose my foot.
1:10:48 This is like, and I did a crazy thing, dude.
1:10:49 I went back.
1:10:50 I kept going.
1:10:55 Everyone expected me to quit because probably because the old me was such a bitch.
1:11:01 You know, I was like, my whole life was about me and everything.
1:11:02 Me being comfortable.
1:11:05 And so like, I’m going to do the opposite.
1:11:07 I’m going to be a five-star Walker.
1:11:08 Right.
1:11:09 But do it different.
1:11:10 I’m going to do it different.
1:11:14 I’m not going to use this injury as an excuse to do less.
1:11:16 I’m going to use it as an excuse to do more.
1:11:22 And yeah, I get to do podcasts and talk about it.
1:11:24 And this thing is on my Wikipedia page.
1:11:30 And the real trophies that you asked is, I became someone new.
1:11:39 And that part of me is, it is so different having an inkling.
1:11:40 You’re strong.
1:11:45 You’re strong versus knowing you’re strong because you were strong.
1:11:48 And I was strong in a way I hadn’t been before.
1:11:49 That’s amazing.
1:11:53 I think that the, there’s this concept of misogy.
1:11:54 Have you heard of this?
1:11:56 We’ve talked about it on the pod before.
1:11:59 It’s got Jesse Itzler came on.
1:12:00 Oh, I love Jesse Itzler.
1:12:02 He’s a good friend, man.
1:12:03 Yes, so Jesse came on.
1:12:04 Anything for Jesse Itzler.
1:12:06 I like that.
1:12:07 For real.
1:12:12 He’s one of my like, I don’t ever use the word like mentors or heroes or anything,
1:12:14 but like I call him blue print, blueprints.
1:12:18 So I look for people who live interesting lives that I’m like, oh, that could be.
1:12:20 I like the way that house is laid out.
1:12:21 Maybe I could steal some of that blueprint.
1:12:22 Same.
1:12:23 He’s that for me too.
1:12:27 And by the way, a friend spent time with him off the, off the record.
1:12:27 Yeah.
1:12:28 He’s that guy.
1:12:29 Yeah.
1:12:31 That’s actually something I always wonder because on the podcast,
1:12:32 you always see people’s, you know, hopefully best.
1:12:34 He’s that guy, dude, 24.
1:12:36 I’ve been with him or watching with his kids.
1:12:37 He’s that guy.
1:12:42 So he’s got, he has this idea of Kevin’s rule and he’s got the Missogi,
1:12:45 which is like, Missogi is like the one, one grand challenge a year.
1:12:48 One ambitious, hard thing you’re going to do,
1:12:50 whether it’s super physical or it might be some other thing.
1:12:51 Like I have mine, which is,
1:12:54 can I go 24 hours straight without a complaint in my head?
1:12:56 That’s my, that’s my Missogi.
1:12:58 It’s harder for me than a, you know, an Iron Man or anything like that.
1:13:00 That’s dope, dude.
1:13:01 I want to try that too.
1:13:02 That’s a superpower.
1:13:04 Not in your mouth, in your head, dude.
1:13:05 Yeah, yeah.
1:13:06 Anybody could not say it.
1:13:07 But I’m saying it to myself.
1:13:09 It’s the conversation I’m having in my head is the big one all day.
1:13:10 So good, man.
1:13:12 And so I’m really working on that.
1:13:13 And it’s so funny.
1:13:16 You, you see it, you’re like, and actually you’re a Tony Robbins guy.
1:13:17 I’m a Tony Robbins guy too.
1:13:20 He said a phrase, which made me realize how important this was.
1:13:24 He says he goes on some trip and he meets some guy in India or whatever.
1:13:28 And the guy goes, asked him something about suffering.
1:13:31 And he’s like, yeah, I’m Tony Robbins.
1:13:34 Like, I don’t know if you know this, but suffering.
1:13:36 Is it what usually people describe me as like, you know,
1:13:39 I’m driving a powerful, successful, all these things.
1:13:43 He’s over, he’s, I didn’t say that to him, but that was an internal feeling was like,
1:13:44 what do you mean suffering?
1:13:48 And he’s like, well, I just saw you kind of yelling at your guy over there.
1:13:50 He said, well, no, he wasn’t doing his job.
1:13:53 And so I had to, you know, immediately, you know, demand the performance.
1:13:57 And the guy brought to his awareness like, man,
1:14:00 there are so many of these little moments every day where you’re losing your state,
1:14:02 this beautiful state that you’re in.
1:14:03 And then it goes away.
1:14:06 And he said it like, he said, how cheap is your happiness?
1:14:10 Like, how little does it, how much, how little of inconvenience does it take?
1:14:12 If I spill this water on this desk right now,
1:14:15 do you lose that beautiful state or you stay in it?
1:14:16 Because if you lose it, then that was cheap, man.
1:14:18 That was so easy to knock you out of that.
1:14:19 And I heard that.
1:14:23 And that was like, ooh, that’s a, it’s a thing I want.
1:14:27 And when I look at your story about like the things you wanted in your 20s,
1:14:31 the success, the fame, the money, the love of everybody.
1:14:35 Like those are the things all of us want, at least in our 20s is often our whole lives.
1:14:41 And a big part of life seems to be just figuring out what are you supposed to actually want?
1:14:44 You know, I wanted this, I achieved this.
1:14:46 Oh shit, worst case scenario.
1:14:49 I’ve realized I didn’t even want the right thing in the first place.
1:14:51 I played a game that was rigged for me to lose.
1:14:56 So, you know, some of your story reminds me of that philosophy that has served me well.
1:15:02 It’s so well said and, and I believe the person that Tony was talking to was Christian G.
1:15:02 Yeah.
1:15:06 And, and so Christian G and his wife, Pretenant G, are these amazing,
1:15:09 and they teach that there’s only two kinds of states,
1:15:13 beautiful states and suffering states.
1:15:17 And there’s all different types of suffering states and types of beautiful states.
1:15:22 Joy, laughter, you know, calm, serenity or pain, depression, you know,
1:15:23 self-pity, you name it, right?
1:15:25 But there’s really only two states.
1:15:33 And so I think what all of us really want is to have more beautiful states, less suffering states.
1:15:35 And so we’re talking about tools to get there.
1:15:36 What do you want?
1:15:38 That’s what you want, I think.
1:15:42 Right, the problem is we convince ourselves that we want the middleman,
1:15:45 we think the middleman, the promotion gives us the beautiful state.
1:15:45 Well, yeah.
1:15:47 The achievement gives us the beautiful state.
1:15:51 Anything you want, you want because you think it’s going to give you a better state.
1:15:55 And maybe it will momentarily, but the trick of the game is,
1:15:56 hey, you don’t have to wait for the thing.
1:15:57 Right.
1:15:57 Feel it now.
1:15:59 Feel it right now.
1:16:02 And if you can, if you can win that game, you’ve won life.
1:16:03 Right.
1:16:03 Right.
1:16:06 And so nobody’s perfect.
1:16:08 I don’t know anybody.
1:16:09 You, you know a lot of these guys too.
1:16:11 We just met, so now you know.
1:16:11 Right, right.
1:16:19 But like you, we get to spend time with a lot of these teachers and gurus.
1:16:27 So I haven’t met one yet that’s 100% in a beautiful state, but we can work more towards
1:16:31 there and we need external goals.
1:16:32 So that’s a lot of my message.
1:16:35 Hey, you set a, you set a goal that actually inspires you.
1:16:37 That’s Victor Frankel, man search for meaning.
1:16:39 You need something in the future looking forward to.
1:16:40 It’s important.
1:16:47 At the same time, you need to be winning this internal game of, hey, that’s my goal.
1:16:49 But how do I want to feel as I’m going after it?
1:16:55 That’s a different kind of goal that, that interweaves with your external goal.
1:17:01 And most people forget to set that one and they lose, they lose life.
1:17:06 They might win on the vertical axis or they might win on the horizontal axis,
1:17:08 but they lose in the depth, the vertical axis.
1:17:10 So that’s it, man.
1:17:13 It’s such a, thank you for bringing that story as a great reminder.
1:17:14 And that’s it.
1:17:16 That’s all we’re trying to do, man.
1:17:24 And so any of these like tips or tools or stories or, you know, it’s all to, to win that game.
1:17:24 Right.
1:17:24 Yeah.
1:17:28 Well, listen man, I appreciate you inviting me out to your house and appreciate you doing this.
1:17:28 Thank you, bro.
1:17:29 That’s been great.
1:17:29 Great fun.
1:17:30 It has been great.
1:17:31 Peace.
1:17:33 I feel like I can rule the world.
1:17:39 I know I could be what I want to put my all in it like my days off on the road.
1:17:39 Let’s travel.
1:17:40 Never looking back.
1:17:42 Bye.
1:17:52 [BLANK_AUDIO]

0:00:02 All right, it’s it’s Q4.
0:00:05 So I don’t know what whatever day you’re going to hear this.
0:00:09 There’s about 70 days left in the year, 70 days left in here.
0:00:13 And everybody makes a big deal about January 1st, New Year’s resolutions.
0:00:15 But I have a different argument.
0:00:17 I have an argument that says there’s 70 days left in the year.
0:00:21 Just enough time to actually do the thing.
0:00:25 Whatever the thing is for you, that’s going to make this year amazing.
0:00:27 I feel like I can rule the world.
0:00:33 I know I could be what I want to put my all in it like the days off on the road.
0:00:36 Let’s try today is a wake up call 70 days left.
0:00:42 It’s time for one sprint on one priority to try to make it happen.
0:00:45 The one thing you could do, whatever it is, that’s going to make your year awesome.
0:00:49 So, for example, maybe you’re trying to get in great shape.
0:00:51 The diet starts this morning.
0:00:53 It starts now and we’re going hardcore.
0:00:54 It’s life or death diet mode.
0:00:58 If you really want to quit your job, start the business, put in your notice.
0:01:00 Put in your notice today.
0:01:01 Just put it in and see what happens.
0:01:02 See how it feels.
0:01:02 Just the tip.
0:01:08 Whatever you’re going to do, you’ve got to figure out how you’re going to use the 70
0:01:11 day sprint if you’re trying to hit your growth goal.
0:01:16 If you’re trying to raise around a funding, whatever it is, this is the lock in time.
0:01:22 Because 70 days is about the perfect amount of time where you could totally shift your life.
0:01:27 It’s enough time to be honest about how long things take to make a change happen.
0:01:32 But it’s short enough where you won’t lollygag.
0:01:34 And you’re either going to make it happen this year or you’re not.
0:01:37 And this last 70 days is going to be the make or break.
0:01:41 As Frank Slutman, the guy who was CEO of Snowflake and wrote that book, amped it up,
0:01:44 he goes, “Priority should be a single word.”
0:01:49 If somebody tells me they’re top three priorities, all I ask them is, which one is it?
0:01:51 And then they get really flustered.
