Buffett’s Money Wisdom, Galloway’s $100M Advice & Why Newsletters Suck (#493)

And that's how we grew. And that's why I tell people, I say to blog, I don't actually mean blog, but I meant create bangers, text-based bangers on a consistent basis and get people to love your free content enough to subscribe.

TBB, baby. Text-based bangers. That's been our strategy, right? Like, how'd you—

All right, we're live. Can I tell you about a few interesting pieces of content I've consumed lately? And I want to hear what you've consumed.

Yeah, let's do it. The info diet section.

The info diet section. Yeah. Let me tell you the first one. So I have been on a Scott Galloway kick. Scott Galloway, um, has a podcast and I think that's what he's more famous for than anything, but he, uh, uh, he started a few companies. But he's got this, like, one of his companies, L2, I think it sold for like $200 million. It was like 9 figures. He, dude, he did this podcast called Scott's Personal Finance. I found it on YouTube where he talks about like money and, and, and like how much money he has and what he spends it on. And he like, he's like, this is all going to sound douchey, but I'll tell you. He's like, basically I'm worth at least $100 million. He goes, he goes, I made it into the 9 figures recently. He said, I'm still incredibly anxious about money. It stems from childhood. He's like, we were just poor and I'm super anxious about it. But then he goes, he does something cool. He says two things that are interesting. One, he goes, I'm spending between $200,000 and $400,000 a month and I moved to Europe. And the guy was like, why would you move to Europe? He goes, well, America's the best place to make money and Europe's the best place to spend it.

Love that. That's great.

Yeah, it was awesome. He goes, he goes, look, what I've realized is that I'm getting older. I don't have a lot of time to live. Maybe I have 40 more years or something like that to live. I'm going to spend it and I'm going to enjoy the hell out of it. He goes, it feels incredibly masculine for me to be able to provide these experiences for my family. And I'm doing it. He says, I spend around $100,000 to $200,000 a month now on travel. We fly private. We went to the World Cup. I brought my, uh, I brought, uh, another couple and their family just because I wanted to. We paid for the whole thing. And he goes through this like really like detailed thing about spending his money. And another interesting thing he said, and I want to ask this about you. So he has had, I think, 3 companies of which one was like a very big success and that it probably made him $50 million. But he said, I've made more money being on board, on the boards of companies and the equity that they've given me than actual, actually building companies. And what I'm surprised about is what he said is that I've made more money doing not my main thing, or at least what I thought was going to be my main thing, doing these like ancillary things. Has that proven to be true in your career yet?

100%. I wouldn't say more yet, but I've definitely seen examples of that. So I'll give you a very simple example of my life and I'll tell you one that was from a recent episode. So in my life, I've, I started an e-commerce company, maybe e-commerce brand 3 years ago, roughly. I can't tell you how many hours I've spent on this e-commerce thing. Like it takes a lot of time to build a real company that actually has, you know, real revenues, real profits that are significant. And there's a physical product, tons of energy that goes into it. I have pulled out $0 and $0.00 from this business. Now the business makes a lot of money, right? We're tens of millions of dollars in revenue, but I pull out $0. It all gets reinvested and all my time gets invested into this thing. And it is very labor intensive. So I haven't made much money from this. But one thing that did happen was along the way, I was like, ah, such a pain. Like, I'm always on my phone, you know, like often if you message me, I'll be like, oh yeah, I'll send it to you when I'm back at my computer. They're like, I'm not just like at my computer a lot. And, um, I wanted to be able to check on my, my, my store from my phone. And the Shopify app doesn't really make that very easy. Like you can get in, you can maybe see your revenue, but you don't know how your ads are doing. You don't know how your Amazon store is doing. You don't know how your Google accounts do it. You don't know how your Klaviyo emails are working. And so meet these two, you know, two Jewish guys who are like, hey, we made this thing that's like a mobile way to manage your storefront for any e-com brand. They're like, oh, we have an e-com brand. We built this thing for us and I use it. I'm like, oh, this is great. And I'm like, hey, I'd like to invest. And they're like, oh cool. Like, you know, I think I was maybe the first investor, maybe second, something like that. Very cheap, like $5 million valuation or something like that.

Do you remember what you put in?

$75,000 to a company called Triple Whale.

Was that all your money?

Uh, no, this, all my investments have to go through the fund unless it's like, um, something that like wouldn't be eligible for the fund, but this would, because otherwise it's like a bias thing. So put it in from the fund. Um, so put this money in and I'm like, uh, great. I hope this does well, but I'm not sure. It seems like, you know, maybe just an analytics widget. I don't know. It might not be the biggest thing in the world, but I, I think it's really useful for me. I think other store owners will find it useful, start telling other owners about it, blah, blah, blah. This company's now worth hundreds of millions of dollars. So, you know, on a $5 million valuation entry point, you know, we're up 40x or something like that. You know, 30, 40, 50x, somewhere in that range. So, you know, take $75,000 and multiply by, let's just take 40x for a second.

It's $3 million. $3 million.

Now of course it's the fund, so, you know, my carry on that's 20%. But it's also not done. This is just like, you know, a couple years in. If this becomes a $2 billion company, you know, I, I, there's, it's easy to see that I will have made more. And, and by the way, I invested in 6 other e-commerce SaaS tools. It's like, oh, sales tax is a pain in the ass.

Cool.

Let me use Numeral for that. This is like a new startup that's doing making it easy for e-com owners to do sales tax. Oh, I need, uh, bookkeeping and accounting. Let's use Finaloop instead of QuickBooks. It's like I started investing in a bunch of these, whatever I thought was the best tool after I did the research. I was like, well, I'm not just gonna be a user, I'm also gonna be an investor. And I just did that across the board. And a lot of these are, are huge now. Postscript for, for text message, like what Ron DeSantis is using for his, uh, text messaging. I don't know what he's using, but he probably should be using Postscript 'cause it's the, like the best way to send. SMS marketing, and you just invest in these because you're a user. But like, I've made more money investing in e-commerce SaaS tools than I've made from my store. And the store took all of my time and these other ones took 1 hour of emails to back and forth to just do the investment. And that's like, you know, not what I would have expected going in. However, had I not done the e-commerce thing, I would have never understood the value of these tools or been able to see them early or been able to be like, hey, Let me in and I'll introduce you to 100 other people that have stores because I'm in that network now. And so you made money in this, like, not what you planned to make money. You made money in this other weird way. Same way Scott Galloway didn't make, you know, he makes the money in his company, but then his reputation is where he gets paid to be on boards way easier and more money, especially when you count dollars per hour. I'll give you another example. We just did a podcast with Samir from Colin and Samir. And in that he talks about like, They got their start doing something that like nobody would look at it and be like, this is a good business plan. He was like, we're going to basically, I think they were fans of lacrosse or lacrosse, they were lacrosse players or something. And they created like a lacrosse sports commentary network on YouTube. It's like niche of a niche of a niche. And they did this pretty early on YouTube. And honestly, it didn't work that well, but it did two things. It taught them about YouTube and making videos. And now their YouTube channel is like million subscribers. It's a, you know, it's a multimillion dollar brand easily. So that taught them that. But also when they were doing that, when they were following the lacrosse scene, they saw this one guy, he was the best lacrosse player in the country and he's like, wanted to go pro, but there's like no pro scene for lacrosse. You get paid nothing. And so he's like, dude, if I go pro, I make $35,000 a year. This sucks. He's like, screw it. I'm going to make my own lacrosse league. And this guy created his own lacrosse league. Well, guess who became the first investor in the lacrosse league? Samir, because anyway, he's like, I didn't have a lot of money. I put in whatever, I don't know what it was. Let's pretend it's $10,000. But that lacrosse league is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars and he got in at the very beginning. So in this weird way, he's going to make, he'll probably make more, have made more from that one investment than all of the YouTube action he was trying to do along the way. But it only would've happened by being in the game and getting, giving yourself that opportunity to get lucky.

I think it's called the Arena. It's being in the arena.

Sorry, it's hazardous for brown guys like me to say the arena. I don't want to get caught in that fire.

You could say that he's in the arena. That's good. And by the way, that podcast was great. The second thing that I've consumed lately, I've been reading like crazy. So you and Andrew kind of got me turned on this. I hate, I don't really love investing, but I wanted to learn more about it. And so I read Warren Buffett's biography, not the one Snowball, because that's too long. It's like 1,000 pages. This one's called The Making of an American Capitalist. Have you ever read anything about Buffett?

Back in the day, like 10 years ago, I read a Buffett book, but I don't really remember it, to be honest.

Man, I didn't know anything about— I didn't really know anything about him, but there's a few traits about him that are crazy. The one, like, he's got like this aw shucks demeanor. Like, I'm from the Midwest. Like, what do I know? You know, I just—

super charismatic. He could be president.