0:01:54 But he goes, “I believe priority is a single word.”
0:01:58 And so I highly suggest, figure out the one priority.
0:02:01 The one thing that if you just did this one thing, the whole year is a win.
0:02:04 And they use the 70 days to do it and wipe everything else off the calendar.
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0:02:46 What’s your thing going to be?
0:02:50 My one thing for this year, the one thing that if I just did this thing,
0:02:54 I could look back and be like, well, I don’t care what else happened that year.
0:02:55 That happened.
0:02:56 And that’s all that matters.
0:02:58 For me, it’s getting in the best shape of my life.
0:03:00 And so I’ve made good progress.
0:03:02 I’m down about 15 pounds.
0:03:06 I would like to turn the corner, get the last 10 down by the end of this year.
0:03:08 And to do that, I’ll need to ratchet it up.
0:03:12 And really, it’s not necessarily about pounds, but like I set these habits.
0:03:16 I was like, all right, I have these habits that got me this body.
0:03:20 If I want that body, I got to have these other habits.
0:03:22 And so I’ve been trying to change these four or five habits.
0:03:23 It’s just four or five.
0:03:26 Four or five of these habits that got me where I’m at, where I want to go.
0:03:29 And I’ve probably changed two of the four.
0:03:32 So I have the last 70 days to get the other two done.
0:03:34 What are the other two?
0:03:36 So I’ll give you the two I did, and I’ll give you the two I need to do.
0:03:42 So the two I did, the first one is planning the health part of my day at the beginning.
0:03:43 First thing when I wake up.
0:03:43 Yeah.
0:03:46 We both, I don’t know if you still do, but I use my body tutor.
0:03:48 So she calls me.
0:03:48 It’s great, right?
0:03:50 It’s a great service.
0:03:50 Yes, it’s a great service.
0:03:53 We have no stake, at least I have no stake in this business.
0:03:55 It’s, you know, I’m just a big fan of it.
0:03:59 So she calls me at 8 in the morning and she says, how did you actually go?
0:04:00 What’s today, blah, blah, blah.
0:04:06 But the thing that happens is instead of waking up and just starting my day with my work
0:04:09 and my emails and my Slack and like me little computer stuff.
0:04:13 No, I start my day with the top priority, the thing I really care about,
0:04:15 which is rewiring these habits.
0:04:19 And in doing so, I basically stop improvising because the improvising is where
0:04:23 I’m just going to make whatever decision happened in the moment.
0:04:25 And that those decisions are the key thing, right?
0:04:29 So by planning my day, I say, all right, I’m going to eat this, this and this at these times.
0:04:29 I’m going to work out here.
0:04:33 And most importantly, we identify like, what might trip me up?
0:04:36 It’s like, oh, I have to take my kids to the gymnastics thing.
0:04:37 That’s like an hour away.
0:04:39 It’s at the time I normally eat dinner.
0:04:41 So you plan around the grenade.
0:04:42 Yeah, it’s like, oh, so what are you going to do?
0:04:46 Oh, simple. I’ll just bring it with me in the car or I’m going to eat before I go.
0:04:49 Or you’ll look ahead like three days.
0:04:51 You’re like, all right, on Saturday, I’ve got a birthday party.
0:04:52 I know we’re going to have cake.
0:04:55 I’m going to splurge on that one piece of cake, which means leading up to it.
0:04:59 I got to prepare that I’m going to be tight today.
0:05:03 So a big part of it was realizing the decision tank,
0:05:06 the gas tank of decisions, good decisions is full in the mornings.
0:05:09 And by the evening, it’s depleted.
0:05:11 And so all my bad decisions happened then.
0:05:15 And so I just make all the decisions up front for what I’m going to do.
0:05:18 And then I simply just need to stick to them, which of course, not perfect.
0:05:20 Like the daily ones, basically they call you daily.
0:05:23 And the reason why that’s good is that’s when you’re like really getting after it.
0:05:27 And then the weekly one is like, I use her as like, I’m happy where I am.
0:05:30 They should call it the serious person plan and then the unserious person plan.
0:05:32 Like, are you serious about this or are you not so serious?
0:05:35 If you’re not so serious here, do this weekly plan.
0:05:37 And then what’s the fourth part of the fourth?
0:05:41 So first habit, plan all the meals and the workouts up front.
0:05:42 First thing in the morning, make the decision.
0:05:44 Then don’t make the decisions as you go.
0:05:45 Make one decision at the beginning.
0:05:49 The second one is what I call the four-point swing.
0:05:52 So if you’ve ever played basketball, you know, there’s this thing
0:05:56 that the announcers will say where, let’s say you had an open shot.
0:05:56 You should have made it.
0:06:00 You would have scored two points, but instead you fumbled the ball.
0:06:02 The other team takes it and they get an easy shot.
0:06:04 And so it was a four-point swing.
0:06:06 It should have been two, you know, you should have been up to and they should have zero.
0:06:09 Instead you missed your two and they got two, right?
0:06:09 So four-point swing.
0:06:13 So I realized, oh, there’s one part of my day that’s like the four-point swing.
0:06:17 It’s like, could have gone in my favor and instead it totally wipes me out, which is like,
0:06:19 basically for me, it’s, I work pretty late.
0:06:24 So after my kids go to bed, then I have kind of like this relaxation and I’ll do like more work.
0:06:26 So I usually stay up pretty late.
0:06:29 If I late night snack there and I, so basically it’s like, I’m up late.
0:06:31 So I sleep, I sleep late.
0:06:34 And therefore I also, because I’m up late, I eat late.
0:06:37 And then I started going to bed early just to avoid that situation.
0:06:42 Exactly. It’s like, yo, I don’t know if I have the willpower to not late night snack,
0:06:44 but I can just go upstairs and go to bed.
0:06:45 And that’s kind of the only thing.
0:06:46 And then in the morning of I’m hungry, great.
0:06:47 I make good decisions.
0:06:49 Again, the tank is full.
0:06:54 So anyways, that those are the two that I’ve been working on and made a lot of progress on.
0:06:57 And then I have two more, which is treat the weekends like the weekdays.
0:06:59 Because my weekends, I was just become a different person.
0:07:00 It was fucking Mardi Gras for me.
0:07:04 It was like, wait, wait, well, why, why did I throw away all those habits that I do during
0:07:07 the week that are great and just treat the weekends totally differently?
0:07:08 So that’s silly.
0:07:09 I’m not going to do that anymore.
0:07:16 And then I have one more, which is my sort of thing that gets me is chips.
0:07:18 It’s sort of like a snack.
0:07:19 So it’s kind of the root why.
0:07:21 It’s like, well, it’s basically the cheapest way to pleasure.
0:07:22 It’s like super fast.
0:07:23 It’s right in front of me.
0:07:26 It’s the fastest way to pleasure.
0:07:29 So substituting that with another thing that’s a fast, cheap way to get pleasure.
0:07:34 So it’s like other things I like to do are other things that feel good in the moment.
0:07:36 That’s not like some delayed gratification.
0:07:40 Instant gratification, just not through a snack, but through whatever, like,
0:07:45 you know, take a shower or there’s like this other like a sparkling water drink that I make,
0:07:47 whatever, little other things that I could substitute.
0:07:48 So doing those substitutes.
0:07:50 The weekday weekend thing is pretty funny.
0:07:53 Once I’ve known Kagan, he’s one of my best friends.
0:07:58 And he was like, years ago, he goes, you’re the only person I know who doesn’t drink,
0:07:59 but you’re still fat.
0:08:00 What the hell?
0:08:05 I had a friend that’s of the same.
0:08:06 He goes, I saw my company.
0:08:07 He goes, okay, cool.
0:08:08 You’re rich now.
0:08:09 I’m like, yeah, thanks.
0:08:12 And he goes, there’s no, you can’t be rich and fat.
0:08:13 He’s like, there’s no excuse.
0:08:16 If you’re poor, you just don’t have the time.
0:08:18 You can’t get the nutritious food and you can’t get the gym.
0:08:20 Like, okay, understandable.
0:08:21 You’re rich and fat.
0:08:22 That’s you.
0:08:23 That’s all you.
0:08:25 So he was like, you can’t be rich or fat.
0:08:26 It’s just a rule.
0:08:28 I was like, oh, okay.
0:08:30 Felt like I got into some club and they were like,
0:08:31 you need to take your shoes off at the door.
0:08:33 It’s so funny.
0:08:36 By the way, one thing to finish that food thing.
0:08:38 Remember when Brian Johnson came on the first time
0:08:38 on this podcast?
0:08:42 Like before Brian Johnson became like way more famous
0:08:46 and like, you know, changed his entire look.
0:08:50 So like kind of the before photo, Brian Johnson, basically.
0:08:51 When he came on, he said something.
0:08:54 He goes, oh yeah, we fired evening Brian.
0:08:56 And I thought that was just such a good way of saying it.
0:08:58 He’s like, yeah, we had a meeting of the Brian’s.
0:08:59 Morning Brian was there.
0:09:00 Work Brian was there.
0:09:01 And evening Brian was there.
0:09:02 We just decided evening Brian,
0:09:04 you’re fucking it up for the rest of us.
0:09:04 So you’re fired.
0:09:06 You no longer get to make decisions.
0:09:09 We’ve taken that power away from you.
0:09:10 So that was a great way of saying it.
0:09:12 He did a really good job.
0:09:14 Have you read the book 48 Laws of Power?
0:09:16 Like one of the laws of power is like,
0:09:18 change your identity occasionally.
0:09:24 And like occasionally it’s a tool.
0:09:24 It’s like a tool.
0:09:28 So for example, the author, he was like Lady Gaga.
0:09:30 Like if you look at like early photos of her,
0:09:31 she was like a very normal girl,
0:09:33 but she always had like a little weird quirky side to her.
0:09:35 But she’s like, she went all in on it
0:09:37 and just changed her identity overnight
0:09:39 to be like this kind of like strange person.
0:09:41 And then nowadays, by the way, if you see Lady Gaga,
0:09:42 she’s not actually that weird anymore.
0:09:45 You remember that era where she like would wear meat as a dress?
0:09:48 Now she like has an album with like Tony Bennett,
0:09:50 like a very classic singer.
0:09:53 And she’s like more of a like, you know, whatever she,
0:09:55 that would be called like classic beauty versus before.
0:09:57 She was like artistic.
0:09:58 Pop when Bitcoin prices up
0:10:00 and pop when Bitcoin prices down.
0:10:02 There’s two pops, the tale of two pops.
0:10:04 And I think Brian Johnson changed his identity.
0:10:06 And I thought that that was like a really savvy thing to do.
0:10:07 I thought it was great.
0:10:09 And I think that I take inspiration from it.
0:10:13 Can I tell you a story that I’ve been kind of
0:10:14 thinking about constantly?
0:10:15 Okay.
0:10:15 All right.
0:10:18 So I have to tell you the story about this guy named Jamie Beaton.