Yeah. Yeah, well, it's mostly kind of bullshit in a sense. Like the guy's a genius. Like he's like the 1% of the 1% in terms of IQ, in terms of horsepower. And there's this crazy, this crazy story where he's like helping to buy, I think it's Salomon Brothers or no, sorry, it's ABC. So he's buying ABC for multi-billions of dollars and he's sitting at his desk and they're like, all right, let's work out the deal. He goes, oh no, let's just work it out right now. Like, and he's like, well, what about your analysts? Like, where are they? He goes, I'm the computer. It's all here. And he doesn't have a calculator. He doesn't have anything like that. He's like, let's just, we're going to do the deal right now. And I can just do it in my head. And he just memorizes all these, their annual reports and all their numbers. And then he like does the math in their head. He's like, if I, Warren goes, if I can't do the math in my head, then I don't understand this deal and I probably shouldn't do it. So his IQ is crazy. The second thing is that his discipline is super strong. So before he had Berkshire Hathaway, he had a fund. With like, I think it started with like $100 grand or something, not substantial, but it was growing 30% a year. And he did that for like 10 years. And in the '60s, he just shut it down. And they're like, why are you shutting this down? He's like, well, I just don't see any good opportunities right now. You know, I, like I said, I'm looking for good opportunities. I don't see any right now, so I'm just going to shut this down. And so he just doesn't, he quit investing and had a little mini retirement. He's incredibly disciplined. And then the last thing is that he has super high integrity. So like he's only sued someone one time, and that time was when he gave a guy a charity $25,000 and the guy robbed him of the— and he didn't actually provide the charitable work. That's the only time he sued someone. And there was another time where he was being investigated by the Senate. They thought that he was insider trading because he did a few things that were like smart and he just made the right calls. And after investigating him for 2 or 3 years, they're like, hey, do you want to like join this committee on like fraud? Because you're really smart and you're like the most honest guy we've met. And he joined the committee. There's another time where he wants to, uh, he's like in this country club and he's like, hey, why don't we let Jewish people in this country club? This is pretty ridiculous. And he's like, and the guys were like, look, the Jews have their own thing. They have their own country club. It's 100% Jewish. Let the Jews go there. So Instead of putting up a fuss about it, he goes and joins the Jewish country club and he goes, hey, they integrate and they let non-Jews into their thing. I think we should do that to our thing. And that's like how he goes about doing stuff. He's like not confrontational, but he's like pretty slick. And then the last thing I guess is he basically, for the first like 40 years of his career, he only read annual reports and that's how he got his information. So people are like, how are you so good? And he's like, Dude, I just read like 5 annual reports a day and all the information that I'm using, he was like, I don't even have a computer. I don't have a terminal. All the information that I use, any one of you out there can go to a library and get that same information. So super unique guy. So I've been very fascinated with him, but he's got one downside. Do you know what is, you know, he's like a shit family man, right? Right.

Yeah. He, he's a very weird, a strange family dynamic. So what happened? So he got divorced.

Yeah.

But then he didn't get divorced.

So his wife, Susie, they, she was like a hippie. And for some reason he was into that and they were married and he loved her and everything. But she was one day, she goes, you know, Warren, I just want to go off to San Francisco and I want to do my own thing, but we're not going to get a divorce. And he's like, all right, cool. And she goes, also, I have my friend named Astrid. She's going to come over and take care of you.

I thought it was her sister. It's not her sister. It's just a friend.

It was, it was like someone she was friendly with.

Okay.

And so within a week of Astrid taking care of Buffett, of Warren, they are like lovers and like she moves in and they like date. However, like they're all friends with each other. And so Susie's like, hey Astrid, I think you should redecorate the house from when I did it. It's getting a little old. Like she gives her tips on taking care of him. And then like when Buffett has to go to like these big, like presidential public meetings where he is meeting with Senate or whatever, Susie comes when he, when she wants, when he wants to go and do like some local stuff or like some, some stuff that doesn't require a lot of press, Astrid comes and they take turns. And every once in a while, if it's like a really big thing, they'll both go and they'll team up and they'll support him. It's very interesting and it's very strange, but he's not a very present father and he's super fucking cheap with his kids. So there was a time when his daughter was living in a really crappy apartment and she had just had a baby. And this one of Buffett's friends goes to check on her and the daughter can barely see the TV because it's a little small black and white TV. And the friend goes, Warren, you should buy her a big screen TV, man. She just had a baby. She's sitting in this shitty apartment. Just buy her a fucking TV. And he wouldn't do it. He didn't want to buy her a TV. And it took him convincing to, he's like, I don't want to spoil them. And so he's really cheap and it didn't seem like the best father. I like that.

There's one thing I always remember about Buffett that are like two things that I really like about Buffett. I have a whole doc that I keep called Buffettisms. And because he has this skill of telling these tiny stories, these little parables, that are both funny and interesting and then make his point for him. And I just feel like he's got an arsenal of these. And so I've been, I don't read a lot of his books, but I watch a lot of his talks and I watch a lot of their annual shareholder meetings to try to find these little phrases he uses that I am like, oh, this guy's so charming, but also he does a great job of making his point using that. Another thing I like about Buffett is he said one thing once that really stuck with me, He goes, the stock market, like people are like, why don't more people get rich? He goes, because they don't really understand how the game works. He goes, the best rule of this entire game in the stock market is that you don't have to play. He's like, most people's problem is that they just do too many things. They make too many investments, they buy and sell too many things, and they feel constantly compelled to like come to an answer on should they or shouldn't they do X. And he's like, you really just have to sit and wait for the fat pitch. You just don't have to do, you don't have to swing.

That's where you got your fat pitch thing.

Yeah, exactly. There are no called strikes in investing. Like you could sit there all day and just watch pitches go by and just wait for the fat pitch. The problem is people suck at waiting. And that really stood out to me because I'm somebody who historically is very bad at waiting. I'm a very impulsive, impatient person. It serves you well as an entrepreneur. To be very impatient. You take a bunch of action. As an investor, impatience and impulsiveness is a terrible trait. So as I've shifted my career to go from entrepreneur to investor, I had to ask myself, you know, what do I need to relearn? What do I need to unlearn? What served me as an entrepreneur that's not going to serve me as an investor? And let me make that conscious switch. And that was one of the key switches that I realized I had to make.

And I just, and I agree, that's a really good lesson. And I think he stole that from Teddy Williams, like a famous baseball player who hit lots of home runs. And he like, Teddy Williams made this like graph.

He just, he has a strike zone. So it was just the strike zone. And he's like, look, my batting average, if I hit a pitch in this bottom corner is pretty low. I might make connection with the pitch. It might be a strike, but my batting average is low. I really shouldn't even swing at that pitch, even though it's a strike. He's like, I'm looking for stuff in the sweet spot because here I'm over.400, right? So He has the, Ted Williams has the greatest batting average ever. And one of the reasons why was he was more disciplined than others in what pitches he would swing at. He would really wait for those fat pitches, whereas most batters get quite impatient and start just hacking at everything.

But my issue with Warren's advice on that stuff was, all right, well, what's a good pitch look like? And so I ordered this book that's going to, it's like they didn't make a lot of copies of it, but so I had to find it on Amazon and it's going to take like 2 or 3 weeks to come, but it's I like how you just said Amazon like it's like some niche bookstore you went to. Like, oh, it's hard to find.

I had to go to amazon.com to find it.

It's this little book, this little mom-and-pop boutique. But they analyze all of his deals and they write out what he saw in them because I'm trying to figure out, okay, you're telling me what a bad one looks like. What's a good one look like? And so that's some of the content that I've been consuming. Um, it's been good. I've been reading like a book or two a week. It's because Kindle, you read on Kindle ever?

Yeah. Yeah. That's all I read on pretty much. I'll, I start on Kindle and then if I like the book, I'll order the hardcover so that I have it around the house to just remember it, pick it up whenever I want. But I start on Kindle.

Well, they have this like percentage bar at the bottom where it says what percentage of the book that you've read. And I'm like, I'm going to get through 20% every night. And, uh, it's been awesome. So shout out to Kindle. You got, you nailed it.