0:10:21 So Jamie is a 29 year old from New Zealand.
0:10:24 He was raised in a single household in New Zealand,
0:10:26 but he’s kind of like grown to be
0:10:29 probably like the best college kid on earth.
0:10:30 So listen to the story.
0:10:32 So this guy Jamie, he’s raised by single mother in New Zealand.
0:10:35 And I guess if I had to like cycle analyze him,
0:10:38 he’d probably like has some like rejection type of like,
0:10:40 you know, he’s not good enough type of vibe
0:10:42 that a lot of great, great people with cheap greatness have.
0:10:45 And he gets obsessed with school,
0:10:49 but particularly with university applications
0:10:51 and how to get into like the best university on earth.
0:10:53 And so he sets out with a goal
0:10:56 to become the most qualified high school student
0:10:57 in all of New Zealand.
0:11:00 And he like creates this really in depth strategy.
0:11:01 It’s like, you know, he’s got to be unique.
0:11:03 So he goes and starts two different businesses,
0:11:05 one being like a newspaper delivery business,
0:11:07 one another being like an iPhone repair business.
0:11:09 He focuses on being the best.
0:11:11 And so he like strategically picks activities
0:11:12 that he can excel in.
0:11:15 Then he looks to maximize validation,
0:11:16 meaning like whatever he’s good at,
0:11:18 he wants like enter into a contest and like win.
0:11:21 And then really good academic.
0:11:22 So he’s like, it’s straight A’s.
0:11:25 And so he like does this like crazy curriculum
0:11:26 that he creates for himself.
0:11:27 And by the age of 17,
0:11:29 he’s accepted into 25 universities.
0:11:31 So he’s accepted into Harvard, Yale,
0:11:33 Princeton, Sanford, Columbia, Cambridge,
0:11:34 Duke and a bunch of other stuff.
0:11:38 But he ends up going to Harvard.
0:11:39 But before he gets into Harvard,
0:11:41 like word spreads in New Zealand
0:11:43 that this kid is like a wonder kid.
0:11:45 And he’s like the greatest thing on earth.
0:11:49 And so he even like hosts like a 230 person talk in New Zealand
0:11:50 where all these parents are like,
0:11:51 Jamie, tell us how you did this.
0:11:53 Like this is so amazing.
0:11:55 So fast forward to today.
0:11:56 He’s 29 years old.
0:11:58 He’s got seven degrees and one PhD.
0:12:00 He has a, like if you go to his LinkedIn,
0:12:02 it literally looks like a fake LinkedIn.
0:12:03 Listen to his education.
0:12:05 So a bachelor’s in applied math from Harvard,
0:12:07 a master’s in applied math from Harvard,
0:12:09 a PhD in public policy from Oxford,
0:12:11 two masters from Stanford,
0:12:13 a master’s in entrepreneurship from Penn,
0:12:14 a master’s from Princeton,
0:12:15 a law degree from Yale,
0:12:17 and a master’s in global affairs
0:12:19 from a university in China.
0:12:20 Is that insane?
0:12:23 This is real.
0:12:24 Show 12 educations.
0:12:26 I’ve never even seen that.
0:12:28 It looks fake.
0:12:31 So now while this kid, he’s 29 now,
0:12:33 but while he was a kid at sophomore in college,
0:12:36 he was like, this is kind of interesting what’s going on.
0:12:38 And so he creates a college tutoring business,
0:12:40 which is like kind of like a stereotypical,
0:12:41 not stereotypical,
0:12:43 but it’s like a common story of people who like master the game.
0:12:45 They like start these tutoring businesses,
0:12:47 but it actually starts working to the point
0:12:48 where by the, he’s a sophomore in college,
0:12:50 it does a million in revenue.
0:12:53 And obviously he’s interning
0:12:54 because that’s what great college kids do,
0:12:56 but he’s interning at tiger management,
0:12:57 which is like, you know,
0:12:59 one of the most prestigious like hedge funds in the world.
0:13:02 And his boss is like, dude, this is pretty cool.
0:13:04 You should like go in on, go all in on this.
0:13:06 And so he turns his little side business.
0:13:08 I mean, it was a million in revenue
0:13:09 by the time he was sophomore,
0:13:11 one that wasn’t that much of a side business,
0:13:12 but he turns it into a real business.
0:13:15 And it’s called Crimson Education.
0:13:17 And that’s like what the story in the Wall Street Journal was about.
0:13:22 So Crimson Education does something like 120 to 150 million in revenue.
0:13:24 It’s valued around $500 million.
0:13:26 They have something like a thousand employees.
0:13:28 And it’s like the greatest way, I guess,
0:13:31 to get into a highly touted university for your kids.
0:13:34 And so these parents are spending crazy amounts of money,
0:13:36 something like $200,000 a year
0:13:38 for a handful of the product offerings that they have
0:13:41 in order to get their kid into an Ivy League school.
0:13:42 And it starts way before high school.
0:13:44 We’re talking like fifth, sixth grade.
0:13:46 You’re smiling. Is this ridiculous or what?
0:13:48 So I’m smiling for a couple of reasons.
0:13:49 First, the headline is great.
0:13:54 So it says, “The guru who says he can get your 11-year-old into Harvard.”
0:13:56 And there’s a picture of him shaking this Asian kid’s hand.
0:14:01 First, why an 11-year-old into Harvard?
0:14:03 All right, that’s funny thing, one.
0:14:06 Two, love the name Crimson Education.
0:14:11 As you know, big fan of when you hijack the prestige of another thing
0:14:14 in a way that’s totally legal,
0:14:15 the way that you did with Hampton,
0:14:19 the way he’s doing with the Crimson color for Harvard,
0:14:21 Crimson Education, great name.
0:14:24 When I Google the name, the very first thing it says,
0:14:26 and by the way, this article came out six days ago,
0:14:28 the very first thing in the Google headline is,
0:14:31 Crimson Education as seen on the Wall Street Journal.
0:14:34 I’m like, this guy is a fucking prestige hacker.
0:14:36 Immediately it was like,
0:14:39 now it’s going to be like as featured on My First Million, right?
0:14:43 Like he’s just going to keep grabbing badges from schools,
0:14:46 from press, from whoever you can get.
0:14:47 So I think that’s hilarious.
0:14:52 The next thing that I find a little bit funny is,
0:14:54 the premise of this is,
0:14:58 I will help your kid get into a top university, is that right?
0:14:59 But it’s not test prep.
0:15:03 No, so they have, first of all, if you go to,
0:15:04 are you on their website?
0:15:06 Their offering or like their headline is amazing.
0:15:10 98% acceptance rate to your top college choice.
0:15:11 So listen to like the product.
0:15:14 So the product is like pretty ridiculous.
0:15:16 Basically, like, you remember how I like outlined it,
0:15:19 to like stick out, you know, like be unique, whatever.
0:15:23 The Crimson Education has these like tenants of what you need.
0:15:26 So it’s like, get amazing grades.
0:15:27 So he’s like, these are bombs.
0:15:29 You basically have to have like perfect A’s.
0:15:32 Then he’s like, you need to have strong leadership.
0:15:34 And so what Crimson does is they definitely tutor people.
0:15:37 So I think they have 50,000 students who get tutoring.
0:15:39 But dude, they encourage you to do all types of crazy shit.
0:15:42 So they encourage you to start a business podcast
0:15:44 or rather start a business or start a podcast
0:15:46 or go and publish an academic paper.
0:15:49 And so they have services that help their students get PR
0:15:52 or help their students go and publish research.
0:15:56 And so they’re one example of a kid who started a podcast
0:16:00 and it got so popular that universities started asking
0:16:02 to be featured on the podcast.
0:16:03 And so that’s an example of like things
0:16:06 where they try to tell you that you have to have strong leadership.
0:16:08 They also say that you have to have a unique profile.
0:16:10 And so what he says is or what Crimson does
0:16:13 is they help students find like 10 activities
0:16:15 that they’re interested in and then helps them
0:16:18 be the best at the activities and cut the fat
0:16:20 and not participate in things
0:16:21 that they’re not going to be like the best at.
0:16:23 It’s like pretty ridiculous.
0:16:25 So they offer tutoring, but they also offer
0:16:27 like for something like $200,000.
0:16:31 They do like really hands-on like we need you to do this,
0:16:33 this, this, and this over the course of a handful of years
0:16:34 to increase the likelihood.
0:16:36 And by the way, it works.
0:16:39 Like there’s debate over how much it works.
0:16:40 Like there’s debate where they’re like,
0:16:43 you know, these kids are like rich, smart kids anyway.
0:16:45 Like their parents are going to like force
0:16:46 them to get into all this shit anyway.
0:16:47 Like did this actually help?
0:16:50 But something like 2% of the students admitted
0:16:55 into Brown, Columbia, Harvard, and Penn last year were his clients.
0:16:58 And it says like this many people get in as verified
0:17:00 by big four accounting service.
0:17:04 Like he’s like touting that they’ve been audited
0:17:06 on their claims of this.
0:17:07 This is pretty wild dude.
0:17:09 Cause he’s like bragging, he was bragging
0:17:11 to the Wall Street Journal reporter like crazy,
0:17:13 or not bragging, they’re asking him questions.
0:17:17 And he was like, yeah, like we had 24 people into Yale 34.
0:17:18 Look at this marketing funnel dude.
0:17:19 But listen to what he says.
0:17:21 He goes, the acceptance letters were certified
0:17:22 by Price Waterhouse Cooper.
0:17:24 And a list of students admitted.
0:17:27 So like he, he, he sent Wall Street Journal the thing.
0:17:29 And it had like the Price Waterhouse Cooper’s like seal
0:17:30 of like, yeah, it’s legit.
0:17:32 I hate this, I’m just going to say that out loud.
0:17:35 I hate this, but I respect this.
0:17:38 Why do you hate it for what?
0:17:39 I mean, the respect is easy.
0:17:40 Like it’s easy.
0:17:42 I mean, it’s the same reason I hate the Olympics.
0:17:44 And I respect people, I respect Olympians,
0:17:46 meaning this guy is doing the thing.
0:17:48 And the first thing I said was stupid about the Olympics
0:17:51 where somebody dedicates 20, 20, 22 years of their life
0:17:54 to becoming the best, you know, luge,
0:17:56 the luge pusher in the world.
0:17:58 And it’s like, bro, like if you had this much talent,
0:18:01 why didn’t you just apply it to something that’s useful?
0:18:03 Dude, what else could you, if you’re a loser,
0:18:06 what do you just got a big ass and you could like push heavy shit?
0:18:07 Like, what else are you going to do?
0:18:09 It’s the luge is built for you.
0:18:10 You can lay down well.
0:18:14 It could have been a famous, you know, person in a rap video.
0:18:15 It could have been many, many options.
0:18:17 The only fans, you have better options on the table.
0:18:22 No, but seriously, like the sort of like game,
0:18:25 embracing the system so much that you try to game the system
0:18:28 for this arbitrary university application thing,
0:18:30 it’s just, it’s like dialed up to level 20.
0:18:33 There’s something off-putting about that to me.
0:18:35 I don’t know. I guess like, I just don’t,
0:18:41 like I think most college educations and as I wear a Duke sweatshirt,
0:18:44 most Ivy leagues and the admission process,
0:18:45 I think it’s all pretty bogus.
0:18:47 And I don’t think it has a very high correlation to like,
0:18:49 it’s the wrong game, right?
0:18:52 What does the phrase play stupid games with stupid prizes?
0:18:54 I think this is playing stupid games to win a stupid prize.
0:18:57 However, I get it.
0:19:02 And I respect that this guy has preyed on the fears
0:19:07 and the hopes and the dreams of these tiger parents to be like,
0:19:08 hey, give me $200,000.
0:19:10 I’ll make sure your kid has a,
0:19:12 he gets the right logo on there.
0:19:15 Dude, let me, I hear you and a lot of me agrees with you,
0:19:17 but let me just make the argument against you.
0:19:21 First of all, your group of people, the Indians in part,
0:19:24 have thrived in America because of the emphasis on,
0:19:26 not just on education, but like being the best.
0:19:28 So like, there’s definitely power to it,
0:19:30 but you also went to Duke.
0:19:31 I didn’t go to Duke.
0:19:33 My wife went to an Ivy league school.
0:19:35 So I hang out with a lot of these like smart people,
0:19:36 like you and her.
0:19:38 And that type of education, it’s on one hand,
0:19:41 it’s sort of like a rich person telling you rich,
0:19:42 it doesn’t make you happy to be rich.
0:19:44 And you’re like, yeah, let me, let me figure it out on my own.
0:19:46 Like, let me get there and I’ll decide.
0:19:46 I’ll try.
0:19:47 Yeah.
0:19:50 But the second thing is I actually think that there’s a huge
0:19:51 amounts of tangible benefits.
0:19:52 The education, that’s normal.
0:19:54 What does Will from Goodwill Hunting say?
0:19:57 Like just, I can get that for like 15 bucks in late fees
0:19:59 from the library to learn the same shit as you.
0:20:03 But like your network, partially because,
0:20:04 mostly because of San Francisco, to be honest,
0:20:07 but a lot of it because of Duke and Sarah’s network,
0:20:08 because of Penn.
0:20:10 Like it was so much more global than mine was
0:20:13 at a small Rinky Dink school in Nashville, Tennessee.
0:20:14 Like you guys thought so much bigger.
0:20:16 The people who you’re with were so much more global.
0:20:19 They were so much more prestigious and in a good way.
0:20:21 And so I actually think that playing the game
0:20:24 to go to a top 20 university is probably worth it
0:20:26 to play the game to win,
0:20:28 to play the game and not go to one of these amazing schools.
0:20:29 I actually don’t think it’s worth it.
0:20:36 Hey, let’s take a quick break to talk about another podcast
0:20:37 that you should check out.
0:20:38 It is called the Next Wave.
0:20:40 It’s hosted by Matt Wolf and Nathan Lans
0:20:42 as part of the HubSpot Podcast Network,
0:20:44 which of course is your audio destination
0:20:45 for business professionals like you.
0:20:47 You can catch the next wave with Matt Wolf
0:20:49 and he’s talking about where the puck is going
0:20:51 with AI creators, AI technology,
0:20:53 and how you can apply it to your growing business.
0:20:54 So check it out.
0:20:57 Listen to the Next Wave wherever you get your podcasts.
0:21:02 Yeah, I’m not saying necessarily
0:21:04 that going to top school is not worth it.
0:21:06 I guess what I’m saying is the amount of energy
0:21:08 and sort of the manufactured nature of this,
0:21:10 it’s sort of like the way that PR.
0:21:12 It’s like, I guess it’s good to be featured,
0:21:16 but like PR is sort of the process to get a bunch of press
0:21:18 is often a very sticky process.
0:21:20 Yeah, you’re hating the game.
0:21:22 Yeah, exactly. I hate the game.
0:21:23 And I think that in this case,
0:21:27 dedicating your life to manufacturing this perfect resume
0:21:30 that’s optimized for the Harvard admission system
0:21:34 just doesn’t seem like the right use of talent and time.
0:21:36 And so that same person,
0:21:39 if they actually just did what they were interested in
0:21:43 and followed their actual curiosities and passion,
0:21:44 I think that’s just a better way to live.
0:21:47 But I’ll get off my high horse now.
0:21:48 Let me get a stool so I can get down.
0:21:51 Did you see a photo of this guy?
0:21:55 He looks exactly like I want him to look like.
0:21:57 He looks like a student still at 29.
0:22:00 Like he looks smart, I guess.
0:22:02 So he looks Ivy League.
0:22:06 Did you have a college admission counselor
0:22:07 or anything like that?
0:22:09 Yeah, like our high school had a college counselor
0:22:11 who I went in and they go,
0:22:13 “Okay, so where do you want to go to school?”
0:22:14 I said, “I want to go to Duke.”
0:22:18 And they go, “You should lower your expectations.”
0:22:20 And I was like, “Wow, that’s the opposite
0:22:22 of what I think somebody’s supposed to say in your job?
0:22:25 Like, aren’t I supposed to dream big?
0:22:26 What’s going on here?”
0:22:29 And he’s like, “Yeah, it’s pretty tough out there.
0:22:31 So, you know, what else we got on the list?
0:22:33 Let’s go down lower on the list and see what we can do.”
0:22:35 Because my grades weren’t the best.
0:22:36 And then you rubbed it in his face.
0:22:39 But did you have like a tutor?
0:22:40 No.
0:22:41 But I did take like, you know, G-MAT,
0:22:42 or what not G-MAT?
0:22:44 Like the S8 Kaplan test prep.
0:22:46 Like I studied for the SATs.
0:22:47 That was what I did.
0:22:48 I did not have any of that stuff.
0:22:50 But when I was reading this article,
0:22:51 they said roughly 25%.
0:22:53 Did you take the SATs?
0:22:55 No, I did the ACT.
0:22:57 Okay, so you took the ACTs.
0:22:58 Did you do a test prep thing?
0:22:59 No.
0:23:01 I took it one time, my junior year, I think.
0:23:03 Or maybe I took it twice my junior year
0:23:05 and I got a combined score, I think of 28,
0:23:06 which is like 80.
0:23:08 Combined score with both tests?
0:23:11 No, I think, maybe I’m wrong,
0:23:14 but I thought they take like math and verbal or whatever.
0:23:16 Yeah, like you get like the best of each try
0:23:17 and they like combine it.
0:23:19 And I think I got a 27 or 28,
0:23:22 which is like 85% tile, I think.
0:23:22 Did you do well on it?
0:23:24 I did good on it.
0:23:26 I was a good test taker.
0:23:27 I wasn’t good in school,
0:23:28 like the consistency of every day.
0:23:30 So you know me.
0:23:31 I’m not good with the everyday stuff.
0:23:32 But if it was like,
0:23:34 it’s time to do the big performance,
0:23:35 I could do that part well.
0:23:37 What did you get on the SAT?
0:23:39 You have to brag about it then if you did good.
0:23:41 I think I got the equivalent of like a,
0:23:43 because they had changed the scoring system
0:23:44 to like the 2400 or whatever.
0:23:48 But I got the equivalent of what now is like a 1500 basically.
0:23:50 What, I don’t know SAT, but let me look it up.
0:23:51 It goes up to 1600.
0:23:52 1600 is perfect.
0:23:54 1500 is like excellent.
0:23:56 And like, you know, 1300.
0:23:58 Dude, it says that’s in the 98th percentile.
0:24:00 Yeah, it was a really good score.
0:24:02 It’s like you missed like a couple of questions basically.
0:24:02 Did you try?
0:24:04 Yeah, yeah, I tried.
0:24:08 I took, I basically for like 60 days before the test,
0:24:11 I just took two practice tests a day.
0:24:12 And this essay is like a six hour test.
0:24:14 So I took a six hour test in the morning.
0:24:15 I took a break, I ate whatever.
0:24:16 And then I took another six hour test
0:24:19 or a five hour test, whatever it was in the evening.
0:24:21 And I just did that every day for like 30 days during the summer.
0:24:23 And then I took the SATs.
0:24:26 Well, you should have went and started one of these like companies
0:24:31 on how to like master that shit because I didn’t realize how big these,
0:24:32 I didn’t realize how big this was.
0:24:35 They said that like 25% of people going to Harvard this year,
0:24:37 they had one of these like tutors.
0:24:39 And then it goes up even higher that if your parents,
0:24:42 if your parents have a household income of at least half a million dollars,
0:24:45 half of them use these types of tutors.
0:24:49 And yeah, I didn’t realize how much of a game
0:24:50 or how you could gain this.
0:24:53 So like you could really kick ass at it.
0:24:55 If you just like, well, if you average parents for one
0:24:58 and two, if you just like hire coaches, I didn’t, I didn’t buy into that.
0:24:59 But now I do.
0:25:01 So you’re going to do this type of stuff?
0:25:05 I think that if my children show an academic,
0:25:07 like if they’re, if they’re good at academics,
0:25:09 and yeah, I would encourage them to do this.
0:25:12 If they’re only mildly decent at academics,
0:25:14 I would say like, let’s consider different alternatives.
0:25:16 I think I, dude, I’m like kind of an elitist.
0:25:17 I think that like these fancy schools,
0:25:20 like what you went to should be like designed for like the,
0:25:23 for like the academic class and like the rest of us like pleads.
0:25:27 Like I think I should have gone to like a trade school or, or, or, or a state school.
0:25:32 I think I should have gone to like a, like a, like a $15,000 year University of Missouri
0:25:36 and like explored versus going into debt of 150 grand
0:25:39 to go to like a non-top University.
0:25:40 I think that’s ridiculous.
0:25:41 Yeah, I think that’s right.
0:25:43 All right, I have one and you have a few.
0:25:44 Which one do you want to do?
0:25:45 Let’s do a quick one on this Ken Fisher thing.
0:25:46 I don’t know how much I have to say.
0:25:48 It just kind of fascinated me.
0:25:50 So let’s see if there’s something interesting here.
0:25:55 So I was at a breakfast and somebody was talking to me about a business idea
0:25:57 that they were doing or that they had done in the past.
0:25:58 I was like, man, that sounds like a good idea.
0:25:59 Where’d you get that idea from?
0:26:01 And he goes, oh, it’s the Fisher Investments Model
0:26:04 of what’s Fisher Investments.
0:26:06 And he goes, oh, you don’t know Ken Fisher?
0:26:08 Oh, he’s like, you got to look this guy up.
0:26:09 So I go down this rabbit hole and who is Ken Fisher?
0:26:12 So basically he’s a billionaire money manager.