Gamified your ass. Okay, so let me, let me tell you two things that are interesting. One, the content I consumed. So I listened to this podcast by our friend David Senra. I don't know that, that well. I hung out with him one time and he's, he's a total nut in the best way. Like, he's 1,000 miles a minute. But I want to share with you, he did a pod the other day that I thought was really good called, I think it was called The Greatest Interview I've Ever Done. And it was basically some, it was Patrick O'Shaughnessy interviewing him. They're like, what did you notice about a lot of, you've studied all these great men in history, right? You read these biographies and what are some common things that you see? He goes, the story of the son, the story of the son is begins at the end of the story of the father. So basically like, embedded in the story of the son is the story of the father. And he's like, this is very, very common. Whether the father was great in all these ways, often you'll see the son take a totally different approach. Or if the father was limiting or hard-ass or really brutal in one way, the son takes that trauma and basically uses it in what they do. And I thought that was pretty cool. Second thing he said about reading that I really liked, he goes, They go, do you reread books? And he goes, yeah, of course. I love rereading books. Reread books all the time. And I think a common thing would be like, oh, isn't that kind of a waste to read what you've already read? It's like, you've already read that book. It's the same thing. Why not read something new? And he said it really well. He goes, I read books like several years apart often. And he goes, the words are the same, but I've changed. He's like, I'm a different guy than I was when I first read that book. So the second time I read it, I've had years of life experience. I've read 100 other books. I've had all these things that I've done in my life and now the same words mean something totally different to me, or I have an elevated understanding or memory, or a different thing stands out to me. I thought that was a really great insight on rereading because I'm a big fan of rereading. Like, I'd rather find a great thing and soak in it versus trying to just move on to the next and count the number of books I can read in a year. And I thought that point he brought up is one that I really never never heard. I also thought that he did an amazing job of almost like building his like personal story. So he said it really well. Why'd you start doing this? Like, why did you start this, this whole thing where you're reading all these books and you're doing this podcast? Like, how did you even have the inspiration for that? He goes, look, man, my, my childhood was not the best. Like, I grew up and my parents did their best, but they weren't necessarily the best. He goes, I'm the only person in my family to ever graduate from high school. And he's like, I wanted to be successful, but everywhere I looked around me, all I saw was the wrong answer. All I saw was what not to do. I didn't read just as a hobby for fun. I read because I was looking for the answers. I wanted to know what to do because all I saw in my life was what not to do. That's what led me to reading the biographies of the greatest people. He goes, I have spent the last, you know, whatever, 10 years of my life having one-way conversations with the greatest people ever to live on this earth. And he goes, that's what I think about reading. He goes, I think reading is having a one-way conversation with the greatest people on earth. And he goes, and he goes, and the, you know, the podcast, the people are like, why'd you start a podcast? I don't know, man. I didn't even start it. He goes, this is just an obsession. I'm just studying these people. I needed a way to put it, put my thoughts down. He goes, this is an obsession disguised as a podcast. And I loved it. I was like, wow, these are great little one-liners. He's very lyrical with it. And so, um, I'm very impressed by David Sennett. I think he's doing a great job. And yeah, there's, there was, it was a fun, fun thing to consume.

I joked with them. I was like, you know, like David, I got turned off on reading a lot of these books for a while because I would listen to them on Audible and I had my favorite narrators and I would go like, oh, I love this guy's voice. What else did he read this narrate? And this guy has read like a thousand, narrated a thousand books. And I'm like, How the fuck is this guy still a narrator? Wouldn't you think if you like read all these business books, he would be way more successful?

Well, that's, that's kind of what I'm bringing up here. Like, I love the way he phrases things. I think it's really compelling. I actually don't agree with him that like, you're not actually having one-way conversations with the greatest people on earth. It's not like you needed to do all of that to be successful. Actually, you should probably just get out there and do some things, right? Like, I actually could argue a bunch of the other sides, but what's the point? The fact that he believes that is going to lead him to a really great and successful place. I don't subscribe to all his thoughts, but I am a fan of his level of intensity and conviction in himself and what he's doing.

In California, like, I think in the '90s, they banned weightlifting in the prisons because they're like, holy shit, we're building super criminals. These guys are getting yoked. They're like too big. And they're surrounded by other criminals. They can talk about the best way to do stuff. And now they're fucking bench pressing 500 proud. These are super criminals. We gotta get rid of 'em. David is like becoming a super criminal a little bit. He's like one of the guys who's like reading it and like in the yard just cranking away. He's plotting. David's plotting, dude.

There's a, I feel like I could be like, hey David, he's sitting there reading a book. I'm like, David, you like that book? He's like, fucking love this book. What are you, are you joking me? And I'm like, David, in this room right over here, Heidi Klum is standing there naked. She's surrounded by all the best desserts you could ever eat. Michelin star desserts. The music, it's the greatest music you've ever heard. All of the unreleased Drake albums are in here. It's the best music. It's the best party. There's no other guys in here, just all naked supermodels. And David, the best part is when you walk in, you become a billionaire. And I think he'd be like, he wouldn't have even heard anything. He'd just be turning the page to the next page. Like, this guy doesn't want to do anything else.

He would've licked his fingers and just looked back down and said, just turn the page. The silence, chump.

Reading, and that's the best compliment and the best insult I can give him at the same time. Like, I think it is amazing that he is that way, that he really feels like this is the best thing that anyone could possibly do. He can't believe nobody else is doing this. He doesn't— it's like, this is the peak of the peak of life experience.

I'm inspired by him. Anything else that you've consumed that you like?

Not a consume, but I have a different— so in the way that I'm like, by the way, I hope he doesn't take offense.

I'm joking about some of these things, but like, yeah, I'm a huge fan of David Eagleman. I'm a fan of his stuff and I think he does an amazing job.

And I have no vested interest in his success except for I think he's really cool and I think he does a great job. I appreciate his craft.

And he's one of the few pods that I like listen to on a regular basis. It's quite good.

Yeah, that was like a genuine endorsement.

It's called Founders, by the way. The pod is called Founders. So we'll give him a, we'll give him some love.

The other thing that, uh, so I'm, so the other interesting experience I had was I recognize I'm drawn to people like him, people who are slightly extreme, who are obsessed, who have an independent mindedness. They're deciding how they want to live life. And their rubric of success is different than others, right? That's what I just described about him that I like. Ben had a meeting with somebody and he comes back, he calls me, oh dude, I met this guy, he's great, he's doing this thing. And then he just kept saying, he said 2 or 3 times, really great guy. And I was like, Ben, why is he such a great guy? You're only there for 45 minutes. What do you mean by that? Why did you, he kept saying, I really liked him. I really liked him. I really like what he's doing. I go, do you really like what he's doing or you really like him? He goes, I think I really like him. I go, let me guess, was he high energy when he talked? A nice guy, like simple, not, didn't intimidate you by kind of being a hard ass about anything. And did he teach you one or two interesting things during the conversation? He goes, bingo. I know Ben, because that's your archetype of what you really like. That's why you really like me. I'm a high energy guy. I'm a nice guy. I don't like, you know, I don't like kind of push people into a place that they feel uncomfortable. And usually if you talk to me for an hour, you're going to learn one or two things. That's why we get along. And I said, you know, one thing we should do as, again, how do you become a great, how do you shift from operator to maybe spending more time investing is I think we got to investigate what are our bias and our blind spots. So basically we made a little list of what's the personality archetype I am irrationally drawn towards. For me, it's the David Senra types. It's the slightly extreme, uncomfortable ambition around their thing, independent-mindedness, obsession with their craft. I am drawn to that. I will make mistakes. It's like a girl who's like, ah, he's a 6, but he's wearing a leather jacket. It's like, it just does something to me. I gotta go for him. Like, that's what I'm drawn to. And I was like, on the other side, what can't I stand? Somebody who's just dry. If you have no sense of humor, if you're dry, like you could be the smartest guy in the world sitting on a gold mine of a business. If you're boring, like within 5 minutes I'm like, this guy sucks, I'm out. And you know, I'm just like, who's an example of that?

Like a famous person. Well dude, I'm not trying to make a, you know, I'm trying to give you a famous, like a, like a, or like a, a, someone who you've read about.

Let's see.

A public person.

I don't know off the top of my head.

Do you have one who's just dry? I mean, there's like a bunch of like famous investors and shit who like I've read about and I'm like, this is snoozefest.

Um, like, yeah, there's probably just like some, I don't know, enterprise SaaS or these people who are like, yeah, we just make the best, um, we're like, you know, we just provide, uh, solid procurement services to others. Right. It's like, I don't know.

And like, they don't have a lot of hobbies.

Yeah. I'm like, do you love that? Like, no, but we service a need and it's like, cool. Like, so like, what are some of the cool growth hacks you've been doing? They're like, Oh, we don't really need growth. Actually, we grow 17% year over year. It's like, uh, we just really need to do solid operations. It's like, oh, okay. I, I just, I need to get out of this conversation right now. Like I'm, I feel itchy. Like I gotta get outta here.

Whenever I read about like hedge fund guys, I'm like, this is a snooze fest, dude. You're just like this, like, oh, like, like when they do like a lot of like fast trading, unless they're kind of like a criminal and kind of doing drugs, then I'm in. Well, yeah, I'm always down with like, uh, I love a good crime story unless you're, Driving your successful life off a cliff.

I'm out.

Yeah. Yeah. I need some drama, but like whenever I read about like hedge fund guys, I'm like, dude, you're just playing on Excel all day. I don't find that enjoyable to hear about.