0:26:13 So he’s my billionaire the week.
0:26:17 Big-time billionaire, like 11, 15 billion.
0:26:18 Yeah, exactly.
0:26:22 And he basically created a simple firm.
0:26:27 So it’s an investment advisor, money manager type of firm
0:26:29 called Fisher Investments.
0:26:36 And he grew it over the years to where they now manage upwards of $275 billion
0:26:38 dollars assets under management.
0:26:40 So $275 billion with a B.
0:26:46 They got 3,500 employees and they ended up selling to private equity.
0:26:49 So they sold to Advent.
0:26:54 They sold not the full amount, but they sold at a $12.5 billion valuation.
0:26:56 And that was the first outside capital raise.
0:27:01 So this guy basically bootstrapped his way to a $12 billion company.
0:27:03 And the question is, how did he do it?
0:27:04 What did he do?
0:27:08 And so this guy’s story in the, I guess the simple terms is,
0:27:09 his dad was a finance guy.
0:27:13 He actually wrote a book that was kind of popular called Common Stocks and Uncommon
0:27:16 Profits, which by the way, when I went to Monish Papri’s house,
0:27:20 he, I asked him to recommend four or five books off his wall.
0:27:20 And that might have been one of them.
0:27:23 I remember seeing it in his library.
0:27:26 And Warren Buffett called that book a major influence on his career.
0:27:26 So that was his dad.
0:27:32 What he did was he left, he went out and he started his own firm.
0:27:34 And the key is this guy’s basically a marketing master.
0:27:39 So what he did was instead of trying to, I shouldn’t say instead of,
0:27:43 but like most people who are great with investments or money management,
0:27:45 there’s a certain profile of a person.
0:27:50 And that person typically doesn’t have incredible direct response advertising skills.
0:27:52 By the way, it’s typically the opposite.
0:27:57 A lot of people who are in this industry are the opposite of extroverted
0:28:00 and they kind of like want to be in a hole and just not talk to anyone.
0:28:01 And they don’t advertise at all.
0:28:05 And it’s, so when, when they did this deal, some of the numbers came out
0:28:08 and basically these guys are spending $60 million a year on marketing,
0:28:11 which sounded like a ton to anybody else in the money management space.
0:28:13 And to him, he was like, that’s nothing.
0:28:16 He goes, I get the question, why do you advertise so much?
0:28:18 He goes, because we have no market share.
0:28:21 They go, you have over a hundred billion dollars in assets under management.
0:28:22 He goes, that is nothing.
0:28:25 Have you seen the size of this market?
0:28:27 We’re just the biggest grain of sand in the sandbox,
0:28:29 but we’re still just a grain of sand.
0:28:32 We have 0.1% if that.
0:28:36 And so he said, we spend about 6% of our revenue on marketing.
0:28:37 So that’s still not a lot.
0:28:40 They spend 60 million a year.
0:28:43 And so they’re doing about a billion dollars a year in revenue.
0:28:48 And he basically created this system of this marketing system.
0:28:50 And so you can go watch his ads.
0:28:51 And I went and watched a bunch of his TV ads.
0:28:55 And what he says is like, he’s like, well, there’s, we broke it down.
0:28:59 So he’s like, there’s six mental profiles of people of how they think of
0:29:01 their retirement and their savings and investing.
0:29:04 And so they break out the six psychographic profiles.
0:29:08 You have, let’s say, the grandma who just doesn’t want to lose at all.
0:29:14 You have the guy who’s stashed away and is 401(k) and he’s looking for,
0:29:16 he thinks he should, he feels like he should be doing more,
0:29:17 but he doesn’t know exactly what.
0:29:21 And he’s pretty distrustful with most people, with people who come to him.
0:29:24 And so they have these profiles, and then they started running ads.
0:29:26 And you think focus groups and try to figure out which ads are working.
0:29:28 And there’s little nuggets along the way that they were like,
0:29:31 why do you use, they were like, why do you use your face in the ads?
0:29:33 You know, do you feel like there’s some risk with that?
0:29:35 Or would it make it harder to sell the business?
0:29:39 He goes, because we found that clients want to believe
0:29:42 that there’s someone who wakes up in the morning and gives a darn
0:29:44 that there’s a person, not an institution who cares.
0:29:46 That’s why we use my image because here’s Ken.
0:29:47 He’s 68 years old.
0:29:49 He gets up in the morning and he cares.
0:29:51 That’s what I need to convince you of.
0:29:54 And then he talked about how they’re like, you know,
0:29:56 what did you learn from your, you know, your advertising?
0:29:58 Because they’re very scientific about it.
0:29:59 He’s like, well, one thing, for example,
0:30:01 we learned that men’s faces do better than women’s.
0:30:03 Everybody told us we should be using female faces.
0:30:05 That’s going to appeal more, not in our testing.
0:30:09 Our testing shows that men’s faces are going to convert better than female face.
0:30:12 Ken, there’s a famous ad where it’s an outline.
0:30:14 You know how the Wall Street Journal has photos of their authors
0:30:15 that are like dots.
0:30:17 It’s like a, it’s like a sketch actually.
0:30:19 It’s a, it’s a sketch out of dots or whatever.
0:30:24 He buys outbrained ads and tabula ads.
0:30:26 And they would always see a dotted profile photo
0:30:29 where you think it looks like a Wall Street Journal article
0:30:31 and then you click and it goes to Fisher Investments.
0:30:32 And so that’s how I first learned about them
0:30:34 because I’m like, these guys, Fisher Investments,
0:30:36 they’re following me everywhere on the internet.
0:30:41 So if you click one of those, they’re great with headlines.
0:30:44 So for example, you click one of those outbrained ads as tabula ads,
0:30:46 you’re going to go to a page that’s just a video.
0:30:48 There’s no navigation.
0:30:51 There’s no nothing in the videos called debunkery.
0:30:54 Seeing through Wall Street’s money killing myths.
0:30:56 And it’s a 12 minute video that you’re going to see
0:31:00 where he debunks, you know, Wall Street, Wall Street myths.
0:31:04 And, you know, this type of like Buzzfeed headline stuff
0:31:06 isn’t what you’re going to find from most money managers.
0:31:08 Most money managers would cringe at that.
0:31:10 They don’t know that they don’t know how to do those.
0:31:11 They don’t have the team in place.
0:31:13 Like you’ve talked about Agora, for example,
0:31:16 he’s basically a glorified, you know, money management
0:31:19 by putting out really compelling juicy content
0:31:21 and then advertising it everywhere.
0:31:23 So they spend a ton of money on ads.
0:31:25 They’re on Fox News or on Forbes or on Wall Street Journal.
0:31:26 They’re on MarketWatch.
0:31:29 You know, they’re basically, they have this profile.
0:31:31 They’re like, we’re looking for somebody
0:31:33 who’s got a $500,000 retirement portfolio.
0:31:35 They don’t want to get rich quick ad.
0:31:37 And then you look at their ads and it’ll say,
0:31:39 want to retire comfortably?
0:31:42 If you have $500,000, download this guide by Forbes columnist
0:31:44 and money manager, Ken Fishers-Firm.
0:31:46 It’s called the definitive guide to retirement income.
0:31:48 And then there’s a picture of a guy on horseback.
0:31:51 Like a dude who’s like ready to retire
0:31:53 and like get out of the office and be on horseback.
0:31:55 Or he’ll have an ad.
0:31:57 Like I have one here on, I’ll put these up on YouTube
0:32:00 so you can see the ads, but like his outbreak ad says,
0:32:02 what does your net worth say about when,
0:32:04 say about how you’ll retire?
0:32:05 So it’s kind of like a personality quiz.
0:32:07 It’s like, what does your net worth say
0:32:08 about how your retirement’s going to go?
0:32:11 And it’s a picture of a man and a woman on a boat, like Titanic.
0:32:13 Dude, this is so good.
0:32:14 I’m looking at it now.
0:32:17 I mean, like, I want to show you this.
0:32:19 Here, just I’m going to screen share this real quick.
0:32:22 It works, by the way, because I have to assume
0:32:24 that his product is good, right?
0:32:26 I don’t know.
0:32:26 We’ll see.
0:32:29 I don’t have a strong opinion on that.
0:32:30 Look at this landing page though.
0:32:31 Designed for conversion.
0:32:34 He’s got the 15 minute retirement plan as a book
0:32:37 and it’s an arrow and there’s a drag and drop like box.
0:32:39 It’s like, where should you get it?
0:32:40 Get it right here.
0:32:41 Get my free quote, right?
0:32:42 And then you got Ken Fisher below.
0:32:44 Here’s a white guy you could trust.
0:32:48 And I just thought this guy’s marketing is just excellent.
0:32:49 I think it’s to be studied.
0:32:51 I think it’s extremely effective,
0:32:53 especially with the crowd that he’s going for,
0:32:56 which is kind of like the 50 and up crowd.
0:33:01 So studying this guy’s ad library was pretty insightful.
0:33:03 And it also just brought up an interesting idea,
0:33:06 which is a lot of people, when they’re great at marketing,
0:33:09 they go into spaces that them and their friends are already in,
0:33:14 which is often like D2C, e-commerce, or marketing agencies.
0:33:17 Like you are trying to be a great marketer
0:33:19 in a sea of great marketers.
0:33:21 I think what the genius of this guy is, is he said,
0:33:27 how do I be just two notches above average at marketing,
0:33:30 but go into a space where nobody knows anything about marketing?
0:33:32 Or everybody is like doing a very rudimentary playbook.
0:33:34 And so that’s where I think the opportunity is.
0:33:37 Like if you go do this in the senior living space,
0:33:40 it’s like the people who own and operate senior living businesses
0:33:42 are not the same sharks that you’re going to get
0:33:45 trying to sell handbags on the internet.
0:33:48 Because those people, the people who sell handbags on the internet,
0:33:49 they’re worth class marketers.
0:33:52 That’s why they’re able to sell a handbag for 10x the Cogs.
0:33:55 And the other thing is that when people see these ads,
0:33:56 they think, does this work?
0:33:57 I can’t believe this works.
0:34:00 First of all, yes, it works.
0:34:01 It does.
0:34:02 It works for everyone.
0:34:04 It’s not just like old, like you kind of made a comment,
0:34:05 like only older people are into this.
0:34:07 I think this always works.
0:34:11 This type of stuff works really well, regardless of the age.
0:34:16 But when like a brand advertising guru who lives in Brooklyn, New York,
0:34:19 who wears common project shoes, they see this type of shit
0:34:21 and they think, this is fucking lame.
0:34:23 I should make my website look flashier.
0:34:27 When in reality, a plain white website that has just long form copy
0:34:30 of like 3,000 words can oftentimes, more often than not,
0:34:32 convert better than a flashy website.
0:34:35 So let me read you the last few notes I have here.
0:34:37 So he’s been a Forbes columnist for like 20 plus years.