But I think, I think it is useful. It was a useful exercise for us to do, which was what are you irrationally drawn towards that you should probably like dial it down, discount, be able to apply a discount after the fact when you're, when, when, when you're out of heat. And then what do you have an irrational distaste for? Where you're going to underprice or underestimate somebody and actually you shouldn't be. People have been talking about like bias and like the stuff like, but like, you know, they always came at it from like a diversity and inclusion point of view. For me, I, you know, like, sure, that's fine, but I've never been like drawn to like, you know, I've never been drawn to spending a bunch of time thinking about that. However, for this, I immediately saw for myself, oh yeah, I could see myself making mistakes being overly generous towards a certain personality type. You say the certain 3 key phrases and I'm all in. And I'm kind of repelled from these things even though I really shouldn't be. It's actually like, I don't need to be your friend. I just, like, if I'm investing into you, I don't need to think you're cool and want to hang with you. I just need to be able to understand what you're doing and invest in it. Do you feel like you have the same thing? Do you have a thing you're drawn to? Like, I feel like one of yours, I'll just say it out loud, is I feel like you're drawn to people who are very meticulous and orderly in the way they operate. Like if somebody's got like a system and like they're a stickler for the details, I feel like in your, like they go up 100 points in your book. Whereas for me, that doesn't really do it.

That does it for me because I envy that. 'Cause that, that's not my natural, you know, like my wife is like that. Like I'm drawn to people who are like orderly and systematic. In discipline, like people who wake up at 5 AM every morning. That's not me. And so like, I'm really fascinated by people who like grind really hard and are systematic and are operational and things like that. Uh, I, I, I get a lot of joy being around those people because I'm not like that.

Can I tell you real quick about a cool thing? Because I feel like we did a bunch of, uh, fluffy stuff today. Okay. Yeah. I got to get a rant off my chest. Um, people are really drawn to things that are highly tactical or highly specific versus, and complex versus things that are simple but might be a little bit airy. Let me give you an example. When I was in LA, we did a bunch of those dinners with founders, and I think I said this in my debrief, but I'll point it out again. People, the conversation would inevitably go like, you have a bunch of people who've all sold their company. Everybody in the thing is successful by traditional measures. And the conversation would always gravitate towards two subjects, like kind of health and longevity, or just like kind of like being happy, being a happier person, some sort of like life quality of life improvement.

Rich guy problems.

Rich guy shit. He's like, oh, I've already made it, but yeah, I feel like I'm not as happy as I thought I would be. So then what? And the longevity health things gives them a new carrot to chase and they kind of feel like they neglected it while running their company and the life quality. Everybody actually just wants a high quality of life. They just don't know how to ask the questions around it. And what you would see was two things. Somebody would say something like that was just like simple and useful. They'd be like, yeah, before bed I don't really use my phone. I just actually kind of review the day and think about how I did and what, just in general, like my interactions of the day, what I might have done differently. And I'm like, oh, I do that too. I have this thing called Revision and it's like I just kind of see the day events of my day and I just go back and just Play them out a little differently in my head. It's really useful. And people are like, the reaction to something like that, if you just kind of tell people like, hey, you know, here's a simple thing you could do. Imagine what you want and what it would feel like to have it. Or think about how your day went to just be kind of mindful and thoughtful about like, you know, versus just always onto the next thing. And the reaction I would get would be like, cool. And the cool is kind of like cool, good for you. Like, I ain't doing that shit. Like, you know, don't tell me to be alone with my thoughts. And then somebody would be like, yeah, you know, I really, I was feeling kind of, you know, I've just been feeling like I'm in a funk. And so I started taking, you know, 6mg of low-dose naltrexone. And then people are like, what, what, what, what is it?

What is it called?

And they're like getting their, every, literally everyone gets their phone out. They start, what is it called? How do you spell that? I'm like, are you just going to take this random drug? This person you've never met. And they'd be like, how many milligrams is that? 5? Is 5 what they say? Where do you get it? Can I order right now before I leave this dinner? And I'm like, y'all motherfuckers are crazy. Why are people so attracted to the pill? The complex thing you can't even pronounce that just might do it for you. Versus, or they'd be like, yeah, I hired this functional cognitive coach. And they'd be like, what's his name? Does he take more clients? Here's the money. And I'm like, bro, have you tried fucking writing down your thoughts for a second? Nobody wants the simple thing. Like, nobody wants the simple obvious thing.

I just thunk it up. I just thunk in my bed and it worked.

I was like, hey, here's what I do. You know, when I go into a situation, instead of just reacting like, oh, it's kind of cold out here, so I'm uncomfortable now, I feel bad, I'm a little bit bothered by that. I just decide before I go in, like, you know what? I want to have a playful experience. I want to have a laughing experience right now. And then I'll just like I was like, I decide that, then I go in and I have that. I look for those moments and I create that experience for myself. It's pretty amazing. You could just do this. You could just decide what experience you want and then go have it. And they're like, is it okay? Can the next person say like a pill that I could take? Like some new nootropic that's going to help me?

They're like, all right, all right, Sha, but can I put that in my body intravenously? Like, does it come with needles or do I buy them?

I'm just like, y'all are insane. You're insane. Insane. Or this guy's like, uh, he's like, uh, you know, I, um, I really want to like— what's that, you know, this equipment? Oh, I bought all this exercise equipment. I'm like, bitch, do you walk? Do you even have like 30 minutes a day? He's like, no, no, I don't exercise. I don't have time, but I'm building out this home gym and I'm building it out. And like, like, you know, you could just do push-ups on the floor, right? You don't have to first buy $10,000 of equipment before you can work out. Like, there's There's no gate to pass. You can literally just do 10 pushups right now. In fact, let's do that right now. And people are not ready for simple action that doesn't require a magic bullet solution. And it annoys the hell out of me. I'm like, are you guys— is everybody around me insane? That's how I feel.

When people say magic pill, I definitely automatically get interested because like, I would like that. Like, why don't they say shortcuts? Like it's a bad thing, but it's like, yeah, I mean, if I can get to my destination shorter and faster, I'm in. That's pretty cool.

They're not even shortcuts. Literally this shit that I was talking about, this low dose fucking whatever it's called, Naltrexone, I don't know what it was. Because guess what? I don't care. Don't need it. But I was like, I was like, so does this work? Like, have you felt like an amazing difference? The person was like, no, you have to take it for 6 months first for your body to acclimate. I'm like, you're getting hosed. And I'm like, okay, honestly, I don't know what this drug does. Maybe it's useful. Maybe it's a specific thing. I'm kind of jokes aside, but I, for that person who, you know, got it prescribed, maybe they needed it for the other 8 bastards in the, at the dinner who were like immediately trying to order it. I was like, y'all don't need this. Like you don't need that right now. That is not the answer to whatever you're, whatever hole you're trying to fill right now. Like there is no chance that that is the correct first step you should be taking.

Well, I think we talked about like the different types of procrastination, like the good, there's actually good types of procrastination, which is like, uh, like the forgetful scientist who like forgets to like shower or like put on the right pair of socks. It's like, ah, that's all right. He's doing the big things right. That's okay. And then there's like the bad type, which is like making plans that don't need to be planned or like buying domain names or like.

Going back and color coding it afterwards. Like, dude, it's okay.

Like, yeah. Or like in, in this case it's like buying pills when it's like, eh, just 10,000 steps a day will, will do the trick as well. But that's pretty funny. That's a good story. I, I, I would've liked to have seen you in that room.

Yeah, I was, I was just like, you guys are nuts. But okay, now to satisfy—

I like this stuff though. I like this stuff by the way. I like this stuff. Uh, me too. I love that. It's just me most because tactics change, strategies don't, you know what I'm saying? Like, I like talking about strategy sometimes. Our software is the worst.

Have you heard of HubSpot? See, most CRMs are a cobbled together mess, but HubSpot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous. I think I love our new CRM.

Our software is the best.

HubSpot, grow better. Dude, have you been following the presidential debates and campaign stuff that's going on. Did you watch the Republican debate?

I watched the clips. So everyone is, it seems like Vivek is, uh, wow.

There's two ways to say his name. That, and one is the right one. One is the wrong one. And you just came with a third Vivek. Holy moly.

It's V-I-V-E-K, right?

Vivek is the way you say it. So some people say Vivek, and you went, I don't even know where you just went.

Dude, that's like correcting me if I say it like Lady Gaga. So are you a big Lady Gaga fan? I mean, come on.

So he was like the star of the debate because he's just, look at him. The guy is like a debate champion. It's like what this guy's trained to do, but he's still polling like, I don't know, 10% or something like that. So I think it's all, I mean, I think Donald Trump's gonna win. But I did want to tell you a funny thing that I remembered when I watched that debate.