0:34:40 So he was like, he’s basically content marketing, right?
0:34:44 Like what we do and what we get a lot of credit for, which is like,
0:34:46 well, you build an audience, you build a brand,
0:34:47 and that helps with distribution.
0:34:49 This guy has been doing that for 30 plus years.
0:34:50 He wrote several books.
0:34:52 So he wrote super stocks and other ones.
0:34:55 He has an army of salespeople that cold call investors.
0:34:59 And they talk about this basement, this basement of like cold callers
0:35:01 that are just sitting there and people report that like,
0:35:06 dude, I signed up for this free guide once I read it.
0:35:08 And then they’ve just been badgering me for like years ever since.
0:35:11 And they keep calling me trying to get me to invest with them.
0:35:16 He says that everybody else relies on referrals from other partners.
0:35:17 They don’t think about the broader world.
0:35:19 How do we get people calling us?
0:35:20 That was their goal.
0:35:22 And they have estimated about $14,000 cac.
0:35:25 So it costs them $14,000 to acquire a customer.
0:35:30 They spent, you know, just over $60 million on ads back in 2019.
0:35:32 They’re the 12th biggest spender of financial services.
0:35:37 They have like, you know, 60 plus thousand individual investors,
0:35:41 plus then they manage another $10 billion plus from pensions,
0:35:43 state governments, municipals, et cetera.
0:35:48 They charge about, you know, 1%, 1.25% in fees.
0:35:53 So, you know, you could do the math on 1.25% of $250 billion.
0:35:56 And then it’s hard to gauge the performance.
0:35:58 They don’t have publicly available numbers for everything,
0:36:01 but they, in the past, Fisher funds with publicly available numbers
0:36:04 have underperformed the market substantially.
0:36:06 So they have a Purisma total return fund.
0:36:09 It was a mutual fund that had 25% return in 10 years.
0:36:12 The S&P 500 index would have been 1,000% in the same time.
0:36:15 Yet still, if there’s some of the quote was,
0:36:19 if his firm is not the biggest RIA, it’s close.
0:36:23 And so to build the biggest investment advisor firm
0:36:26 while not necessarily having the best returns
0:36:28 in, you know, but being the best marketer is the story here.
0:36:30 Dude, fuck podcasts.
0:36:32 I want to do that.
0:36:34 This sounds awesome, right?
0:36:38 Of course, there’s a billion reasons why, like,
0:36:40 it’s a pain in the ass to run just like everything else is,
0:36:42 but this sounds great.
0:36:43 Dude, I’ve been watching Better Call Saul.
0:36:44 Do you ever watch this show?
0:36:47 What? And what do you want to become like an ambulance chaser?
0:36:48 Isn’t he just a lawyer?
0:36:50 No. Well, yeah, he’s a lawyer,
0:36:52 but like one of the things they show him doing
0:36:54 is like him making his commercials and his ads to try to be,
0:36:56 you know, to be like Better Call Saul.
0:36:59 And it reminded me so much of this Ken Fisher playbook.
0:37:02 And the show makes it seem, the show makes also,
0:37:04 the hustle he does to like create these commercials
0:37:05 is also very fun.
0:37:06 He’s nailed the branding.
0:37:07 This is cool.
0:37:08 I’ve seen his ads all over the place,
0:37:09 and I knew he was big.
0:37:10 I didn’t know they got acquired,
0:37:12 so I wasn’t able to ever see any of the numbers,
0:37:13 but that’s amazing.
0:37:15 Well, look, here’s some of the,
0:37:17 I think this is his own reporting of his performance.
0:37:19 2007, he says, if you bought,
0:37:21 this is not their funds,
0:37:22 this is like his recommendations,
0:37:24 but if you bought all 60 of my recommendations,
0:37:30 you would be up 0.9% and assuming you lost 1% transaction fees,
0:37:31 the S&P founder is down 0.5%.
0:37:32 Okay, so nothing big.
0:37:35 2008, he says, how are my results last year?
0:37:35 In line with the market,
0:37:37 which is to say, not good.
0:37:39 That’s what he said.
0:37:42 Yeah, 2009, I made 65 recommendations.
0:37:43 If you put an equal sum in each,
0:37:44 you’d be up 44%.
0:37:46 The stock market’s up 20.9%.
0:37:50 2010, he says, your return is 18% versus 12%.
0:37:52 But these are like his stock picks,
0:37:54 I think, from his Forbes column,
0:37:55 which is not the same.
0:37:56 That’s like his entertainment.
0:37:58 Well, if you have an event,
0:38:02 and a wealth advisor or whatever this stuff’s called,
0:38:04 if you have an advisor who promises
0:38:07 to make you more than the index, they’re lying.
0:38:09 But then what is the point of the advisor?
0:38:13 The point is that as you grow and get older,
0:38:15 it’s savvy to think, all right,
0:38:18 I need to get less stocks, more bonds,
0:38:21 and those mature sometimes six, 12, 24 months.
0:38:22 So it’s like the buying of those.
0:38:24 If setting up at a state plan,
0:38:26 there’s a bunch of administrative stuff
0:38:27 that often, but not always,
0:38:30 that 1% can kind of pay for itself or help you.
0:38:33 You could also say that they are kind of like a therapist.
0:38:34 So when you want to sell stuff, they’re like,
0:38:36 “Dude, don’t sell it. Don’t be an idiot.”
0:38:38 But there’s a bunch of administrative stuff,
0:38:42 but outperforming the market is not the main value.
0:38:44 And if you have an advisor who says
0:38:46 that they’re going to out pick, then they’re foolish.
0:38:49 By the way, do you know who else does this?
0:38:50 It’s Motley Fool.
0:38:54 So the Motley Fool, they have a fund
0:38:57 that has well over a billion dollars.
0:38:59 And it started as a stock picking newsletter,
0:39:01 and now they’ve branched out to having a fund.
0:39:04 And so they actually have a wealth advisory business
0:39:05 that is massive.
0:39:07 And it was built up the exact same way as Confisher.
0:39:10 Yeah, it’s pretty crazy that you set a billion dollars.
0:39:12 This guy’s over 250 billion.
0:39:14 So somehow Motley Fool, which is also excellent
0:39:17 at online content and probably has way more traffic,
0:39:20 does not have anywhere near the same assets under management,
0:39:22 which I think is always interesting to look at.
0:39:25 When two people pursue the same strategy
0:39:26 and one gets a hundred X return,
0:39:31 sometimes you point to luck or timing or other things,
0:39:34 but often it’s a business model choice.
0:39:37 It’s a strategic choice, or it’s an execution point
0:39:37 that’s different.
0:39:40 Yeah, this is insane.
0:39:41 Motley Fool has 1.5 billion.
0:39:46 Can I tell you a quick story about related to something
0:39:47 that Elad Gill said?
0:39:48 Yeah.
0:39:52 So he made a comment where we asked him what he’s interested in,
0:39:54 and he said monuments.
0:39:58 And so what he meant was like an example of a monument
0:40:03 is the Statue of Liberty or in some ways the Eiffel Tower,
0:40:07 like things that exist mostly to bring pride to a country,
0:40:09 but then also act as a tourist destination.
0:40:11 And he was saying, why don’t we build more of these?
0:40:13 What happened to the monuments was sort of the question.
0:40:16 Yeah, he was like, look, when we were up and coming,
0:40:19 we loved building monuments and it gave us a sense of pride.
0:40:22 And it was good for, it was very pro-America
0:40:23 and it got people bought in.
0:40:26 And I had a guy listen to the podcast
0:40:29 and he sent me the deck that he’s trying to raise money
0:40:33 for a monument that’s based in San Francisco on Alcatraz.
0:40:35 And so you have to see this.
0:40:36 So it’s a picture of, first of all,
0:40:38 I don’t know who this, I’ve never heard of this person,
0:40:40 but you know who Prometheus is?
0:40:42 He’s like a Greek God.
0:40:43 And it’s basically like,
0:40:45 he represents the spirit of innovation and courage
0:40:48 for the purpose of building, for manifest destiny,
0:40:51 for inborn nobility, which elevates humanity.
0:40:54 They want to build a massive statue of him
0:41:00 that’s 350 feet tall and it’s on where Alcatraz is.
0:41:03 It’s like if the Statue of Liberty had like a hot boyfriend,
0:41:05 this would be him.
0:41:07 Yes, and that’s exactly what it is.
0:41:09 On the other side of the country,
0:41:11 he’s just holding up a torch just like she is,
0:41:13 except for he’s absolutely ripped
0:41:15 and he’s from the movie 300.
0:41:16 And he’s got like a Speedo on.
0:41:19 It’s basically a Speedo.
0:41:23 To be honest, they did not pull any punches
0:41:25 as far as the amount of stone and steel
0:41:26 that’s going into this guy.
0:41:31 So here’s the deal.
0:41:35 I made most of my money from a newsletter business.
0:41:36 It was called The Hustle.
0:41:37 And it was a daily newsletter at scale
0:41:39 to millions of subscribers.
0:41:41 And it was the greatest business on earth.
0:41:45 The problem with it was that I had close to 40 employees
0:41:48 and only three of them were actually doing any writing.
0:41:50 The other employees were growing the newsletter,
0:41:52 building out the tech for the platform and selling ads.
0:41:55 And honestly, it was a huge pain in the butt.
0:41:58 Today’s episode is brought to you by Beehive.
0:42:02 They are a platform that is built exactly for this.
0:42:03 If you want to grow your newsletter,
0:42:04 if you want to monetize the newsletter,
0:42:05 they do all of the stuff
0:42:08 that I had to hire dozens of employees to do.
0:42:10 So check it out. Beehive.com.
0:42:14 That’s B-E-H-I-I-V.com.
0:42:21 And so first of all, I’ve got to say the obvious
0:42:23 that there will never be a statue
0:42:27 that touts manifest destiny and inborn nobility
0:42:28 and the spirit of courage
0:42:31 that’s going to sit in the Bay of San Francisco.
0:42:35 And a shirtless rip, dude.
0:42:37 None of that, I think, will ever happen.
0:42:38 But the idea is actually interesting.
0:42:40 And so what they want to do is they’re
0:42:44 raising $100 million to build this statue on Alcatraz.
0:42:46 And so it’s 350 feet.
0:42:52 And but in their deck, they talk about the money
0:42:54 or the revenue and profit of other people,
0:42:55 of other statues.
0:42:56 So listen to this shit.
0:43:02 So the Statue of Liberty does $154 million a year in revenue,
0:43:04 $70 million a year of net income.
0:43:06 And then you can go down to like Pearl Harbor.
0:43:07 Really?
0:43:08 Yeah, I mean.
0:43:08 Hold on. Where is it?
0:43:10 Okay, so Statue of Liberty.
0:43:11 Let’s say that again.
0:43:12 That’s mind blowing.
0:43:16 So Statue of Liberty, you said $70 million of net income,
0:43:18 $150 million of revenue.