You watched it?

Oh, I love watching. I don't care about politics, but I love watching fights.

I would not have thought that.

I love the debates. I love the strategy of the debates. I love watching. It's content creation. I just love watching the strategy that these guys take into it. I couldn't care less about who gets picked. Couldn't care less about their policies because they don't care about the policies as far as I'm concerned. To me, it's a popularity contest and I like to see who markets themselves better. I think there's a lot to learn from that. But one of the things that's, I remembered was back in the day, I was working at Monkey Inferno and I used to work for a guy named Michael Birch. And Michael Birch is a very interesting guy. He has built and sold multiple companies. So he sold Bebo famously for $850 million.

He, of which him and his wife owned it. So they got, they owned the whole thing.

Yeah. So it was a huge exit for a husband and wife couple. Before that, he had built another social network, sold for a few, you know, single digit millions of dollars. So he kind of made one, sold it for a few million bucks. Then as soon as the non-compete ended, he created it again. He's like, oh, now I know what I should have done the first time. And that became the $850 million exit. But he also created Birthday Alarm, which is a company that had millions of dollars in cash flow every year. So he had multiple wins. Very interesting guy. But ever since the big Bebo acquisition, he created this Idea Lab, but he kind of transitioned to a different phase of life almost. He was like, you know, I'm not like, you know, what do I care? It's sort of like, yeah, I angel invest, but like, you know, does it really matter? Like I kind of already won the money game in a way, right? He wouldn't say that, but you could just tell it's not like his heart was in that.

Is he a billionaire at this point, you think?

Even that he's like, I'm not really a billionaire, but who cares? You know, like I got, you know, like he's at that 5'10", 5'11" range and like, you know, those guys want to be 6 foot. He was just like, that's pretty much 6, right?

With shoes.

So he's like, you know, he's at $800 million or $900 million or something like that. He's like, I don't know. I don't really keep track of it. Does it really matter? It seems like overkill to care about something like that.

That's a nice billionaire response.

He did two interesting things. One, he built a private members club in San Francisco. So he bought an old candy factory that was 60,000 square feet. That was abandoned because it needed tons of like seismic retrofitting. Nobody wanted to put in the millions of dollars it would take to retrofit this place. He did it and he built a members club. So if you go to San Francisco, you can go to this place called The Battery and it's like Soho House, but for San Francisco, built that thing into a real juggernaut. Like it actually like totally came to fruition. This idea that seemed kind of crazy and he had no experience in, he had never done hospitality, never done any of that stuff.

One time I went there and I saw a booth of 3 people and it was a bald, like imagine a monk wearing like the Dalai Lama, like orange outfit. Like he was bald-headed and sandals with like a black guy that looked like a rapper. Like he had like gold chains on and like sick shoes. And then this blonde-haired lady and they were all leaning in having a conversation. And I was like, this is just the funniest place I've ever been to.

Yeah. That's like the start of a joke. A monk, a rapper, and a, and Sheryl Sandberg walk into a bar. No, but that's what I mean. I saw Leonardo DiCaprio there, tons of famous people, Elon Musk, a bunch of famous people go there anyways. So that was one thing he did. But he always had these random ideas, and once in a while he would just be like, Sean, I'd like to have an idea for you. And he would pitch me this idea. And one of the ideas he had was around the presidential debate. He goes, Trump got elected in, I think, what, 2016? He was thinking about it for 2020. He was like, I think there's a good chance that Trump gets reelected again. And he's like, if you think about why a lot of people in Silicon Valley don't really fully, they take these strong stances on what it means. Is it because part of America feels repressed and they're reacting to the liberal neocon? They start making up all these words. He's like, I don't know if it's that as much as it is that Donald Trump was the more charismatic candidate. And he is like, if you go back and you look throughout time, he's like, in every debate, or sorry, every race, if you go back to the last like 12 elections, which is like 50 years or something like that, the more charismatic candidate tends to win. Not always, but tends to win.

And they're usually like tall, not ugly people.

Yeah. He was just like, The more charismatic candidate wins. It's as simple as that, right? Maybe you're charismatic because you're really good looking and maybe it's that. Maybe it's that you got the gift of gab and you're like maybe an Obama or a Reagan or something like that. Clinton, somebody who is just seen as very charming. People always felt that about Bill Clinton. So he's like, the more charismatic candidate tends to win, even though there are other reasons why you might pick— why pick John Kerry over George Bush? Actually, George Bush is the more charismatic candidate versus John Kerry or Al Gore or whatever it is. And so he's like, I think that given that that's the case, he's like, I don't think that should be the case, but I think it is. I don't think you're going to be able to change that. He goes, I feel like what the Democrats should do is they need to put forward the most charismatic candidate they can. And I would say he turned out to be wrong in that they put Joe Biden, who's one of the least charismatic candidates and he won almost because the vote was basically Donald Trump or not Donald Trump. So I actually think it was a bit of an anomaly. I actually think he was correct. And you're seeing this right now. DeSantis has more experience, had the machine behind him, had the track record, but he's just not charismatic. He doesn't have that, that jus. He doesn't have that sauce. And so a guy like Vivek can come out and he's a better talker. He's got more energy, he's got better one-liners, zingers, He's willing to take stands that will draw attention to him, and he's the more charismatic candidate. He's driving up. So Michael's idea was, let's create a TV show. He's like, just like the way we did American Idol and we did The Apprentice, why don't— why isn't there a show called The President? And we literally just cast people who want to be the president, but we give them an avenue. He's like, because right now the candidates all come from the machine. It's like the party is going to kind of push their favorite candidates forward and this is based on how controllable they are, how likable they are, how much time they put in into the party. He's like, I don't think that's necessarily putting the strongest candidate forward, especially if you looked at this most charismatic candidate. So he's like, why don't you create a, he's like, why don't we create a show that's going to take 12 hopefuls and it tells their story. The show works almost like a Survivor or an Apprentice. Every week they go to a new city, Maybe they go to some coal mining place in wherever, West Virginia, and they're going to talk to the coal miners and there's sort of a challenge. They have to prepare a speech or talking points for what they would do to help those people. And then those people kind of vote off the weakest candidate. And at the end, you're left with the most charismatic candidate. And he is like, that would be a challenger to whoever the Democratic Party is naturally going to put up. And I loved this idea. I was like, this is a crazy idea. And he's like, yeah, my friend Mark Burnett who created Survivor, like he could be the producer of this and we could put this together this way. And even if it doesn't work, like, I think it would just be like a worthwhile attempt in an entertaining way to do this versus like if I really want to get involved in politics, the reason I don't is that's a sort of a very, it's not a, it's a laborious and sort of painful endeavor. This would be almost a fun version of like a way to try to just bring some influence to it. What do you think of this idea that I just remembered?

Did it go anywhere or is he just goofing around?

He also, so he wrote a memo. It was a very well-written memo.

Is that the rich guy version of buying the domain name?

Yeah. He wrote a memo. He showed it to me and I'm like, yeah, this is great. And I think he was like, okay, if I'm going to do this, this is going to take some real kind of like social capital to do. And I think he kind of was like, uh, maybe not. Maybe my life is amazing as is.

Um, that's his version of like when the remote is just a little bit too far when you're laid down and you're like, ah, I'll sleep with the TV on. Yeah.

But I've loved this idea and I'm saying it because A, I think that more business people should apply their kind of creative and entrepreneurial talents outside of just creating yet another business. So I liked that he was taking his creative and entrepreneurial spirit to be like, oh, how could I, what if I did a TV show that would influence politics? I thought that was cool. And I think more people should do that. The second reason is I kind of wish this idea existed and I totally think this would work if somebody created it.

So what's funny is like, because you and I've, I've, I've, I've complimented you with this, but this is actually a criticism at this point, uh, for this particular point, the compliment Sam Parr special.

I don't even know what that meant. Should I prepare myself for a compliment or insult?

Just tell me that. The compliment was that you're worry-free and like, you're pretty optimistic and you always like default to like, oh, that person, they're not trying to do anything bad.

Here comes the bitch slap.

But in this case, when I hear this, I'm like, um, but I want like my president to like know what they're doing and not just be able to like be a good speech giver. Uh, and so like, dude, that's what we have now.

You think, you think Joe Biden knows what he's doing? The guy's not even alive.

Well, I'm not saying what I know works and what I know doesn't work. I'm just saying that like, my romantic view is like, well, that would be, it would be also nice if they knew what they were talking about rather than just good at talking. Yet your take on this is like, wouldn't it be cool if we just let the most charismatic person run away with it?

Well, you know, I think you could design the challenges to actually get them, force them to think on the spot or perform, uh, in terms of figuring out solutions to real problems, um, or like putting forth what their solutions would be in a way that's not just prepared by handlers who have talking points and they're going to avoid the issue or false promises or whatever. Like these people that would be in this, uh, you could design the weekly challenge to bring out whatever it is that you want. Obviously people fall in love with the characters. That's how all reality TV works. You fall in love with the characters. However, you could fall in love with them as they're trying to do certain things in the same way that The Apprentice would test you for, can you figure out how to sell? Can you figure out how to organize a project or manage a plan? I think you could put people through a battery of weekly challenges that are not just, are you good at kissing babies and shaking hands? But that's part of it. But there could be other parts of it that the show decides is like, what are the attributes that a president needs or the qualities, or what do we wish we could see them doing to be able to assess their abilities? I think the cynical person would say, well, We should look at their track record serving in government. Yeah, cool. But that doesn't happen. It's not really what, it's not really what happens. It's not really what works. If that worked, you know, Trump would never have beaten Hillary. She had spent her whole life in politics. She had, she was by far on paper the more qualified candidate, but America didn't get to see that. They didn't get to appreciate that. Uh, all they saw was what gets put forward today, which is debates and campaigning on social media or on TV.

There's this funny story about JFK when— do you remember like, uh, what the Cold War was? You know, it was in the '60s where like we thought that Soviet Union and America were gonna like bomb each other. Yeah. There's a story where JFK, John Kennedy, goes to, um, Soviet Union and he meets with the president or the leader of Soviet Union. And at the end of the meeting, this— the, the leader was like, you know, you're, you're a really nice person. You kind of remind me of my son. I guess like we could be We could be cool. Like, you know, you seem, you seem kind. And I read that story and I was like, oh, I guess like charisma really does matter a whole lot when it comes to like diplomatic stuff. Like just being likable and being like, hey, let's just calm down. Let's be friends. It definitely is important.

Tony Robbins tells the story. I don't know if this is real or not, but who was the, do you know who, who was the president during the Cold War? Is that Nixon? Is that Reagan?

Well, Kennedy, Kennedy for the Cold War was a long period, but Kennedy was like when we thought that we were literally going to bomb each other.

Okay. I feel like it wasn't Kennedy he was talking about, but Tony Robbins tells the story. He goes, I had a chance to talk to former president whoever. Let's just pretend I know or care about presidential history. Sure. And he's like, the Cold War was happening and he went to go see, I think it was Cold War. People who actually know about this are going to, you have full permission to beat me up in the comments. So he goes to see Gorbachev and they have a meeting. And the meeting is not going well. The hope was we could de-escalate, but actually the meeting was sort of like tension and neither side wanted to give and they were sort of getting more dug in and more stubborn in their stance.

And this would be Reagan, Ronald Reagan.

Reagan. All my married men out there know when this happens, you think you're going into de-escalate, but actually both sides are what Sam Parr calls dug in and the tension is escalating. He doesn't know really what to do. And he goes, he goes, how did you do it? How did, he's like, something happened in that meeting that worked. What was it? He goes, well, we hit that point and I said, this is not gonna work. And I got up and I walked outta the room fast, stormed outta the room. And right before I got to the door, I hit him with a little 360, turned back, big smile on my face, said, let's start over. Smile on his face, shook his hand and said, I'm, you know, I'm Ronald. And I really appreciate these things about you. And he turned her, he just basically broke the frame for a second and used a little bit of charisma, a little bit of playfulness in order to reduce tension. And then they had a conversation. Now, I have no idea if this story is true. Tony Robbins told me this. I believed it in the moment because it's a great story and who, why let the truth get in the way of a good story? If it is true, that's unbelievable. If it's partially true, that's really cool. If it's totally made up, ah, whatever. Uh, you know, it's okay. Still, the story still serves its purpose. It is a very useful technique to be able to do this, to be able to use a little bit of charisma and playfulness in order to defuse a situation or to, uh, to break through any like deadlocks that, that exist, whether it's in business or in personal life.

So either Vivek is just not charismatic or I'm an idiot, but let me tell you a really quick story. I have, um, so I've turned down two presidential candidates to either come on this pod or speak at my events. The first one was Andrew, uh, what's his name? Yang, the guy, the math guy. So he emailed me, I think in 2015, being like, hey, I want to come speak at your event. And I don't know if the podcast existed then, but he's like, or if you guys want to write about me in the newsletter, I'd love to do an interview. You know, I, I run this study test prep company. It did okay. And now I'm running for president. And I was like, oh, you're insane. You're, you're like, you're going to make me look like a fool. Just this nobody guy who run a mediocre business running for president. I can't interview you like that. That hurt my credibility. Well, turns out he was a serious candidate, or at least he made it in the top 10 or whatever. The second time this happened was Vivek. Vivek. Vivek. Lady Gaga. It's not, it's not, is it not called Fajita? It's Fajitas. Fajitas. Um, so Vivek DM'd me on Twitter like a year ago and he was like, hey, would you guys want me to come on the pod? And I stiffed on him hard. I thought this was because he had a really— his Twitter picture was him in a suit with a nice smile.

Stuff it, nerd, you're not coming on the podcast.

Well, and I think like I was like researching Martin Shkreli and I was like, oh, this— and, and his bio said he was in bio, like, uh, pharmaceutical industry or something like that. And I was like, Oh, this guy's a charlatan. Like, he's so good looking. He's got a nice smile. This is like a crypto guy with abs and a Ferrari. Like, I can't take this guy seriously. And I just said, what do you want to talk about? Like, and I tried to like stiff arm him to like make him prove himself. And he replied and I ignored him. Turns out, you know, a year and a half, two years later, he's actually a threat. So this is the second presidential candidate that I've had bad judgment on of whether they're going to be serious and not asking them to come on the pod.

Yeah, yeah, totally. Totally with you. By the way, for high entertainment, do you subscribe to Ron DeSantis's SMS program? No.

No.

So if you want to learn about marketing or you want to learn how the presidential race really works, go subscribe to all the candidates' marketing emails and text messages. Warning, it's fucking annoying. Okay, so that's the first problem. If I wanted somebody to text me every day, I'd have a girlfriend. And this guy texts you all the time and they text the dumbest stuff. So like here, I'm just going to read you the last 5 texts. If you think this guy's like some super serious politician who's really making it a substantive race about the issues, here's what he's saying.

And was it like 5 in one day?

Text yesterday. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yesterday, 4:21 PM. New shirts, shirt emoji, new koozies, new cups, new buttons, new stickers, new hats. If you haven't seen our storefront, go get the hottest limited edition campaign merch here. Okay, that's yesterday.

Okay, cool.

Let's go back. Friend, it's Ron DeSantis. This is now the day before, 2:08 PM. Friend, it's Ron DeSantis. I want you to know that as president, I will not let the government weaponize federal agencies against Americans who dare to disagree. I'm disgusted by the FBI's disgraceful act labeling Catholics as extremists. It's time to fire the FBI director. And defend liberty, religious liberty for all. Can I have a donation to have your support? Okay, so that's the next one. Here we go again. Let me find a particular— he just texted me at 7:19 AM. It's too early for a text, Ron. Enough with the talk. Americans need action, and that's what Ron DeSantis is all about. I'm the leader you need. This time to act is now. This can't wait. Rush your support in. Link to his donation campaign, link to his donation. Then another one. Hey, like this, like this credential. And he puts a picture of a, like a credit card that just says DeSantis on it. And he goes, you could have your own, all caps, donation with $47 or more to join my investor team. If you're an investor in this campaign, you'll have everything you need to show it off. Grab your membership card today. And it just continues every single day. Hey, enter this giveaway to come to the next debate. You just have to donate and you can win a VIP experience. It just keeps going. And it'll just be like, hey friend, I'm out here draining the swamp right now. And it's like, dude, just stop. What are you talking about?

Well, they're building like a billion-dollar company in like 18 months. They're like a moving company. You ever notice how moving companies, they don't give a fuck about the service because you're only going to use it once? And they're like, let me just get you on board. Gotcha, bitch. And then they just like throw your shit there. They're like, dude, we don't give it like renewals aren't a thing here. I don't care. You know what I mean?

I hired this service that was like, it was called like Musclehead Movers or something like that. And all of the imagery, all of the imagery was just these huge like buff guys. It was like, hey, we make it easy. We'll move that couch. We'll move that fridge. No problem. Just another day at the gym for us. So I'm like, oh, hell yeah. Hire Musclehead Movers. 3 tiny Vietnamese guys showed up and I was like, and the truck said Musclehead Movers.

And I was like, got them.

I'm looking at them and I'm just, are you going to say anything? Are you going to address this, friend? And they didn't. And I didn't because I was like, what am I supposed to say here? I was like, what a bunch of greasy punks.

Hoping.

And they did the job. Like they could move everything because they just used dollies. And I was like, oh. If I wanted dolly movers, I would've, you know, like, it's different. It's a different experience than I signed up for. Catfished.