0:43:24 So 50% net profit margins on four and a half million visitors,
0:43:27 each one paying $25 bucks a ticket and $10 of concessions.
0:43:29 It’s insane.
0:43:30 That’s wild.
0:43:30 It’s insane.
0:43:32 And then it goes down to like Mount Rushmore,
0:43:33 which is on the smaller end,
0:43:37 which does $50 million in sales and $20 million a year in net income.
0:43:41 Or Pearl Harbor, same thing, $50 million, $23 million of profits.
0:43:41 Dude, I was laughing.
0:43:42 Why are we not doing this?
0:43:44 These are amazing businesses.
0:43:45 That’s my point.
0:43:48 And so I went and I saw these numbers and I’m like,
0:43:50 that’s absolutely ridiculous.
0:43:52 And it’s like amazingly good.
0:43:55 And of course, with all things related to like investment decks,
0:43:58 you know, you paint the best possible story.
0:43:59 And who knows if any of it actually comes true.
0:44:00 There’s also no source cited on this.
0:44:02 There’s no source.
0:44:05 I looked up some of the stats and like the Statue of Liberty numbers.
0:44:10 It does, it kind of checks out where it is plausible that those are the numbers.
0:44:13 But they’re raising $170 million to build this.
0:44:17 And their goal is to make $100 million a year in profit.
0:44:18 Or like that’s what they say the numbers are.
0:44:20 And so you start doing the math and like I said,
0:44:23 this is all just some guy drawing this up and like, who knows?
0:44:28 This is painting the best story ever of a thing that doesn’t exist.
0:44:33 But the math is somewhat interesting behind like the like how this all works.
0:44:35 So you’re saying there’s a chance.
0:44:37 Yeah. So they’re like, if we do this,
0:44:40 we’ll do $94 million a year net income.
0:44:43 And so it’s actually pretty interesting that like Monument,
0:44:45 of course, dude, you’re not going to like be able to build this in San Francisco.
0:44:47 They’re not going to have any part of it.
0:44:48 How much have they raised so far?
0:44:48 Do you know?
0:44:53 No, in like when I was Googling it, they have like a sub-stack
0:44:56 and they say things like Joe Linesdale is on board.
0:44:59 And like all these like amazing people are on board
0:45:02 and they have a sub-stack documenting what they’re talking about.
0:45:06 But I don’t think I saw that they said how much they’ve raised.
0:45:08 I think it’s cool that people are doing this.
0:45:09 I guess I have a few thoughts.
0:45:10 I think it’s cool people are doing this.
0:45:11 I hope something like this happens.
0:45:16 I am stunned at the profitability of these other monuments.
0:45:20 That is my golden nugget for the pod.
0:45:21 That is amazing.
0:45:22 Noted.
0:45:23 Okay. Noted.
0:45:24 There’s there’s something here.
0:45:27 This deck, by the way, does not look well made.
0:45:29 And I think if you’re going to try to pull something like this off,
0:45:33 you have to also like, if you can’t pay for a designer for your deck,
0:45:36 then I’m not sure I believe that you’re going to do this.
0:45:42 Yeah. Yeah. And like, this is, I wonder how like, I like,
0:45:43 when they’re going to bed at night talking to their wives,
0:45:45 I wonder if they’re like saying like,
0:45:48 “Isn’t this hilarious that we’re trying this?”
0:45:52 Or is it like, when this thing’s built, we’re going to be doing it.
0:45:54 You got to fully believe that you’re doing God’s work out here.
0:45:57 Yeah. And it could happen.
0:45:59 But so it’s called, if you want to look it up, I’ve got no affiliate.
0:46:00 I’ve never talked to these people.
0:46:02 It’s called the American Colossus Foundation.
0:46:03 Kind of funny.
0:46:06 Yeah. Yeah. I think you’re right though that location really matters.
0:46:11 Like you have to go somewhere that both has, you know, can be a tourist destination,
0:46:13 but has, you need the approvals, right?
0:46:18 You can’t just get stuck in Limbo and San Francisco Bay Area is probably
0:46:22 one of the harder places to get approval for something like this.
0:46:26 Dude, San Francisco is the antithesis of a ripped, like,
0:46:31 a ripped like alpha looking heterosexual male.
0:46:34 Like this is like not like, I lived in San Francisco for 10 years.
0:46:38 This is not exactly what the culture is about.
0:46:42 So I think it’s the kind of art we had on the wall, the giant painting we had on the wall
0:46:46 in my office at Monkey Inferno, where it was the reverse of the evolution of man.
0:46:48 You know, evolution of man is like, it’s an ape.
0:46:52 And then he’s like standing half upright, then he’s fully upright, then he’s walking.
0:46:54 And then it’s like, you know, that’s the homo sapien today.
0:46:57 And the thing we had on the wall was the homo sapien.
0:46:59 And then it’s him bending over, looking at his phone,
0:47:02 bending over, sitting, basically sitting down at a laptop and then typing.
0:47:04 And it was like a motor at the end of it.
0:47:05 And it was like, that was the final evolution.
0:47:08 I think the opposite.
0:47:10 That was what, that’s what should be the monument in San Francisco.
0:47:12 Yeah.
0:47:13 It’s like a giant neck beard.
0:47:15 Yeah. Wearing a hoodie.
0:47:18 It’s not, not, not a jacked Greek God.
0:47:18 Yeah.
0:47:20 You want to do one more thing?
0:47:23 Yeah. I got a few quick hitters.
0:47:26 Okay. Let’s do, let’s do this one.
0:47:29 So talking to bankers, I think this is a good value add.
0:47:30 This is a pro tip.
0:47:33 Life pro tip for, for any founders out there.
0:47:38 I didn’t know this when I first started doing startups.
0:47:42 I had no idea and only the first time I ever came into contact with a banker
0:47:45 was when I tried to sell my company.
0:47:49 So it was kind of like eight or nine years into doing entrepreneurship.
0:47:51 And even then I didn’t know what a banker was.
0:47:53 Somebody said, I’ll introduce you to a banker.
0:47:56 And I thought that’s the guy at Wells Fargo that like sits in the back, not in the front.
0:47:58 Like I didn’t, I didn’t really understand what that meant.
0:48:00 Turns out a banker is like an investment banker.
0:48:05 There’s somebody who can help you sell your company, raise capital, get debt, that sort of thing.
0:48:07 And they, they come in at a certain level of scale.
0:48:13 So usually something like $30 million and up, really they try to be like kind of like a $100
0:48:14 million company or so.
0:48:20 And I had a friend who was a successful entrepreneur and he told me something that really stuck with
0:48:23 me. He goes, I was like, Oh, when do you think you should talk to these guys?
0:48:25 Like, you know, and I was thinking, meaning like
0:48:27 When you’re ready.
0:48:29 Yeah. Like when I’m ready, like at the very beginning of what I’m ready,
0:48:31 or do I need to have all my stuff together?
0:48:35 And he goes, I, he goes, the best thing I ever did was I talked to a banker a year
0:48:36 before I wanted to sell my business.
0:48:39 And I talked to them and I go a year before, what do you mean?
0:48:42 And he goes, yeah, because I went to the banker and I said,
0:48:44 if I wanted to sell my business today, what would it be worth?
0:48:46 Would it be able to sell?
0:48:49 How strong would this asset look like in the marketplace right now?
0:48:52 And they know all the deals that have gotten done.
0:48:53 So bankers are in the process.
0:48:56 The bankers are in the middle of selling companies just like yours in your industry.
0:48:59 So you go to a banker that’s in the industry.
0:49:01 They’ve seen everything that’s traded.
0:49:02 They know the relative strength.
0:49:03 They know the valuations that they’re trading at.
0:49:04 They know who the buyers are.
0:49:06 They know why that they’re buying.
0:49:09 And so they can give you a really clear picture.
0:49:12 And he goes, I went before I was ready because I wanted them to tell me
0:49:15 what would cause this to not sell.
0:49:16 What would be the weak points of this business?
0:49:20 So that became my roadmap for the next year of what I needed to fix.
0:49:23 That became my priority list so that when I did go to market,
0:49:24 I actually had those things fixed.
0:49:26 And if I hadn’t gotten that feedback at that point,
0:49:28 I would have just got that same feedback a year later.
0:49:30 And it would have punted the way down the road.
0:49:32 They’re going to tell you that shit regardless.
0:49:34 And so it’s nice to know early.
0:49:37 And so I think bankers are actually a pretty big cheat code,
0:49:38 not just for selling it.
0:49:40 So that was the first thing I learned.
0:49:44 Second thing was you could actually talk to bankers before you even go into a space.
0:49:45 And I think you’ve done this before too,
0:49:48 which is you go to a banker who’s in a space that you’re interested in
0:49:51 and you talk to them about the companies that have sold.
0:49:53 And you’re like, what companies have sold?
0:49:54 How are they doing?
0:49:56 What was their strengths and weaknesses?
0:49:57 Who are the buyers?
0:49:58 Why do they buy?
0:50:04 The question is basically what’s the profile and attributes of a business
0:50:08 in this space that outkicks the rest that performs better than the other ones?
0:50:12 So tell me all those attributes and those strengths and weaknesses.
0:50:14 And I’m going to just do that.
0:50:15 Exactly.
0:50:17 You can reverse engineer.
0:50:19 Meaning you can work backwards from that and find a great business.
0:50:21 So I did this with a recent business we haven’t announced yet
0:50:25 where we first talked to bankers and we learned from that.
0:50:29 Oh, that validated a lot of things we already liked about the business idea.
0:50:31 We had an idea, talked to the bankers.
0:50:33 That kind of cosigned or stamped that, yes,
0:50:35 this is actually an even better idea than we thought,
0:50:38 meaning it traded for much higher multiples.
0:50:42 And the business could be like, we didn’t have to do A, B and C.
0:50:45 A and B were going to be more than enough to have an outstanding outcome.
0:50:48 They also told us, on the other hand, like, so for example,
0:50:49 here’s my five questions for bankers.
0:50:53 I go to bankers and I say, what deals have gotten done recently?
0:50:54 So that’s the first question.
0:50:57 Number two, which ones, like you said, outkicked the coverage.
0:50:59 So which ones traded at the highest multiple and why?
0:51:01 What was the unique about those?
0:51:04 Was it just simply timing or was there something that they had in there,
0:51:08 the way that they did it or the cost structure that made them particularly attractive?
0:51:12 Then the third question I ask is, what deals didn’t get done and why?
0:51:15 So meaning what deals couldn’t cross the finish line?
0:51:17 What were the big red flags that stopped people from buying the business
0:51:19 because you want to basically know those too?
0:51:22 Fourth question, who are the buyers and why are they buying?
0:51:25 So basically, every buyer has a plan and you want to know,
0:51:28 are the buyers only strategics or are there private equity folks?
0:51:29 Are there independent sponsors?
0:51:30 Who are the potential buyers?