That's so stupid.

Um, there's, uh, there is one cool thing I wanted to tell you about. All right.

What is it?

There's a guy named Seth Bannon who tweeted this out. He goes, um, 2 million scientific papers are published each year. That's over 5,000 a day. Even if you're working 10 hours a day, no breaks, you'd have to read one paper every 7 seconds just to keep up. So we built Paper Scraper to like basically programmatically read every paper that comes out. But not just every single paper, we prioritize and weight any paper that's being shared by top scientists on social media. So we basically built a thing that makes it easier to keep up with science. And he's the second person I've seen do this, and I'm actually like pretty convinced it's actually just a good product idea.

So what's the, what's the URL? Do you know? Because it's so new, it doesn't show up on Google.

There's not a website for it yet. He's like, oh, like we built this for ourselves, but I'll let some people in beta if you fill out this Typeform, that sort of thing, like soft launch.

I would love to see that.

Our buddy Lior, who does Alpha Signal. So this guy built like an AI newsletter thing, but his AI newsletter has one key difference, which is instead of just telling jabronis what the new ChatGPT feature is, it's basically an AI newsletter that's for technical people. So if you're a researcher, you're a machine learning engineer, you're a a PhD type person. Alpha Signal is a newsletter for those people, which I actually think is a very smart way to approach this business because that's a very high value reader and customer. And for them, he provides a very simple service. So he also built a thing like this internally. So what he did was he goes, all right, every paper has a list of scientists that are like the researchers that were involved. And actually there's a naming convention, just like in movies, the credits, like the stars go first. And the people at the back were like kind of the end credits. In research papers, it's kind of the same thing. The people at the top did all the work. The last person is like the, the names person who reviewed it or edited it at the end, put or stamped, you know, their seal of approval on it or the lab they're associated with. So he kind of first created a, a, a, a PageRank of researchers and scientists.

This is awesome.

Then he's like, cool. Now when a paper comes out that has one of them in the name, or those people on social media share a paper. I immediately know this is probably an interesting paper. So that first creates a hit list. He gets alerted, like, alert, top scientists have shared a paper.

PageRank is what Google invented. It's how they know what to show up on the top of Google. PageRank is categorized, like, there's a bunch of different measurements. The biggest measurement, or they don't even tell people, but it's theorized, or maybe they even said this though, but which is how many people link back to your website.

Yeah. How many other reputable websites link to yours? So every. Every website has an authority. So let's say New York Times has a high authority compared to shaunpuri.com, right? And so if New York Times links to some other website, that tells Google that that other website might be also a high authority site. It increases its authority. If Shaun links to it, it increases it a teeny tiny, tiny amount. And so that's how Google basically figured out what's the right, you know, what's the right webpage to show when I, when you search a question, who's, who has the most authority to, to give you the answer. So this guy for Alpha Signal, Lior, did this for scientific papers. So he's like, who are the top scientists? What are they sharing? What are they linking to? If they're linking to something, that's an important paper or an interesting paper. Then you take the interesting paper, feed it through his LLM, and it gets summarized down into 4 bullet points. Like, what was the finding? What was the methodology? Who are the scientists? And what's the kind of, like, key takeaways from this?

And Alpha Signal is only for, like, AI topics. Correct.

But I'm like, dude, this is a generalized product that's actually just really interesting. Like your, I was like, your method to create this newsletter is more interesting to me than the newsletter itself.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And Paper Scraper is the same idea, just from a different guy approaching it from a slightly different angle, which was same thing, like basically trying to figure out what are the important papers that are coming out. So of the, of the 2 million papers or of the 5,000 that are published every day. Which 3 should I care about? Which 5 should I care about? And then of the 5 that I care about, what did they actually mean? And what are they saying?

Yeah, they're really hard to read. They're really hard to read.

So I think this is a really, really cool product idea. And then he also built like a thing called SpinoutGPT, which was basically like, you can, it's like ChatGPT. You can ask it questions about things that might like, you know, could we commercialize this? And, or like, would this work in cell culture or tissue? And then it'll go look in the paper and find, did they do it in cell culture or tissue? And it'll answer to you that way. So it's almost like being able to talk to research papers or talk to, talk to a very smart person that read all of the research papers. And it's like, oh, I see where this is going. Like, you know, the hustle, Milk Road, these were like, um, the horse carriages, right? Like we have random humans trying to keep up with what's going on. Maybe they set up some Google alerts or they check Reddit and Twitter. And every day they make a list and we talk about it and then they read it and summarize and they summarize it as good as they can. And then the pitch was like, it's like your smart friend explaining what happened in crypto that day. Or yours was, it's like your smart friend explaining what happened in business news that day. And this is like, this is like your fucking genius friend that read every scientific paper ever and you can ask it any question in any variation and it will answer. You're like, Oh, that seems pretty powerful, huh? I was like, yeah, we're on our horseback and just boom, look at the car just flew by. Whoa, what the hell was that?

But what about my friend Greg? He, uh, no, I, by the way, I'm happy we, I would not wanna be in the newsletter business right now. It's way harder.

Which is so funny 'cause everybody's following us into the newsletter businesses now. Like now is like peak hype on newsletters.

And also the way that people are acquiring users, like I just subscribed to Seth Bannon's Substack and like right after I subscribed it said, Do you want to subscribe to these 18 other newsletters? And it's auto-checked and I almost accidentally clicked like, yes.

It's like, and they're all like, whoa, look at my newsletter growth. It's insane. And it's like, dude, anyone on Substack that's talking about your newsletter growth, you're full of shit is my, my answer to you. Like you are absolutely full of shit. It's like people think they're filling out a CAPTCHA and they're just actually subscribing to 19 newsletters like at a time. It's insane. That's why, you know what I like? Beehive has a good feature. They did a feature like that that's actually legit, which is Their thing was you can, you have to manually be like, who do I want to endorse? But also they have this thing, I forgot what it's called, like Sparks or some shit like that. But it's like, you can pay to acquire newsletter subscribers. Like all of us know the best newsletter subscriber you can get is somebody who already subscribes to other newsletters that are similar.

But that's really hard to get historically because you have to advertise in like a hundred different newsletters.

So they create a little mini ad network inside, uh, inside Beehive of all the Beehive newsletters. But what's cool about it was You only pay for somebody who's a retained reader. And I was like, oh, okay, that's actually legit. So instead of just like this, like auto-check vanity metric where it's like, hey, I got more subscribers, but it's like, are they actually an engaged reader? You have no idea, but you're, you're excited about that anyways. What I liked that Beehive did was you only pay, it's like, you know, CPA versus CPM, uh, or CPC. It's like CPA is like you only pay for a reader you actually acquired who's still reading from you. And, um, And so it, it forces quality because that's the only way you get rewarded in that network. So I was like, that's smart.

First of all, this Seth Bannon thing is awesome. I just, I, the tweet that Sean's referring to is from June 12th. So if you Google Seth Bannon and go to his thing, it was on June 12th. That's awesome. He filmed the video in like an amazing place. Like it looks like a TED Talk almost, but like with like an IMAX style screen explaining his concept. I don't know if that would be a good business. I'm nervous about people building businesses right now on top of OpenAI because I'm like, they're just going to crush everyone and just do it themselves. But this is awesome. And second, yeah, to reiterate, I'm happy I'm not doing a newsletter as my main thing right now. It seems really, really hard. And like, I remember at The Hustle, we had one daily newsletter and then Morning Brews. Um, strategy was to launch more, but my thing was like, fuck, but if we have more, our main thing was going to go down. Like, they're not going to open 2, they're not going to open 3. Now people, if the numbers are true, are subscribing to dozens. And I want to know, is the engagement even remotely the same? It seems really, really, really hard. It seems way harder.

Yeah, I think it's a lot like podcasts. Like, how many podcasts do you actually have in a regular rotation at any given time?

Yeah, it seems hard. I mean, with newsletters it's easier 'cause it only takes 3 minutes to skim it, but it seems really hard to get people's attention with the newsletter right now. It's just so funny when we, so I got the idea for a newsletter because I had my friend Noah Madora and then my other friend Noah Kagan. They were like, they had one foot into the startup world, one foot into like the internet marketing world. And I was like, oh, this internet marketing world, they love email and they use it in sometimes shady ways, but let's just see if we can do it a legit way. And people are like laughing at that. Now it's so cool, but also that people take it seriously, but I'm so happy I'm not doing it. It seems way more challenging at the moment. I, it seems really hard.

Yeah. I think the best will still win because, you know, the best tends to win in everything. Like, you know, so I say it's not that the door is actually closed, but it's definitely much harder than when you started. You know, when did you start? 2015, 2016?

Yeah, I got the idea of doing a newsletter and I started it in 2014, but it became what it was on May 19th, 2016.

A great day in history.