0:51:32 And then what’s their game plan once they buy it?
0:51:38 Oh, they’re buying things at a $5 million EBITDA number for 7x or 10x.
0:51:43 And then they’re rolling up five of those and they’re trying to get to $25 million
0:51:45 and they’re trying to trade that at 20x.
0:51:46 And okay, that’s their game plan.
0:51:47 Gotcha.
0:51:51 And then the last one is, if my business did XYZ,
0:51:54 so this is the useful one when you’re not ready yet.
0:51:56 But I basically say, hey, here’s where we’re at today.
0:51:58 Here’s where I think we’re going to be in a year.
0:52:00 If this is what my business looks like a year from now,
0:52:02 what do you think it would trade for and why?
0:52:07 And getting that from four or five different bankers really helps triangulate a space.
0:52:14 So last week, I spent maybe seven hours on the phone with bankers doing this process.
0:52:20 And I feel like I learned more in those seven hours than I would have in seven months
0:52:21 of just operating my business.
0:52:23 It was so clarifying how to do this.
0:52:26 And it just made me realize, man, more people should do this.
0:52:29 I’m going to come on the pod and at least say it so that for the people for whom it’s applicable,
0:52:34 which is, I would say, you’re an entrepreneur looking for your next hit, next space,
0:52:37 and you’re not just being driven by some passion or calling.
0:52:39 You are doing it more analytically, let’s say.
0:52:40 This is a tool.
0:52:43 Or if you’re a business owner and you want to sell someday,
0:52:49 and you’re at a few million dollars or your profit minimum, go have this conversation.
0:52:52 I’m so on board.
0:52:54 I’ve done this a bunch of times and I think it’s so smart.
0:52:57 I think that there’s this idea in Silicon Valley.
0:53:02 There was this trick question when you’re raising funding from a VC and it says,
0:53:04 what’s the outcome here?
0:53:05 Like, what would you sell for?
0:53:08 And the answer that everyone pretends–
0:53:09 Over my dead body.
0:53:10 Yeah, I would never sell.
0:53:16 And the answer, absolutely, could be like, I’m going to sell.
0:53:19 But the answer probably should be like, well, I don’t know.
0:53:19 Maybe we will.
0:53:20 Maybe we won’t.
0:53:24 But if we get to these numbers, we can sell for this or we can IPO.
0:53:30 Like, the idea of I have an exit in mind has been told to us that that’s silly.
0:53:31 I think that that’s silly.
0:53:35 Well, it’s a very Silicon Valley thing because for two specific reasons.
0:53:40 One, all venture capital is predicated on the idea that you’re going to drive this to a billion
0:53:40 dollars plus.
0:53:45 So if you show any weakness, any hint that this guy would sell for less than a billion
0:53:49 dollars, like if he got an 80 million dollar offer that would change his life, he’ll take it.
0:53:53 Well, then this is not a good investment for me because I’m taking all the risk of failure.
0:53:57 But I need to know that if this succeeds, it can be a billion dollar plus.
0:54:00 And one of the risks of it being a billion dollar plus company is not just that the business works,
0:54:04 but that this founder will hold on and they will resist temptation.
0:54:08 So Silicon Valley investors, because of the fund math, they need that.
0:54:12 That’s why they put their values on you and say, well, those are your needs.
0:54:13 That’s cool for you.
0:54:15 That’s not my needs necessarily as an entrepreneur.
0:54:16 That’s the first thing.
0:54:19 The second thing is, there’s an ego pride.
0:54:22 It seems noble in some way to say, this is my life.
0:54:23 This is my life company.
0:54:25 I’ll do this for 100 years.
0:54:27 I think we’re going to dominate the space so much.
0:54:28 It just sounds so cool.
0:54:29 It sounds so great.
0:54:34 By the way, I think you can do that and also this.
0:54:36 So there’s this book that I love called Built to Sell.
0:54:38 Have you ever seen Built to Sell?
0:54:38 No.
0:54:42 It’s a popular book, but here’s the premise, which is you build your company to sell because
0:54:46 building a sellable business means you may or may not sell it, but you have a company that
0:54:47 operates well.
0:54:49 And what does Warren Buffett say?
0:54:54 He says, build your company so an idiot can run it because someday an idiot will be running it.
0:54:58 That’s kind of the premise here with Built to Sell, which is you’re going to build your
0:54:59 company to operate well.
0:55:03 And so I think you should build your company to exit regardless if you’re going to exit or not.
0:55:04 I agree fully.
0:55:09 I guess what I’m saying is, and that works for us because we don’t raise venture capital
0:55:10 for our businesses anymore.
0:55:12 We just own them ourselves.
0:55:17 But a lot of the advice you get is still from VCs because they’re the loud people.
0:55:18 They’re the people who are famous.
0:55:20 So you sort of take their advice even though you’re not actually in their game.
0:55:21 You’re in your own game.
0:55:24 And so I think that’s a very, very important distinction.
0:55:29 The other thing though is it does sound cooler to say I would never sell this.
0:55:32 I sell to Amazon.
0:55:33 I’m trying to buy Amazon.
0:55:36 Why do you love your boy, Brett Adcock?
0:55:37 Because Brett Adcock is all bravado.
0:55:38 He’s all chest.
0:55:41 He basically will say, we’re going to change the world.
0:55:42 We’re going to build a trillion-dollar company.
0:55:44 Anything less than that, what’s the point?
0:55:49 And you’re like, oh, my God, it’s intoxicating as Sam Parr would say.
0:55:54 It is intoxicating to be around somebody who is going only for the big shot and is not
0:55:59 saying I’m building this to sell or that there’s a path here to a $350 million exit,
0:56:02 which will 7x your money.
0:56:03 He doesn’t talk like that.
0:56:07 And because he doesn’t talk like that, it is very attractive.
0:56:12 And it is very admirable because many of us wish that we could be as hardcore and brave
0:56:13 and bold as that.
0:56:14 We’re just not.
0:56:16 And by the way, I don’t think you have to be.
0:56:17 I don’t want to play that game.
0:56:19 But when you do see somebody play that game, it’s cool.
0:56:20 I got to admit, it is cool.
0:56:21 Yeah, I agree.
0:56:22 I agree.
0:56:22 It’s cool.
0:56:23 I agree.
0:56:28 And I’ve invested in a couple, like Brett Adcock I invested in and he has this attitude.
0:56:29 And I like that.
0:56:34 By the way, now that you have friends that are VCs or I mean, you sort of were one for
0:56:39 a minute, isn’t it funny how you talk to them about like your company and raising capital
0:56:41 and you’ll say, no, we don’t raise capital.
0:56:45 And when you’re friends with them, it’s like, that’s the right move.
0:56:45 Yeah.
0:56:46 You know what I mean?
0:56:47 Yeah, exactly.
0:56:48 When you’re not, when you’re not…
0:56:49 To give you a low five.
0:56:53 Then I’m going to hit you with a low five real quick.
0:56:54 Yeah, they like say that’s the right move.
0:56:58 Now, when you tell them that and you’re a potential client, they say like, oh, that’s
0:57:00 cute, like, you know what I mean?
0:57:01 That’s a lifestyle business.
0:57:02 That’s good for you.
0:57:06 But when you’re friends with them, they think to themselves, they’ll say like smart.
0:57:11 The irony of the VC thing is a VC does the opposite of what they want all the founders
0:57:12 to do.
0:57:13 So they don’t go all in on one idea.
0:57:15 They have a diversified portfolio.
0:57:20 They, they are not, you know, sort of only looking at the upside.
0:57:22 They make a ton of money in fees, right?
0:57:25 So they, you know, they’re going to whatever when, when somebody raises money.
0:57:28 So for example, what’s the podcaster?
0:57:32 Harry Stebbings just raised a $400 million fund.
0:57:34 That’s amazing.
0:57:35 That’s incredible, by the way.
0:57:42 Harry is going to make $80 million guaranteed in fees, just fees.
0:57:45 He could be the worst investor in the world.
0:57:46 Why?
0:57:50 Because he’s going to make $80 million because he’s going to make 2% a year on $400 million.
0:57:52 It’s 20% over the life of a 10-year fund.
0:57:53 So just do 20%.
0:57:56 $80 million in fees guaranteed.
0:57:57 That’s his floor.
0:58:01 Who cares about the upside from there if you’re Harry Stebbings, right?
0:58:04 All you got to do is keep the game going and raise, maybe raise another fund.
0:58:05 That would be amazing, right?
0:58:10 So VCs, while they want you to be all in, and they want you to live on scraps,
0:58:14 and they want you to have no, no diversification and stay super laser focused,
0:58:17 and they want you to go ride for the big upside.
0:58:20 They themselves have a very different picture of risk,
0:58:23 which by the way, I think is a smarter picture of risk.
0:58:26 But it is, it is just funny that that’s true.
0:58:30 It’s funny that the person giving you that advice is literally doing the exact opposite
0:58:32 with their own finances and portfolio.
0:58:32 That’s insane.
0:58:34 And by the way, they’re not wrong because they’re saying,
0:58:37 “Oh, you wanted to play the Mark Zuckerberg game, then that’s how you got to play.”
0:58:40 So then they are giving you the right advice for you if you want to be doing that.
0:58:44 The $80 million fee thing, I never knew that.
0:58:47 I mean, I knew that they get, what is it, 2%?
0:58:48 When do you do the math?
0:58:50 Well, 2% is misleading.
0:58:52 It’s 2% every year off the top.
0:58:54 So the same reason why financial vie, we talked about Ken Fisher.
0:58:56 Oh, 1%, that’s not much.
0:58:59 1% of your entire net assets every year off the top,
0:59:05 regardless of performance, is like one of the great sort of seven wonders of the world.
0:59:06 That’s the eighth.
0:59:10 It’s like the eighth wonder of the world is that a 1% off the top fee every year
0:59:13 is actually, it becomes a gargantuan number over 10 years.
0:59:16 And so that’s the same thing with a venture fund like this.
0:59:18 Dude, God bless him.
0:59:19 God bless America.
0:59:21 I guess he’s not even in America.
0:59:23 That’s the best part.
0:59:25 They need to put a monument of Harry Stepping somewhere
0:59:28 for raising a $400 million fund and $80 million in fees.
0:59:30 It’s the $80 million monument.
0:59:32 Oh my God, that’d be great.
0:59:35 That fun thing, or that monument thing is ridiculous, right?
0:59:36 This monument thing is fascinating.
0:59:38 We got to, I got to go look more into this.
0:59:40 This is a great episode.
0:59:40 All right, that’s it.
0:59:41 That’s a pod.
0:59:43 I feel like I can rule the world.
0:59:45 I know I could be what I want to.
0:59:48 I put my all in it like no days off.
0:59:51 On a road let’s travel never looking back.
0:59:53 Right.
0:59:55 You.
0:59:57 You.
0:59:59 You.
1:00:01 You.
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