Well, I always remember that 'cause it's the day before 4/20, so it was always easy to remember. But yeah, and it was like, I remember like at, for, I originally started it as a conference and if I had 5, uh, if I had 2,000 subscribers to my conference newsletter, I think I made $50,000 in conference ticket sales. And then when I had 10,000, I think we did $150,000 in ticket sales, something like that. And like the engagement was quite high. And then I remember people back then saying, I think Gary Vaynerchuk, I talked to him one time. He was like, dude, my newsletter, we had a 99% open rate because no one else was doing newsletters. Yours is only 40%. It's so much harder. And, uh, I was like, oh man, I wish it was easier. Now I don't know what those numbers would be like, but I think it would be hard to make that amount of money with as few subscribers today as it was. It was easier then.

You know, the other thing that's funny is, um, or I guess the other thing that that kind of reminds me of is your— I wish people would see kind of your early blog posts or you should, we should do kind of like a trip down memory lane. Of some of our projects, um, because you're incredibly good at creating content and writing. Um, we, like, when I see what you did versus what I see a lot of people doing now, I'm like, oh, there are like many rungs on the ladder above is where, where you were with creating content. Um, back then, like, I remember your early blog posts that were just regularly going viral, getting millions of hits. To the site, um, because they were that good.

Like which ones?

Like when you were doing the guy, you like, first you had the right concept. So you were kind of like a YouTuber before YouTube. Actually, you really should have been a YouTuber. Like that would have been your calling.

I believe we got, we got asked to do it.

Like we were thinking about doing it, but I was like, the hustle, I was saying Sam Parr as a YouTuber would have been, I believe like you would have been one of the most successful YouTubers on the platform. Let me give you an example.

Oh, that's awesome.

You're like, for example, I remember some of your early Hustle blog posts, surviving 30 days on Soylent only. Guess what that sounds like? Every Ryan Trahan video, every MrBeast video. Like, this is the current meta of YouTube. You were doing this 8 years ago. You know, like, it was— you were wit— you did microdosing LSD. You did an interview with an anonymous entrepreneur who Who plagiarizes books. Yeah. Yeah. You did the, the, the, you, the thing where you were like, Amazon bestsellers are bullshit. I'm going to prove it by making an Amazon bestseller spending only like $1,000.

Guess what?

That's a YouTube video. These are YouTube videos. They would, these videos would still work. But the thing is you have to do them with style. You actually did the thing with style. Now you, your problem was you were locked into this blog world because those are the people you admired at the time.

But the reality is, and I knew how to write, you know, like writing was my thing. I wasn't, I don't know if I could have, maybe I could have had the visual aesthetic too.

Like you're good on camera. You like lived in a fricking, you like lived on a motorcycle or something. I don't know. You were sleeping on a motorcycle. You're doing some crazy shit. It's like you had the dog and you had the look and you had the humor on camera and you were willing to, you liked Jackass and those sorts of things. And I feel like you would've kind of tortured yourself for people's entertainment. As soon as you got that hit of feedback, you would've gone all the way in. Yeah, for sure. And I just wish you had kind of gone down that route. In fact, I still think you should go down that route. Like, for example, I think I can be successful. In fact, I'm going to be successful on short-form video, but it's not gonna be the way you could have been because you're kind of like those, like, you know, whoever the Danny Duncan and, uh, and, uh, Ryan Trahan and, and, and, you know, MrBeast, you're, you're a lot like them in the, in the way that you are as a character. And what you're willing to do and what you were willing to do and how long you were kind of like, I'm single and don't give a fuck. And like, I don't need comfort. And like, you know, oh, like this firecracker is going to go in my ass. All right, let's roll. Like, you know, lights, action. Right. Like, I think that you had all of that. And so anyways, I don't know what my point is here.

I don't wish I would have gone that route, by the way. I don't. I think I probably could have done it. I think that that's a hard life. I think it's hard. I like Danny Duncan a lot, but I'm like, can you do that at 40? I guess it just has to change. It has to evolve. Or like MrBeast, what's he going to do at 40? He's going to be so wealthy. It doesn't really matter.

Yeah. But you would've done the same.

Yeah. But, um, yeah, like our early blog posts were good and there was a period where I was writing like 5 a day. Um, I would write so many of them. Not all of them were bangers, but like we would write a ton and that's how we grew. And that's why I tell people, I say to blog, I don't actually mean blog, but I meant create bangers, text-based bangers on a consistent basis and get people to love your free content enough to subscribe.

TBB, baby. Text-based bangers. That's been our strategy, right? Like, how'd you, like, for me, when we wanted to grow on Twitter, it was like all the advice was you got to be consistent. Well, guess what? I'm like the least consistent human being on earth. Like, if you weren't super consistent and a real hard ass about like, we're going to record this every Monday, every Wednesday at 9 AM, every single every single week without fail, no matter what. There's no way I would keep up this schedule, right? Like, I only do that because you're my friend. I don't want to let you down. When I'm on my own, I'm inconsistent. And when I wanted to grow on Twitter, I was like, look, all the conventional wisdom, you got to tweet every day, multiple times a day, find the right time of the day, be consistent, be on brand, have a single message, do a call to action. I'm like, dude, I ain't trying to do all that. That sounds like hard. Sounds like the lame version of success. And, um, I agree, it's probably right, but like, I didn't want to do it that way. And my way was text-based bangers. It's like, I basically had like 6 viral tweets that grew me to like almost 400,000 followers. It was literally just 6 tweets basically that did the bulk of the growth. Like the Clubhouse one, the metaverse one, this one about Elon Musk, this other one. It's just like, that's all it was that got me like kind of all the growth. And then I'm just like several weeks in between posts. I'm completely inconsistent.

Well, what I told people was, like my team and like myself, when I was starting the hustle, I was like, you know, everyone says it's a marathon, not a sprint, but you're kind of just telling me that you just don't want to work that hard. And if you look at the world-class marathoners, that's going to feel like a sprint to most people. So that's just kind of like how we're going to live our life, which is like, it is a marathon and it's run so fast that it's going to feel like a sprint to most people.

It's a marathon, not a sprint, but we're Kenyan.

And so we're going at a 5-mile, 5-minute mile pace. Yeah, your last name is Kipchoge, you know, you're going to be a Kenyan. Yeah, you can be Bekele, you're an Ethiopian, but you know, like we're East Africans here, baby. We're going to run fast. And yeah, I think, but I actually, I prefer writing. I think that it's more fun to be in a quiet zone late at night and just bang it out. And it feels a little bit more artful. Uh, it felt like I was in my zone of genius a little bit, whereas with video, it feels like sometimes you have to perform. And I felt that writing was a different type of performance that is more enjoyable to create for me.

Yeah, sure. Surprise, surprise, man likes his choices and defends them.

By the way, look at my shirt.

That what they did was the correct thing.

Shocker. I did live that life. Look at me when I was fat and selling hot dogs, man. I was about, I was about, I was that YouTube life. It's just, you know, without the camera. I was telling Sarah, I was like, I'm nervous about going to Westport or like Connecticut or like if we're going to move to the suburbs. And she's like, why? I was like, well, one of my favorite things to do is like, so every day I like to go to this gas station near my house and get a Diet Dr Pepper and loiter. Like I just like the Yeah, I get a Slim Jim and a Diet Dr Pepper and I'll like dab it up with like the clerk and then I'll just sit and see the regulars. Like, what's up, man? Right now, what's good? How are you? Like, I just like to loiter and like do hoodrat shit, man. Yeah. And I was like, Connecticut doesn't have like hoodrats or gas stations. They have like people that pump your gas. Yeah. It's like, what am I going to do? Like where, like I want to watch people buy lottery tickets and scratch-offs and like, like smoke Black Milds. Like where am I going to hang out with? Like I need the smell of like the woods, they call it, you know, like the blunts. And where am I going to do that? You know, like that's how you get like good ideas and you like see interesting people. So yeah, I'm not—

how many incredible podcasters there are that just don't podcast, but they just chop it up sitting on steps like all day or a milk crate. People that come by, like, can you imagine how good those people would be if we just put a mic in front of them? They just don't know. Like, they're just, they're just like, you know, it's like those like kids who are like incredible basketball players somewhere in Africa that we just don't know. We haven't found them yet. Like, Just imagine the dudes that just stood on the steps all day just shooting the shit. That, like, Joe Rogan is lucky those guys don't have a microphone.

And they just like sit outside of a gas station, like reading newspapers. I always be funny. I always thought it'd be funny if you like walk up and you overhear their conversation and they're like, dog, you better diversify your bonds, man. Like the Dow's down. Like, are they just having like the most academic conversations ever because they read newspapers all day? All right.

All right. I think we've, I think we've crossed, crossed the threshold.

The Slap Happy Phase is initiated. All right, that's the pod.